Dark Rivers of the Heart (33 page)

Simultaneously, gradually, the tremendous power of the thwarted currents actually lifted the truck a foot. The dark water surged against the passenger side, no longer halfway up the windows on that flank but swirling at the base of them.

Rocky remained down in the half-flooded leg space, enduring.

When Spencer had quelled his dizziness with sheer willpower, he saw that the spine of rock bisecting the arroyo was not as thick as he had thought. From the entrance to the exit of the sluiceway, that corridor of stone would measure no more than twelve feet.

The jackhammering river pushed the Explorer nine feet into the passage, and then with a
skreek
of tearing metal and an ugly binding sound, the truck wedged tight. If it had made only three more feet, the Explorer would have flowed with the river once more, clear and free. So close.

Now that the truck was held fast, no longer protesting the grip of the rock, the rain was again the loudest sound in the day. It was more thunderous than before, although falling no harder. Maybe it only
seemed
louder because he was sick to death of it.

Rocky had scrambled onto the seat again, out of the water on the floor, dripping and miserable.

“I’m so sorry,” Spencer said.

Fending off despair and the insistent darkness that constricted his vision, incapable of meeting the dog’s trusting eyes, Spencer turned to the side window, to the river, which so recently he had feared and hated but which he now longed to embrace.

The river wasn’t there.

He thought he was hallucinating.

Far away, veiled by furies of rain, a range of desert mountains defined the horizon, and the highest elevations were lost in clouds. No river dwindled from him toward those distant peaks. In fact, nothing whatsoever seemed to lie between the truck and the mountains. The vista was like a painting in which the artist had left the foreground of the canvas entirely blank.

Then, almost dreamily, Spencer realized that he had not seen what was there to see. His perception had been hampered as much by his expectations as by his befuddled senses. The canvas wasn’t blank after all. Spencer needed only to alter his point of view, lower his gaze from his own plane, to see the thousand-foot chasm into which the river plunged.

The miles-long spine of weathered rock that he had thought marched across otherwise flat desert terrain was actually the irregular parapet of a perilous cliff. On his side, the sandy plain had eroded, over eons, to a somewhat lower level than the rock. On the other side was not another plain but a sheer face of stone, down which the river fell with a cataclysmic roar.

He had also wrongly assumed that the increased rumble of rain was imaginary. In fact, the greater roar was a trio of waterfalls, altogether more than one hundred feet across, crashing a hundred stories to the valley floor below.

Spencer couldn’t see the foaming cataracts, because the Explorer was suspended directly over them. He lacked the strength to pull himself against the door and lean out the window to look. With the flood pushing hard against the passenger side, as well as slipping under it and away, the truck actually hung half
in
the narrowest of the three falls, prevented from being carried over the brink only by the jaws of the rock vise.

He wondered how in God’s name he was going to get out of the truck and out of the river alive. Then he rejected all consideration of the challenge. The fearfulness of it sapped what meager energy he still had. He must rest first, think later.

From where Spencer slumped in the driver’s seat, though he had no view of the river gone vertical, he could see the broad valley beneath him and the serpentine course of the water as it flowed horizontally again across the lower land. That long drop and the tilted panorama at the bottom caused a new attack of vertigo, and he turned away to avoid passing out.

Too late. The motion of a phantom carousel afflicted him, and the spinning view of rock and rain became a tight spiral of darkness into which he tumbled, around and around and down and away.

…and there in the night behind the barn, I’m still spooked by the swooping angel that was only an owl. Inexplicably, when the vision of my mother in celestial robes and wings proves to be a fantasy, I am overcome by another image of her: bloody, crumpled, naked, dead in a ditch, eighty miles from home, as she had been found six years before. I never actually saw her that way, not even in a newspaper photograph, only heard the scene described by a few kids in school, vicious little bastards. Yet, after the owl has vanished into the moonlight, I can’t retain the vision of an angel, though I try, and I can’t shed the gruesome mental picture of the battered corpse, although both images are products of my imagination and should be subject to my control.

