| Wes Boyd's Spearfish Lake Tales Contemporary Mainstream Books and Serials Online |
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| Wes Boyd's Spearfish Lake Tales Contemporary Mainstream Books and Serials Online |
Chapter 17
Duane stood by the trail trying to pull himself together for a few moments as he watched the mule train cross the bridge and head on up the trail. His world had just changed a hell of a lot, he knew, and in ways that he hadn’t even begun to think about.
Son of a bitch, he thought. What the fuck am I going to do now?
Take care of business first, he thought. You’re going to have plenty of time to worry about this. He glanced at the departing mule train again, then headed back down to the rafts. Lunch was still laid out, although Barbie and Brett were starting to pick it up and get things repacked.
“You want another sandwich?” Barbie asked.
“Yeah, I’ll throw one together quick, and then you can go ahead and pack up,” he said. “I’m not going to have to make the run up to Phantom after all, so we might as well get on down the river.”
“So what happened?”
“Might as well tell all of you at once,” he replied as he looked around. The other three crew members were working on their lunches while schmoozing with some customers. “Terry! Erika! Andy!” he called. “Come on over here, we gotta talk for a minute.”
A couple of the customers glanced up, a little curious about what was happening. He looked over at them and said, “This is mostly just news for the crew, but it’s no big secret, so you don’t have to get lost or anything.”
“Yeah, Duane. What’s up?” Terry said as he came over to the table where the lunch was spread out. Erika was with him, of course; they’d been spending a lot of time around each other. That could lead some place where they might not want to go, Duane thought – he was all too aware of that at the moment.
“Michelle brought several pieces of news with her,” he said, trying to sound more upbeat than he felt at the moment. The comfortable lifestyle that he enjoyed all of a sudden had a good many dark and unpredictable holes opened up in it, more than he could contemplate, more than he wanted to contemplate. “The first big news is that the next break is gonna be a little longer than we’d expected. They’re going to get the groceries topside and pack them for us, so we won’t have to do it. And we’re probably not going to head up to Lee’s until the morning we launch.”
“Hey! Wow! Great!” were some of the words he heard from the crew in the next few seconds. They were going to be heading into a short break, and it had just become considerably longer.
“We’ll talk about it more later,” Duane said. “The second piece of news is that Andy, you’re on this team for the rest of the season, unless something else unexpected happens.”
“Good deal,” Andy said. “I was hoping Al could come up with something. Even if the next break is a short one, it’ll be longer than the one I just had.”
“But Duane,” Barbie asked. “If Andy is going to be on the crew, who’s going to be leaving when Michelle comes back?”
Duane took a deep breath, and glanced up to see the last of the mules going out of sight. “That’s the hard one,” he said. “Michelle isn’t going to be back this season. She’s pregnant.”
“Michelle? Wow!” Barbie said. “Was that what all the barfing was about last trip? You guys weren’t exactly expecting this, were you?”
“Yes, that was what it was all about, and no, we weren’t expecting it,” Duane told them. “This is just about as new to me as it is to you, and I haven’t thought anything out yet, so let’s not get too deep into it just now. Barbie, Michelle didn’t mention anything from Al about you staying on as assistant, but until I hear otherwise from Al, you’ve got the job. I know all of you’ve got questions, but they can’t be anything like the ones I have, so like I said, let’s not kick it around right now. Let’s get packed up and get on the river.”
Over the course of the next few minutes the crew tore down the lunch area, packed the unused lunch meat and other things away, and soon they were loading them onto the rafts. The routine process of loading up after a lunch break gave Duane something familiar to concern himself with, rather than all the unknowns that lay ahead in his mind.
It didn’t take too much longer to get out on the river. “Barbie, take point,” he called. “But we’d better figure on stopping at Horn Creek for scouting.”
“OK, Icewater,” she called back over the water separating the two rafts. “Keep your mind down here, not topside.”
“Yeah,” he replied, realizing that it was good advice. This was not the time to be pondering the imponderable, not while they were heading down into Adrenaline Alley. That was a lot more important right at the moment.
“I heard your news back up there,” one of the jovial customers said. “Good news, huh?”
“Yeah, it is,” Duane admitted, shading the truth a little since he wasn’t sure just how good the news was, but the customer didn’t need to know that. “It just came as a real surprise, that’s all.”
