Borderline by Nevada Barr

came from all over the country during the season—December through the middle of March when the river was high—but a stalwart few stayed year-round, most living in the town of Terlingua and getting by as best they could.
    “What do you call a boatman without a girlfriend?” Carmen was saying as Anna joined the party around the breakfast preparations.
    “Homeless.” Carmen delivered her punch line while flipping a pancake, as polished as any showman.
    “What’s the difference between a boatman and a large pizza?”
    “The pizza can feed a family of four.”
    “We are all here,” Carmen said as she served Anna two pancakes from her griddle and pointed her toward the butter and syrup.
    When they’d settled, the guide said: “This morning’s float starts out pretty easy. The first couple miles are flat water. Then we get to the rockslide.”
    A ragged cheer went up from the narrow twins. The rockslide—and there were rapids of that same name in most rivers Anna had run—was rated at anywhere from a class II to a class IV, depending on the water levels in the canyon.
    “I heard from one of the other guides before we set out that the slide was at about a level three when he went through it,” Carmen went on. “But that was two days ago. I’m guessing it will be nearing a four if it hasn’t gotten there already. The river’s up from last night even. Not much, maybe two inches, but when the canyon starts squeezing the water it can go up fast. Before we hit the slide there’s a good place to pull over and beach. We can talk more about it then and I can show you how we plan our run, depending on what the water is doing.”
    They breakfasted sumptuously—float and bloat, Carmen joked—broke camp and again took to the water, this time wearing life vests. The scrap of blue that had struggled so mightily against the clouds lost the fight and the sky was marbled with silver-gray and black. Anna felt the boil of the thunderstorms in the air and reveled in it. Ozone levels were high and she enjoyed the tingling in her blood.
    The raft rounded a bend in the river and floated into the view they had enjoyed from the groover. Anna found her breath being stolen by the sheer height of the cliffs they were heading into. They rose a thousand feet into the sky on either side of the turgid brown water, straight and true as if a cosmic force had cleaved them with one mighty blow of an ax.
    “Wow,” Anna heard someone breathe and realized it was her.
    “Awesome,” Lori said.
    Anna had heard her use that word in reference to the chicken sandwiches and guacamole they had had for lunch, Brad Pitt and Carmen’s straw hat. This time the word was apt, describing that which induces a sense of awe into the beholder, a sense that there is a greater force at work than human minds can conceive. There’d been a time Anna believed in a god or gods of some sort. Meeting Paul had reintroduced this illusive and intoxicating possibility into her soul. Recently, though, she had retreated to the loneliness of the ungodly, the lights on, lights off logic of the atheist. When a light was turned off it didn’t go elsewhere to light the rooms of others in worlds to come, it just ran out of fuel and was no more. Much as she wanted to believe it was otherwise for people, she could not. Less could she believe, if other places on other planes existed and were policed by supreme beings, that they would by choice let the rabble of the earth invade. Should there be a heaven it would probably have a border patrol that put Homeland Security to shame.
    They slipped into Santa Elena Canyon and the subtle sounds of birdsong and wind in the reeds faded. Even the water lapping against the sides of the raft seemed hushed. Deep and channeled through a narrow gorge of stone, the river boiled beneath them, but its surface showed only the bulge and twist of enormous muscles under a glassy-smooth skin that gleamed where it powered around submerged rock and slipped