The River (12 page)

“Gross! I even had my mouth open.” I wiped the saliva off my face with the back of my sleeve. I sniffed the air. In close range, the smell was even worse.

I stood up slowly and took in the length of him. His hackles were down and he was wagging his rump where a tail should have been. We were comrades now—all because he knew either from my words or my smell that I was the one creature in the Santiam National Forest who was probably as miserable as he was.

What now? Hesitantly, I grasped the rope around his neck and yanked the other end, which was still somewhere in the horsetail ferns. With one good tug it slithered free. It was short, ending in something big and dirty and rusted that looked like a railroad spike. I glanced from the hellhound, along the short rope, to the spike, and back. I thought I could piece together what had happened. Someone had kept this beast on a short chain and he’d broken free with sheer muscle power. Maybe I could find the owner and the owner would put him right back. On a short chain. Without food.

No. That was absolutely the wrong thing to do. But what was the right thing? Ranger Dave would know. I took the cell out of my pocket, called him, and explained the situation. He growled. “Jesus, Ronnie. How could you do that? I turned around and you were gone but Allison and Nolan were still here. How was I going to explain this to your parents?”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

I heard him breathe heavily into the mouthpiece. “All right. Come out to the road, I’ll find you.”

The animal and I galumphed along together, me keeping a loose grip on his rope. I knew that if he charged someone there was nothing I could do. But I held on anyway because I liked the illusion of control. He seemed to as well, first forging ahead and then looking back to make sure I was following. Come on, slowpoke.

When we got to the road, Ranger Dave was already there in his US Forest Service SUV. He opened the passenger door. “Get in,” he said. His tone was terse. I encouraged the critter into the backseat and got into the front. I didn’t say anything. I’d never seen Ranger Dave mad before, and it scared me.

“Call your dad right now,” he said as he eased the car out onto the highway. “Tell them we’re going to the vet. Tell them about the dog. Don’t mention where you found it, okay? Just say it wandered onto the track.”

I muttered a thanks and said something about making it up to him. His disappointment filled the car as much as the 150-pound dog in the backseat.

“Damn straight you will,” he said. “You can’t keep wandering off like that. It’s dangerous.”

“So I’m told,” I said.

He wagged a finger at me. “Don’t get smug, missy. We’ve got to find a way to curb your recklessness.”

“What did you have in mind?” I asked.

“I don’t know right now. But believe me. There will be consequences.” He sniffed the air. “Pee-yew! Have you looked for dog tags?”

“No tags,” I said quickly. This beast belonged to someone before, but that someone had forfeited him.

Ranger Dave just nodded and cracked the back window hoping to dissipate the stench, and the dog spent the ride with his disgusting snoot in the open air, looking mournful.

At the vet’s office in Salem they took charge and knocked the dog out with a short-acting anesthetic so they could stitch up his ears and clean out the deep cuts. While we waited, Ranger Dave paced the parking lot talking on his cell, presumably with the Humane Society or Animal Control. I didn’t listen but figured he was trying to rig it so he could adopt the hound and let it convalesce at the ranger station.

At last the vet himself emerged, a guy with a gray moustache wearing scrubs with cartoon puppies and kittens on them. He was holding the dog on a leash. It was one of the funniest sights I’d ever seen because the beast was wearing some kind of inverted lampshade on his head and kept running into walls. Step, step,
bonk
! Step, step,
bonk
!

“Here you go, young lady,” the vet said, handing me both the leash and a bag that said “Salem Veterinary Associates” on it. “Food dish. Canned food so she’ll put on weight. We gave her her shots. You’re really lucky. You’ve got yourself a fine girl under all that muck. Looks to be a purebred mastiff.”

I stood there openmouthed, holding the leash in one hand and the bag in the other while
she
sat on my feet and swatted good-naturedly at me with her front paw.

“Ronnie,” Ranger Dave said. “She wants you to pet her.”

No no no. This was all wrong.
She
wasn’t mine. I wasn’t a dog person. I was especially not a mastiff person. A mastiff with ragged ears and, let’s face it, a really foul smell. There didn’t seem to be a centimeter on her hide that wasn’t shaved, or stitched, or gross, or all three at the same time. I didn’t want to pet her. I wanted her out of my life. I’d already done my part, hadn’t I? I’d rescued her from starvation.

I turned to Ranger Dave. “This is just for the ride home, right? You’ll take care of her, won’t you?”

