It was instinct more than an answer. The soft ground was gumming my Velcro sneakers, my mind was on mud and secrets, and secrets were buried treasure.
“What would you bury?” Fiona asked.
“I don’t know. Money?”
“That’s stupid,” she said, and she wrapped her arms around the frog’s neck. “Isn’t that stupid, Mr. Hopper?”
“Okay, fine.” I looked to the yard for inspiration. In our weedy sandbox were action figures, strewn about like all casualties of play. On the stump of a willow tree was a deflated rubber ball that Keri and I used to throw at each other while yelling “Bombs over Tokyo!”
“How ’bout … something to tell some new kid that I was here first,” I said.
Fiona put a finger up—Eureka! “I once saw spray paint on a bridge that said Kilroy Was Here.”
“Who’s Kilroy?” I asked.
“Beats me. But he was once there. And now I know about it.”
Writing Alistair Was Here on something and burying it in the ground seemed weird, but I had no idea what else might symbolize me, what object might communicate that I was a kid who lived in this house his whole entire life, and that it was my house before it was some other kid’s house.
“How ’bout…”
“How about you don’t tell me right now?” Fiona said. “But if you move away, then you can bury something here for me to find. And I’ll dig it up!”
“Okay,” I said, warming to her variation on my theme. “But what if you move away first?”
“Then I’ll bury something for you to find. And you’ll dig it up! One catch, though. Whatever we bury, it has to tell a secret.”
I actually liked this scenario better. It felt like we were forming our own super-exclusive club. Membership: two. “It’s a deal,” I told her.
“More than a deal,” she replied. “It’s a pact. Do you know what a pact is?”
“I think so.”
“Good.” She slid down the rock.
“Should we prick our fingers?” I asked. “Like blood brothers … or sisters?”
She grimaced and shook her head. “A handshake oughta do.”
* * *
I dug. How could I not?
It had been at least five years since we’d made that pact, five years in which we had hardly spoken to each other. It might seem strange, but once our parents stopped being friends, so did we. A lot of it was the she’s a girl and I’m a boy divide that happens in elementary school. Part of it was convenience. She didn’t come around anymore, and even though she lived up the street, it was like she’d moved away.
Now she had buried something for me. It could only mean that she was actually moving away. Maybe over the last few weeks her family had been packing up the house and the moving truck would be showing up at any moment. Or maybe it was only Fiona who was leaving. After all, I hadn’t seen a For Sale sign anywhere. Whatever was happening, I wasn’t going to wait to find out. You’d better believe I was going to dig.
That night, after my family went to sleep, I set a flashlight on the knee of Frog Rock and I went to work with a camping shovel. The ground was soft, but not soaked. Every autumn the swamp dried up and chilled to the point where it was more a frosty and muddy glade than it was a wetland. It felt like hours, but it probably wasn’t even twenty minutes before I struck something that wasn’t a stone or a root. I clawed the dirt away and unearthed a handle.
Moments later I was sitting at our picnic table with a long metal box in my lap. It was a relic, a green rectangular thing with a hinged top and rusty latches and a few fading, peeling baseball stickers on the outside. And on the inside? A soupy mess of dirty water and worms, but also a Ziploc, sealed and wrapped in rubber bands to keep its lumpy contents safe. I wiped the bag against damp grass to remove most of the muck and I rolled off the rubber bands.
I’m not sure what I was expecting to find in there. A diary? Maybe a key? Certainly not what I found.
It was a white handkerchief. Fiona had used Magic Markers to draw a rough grid of forty to fifty squares on it. In most squares, there was a name written. Chua Ling, Boaz Odhiambo, Rodrigo Hermanez, Jenny Colvin, and others. Some names were written in red ink. Some in green. Some were full names. Some only first names or initials. Next to a few, there were also the names of places. Kenya, Argentina, Milwaukee. In a square near the edge, Fiona Loomis Was Here.
A few of the squares had X’s on them. A few had?’s.
