Nightingale

by David Farland

  He decided to sing about the stone warriors, so he closed his eyes and began:

  "In days of yore when dinosaurs roared,

  Beside a wine-dark sea,

  Guardians of stone,

  Grown from earth's bones,

  Swore to keep watch

  For eternity..."

  Bron knew it wasn't finished, but he kind of liked it. He smiled and asked Olivia, "Will you get off my back now?"

  But when he glanced to his left, it wasn't Olivia driving at all. It was the old man from the electronics store—with his killer's eyes and a mouth drawn in contempt. Bron had never seen such hate in a face, and never felt so alone or frightened.

  "When the serpent bites," the old man growled, "the flies shall soon gather!"

  Bron sat bolt upright in bed, heart hammering so hard that his chest hurt. He gasped for breath, and glanced around.

  The only radiance in the room came from a bit of starlight filtering through the open window. The air still felt stuffy, as if the room hadn't been aired in years. A sheen covered Bron's forehead and made his skin stick to the sheets.

  He wiped his face, and the calluses on his fingers felt surprisingly hard, larger than normal.

  Bron climbed from bed, still in his clothes, and stood for a moment, gasping.

  Who is that old man? Bron wondered. Why is Olivia hiding from him?

  The dream had felt so vivid—more like a memory than a dream.

  He focused on the red sandstone cliffs. In the dream, they'd seemed... so familiar.

  Could I have been born around here? he wondered.

  No one had ever claimed him. The police had made a fuss about him, and the news had plastered his face on television, with anchors pleading, "Does anyone know this child?"

  Mr. Bell had told Bron that the investigators had gotten hundreds of leads, placing his parents everywhere from Austin, Texas to Ontario, Canada. But all the leads evaporated into nothing. It seemed that no one had ever known him. No mother, father, grandparent. No neighbors or friends.

  No one reported him missing, and no one had ever been able to put a name to him. It was as if he'd appeared out of thin air.

  He shook his head, trying to clear it of dreams that were far too lucid.

  Bron went to the window, looked out. Here so far from the city lights, the stars blazed. There seemed to be a hundred thousand, twinkling and throbbing. No sooner had he glanced out the window than a shooting star barreled across the horizon. Tonight was the second night of the Perseid Meteor Shower, a moment later he saw a spray of light as three stars fell at once.

  A rooster crowed in the distance. Back at the Stillmans, Bron used to like to run at dawn. He didn't have a clock, but he figured that it was close enough to morning.

  He pulled on his new shoes, went outside.

  The air was cooler than he thought it would be. The temperature really dropped up here in the mountains at night, but it wasn't bad for running. In fact, he'd always found a cool day to be invigorating, and he'd once heard a farmer claim that in the autumn, even the horses and dogs like to go running for no reason.

  He stood gazing up into the bowl of heaven, where the River of Stars wound along, powdering the sky, and for long minutes he craned his neck and watched for shooting stars.

  So high up in the mountains, he was able to spot some fast-moving satellites among the countless stars, dull reddish orbs. Things that would have been too dim to see at his old house in Alpine showed up vividly here.

  There was no noise from cars. Down by the creek, perhaps a quarter of a mile out in the pasture, he heard frogs croaking, and after a few moments he heard an eerie howl up in the mountains, above the campgrounds. It was high in pitch, too high to be a wolf, he decided. Besides, there weren't supposed to be any wolves so far south in Utah. It had to be a coyote.

  It had hardly begun to howl when a dozen others joined in, creating an unnerving chorus.

  Bron felt wide awake now. He realized that it was fall night, still at least a couple of hours before dawn. There wasn't the slightest crescent of light limning the hills to the east.

  He remembered the old man, the attack—his friend Riley slamming his fist through the window to break into the car. The memory left him with jitters.

  He recalled seeing how the car had rolled, and he wondered if anyone had been hurt. He hadn't listened to the news that night, but figured that nothing had happened. The wreck hadn't seemed spectacular. It almost seemed to happen in slow motion.

