“We know, Ma.”
“Keep an eye on the sky. I don’t trust this hot, still air. And be back for dinner,” she added.
“We know.”
LeRoy barked at the door, and Mother Klein let him out.
“Wait for LeRoy!” she called unnecessarily as LeRoy bounded out, yapping and trying to get his nose in the basket.
“And keep track of your brother; he’s not a strong swimmer.”
“We know,” said the Bigs as Little Klein moaned, “Mother!”
The Klein Boys balanced their craft on the back of Mark’s bike and pushed it out of town. LeRoy followed them to the river, where Little Klein launched his brothers into the porcelain water with a shove that left him on shore.
“Wait for me!” he cried as a swirling current caught the raft on its conveyor belt. The Big Kleins were spinning; they were sailing fast.
“No fair!” Little Klein stomped as the raft rounded the bend.
“Wrong way!” he yelled when it turned at the river’s fork. LeRoy nudged Little Klein. He barked and ran up the bank. He turned and barked again.
“Shoot, LeRoy. We get left behind again.” Little Klein scrambled through the raspberry bushes after LeRoy. He heard yelling. Little Klein ran faster, trying to follow LeRoy’s barks. Mother was going to be so mad they’d taken Wilson’s Fork. They may have taken off without him, but at least he wouldn’t get in trouble. At the top of the bank he saw the raft again, and his smug heart went limp. The raft was stuck on a rock in the middle of the river, but there were no Kleins on board. LeRoy was already in the water, swimming instinctively now as in his dreams to the three heads that popped up, a constellation in the river’s thundering sky.
“Help!” screamed Mark.
“Shoot!” called Luke.
“The falls!” cried Matthew as he latched onto the dog.
The falls.
Little Klein ran for the road. He ran and yelled, stumbled and yelled.
“Help! Help! Help!”
By the time he reached the road his voice was no thicker than kite string and the passing car was moving too fast to notice a small boy in the brush. A thicket of brambles caught Little Klein. He yanked one leg then the other, wrestling himself free before stepping onto the tar shoulder. He could see a silhouette across the two-lane, but was it human or animal?
“Help!” he gasped, but the shape did not move. He pursed his lips, but he was out of whistle, too. He shivered like January, teeth rattling, kneecaps quaking. Little Klein put his two index fingers in his mouth, Rich Wedge’s method, and he blew. Nothing. He spat. He stomped. He licked his lips, puckered, and tried again. This time — Oh, Glory Halleluia — his instrument trilled; it trumpeted. The shadow quivered and rose.
Holy Moses, it was Mean Emma Brown. He sucked in his breath. One strip of tar separated him from the boy-squasher. If it weren’t that Little Klein needed the Big Kleins to protect him from Emma Brown in all the futures he hoped to have, he would have backed away. But now she had seen him.
She tramped her big brown boots across both lanes without looking for cars. She laced her big brown fingers together and cracked her bony knuckles. When the bellow of Emma’s “What?” hit Little Klein, his bladder released.
“The falls!” he whimpered.
“I can see that,” Emma snorted. “You call me over here for a square of toilet paper?”
Now Little Klein’s eyes released, too. “My brothers!”
Emma looked hard at Little Klein. “Your brothers aren’t . . . they didn’t . . . Wilson’s Fork?”
Little Klein nodded.
“Aw, crap!” said Emma. “I’d just about caught a dragonfly over there. Crap. Well, step on out.”
Little Klein looked at her wide.
“You stand in that lane; I’ll stand in this one,” she continued. “Try to look tall.”
Little Klein stood on the yellow line, his legs wet and sticky, snot running over the bridge of his quivering lip. He drew a hot raspy breath and raised his shoulders as far as he could.
Little Klein thought about his futures. There was his air hero future. He was a member of Captain Midnight’s Secret Squadron and had in his damp pocket at this moment his Photomatic Code-O-Graph. When Captain Midnight’s eyesight got bad, as it was sure to searching for Ivan Shark in the dark, Little Klein would be ready to take over.
