So Cold the River (2010) (22 page)

Josiah blew past that and on into town, stopped at the gas station and put twenty dollars’ worth into his empty tank and bought
a six-pack, drank one down fast while he stood at the pump. Someone pulled in and tapped the horn, annoyed that Josiah was
there blocking the pump while drinking a beer, but it only took one look to make the driver go on to the next available pump.

He threw his empty beer can into the trash and drove away from the station, heading home. His house was out in the wooded
hills just east of Orangeville, surrounded by a few hundred acres of Amish farmland. They ran up and down the road in their
buggies and sold vegetables in front of the farm, and early on, Josiah would hit the gas in his truck when he passed, let
that oh-so-scary modern machinery roar at them. Made him laugh. Over time, though, he began to appreciate them despite himself.
They were quiet neighbors, took care of their land, didn’t bother him with noise or forced-friendly conversation or gossip.
Minded their own, let him mind his. As it should be.

The porch looked clean and bright when he pulled into the drive, but it no longer satisfied him. He’d taken a hell of a one-two
punch. Seeing those guys sitting in Edgar’s living room was bad enough, but that had come right on the heels of Danny Hastings,
old dumbass Danny, looking Josiah in the eye and
telling him he thought Josiah’s plan was stupid. And being right to say so.

Yes, this day was spinning away from him in an altogether unpleasant fashion. Hell, the whole weekend was. Had gone south
fast and furious, starting last night. Things had been fine Friday morning, fine as they ever were, at least.

That was the problem, though—things never were fine and never were going to change. Not unless he took some action. He’d be
sitting on the porch drinking piss-water beer and matching wits with Danny for the rest of his pathetic life, till his reflexes
went and he could no longer handle the truck with booze in his veins and he put it off the highway and into the trees just
like his worthless father had before him.

“Something’s got to change,” he whispered to himself, sitting there in the cab of the truck with sweat trickling along his
neck and the beer warming in the sun while horses walked in circles at the Amish farm next door, turning some sort of mill
wheel, their heads down the whole time, step after step after step. “Something has got to change.”

He got out of the truck but didn’t want to go in the house, didn’t want to sit on the stained couch and look at the cracks
in the wall and the sloped floor. The porch rail glinted under the sun, sure, but now he realized just how damn little the
porch rail meant. The house was still a dump, with sagging gutters and a stain-streaked roof and mildew-covered siding. Sure,
those things could be addressed, but it took money, and even then, what the hell was the point? Could only accomplish so much
with polish on a turd.

Instead of going inside, he took the beer and set off on foot, walked through the backyard and into the field beyond, picking
his way through the barbed-wire fence that separated the properties. He’d walk up into the wooded hills, have a few more beers.

He was halfway across the field, head bowed against the sun and the warm western wind, when he remembered the second half
of his dream, the man waiting for him at the edge of the tree line. The thought was enough to make him look up, as if he’d
see the old bastard standing out there. Wasn’t anything in sight, but the memory chilled him just the same, thinking of the
way the guy had been shaking his head at Josiah as the day faded away and the night came on. Weird damn dream. And that after
the one on the train, the same man standing in the boxcar with water around his ankles.

We’re going home to take what’s yours.

There were those who believed dreams meant something. Josiah had never been of that breed, but today he couldn’t help it,
thinking about the man in the bowler hat.
Take what’s yours,
he’d said. Wasn’t much in the world that belonged to Josiah. Funny, though, him having a dream like that just when everyone
was asking questions about his family. Who the hell would possibly care about Campbell at this point? Had been damn near eighty
years since the thug hopped a train and disappeared.

Hopped a train. An old-fashioned train, with a steam locomotive and a caboose, like the one in his dream.

“Was that you, Campbell?” Josiah said softly, tramping across the field, and he smiled. A bunch of crazy, stupid thoughts,
that’s what he was lost to today. Setting fires and stealing gems and seeing his great-grandfather in dreams? He was coming
unhinged.

