Dark Water

by Laura McNeal

  I had the whole day off, so I had ridden into the canyon early, passing one woman on horseback and another with an off-leash Labrador. I hated the off-leash dogs. They found their way to Amiel’s house fairly often and carried ramen bags away in their mouths.

  I knew that what we were going to do that day was catch cangrejos. It turns out that cangrejos del mar are crabs, but cangrejos del río are crayfish, and that was the kind Amiel meant when he said they were his favorite food. Amiel allowed me to bring things now and then to contribute to our picnics at the river—a nice frying pan, a batch of brownies, matches—but this time he’d asked me to bring liver as bait for the cangrejos. Lamb liver. I handed it over, and he opened the grocery store package with his knife.

  A crayfish trap, or at least a crayfish trap made by Amiel, looks like a collapsible wire basket. The lamb’s liver goes in the bottom, and the long chain that comes up from the center is tied to an old plastic milk jug. Amiel had three of these traps, and once he’d baited them all and attached the floats, he led me to a place along his side of the river where little holes in the sand meant crayfish. Amiel dropped the baskets carefully in the water and led me further up the bank to sit. I had secretly brought something besides lamb’s liver to share: the French mime movie that I’d watched back in May and tried to show him before he tapped my laptop shut.

  “Come on,” I said. “Do we have to watch the traps the whole time?”

  He shook his head, but he seemed to think watching them would be ideal.

  “Come on,” I repeated. I made him follow me into his house—not the roofless old cottage where we cooked, but the grotto. I knew we could see the screen better there because the clouds made it even darker than usual, and I settled on the floor with my back to the wall. I patted the ground. He hesitated. Finally, he sat beside me, but I could tell he was thinking about his crayfish traps. “Just watch the beginning,” I said.

  Les Enfants du Paradis began, and I shifted the laptop a little so that he could see it better—one half of the keyboard on his leg, one half on mine. I thought he liked it, but I wasn’t sure. He might have nodded now and then to make me think he liked it.

  At the intermission, I said, “Do you like it?”

  Another nod. “Los cangrejos,” he said, and went to check the floating milk jugs, so I followed him. When Amiel lifted them to show me, he grinned at the crayfish that were stuck there, six of them sucking down the lamb’s liver.

  We boiled them over the fire in the roofless house. Pretty soon I had to follow Amiel’s example as he poked a fork inside the red shells of the crusty things and plucked out bits of crabby stuff. He began to extract whole lumps of chubby meat, while I just kept shredding it, and when he saw my clumsy efforts, he held out his fork of cray meat for me to take with my mouth. At first he was laughing, but as the meat got closer to my mouth, he stopped. I took the bite and chewed. He wiped my lower lip with his finger and then he leaned back. After that, he ate his crayfish and I ate mine. The weather had turned hotter, and I was desperate for a swim, a thing, strangely, we’d never done together. I wasn’t wearing a swimsuit, but it was so hot and humid that I wanted to duck under the water in my clothes.

  “I’m going to swim,” I said. Sometimes, if I knew the Spanish word for something, I liked to show off. “Nadar,” I said. “Yo.”

  He gave me the look my Espanish deserved, but I walked to the deepest spot on his side of the river, dramatically plugged my nose, and plunged in. I have to admit I wondered if the crayfish would mistake me for lamb’s liver. I treaded water and then, gingerly, let my feet touch bottom. “Amiel?” I said.

  He appeared on the bank and stepped out of his shoes.

  He took off his shirt.

  Unmoored, I looked away. That was all he removed, though. He stepped into the water as you would step off a cliff, still wearing his jeans, and the two of us laughed. The skies got darker and heavier until the thing that almost never happens in summer here happened: it began to sprinkle and, briefly, to rain. It didn’t last, but for a while we swam in the dimpled water and listened to the drops falling on all the sun-warmed rocks and roasted dust.

