Dark Water

by Laura McNeal

  “Are you sure?” he asked.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  As soon as we passed over the freeway and began to skim along the tight curves of Mission Road, I became even more reckless. “You know what,” I said. “I could show you a different part of the river. I found a new trail entrance the other day.”

  “Okay,” he said, cheerful about his new car or his intentions or maybe both. He had a little crescent-shaped scar on his cheek that he believed was my fault, though I didn’t remember scratching him when I was five. It looked deeper in the foggy light. The road twisted in and out of half-seen oaks, and we spiraled slowly down to the riverbed among the crows and hawks and chittering ground squirrels, but we didn’t pass Amiel. We passed no humans at all, in fact. We parked at the place where I’d seen Amiel last, and I stared up at every house that might be his.

  We began to hike past the dry meadow, waist high with fennel, and at the top of a hill, Robby stopped to read a Land Conservancy sign I hadn’t noticed before. “Agua Prieta Creek this way,” Robby said. “Is that where we’re headed? Dark Water Creek?”

  “Yes,” I said, not really sure it was the right way until I saw the arch of oaks and sycamores that led, like a living tunnel, to the river itself. “Yeah, this is right,” I said. Just then we caught up to a man, a border collie, and a little boy.

  “Look, Dad!” the boy said. “The hobos made a jump for their bicycle!” and he pointed to a steep, well-packed bump in the trail.

  For a while, we could hear him pointing out all the hobo improvements.

  “Look! The hobos have a swing!” he said, and that one was obvious: vines hanging down from a cluster of trees. I didn’t know what he meant by a hobo pineapple tree until I saw a funny little palm tree, no taller than my knee, with a trunk that was shaped just like a pineapple.

  “Hobo traps!” (Metal lockboxes someone dumped under a tree.)

  “That’s where the hobos keep their alligators.” (A stagnant algae-green pond.)

  “This is a hobo finder,” he announced before they took another path and headed out of our hearing. The boy picked up a forked stick that my mother would have called a water witcher. “They use it to find things,” the boy said.

  Once we were alone, Robby started pointing to stuff like a tour guide and saying, “Hobo fish farm.” “Hobo bathtub.” “Hobo slide.”

  “We should move out here,” I said. “The hobos are having all the fun.”

  Every year on Halloween until I was about eleven, my mother sewed, glued, and/or papier-mâchéd me into some complicated, uncomfortable costume, and then if I complained that it was scratchy and I didn’t want to wear it, she would say, “Fine. You can just go as a hobo, like I always was.”

  “What is a hobo, exactly?” Robby asked.

  “What adults used to be for Halloween,” I said.

  He frowned and took aim at a huge fennel plant, then whacked it with a branch he’d picked up along the way. The trees were green overhead now, and all the color was coming back into the world. “Unless they were French,” he said. “I don’t think my mother was ever a le hobo.”

  “Why is it that no one ever says he’s going to be a homeless person for Halloween?” I asked. “Or an illegal alien?”

  “Why can you be a pirate and not a Nazi?” Robby asked, using his branch as a tester for water depth. We were standing on the edge of a nice round virgin pool, green-rimmed and flecked with water skaters. A sun-bleached log formed a picturesque bridge, which Robby began to cross.

  We weren’t far now, it occurred to me, from the hammock.

  “You know what?” I said. “You won’t believe the hobo bed I found in here the last time I was hiking.”

  “Ew,” Robby said.

  “No,” I said. “It was a hammock, not a mattress. I’ll show you.”

  Everything is farther the second time. I led him under countless oaks and over countless anthills, through dappled shade, gnat clouds, and stuff I really hoped wasn’t poison ivy. Finally, we stood at the edge of the wide, rippling water, and I sat down to remove my shoes, so Robby obediently did the same, and we went sloshing through cool water under a sky that felt enormous and unspoiled. I led Robby into the grotto and stood before the tree. “Here,” I said, but there was no hammock.

  “It was right here,” I repeated. I touched the trunks of nearby trees, searching for string or string marks.