There was his farmer future, where he rode a horse that made him taller than all the other Kleins and where he had a pack of wolves that bared their teeth should Mean Emma Brown even think about stealing corn from his field.
Little Klein slid one eye in Emma’s direction. Soon his brothers would be here to raise their fists at her. His brothers must have climbed out of the river by now. They were probably sneaking up behind Emma, laughing as they plotted their surprise attack.
Then there was his golden future. The future that featured Little Klein as a star boxer, raising his dukes to the likes of Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson. He’d have red silk shorts and brown leather gloves the size of balloons. From town to town he’d ride in his very own pickup truck, with all the banana sandwiches he could eat in a cooler on the seat next to him. There would be photos of Little Klein in the drugstores. Little scrappers would ask for his autograph.
In each of Little Klein’s futures there were Big Kleins. Big Kleins filling the tank of his fighter plane. Big Kleins driving plows through his fields. Big Kleins collecting bets before fights and clearing his path through the cheering crowds. Soon Big Kleins would be grabbing him off this hot pavement and leaving him stranded in a high tree or dangling him over the rushing river from a hanging branch.
The rushing river.
The road was deserted.
After a thousand years a pickup sputtered around the bend, tooted its horn, and coasted onto the shoulder next to Emma. An ancient woman leaned out the window.
“What’s a matter, girl?”
Emma pointed at Little Klein.
“The Klein Boys’ve caught a current.”
“Fool boys, in the river after those rains,” Nora Nettle scoffed. “Hop in the back.”
Emma grabbed Little Klein and hoisted him into a heap of rope and barrels and fishing rods, then climbed in herself. The truck lurched forward and off the road, bumping and scraping through the brush until it skidded to a stop at the edge of the falls. Emma and Nora Nettle climbed out to the cliff. Little Klein, caught in a tangle of rope and fishing line, hollered for his brothers.
“Come on out, guys!” he shouted. “I got her cornered!” He wrestled himself free and dropped over the edge of the truck. No sweaty hand grabbed his puny arm. No smelly breath hissed a snake scare in his ear. No sweeping arm lifted him off his feet. Little Klein stomped around the side of the truck.
“Guys!” he shouted. “Come on, guys!” Little Klein wiped his hand across his eyes and let out a roar.
“Stop it, you guys!”
A shivering blanket of wet fur yelped at Little Klein’s side. “LeRoy!” he cried. “Good boy, LeRoy. You swam, LeRoy! Good boy! Where are the guys, LeRoy?” He wrapped his arms around the dog’s neck. “You’re okay, boy. Shake it out, shake it out, come on, shake off all that water!” Little Klein shook himself all over to demonstrate. LeRoy gave a little shake and laid his head on his paws.
Then Emma was standing next to him. Mean Emma Brown was looking at him with her railroad nail eyes.
Little Klein bared his teeth at Emma Brown and put up his dukes. “Where’re my brothers?”
Emma looked into Little Klein’s eyes, into all his pasts and all his futures. She lifted Little Klein back into the nest of rope and fishing line. Then she dropped the shaking dog into his lap and got into the cab with Nora Nettle.
“Wait!” cried Little Klein. “My mother will kill me if I come home without the boys!”
The wheels spun in the wet sand then caught their tread on the dirt and the truck lumbered back through the brush, back up the hill, back onto the hot, deserted tar.
The river did not intend to swallow people. New waters flowed by the town of Lena every day on their predestined journey. Every day new waters were discovering the quiet green shores, the soaring bluffs, and the rocky and sandy bottom that adorned this particular part of their passage. Here, the river narrowed and widened, rounded bends and skirted boulder beds, then split for a ways into two branches — one calm and even, the other sending the water tumbling over a cliff in a joyful free fall.
Long before the river was born, a warm ocean covered this part of the continent. When the water of the ancient ocean disappeared, it left sediment piled so high in one place that when the rest of the area got locked in glaciers, this plateau was missed, a rocky island alone for thousands of years in a frozen sea. Sliced top to bottom, this plateau would look like a many-layered rock cake topped with limestone.