At the bottom there was a note:
Dear Alistair,
You’ve found this because the Riverman has taken me. By now, he might have taken all of these kids. Someone must warn the green ones. Someone must stop him. I don’t know what to do anymore.
So confused. So scared.
Fiona
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 18
The halls after the second bell were always a muddle of tension—kids trading halfhearted shoves and taunts as they jostled from homeroom to first period through the gantlet of mustard-yellow lockers. I spotted Fiona in the mix, shuffling alongside her friend Fay-Renee. They weren’t talking to each other, but you could tell they were tuned to the same frequency simply by the way their eyes moved in tandem. I stepped in front of them, and they zeroed in on a milk stain on my shirt and followed the path of my buttons to a zit on my chin, until finally settling their pupils on mine.
“Hey,” I said to Fiona. I pinched at my earlobe, shielding the zit with my wrist and the stain with my arm. “Can we talk for a sec?”
Fiona nodded it’s cool to Fay-Renee, who shrugged and stepped back into the swell.
“What’s up?” Fiona asked.
“Tell me about the Riverman,” I said.
I might as well have admitted to torching her house. Her reaction isn’t easy to describe. It was almost like watching a sand castle struck by a wave.
“He found me?” she asked as she braced herself against the lockers and closed her eyes.
“What?”
“Are you him, or did he send you to get information on me?” Her arms fell limp. Her head fell to the side.
“Huh?”
“I’m so sorry.” She opened her eyes. There was a tiny swirl of rage in them, but mostly it was sadness. “Actually, no. I’m not sorry. But I guess it had to come to this. If he can’t find me there, then he finds me here.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I pulled the handkerchief from my pocket. “This was buried behind my house.”
The rage bloomed into a tornado, and she snatched the handkerchief and hissed, “What the heck are you thinking?” She didn’t have pockets, so she stuffed the handkerchief down the front of her shirt and shouldered past me.
Chasing her, I said, “I should be asking you that. I don’t know if this is a prank or you’re just plain nuts, but—”
Before I could finish my thought, Fiona had a hand on my mouth and she was pushing me against the lockers and whispering to me, “Don’t ever show that to anyone. Understand? People will suffer. Hundreds of people. Thousands.”
Over her shoulder, I saw that Charlie was watching us. He was making kissy-faces at me, puckering his lips so much that you could hear a wet squeak over the buzz of the crowd. I pushed Fiona’s hand away and said, “Whatever. Forget I even brought it up.”
Bulling into the throng of my classmates, I headed to first period.
* * *
When I was embarrassed, confused, or simply lonely, I would take long, hot showers. I would sit in the tub and lean forward and let the water massage my neck and scalp. I wouldn’t close my eyes. I liked to watch the water cascade off my head.
That night I showered until the hot water ran out. When I was finished, I put on my pajamas and headed to the living room to watch TV. I didn’t want to talk. I didn’t even want to think.
On my way through the dining room, my dad handed me a coffee can overflowing with potato peels, eggshells, and the ends of carrots and celery. “A man’s work is never done,” he said.
/> “Crap.”
“Hey there now. We don’t pay you for your witty commentary.” He took a side-sip from his beer and cocked his chin. “When I was your age—”
“You probably had to carry a hundred pounds of compost ten miles down the road every night.”
“Forget that.” He laughed. “No one composted back then. Besides, my parents hired people to do everything for us. That’s why I hire you.”
As far as chores go, taking the compost out was fairly painless, and combined with doing the dishes and dragging the trash cans to the corner, it was worth the five dollars of allowance each week. Still, on cold nights, with wet hair, it could be downright painful.
“Hilarious,” I groaned, and my dad gave me a pat on the shoulder and escaped to the living room.
I slipped into a jacket and a pair of mud shoes and took the route through the garage to the backyard. It was blustery, and I could smell burning wood in the air. Fireplace season had started, a clear indication that there was no looking back. It was only going to get colder.
The compost heap was out by the swamp, not far from Frog Rock. As I emptied the can, I looked over to the spot where I had dug up the metal box the night before. Out of the darkness a figure emerged.