“Not me,” he said, and smiled an impish smile. And I understood. I stared down into the dog’s face—
her
face—and knew that I was looking at the big hairy snout of my con-sequences. Ranger Dave hadn’t been on the phone with the Humane Society. He’d been on the phone with my parents who had decided it was a fine idea for me to have a pet.

My mood didn’t improve on the car ride home, either, because the oaf wouldn’t stay in the back seat. She would creep up on silent paws to where I was riding shotgun, and try to plunk herself into my lap. She seemed to think that if she was really slow and quiet, I wouldn’t notice her. It didn’t work for two reasons: 1) she wasn’t dainty, and 2) that lampshade kept getting in the way. I pushed her back twice, furious each time. As far as I was concerned, she was just one more thing anchoring me to a life I didn’t want.

By the third time I gave up trying to push her out of my lap. It was easier letting her have her way. I arrived at the inn cradling 150 pounds of muddy, stinky dog.

Mom and Dad were enjoying hot buttered rums on the front porch, safe and dry under the eaves with an outdoor heater pointed at their legs. Mom picked up a tray from the railing.

As soon as I opened the car door, the dog hopped out and careened up the front steps (walk walk
bonk
! Walk walk
bonk
!). Mom stood up and whipped the linen napkin off the tray. It was piled high, volcano-style, with grilled sausages and carmelized onions. The smell made me salivate worse than the dog, and I realized how hungry I was.

Then she plunked the tray on the ground, and I understood that, once again, the food wasn’t for me.

“Now let’s see. These have chicken, apple, and cumin, and those are andouille, and these are chorizo…”

It didn’t matter. The dog put her head down and they were gone in one massive slurp. Then she looked up, belched, shook her head, and the slobber went winging all over the porch. I thought for sure that now Mom would be disgusted, mutter a few phrases about health code violations, and make us find the dog some other home. But she just laughed. It was more than a laugh, it was actually a cackle. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard Mom cackle. It took ten years from her lined face.

“Are you sure this one’s okay?” Dad said to Ranger Dave. “Couldn’t we start with something smaller?”

“This is exactly the right one,” he said, and Dad didn’t question him further. Ranger Dave knew his critters.

Mom sniffed the air. “Too bad about the aroma,” she said. “Do we have to wait until the stitches come out until we can bathe her?”

But then a funny thing happened. It was like in horror movies when halfway through the film you stop sympathizing with the heroine and start sympathizing with the serial killer. When Mom made that comment about her pungent bouquet, this beast with the brindled schnoz of death stopped being
a
beast, and became
my
beast. And I couldn’t have anyone dissing
my
beast.

“She’s not so bad,” I said. “She smells just like a petunia.”

With that, Dad opened the front door and Petunia herself trotted right in, proprietarily, as though she’d lived here forever.

15

Petunia wasn’t the only consequence of my recklessness. I was also grounded from using the family car for two weeks, which meant Dad had to drop off Tomás and me at school, then pick us up after practice, like in kindergarten.

That first afternoon of chauffeurage, Tomás and I were camped out in front of the gym while the fast twitch kids were still stacking hurtles. They gave me all kinds of grief when Dad pulled up in his SUV with Petunia painting the back window in slobber. “Look, Ronnie. Your
daddy’s
here,” Nolan Chapman said.

“Hi, Tomás,” Allison Lehman said with a sly little wave. Tomás acknowledged her with a thrust of his chin, and continued his slow lurch to the car.

“This sucks,” I hissed to him. “How come my stock has gone down and yours has gone up?”

Tomás paused with his fingers wrapped around the door handle. His brow was a “v” shape of concentration. Then after what seemed a half hour, he turned to where Nolan was, and slowly, deliberately, flipped him off.

“That better?” he said as he crammed himself into the shotgun seat.

“Yes,” I said. And surprisingly, it was.

Even before I sat down Petunia was crawling into my lap and thrusting her snoot into my face. I managed to get an arm up to block her but her lampshade scratched it. When I pulled away to inspect the damage she zoomed in for a full-face slurp.

“What does Ranger Dave say about dog breath?”

“Live with it,” Dad barked.

When we walked through the front door of the inn, I hung up my dripping rain jacket and dropped Petunia’s leash. Dad stopped me with an “Uh-uh-uh, Veronica. What do you think you’re doing?”