Future children would easily carve their initials with sticks in this soft stone, and when melting glaciers to the north birthed the river, its waters had no trouble cutting through it. So easily did the limestone dissolve, in fact, that simple rain cracked its surface in places.
By the time the glaciers had disappeared and humans lived on the land, eroding water had carved out caves, caverns, and underground rivers from the limestone. Even this river, intent on its mission to feed larger water bodies, was unaware of the vast geography of its buried sister streams and only during floods did it explore the caves.
The waters that passed each season were new, but they were related by the continuous cycle of drops pulled out of the ocean into the air and dropped back down by heavy clouds. Reincarnated sometimes in the very same river, they enjoyed the trip all the more the second time through, like revisiting a childhood home and finding it smaller than one remembers.
The waters that flowed past Lena after heavy rains were the most unpredictable waters. They had a nervous disposition and were easily rallied into tight spinning currents with magnetic grips. Farther down their journey they would look back on that portion of the trip with a sigh — oh, the exuberance of youth — for Lena was only a day’s journey from the birthplace of the river. And like impetuous youth, the early waters sometimes acted without regard for consequence.
That’s how it had been two years ago when a celebratory group took a trip on her surface. They intended to put in at Lena proper and disembark at the park near the river’s fork for the annual First Picnic of the Year in which the music of the falling river in the distance would be their entertainment.
That spring the waters flowed quietly past Lena proper. It wasn’t until just before the fork that the waters gathered together in a magnetic twirl, ready to dance and fly off the cliff together. With some of the youngest and oldest citizens of the town standing onshore, the waters of that spring carried the long boat on their current past the park, past the food and streamers and horseshoes, and didn’t release it until it was airborne.
As the water found its path again below the cliff, it coughed up wood and shoes and Felicia Olson and Crumly Bottom and Lester Prentice and Floyd Ranborn and the Brown couple and many more. Some the water left by banks and in weeds; others it carried on before Officer Linden and his crew lifted them out.
Now the river was running high again. Heavy rains had added a powerful depth to the river that was disguised near town by a serene skin. When three boys on a slatted raft grazed its surface, the river’s dark memory trembled. The waters for whom this was a return journey knew the falls were ahead. Even as they pulled the raft into Wilson’s Fork, they knew the fate of these boys and steered the craft onto a jutting rock. But the raft met the rock too fast, and the boys could not hold on. The river was able to release their dog into a clump of weeds and brush, but not the boys. The current pulled them in, pulled them down, swallowed those boys whole as it skimmed toward the cliff.
Terrified at its own strength, the water below the falls caught the boys and held them in a churning grip, churning but not sending them downriver. Finally, the river tucked those boys, one by one, safely into a chamber of ancient rock bed worn into a cave by generations of river water. Only a shoe and a cap were released to travel on farther.
Bumping along in the back of Nora Nettle’s pickup truck put the ice of a nightmare in Little Klein’s chest. His nightmares all had one thing in common. Whether he was facing a pack of wolves or arriving at school in his underwear, he was alone. In his nightmares no one called him Little Klein because there were no Big Kleins in Harold’s nightmares.
It was only LeRoy’s slobber on his foot that assured him now in this truck that he wasn’t dreaming. Harold Sylvester George Klein grabbed LeRoy’s face and lifted it to look at him.
“LeRoy. You’ve got to help me find the guys.”
LeRoy whimpered and laid his head back down.
The rickety truck bounced slowly along.
“What if they’re drowning, LeRoy? What if they’re calling for help? Why can’t she go faster?” he pleaded in vain. All the cold fright turned to hot rage in Harold’s chest as he relived the moment the raft had slipped out of his reach.
“They left me on shore!” He pounded his fist on the barrel next to him.
“Ouch!
“They left me on SHORE! They ditched me. Again! Bullies. We’re going back. Come on.”
