the Buffalo Soldier (2002)

by Bohjalian, Chris

  HE HEARD THE river before he saw it, and then as he neared the church and the general store, he saw the vehicles parked along the side of the road--there were a half-dozen cars, and perhaps that many pickups--and the people standing near the banks of the water. Then, as he neared the center, he was able to see above the crowd because he was atop the horse, and he saw that the bridge--the bridge made of steel and cement, the bridge that had withstood the wave two years ago that swept away Hillary and Megan Sheldon--was gone. The guardrails and the asphalt and the steel cross beams had vanished. He envisioned the stanchions being pounded throughout the day by those immense chunks of ice, and then one great wave of rainwater and melted snow crashing into the overpass, ripping it vertical--there it was in his mind, standing up on its side for one long, long second, before hurtling back into the Gale--and sending it downriver in pieces. In his mind he saw chunks of asphalt that looked like pieces of meteors, the guardrails twisted like licorice, the cement now rocks in the mud in the channel.

  He pulled the horse to a stop when he saw an older woman he recognized whose name, he believed, was Mrs. Wallace. He knew she was friends with the Heberts, because he'd seen her at their house a couple of times that autumn and winter.

  When did the bridge go? he asked her, bending down from the horse and raising his voice.

  She looked up at him, and he saw that her skin had the gray translucence of block ice.

  Alfred, she said, and because she was speaking instead of shouting, he could barely hear her over the torrent. Alfred, she said again, but he only knew she had spoken his name because he could read her lips.

  Just now? he asked, yelling.

  She shook her head and took a deep breath and sighed.

  Is that why I heard the sirens?

  A fellow who he knew had children in the first and third grades turned toward him and answered for Mrs. Wallace. The trucks didn't get over the bridge before it went, he said, cupping a hand around his mouth as he shouted. They wanted to get 'em on this side of the river, but they didn't make it.

  Where did they go? he asked, and the look of fear on his face must have been obvious: He'd imagined a truck on the bridge at the exact moment the span collapsed.

  The road's been chewed up again closer to Durham, the man said calmly, clearly trying to reassure him. They're going the long way around, through Ripton, to see what's happening on the other side of a very big crater. That's what you heard.

  The older woman turned toward them. This sort of thing is only supposed to happen every generation or two, she said, speaking loudly enough this time for him to hear her. If that. Now twice in barely two years. It's sad. So terribly, terribly sad.

  At least this time no one was on the bridge, the man said. Thank God for that.

  Yes. Thank God.

  Still. This one's going to be mighty nasty to clean up.

  Alfred looked to the west and realized he hadn't seen a single car coming east along the River Road. The road's really gone, isn't it? he asked.

  Well, I wouldn't say it's gone, but you can't drive on it. There's a major gorge about half a mile from here, and who knows what's going on beyond that. Probably more damage.

  The reins were raw where they weren't wrapped in his hands, and when he stretched his fingers, he discovered just how cold his hands had become. Quickly he curled them back into fists around the leather.

  You should get out of the rain, Mrs. Wallace said to him. We all should. There's nothing to be done now.

  He turned the horse around, but he couldn't imagine just going home. There was no reason to believe Laura was there yet, not with the roads this bad, and Terry probably wouldn't be coming by now at all. Not with this storm and the damage it was doing: There'd be chaos everywhere he'd have to help clean up. And Paul and Emily weren't at their house, either. And so instead of riding back up the hill, he gave the horse a squeeze and started west toward that immense gash in the road. He'd never seen such a thing, and he might never have the chance again.

  Besides, a thought was forming in his mind: Although Laura rarely took the River Road, she had to know that the rains might be washing away whole sections of dirt on the notch way, while turning other long stretches to quicksand. Perhaps today of all days she had chosen to come home via the River Road, and somewhere beyond that great hole in the asphalt she was trapped in the storm in her car.

  "I had never seen a train. I was unprepared for it to be so uncomfortable and so noisy. I guess because white people rode them, I had expected it would be like a palace. I had been almost as comfortable in the wagon we'd used to reach Dennison."

  VERONICA ROWE (FORMERLY POPPING TREES),

  WPA INTERVIEW,

  MARCH 1938

  *

  Phoebe

  She had been driving carefully through country that was almost all snow-covered farmland, and now she was climbing up a series of foothills and at the higher elevation the rain was changing to sleet and--she thought possibly--ice. She was keeping both hands on the wheel at all times, she was pumping her brakes when she needed to slow. She was listening to her music a little softer than usual so she could focus on the conditions of the road and remain alert. Once she looked back to make sure she had remembered to toss her duffel bag into the backseat of her car (she had), but otherwise she stared straight ahead and kept her eyes on the pavement before her.

  Generally she had been pleasantly surprised. Once she was beyond Eden Mills there'd been little ice on the roads, and even north of there the pavement had been so thoroughly salted that it hadn't been too bad. And she knew it was warmer still to the south, and soon she'd only have to confront rain. Nevertheless, she realized she still had some dicey conditions before her: She was hearing that some roads had been closed by high water--she guessed her first big test would be the Lamoille near Johnson--and there were power lines down in almost every county. But Route 100 had really been pretty good. The key was simply to be slow and cautious, and leave nothing to chance.