  He thought about Mike's cool reception, and suspected that they were going to have problems.

  He thought about the warm way that Olivia had spoken earlier. He could still smell the faint scent of her perfume on him. It was ... strangely intoxicating.

  He tried to clear his mind, to stop thinking about her, to get her bright eyes out of his mind, and he decided that he was too wound up.

  The stars lit the long driveway, reflecting off the ash-colored dirt and crushed rock, almost as if it were a river.

  He decided to follow it. He hadn't had a good run in two days, and he started out at an even pace, falling into rhythm as he reached Main Street, and then picked up his pace down the long road into town. The houses were few and far apart, and half didn't seem occupied.

  He raced through town, and twice he had dogs bark at him—big guard dogs that woofed so loud that he worried they might waken their masters.

  He reached the T-intersection leading to the highway to Saint George. There weren't any houses along that road, at least none to speak of, so he turned and ran for another mile, heading across the valley and up a sloping hill.

  By the time he reached the top, he was sweating and winded, so he turned and jogged slowly, enjoying the rhythms of his breath, the way that his legs felt strong and powerful, like the pistons of an engine that worked by will alone.

  The endorphin rush was on him, and he let his mind go to that place where there was no thought, only the pounding of feet on the gravel, the distant wail of coyotes, and the occasional buzz of a cicada.

  It was in this place that he always found peace. In this place, Bron thought, a man can touch eternity.

  He became aware that a car was coming up behind, easing down the road toward town. He got well onto the shoulder of the road. He kept up his pace until the car pulled up beside him.

  It suddenly slowed, and a spotlight shot out the passenger's window. A gruff voice called, "You trying to get run over?"

  Bron spotted the bubble lights on top of the car. He pulled to a stop. There were extra lights in the cab for the radio, but Bron couldn't see anything: the cop had his spotlight aimed right in Bron's eyes. Bron raised a hand.

  "No, sir, I'm not trying to get hit."

  "It's three o'clock in the morning!" the policeman growled. "What in hell's name do you think you're doing out here? What are you runnin' from?"

  "I woke and went to watch the meteor shower," Bron explained, "and then I couldn't sleep, so I thought that maybe a run would help. I... was on the cross-country team last year. I... was hoping to take state this year."

  Taking state was far beyond Bron's capabilities, but he hoped that it might garner some sympathy. The cop waved the light at various corners of Bron's clothing, as if a handgun might fall out of his shirt at any moment.

  "You're waking people up," the cop said. "Got a call that some kid was running through town, maybe a vandal or a thief. This is a quiet neighborhood. Folks here don't run—at least they don't run in the night."

  "I'm not from around here," Bron said. "I just moved in yesterday ... with Mike and Olivia Hernandez."

  "You that social services kid?" the cop asked. He flipped off his light, but Bron still couldn't see much. It would take minutes for his eyes to adjust.

  "You heard about me, so soon?"

  "Olivia bought dinner at the restaurant. The whole town knows about you, and they got nothing better to talk about."

  Bron smiled. "Wow, sounds like I'm famous." He coul
d see the cop now—maybe fifty, with a buzz cut and glasses. His face was wide at the mouth, like a bullfrog's, but it was his eyes that bothered Bron.

  The officer didn't have much use for "social service" kids, obviously.

  "There's a statewide curfew, you know," the officer said, "from eleven to five. I could give you a ticket, you know."

  He looked down to a little yellow pad resting on the passenger's seat, as if trying to decide whether to write out a ticket. Bron didn't think that a judge would bother fining him for taking a late-night jog, and apparently the officer reached the same conclusion.

  "I'm going to give you a ride home," the officer said. "No need to set no more dogs to yappin'. Get in!"

  Bron opened the door and climbed into the passenger seat. "I'm real sorry if I disturbed anyone," he said. "I used to go running before sunrise every morning up north."

  "Well," the officer said gruffly as he accelerated onto the road. "You aren't up north. You're down in Little Dixie. Things are going to have to change. I don't know what kind of trouble you bring with you, but I don't want any of it around here."