“Happened to me sort of like that, right out of the woodwork with no warning,” the guy said. “But it’s proved to be worth it in the long run. I wouldn’t trade my family for anything.”
“You’re probably right,” Duane told him. “I just have to get my mind around it.”
The Bright Angel Trail winds along the river bank for a mile or so and the rafts were moving right along, so they soon caught up with the mule train. He could see Michelle sitting on the back of her mule, looking down at them passing on the river. He watched as she waved to him, and he waved back at her, but had to give his attention to the river since Pipe Spring Rapids was coming right up. That demanded his attention, even though it wasn’t a particularly big one. When he was finally able to look back over his shoulder, the mule train was out of sight around a bend. Damn, he thought. For once he knew he’d rather be on the mule train than running down the river, but he knew he had to do what he had to do.
It’s only a little more than a mile from Pipe Springs to Horn Creek and the current moves fairly fast, so it didn’t take long to get down to the next major rapids. As always, Horn Creek was one that called for some scouting to be on the safe side, and Barbie landed river right to look it over. It hadn’t changed since the last time, but it was always good to check. “Go ahead and take point through it, Barbie,” he said. “I don’t want to stay here, but we need to be thinking about getting off the river for the day since it’s so late.”
“And you probably don’t want to be on the river any more than necessary this afternoon, right?” she nodded.
“Yeah,” he replied honestly. “Let’s try for one of those sites near Trinity Creek. I’d prefer the one on river right since there’s at least a little bit of a hike out of it, but I’m not being picky. I’ll take either one of them over stopping at Granite again.”
“It’s getting late enough that I’m not sure we could get into Granite anyway,” she shrugged. “If we miss out on all three we keep going, right?”
“Right, we’ll keep going till we find a place; we’re not going to miss out on everything. Let’s get back in the rafts and get it done.”
Fortunately, he knew that Horn Creek was a tough one, and he shoved his ruminations and worries back in his mind to face up to the immediate challenge. Once again, he was sweep through the rapids, and the rest of the rafts ran clean, as far as he could tell. When it was his turn, he pulled toward the lip of the big drop, plunged over it, and managed to keep things under control until he rode out the wave train. It was a wet ride, but he’d run it successfully; he also realized he was going to have to keep his mind on business in the real big stuff tomorrow.
A little over a mile downstream they found that the site on river right at Trinity Creek was empty; Barbie pulled right into it, with the other rafts following. They soon were tearing the tarps off the rafts, and setting up a duffel line to get the gear up on shore. “What do you think?” Barbie asked him. “Kitchen downriver a touch, and the rocket box back around that little bend?”
“Whatever you want works for me,” Duane shrugged. “Go ahead and set it up that way. Brett, you’ve been up the side canyon here, haven’t you?”
“A couple times,” the taciturn boatman said.
“Go ahead and lead a hike up it, anyone who wants to go. We’ve got a couple hours till dinner, right Barbie?”
“Something like that,” she agreed. “Now that we’re off the water there’s no big rush. If those not going on the hike want to help with setting up the kitchen it would be a big help.”
It was a few minutes before Brett left with the hikers, and there was quite a bit of work done to get the camp set up for the night, but soon things quieted down. A couple customers worked their way up the river with fly rods in hand, a couple others took naps, one worked on a journal. All of a sudden there was little left to do, so Duane just headed down the river a little ways, found a convenient rock and sat down to consider things. The news that Michelle had brought down to Phantom was still a hell of a shock, and he hadn’t had any time to even begn to let it set in, let alone contemplate what it was going to mean for the future.
He wasn’t aware of how long he sat there, just staring at the river letting things roll through his mind, but he was jolted suddenly to hear Barbie say from behind him, “Duane?”
“Yeah?” he said, turning to look at her. She was standing a couple feet away, with a couple cans of beer in her hand.
“I saw you staring at the water, and I thought there’s a guy who needs a beer and needs a friend.”
“Yeah, I guess I do,” he replied, feeling rather subdued. “Thanks for thinking of me.”
“No big deal, that’s what an assistant trip leader is for,” she said, sitting down on the sand next to him and handing him one of the beers. He took it from her, popped the top, and had a good swallow. It tasted good, just what he needed.
