River Runs Red (The Border Trilogy) (16 page)

Back from his brief Colorado junket, Captain Vance Brewer crossed the tiny room, moving quietly—out of habit; the artist wouldn’t have noticed if he stomped or danced around in tap shoes—and picked up the sketches. They were all of the same general subject: a woman dancing. Her skirt swirled around her, her arms variously raised over her head or bowing out away from her body or holding onto a partner who was never pictured.

Brewer wished he could ask the old man what the pictures meant. Their subject matter was obvious, but there had to be something behind it, some meaning to the dancing woman. This meaning was locked in the old man’s head, and try as he might, Brewer would never persuade the man to reveal it.

He looked over the man’s shoulder at the next work in progress. A woman—the same or another, he couldn’t tell—also dancing. The old man would keep drawing, sitting in that chair, and then at some point he would stop, and then he would start again. The room didn’t contain a bed or a toilet or much of anything else. He didn’t need those. He only needed the chair and the drawing board, an endless supply of paper and dozens of pencils.

No reason to mess with a good thing.

Brewer left the room, locking it from the outside with a case-hardened padlock. He had the only key, on a keychain with nine other keys, and he kept it in his right front pocket at all times. If anything ever happened to him, someone would have to break the door down to get to the old man.

It could be years before anyone bothered.

SIXTEEN

Outside, a fierce wind blew sand against the walls and windows. Maha Yamani lived in Riyadh, in the old Al-Bathaa district near the center of the city, but when it blew hard enough, the Saudi Arabian desert seemed to rise up from its bed and blanket the entire city, from the newest high-rise buildings to the ancient mud-brick structures.

She had been scrying, or attempting to, at any rate, hoping to determine which of the two possible courses of action her client was considering might prove more favorable to his business. Her specialty was hydromancy, and it seemed particularly ironic, in the midst of one of the world’s great desert regions, to use water as a means of divination. Her copper basin was full. She meditated to the point of trance, staring into the water, waiting for the spirits to use it to send their messages.

After a time, the water started to churn, as if it was beginning to boil. Maha peered into it, willing it to reveal something, to settle into images or impressions of some kind. Instead of settling, though, the water merely bubbled more ferociously.

Something wasn’t right. The water had no heat source beneath it, so there was no reason for it to literally boil. She came out of the trance, held her palm out over the basin. Water spat against it, scalding her. When she snatched her hand away, it seemed to leap at her face, and she felt it strike, like tiny hot pokers stabbing her skin. She bit her lower lip and jumped from her chair and backed away from the table. Still, the water churned and roiled.

On the other side of the room, away from the plain table and chair at which she did her divination, Maha had a modern, Western-style living room set up, with leather couches and a steel-and-glass coffee table and, most importantly at the moment, a cordless phone. She snatched it from its cradle and hit a speed-dial button, then listened as it beeped through all the digits necessary for an international call.

Eduardo Pinedo answered on the third ring. “Hello, Maha,” he said. He was telekinetic, not clairvoyant, so she supposed he had caller ID.

“Eduardo.” Neither knew the other’s native tongue, so they always conversed in English. He lived in Ipala, Guatemala and spoke Spanish. “Are you well?”

“As well as can be,” he replied. He was ordinarily effusive, and such a noncommittal answer was unlike him. It was a dodge, and a transparent one at that.

“I wish I could say the same.” She had called him, so she didn’t plan to be similarly evasive. “I’ve had a problem.”

“What is it? Something I can help with?”

“I don’t know if anyone can help, Eduardo.”

“What is it?” he asked again.

“I…I have been trying to do some scrying, and something is…blocking me. It attacked me just now.”

He was silent for so long she began to wonder if she had been disconnected. Just before she said his name again, Eduardo spoke. “Ever since that night, Maha, my talents are virtually useless. I believe the ley lines are still in some sort of disarray. The frequencies that our powers utilize are off, somehow. It’s like I’m trying to operate a gas oven on an electric line. Is that how it’s been for you?”

“I worry that it might be more than that, Eduardo. More serious.”