  Ahead of her, at the very end of a straightaway on the ridge she had reached, she saw a small SUV with its hazard lights on, but for a moment she couldn't tell through the sleet on her windshield whether it was at a complete stop or simply forging ahead at a creep, and so she leaned closer to the glass to see better between the wipers. It was stopped, and it was only partway off the road--the drifts to the side had been hammered by rain, but they were still a yard high--and so she started to brake. Abruptly she realized the car was sliding, she'd hit a patch of black ice. She tried to steer into it, aware on some level that this--this patch of slippery glass on the road--was why the SUV had pulled over, but she understood as the rear of her car swung to the side that this knowledge wasn't going to help her. Then she saw she was in the other lane, the wrong lane, and there were headlights coming toward her through the side windows and someone somewhere was pressing a hand down upon a horn. And so she jammed her foot as hard as she could to the floor of the car and rammed the gearshift into park--anything, anything at all, to stop--and, much to her surprise, she was airborne. She was actually off the pavement, spinning, and the lights were getting closer and the horn was getting louder--louder even than the wind and the rain and the wipers--and she thought, Shit, I'm going to have an accident and I just can't afford this!

  Then, at the moment that she landed back on the ground, her front wheels on the pavement and her rear wheels in the drift to the side, she remembered she was pregnant and she let out a whimper, but she didn't hear the small cry because of the almost deafening crunch of metal upon metal as her car started to collapse all around her.

  "And I knew I was pregnant on the train, and that didn't make the ride any easier. I told George, but not the girls. It was going to be complicated enough when we introduced them to George's brother's family. And so mostly on the train I talked about the buildings, and how some would be taller than any trees they had seen. But even that was difficult, because I'd never seen such a building myself, and only knew of them what o
ther people had told me. It was like describing a rattlesnake if you've never seen one--not even a photograph. I think my children expected the walls would be made of animal hides."

  VERONICA ROWE (FORMERLY POPPING TREES),

  WPA INTERVIEW,

  MARCH 1938

  *

  Alfred

  Just as there were people at the spot along the river where there had once stood a bridge, a small group had gathered just to the east of the first great fissure in the paved road. Again some had driven and some had walked, and he counted nine grown-ups and five teenage boys. They stood wondering at the sight of the canyon, and he realized as he listened to them talk that their awe wasn't driven simply by the crater's size--easily twenty feet deep and twenty feet wide--or by the high water that even now was carving away the ground in the hollow, but by the reality that nature was pummeling them once again.

  There was no one on the other side of the chasm because no one had wanted to risk crossing the water in the bottom or hiking into the slippery woods on the far side of the road. He guessed the teenagers might have tried, but two of them had their parents with them and the grown-ups were not about to permit them to even attempt a crossing.

  It was clear from the conversation around him that everyone believed there were other breaks in the road, too: If there weren't, by now cars would have come this far east from Durham, and they would have seen them before the vehicles would have had to turn back. But none had made it this far.

  Think people are trapped? one of the teenage boys wondered, and it sounded as if he was reveling in the ghoulish possibilities.

  You mean like the Willards two years ago? someone--the boy's mother, Alfred suspected--asked. Even he had heard the tale of how this septuagenarian couple had found themselves on the road between Durham and Cornish when the river had destroyed the pavement before and behind them, and forced them to hike across one of the pits it had hewn from the hillside.

  Yeah, the teen said. Like that.

  Instantly he thought of Laura, and he wished he knew more about jumping. He wished he knew anything about jumping. Briefly he imagined himself riding the horse into the crevice and then leaping the span where the water was churning up rock and mud. But he could never do that. Not yet, anyway.

  He could, however, ride up into the woods. He'd go wide of the gorge, twenty or thirty yards into the melting snow and slick brush if he had to, and then he'd return to the road when he was west of the break. Quickly he sought out with his eyes the widest nearby gap in the maples and pine, and before anyone would be able to grab the reins and stop him, he prodded Mesa into the woods. He heard them calling after him--some calling him by his name and others just shouting Boy! and Son! and You there!--all of them shouting that he should come back. But he was in the woods now, lowering his chin almost to his chest so the thinner branches would glance off the top of his helmet, guiding the horse as best he could between the trees and the brush, aware that the animal was struggling on occasion for purchase beneath the melting snowpack.

  And then he was out and back on the road, well beyond the western lip of the crevasse. He could still hear people yelling for him to return, but it was going to be dark soon and so he soldiered on, and it was easier now because he was on pavement. He pushed Mesa harder--despite his sudden misgivings that she might yet slip and be hurt, and he would have injured an animal he guessed he loved more than most humans he had met in his life--and she started to run and the voices behind him faded beneath the sound of the rain and the river and the distance, and after no more than half a mile he saw another crater. This one was smaller than the first, perhaps a dozen feet wide and barely four or five feet deep. In the pocket there were slabs of asphalt, and while it was a barrier no vehicle could cross, the water had receded and so he slowed Mesa to a walk and the horse gingerly stepped down into the rubble and then climbed back up the other side.