Fiona.
“You called me nuts,” she said.
I stepped away from her. “You made me look like an idiot today, pushing me and snapping at me. If you’re playing some weird sort of game, I don’t want to be involved.”
“Not long ago, even twenty years ago, they’d put kids in asylums. If a kid was talking about things that adults didn’t understand, they’d lock that kid away.”
“I don’t know if you realize how much you’re freaking me out,” I said. “Please leave.”
She shook her head and asked, “Why’d you decide to dig? Did you know the ammo can was down there? Did you know about the map?”
“The map?”
She held up the handkerchief.
“If I explain, will you leave?” I asked.
She took a moment to think about it. She shrugged.
Honestly, any curiosity I had about that handkerchief was overpowered by my desire for life to return to how it was before Fiona showed up at my door, to when she was nobody but an odd girl who lived down the street, a former friend and nothing else. Someone to forget. “Keri saw you bury it,” I explained. “Like a stupid idiot, I went and dug it up last night.”
“Does anyone else know?”
“Keri told her friend Mandy, but they don’t know what you buried.”
“Do you trust them?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Exactly what it always means.” Fiona pulled a plastic lighter out of her pocket, sparked it up, and dipped the corner of the handkerchief into the flame. Nothing at first, then fire scrambled.
“What the…?”
Placing the burning handkerchief on a stone, Fiona said, “You were only supposed to find that as a last resort. If I was already gone. Now I’ll have to teach you. About everything. I thought writing things down, recording things, would be a good way to keep track of all the details, so that people someday know the truth. But if that stuff falls into the wrong hands, there’s no telling what might happen to the others. It’s better if you memorize it all.”
“I’m not memorizing anything,” I said. “You are nuts. They should lock you up.”
Disappointment whittled ridges in her brow. “The only thing I’m asking you to do is listen.”
“And you said that if I had my doubts, then it wasn’t going to work.”
“It’s too late now. You know about the Riverman. You need to be convinced.”
“Convinced of what?”
Fiona crouched down to get a closer look at the burning handkerchief. She kept her eyes on the flames as she said, “There’s a boiler in our basement, in a room where my dad keeps tools and boxes of holiday decorations. The boiler feeds water to all the radiators in the house. That night, when I was four years old, the night I heard the radiators talking? Well, the radiators told me to go to the boiler. As I said, they were clicking. But I understood the clicking. They had a voice, and I did as they asked. I went to that room and I climbed up on a box and pulled the hanging string to turn on the hanging lightbulb, and I climbed down and stood next to the boiler, and the clicking told me to wait for one moment longer, and I asked out loud, ‘Wait for what?’ And that’s when it happened, when it opened up.”
The handkerchief was shriveled and black now, infested with little red embers. Fiona didn’t look at me, and I certainly couldn’t look at her. Because I had abandoned something once in the thicket of images and sounds and smells that made up my early memories, and Fiona’s story was now returning that uncomfortable moment to me. Simply put, what had happened to her had happened to me, and I knew what she was going to say next. And that terrified me.
“Without a noise,” Fiona continued, “without a flash of light or anything like that, the outside of the boiler disappeared. Vanished. A cylinder of water hung in the air where the boiler was. A perfect, unbroken cylinder. It was gorgeous, and I reached forward to touch it. As soon as the tips of my fingers reached the water, I was pulled in. For the first time, I went to Aquavania.”
Wind grabbed the remains of the handkerchief, tore it into bits of ash, and tossed it into the air, where some of it fluttered and landed on Fiona’s face and painted black freckles on her cheeks.
“You’re ridiculous,” I whimpered, and I threw the coffee can at her feet, partly in anger, partly to keep her eyes off mine. “I’m through with you.”
I trudged to the house, fighting the urge to look back.
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 19
I didn’t sleep. I lay under my covers, on my back, drawing out my breaths to keep myself calm. That image of water floating in the air was too much. It was too familiar.