  Robby walked around with an interested look. I wandered behind him, assuring him, as I swatted insects from my face, that I’d taken a nap right here, and then I stopped to examine what I thought was a nest. It turned out to be a swirl of dried river algae baked to the color of straw. Robby kept walking, and in a few minutes I heard him say, “Check this out.”

  He was holding a tin pot in one hand, and with the other he pointed to what I had assumed was a big pile of driftwood. The river was never the same height. Sometimes, the rains fell hard through January and February and the river thundered through here for a month, but it always dried up again, leaving dry islands of uprooted trees and waist-high nests of algae like the one I’d just touched.

  I walked closer to where Robby stood, and I realized that the silvery wood wasn’t just a random pile. It was sticks laced together to look like a random pile. When you walked around the other side, as Robby had done, you saw a crude but clever house. It was barely six feet high—lower in the doorway—and the other three walls were made of wood scraps, tin, and rocks. The best part was a sort of stained glass window made of glass bottles wedged into an old window frame. One bottle was blue and one was brown, but the others were clear and had been arranged like puzzle pieces.

  “Isn’t this the greatest?” I said. “It’s like your tree house, only with found stuff. Like a fort you can really live in.”

  “The hobo really has been living it up out here,” Robby said, and I could tell he didn’t think it was the greatest. I checked my watch. I knew the farmers’ market was a forty-five-minute drive, one way. And Louise was the type to talk to every peach seller and crepe maker. Still, I was nervous.

  Robby set the pot down on a counter built of more river stones and some mismatched tiles. He opened another pot and lifted up a bag of tortillas to show me, then pointed to a plastic bag strung from a nail on the wall. It was full of ramen noodle packages, the cheapest food on earth. Robby walked out of the house again, still in full surveillance mode, and I wondered how you cooked ramen noodles here without getting caught. Wouldn’t a hiker or a Friend of the Fallbrook Land Conservancy see the smoke?

  I didn’t like the way Robby casually examined everything, but while he was outside, I did touch one thing: on a little stump of wood beside the blanket was a tin box, an ornate cylinder with fluted sides and black and gold latticework, scabbed with rust, that framed two faded, greenish scenes of courtly dancers. On one side, a man played a lute for a woman perched on a cushion. On the other, they had begun to dance.

  I shouldn’t have opened the box, but I did, and when I looked inside, I expected to see rolled-up money or change. What I saw in the bottom of the tin, though, just as Robby said, “There are some hobo bicycle tracks out here,” was a business card and a photograph. The business card said AMIEL DE LA CRUZ GUERRERO. HARD WORKER. The photograph showed a woman in a gingham smock standing in front of a turquoise wall with a red door half open behind her. Her hair was long and black. She wasn’t smiling as she rested both hands on the shoulders of a little boy with a narrow, hopeful face.

  “I think we should tell the police,” Robby said. His voice was very close to the door, and as if hiding the photograph would be enough to save Amiel, I dropped it and the card back into the tin box, closed the lid, set the box on the stump, and made for the doorway.

  “Why?” I said.

  “This is obviously some migrant worker’s camp, and you can’t just live in a nature preserve.”

  I realized this must be how I sounded to others most of the time. “Why not?” I asked.

 
“It’s a fire hazard, for starters.” Robby pointed to the bicycle tracks in a deep pile of white sand. “That’s how he gets here.”

  “We should go,” I said. “My mother’s going to come home.”

  Robby looked at his watch, nodded, and picked up his shoes to wade back through the river.

  “I think we’d better go right back,” I said. I felt the sinking of each bare foot and imagined Amiel studying our tracks. Illogically, I wanted Amiel to know that the tracks were mine. But he wouldn’t. It would just scare him to see that two strangers had come into his hiding place, and maybe he would have to disappear now, as the hammock had. Maybe I would return and find nothing but the false nests the river spun for itself in the willows. I let my legs sink into the cold jade-green water and followed Robby to the other bank.

  “Where were we going, anyway?” I asked. “I mean the second place.”

  “Tintin’s on the trail,” Robby said.

