The River at Night(70)

He smiled a little, and I thought, what did I really know about what was good in this world? How could I call myself an authority on that? Who knew, maybe the forest was a better place for him . . . at least here, all around us, was beauty and certainly bounty if you knew how to find it—he’d shown me that—and I thought, Why not let him be wild? What if it’s wrong to sell him on the greedy, dirty, moneygrubbing, backstabbing, brutal place we call the civilized world?

A change in the air; a quickening. My body tensed.

I looked up.

A dot. On the far side of the field, just past the trees that guarded it. The dot moved with dispatch down the hill. Grew. I turned to the road where Pia and Rachel stood like two rag dolls, waiting.

Dean signed in my hands that still held his. It felt intimate, like Marcus when he was little and sharing a secret with me or telling a joke. “I remember chocolate,” Dean signed in my sweating palms. “Do you have chocolate in town?”

I watched the dot take shape terrifyingly fast, grow arms and a head as it disappeared and reappeared among the tall grasses. “That’s the first thing we’ll do when we can get to a store, okay? Get you some chocolate.”

He looked up at me finally. Signed, “You stay with me?”

“Yes, I will stay with you.” I got to my feet, pulling him up with me. “But let’s go. Right now, okay?”

He gave me a long look, as if holding me to my words with the force of it, then picked himself up and began running toward the road, much faster than I could. I held my arm in a vise grip to my chest, choking back a yelp with every jarring footfall through clumps of waist-high grass, my blood pounding in my ears.

Fifty yards from the road, I glanced behind me. An orange ski cap bounced up and down among the cattails and goldenrod. Simone was catching up.





48


Pia jumped up and down waving her good arm as the monster truck plowed hell-bent—horn blaring—straight at her.

“Get the fuck out of the road!” I leapt out onto the blacktop to pull her aside, but the trucker had seen her and began to steer to the shoulder where we stood huddled together.

The immense grill snarled headlong toward us. Rows of steel rods on either side of the truck bed cinched logs stacked two stories high, rear tires flattening with the cargo. Just the scale of the thing was mythic. I wasn’t convinced it would be able to stop, but it began to slow as if an unseen force were yoking it back. It screeched to a halt on the thin spit of gravel, dust billowing up all around the ten giant wheels.

Charged silence. The smoke lifted, leaving the smell of pine sap, singed wood, and diesel.

All around us—a series of dull popping sounds.

“She’s coming!” I screamed. “Get in the truck!”

Pia hurdled up onto the running board, lunged for the door, and opened it. A smallish man with greasy hair and a bushy mustache glared down at us from high up on his cracked leather seat. Given the size of the truck, I had expected a bigger man. He was none too happy looking.

A bullet pinged off the huge side mirror, yanking it to a crazy angle.

“What the motherfuck do you think you’re doing? Are you trying to kill me?” He scowled, rat-colored teeth showing under thick lips, followed by a look of incomprehension, probably because of how barbaric we looked, Pia half-naked too. Her arm had caked over, but as a whole she looked pretty terrifying. We all must have.

The road felt foreign under me, damp from the rain but having nothing to do with dirt or rocks or roots, the sun heating it up under my bare feet. In my nightmare, Simone ran toward us. In reality, she did the same. Fifty feet away now, she paused, crouching in the grass to take aim. Dean couldn’t take his eyes off her. I looked back at the river with something like longing. Time slowed down, then sped up twice as fast.

Pia grabbed Rachel around the waist and shoved her up into the cab of the truck. “Someone’s trying to kill us!” she screamed at the driver. “You have to help us!”

I thought, Please, God, understand this, and understand it fast. Or, hell, just believe it. A bullet sank with a thud into a log, rang off the hood of the cab.

“Somebody shootin’ at you?” the man said, his face screwing up, then growing pale and slack with fear.

Pia climbed up into the cab, knocking Rachel nearly on top of the driver before reaching down for me. The floor was littered with fast-food trash and the air stank of rancid oil and wet tobacco; the seats were desiccated with age and wear. It felt as if we had crawled into the giant dusty rib cage of some extinct beast.

I clambered in. “Dean! Get in the truck!” I called out through the still-agape door.

He ignored me. He stood on the road facing the field where his mother had stopped shooting long enough to scramble up the berm the road was built on. There was something so pitiful about her yet something so worthy of our terror—her riveting presence, her daunting will. No one could look away. Even the clouds stopped moving across the sky, as if to frame her. With a growl she wrenched herself free of the last tangle of buckthorn bushes that lined the road. Now just a dozen yards away, she stood swaying, her body buzzing with rage, grotesque skirts rustling. Unsteady, she hazarded a few steps forward, toenails curling over her rubber shoes and scraping on the asphalt.

“Dean,” she cried liltingly, “my darling boy.” She raised the gun, aiming at her son’s head. Heat tricks shivered on the blacktop as beads of sweat rolled down her forehead. She blinked and shook her nest of hair and, in that moment, seemed to lose her purpose. Her body slackened. A cry burst out of her, followed by sobs that left her breathless. She lowered the gun.