Into This River I Drown (7 page)

Not so ridiculous,
I tell myself.
It’s mine. It’s
mine
because it came from
my
dre—

She hands it over to Nina, who moans softly as it touches her fingers. “It’s so pretty,” she whispers. “And so, so blue.” Her eyes flick to mine at this last. I look away. “Did you see him?” she asks me.

I close my eyes.

“See who?” Christie asks, baffled.

“The bird?” Mary asks, confused.

“It must have been huge,” my mom said.

I open my eyes. All are watching me. But it’s Nina I look at. “No,” I say. “I didn’t see him.”

She nods as if she’s received the answer she expected. She watches me for a moment longer before handing the feather back to me. There’s a burst of heat as it touches my fingers, and I know she can feel it too when her eyes widen, when a coy smile dawns on her face. “It’s
blue
,” she says after a moment. “Isn’t that right, Benji?”

“Yes, dear,” Mary says, smiling at her sister. “The feather is blue. That’s very good!”

I shove it in my backpack and turn to walk out the door, unable to take her knowing eyes on me anymore. My mother calls after me, reminding me that I’m taking the day off tomorrow, that she’ll open the store. I wave without looking and then am out the door into the cool morning air.

“This
whole area used to be gold!” Abraham Dufree tells me a few hours later, standing above me while I lean under the hood of his ’89 Honda Civic. “That’s why Roseland was founded, you know!”

I know only because Abe tells me the same thing almost every single week when he brings in his car for a rattling he’s sure he hears under the hood, or how his tires seem to be low, or he’s sure there’s a brake problem because they feel squishy to him. More often than not, there’s nothing wrong with the car. “He just needs someone to talk to,” my father had told me once. “After Estelle died, he got lonely. It’s what happens when you’re with someone for over sixty years, Benji. When that is suddenly gone, you’re lost. He just needs help finding his way back.” After Big Eddie, Abe still brought his car in and transferred all his stories over to me. I don’t know when it happened, but I suddenly found myself with a best friend who was an old man.

“In 1851, right?” I say, tightening the spark plugs that I loosened only moments before to make it look like I was doing something.

“That’s right! This place was just empty fields and hills, and then they found gold! Over the next year, over two thousand people made their way up here, thoughts of riches flashing through their eyes, wouldn’t you know. O’course, once the railroad moved south, the town pretty much dried up along with the veins buried under the rock.”

“But somehow it’s still here, right?”

“Oh, sure. There’s something special about this place. There’s something about Roseland that kept it alive, even when everyone else thought it would die.”

“What makes it special?”

He laughs, as he always does at this point. “The people, o’course! I’ve lived here all my life, Benji. It’s always the people. They’re the ones that kept it alive. You and I have kept it alive.”

“And what was it Estelle always used to say?” I ask him, even though I can tell him verbatim. “What did she used to tell you about the gold?”

He grins and nods, his dentures sturdy and slightly yellowed. “She used to say, ‘Abe, there’s still gold up in those hills, I can just feel it! I’ve almost a mind to head on down to the hardware store and pick up a shovel and a pickax and just start hitting rocks to see what I could find!’ That’s what the missus used to say. Sure as I’m standing before you, that’s what she said.”

I don’t know why, but I choose to deviate from our usual conversation. I’m supposed to tell him that I wouldn’t be surprised if his late wife was right on the money, that there were nuggets of gold the size of footballs just waiting to be discovered. Then we’d move on to the weather and how it seems to get hotter and hotter every summer and the season approaching should be a
doozy
. It was March and already in the seventies? Gosh!

But I don’t. Somehow I know things are changing, and I can’t stop myself. I’m thinking of the feather when I say, “And did she ever?”

The grin slides from Abe’s face. He looks confused. “Did she ever what, Benji?”

“Did she ever get a shovel? Did she ever get a pickax? Did she ever head into the hills and split rocks until she found gold?” My hands feel cold, even though it’s warm; wet, even though they’re dry.