Bare-chested and barefoot, I move farther behind the barn, which hasn’t been a real working barn for more than fifteen years. It’s a well-known place to me, part of my life since I can remember—yet tonight it seems different from the barn I’ve always known, changed in some way that I can’t define but that makes me uneasy.

It’s a strange night, stranger than I yet realize. And I’m a strange boy, full of questions I’ve never dared to ask myself, seeking answers in that July darkness when the answers are within me, if I would only look for them there. I am a strange boy who feels the warp in the wood of a life gone wrong, but who convinces himself that the warped line is really true and straight. I am a strange boy who keeps secrets from himself—and keeps them as well as the world keeps the secret of its meaning.

In the eerily quiet night, behind the barn, I creep cautiously toward the Chevy van, which I’ve never seen before. No one is behind the wheel or in the other front seat. When I place my hand on the hood, it’s warm with engine heat. The metal is still cooling with faint ticks and pings. I slip past the rainbow mural on the side of the van to the open rear door.

Although the interior of the cargo section is dark, enough pale moonlight filters back from the windshield to reveal that no one is in there, either. I’m also able to see this is only a two-seater, with no apparent amenities, though the customized exterior led me to expect a plush recreational vehicle.

I still sense there’s something ominous about the van—other than the simple fact that it doesn’t belong here. Seeking a reason for that ominousness, leaning through the open door, squinting, wishing I’d brought a flashlight, I’m hit by the stink of urine. Someone has pissed in the back of the van. Weird. Jesus. Of course, maybe it’s only a dog that made the mess, which isn’t so weird after all, but it’s still disgusting.

Holding my breath, wrinkling my nose, I step back from the door and hunker down to get a closer look at the license plate. It’s from Colorado, not out of state.

I stand.

I listen. Silence.

The barn waits.

Like many barns built in snow country, it had been essentially windowless when constructed. Even after the radical conversion of the interior, the only windows are two on the first floor, the south side, and four second-floor panes in this face. Those four above me are tall and wide to capture the north light from dawn to dusk.

The windows are dark. The barn is silent.

The north wall features a single entrance. One man-size door.

After moving around to the far side of the van, finding no one there, either, I’m indecisive for precious seconds.

From a distance of twenty feet, under a moon that seems to conceal as much with its shadows as it reveals with its milky light, I nevertheless can see that the north door is ajar.

On some deep level, perhaps I know what I should do, what I must do. But the part of me that keeps secrets so well is insistent that I return to my bed, forget the cry that woke me from a dream of my mother, and sleep the last of the night away. In the morning, of course, I’ll have to continue living in the dream that I’ve made for myself a prisoner of this life of self-deception, with truth and reality tucked into a forgotten pocket at the back of my mind. Maybe the burden of that pocket has become too heavy for the fabric to contain it, and maybe the threads of the seams have begun to break. On some deep level, maybe I have decided to end my waking dream.

Or maybe the choice I make is preordained, having less to do with either my subconscious agonies or my conscience than with the track of destiny on which I’ve traveled since the day I was born. Maybe choice is an illusion, and maybe the only routes we can take in life are those marked on a map at the moment of our conception. I pray to God that destiny isn’t a thing of iron, that it can be flexed and reshaped, that it bends to the power of mercy, honesty, kindness, and virtue—because otherwise, I can’t tolerate the person I will become, the things I will do, or the end that will be mine.

That hot July night, beaded with sweat but chilled, fourteen in moonlight, I am thinking about none of that: no brooding about hidden secrets or destiny. That night, I’m driven by emotion rather than intellect, by sheer intuition rather than reason, by need rather than curiosity. I’m only fourteen years old, after all. Only fourteen.

The barn waits.

I go to the door, which is ajar.

I listen at the gap between the door and the jamb.

Silence within.