  He'd ridden more than halfway to Durham, another two or three miles, he guessed, when he saw what looked to him like the searchlights at an airport taking aim at the sky. These weren't as powerful, but he could see them through the fog and the gathering dark. Two of them, he realized as he approached, there were a pair of them. He wondered if he'd reach a chasm and find there a chain of cars on the other side, including one that held Laura.

  As he neared the lights, however, he understood by their angle that they couldn't possibly be from a vehicle that was parked on the road. The ground was hilly here, yes, but it wasn't so steep that a car would be able to shine its front headlights almost straight up into the air. Then he saw the break in the pavement and he slowed. The lights were beaming up from inside the rift. He rode to the very edge, and there below him he saw the vehicle that was generating the lights. It was flipped upside down against the side wall of a twenty- or twenty-five-foot-deep hole that less than an hour before had been a hillside with a road, and he could see the wheels and black and brown metal of the undercarriage and the engine. There was water pooling around the automobile and so he rode Mesa to the side of the road where there were trees, got off the horse, and looped the reins around a branch. Then he started down into the hole. He realized no one but him knew this car was here, because otherwise there would have been vehicles on the other side. Clearly there was at least one more break in the road between here and Durham.

  HE GROPED HIS way down the sides, careful to make sure the craggy chunks of asphalt were solid before lowering himself upon them, and digging his boots into the muddy ground wherever he could. He'd descended no more than five or six feet when he realized how quickly the water in the chasm was rising: It was now lapping at the rear wheels of the car--the trunk was completely underwater--and he was sure it hadn't been that near them before.

  He couldn't make out the color of the vehicle yet, but with relief he decided it was too dark to be Laura's gray Taurus. He wondered if it was possible that whoever was driving had been thrown safely from the vehicle before the water had taken the road out from under it and sent it spinning into this canyon--or, for all he knew, driven the automobile backward into the hole, the water a wave that upended the vehicle like a seashell--but he didn't believe that was likely. He had a sense there would be a person, maybe even people, inside the car. Still, he could hope, and he imagined the driver walking back toward Durham in the rain, cursing his bad luck at having been on this exact patch of the road when the wave had risen up from the river.

  When he had climbed down so that he was even with the front grill, he looked beyond the headlights and he could see just enough of a front panel to realize the car was a deep olive green. It was a cruiser; he could see now the inverted lettering on the door and the chipped shards of blue plastic from the roof's strobe lights that had been blown to the sides when the car flipped over. He craned his neck to peer into the driver's-side window--the windshield was buried against the side of the cleft--and though he couldn't see the man's face, he could see someone was still inside. He knew it was Terry, it absolutely had to be, and he was afraid he was going to be sick: For all he had seen in his life, he had never seen a dead body, and he wanted to flee. But the water was continuing to rise and might eventually submerge the vehicle completely, and so he held on to a slab of rock and stepped tentatively onto the vehicle's side-view mirror. He wanted to take a look and be sure that Terry was dead before succumbing to the panic that was swelling inside him, and allowing himself to run away. He bent over and glanced inside the window, recognized Terry's profile instantly, and nearly screamed when the man turned slowly to face him and through the fogged glass mouthed the word Help.

  "I missed the west, but I was happy. Since I was a teenager I was an outsider, so this was not new."

  VERONICA ROWE (FORMERLY POPPING TREES),

  WPA INTERVIEW,

  MARCH 1938

  *

  Laura

  She sat in the midst of a line of cars on the notch way into Cornish, watching a backhoe pile earth into a hole that had formed when a mountain stream ov
erran the culvert and carved an impassable trench across the road. She tried to be calm, and reminded herself she couldn't have gone home via the River Road even if she'd wanted to, because that route was gone and everyone was being detoured up here, anyway. She told herself that once enough dirt had been dumped into the crevice before her, she would continue on her way; she'd probably be at the house in another ten or fifteen minutes. Certainly no more than twenty. And though the cell phone didn't work in the hills in this corner of the county, she'd stopped at the bakery in Durham and from there called Mandy Acker, Tim's mother, and asked her to check in on Alfred and make sure he knew she was on her way home. She had convinced herself that he was only feeding Mesa when he didn't pick up the phone at their own house, because even the briefest contemplation of any other possibility would have finished off her already scanty reserves of strength in the face of her memories.

  Still, this was just taking forever. There'd been a small fender bender in the corner of the commons in Middlebury, there'd been a power line down just south of New Haven, and she'd been slowed everywhere by the rain that had pooled in the potholes and troughs in the road.

  In her head she saw the high water in the Gale River, and she vowed when this was over she would move. With or without Terry, she and Alfred would move. Not to Boston--no, never there. And not to Burlington either, not to that small city where Alfred had almost been lost. But...somewhere. With or without Terry, she would leave this hill town with its flash floods and hard winters, the apparitions that could be conjured by wind and rain and the simple sound of the Gale as it lapped at its banks.