  Bron knew the suspicions that some folks harbored about foster kids. The truth was that he'd made the common mistakes that kids do. He'd gotten caught at the age of eight stealing a candy bar from the local 7-Eleven. He'd once cussed out a foster sister. He'd gotten in wrestling matches with his brothers.

  He'd learned that the rules for foster kids were different from those of normal folks. The things that people tolerated in most children—the things that they laughed about and considered rites of passage for their own kids—were unforgivable in a foster child.

  "I've never been in any trouble," Bron said.

  "You got thrown out of your old house," the officer suggested, as if that were evidence of some crime. "By tomorrow I'm going to know everything about you. I don't want no trouble in these parts."

  The officer fell silent, and Bron wondered what kind of trouble he might be in. Pine Valley seemed too small to have a police force. The closest thing that he'd seen earlier to a lawman was the park ranger out in his little shack. Bron glanced at the officer's uniform. He was from the Washington County Sheriffs Office. A pin on his shirt said that his last name was Walton.

  They drove through town, and when they reached the driveway, the officer made a point of hitting his flashing lights. He dropped Bron off at the front door. Mike and Olivia staggered out of the house in their bathrobes, and Mike shot Bron a distrustful look.

  Bron went to his room. He threw himself on the bed and waited for Mike to come yell at him or something.

  Instead, Olivia came to the door. She wore a satin nightgown in a soft shade of peach that accentuated her curves, and Bron gritted his teeth, waiting for her to chew him out.

  "Please," she said softly, "in the future, don't go running in the night. There are worse things than Officer Walton out there."

  To tell the truth, Bron had worried about that a little. "Like cougars? Or bears?"

  "Worse than that," she said as she slipped out the door.

  Saturday Bron woke feeling so exhausted that he was reminded of a book that he'd once read about potato farmers in Idaho who turned unsuspecting townsfolk into zombies and made them dig potatoes from dusk till dawn. Bron's muscles ached, and his thoughts were cloudy, filled with dreams of guitars. It was the crack of dawn.

  Bron got up, glanced out his open window. Morning stole quietly over Pine Valley. The wildfires in California were heating up, sending soot and ash into the heavens, so that a red haze enveloped the vale, bloodying the land. Had someone said that dragons were setting the skies afire, Bron would have believed.

  He wandered to the kitchen, got a drink of water. Olivia came in from her bedroom.

  "Bron," she said, "Mike's out in the barn. He's going to make his morning rounds to check on the cattle. I thought that you might like to go."

  She didn't have to say more. There was a pleading tone to her voice. This was supposed to be a father-and-son outing, a chance for them to bond. Bron had been through the routine often enough.

  "Sure," he said.

  Mike took him out on an ATV to show him his land—eight hundred acres of grassland and forest here in the bowl of the valley, climbing up into the mountains. Mike explained that most of his cattle were still up in the hills, grazing on public lands. The government let him run his cattle in the mountains for a small fee, but Mike always kept the younger calves near the house. Tourists often came by in the summer, and Mike charged the kids $5 to feed the calves a bale of alfalfa. It offset the cost of his feed.

  They drove up a dirt track into hills where gray hoodoos rose up along the hills, like ancient towers of ash.

  "Wow," Bron said when he saw them, "I didn't expect to see these back here."

  "Seventy-five million years ago," Mike said, "this land was all covered in dunes, three and four thousand feet high. These cliffs are all that is left of them. There are still a lot of petrified dunes around here that you can climb on. You remember the little volcano just north of the park?"

  "Yeah," Bron said. It wasn't tall, but it had a perfect cone on top.

  "Just across the highway is White Rock trailhead. It's just a short hike to a little natural amphitheater that climbs up a thousand feet on each side. Olivia likes to go there in the mornings sometimes, to play her songs to rabbits that live by this pool."

  "If people knew that all of this cool stuff was here," Bron said, "they'd be crawling all over these rocks."

