A car. I heard a car.
Rescue! Oh, thank you!
I moved closer to the road, but a hallelujah yell died on my lips as an old pickup, gray with spots of rust and a missing front fender, rattled into view amid the dust cloud. Squinting, I tried to make out the driver, but reflections on the dirty glass obscured the inside. The shadow of a pine tree, thick and murky, finally passed over the vehicle, yielding a fractional glimpse into the cab. The driver was tall, thin-shouldered, wearing a ball cap of some kind. He wasn’t alone in the truck. Someone was in the passenger seat, the head rising just slightly above the dash. A child, perhaps. The idea was comforting, as if somehow the presence of a child indicated that I, too, would be safe.
On the other hand, my new career was all about the knowledge that children weren’t always safe. I’d headed up here for a home visit with a woman who’d been reported to CPS by a summer-school bus driver who couldn’t drop off the kids because a domestic dispute was ongoing in their front yard. Growing up, I’d heard the plethora of warnings about the riffraff living on the
other side
of the lake. There was no telling what kind of people resided in these hills, where patches of private land remained remote, surrounded by sprawling state park holdings and massive blocks of territory that had been timber tracts in days gone by.
Stepping back against my car, I held out an uncertain, one-handed stop sign, mentally weighing my options. I needed help, but I knew I was in a very vulnerable position. . . .
The truck drifted to the left, as if to go around me and pass by. Surely no one would simply drive on and leave a woman stranded alone on this remote road.
I moved forward a step, stuck my hand out farther.
Surely he’d stop.
“Hey!” I hollered. The truck was only a few feet away now, close enough that I could see a hand gripping the partially opened passenger window. A small hand. A child’s hand, the fingers brown with dirt. “I need help!” I hollered above the engine’s wheeze and chug. Something was squealing at an ear-piercing pitch, the sound bouncing off trees and cliffs. “I need help!”
As if in answer, a sudden gust of wind swirled up, caught the dust cloud rising behind the truck, whipped it in my direction. I threw my arm over my eyes, felt grains of sand and tiny bits of gravel pepper my cheeks.
Thunder rumbled somewhere nearby.
A dog barked and growled, the sound so close that I felt for the edge of my car, grabbed it and pulled myself back, prepared to climb in, if necessary. Squeezing my eyes open a pinch, I saw the dog, a pit bull with its ears flattened and teeth bared, poised to jump as the truck slowly circumvented my car. I watched in frozen fascination, the way voyeurs look into the eye of a tornado or ogle a traffic accident.
The truck cleared my vehicle, and behind the dog’s frenetic barking, a tiny slice of movement snagged my attention. A little girl was watching me through the back window. She’d turned in her seat, climbed onto her knees, pressed a palm to the glass, her head tilted slightly to the side, as if she were curious about me, or confused by my presence on the road. Her dark hair floated in wispy, tangled curls around her face, her pale blue eyes regarding me with a concern that seemed out of place in the round orb of a child’s face. She couldn’t have been more than five, maybe six. Leaves were tangled in her hair, and her skin was brown from the sun, her cheeks a combination of pink sunburn and smudges of dirt.
She wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. The mother in me protested, and the newly certified counselor made a mental note. It wasn’t uncommon for people to skip the seatbelt while tooling around the lake on these back roads, but it wasn’t legal, either.
The truck drifted to the shoulder ahead, the brakes squealing as it slowed. I caught a breath, relieved, and in the back of my mind, I turned over the seatbelt issue – looked at it from a few different angles. Was there a polite way to tell your rescuer that he needed to buckle up his little passenger? Judging by the stooped shoulders and shaggy strings of gray hair dripping from the edges of the ball cap, he was probably a grandfather who didn’t know any better. Perhaps still living back-in-the-day when kids cavorted around car interiors unburdened by seatbelts, and the only safety restraint was a grownup’s hand shooting out at a sudden stop.