His old face wrinkles further as he frowns. I wonder if I’ve made a mistake. I wonder if things are supposed to always stay the same. I wonder if it’s too late to take it back. Then, in a quiet voice, he says, “No. She didn’t. It was just something she always said. She liked to talk big sometimes, you know. I think we all do.” He sighs as he looks out the front of the garage, sunlight dancing through the trees. The shadows sway along the ground. “But that was her talking, the old girl. Something she said when she was dreaming out loud. Do you ever dream out loud, Benji?”

Now
he’s
changing the script. I’m immediately on the defensive, attempting to resist the blinding, fiery urge to run into the shop, to check my backpack to make sure the feather is where I left it.
It’s probably gone
, I think.
It’s probably gone because it was never there to begin with. It was just a dream. It was only real to me because I dreamed it out loud. I dreamed it real.

I stand up and close the hood of the Honda gently, pressing down until it latches. I grab an old rag off the workbench and wipe a smear of grease off my left hand. Some of the black is caught under my thumbnail.

And still he waits. He pulls out a pocketknife and starts twirling it deftly through his fingers. It’s an old thing, scuffed and tarnished. Estelle had given it to him on their first wedding anniversary he told me once, reverence in his voice. They didn’t have a lot of money, he said, but she knew they would only ever have one first anniversary. So she had taken some of her savings from her little jar on top of their old green fridge and marched out one pretty fall morning and had come back with the beautiful knife. Engraved in gold on the side were the words
I love you, my husband. Forever, Este.

My heart is a little sore at the thought, but I can’t ignore his question. Not now.

Do you ever dream out loud?

“Sometimes,” I say.
All the time
, I really want to say.

Abe nods. “I thought you might. You and I are the same, you know.”

“How do you figure?” I ask, even though I already know the answer.

“We’ve lost,” he says simply, but what I hear in those two words is
my half is gone, my everything is gone, and Big Eddie… wasn’t he almost the same to you? Wasn’t he just almost the same? There’s a hole, isn’t there? Some hole in your chest or at the pit of your stomach that is not filled, that won’t ever be filled.

A bell dings overhead. Someone at the gas pump.

Abe glances out the windows. He narrows his eyes. “This can’t be good,” he mutters.

“What is it?” I follow his gaze out the window. A nondescript black sedan is sitting next to the gas pump, its engine ticking loudly as it cools. There’s no movement that I can see, but the tinted windows are just dark enough to block any views to the inside.

“Government,” Abe says.

I laugh. “What? Abe, you’ve watched too many movies. Let me go take care of them and we can finish up here. They’re probably just lost.”

“Not like us,” he says as I walk out the front of the garage.

The driver’s door opens and a man climbs out of the car, maybe in his late thirties, early forties. The sleeves of his dress shirt are rolled up to his elbows, his tie loosened around his neck. His black hair is short, his eyes hidden behind mirror shades.

“Help you?” I ask.

“You the owner?” he asks, his voice higher pitched than I would have thought.

“Yes, sir.”

He sizes me up and down and glances up at the sign spinning overhead, and I wait for it to come, as it does with all outsiders. “Big Eddie, huh?” he says, sounding amused.

I shrug. “My father.”

“Is he around?”

Sometimes I think so
. “He’s dead.”

“My condolences.”

“Sure. Thanks. Did you need gas or….”

“When did he die?”

“I’m sorry?”

“When did he die?”

I pause. It seems outside has gotten brighter and I squint. “Who are you again?”

A thin smile reaches his lips before he reaches back down into the car and then stands back up, closing the car door. He walks toward me until only a few feet separate us. He raises a badge. Joshua Corwin, it says. FBI.

You win that one, Abe.

“Your name?” Agent Corwin asks.

“Benji. Benjamin Green.”

“How’d your dad die, Benji?”

My throat is dry. “Car accident?”

He hears the inflection in my voice. “Are you asking me or telling me?”

“Car accident.”

“Oh? When?”

“Five years ago. Five years this May.” A little over a month away.

“That right?”

I’m uncomfortable, unable to see his eyes. “Why?”

He ignores this. “Sheriff Griggs still around, huh?”

“Sure.” It comes out bitter.

“Not friends, I take it?”

“Long story.”

“It usually is. Was your dad a good man, Benji?”