I push the door inward. The hinges are well oiled, my feet are bare, and I enter with a silence as perfect as that of the darkness that welcomes me….

Spencer opened his eyes from the dark interior of the barn in the dream to the dark interior of the rock-pinned Explorer, and he realized that night had come to the desert. He had been unconscious for at least five or six hours.

His head was tipped forward, his chin on his chest. He gazed down into his own upturned palms, chalk white and supplicant.

The rat was on the floor. Couldn’t see it. But it was there. In the darkness. Floating.

Don’t think about that.

The rain had stopped. No drumming on the roof.

He was thirsty. Parched. Raspy tongue. Chapped lips.

The truck rocked slightly. The river was trying to push it over the cliff. The tireless damned river.

No. That couldn’t be the explanation. The roar of the waterfall was gone. The night was silent. No thunder. No lightning. No water sounds out there anymore.

He ached all over. His head and neck were the worst.

He could barely find the strength to look up from his hands.

Rocky was gone.

The passenger door hung open.

The truck rocked again. Rattled and creaked.

The woman appeared at the bottom of the open door. First her head, then her shoulders, as if she were levitating up out of the flood. Except, judging by the comparative quiet, the flood was gone.

Because his eyes were adapted to darkness and cool moonlight shone between ragged clouds, Spencer was able to recognize her.

In a voice as dry as cinders, but without a slur, he said, “Hi.”

“Hi, yourself,” she said.

“Come in.”

“Thank you, I think I will.”

“This is nice,” he said.

“You like it here?”

“Better than the other dream.”

She levered herself into the truck, and it wobbled more than before, grinding against rock at both ends.

The motion disturbed him—not because he was concerned that the truck would shift and break loose and fall, but because it stirred up his vertigo again. He was afraid of spiraling out of this dream, back into the nightmare of July and Colorado.

Sitting where Rocky had once sat, she remained still for a moment, waiting for the truck to stop moving. “This is one tricky damned situation you’ve gotten into.”

“Ball lightning,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“Ball lightning.”

“Of course.”

“Knocked the truck into the arroyo.”

“Why not,” she said.

It was so hard to think, to express himself clearly. Thinking hurt. Thinking made him dizzy.

“Thought it was aliens,” he explained.

“Aliens?”

“Little guys. Big eyes. Spielberg.”

“Why would you think it was aliens?”

“Because you’re wonderful,” he said, though the words didn’t convey what he meant. In spite of the poor light, he could see that the look she gave him was peculiar. Straining to find better words, made dizzier by the effort, he said, “Wonderful things must happen around you…happen around you all the time.”

“Oh, yeah, I’m the center of a regular
festival.
”

“You must know some wonderful thing. That’s why they’re after you. Because you know some wonderful thing.”

“You been taking drugs?”

“I could use a couple aspirin. Anyway…they’re not after you because you’re a bad person.”

“Aren’t they?”

“No. Because you’re not. A bad person, I mean.”

She leaned toward him and put a hand against his forehead. Even her light touch made him wince with pain.

“How do you know I’m not a bad person?” she asked.

“You were nice to me.”

“Maybe it was an act.”

She produced a penlight from her jacket, peeled back his left eyelid, directed the beam at his eye. The light hurt. Everything hurt. The cool air hurt his face. Pain accelerated his vertigo.

“You were nice to Theda.”

“Maybe that was an act too,” she said, now examining his right eye with the penlight.

“Can’t fool Theda.”

“Why not?”

“She’s wise.”

“Well, that’s true.”

“And she makes
huge
cookies.”

Finished examining his eyes, she tipped his head forward to have a look at the gash in the top of his skull. “Nasty. Coagulated now, but it needs cleaned and stitched.”

“Ouch!”

“How long were you bleeding?”

“Dreams don’t hurt.”

“Do you think you lost a lot of blood?”

“This hurts.”

“’Cause you’re not dreaming.”

He licked his chapped lips. His tongue was dry. “Thirsty.”