The Color of Green Lizards

They began where the river began in a bottomless pool; no one had ever been to the bottom, no one knew if there was a bottom. This was the riverhead, fed by unseen streams welling up to form their own reservoir and measuring over a hundred feet at its widest point. This distance they knew; they’d swum across before and climbed up the rocky precipice to stand on the edge high above the opaque water, the color of green lizards.

One had dared the other to jump off the edge and, in the way that these things happen, the rest followed. But not Kim, who liked to watch from above. One by one their bodies were sucked under and their heads sealed over, their exhilarating shouts and great splashes silenced. In that moment, she saw them frantically clawing to get to the surface and, even though no one would admit it, it was obvious to her from up there that the fear of being under water for only a few seconds was far greater than the fear of falling the twenty feet through the air.

It was at the riverhead that the Rio Bueno began its certain journey toward the sea. By car, the journey took about thirty minutes, but it would have been less if the road had run alongside the riverbed. Instead, the marl road curved and climbed, dipped and descended, past houses and villages and over the main road to get from the riverhead to its mouth: that nebulous place where cool currents flirted with warm waves, and gray pebbles lay with golden sand.

They’d not seen anyone else at the riverhead the first time they went, although they supposed other people knew about it. Mark’s uncle, who managed a flower farm nearby, told him about it and Mark had led their group on a hike up to the spot. Later, each of them would have a different opinion of who was to be blamed, but they all agreed the journey down the river on the inflated tubes of dump truck tires had begun that first time as they lay drying themselves on the banks of the riverhead. The lure of being the first—at least in their own minds, choosing to forget the hundreds of years of Taino and Maroon usage of rivers like this one as fishing grounds and escape routes—was enough for Kim, Shara, and the boys. Tina took more convincing; such adventure was uncharted territory for her. But soon, haunted by the familiar pressure of having much to prove, she too gave in.

They decided to go on the Independence holiday weekend in August in the midst of their summer jobs and a few weeks before they would be heading off in different directions: Peter on scholarship to an American prep school; Tina to her aunt in New Jersey to find a job; Shara to an English boarding school; and Kim to do A levels at the local sixth form college. Mark was the only one without a plan. He said he would wait and see what happened. The others knew this meant he would stay in Jamaica and live at home and be forced to take a job at his father’s furniture workshop. None of them judged him for it, though; they’d provided shelter to one another ever since the year they were eleven and all in the same class at the public high school in the city. The U-n-i-t-y Crew was what they called themselves in the beginning, carving their initials into the wooden uprights of the lunch shed, which had recently been torn down to build more classrooms.

Mark’s uncle drove them to the riverhead in his battered bottle-green Land Rover from his house, where they’d slept the night before. The boys sat on the folded-down back of the vehicle to make sure the tubes wouldn’t fall out and go bouncing and spinning down the steep road behind them. The girls, dressed in their swimsuits and sneakers, squeezed into the benchlike front seat, their...