  It stopped within fifteen minutes, and we climbed onto a table rock to dry. The air smelled sharply of minerals and lead. I saw the hats of walkers on the other side of the river, heard their voices and the jingling collar of a dog. I ducked my head, though we were doing nothing wrong. I thought briefly of my computer in Amiel’s house, but I didn’t want to go back there and check on it. If I did, it would seem like I was collecting my things, and if I collected my things, the day would end. I would have to go home.

  Instead, I gestured for Amiel to follow me to the roofless house where we’d cooked the crayfish and drowned the fire. I didn’t have a plan. I was vaguely sleepy, vaguely hungry. The ruin had a strange glow in the aftermath of the rain, the old white stucco bright against the spent gray clouds. The sharp mineral scent of the air gave way to woodsmoke and fish scales as we stood in the center of the wide-open house, and the silence became something you could feel all over, like cold. I didn’t know what to do, so I stuffed my hands into my pockets, which were still wet, so I couldn’t get more than my fingertips in.

  “Why won’t you tell me about the accident?” I asked.

  Amiel stood near me, and I felt the old helplessness, when what I wanted to say I couldn’t say. He reached down for his whittled stick and said hoarsely that after his father stopped sending money, his grandfather decided Amiel’s mother should be his wife. “Mi abuelo,” he said, either translating the word for “grandfather” or emphasizing the outrageousness of it.

  “One day I saw him to hurting her,” he said, and he coughed, paused, started again. “I said I was going to tell my tío.”

  I knew tío meant “uncle,” so I waited. Amiel balanced the stick upright on his palm. He bounced it once, caught it, and bounced it again.

  Looking at the stick, not me, he said hoarsely, “Mi abuelo let go of my mother to come after me with a rope.” Amiel found a piece of string on the ground and tied it tightly around the stick. “Así,” he said. Then Amiel let the stick fall, jerked on the string, and pulled the stick around in the dirt.

  I just stared at him for a few seconds. “So there wasn’t a car accident or a steering wheel?”

  “No,” Amiel said. He untied the string, wadded it up with his fingers, and let it fall. He drew a circle in the dirt with the stick, then took my hand and pulled me gently until I stood in the center of it. He drew my arm straight out and turned my palm upward. Then he stepped into the circle behind me until his bare chest was pressed lightly against my back. While my hand trembled, Amiel tried to balance the stick upright on my palm. It stayed upright for only a second and then fell outward, and I was unwilling to step away from him to catch it.

  Still pressed against my back, Amiel drew my arm back toward us and with his index finger began to trace letters on my forearm, his fingers as cold as rain. I felt the letters he was making on my skin, felt them all the way to the backs of my knees, but I was powerless to read them. The lines might have been hieroglyphics or flying birds. My arm trembled with each stroke until he reached the end of what he was writing and held still, my arm still propped in his arm, his breath near my left ear, his upper body bare. I waited, and he waited, and then he started again. I don’t know if it was a new word or the same word, but I saw clearly this time that he was spelling, as I once had, PLEASE.

  This time when we kissed, he didn’t pull away, and I was close enough to his mouth for him to whisper what the tiny old vaquero had said a long time ago, the part about being of two worlds.

  Tú eres de dos mundos.

  I closed both of my eyes, the blue one and the brown one, so I could be in just one world, his, and as he kissed me, I understood what the silkworms were conjuring when they swayed and spun a coffin egg so tight and hollow they could disappear into its filaments. I touched with my finger the black disk on the hollow of his neck, he kisse
d my mouth and my neck and my eyes, and for the time that he held me there in the circle he’d drawn, what I wanted and what I had were the same.

  A motorized roaring, loud and furious, finally made us pull away. Helicopters fly over Fallbrook all the time, usually marines training at Camp Pendleton, but sometimes they’re the small white police helicopters looking for criminals who are being chased on the ground.

  I opened my eyes to look up, and I saw the white body of a police helicopter zipping north in the air above us. It wasn’t low enough for me to think the pilot was looking right at us, but it was low enough for me to feel exposed in the roofless house. I still didn’t want to let go of him, but Amiel broke free and began scrambling into the hollow where the tree roots led to the river.