“You know,” he said absently, “I always heard that Al kept a bottle of J.D. in his drybox for emergencies. I know Crystal used to keep a bottle of vodka, but I don’t know if she still does. Either one sounds like a good idea, but I don’t think anyone has anything like that with them.”
“Big shock, huh?”
“Yeah,” he said. “That never even crossed my mind. Michelle’s either, I guess.”
“You happy about it?”
“I don’t know yet,” he admitted. “I mean, on one level, yeah, I’m happy, but I’m more scared of what’s going to happen to Michelle. Her life is so wrapped up in being a boatman that it’s not funny. I mean, it’s all she ever wanted to do since she was a little girl, and about all she’s done for ten years. Now, all of a sudden, bang, it’s gone, no warning. I’m not sure how she’s going to deal with it, and what’s worse, I’m not sure what I can do to help her deal with it.”
“Yeah,” she said thoughtfully, and took a sip of her beer. “I guess I’m like that a little. Well, more than a little. Christ knows what I’d do if I had to give it up all of a sudden. I’ve never really thought about it.”
“I don’t think she has, either,” he agreed. “Several times over the last few months the subject has come up of how glad we are that we don’t have to live the straight life. You know, mortgage, kids, desk jobs, and like that. Well, so much for that idea. I guess we have to give it a try now whether we want to or not.”
“Yeah, that’s what I’d be worried about,” she nodded. “I prefer to not think about those kinds of things.”
“Me, either,” he said. “And I haven’t until now. The hell of it is that if something came up where I had to leave the river, I think I could. I might not like it, but I think I could do it. I’m pretty sure you know the story, I never set out to be a boatman, it just sort of happened.”
“The way I heard it was that Michelle, Crystal, and Scooter sort of dragged you into it.”
“Well, yeah,” he nodded. “It depends on who’s telling the story. Let’s just say that if I was dragged, I was sure dragged willingly. It wasn’t what I’d set out to do at the time, and I just hopped on the opportunity when it came along. I was actually filing resumés and applications to be a NPS ranger, and I think I could have liked that life. But Michelle, well, she’s never considered even those kinds of alternatives. That makes me a little worried for her. Well, more than a little.”
“I’ve never seen her back down from a challenge. I mean, never.”
“Yeah, but it’s a river challenge, usually, and those are a little different. We’re heading into uncharted waters on this one, and while I think she’s going to handle it OK, I can’t be sure.”
“She’ll handle it OK,” Barbie replied soothingly.
“I hope so,” Duane said. “In fact, the odds are that she will, and I’ll do everything I can to support her even if it means I have to leave the river. But you know what scares me? Have I ever told you the story of my mother?”
“Died when you were pretty little, wasn’t it?”
“Well, yes and no. That was Christine. I’ve always considered her my real mother, even if she was only my stepmother. My birth mother, well, I don’t like to think about her. She got pregnant at, hell, about eighteen I guess, just about as accidental as Michelle and me. I guess she really didn’t want to be a mother at all, because one day when I was about six months old my dad came home and found a note telling him that she’d left me with his parents. No word about where she was going, or anything. To the best of my knowledge no one we know has ever heard from her since.”
“Jesus, I never knew that. That’s really harsh.”
“Dad always figured that she’d had to face one too many dirty diapers or something,” Duane shrugged. “I guess we’ll never know. Obviously, I have no memory of her, and wouldn’t know her if she walked up and slapped me in the face. For all I know she could be a bag lady or that snaggle-toothed old bat who cleans the rest rooms at the hotel not far from Pat and Rachel’s house. I’ve always kind of hoped for bag lady – she deserves it – but I’ll never know, and when you get right down to it, I don’t want to know because I might kill her for what she did to my dad. As far as I’m concerned Christine was my real mother in every way but that one. She was a good person, and well, she was never in very good shape, pretty fragile health, but she always went out of her way to be a good mother to me. But shit, I learned a lesson from that just as soon as I was old enough to have the slightest comprehension of what had happened.”
“You think Michelle could do something like that?”