  “Whose trail?”

  “Mary Beth’s, of course.”

  “I think Tintin better drop me at home,” I said.

  “Come on,” Robby said. “Let’s get something to eat first. It won’t take that long.”

  “How long?”

  “Thirty minutes.”

  I practically ran back to his car, and I was still sweating when he pulled the car into the parking lot behind Café Chartreuse.

  “Is Tintin paying?” I asked.

  “Tintin always pays,” Robby said.

  Seventeen

  She was our waitress, of course.

  “What the le hell are you doing?” I asked Robby when Mary Beth had gone to a far corner of the restaurant.

  “Assessing,” he said calmly. “It’s MBF, isn’t it? She’s the same height as the woman I saw from the hedge, plus this café did the catering last night.”

  “Yes,” I said. I bit a fingernail too bitten to need work and looked around for friends of my mother’s.

  Mary Beth came over to ask, “Have you decided?” If she was tired, it didn’t show, and if she recognized Robby, she didn’t say. I thought she was studying him more intently than she studied me, but that was natural. Robby was good-looking even in his stretched-out T-shirt and old tennis shorts and the shoes that he wore without socks. Greenie used to want me to set her up with him, but Robby was so indifferent when she was around that she finally gave up.

  “What’s your most irresistible sandwich?” Robby asked, looking adorably curious.

  “Statistically speaking,” Mary Beth said, “I’d have to say salmon. Though a lot of people order the goat cheese, too. And the Brie.”

  He acted like she’d said something profound. “The salmon,” he said.

  Personally, I wondered why Mary Beth was still in Fallbrook. Robby and I were both too ambitious and snobby to consider colleges within commuting distance.

  “Do you have crab?” I asked.

  “Not for lunch,” she said.

  I ordered a panini and my mind drifted to Amiel’s house. I wondered how many other day laborers lived in the ravines and thickets of Fallbrook and whether we would like them better if we called them hobos. I also wondered what would happen if my mother walked into the café.

  When Mary Beth disappeared into the kitchen, Robby asked, “What do you think?”

  “Think?”

  “Of MBF.”

  The name had a vaguely insulting air, I suppose because of the F. “She’s conventionally pretty,” I said.

  “You know the owner, right?”

  “Sort of.” Mr. Eckert was standing at the espresso machine when we arrived, and I was relieved that he hadn’t seemed to notice me. I was dreading the questions he might have about my father, who used to bring me to the café for breakfast on his home weekends and sit at the counter afterward, talking to Mr. Eckert about Italy and New York, two places my father had once thought I ought to see.

  “Quiz him a little. Get the le scoop.”

  “But he’ll wonder why I’m so nosy.”

  “So? Come on. Please. You of all people should understand what’s at stake here.”

  I pictured Robby’s giant house turning upside down and coming to rest on its giant stone chimney. I pictured the foundation covered with soil and worms and roly-poly bugs as it was exposed, for the first time, to everybody’s shameless scrutiny. I won’t say that I didn’t feel that horrible niggling wish for other people’s lives to be as screwed up as my own.

  “Please?” he asked again.

  “Fine. I’ll pry for you. But only if you promise not to tell the police what we saw today,” I said. “I mean the hobo house.”

  Robby tapped his fingers on the table and studied me like my father’s divorce lawyer had studied my mother’s divorce lawyer. “All right,” he said. “I won’t tell the feds on El Hobero.”

  In spite of my work in Ms. Grant’s drama class or maybe because of it, I’m a terrible actress, and I began to get nervous when I saw Mr. Eckert heading toward us with tall glasses of pink soda. I asked Robby, “Can I say that I’m asking because you want to know?”

  “Sure,” Robby said. “I do want to know.”

  “Here you go, Pearl,” Mr. Eckert said, setting the drinks down in front of us. “Good to see you again. How’s your dad? I haven’t seen him for ages.”

  “Oh,” I said. “He moved.”

  “Moved?”

  “Out,” I said. I was surprised no one in town had told him. Usually, I heard about affairs and divorces and drug problems that way: from adults talking to each other.

