The Hotel Eden(52)

The sun had straightened, into noon, and the fishing had slowed considerably. I had taken two little trout from pools in the lee of two boulders, handling them with exaggerated care for Toby’s information and then returning them to the water. Then, around the next bend, there was a long slow avenue of river and I found out I had been right about the four rafters. They had been nude. About a half mile down, under a sunny gray shale escarpment, there was a party in session. Eleven or twelve rafts of all sizes had been beached, and fifty or sixty people loitered in the area in a formless nude cocktail party.

“Fish this side of the raft,” I said to Toby, adjusting his pole opposite the nudists. Just as I settled him, with a promise of lunkers in that lane, Glenna spotted the other rafters and determined the nature of the activity. She was working down her third wine cooler, a beverage which evoked her less subtle qualities, and she cried out, “Check this out!”

A dozen or so of these noble campers sat bare-assed on a huge fallen log along the river, nursing their beers, taking the sun, watching the river the way people wait for a bus. I heard one call out, “Raft alert! Raft ho!” There was some laughter and a stir of curiosity about our little craft as it drew closer.

I wondered what it was about the wilds that made all these young lawyers feel impelled to take off their clothing. Is it true that as soon as most folks can’t see the highway anymore, they immediately disrobe? We came abreast the naked natives in an eerie slow-motion silence. They stopped drawing beer from the keg, quit conversations, stood off the log. Many turned toward us or took half a step toward the river. Glenna was leaning dangerously out of the raft on that side, another wine-cooler casualness (she was just full of wine coolers), and Toby had swiveled fully around from his fishing duties, striking me in the ear with the tip of his rod. I lifted it from his hands.

One bold soul strode down to the edge of the river, waggling himself in the sunshine. He lifted his cup of beer at us and called, “Howdy! What ya doing?” Behind him, still standing against the log, was a slender, dark-haired girl who looked a lot like Lily. She was about as tall and had the posture. Her breasts were pure white, the two whitest things I’d ever seen at noon on a river, a white that hurt the eyes, and her pubic hair glinted red in the bright sunlight. Oh, I don’t need to see these things. I need to fish and have my heart start again and be able to breathe without this weight in my chest. I could not physically stop looking at the girl.

“The same thing you are,” Glenna answered the young man. “Fishing with worms!” She laughed a full raw laugh back in her throat, leaning so hard on the side of the raft that a quick stream of cold river water sloshed in. As Glenna continued staring the man down and chortling, I thought, This is where it comes from: the devil and the deep blue sea. I am caught, for a moment, between the devil and the deep blue sea. I looked down into the crystal green slip of the river; the stones shimmered and blinked, magnifying themselves in the bent waterlight.

Slowly, we slid past the naked throng. It seemed a blessing that Glenna had not thought to take any photographs. I shifted some of the gear out of the new bilgewater and cast one terrible glance back at the girl and her long bare legs. The arch of her ass along that large smooth log caught my heart like a fishhook. Toby had collapsed like a wet shirt and was sitting on the bottom of the raft, soaking. He bore all the signs of having been electrocuted. I doused his face in a couple handfuls of river water to put out the expression on his face, and sat him up again with his fishing pole and a new lure, a lime-green triple teaser which looked good enough for us to eat. I almost had him convinced that it was still possible to fish in this world when I heard Glenna groan and I felt the raft shift as she stood.

I cursed the pathetic confectioneer who had invented wine coolers and turned to see Glenna reach down and pull her tank top over her head, liberating Romulus and Remus, the mammoth breasts. Shuddered by the shirt, they rippled for a moment and then settled in the fresh air.

“No topless fishing,” I said to her. “Don’t do that.” I handed her the shirt.

She threw it in the river. “I’m not going to fish,” she said back to me. Toby had put his pole down again. This river trip had become more dangerous than he’d ever dreamed. I put one hand on his shoulder to restrain him from leaping into the sweet Green River. When I felt him relax, I turned back to Glenna and her titanic nudity. It was still a day. The sun touched off the river in a bright, happy way. We fell out of the long straight stretch into a soft, meandering red canyon. It was still a day.