The truck rattled to a halt thirty feet past my car. I waited for it to shift into reverse and come back, but it only sat idling. The driver moved just enough to look in his rearview mirror as the dog ran to the tailgate to bark. The little girl continued eyeing me through the back window.
Walking to the center of the road, I motioned to my car. “Hey . . . hello? I have a flat tire. I . . .” In my head, a caution flag went up. This was not normal behavior. He was just watching me in the mirror. Something was wrong.
Overhead, a cloud blotted out the sun, and the wind caught the flat of my back, shoving like an invisible hand. Somewhere in the hills, thunder rumbled again, raising goose bumps on my arms and making me acutely aware of my desperate circumstances.
The dog clawed the tailgate, snarling and baring its teeth, its small, slanted eyes narrowing as if it were priming for attack. Inside the truck, the little girl turned her attention to the animal.
A child wasn’t safe around a dog like that. That was the kind of dog that ended up on the news for mauling someone to death. What sort of a person kept a dog like that around a child?
I took a step backward, looking again at the driver. What was he doing? Why was he just watching me? Why would he stop but not get out?
Was he studying me, trying to decide if I would put up much of a fight?
If you take your boat to the shallow waters,
you’d better know where the stumps are.
– Anonymous
(Written on the wall of wisdom,
Waterbird Bait and Grocery)
Mart McClendon
There was a summer storm popping up in the hills across the water – just a little thing, but if it kept coming this way, it’d drive the tourists off the water and put a damper on the day. One thing I’d learned in my short time here was that you couldn’t predict the weather, or pretty much anything else. On Moses Lake, it was just about as likely the unexpected would show up as the expected. For folks who liked to plan, make schedules, and keep some form of electronic device strapped to the hip, Moses Lake was just a spot to pass by on a Sunday drive, maybe pull off at the scenic overlook above Eagle Eye Bridge and watch the weekenders tear up the water with their ski boats and pontoon rigs.
Those up for some adventure might cut off the highway near the dam, pick up a sandwich at the Waterbird Bait and Grocery, or rattle down through the trees and rent a cabin or book a canoe trip. Could be that half-day canoe trip or lakeside vacation wouldn’t end up to be any more than a quiet, relaxing time-out from whatever they left behind. If they were lucky.
Moses Lake had a way of taking on a life of its own. You could ask twenty full-timers why that was, and you’d get twenty different answers – everything from Native American legends to ghost stories about the strange voice of the Wailing Woman coming off the cliffs at Eagle Eye. Some would say the lake was haunted by restless spirits from the farms and towns that were buried under twenty-five thousand acres of water when the Corps of Engineers seized the land in the fifties and built the dam. Others claimed it was the name – Moses Lake. Moses wandered in the wilderness for forty years before he found a resting-place, and even then he couldn’t go in.
If I had to give an opinion, I’d say it’s the water. There’s something about water that attracts all sorts of folks and brings out impulses they didn’t know they had.
There was never any telling, on any given day, who’d show up in Moses Lake and what would happen. After just under six months as game warden in the southern part of the county, I’d figured out that life in Moses Lake was as random as the weather. That must’ve been why, twenty-odd years ago, my folks didn’t stay in the area any longer than they had to. Soon as my dad finished working construction on the hydroelectric plant, they’d loaded us four boys and beat it out of town. We’d ended up in southwest Texas, where you could figure on the weather, and the folks, and the rhythm of things. It was quiet down there in the Big Bend country – friendly, peaceful, and scenic, if you liked a long view and a big sky.
But for years all I could hear was the place that was special to me when I was a boy – Moses Lake – lapping at the shores of my mind and calling me home. When it came time for me to get out of the Big Bend country for good, I packed up my gear and headed for Moses Lake.
The place was just like I remembered it, which was exactly what I needed it to be. There wasn’t a trace of what’d happened back in the Bend country. Here, there was just the water, the breeze shifting through live oaks, and the boats passing up and down the lake, leaving white-tipped trails that’d close up and go back to perfect inside of a minute. No sign that anything had passed by and disturbed the normal way of things. Moses Lake was a constant place, on the surface. But when I took the job as game warden, I should’ve known better than anybody that sometimes the surface is a pretty illusion.You can’t always tell by looking, what might be brewing underneath.