Harold braced his feet against LeRoy’s side and pushed until the dog slid toward the end of the truck. He scooted his rear forward and pushed again until they were at the gate. He looked back at the cab, but the window was too dirty for him to see in or for Emma to see out. The gate latch had been eaten by rust and just a rope looped over a hook held it closed. Once released, the gate flopped down like a slide to the tar slowly rolling out below them.
“Ready, LeRoy?”
LeRoy whimpered and laid his head on his paws, looking up at Harold with what he hoped was his most pitiful gaze but which Harold interpreted as a nod of agreement.
“Good boy. There’s my boy. This old truck is barely moving. It’ll be easy. Close your eyes. I’ll count. One . . . two . . . three!” Harold pushed off and slid out of the truck, landing with a thud that knocked the wind out of him.
“See,” he said when he caught his breath. “Nothing broken. That wasn’t so bad, was it, boy? LeRoy?”
The road next to him was empty. Turning, he saw LeRoy’s face in the truck bed, growing small. His mouth was open in a bark, but the sound was lost in the rattle of the pickup.
“Shoot, LeRoy!” Harold stood up. “Ow! Ow! Ow!” He tested out his limbs. Everything worked, but his sitter smarted with every step. “I’m going to get those guys,” he muttered as he trudged along. As soon as he started feeling sorry for himself, his energy waned. So Harold mustered up all the old grudges stored in that little-used part of his heart.
“Can’t even get a dumb old dog to follow me.” He walked a little faster as he mimicked the deeper voices of his brothers. “Little Klein isn’t big enough to ride a bike. Little Klein isn’t strong enough to fly a kite. Little Klein isn’t tall enough to . . . Three milk shakes and oh, a strawberry kiddie cone for him.” Harold kicked a stone. “I want vanilla!” he screamed at the top of his lungs. “In fact, forget the cone — I want a root beer float!” He started to jog.
“Gardens are not just for sissies!” He clenched his fists.
“Ditchers!” A squirrel was rooting around on the side of the road. Harold hissed at him. “Scat, you!” he shouted.
Then he saw the tire tracks coming up out of the grass and leading into the trees. Harold stopped. He turned to follow the tracks.
“Be there, guys. Be there,” he chanted in a whisper with each step. The sweat that had drenched him while he ran returned as an uncomfortable chill when he reached the dense shade of the trees. All his blood huddled in his heart, thumping and pumping, threatening to burst out of his chest. His feet heavy and his head light, Little Klein followed the sound of the falls until he was standing at the edge of the cliff. He whistled, then stopped to listen. Nothing.
“Come on out! I won’t tell!” he shouted, then whistled again, but the falling water drowned out even his whistle. He ran his hands over the goose bumps on his arms while picking his way along the shore, then wound back up over the hill, around the bend, until he could see flattened grass where they’d sat on the raft before launching it in the river.
“They started here,” he said in a soft, quivering voice, pantomiming his shove. He followed the path along the river again. “They started swirling there,” he said a bit louder. He followed the trail over the hill where the river forked, then mustered his most determined voice: “And there’s the rock that caught the raft.”
Harold peered across the water. Had they gotten out on the other side? There was no movement. His calls brought no response. He looked over the falls again, and his knees melted. He knelt and looked downriver.
What if they did go over? He lay on his belly and pulled himself to the edge with his elbows until he was looking directly over the cliff, the spray of the water misting his face, the sound deadening his thoughts.
He covered his ears and tried to concentrate. What would happen if they did go over? The falls weren’t so tall, not like Minnehaha Falls when he visited his aunties. Maybe the boys would go under at the bottom, but wouldn’t they bob back up and float downstream? That had to be it. They must have crawled out where the river gets shallow and slow again. Emma Brown and the old lady just panicked when they didn’t see them — that was all.
Harold pushed himself back from the edge and stood up. He walked through the woods to the place where a trail wound down the steep slope. Standing at the base of the falls, he looked up into the tower of water. He turned and started downriver, studying its surface and whistling into the woods. In one place the land rose above the river and Harold had to steel his squirming stomach and peer down again. Just beyond this was the footbridge.
Little Klein Page 7