The sun was hot and the beer cans clanged awkwardly against his leg as he walked, but he didn’t mind. His shirt was soaked
with sweat and gnats buzzed around his neck but that was fine, too. It felt good to be outside, good to be moving, good to
be alone. He’d grown up in the woods and fields out here, spent more time in them than in his home.
Field runners,
Edgar used to call him and Danny. Old Edgar had done well by Josiah. Josiah’s
own family had been such a damned disaster that he’d as good as taken in with the Hastings instead. He and Danny had been
close as brothers, and while Danny wasn’t much in the brains department, Josiah had never minded that so much as he did lately.
Fact was, he’d always liked Danny fine, just looked down on him a touch. Danny was a good man, but not one who was going to
do anything with his life. Even when they’d dropped out of high school on the same day, it had felt like Danny was playing
out his fate while Josiah was making a choice. Josiah was the half of the pair who would accomplish something, the half with
ambition.

That had always been the notion in his head, at least. Now, though, he felt as if he’d sobered up and took a blink and realized
there was nothing separating him from Danny at all, nothing that anybody else would see, at least, nothing tangible. They
were both still in town, living in shitty houses and driving shitty cars and swinging weed eaters and hedge clippers and drinking
too much. How in the hell had that happened?

The place he was headed today was a spot he’d found when he was a kid, twelve years old and hiking alone. Well, not hiking
as much as running, with the sting of the old man’s belt still on his back. They’d lived only two miles from where he did
now, two miles separated by the fields he’d just come through.

That day he ran until his lungs were clenched tight as fists and his hamstrings were screaming, and then he’d slowed to a
stumbling walk, moved through another field and into the woods, and found himself scrambling across the face of a steep hill.
It was a difficult climb, overgrown and pockmarked with slabs of limestone. He’d heard a gurgling noise and frozen, listening
and growing progressively creeped out because the sound was coming from
beneath
him. From right under his feet, he was sure of that, yet there wasn’t so much as a puddle in sight.

He’d followed the sound, fought down through the trees, and found a cliff face, a good hundred feet of sheer rock leading
to a strange pool of water below that had an eerie, aquamarine glow. The pool was still as a farm pond, but all around it
the gurgling, churning noise of water in motion persisted. Birch trees had tumbled off the ridge and lay half in and half
out of the water, their ghostly white limbs fading into green depths. All along the top of the cliff face, root systems dangled
free, hanging across the stone like something out of one of those slasher movies set in the swamps.

The ridge ran around all sides of the pool, forming a giant bowl, and it took some effort for him to pick his way down to
it. At the bottom the place seemed even more ominous than at the top, because here there was no getting out fast, and the
wind picked leaves off the trees that rimmed the ridge and sent them tumbling down on you. Now and then one corner of the
pool would seem to snarl, spitting water into more water, and beneath the rocks water trickled, always audible but invisible.

Josiah had never imagined such a place.

He’d risked another beating that night by telling his father about it, swearing the place was something magic, and the old
man had laughed and told him it was the Wesley Chapel Gulf, or the Elrod Gulf if you were an old-timer, one of the spots where
the Lost River broke the surface again, coughed up by the caves that held it.

“You stay away from there in flood season,” the old man had warned. “You know where the water was today? Well, it’ll rise
up thirty feet or more along that cliff when the underground part of the river fills up, and it’ll spin, just like a whirlpool.
I’ve seen it, boy, and it’s made for drowning. You go there in flood season and I’ll tan your ass.”

Naturally, Josiah had gone back to the gulf during the spring
floods. And son of a bitch if the old man wasn’t telling the truth for once—the water did climb the cliff face, and it did
spin like a whirlpool. There was a shallow spot in the bowl-shaped ridge that held it, and the water broke through there and
found a dry channel and filled it, rushing along for a piece and then disappearing into one of the swallow holes only to resurface
a bit farther on.

It was one strange river, and it held Josiah’s attention for most of his youth. He and Danny traced the dry channels and located
the swallow holes, found more than a hundred of them, some drinking the water down in thirsty, roiling pools, others spitting
it back to the surface as if disgusted. There were springs, too, some of them so small as to be missed unless you were standing
beside them, springs that put off a potent odor of eggs gone bad. They even found traces of old dwellings scattered along
the river and through the hills, rotted timbers and moss-covered slabs of stone.

