The River (8 page)
The river is slightly higher now. It rained hard for the first time last night, and I’m trying not to think of that as a harbinger. Besides, today is glorious. Hard to believe frost will ever come. It will be summer here forever.
Karen walks ahead of me and volunteers what I wasn’t brave enough to ask her before.
She slips off her flip-flops. Come on, Ronnie, let’s go see what’s on the other side. She puts one foot into the water. It looks cool and accommodating, the way the current flows around her ankles.
I don’t know, I say. The rocks look slick.
It’s no big deal, Karen says. I’ve done this lots of times.
The river changes, I say. At least that’s what Ranger Dave tells me.
That’s what makes it fun, she says. Who knows what we’ll uncover? Maybe there’ll be cave drawings….
Are there caves over there?
… or a new kind of dinosaur.
I know she means dinosaur fossil, but I imagine something huge with big teeth chasing us.
But Karen’s eyes are sparkling with the possibility of discovery.
Maybe we’ll find a sasquatch, I suggest.
That’s the spirit, Clark.
I’m Lewis, I say. Clark was an idiot.
Whatever, she says. Let’s go.
Hold on a sec. Wouldn’t you rather go for apple cake? It’s got caramel frosting.
Swear to Jesus, Ronnie. For a big kid you’re a real wuss.
Karen, I say, channeling that stern tone my father uses when he’s unamused. We should be getting back.
Fine, she concedes. Run home to the East Coast before we even get to the Mississippi. You’re not even Clark.
But she follows me back.
As we turn to go, I watch her face for disappointment. But she doesn’t seem disappointed—she seems resolved, and I know that the instant she shakes me off she will cross over, deliberately going farther than before just to prove she can.
If I’m really concerned for her safety, I will go with her now. We will explore together.
Instead I lure her inside my gingerbread house with treats. Come, little girl. Come have some candy.
I know that by tempting her inside I am caging her, and I know what that makes me. She’s right: I’m not even Clark. I’m much worse than that. But I still don’t want to cross. She’ll get over it, I think. She’s too resourceful to sulk.
That afternoon I barely made it to Clark status. I was a horrible frontierswoman, but I forged ahead for Karen, threading my way through tall grass and Himalayan blackberries, eyes on the banks and on the current. I was combing, a slow walk looking for something someone else might have missed. I didn’t find anything unusual—coyote sign (that’s what Ranger Dave would have called it—it was really just paw prints and poop), rabbit sign, a hunk of jasper, a thunderegg, and the occasional spent shell casing. I suppose the shell casings were creepy, but even though I was looking for creepy things, I couldn’t make myself believe that this was worse than what it was: poaching sign. There were plenty of mule deer with velvety ears and mossy antlers around, but hunting season ended in December. Either the casings were two months old or else someone didn’t care about silly little things like hunting licenses.
Ranger Dave once told me that, since it’s only legal to hunt stags and not does or fawns, at the first sign of chill, stags will separate themselves from their families, so in case they do get blown away, the women and little Bambis will be safe.
When Ranger Dave first told me that, about the stags wandering off at the first nip in the air to save their families, it broke my heart. But not today. Today there were worse things to be than a lone stag. I’d seen those suckers run. At least they had speed on their side.
Coyote sign; rabbit sign; shell casings. An empty box of Froot Loops circling a backwater. Nothing exceptional. At least not here. But what was on the other side? Ah… that would be different.
And yet I didn’t even try to cross the river. I blamed it on my shoes with their flat soles. I’d either have to wear them or take them off. Either way there wasn’t much safety fording those slippery rocks. I’d seen Karen’s scalp. Much as I wanted to help, I didn’t want to be another corpse.
I doubt I even made it a quarter of a mile, my frontier skills were so wimpy. Every so often I tilted my head to the rain clouds and said, “I’m trying,” as though I were apologizing to a Karen in some heaven in the sky, instead of just around the bend, just out of sight. I told myself that I wasn’t looking for Karen herself—I was looking for Karen
sign
. I shuddered and looked at the unknown east bank. Even then I knew that if I wanted to catch up with her, I would have to cross over.
I was saved from a total retreat by a rustling in the bushes. This is it, I thought. Whatever I’m waiting for, it’s about to spring on me. I saw a big flash of brown. It was big—maybe a deer, maybe a grizzly, maybe a poacher, maybe a sicko with big hairy arms waiting to force my head underwater.
Step shuffle step shuffle step shuffle
. Tomás emerged from a thicket, wearing a brown rain poncho and waving around a flashlight in broad daylight.
“Jesus. You scared the hell out of me,” I said.
“You’re one to talk. Why did you just wander off like that?”
I didn’t know what to say, and muttered something like, “To save the herd,” but it didn’t make any sense, not even to me. So what? I liked him but that didn’t mean I owed him a coherent explanation.