  Mike shrugged. "There's so much beautiful country around here, people turn up their noses at this. Personally, I'm happy to have the tourists leave it alone. A few miles from here," Mike said, "the sand dunes dropped down into an ancient sea. At the edge of it, dinosaurs roamed. The dinosaur run at Johnson's Farm is one of the best in the world. You can see where allosaurs used to sun in the mud and swim in the lake. But there are dinosaur tracks everywhere around here. Home builders will hide them so that the building inspectors can't see, afraid that the government will turn their home lots into archaeological sites.

  "There's a great place to go hiking about twenty miles outside of Washington. It's a dry creek where you can follow the dinosaur tracks for three miles, on the trail of a T-Rex that was hunting on a muddy day. Seeing dinosaur tracks is kind of cool. Putting your hand in one is even cooler."

  Bron studied the gray hoodoos, and tried to imagine what it had looked like here seventy million years ago. He somehow felt old today, as if he were part of this land. Maybe it was the attack yesterday, but he felt wise and sad.

  Mike loved his land, it was obvious. The very eastern tip of his property climbed up into the hills, into a forest of brooding pines where the shadows made it feel like dusk.

  They had just started driving up a wooded hill when Mike let out a curse. High above them, on a rocky bluff, a calf lay in bloody ruin.

  Mike turned off the ignition. "Let's check that out," he said, voice shaking. Mike loved his land, but he loved the cattle even more.

  They climbed the steep hill for two hundred feet, circling a chimney of ash-gray stone. When they reached the top, they could see the calf clearly, its belly split.

  Mike didn't get close. He stopped fifty feet away. "Looks like something got to it, a cougar maybe," he said in a soft voice. "If it was a cougar, it will usually find a little perch close by. It will want to keep an eye on its kill."

  Bron looked uphill in the shadows of the pines, but couldn't see much. He spotted a few fallen trees, but nothing crouched on top of them.

  "I heard coyotes last night," Bron said, "when I was running."

  "Coyotes won't kill anything this big," Mike replied. He squinted at the carcass. "Let's take a seat right here."

  He squatted on the ground like an Indian, and Bron sat next to him. A kid at school had once explained that there was a correct way to sit on the ground without hurting your legs. The samurai had called it "sitting seiza," or "the one true way of sitting." Bron l
iked the idea that something as simple as sitting required a certain type of mastery, as if, by learning to do small things well, our lives could be vastly improved. So he sat seiza, with his knees together and pointed forward, his toes pointing back, and his heels propping up his butt. It required so much dexterity that most people would never attempt it.

  Mike glanced at his pose, nodded approvingly.

  They still hadn't approached the dead animal. Bron could see that its belly had been split cleanly open, so that its guts were spilling out. The stroke looked almost surgical. A few flies circled, green gems in the morning sun. He could smell blood and stomach acids.

  "What are we doing?" Bron asked.

  "Sometimes," Mike said, "you have to look at something for a long time before you can really see it. Don't speak. Just look."

  So Bron simply studied the calf. It was a big calf, he decided. The legs were thick, the fur clean and sleek. There were no teeth marks on the throat that he could detect, the way that he'd expect a cougar to take such a big animal.

  He couldn't see where the grass around it had been beaten, as one might find if there had been a struggle. Instead, dry stalks stood up all around.

  Bron studied the ground looking for a track. On television there was always a patch of clear ground where some freshly turned earth gave away the identity of a predator, but this wasn't television. The ground was rocky, and few plants rose from it.

  "It wasn't dragged up here," Bron surmised after fifteen minutes. "It's almost like it walked up here."

  "Or flew," Mike said.

  It was such a strange comment, Bron glanced up at him.

  "My grandfather used to say, 'When we imagine that we know how the world works, it closes our mind to wondrous truths."

  "So," Bron clarified, "you think that cows can fly?"

  Mike smiled, almost a laugh, as if Bron had just been suckered in by a joke.

  "No. I think someone killed it," Mike said. "Sometimes kids will shoot up an animal just for fan. Or maybe a bow-hunter shot it, then cut his arrow out. It doesn't look like an animal kill."