A short bark of laughter is out before I can stop it.

An eyebrow arches above the sunglasses. “Something funny?”

“If you knew him,” I say, my voice growing hard, “you wouldn’t have asked that question. He was a good man.”

“Oh? He would have done the right thing, you think?”

“Always.”

He nods.

“Look, did you need something? I’ve got a customer waiting on me, so….”

“Old-timer? Yeah, he hasn’t stopped staring at me since I got here.” Agent Corwin waves at Abe, who is still standing at the window. Abe doesn’t wave back. “Nice guy,” Corwin says.

I wait.

Finally, “What’s the word on the wind, Benji?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

He cocks his head at me. “This is a small town, right? Doesn’t everyone know everyone else’s business here? Rumors usually spread like wildfire.”

“Maybe,” I say slowly. “But I’ve never been one to care about that sort of thing.”

He reaches back behind him, and I think for a moment he’s going to go for a gun, or handcuffs, and I think that maybe I’ve done something wrong, that I shouldn’t have looked into things like I did. I want to tell him I’ve left it alone for a while now, even though it is still there in the back of my head, white noise that won’t ever disappear.

He hands me a business card instead. The FBI seal. His name. His phone number is listed, and for a moment, I zero in on the last two digits: seventy-seven. “You call me you ever start to care about that sort of thing,” he says. He’s mocking me, but he doesn’t know that I know.

“Sure,” I say.

He asks me to fill up the car and I do. He pays me and leaves without another word. I return to the garage.

“What’d he want?” Abe asks me, sounding worried.

“I don’t know,” I say honestly, showing him the card. “Just asked about Dad and… I don’t know.”

Abe shakes his head. “Big Eddie?” he asked, his eyes wide. “Why’d he want to know about
him
?”

“Just… he asked me if I thought Dad was a good man.”

Abe snorts. “Good man. Big Eddie was the
greatest
man. Don’t you dare believe otherwise. I loved that man as if he were my own. Blast it all, he
was
my own. And the only thing you need to concern yourself with is to keep doing what you’re doing. He’d be proud of you, Benji. I just know it.”

I nod, unable to speak.

His eyes soften. “We’re the same, you and I,” he says again.

We are. I really think we are.

I assure him I’m okay.

I can tell he doesn’t believe me.

Throughout
the afternoon, a spring thunderstorm etches its way across the Cascades. It looked like the mountains would hold the storm off from dropping down into the valley, lightning flashing near the peaks, but as I start to close up the shop for the night, the air smells of rain and ozone. Ripples of thunder peal through the air, crashing and causing the ground to vibrate underneath my feet. There’s no rain, and the air is heavy with static.

My father was a great man.

It’s this I think as I sit at a stop sign. The wind is picking up around me, and the thunder has begun to sound angry. Arcs of electricity travel along the surface of the clouds, light up the world in purples and white. And blues. So many shades of blue.

My father was a great man.

Straight ahead is the way home. To turn left is to head toward Lost Hill Memorial.

To turn right? To turn right is to go to the highway. To mile marker seventy-seven.

I told myself I wasn’t going to go there anymore, that there was nothing left at the river for me to see. There was no longer any trace that a man had ever died at seventy-seven. Someone (I don’t know who) had put up a small white cross on the river’s bank shortly after the accident. I saw it for the first time four days after the funeral. It confused me.
BIG EDDIE
had been written in a childish scrawl across the horizontal bar. I knew what had happened there. I knew now where my father lay. I was certain that having
two
memorials would trap him, that he’d be stuck between the two, forced to return to the river over and over again, unable to leave.

I tore the cross from the earth. I broke it in half, then in half again. I threw the pieces into the river.

No one ever put up a cross again.

But they could have
, I think now, irrationally.
These are strange days and strange nights. There are feathers and blues. Dreams and storms. There are things Nina sees that aren’t really there. The script has been broken with Abe. The FBI wants to know if my father was a good man, and I think Little House is haunted. I think
I’m
haunted and it’s not real. It can’t be real. I am drowning in this river and I don’t know how to stop. I haven’t been to seventy-seven in days. Weeks. Someone could have put a cross back up again.