Little Klein (10 page)

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.