“I don’t think so, and I hope not. She knows that story, by the way, and she’s always been pretty sympathetic about it. But considering what happened to my birth mother, I have to at least consider the long shot and it could happen. But that’s not what scares me. The thing of it is, I always made up my mind that if I fathered a kid it would be a planned deal, and with someone who I was sure was ready to be a mother.”
“And now, guess what?” Barbie nodded sympathetically.
“Yep,” he nodded and took another swig of his beer. “That’s about the size and shape of it.”
“I can see why you’re concerned,” she replied. “But Michelle isn’t like that.”
“I don’t think so, but for obvious reasons I don’t know for sure,” he shrugged. “There’s always going to be that doubt in my mind, and that’d be true of anyone, not just Michelle. You take Chica, the girl I was living with when I met Michelle. I could never figure out why we couldn’t quite make it work, until one day I realized that my gut was telling me that there was too good a chance that she could pull on me what my birth mother pulled on Dad. Fortunately Michelle and Scooter and Crystal came along about that time and yanked my ass out of there, so things never got that far.”
“Yeah,” she replied thoughtfully. “I guess that explains a lot.”
“It was more than that. Dad went through a lot of problems raising me, first with my birth mother leaving. Then he married Christine, and it wasn’t long before she got sicker and sicker, so he had to spend a hell of a lot of time nursing her. A lot of the mothering I got in that period came from the girl who lived across the back yard, Vicky, and she was only just beginning to be a teenager when Mom was getting sick. After Mom died, Dad and I were pretty close, but he pretty much made up his mind he wasn’t going to risk having me lose another mother. So he didn’t get married again until a few years ago. I was working on the river by then. I think you were on that trip where I had to go straight from Diamond Creek to Las Vegas and on to his wedding over a trip break.”
“Yeah, you told some stories about that on the next run on the river,” she smiled. “As I recall, it was a pretty good wedding.”
“Well, yeah, Dad’s a character and Vicky has only brought it out more,” he smiled – the first one he’d had in a while. “Finally, at the age of fifty-damn-something he’s got the wife he deserves.”
“Vicky?” she frowned. “The same girl who helped raise you?”
“Yep, that Vicky, she’s close to twenty years younger than Dad. That gives her enough energy to keep up with him. They’ve got two little kids now, and he’s getting to do it right this time rather than having to struggle his ass off. Damn it, he deserves to be happy after all the shit he went through for me.”
“But you’re looking at this through your father’s eyes,” Barbie said wisely.
“Yeah, I guess I am. And I’ll follow in his footsteps if I have to. But shit, I wasn’t ready for this.”
“You think he was?” she said quietly.
“Well, hell no, he just did what he had to do.”
“Duane, if I know anything about you, I know that you’ll do what you have to do and do it to the best of your ability. And I think you’re a little more concerned about Michelle than you need to be.”
“I hope you’re right, but you can see why I have reservations, though even I realize they’re a little illogical,” he said. “Anyway, I’ve got to get some of this shit and negativity worked out in my mind so I can have a positive face when we get off the river. I have to keep it upbeat, if for no more reason than to keep from dragging Michelle down. I can tell you that while she’s trying to put a good face on it, the thought of having to leave the river isn’t going over well with her.”
“You think?”
“I more than think; I could read between the lines back up at Phantom. It’s too much of what she is, and now she’s got to build a new life for herself on short notice and without my being around to support her very much. I didn’t get the chance to tell you guys, but she’s the one who’s going to be buying and packing the groceries topside, not just for us but for all the trips. I can see she wants to at least keep a finger on being a boatman. I can’t tell you how it’s going to work out. But I’m sure that the days of Michelle describing herself as a boatman are pretty well gone, maybe for a while, maybe permanently, even if she doesn’t realize it yet.”
“Yeah, I can see why you’d have some concerns about that,” she nodded. “What’s more, I think you might have a point. So what are you going to do?”
“Christ knows,” he said. “It may take the two of us going away from here and building some kind of a life where the Canyon isn’t a continual overwhelming presence. I just don’t know yet. What’s more, I don’t think I’m going to know for a while. A lot is going to depend on what happens with her, and I sure as hell know I didn’t find out all there is to know back when we talked that little bit up at Phantom.”
“To tell you the truth, I think you’re over-thinking it, at least for right now. You’re still dealing with the shock. I think things will make a little more sense after a few days on the river.”
