strength, and that just boarding it would be tricky.
“You first,” she said.
Her muscles strained with the effort of keeping the raft steady against the riverbank. I took a breath, concentrated, prayed to whatever gods might be that I wouldn’t screw this up like I had screwed up crossing the first river, and crawled onto it on all fours. It rocked queasily but held me. I added a quick addendum prayer for no more hippos. I knew they killed more people every year than crocodiles.
“Go a little bit further,” Lisa ordered.
I reluctantly obeyed. Just as the raft began to tip precipitously in my direction, and I gasped with dismay, she stepped on beside me and quickly dropped to hands and knees, righting it. The shore drifted away; and as the last rays of sunlight slipped away from the earth, we began to coast downriver.
Chapter 17
Our combined weight drove the raft deep enough that water seeped up between the logs. I grabbed a loose vine-end and wished we had built in handles. In the faint starlight I could make out the line of termination between water and air, but the walls of foliage on either side were like moving shadows, motion without form. At first the ride was remarkably smooth, almost like bobbing up and down in still water while the land churned past on rails.
I was shivering and starving and I hurt all over, but I commanded my brain to ignore my body’s distress signals. The only good thing about this mad Mark Twain journey was that one way or another it would be over relatively soon. All I had to do was endure for, I hoped, a day more at most. Unless we fell off the raft, and got separated in the darkness, and I washed up on the shore and found myself alone and nearly naked in the jungle. The prospect seemed terrifyingly plausible. I tightened my grip on the vine.
A burbling sound grew suddenly louder, and we hit a standing wave. I gasped as the raft rocked, but we did not overturn or begin to break apart. A flickering light appeared in the distance, a fire in the jungle, not far away. The foliage silhouetted in that dim light looked like the outline of an HP Lovecraft nightmare, a dark mass covered with waving tentacles.
“That must be them,” Lisa murmured. “The narcos.”
We passed within a few hundred feet of their campfire. I didn’t see the riverbank trailhead, but it must have been near. The river widened again, and I began to breathe easier, until we bumped into a rock or deadhead log lurking just below the surface, which nearly knocked me into the water, and sent us into a slow spin.
“Just stay low,” Lisa said. “We’re going to be OK.”
I had my doubts. My teeth were beginning to chatter, my fingertips were growing numb, and I didn’t dare move for fear of falling off or overturning the raft. “Lisa, just for the record, this is without question the stupidest fucking thing I have ever done.”
“And you’re not even getting paid for it. At least I’m on duty here.”
I forced a chortle. “Exactly.”
“Remember the Stoics. Try to enjoy the moment.”
“Fuck the Stoics.” But I tried anyways, and almost succeeded. I was miserable, but I was still breathing, still alive, and that was still cause for celebration.
We both fell silent as a rushing sound began to grow in the distance. It sounded almost like cars on a distant highway, but we knew it was whitewater. We were about to join the big river, the one that had already nearly killed me.
The noise swelled in volume. Even in the near-total darkness we could see the pale froth of the rapids ahead, glistening in starlight. It was even worse than I had feared. I heard a whimpering noise and realized a moment later it had come from my own throat. My heart sank and my stomach writhed as if I was falling.
“Hang on,” she muttered, unnecessarily.
Then we hit the whitewater mainstream, and the raft immediately overturned.
I somehow held on to the vine as I bounced off one rock and was scraped against the length of another. The raft hit a boulder with an audible clunk and something relatively soft plunged into my midsection. It wasn’t until I came up gasping for air until I realized that it had been one of Lisa’s limbs. I managed to grab the raft and steer myself behind it, so it would take the brunt of any new impact. I didn’t know where Lisa was, but there was no time to worry, another stretch of violent whitewater lay just ahead.
Those rapids began with a sheer ten-foot drop. As I whirled in the churning waters of the pool beneath, buffeted on all sides, the loop of vine slipped from my hand. I was dragged underwater and held for several long seconds, trapped between two irresistible currents, until in my panicked thrashing I kicked a rock, shattered the equilibrium, and popped like a cork back into the main flow. The river flung me downstream and suddenly I was drifting in smooth deep water again.
“Lisa!” I called out hoarsely, treading water. “Lisa!”
I barely heard her voice over the rushing water: “James! Are you OK?”
“More or less! Where are you?”
“This way!”
“I lost the raft!” I shouted, splashing my way in the general direction of her voice.
“I’ve got it!”
“I can’t see anything!”
For a moment she didn’t answer. Then, with an edge of near-hysterical laughter in her voice, she shouted out, “Marco!”
I couldn’t help but smile. “Polo!”
“Marco!”
“Polo!”
The ancient game led me to her. It was so dark that I touched the raft before I saw it, the found her in the water behind it.
“You think we should get on?” I asked.
“I think we’ll be safer and warmer staying in and kicking.”
She had a point; my recent frenzied struggle to stay alive had at least defeated the creeping cold preying on my bones. And the water was arguably warmer than the air.
My shoes dragged my feet downwards, and I soon gave up, contorted myself while hanging onto the raft with one hand, and peeled them off. The river swallowed my tears of agony.
We drifted half-submersed for a long time. Slowly the water leeched the heat from our bodies despite our attempts to keep kicking. I almost didn’t mind, numbness dulled the pain from my feet, but I knew intellectually that this was a bad sign. A memory leapt into my mind, something I had seen on TV when I was a kid, a special program about some girl who had swum across Lake Ontario. I thought dizzily, If she can make it, I can make it, redoubled the pace of my weary legs, and concentrated on breathing deeply like Lisa had told me. It seemed to help a little. I told myself that I had it easy compared to Lake Ontario, I didn’t have lampreys attacking me and sucking my blood. Although Colombia had alligators. And maybe piranha. I froze for a second, then reassured myself that there would be no predators in water moving this fast.
“How are you doing?” I muttered, realizing dimly that we hadn’t spoken in a while. There had been no rapids since the rivers had joined, and it was hard to tell, but I thought the river was widening and the water slowing. I wondered how deep it was.
“About as well as you might expect.”
We drifted onwards.
“Try to enjoy the moment.” It was growing hard to decipher her words. “The Stoics say it’s possible to be happy even as you are stretched upon the rack.”
“They are of course full of shit.”
She didn’t answer. I feared she didn’t remember having quoted the Stoics to me before. Not a good sign. Delirium and confusion were signs of hypothermia.
“Penny for your thoughts,” I said, hoping that talking might keep up her strength.