“Washing my hands then prepping?” It’s what I did most afternoons. I figured after I’d been so grievously busted I would be chopping cilantro for the rest of my life.

Dad leaned over and picked up Petunia’s leash, giving the end to me. “First you need to walk your dog. Do you have your mace?” Now this was more like the old Dad. He knew, even without my telling him, that I had no idea where my mace was. I’d lost track of it as soon as Sheriff McGarry gave it to me.

I didn’t need to say anything before Dad was on me again. “How ’bout your phone?”

That was something I had a response for. “It’s in my backpack.”

“Pull it out, then.”

I undid the front zipper and foraged inside. It was usually right here, underneath the lip balm and PowerBar. Except that it wasn’t. I dumped it upside down on a lowboy. Three tampons, a handful of change covered in a mysterious brown dust (old Oreos?), a pair of sunglasses, but nothing else spilled out.

“Try the main pocket,” Dad suggested. So I upended that, too. Chem textbook;
Literature for You
, Second Edition;
¡Hola!
, Fifth Edition; three subject folders and corresponding spiral notebooks; a folded schedule of track meets, a pair of really smelly ankle socks, and that was it.

“Huh,” I said. “I could’ve sworn I put it in there this morning.”

“Well, you’re not going outside until I see your cell fully charged and switched on.”

“It’s all right, Mr. Severance. I’ve got mine.” Tomás was standing behind me. Then he thrust his Motorola out for Dad to inspect. That made it twice that day he had come to my rescue. And while I didn’t like feeling helpless, it was kind of cool having someone back me up. I could see why the guys on the basketball team loved him. It wasn’t just for his height.

But Dad wasn’t done with his interrogation. “I suppose you have her mace, too.”

“Right here,” Tomás said, popping the cap and tossing it to me.

“Flashlight?”

“Check,” Tomás said.

Dad softened. “Thanks, Tomás. Good thing
one
of you is organized.”

Then he shot me a last stern, disapproving glance before retreating to the Astro Lounge.

After reloading my backpack, we went out the sun porch and down the back steps, Petunia on one side of me, Tomás on the other. I thought:
This is insane. Dad might as well have handed Tomás to me on a leash, too
.

The river was higher than it was yesterday, and it made me anxious. I knew it was just runoff and that’s what happened in the spring, but to me it meant that I was losing ground and
la llorona
was gaining it.

“I wonder what happened to my cell,” I mused aloud.

“You missing anything else?” Tomás spoke up. He was so graceful and quiet, for a minute I had forgotten that he was there with me.

“You mean like my iPod? And Dad can’t find some of his antidepressants.” I suddenly understood what he was talking about. He wasn’t accusing me of being impractical. “Come on. You heard Dad: I’m disorganized. I just misplaced that stuff.”

“Even your dad’s drugs?”

That stopped me. Could he be right? Was someone ripping us off?

“What about your purse?” Tomás went on. “Do you still have cash in your wallet?”

“I don’t know.” It wasn’t something I checked a lot, which might seem strange, but there wasn’t anything in Hoodoo to buy.

Tomás frowned. “We should go back. We should go back right now and check.”

“I already have a father, thanks,” I snapped. I was lucky to be out—on or off a leash—considering all the trouble I was in. And I didn’t want Tomás telling me how to spend what little freedom I still had.

I hadn’t even gone two strides before I was sorry. Had not the man come through for me twice today already? And no, that didn’t entitle him to run my life, but that was what siblings were about. Or so I was told. We might drive each other crazy but we couldn’t walk away. Besides: I had no trouble dealing with Esperanza waking me up at 2:00 in the morning, and she hadn’t even flipped anybody off for me.

I was about to apologize but he did it first. “That was way out of line,” he said. “We’re all a little freaked. I just thought…”

He stared at his shoes. Something was dammed up inside him, like it was the day Karen had prodded him to ask me something that he never got around to. “You just thought what?”

“I don’t know. I guess I thought we were safe.”

I nodded, I thought so, too, and the feeling wasn’t even that strong with me, because I still saw the inn for what it wasn’t, namely the city. But Tomás was different. He needed to be here, cocooned by his family and mine. And I wondered what he was escaping.

“What do you need to be safe from?” I said.