“You’re probably right,” he said, then upended his beer can. “But that’s not going to keep me from chewing at this.”
“Probably not, but you need to keep things in perspective. It’s like you say about running rapids; you have to take them as they come. That’s still pretty good advice, Duane. Don’t get so far ahead of the raft that you miss what’s right in front of you.”
“Yeah, I know,” he nodded. “But saying it and doing it are two different things.”
“Look, I realize you’re going to have some problems with this the rest of the trip,” Barbie said. “Feel free to talk it out with me whenever you think you need to. That’s what a friend is for.”
“Yeah, Barbie, I’ll probably do that, and I really appreciate the offer. Feel free to kick me in the ass for the good of the trip if you think I’m getting too wrapped up in this shit.”
“Hell,” she snorted. “What do you think I came over here for?”
Either Duane felt better the next morning or the realities of where they were got to him, because at least for the morning most of his attention was on Adrenaline Alley. They still had Granite, Hermit, and Crystal to run, and that meant his mind had to be on business.
For the most part, it was. They scouted and ran the three big ones in succession; the boats bucked up and down in the wave trains and passengers and crew got wet to various degrees, but they all made it down safely, and the customers seemed to have a good time.
Once again, Duane stopped the trip at Baseball Man for lunch, a short hike, and to wring out after the end of the big stuff. However, with the tension of the tough ones behind them, he felt his resolve to keep his mind on business starting to drift away, and now he could do something about it. “Erika,” he told his swamper as they got set to get back on the river, “I don’t think we’ve been letting you on the sticks enough. Row my raft this afternoon. There’s nothing ahead you can’t handle but I’ll keep an eye on you, and maybe take a nap in the slack areas.”
He told Barbie to take point and Andy to take sweep, and just sat back on the side tube for a while, mostly alone with his thoughts. After a while he crawled up on the gear pile, found a somewhat-comfortable place to lie back, and just plain zoned out, letting his mind take him where it would. Mostly he tried to make sense of what Michelle’s surprise announcement back up at Phantom the day before would mean to him, them, and their lives.
Not surprisingly, he didn’t come up with any major conclusions, at least any that he hadn’t already reached. It was hell being down here in the Canyon when the problems he had to be confronting were topside. They stopped briefly for a rest and potty break, and there he told Barbie to grab a campsite down around the Bass trailhead somewhere. Back on the river, he got back into his position on the gear pile and let himself go again. He really did take a nap and woke up to discover that Barbie was pulling the group in at the big campsite on river right just below the trailhead, the one he would have liked to have been in on the trip before.
That night was usually one for a semi-celebration for running Adrenaline Alley successfully, and it was this time, but to Duane’s mind it lacked something, because Michelle and her guitar were topside. This group would have enjoyed some of her rowdier songs, he thought, and they were going to be poorer for missing them.
They were on their way about like normal again the next morning. For the rest of the trip Duane let Erika row at least half the time, and almost always in the more-difficult rapids. She handled them well, with no problems that he saw, so considering that it had to be done sometime, he let her have the sticks when they hit Lava a few days later. Not much to his surprise she did a good job with it; as they wrung themselves out along the shore a little ways downstream, she was tickled pink at him letting her row the big one for the first time, and that she’d done so well. That was good enough for him to resolve that she’d row one or another of the rafts almost all of the next trip and be in his for the big ones. She was clearly well on the way to being a boatman, maybe even the next year, and they might as well have her ready to take on the responsibility.
As always, the rest of the trip down to Diamond Creek was almost anticlimactic. Though he swapped Erika around some of the other rafts and even let a few of the customers try their hand at rowing, he spent more of his time at the sticks himself. More than a week had gone by since Phantom Ranch, and at least he was now starting to get used to the idea of his and Michelle’s new situation.
As they pulled away from Granite Springs on the last morning of the trip, he felt that he could at least approach some of the questions and challenges of the upcoming weekend fairly rationally, something it would have been difficult to do the week before.
It was going to be a tough weekend no matter how he looked at it. It would be a short-break weekend, one of two the Gold Team would have all summer. They would get off the river on Thursday, and have to be back on it Saturday morning; although the schedule said they the break was two days, even with help pulling stuff together topside it was really going to just be one day with two nights.