It took me back to when I was six years old and I won a goldfish at a school fair. I named the fish Humbert and kept him in a bowl on my dresser and fed him flakes twice a day. Humbert died after four or five months, and I took it badly. There was a coffin made of cardboard and a funeral in the backyard. Charlie attended and played taps on a recorder. Charlie’s brother, Kyle, called us “a coupla wusses,” but we didn’t see it like that. Humbert was our friend, the sea monster in our action figure battles, the shark under our model race car bridge.
I didn’t want to be alone on the night of the funeral, so I asked Charlie to stay for a sleepover. We curled up in our sleeping bags on the floor next to the TV and faded off within its glow. That night I had what I always thought of as the most vivid dream of my life.
I was called from the sleeping bag by the voice of Humbert. I’m not sure why I thought it was Humbert’s voice, but I did. The voice led me back to my room, where the fishbowl still sat on my dresser. There was only water left in the bowl, but I spoke to it like Humbert was inside.
“I’m sorry for not feeding you enough, or feeding you too much, or whatever I did wrong.”
Without warning, the bowl disappeared and a globe of water was floating over the dresser. I was tempted to reach out and touch it, but I didn’t. I marveled at it, for it was both the loveliest and scariest thing I had ever seen. I closed my eyes.
When I opened them, I was back on the living room floor, neck-deep in my sleeping bag. A rainbow of colored bars glowed on the TV, announcing that programming had ended for the night and dead air would be broadcast until morning.
At dawn, I dumped the water out of the bowl and put it in the trash. I didn’t tell anyone about the dream because I didn’t want to revisit Humbert’s passing. It was time to move on, a sentiment echoed by my dad that night after he dragged the trash to the curb.
“You’re growing up, bud,” he told me. “Becoming a little man. I’m thinking it’s time you had some chores.”
* * *
I feigned sickness the morning after Fiona met me on the edge of the swamp. Keri wasn’t buying i
t, but “stomach stuff, uncontrollable and unpredictable” was more than enough detail to convince my parents. My dad treated me like I was a mugger, sidling to the door with his hands up and toast in his mouth. “Yikes,” he mumbled. “I carry that plague to the hospital and I’ll wipe out the entire east wing.”
My mom was more sympathetic. Before leaving for her job at the post office, she handed me a box of saltines and some ginger ale and told me, “Take it easy, on your belly and on the dragons.”
There were no dragons in the video games I played, but I knew what she was saying. She didn’t want me ending up like Charlie, under the spell of television and computer screens every waking hour of the day.
It didn’t make a difference. Video games, TV shows, books—none was a sufficient distraction. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t shake Fiona’s story and the memories of that dream from years before.
I paced.
The house seemed smaller, more sinister. Lightbulbs seemed to flicker. White walls seemed subtly filthy, streaked with faint tea-colored stains. Acid climbed the cliff of my throat. I needed fresh air.
I was leaning against a tree in my front yard, counting the shingles on my neighbor’s garage, when Charlie’s brother, Kyle, pulled up in a battered gray van. A guy with a reputation like Kyle’s deserved a motorcycle or a muscle car, but I guess he didn’t have enough cash for either. He rolled down the window and asked, “Skippin’?”
“Sick.”
“Of algebra? Of women?”
I shrugged.
“Does your mom act like a mom? Call to check up on you and all that?”
“Only after lunch,” I said. “She’s working the window this morning.”
Kyle rapped his fingers on the door, a happy little drumroll. “Then we have some time,” he said. “Hop in. I could use a copilot today.”
Accepting a ride from Kyle Dwyer was probably number one on my parents’ Don’t list. They weren’t fans of the Dwyers in general, but while Charlie only annoyed them, Kyle frightened them. He was a badass of the old mold. Wore a cigarette behind his ear, carried a butterfly knife, kept his van stocked with a stack of blankets and a candle in a jar and a jug of something sweet and alcoholic to ease things in his direction.
The Riverman (The Riverman Trilogy) Page 3