Tomás rubbed his wrist, the one with the impressive scar. Safe from whatever had given him that. In a lot of ways he was like
la llorona
, I thought, careful about giving up secrets. But if I had to guess what he was talking about, it wasn’t just that his dad had gotten drunk and knocked him around. He was talking about rage and death, the darkness that stumbled past my bedroom window every night in the old house. Whereas I had the luxury of watching it progress from warmth and safety, Tomás had to live with it. That darkness was probably what he thought he’d outrun, and then it had overtaken Karen.

“It’s all right,” I said. “I don’t need to know.”

I looked at the sky, which was now the deep purple of boysenberries. Once again I was dead-ended. “I suppose we should get back.”

I jerked on Petunia’s leash and started back toward the inn, trying to avoid the stinging nettles. I heard Tomás’ voice over my shoulder. “There’s something I want to ask you.”

I turned around. I wondered what he was going to say, but had a feeling it had nothing to do with his scar. It was as though a little trickle of freedom was coming from him, and it was my job as his near-sister to encourage it into a steady current.

“Shoot,” I said.

There was another long pause. That was okay. I could wait. “Do you know anyone who would go out with me?”

I almost had to ask him to repeat himself, because that wasn’t the question I’d been expecting. I didn’t realize I’d been expecting anything, but at that moment I knew that I had—I’d even rehearsed what I would tell him.

While I was puzzling over this, I lost my footing and fell face forward, right into something hard and scratchy. I tried to pull myself together, but the bushes weren’t let-ting me go. Petunia helped me by sitting on my feet and swatting me with her front paw.
Get up
. I managed to get myself disentangled and into a sitting position, feeling my throbbing forehead. A thunderegg was forming above my right eye.

“Are you all right?” Tomás said, and extended his hand to help me up. I didn’t take it, because I noticed something hidden in the tall grass. Something shining, like a diamond, where everything shiny should have been snuffed by the darkening sky.

“Hand me the light.” I took it and inched my way over to the object on all fours. It was just more junk—an empty cigarette package. I picked it up tentatively as if it was a dead bird. Why did I need a closer look at this? I saw junk all the time.

Then I uncrumpled it and looked at the label.

Jakarta.

Reading the letters made me feel glacial, like the moment before all your fingers and toes go black from frostbite—that moment when you still have feeling but you know you have to get out of the cold.

“Isn’t that Keith’s brand?” Tomás asked.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” I said. “He’s always bank-combing for junk for his mom’s art projects. I see him around here all the time.” And that part was true. The smokes probably had nothing to do with Karen’s murder. All they really proved was that Keith had been through here.

So why was something whispering to me that this wasn’t right?

Look, Ronnie, just look.

All those months following Karen around. She had trained me to spot the unusual. And so, even though my first reaction was to deny I’d even seen this, something deeper told me different.

“Ronnie…”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

I got to my feet. I shone the flashlight all around the ground and along the bank. There were no shoes, no hairbows—not even any Happy Meal toys. Tomás looked around, too. Five feet upstream there was a tall cedar and lots of brambles. No way anyone could maneuver around it. That must be what happened: Keith was out here looking for stuff for his mom, had a smoke, turned around, and went home. It was the rainy season. He could leave his butts out here without torching acreage.

“I can’t do this anymore today,” I said. I should have said, I don’t
want
to do this. I’d been looking too hard, trying to make sense of a senseless death, and I was circling like an eddy.

I started walking back to the inn.

“Hold up,” Tomás said, took the flashlight from me, and shone it in my eyes. The bright light made stars explode in front of me, strong as mace.

“You’re bleeding,” he said, and brushed something off my temple.

I ran my tongue over my upper lip. It tasted like rain and something else—something liquid and tangy.

“Does it hurt?” he asked, drawing away his hand. His fingers were red.

Yes
, I almost said. Because when he drew the flashlight away from my face, I first saw fireworks, then when they cleared up, the outline of his face. It was so strong and his eyelashes so thick that for a moment it didn’t matter to me that he wasn’t hip or was never without his baseball cap.

This wasn’t right. I couldn’t be attracted to him. He was almost like a brother. Besides, what about Keith? I fingered the cigarette pack in my pocket. That didn’t prove anything. He was probably still my rock-star hero.

Still, looking at Tomás’ profile in the boysenberry sky, I couldn’t help thinking about how I’d never had him and now I had to give him up, the one who flipped someone off for me, and the pain of that alone was enough to make my face throb.

“Ronnie? Does it hurt?”

I closed my eyes and listened to the river. I didn’t know what I was feeling, but I knew I deserved the pain.

“No,” I said. And I tried to believe it.