  I followed him, and I heard the helicopter move above us to the south. We crashed our way through the willow shrubs and ducked into his safe little house, as dark as a rabbit’s burrow, silent and cool until you heard, coming closer again, the ominous thwapping overhead.

  “Have they done that before?”

  “Sí,” Amiel said. He pulled a dry shirt from a bag and put it on.

  I wanted to resume kissing, and I tried, but he held himself like a person turned to stone. His gold-flecked eyes were dark as mud.

  “They can’t see us now,” I said.

  Amiel shook his head. He picked up my computer and slipped it into my backpack.

  “Okay,” I said coldly. “You want me to go.”

  He nodded very slowly.

  “But I don’t get it. They’re not looking for you. They can’t be.”

  He shrugged. He looked deliberately away from me. I remembered, although I didn’t want to, what Hickey had said about prostitutes working in the reeds over in Carlsbad, and the arrest of Hoyt’s worker at the grocery store, and the border patrol checkpoint on the interstate two miles east of where we sat, where the officers stood in the road at randomly chosen times and stopped traffic in all four lanes, looking without expression into each car before deciding who could go forward and whose car would be searched by dogs.

  “But if I leave now, won’t they notice me?” I pictured the aerial view of the river and how my head, like a moving figure in a video game, might call attention to the roof of Amiel’s house.

  Amiel listened tensely for the helicopter, and I pictured the border patrol agents waiting in their cars along the highway in Rainbow, parked cars I saw so often that I barely noticed them. Now I wondered what would stop them from coming here.

  Amiel pulled me to the wall, and he sat down. I sat down with him. He kept his knees close to his chest, and I sat in the same position, too scared to move. We waited like that until we heard nothing but the slosh of the river against the banks and the mourning doves in the trees. You knew, they always seemed to be sighing in their disappointment. You knew who knew.

  I looked at Amiel’s face and felt the pull of him.

  He kissed me once, soberly, and then he stood up so that I knew I had to go. His eyes had deepened now to shadows, but the trees outside his door floated in amber. The clouds had parted enough to let the setting sun gild the water. I crossed the river and turned to wave, but I saw nothing except willows and the orange spots that burned into my mismatched eyes.

  Forty

  School started. It was unremarkable except that Robby and I could now drive unchaperoned to school. He took us in his birthday car on the first day.

  Me: How was Paris?

  Robby: Oh, you know. Totally superior in all ways to the home sod.

  Me: Really?

  Him: No. I like the museums, though, and walking by the Seine.

  He said Seine perfectly.

  Me: How was Monsieur Pouf?

  Him: Who?

  Me: The ancient le tortoise. Your mother was telling me.

  Him: He mostly hangs out in the garden. I was back there one time, just kind of giving my parents some space, and there he was, smoking the last Gauloise.

  Me: The last what?

  Him: It’s a French cigarette. They don’t make them anymore. Monsieur Pouf, though, he has his sources.

  Me: So what’s the deal with the whole … you know, your dad and Mary Beth.

  Him: I think I’ve persuaded her to switch.

  Me: I know. She came to see me at Subway. To ask me why you dropped her.

  Him: What did you say?

  Me: I said I didn’t know.

  Him: Good.

  Me (feeling kind of mean): So how do you know, anyway?

  Him: Know what?

  Me: That she’s given him up?

  Significant pause.

  Him: I just do.

  Me: But you didn’t specifically talk about it.

  Him: No. Of course not.

  Me (trying to make him feel guilty): She seemed really nice.

  To this he had no reply. We were almost to the school and I could see the ag buildings in the wet morning light.

  Him: What about you, though?

  Me: Me?

  Him: Have you been—hunh hunh hunh (Robby’s impression of Pepe Le Pew)—fabricating zee love while I was gone?

  Me (turning a suspicious crimson color): Why would you think that?

  Him: Lucky guess. What’s all that stuff in the tree house, by the way?

  Me: The shells? Just stuff I found.