“What, then?”

“Eleven years ago, I had a client who I could not help. I tried all my scrying techniques, but nothing worked at all. Finally, she left, furious, calling me a cheat and a fraud. In the street outside, still angry, she didn’t pay attention. She walked in front of a truck. It dragged her nearly a block before it was able to stop. The street looked like someone had painted a wide red stripe down it.”

Eduardo remained silent.

“What if the reason I cannot divine the future,” she asked, straining to find the words, “is because there
is
no future? What do we do then?”

SEVENTEEN

Wade set the digital clock for seven thirty. He hoped to wake up early, grab some breakfast in the hotel, then get over to the hospital to see Byrd. Molly was taking good care of him, but that didn’t mean there weren’t errands he could run. He wanted to do whatever he could for his friend while there was still time.

When the alarm buzzed, he slapped it into silence. His eyeballs felt like lead fishing weights in his skull. His eyelids were sandpaper. He pulled a pillow over his head, shielding it from the faint light leaking in around the curtains.

By the time he looked at the clock again, its display showed 12:35. Only the daylight limning the curtain convinced him that it was still daytime. “Jesus,” he said softly. “Guess I was more tired than I thought.”

He clicked on the hotel’s TV, switching to CNN out of habit. War news still dominated the headlines, then politics, then celebrity nonsense. He left it on while he showered, rubbed lotion into skin that seemed to be drying out more every day, and got dressed. The news had been a constant in his life, the stories changing, the graphics growing more sophisticated, the business models shifting to include online dissemination. But it was still people, mostly white, mostly men, sitting in front of a camera reading whatever scrolled in front of them on the teleprompter without passion or nuance. Cynical, maybe, but he had earned his cynicism in those same trenches and considered it his due.

He had lunch, not breakfast, in the restaurant, because that’s what they were serving when he finally got there. After that, he went back to the room and called Molly at
The
Voice
. Her recommendation sent him all the way to the west edge of town, almost to New Mexico.

When he finally saw Byrd that afternoon, he was startled all over again by how much his friend had shrunk. He wasn’t quite someone you could carry away in a shoebox, but he looked like he was heading in that direction. The cookies Wade brought from Cookies in Bloom, to which Molly had directed him, were chocolate chip, Byrd’s traditional favorite. Byrd just nibbled at his, holding it with both hands at his mouth, like a squirrel, as if one cookie was too heavy to lift.

Byrd had laughed when he’d handed over the bag, though, which made it worth it. “Contraband!” he said. “I love it!” After a few minutes of casual back-and-forth, the conversation turned, as it always did, to rivers.

“Sometimes when I’m lyin’ here and light reflects on the ceilin’, like from cars in the parkin’ lot or whatever, I feel like I’m out there. Like it’s noon and I’ve stopped beside the river for lunch, and the sunlight shafts down into the canyon and you can see the river movin’ in the reflection on the wall, remember?”

“Yeah,” Wade said. He sat in a guest chair and absently started turning his yellow rubber bracelet around on his wrist. “I know that feeling.”

“And then I’ll start to think my bed is movin’. Like I’m lyin’ in it and startin’ to drift away from the bank, then pickin’ up speed. The foot of the bed starts dippin’ and risin’, and there’s a little side-to-side motion, and I can see the walls of the room rushin’ past, and smell that dry-dusty river smell. You think I’m nuts, right? Hallucinatin’.”

“Dude, with as many drugs as you’ve had pumped into you lately, I’d be shocked if you weren’t.”

“The thing is, those are the times I sleep the best. I drift off to sleep as my bed drifts into the river. I don’t have any hospital dreams then, no sick dreams, just peaceful ones. River dreams. Outdoors, with maybe a coyote pack yippin’ or an owl’s call. Stars overhead and mirrored in the river. Times like that, I’m just about ready to go, you know? Just let go.”

“Byrd…”

“What, Wade? I should hang on? Why? What’s my future?”

