The River at Night(51)

A roughly square plot had been cleared of brush and trees. An intricate mosaic of gray, green, and white pebble-size river stones described the shape and size of a man lying on the ground. Black stones defined eyes, eyebrows, and hair, his lips a grim line across his face.

Dean squatted at the head of the grave, rocking back and forth on his tire-wrapped feet. He brought the thumb and fingers of his right hand together and touched them to his forehead, then dropped his hand to his waist, as if removing an imaginary cap. The sign for “man.” He made the sign again and again, seemingly lost in his memories.

“What man is here?” I said, signed.

He tapped his forehead with an open hand. The sign for “father.”

“I’m sorry.”

“How did he die?” Pia asked. Good lord. The directness of her. At least she said it softly.

Dean cast her an agonized glance. Agitated, he jumped to his feet and paced the perimeter of the grave, arrows rattling in his hard leather quiver. After two trips around, he signed to me, “Father bad. Bad man.” He pulled at his hair, slapped his own face once, twice, took another turn around the stone man. Then he stood trembling, as if listening to a voice none of us could hear. I thought of Marcus and those dark days when I couldn’t reach him.

“What happened to him?” I signed.

“He hit my mother. She blood. I saw.”

“What did he say?” Pia said.

I kept my eyes on Dean and spoke as evenly as I could. “He said his dad wasn’t a good guy. Beat up his mother.”

Dean walked purposefully over to Pia; looked up and met her eye. “Tall woman,” he signed. He cupped one hand to his ear, the sign for “listen.” His hands carved the air around us: “Mother shot father. He die. I watch. After, she cut my tongue.” He opened his mouth wide and again made the sign for “cut.” Pia struggled to keep the terror off her face. He turned to show me, so I forced myself to look inside his mouth. The remainder of his tongue, an eggplant--colored stump of flesh, protruded from the back of his mouth, just under drop-shaped tonsils and surrounded by blackened and missing teeth. The stench of his breath nearly overwhelmed me.

I translated. Pia made a strangled sound.

“Oh, dear God,” Sandra said.

Dean closed his mouth and looked at me, as if for my thoughts on the matter.

“Does it hurt?” I asked.

He signed that it didn’t.

“How old are you?” I asked, signed.

“Twenty-three summer,” he signed without hesitation.

“How long have you lived here, in the forest?”

“Eighteen summer.”

“Where were you born?”

His face lit up. He pointed to the trees swaying in the wind above us. “Sky.”

“The sky?”

“Mom says sky. Sun, stars, moon. I am present for her from sky.”

“Before the forest,” I signed slowly, “where did you live?”

“I live with bad people. Mom says all bad people in town. Mom says, bad Dean in town. Scared of town.”

“Ask him if he knows the way out of here,” Rachel said.

“You can ask him,” I said. “He’s not deaf.”

She gave me a look, as much as she could with her one good eye. “Dean, can you take us to a town? Do you know the way, besides the river, I mean?”

“No,” he signed.

“That’s hard to believe.” Rachel snorted. “That the kid’s never been out of here.”

“Why?” Sandra said. She crouched over the pointillist grave, admiring its exquisite detail. It occurred to me just how young Dean was, close to the same age we’d been when we met—Sandra untouched by cancer and a nightmare marriage, Pia before her Wonder Woman years, Rachel when she was falling-down drunk every weekend, back when we still thought that was funny.

“He was five when he came to this place, sounds like,” Sandra said as she got to her feet. “Who remembers when they’re five? I don’t. Not much, anyway.”

Dean had stopped paying attention to us. Squirreling around in a greasy leather satchel, he withdrew an envelope fashioned from a beaten piece of plastic. He peeled back layer after layer, revealing a half-inch-thick stack of photographs.

“Secret,” he signed to me.

He shyly handed me the photos. Pia, Sandra, and Rachel crowded around me as we scrutinized each one. The photos had wide white frames, the kind produced by instant cameras popular ten or fifteen years ago. Most of the pictures were so badly water-and mud-stained that only pieces of the images were clear. A laughing young woman in a print dress held a baby, while a grim-faced older woman trussed in black stood nearby, clutching her purse high up under her armpit. A red tractor loomed behind them; beyond it a modest-looking farmhouse and rolling green hills. Other photos: children cannonballed off a dock into a shimmering lake as a chubby girl in a flowered bikini watched from the shore. A man with a rifle slung over his shoulder stood next to an enormous dead bear. The last few were old postcards: the Statue of Liberty raising her light above the New York harbor; a grinning cartoon lobster and the words Welcome to Boothbay Harbor! superimposed over a photo of a shoreline.

“Who are these people?” I said and signed.

“Mom says fairy tales.”