The gulf became a regular spot for Josiah, but one he’d never hiked to with anybody but Danny until he was sixteen, when he
brought a girl named Marie up to it one night. She’d bitched the whole way, said the place was creepy, then stopped him from
putting his hand up her skirt and had been with another guy not a week later. After that, Josiah never took anybody else back.

Sometimes people came by and dumped trash down the slope and into the pool, and that incensed Josiah in a way few things ever
could. He’d hauled countless beer cans and tires out of there, once an entire toilet. When he was in high school, the national
forest claimed the property, realizing it was something special, and they cleaned it out and put up a sign and took to monitoring
the place.

Today he climbed up to the east side of the ridge and picked his way down to a jutting limestone ledge that looked out over
the pool below. He sat with his feet dangling off the ledge and cracked open a beer. It was lukewarm by now.

If he were on the opposite side of this same hill and the leaves were off the trees, he’d be able to look out to the house
he’d grown up in, what was left of it, at least. Place had been vacant for ten years, and last spring a tree had come down
and bashed a hole in the roof above the kitchen, letting the rain come in. He was surprised the county hadn’t knocked the
house down when they came to remove the tree.

The gulf was within walking distance of his childhood home, and within walking distance of his adult home. He was all of two
miles from the place of his birth.

Two miles. That was how far he’d gotten in life.
Two fucking miles
.

He drank another beer as the sun sank behind the trees and the air began to cool. Down in the gulf, long trunks of fallen
trees weathered to bone white faded into the shadows, the blue-green of the water edging toward black. Now and then there
was a churlish splashing at the edge of the pool as the Lost River gave up more of its hidden water, and the wet whispering
of it moving through the stone below ground was always present. He opened one more beer but didn’t drink any, just set it
beside him and stretched out on his back. He wanted to close his eyes for a piece. Try not to think about the man from Chicago
or the one from the dream. Try not to think about anything.

A
NNE
McK
INNEY ANSWERED THE
door with bottle in hand. She smiled when Eric made introductions between her and Kellen but kept her hand on the door frame,
too, looking less steady than she had earlier in the day.

“It’s the same as yours, isn’t it?” she said, offering Eric the bottle.

He turned the bottle over in his hand and nodded. Every detail was the same, but this one was dry and room temperature, felt
natural against his skin.

“It’s a perfect match.”

“I don’t know who you’d ask to compare them. Maybe it was a foolish idea.”

“No, it’s a great idea. Kellen knows somebody who should be able to help.”

“Good.”

“And you’re sure you don’t care? Because I’d hate to open this if I thought—”

She waved him off. “Oh, it doesn’t matter. I’ve got more, and I doubt anybody will care much about them when I’m gone anyhow.
I’ll leave them to the historical society, but they’re not going to miss one out of the lot.”

“Thank you.”

“How you feeling now?” she asked with what seemed to be genuine concern.

“I’m doing fine,” he lied and then surprised himself by saying, “what about you?”

“Oh, I’m a little tired. Did more than I should have today probably.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t you worry about that. It’s just been one of those days…” Her eyes drifted past him, out to the windmills that lined
the yard and looked down on the town below like sentries. “Some strange weather coming in. If I were you two, I’d have an
umbrella handy tomorrow.”

“Really?” Kellen said, looking up at the blue sky. “Looks perfect to me.”

“Going to change, though,” she said. “Going to change.”

They thanked her again and went down the porch steps and back to the car. The chimes were jingling, a beautiful sound in an
evening that was going dark fast.

Kellen asked if he had a dinner preference, and when Eric said no, they ended up back at the buffet in the casino, because
Kellen said he was “in a mood to put a hurting on some food.” By the time they got inside, Eric’s stomach was swirling and
the headache had his vision a little cloudy, sensitive to the lights that surrounded them. All he needed to do was eat a little.
Surely that was it.