Wade bit back the simplistic answer he would have started to give. Byrd was his best friend. He didn’t want to start lying to him now. Byrd’s future was probably limited to staying in a hospital bed until the end. The fact that he was ready to die was most likely healthier than fighting it or pretending it wasn’t happening.

At least Byrd was more awake now. He sat up in bed, eyes bright. “Right,” he said. “That’s the correct answer. Silence.”

“Byrd, I’m not saying that there are any good options. It’s just an instinctive reaction. You know. Until things are hopeless, there’s always hope, right? No matter how fast the rapids, there’s always an eddy up ahead somewhere. You just have to get there.”

“I think this is my last class four, pal. It’s all whitewater from here. I don’t think I can bail the boat out anymore either. All I can do is hang on to the gunwales and ride it out.”

Wade offered a smile. “You always were good at that.”

“Fuck you, too,” Byrd said. Wade was glad to hear this—when Byrd turned profane, it meant he was feeling better.

They were quiet for a few moments. Byrd stared at the ceiling, and Wade watched Byrd stare. “You remember the mountain lions?” Byrd asked after a while.

Wade remembered. “In Cataract Canyon,” he said. They had just come out of the double whammy of Little Niagara and Satan’s Gut, fighting all the way down, and they were exhausted. It had just been the two of them in twelve-foot Vanguard inflatable, and they had both stretched out, limp and soaked, and let the easy current carry them downriver. After the pounding roar of the big water, the quiet stream seemed virtually silent. They drifted without speaking, oars in the boat.

Lake Powell waited ahead. They shared the river rat’s disdain for that artificial lake, knowing it had drowned Glen Canyon, one of the Colorado River’s most beautiful natural wonders—and given that the Colorado also cut through the Grand Canyon, that was high praise indeed. The river had been dammed in 1963, before Wade and Byrd were born, but they had seen pictures, even old 16-mm movies, and it was one of those topics the old-timers bloviated about around campfires at night. Not so much on commercial river trips; some professional guides publicly bemoaned the loss of the Glen, but for the most part they were intent on making sure the paying customers had a good, safe ride, and complaining about days gone by wasn’t the best tactic. But when Wade and Byrd met up with longtime river rats—once, for one night, even sharing space around a fire with the infamous Ed Abbey, toward the end of his life—Glen Canyon almost invariably came up, and glowing descriptions of its attributes would follow.

Like most river rats, Wade and Byrd looked upon dams in general with contempt, but they shared a special, burning hatred for the Glen Canyon dam.

The Abbey meeting had been one of the high points of Wade’s young life. They were near Mexican Hat, Utah, and had fallen in with some people who knew Abbey. Wade had just sold a story to
High Country News
, his first professional sale since graduating from UTEP, and as soon as the check had come in the mail, he had taken it—and thirty bucks of his savings—and purchased a first edition of Abbey’s classic book
Desert Solitaire
from an antiquarian bookseller in El Paso. When he told Abbey that he’d bought it, the aging curmudgeon had chuckled. “I’ll never understand those prices,” Abbey said. “Most of my friends can’t afford ’em, present company excluded, of course, and my enemies wouldn’t pay a nickel for ’em.”

He had agreed to sign the book the next time they met up. But he had died a couple years later, and Wade never got to see him again. It hardly mattered to Wade, who still had the book at his apartment in Atlanta, because the memory of Edward Abbey calling him a friend made it a prized possession, signature or no.

Abbey spoke of Glen Canyon, too. Even the names of the canyon’s wonders were magical, Wade always thought: Cathedral in the Desert, Hidden Passage, Aztec Creek, Little Eden, Coyote Bridge, Music Temple. All of it lost, buried under the floodwaters backed up behind Glen Canyon Dam. The old-timers still called the Reclamation Bureau the “Wreck-the-Nation Bureau” in the dam’s honor, and still dreamed of ways to destroy the dam and free the canyon. A few years back, drought had exposed parts of Glen Canyon that hadn’t been seen for decades, and Wade hadn’t been able to get away from work. Byrd had made a quick run, and never stopped bragging about it.