“You really had us worried, you know,” he said, and his voice had a cut to it that I’d never heard before, and I was afraid. “You should have told someone where you were going.”
And then, even though I’d never even seen his abusive father, I got an inkling of what he must’ve been like, because I could see it in the shadows of his son’s eyes. This was what kept him quiet around me. This was what he was guarding against. You can’t be six foot six
and
mean
and
still hope to have friends. I never asked Tomás how his father was abusive, but I sometimes pictured it when I looked at the giant ropy scar on his wrist. I mean, if you have a father like that, can you ever be mad? Or would you always be afraid of losing control?
But that wasn’t the root of the problem. I wondered if he was mad because I was inconsiderate, or if he was mad because he was afraid. I had gone missing the day a body had turned up. “You’re right,” I said, because he was. And that deflated him. Any hint of rage seemed drain out of him, right through his boots.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “We were just really worried, you know. I had to tell your mom and dad that you were off on a lark. And I really
really
don’t like lying to your dad.”
Tomás practically worshipped my father. He sometimes even let him win at hoops, which did a ton for Dad’s nonexistent confidence. It was a sweet thing to watch, if I weren’t relegated to watching all the time, wondering how I fit in with them, wondering if I even wanted to. I wasn’t a son; I wasn’t a sister. What was I?
Water, that’s what. Flowing around everything; part of nothing. It was easier that way.
“I’ll call them now,” I said. I reached instinctively for the pocket with my cell phone in it. But there was no pocket. These weren’t my running pants—they were my chinos. Work pants. And I never needed my cell when I was in the kitchen.
“Looking for this?” Tomás asked, and took my phone out of a pocket in his poncho. “Or maybe this?” He took my new lip gloss/pepper spray from another pocket.
I could only look at them dumbly.
“What are you doing out here, anyway?”
I shook my head. “You wouldn’t understand.”
But then he surprised me. “You guys used to come out here all the time. What are you hoping to find?”
“I don’t know. A piece of her, I guess. Just something to show that she’d been here.” I meant both on the riverbank and in my life. And Tomás seemed to understand.
“Like an arrowhead,” he said.
I reached for the phone. This was a call I really didn’t want to make. Tomás was right. My parents were probably freaked. But Tomás held it back, punched a number, and brought the phone up to his ear. “I got her,” I heard him say. “Yes, she’s all right. It’s my fault. I promised her we’d bank-comb. I should’ve told you. We’ll be back in a while.”
As he hung up the phone and handed it to me, I felt as though I reached one watery finger through the pane of glass that was still separating us. There were still a lot of things about Tomás that I didn’t know, and until I knew them, I wouldn’t be his sister or even his friend.
He reached into another pocket, pulled out a flashlight, and pointed it at the banks.
“So what are we looking for?” he said. And that was it. We both had a job to do. But I thanked some unknown deity (in the sky again rather than just around the bend), that Tomás was the one to come get me. I moved over to accommodate, and the two of us had an anti-race, trying to see how slow we could go, and what might be revealed.
It is a chilly fall evening. Karen and Tomás are hanging out, whispering in the kitchen over martini glasses of ceviche—a seafood cocktail in a tangy tomato base. It’s Spanish night so there are tapas, salty dishes with olives and Jamón Serrano, and if those don’t fill you up, pans of paella to be washed down with pitchers of bloodred sangria.
Mom has hired an acoustic guitarist, a ponytailed guy in a gray vest who is out on the floor right now, his fingers tripping over strings at light speed in a lively but melancholy sound. In a surprise move, Gretchen is doing a table dance, flamenco style. She’s had no formal training but she’s donned a flouncy skirt and removed the Snoopy bandage over her nose ring. She oscillates like the bread attachment on Mom’s food processor. A gang has gathered around her, clapping and shouting E-pa! and trilling their tongues. Ai-yai-yai!
Back here in the kitchen, which smells of saffron and capers, Mom has complicated our lives by insisting on serving ceviche in martini glasses. I’ve already broken three, they’re so top-heavy, they tilt at the vibration of a guitar string. But Mom says the stemware is necessary because it makes the shrimp and squid ring look classier, and she’s right.
Karen and Tomás are leaning against a butcher block. Karen is forking calamari from her top-heavy glass with a plastic cocktail sword. She is a third of Tomás’ height, even when he’s slouching. She nudges him in the thigh and nods at me.
Hey, guys, I say, unloading dirty dishes in the sink.
Order up, Mom says. I reload for table seven.
Hey, Ronnie, Tomás says, straightening to his full, lurching height. Do I notice him? Or do I notice Karen stamping hard on his foot? Hard to tell. It’s just a rustling in the corner of my eye as I pile plates on my tray, trying not to tip the ceviche glasses.