  “Then how are you?” Mr. Eckert said.

  “Oh, fine,” I said, grateful to have Robby’s life to discuss instead. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure.”

  “It’s about your waitress,” I whispered. Mary Beth was talking to customers on the other side of the room, but the café wasn’t very big.

  Mr. Eckert bent forward and looked amiable but concerned.

  “You know my cousin, Robby, right? He has a crush. On her, actually. We’re doing reconnaissance.” I paused for a second because I didn’t know how to ask if Mr. Eckert had, by chance, seen Mary Beth with Robby’s father. “Is she single?” I asked.

  “Far as I know.”

  “What else can you tell us? He needs, you know, a flirting angle.”

  “Kind of mature for you, isn’t she?” Mr. Eckert said to Robby, not entirely disapproving, maybe even impressed. “You’re still at the high school, right? Well, let’s see. She’s studying gerontology. Sophomore year, I think. She lives with her parents, very nice also. Her father’s an eye doctor. She had a tennis scholarship to UCLA but pulled something.”

  I was stuck on the gerontology part. She was training to take care of old people and dating a fifty-year-old man?

  Mr. Eckert stopped talking because Mary Beth was coming toward us with our sandwiches. “Mary Beth?” Mr. Eckert said. “Have you met Pearl DeWitt before?” Mary Beth shook her head politely and set my plate in front of me. I could tell she wanted to remain strictly anonymous.

  “This is her cousin …” Mr. Eckert started to say, waiting for me to fill in the blank, but Robby beat me to it.

  “Robby Wallace,” he said. “I think you were at my house last night.”

  Mary Beth gave him his plate with the air of someone who has been lit by a motion detector.

  “My overblown birthday party,” he added.

  “Oh, that’s where I’ve seen you,” she said, as if she’d just that second figured it out. “Happy sixteenth!” Her hands were free, so she tucked a piece of hair behind her ear. It didn’t stay.

  “Seventeenth,” he said.

  I really didn’t know the script at this point. Mr. Eckert winked at me, mistaking Mary Beth’s flustered look for a romantic interest in Robby, and went off to seat a group of people I was glad I didn’t recognize.

  “So you play college tennis?” he asked Mary Beth.

  “I’m not playing right now. I did,” she said. Her fa
ce was red from what I guessed was a little internal voice repeating Oh my God Oh my God. I felt a little sorry for her, though she didn’t really deserve it.

  “You don’t give lessons or anything, do you?” Robby asked. “I thought my dad was saying that you did.”

  “Also past tense,” she said. “I pulled a hamstring.” She looked nervously around the room. “I’d better go take their order,” she said, pointing to another table and starting to walk away.

  “Hey,” Robby said. “Is your dad Dr. Farlow?”

  She nodded.

  “The ophthalmologist?”

  More nodding.

  “My dad keeps saying he’s going to get his eyes checked. He has this weird mass in the right eye, this—what’s it called—occlusion.”

  She blinked.

  “I’ll tell him I saw you.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Occlusion?” I said to Robby in his car on the way home.

  “It just came to me,” he said.

  “Do you have a plan, here?”

  “A plan?” he said. “Sort of. Not really. As much as anyone, I guess.”

  Eighteen

  We beat my mother to the house by five minutes. By the time she arrived, I was cleaning Lavar’s junky old bathroom. After that, she read a book, and I put away wrinkly clothes that hadn’t seen a drawer in weeks. I sat down with my science book opened to the periodic table and looked with a kind of hopelessness at the abbreviations of the noble gases. It was when my mind wandered from He to Uuo that I began to hatch my own Robby-style half-baked plan. If I could sneak out of the house once, why not twice?

  My mother had been to the farmers’ market, but she’d brought nothing home, not even strawberries, so at about six o’clock, we ate a depressing meal of canned tomato soup and quesadillas. I asked, very casually, if I could go do the rest of my homework in Robby’s tree house, and she said okay. I packed my books and then my laptop.

  “Why are you taking that?” she asked suspiciously.