If the undercurrents were a mystery in Moses Lake, one constant was that old fishermen would be out in their johnboats before sunup and back at the Waterbird by the time the day turned too hot to fish. Today their favorite table was occupied by two of the regulars, Nester Grimland, who was all bones and skin and looked the part of a retired school-bus mechanic, and Burt Lacey, who’d been Nester’s principal at tiny Moses Lake High until he quit education and took up full-time fishing.
“You think that’s a doe or a loose calf?” Nester looked at me and pointed off the edge of the dock, a cup of Sheila’s Waterbird coffee sloshing over his hand, soaking into his shirt cuff and the picnic table. Didn’t matter, because the coffee was cold by then, the sleeve had fish guts on it, like usual, and the table was the same as everything else at the Waterbird Bait and Grocery – old and used to the weather.
Burt squinted through bottle-bottom glasses as thick and cloudy as something that’d been dredged up out of the lake. “Tough to tell from all the way across. It could be one of those emu birds again. Mart, you think that’s a calf or emu over by the Big Boulders?” His leathery, sun-freckled mouth worked the end of that question like it had a nice aftertaste and he was ready for another bite.
“Or a doe,” Nester added in, stroking the thick, gray moustache that gave him the look of an old cowboy, fresh off the range. There wasn’t really any need for me to answer the question. Nester and Burt could keep up their own conversation, like usual. They’d only brought me in because I’d happened to pull up to the dock to run into the Waterbird and get a refill on coffee.
“Reckon why a doe’d be wanderin’ around in the open in broad daylight?”
“An emu would do it. They’re not the most intelligent creatures, for the most part.”
“How many emus you been around, Burt?” Nester winked out the side of his eye, while I finished tying up my boat. You know a place is home when you can be away twenty-five years, and it’s like you never left. Nester and Burt didn’t remember me from the old days – to them, I would’ve been just some scrawny dark-haired kid who came and went during a power plant refitting – but I remembered them like a photograph in my mind. They used to buy us kids cokes, if we could catch them in the store. Other than a few more wrinkles and a little less hair, not much had changed. Same old Nester, with the same old sweat-ringed straw cowboy hat; same old Burt, with the glasses a little thicker and fewer worry lines now that he wasn’t running a school. Same old conversation, except for the bit about the emu. No telling what they were looking at. Most likely neither one of them could see all the way across to the undeveloped side of the lake.
Burt stroked a chin that’d probably get a shave sometime in the next day or two – for sure before Sunday at Lakeshore Community Church. “I had an emu show up in my yard last winter. Trying to get him out my gate was like dealing with the board of education.” Burt leaned back and rubbed his stomach, the buttons over his gut gaping and pulling tight, like fish on a stringer, gasping for air.
Nester pointed toward the lake. “’S comin’ closer. Gonna get down to the water here in a minute’r two. Mart, what do you think that is? You’re the fish-and-game expert.The one with the fan-nancy uniform and the badge. Ain’t emus in the game warden handbook someplace?”
“Not unless you’re in Australia.” I looked out over the water. Fairly quiet in terms of traffic today, being Monday. Just the sun rippling on the currents, the little thundercloud rumbling in the distance, and a flock of cattle egrets flying by, like seagulls looking for a sea.
There
was
something moving over on the other shore, coming up one of the park roads, kind of weaving back and forth in the shadows, unsteady. It didn’t walk like a deer, and it wasn’t a calf, either. . . .
I watched it for a minute. Too big for a coyote, too clumsy to be a horse some camper had lost in the state park. Hard to tell, but it looked like it was walking on two legs, kind of stooped forward. Could be an emu, maybe injured or old. After the bottom fell out of the emu and ostrich breeders’ market, ranchers had started turning their leftover birds loose. The economic climate being what it was, feral animals wandering the state park were a growing problem.