“Know what?” I asked, marvelling that such a handsome face, with its burnt umber eyes, thick straight shaggy brown hair, full lips, and a button nose, could be so irritating. We’d worked together as partners on and off on some research projects, and he always, without fail, seemed to come out on top, with his name front stage centre and mine trailing behind. Why I kept co-authoring papers with him I could not fathom. He was so irritating.
“I think you might be out of a job,” he said, pulling a long face, but the cheery tone of his voice revealed his real feelings. He didn’t say anything more, forcing me to ask why, which irritated me even more.
“You didn’t make tenure.” I didn’t say anything at all, fighting back my anger and disappointment as he stood there peering at me solicitously. I had been so sure I’d be considered for tenure.
“How do you know that?” I asked in anger.
He smiled knowingly and said, “Poor little Cordi. You have to know the right people to get the information you want.” Which translated into he did, and I didn’t. “That’s why you have such a hard time getting ahead.” I bit my tongue hard and tried to think of all the devastating retorts I could say, but all I could think of was “Go to hell,” which wasn’t exactly imaginative.
“I could help you, Cordi. You and me — we make a great team,” he said, sidling closer to me. After two years of this I was getting sick of Jim’s game. I backed away and ignored him.
“Don’t you want to know?” he asked, moving closer.
“Know what?” I asked, and backed away again.
“If I got tenure?’ He waited for my response, but I just stared at him.
“You’ll be sorry to know that I didn’t,” he said. But of course I was glad, which made me feel a bit guilty, but only for a moment.
“It’s just you and me now, Cordi. And one of us won’t be here this time next year.”
I looked at him and said, “Would you please get to the point.”
“I also heard that an assistant professor is on the chopping block, come spring,” he said, “and I think it’s going to be you.”
He smiled again and shrugged, holding out his overly muscled arms to me, inviting a hug. I moved away, saying nothing, too afraid my voice might crack, furious at myself for not being able to come up with some witty remark.
“You know why it won’t be me, other than the fact that I’ve published more papers?” he crowed.
When I didn’t answer, his face suddenly twitched in annoyance and he abruptly answered his own question. “Because for your last year here they’re saddling you with the perennially unpopular entomology taxonomy course, now that Jefferson’s heart problem has sidelined him.” He sighed. “I’m really sorry, Cordi, but it sure won’t be easy to impress the tenure committee with an insect taxonomy course, not that that’s a prerequisite or anything.”
He shook his head in commiseration, grinned suggestively, blew me a kiss, and turned to leave, but then couldn’t resist a final jab. Did he know the damage his words were doing, or was he biologically incapable of comprehending?
“I’ve had two papers accepted, you know, and I drew Jefferson’s animal behaviour course this year — hard to make a course like that bomb out, eh? But who knows? Maybe you can do something with the insect taxonomy course that will blow us all out of the water.” He disappeared down the hall, leaving me shaking with frustration at myself for letting him see my shock and the stinging tears in my eyes. At times like this I felt like a real loser even though I knew the jerk was exaggerating. I was good at what I did. I just had to convince myself of it somehow.
I tried to shift my focus away from my depressing thoughts and glanced at Ryan, who was securing the canoe. He had a million new freckles on his arms, legs, and face from the endless days of sun, and the rusty red baseball cap that hid his unruly red-blond hair seemed to have done little to prevent the sun from bleaching most of the red out. I smiled and remembered trying to count all those freckles once when we were kids on the farm: it had been like counting the grains of sand on a beach. We were so different, he and I.
I sighed and got up to tie my line around a large boulder at the base of a cliff that soared above us. The jumble of rocks at its base had once formed part of its face, now battered, craggy, and forlorn from years of losing pieces of itself.
The entrance to the portage trail was framed by the huge trunks of two large pine trees on a height of land. Ryan turned on his heel and disappeared into the woods to scout the rapids. I followed him down the soft earthen trail and saw him veer off the path in the direction of the rapids. We broke out of the bushes onto some sun-warmed, rust-streaked granite rocks overlooking the full force of the rapids.
“Would you take a look at that!” yelled Ryan from his position atop a huge boulder.
The words were whipped away by the wind and the thundering roar of the rapids. I clambered up beside him and looked at the roiling mass of suicidal waves at our feet. I glanced apprehensively at Ryan out of the corner of my eye. He was eyeballing the rapids with the look of someone possessed, and when he caught my glance I rolled my eyes in exasperation.
“No way, Ryan.”
“Aw, c’mon, Cor.” He gripped my arm and pointed. All either of us could see was the ominous white cauldron of water, torn here and there by jagged rocks and a fallen tree hanging out over the water. Further down I could just make out the telltale line where the river suddenly dropped from view as it plummeted over a series of unseen cliffs.
“We could canoe this far side,” said Ryan eagerly. “See? Over here. We take the route between those two boulders, veer sharply left to miss all the mess close to shore there, and then angle back to miss the shelf. We hug the shore and find a backwater just before the tree and the falls. Easy!”
“That’s what you said about the last one,” I yelled, “and we nearly skewered the canoe on that godawful rock just past the mini ledge!”
“Whose fault was that? You were in the bow!” shouted Ryan.
“Don’t remind me,” I said. I hated being in the bow, being the first one down into a boiling cauldron of water, madly trying to take the correct route to get us through. The person in the bow never got the respect they were due. All the stern had to do was follow the bow’s lead, but the bow? The bow had to choose the right route, usually with split-second precision and twenty-twenty vision, neither of which I was particularly blessed with.
“It didn’t look like a ledge when we scouted it!” Ryan protested as he looked back at the river, a look of disappointment on his face.
“You’d canoe Niagara Falls if you could,” I said, knowing there was a spark of truth to it. Ryan seemed to have no strong sense of his own mortality, but fortunately it wasn’t contagious. I suffered from no such illusions of immortality, especially when it came to a wet death.
I looked at the river again, shivering suddenly, as if the water already had me in its grip. “This’d kill us,” I said, and I shivered again as the spray misted my face and left me feeling strangely apprehensive.
Ryan suddenly caught me by the wrists, shaking me out of my thoughts, and pulled me close, whispering in my ear, “Lighten up Cordi, I’m only joking.”
He jumped off the boulder then and headed back into the coolness of the woods. Of course he was only joking. I knew that, so why had I let it bother me so much?
“Come on, lazy, let’s get the packs,” he shouted.
“Lazy? You call me lazy?” I yelled at Ryan’s disappearing back. “The only reason you wanted to run these rapids was so you wouldn’t have to portage the canoe.”
I could just hear Ryan’s answering chortle as I ran to catch up.
The