The River at Night(68)

Dean’s shape came into view, a fierce apparition out of the fog. Deep furrows darkened his cheeks, his hooded eyes sunken in their sockets.

“Slow down, Dean, please! We can’t go so fast,” I said. “We’re hurt. All of us.”

He stared at me too long. I couldn’t read him, and my heart sped up. He took a wide stance in the mud, and though he was slight, I considered his bestial strength; every muscle tensed and full of unknowable resolve. One hand clutched the bow to his chest as the other reached up toward the quiver, his fingers grazing the arrows as if to count them. Three remained.

“You took raft,” he signed in clipped, slicing gestures.

I didn’t like the look of his face. A wave of nausea hit me, and I steadied myself against a branch. “He’s asking why we took the raft.”

“Jesus,” Pia whispered hoarsely.

How could I have forgotten my promise to him? “We had to,” I breathed.

“My raft,” he signed, pounding himself in the chest with the sign for “my.”

Rachel stared at nothing: the seething rain, the haunted woods. “I made her do it, Dean. I was the one who—”

“No glass circles,” he signed, close to her face. “Dangerous.”

“He says he knows you can’t see,” I said.

Rachel breathed heavily in the humid air. A big welt had risen up close to her right eye and festered there. “The thing is, Dean, Pia and me, we got scared. Haven’t you ever been scared? Really terrified?”

Pia had begun to weep, her warrior-woman persona in abeyance. “We’re sorry we took your raft, and that it got wrecked.”

Expressionless, he watched her cry. “Scared is weak,” he signed. “No help in scared.”

With a look of disgust, he turned away from us and pushed into the gloom, but we saw that he had begun to pick his way more carefully, so we were able to track him through the phantom pines. Often his body would vanish in the fog, so we followed the bow he wore strapped to his back, which bobbed ahead of us, until we passed through the scrub pines and found ourselves in scummy water up to our shins. The fog settled thigh-deep, and we saw we were walking in some kind of bog, one in a series of sumps plugged up by beaver dams bristling with thatches of sticks chewed into points.

“Hold on, everybody,” I said. Rachel bumped into Pia, who stopped and turned to me. Dean’s face floated in the mist. “Dean, where are we going? Do you know?”

“Quiet,” he signed. “Listen.”

I did so. Only the hum of insects, the trill of an occasional bird. Something plopped into the water nearby. Nothing from Simone. We were either too far away to hear her, which didn’t seem possible, or she had given up. Also unlikely.

“But, Win, he doesn’t know—” Pia started.

I shushed her and we women huddled together, heads nearly touching. Dean stood apart from us, listening so hard he appeared to vibrate. The trees, the air, sky, the thrum of the insects—-everything that seemed hellishly the same to us told him some sort of story. At the surface of the water a snake wriggled by, a long striped muscle.

Dean pointed excitedly to our right and with no discussion splashed through the muck in that direction. We could only follow.





47


Pine trees rose straight and strong around us, spaced at such gentlemanly intervals that we could see our way to the clearing where the river tumbled by, genies of fog swirling up from it. The forest gave off an air of cultivation, as if someone had planted these trees just so, but I couldn’t be sure. We slowed our pace for several minutes on the bank, drinking from the river as we gazed across it at what looked like a field of Christmas trees.

Downriver on our side, the stretch of red pine marched up a steep embankment. We slogged up the slope in worn-out silence while Dean sprinted past us to the top. In minutes, he came crashing back down to where we’d stopped to rest, nearly plowing into us.

“Cow,” he signed excitedly. “Field.”

I translated for Pia and Rachel. We ran on bloodied feet to the top of the hillock and looked out and down.

“Holy shit,” Pia said. “Thank you, God.”

Fifty yards away, a cow stood in a meadow banked by the river, which now ambled tamely and lushly by. Wide brushstrokes of goldenrod and purple loosestrife colored the tall grasses. Along the bank, pussy willows waved in a brisk wind, their plum-size sacs ripe to bursting. The rain had quit for the moment, perhaps gathering itself for another round.

But—the cow. That simple domesticated beast. The sight of it filled me with joy. Rooted in the undulating grass, vast black-and-white nethers toward us, it swung its anvil-shaped head around and gazed our way as it chewed. A crumbling stone wall ran along behind it, disappearing over the hillside.

“Can you see the cow?” I asked Rachel, who squinted toward where I was pointing.

Her eyes teared up, and she managed a smile. “No, but I believe you.”

Pia unstrapped her helmet and let it drop with a thud to the hard ground. Rachel did the same, and I followed suit. They looked like a pile of skulls.

Over the next hill, the pasture unspooled before us as the river widened and mellowed. We staggered through meadow weeds and sedge that raked at our bare legs. Twenty or thirty cows, black-and-white, or brown-and-white, standing or lying down, watched with little interest as we passed. Steam rose off their big warm bodies into the cool morning air, and we smelled their wet coats and dung. I could have kissed every one of their sweet, endlessly stupid faces.