  Luckily, we could hear the late bell through the windshield as he darted into a parking space, and we both had to make a dash for it.

  Forty-one

  My mother and Hoyt grew up in Idaho, and she says Fallbrook has two seasons: Green Grass, which lasts from January to April, and Fire Alert, which lasts the rest of the year.

  For me, though, Fire Alert didn’t start until October. Summer was supposed to be hot, and if September was hot, well, that was normal, too, because in northern places, which I’d read about in novels, that’s when you had Indian summer.

  But that September was a lilac bush roasting in the sun. Every day, the leaves baked until they were dry, brittle, and pale. The ground turned to rock. And then, all of a sudden, there was a hot wind, like when you lean over a fire pit where you’ve piled newspaper and cardboard and some kindling and you blow all the breath you have in order to make it bloom into flame.

  On September 13, we were the kindling, and a monstrous god leaned over us to breathe. Clouds melted, brush trembled, and the ocean burned white like molten glass. Palm fronds crashed into roads. Leaves swirled in the parking lot. My nose bled and my skin cracked. I breathed cotton-dry breaths through paper lips and dreamed of Amiel in the heat.

  By the middle of the night, the wind was like a dry hurricane. It was furious with the house, furious with the trees, enraged by every last one of us. It threw things at the windows and it beat on the roof. I was reading For Whom the Bell Tolls and my mother was dreaming her sleeping pill dreams, and at 2 a.m., exhausted, I put the book down and covered my head with the blanket and repeated my mantra, Go to sleep go to sleep go to sleep.

  I was hoping, like everyone else who lay awake listening to the wind, that no pyromaniacs were out there, trembling in thrall beneath the god monster, reaching for a match.

  Go to sleep go to sleep go to sleep gotosleep.

  I said it, but I didn’t listen. Then finally, around three o’clock, I guess I did.

  Forty-two

  Fires started twice when my father was still at home, always in October, always to the west of us, where most of the hills were used for training by the marines. Both times, my father kept saying casually, “It’s farther than it looks.” He said it the year forty-seven houses burned in Fallbrook, and he was right. Those houses were three miles from us, not three hundred feet, as it appeared in the dark.

  From our former house, which was on a hill, we could watch fires as they licked their way up hillsides in the dark, and we could follow the tiny red lights of planes dropping scoops of water, and we could hear the sirens as the fire engines screamed west on Mission Road, and we barely slept on those
nights, getting up every half hour to go to the windows and see if the fire had moved any closer.

  Just before dawn on September 14, I heard my mother’s cell phone ring. It was the school dispatcher giving her a job subbing at Mary Fay Pendleton, the elementary school out on the marine base. It was second grade, which she liked, because at that age kids still wanted to hug you, even if you were just there for one day, and the worst thing that ever happened was a kid shouting, “My tooth fell out!”

  “I smell smoke,” I said.

  “The power’s out,” my mom said, flipping the light switch to no effect.

  I looked at the empty face of the digital clock and turned the button on the radio. Nothing.

  We went outside in our pajamas. Lavar’s house was low inside the grove, and you couldn’t see anything but avocado trees. The god monster was still blowing hard on all of us, and the branches shook.

  “Where do you think it is?” I asked, turning around and around. It was already warm outside, like an oven you’ve just turned on.

  We looked at the sky again, and I spotted the plume.

  “It’s always farther than it looks,” my mother said, shielding her eyes, and then she turned to walk indoors.

  I wondered if she knew she sounded like my father. “Don’t you think we should stay home?” I asked. I wanted to go to the river and find Amiel.

  “Oh, it’s probably thirty miles away and ninety percent contained,” she said, letting the screen door flap shut. “Hurry or we’re going to be late.”

  I was still dubious, but my uncle Hoyt called my mother to say he’d checked with the high school and they had electricity. I could hear his voice from clear across the room. “School’s in session, they told me,” he said. “Robby’s going.”

  “Is Robby going to drive?” I asked her to ask him. I wanted to ride with Robby instead.

  “He’ll drive if he can find his car keys,” came the voice.