Truth and Bright Water (18 page)

“Maybe next time,” I tell Soldier, “you won’t say anything until you’re sure.”

Soldier flops down on the thing, and it squishes and rolls under him like a waterbed.

“Nobody’s going to pet you,” I tell him, and I head for the camp. I don’t look around, but I can hear Soldier behind me, fighting the pad, growling, slowly dragging it back through the grass like a lion with a fresh kill.

L
um doesn’t get to the flat until after dark. Soldier and I have a small fire going by then, and we are curled up on the sleeping bag, enjoying the smell of the wood and watching the sparks spiral up into the night sky.

“You advertising?” he says as he steps into the light. “I could see your fire all the way from the bridge.” Lum’s hip is still sore, and he limps as he crosses to the trees, but you can see he’s in a good mood. Soldier folds his ears around his head and starts to tremble and shake with happiness. He rolls off the bag and goes wiggling over to Lum.

“Ever check his ass for a vibrator?” Lum drops his pack on Soldier’s head, but he doesn’t do it hard or in a mean way.

“Nobody’s showed up yet,” I tell him.

Lum looks up at the ridge. “Nobody’s going to show up as long as you’ve got the porch lights on.” He drags his boot through the pit and scatters the wood. The sticks flash bright for a moment and then everything settles back into hot coals and curls of grey smoke.

“I brought a flashlight.”

“Won’t need it.” Lum pulls his sleeping bag out of his pack and throws it next to mine. “Moon’ll be up.”

“What if nobody comes?”

“What if they do?” Lum’s pants and shirt are dirty. His hair is matted and you can still see faint traces of dried mud on the side of his neck. “You bring anything besides the mutt?”

Soldier is sitting by my sleeping bag, and I remember the pad and am wondering where it is when I hear Lum step on it. It makes a soft, low squish, like walking on wet snow or stepping on a fresh cow flop.

“What the…!”

Soldier trots over, grabs the pad by a corner, and drags it towards the trees.

“What the hell is that?” Lum picks up the flashlight. The pad is covered with dirt and junk. He kicks it with his foot, and Soldier pounces on it and drags it off into the grass.

“Where’d he get that?”

“In the river.”

“God,” says Lum. “It’s used.”

“What is it?”

Lum follows Soldier with the flashlight. “They use them in hospitals,” he says. “They stick them under sick people.”

Solider is lying on the pad, chewing on one of the edges.

“Soldier!”

“Chez Mutt.” Lum screws his face into a grin. “A real connoisseur.”

“Soldier!”

“Probably just oozing with protein.” Lum hands me the light. “If he were my dog,” he says, “I’d let him finish his hors d’oeuvre. And then I’d shoot him.”

Soldier stops chewing for a moment and watches Lum push the sticks and ashes around in the pit, but there is nothing left of the fire now except smoke and dust. “You bring the skull?”

“Yeah.”

“So, why we hanging around here?”

“Where we going?” I know where Lum wants to go, but I ask anyway just in case he’s still thinking and hasn’t settled on it yet.

“Don’t use the flashlight until we get to the top,” says Lum. “Otherwise, she might see us.”

“There’s nobody up there.”

While we haven’t been looking, the fog has begun to form. It starts at the water’s edge and works its way out over the river and back across the flat. It stays low, and we’re above it before we even notice that it’s there. By the time we get to the Horns, everything below us on the flat and on the river has disappeared.

“Okay,” says Lum, “start looking.”

“For what?”

“Clues,” says Lum.

I go along, because there isn’t anything else to do, and I’m not
sleepy. We walk around on the Horns watching the ground, and while I don’t think we’ll find something that will tell us who the woman is, it is amazing how much stuff you can come up with when you’re looking.

“Anything?”

“Crushed beer can and a pack of smokes.”

“Empty?”

“Empty.”

Lum finds a plastic bag from the Coast to Coast store, and we throw everything we find into it. We search the Horns for about an hour, and in the end, between the three of us, we find four crushed beer cans, two crushed soda cans, an empty pack of cigarettes, a postcard, a couple of popsicle sticks, a styrofoam cup, a flyer for free carpet cleaning, and most of a man’s belt. All the writing on the postcard has been washed away, and you can hardly see the picture on the front. It looks like Banff, but there’s no way to be sure. The man’s belt is made out of thick leather with a heavy brass buckle. Lum wraps the belt around his fist and swings it through the air. “Could really do some damage with this baby.”

We sort through the junk again, but there’s nothing we find that even looks like a clue.

“Okay,” says Lum. “Time for Phase Two.”

“We go back to camp?”

Recreating the scene of the crime is Phase Two. Soldier and I get to be the truck, and Lum gets to be the woman.

“All right,” says Lum, “put it in gear.” Soldier and I walk out towards the Horns until Lum tells us to stop. Then Lum walks out to the Horns and stands on the edge. “This about right?”

I tell Lum that it looks good to us. Lum holds the skull in one hand and spreads his arms. “The woman with the suitcase full of bones stands on the cliff.” He moves a little closer to the edge. “What will she do?”

Soldier stands up and takes a step forward.

“She’s sorry for what she did!” Lum shouts into the night. “She’s sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry!” And he takes another step.

Soldier is away from my side and on Lum in an instant. He grabs Lum’s pant leg and jerks him backwards.

“The wonder dog wants to save the woman!” Lum pulls his leg free and tries to kick Soldier in the side. “But he’s too late!”

“Soldier!”

Soldier grabs the other leg and begins dragging Lum away from the edge of the Horns. Lum tries to keep his balance, but he slips on the rocks and goes down hard. I’m on the run now, and I get there before Lum has a chance to get his gun.

“You okay?”

Lum lies on his back and catches his breath. “Cousin,” he says, “you got to take this mutt out more.”

Soldier rolls over on his back. Lum reaches out and scratches Soldier’s belly.

“He thought you were going to fall,” I say. “He was just trying to help.”

“Is that what you were doing, you stupid mutt,” says Lum, and he rubs Soldier harder.

“He didn’t know it was just a game,” I say.

The skull is resting against a rock. It has a small chip at the back, but other than that, it’s okay. Lum brushes himself off, walks to the cliff, and looks down. Soldier follows close to his side. “Bring him here,” says Lum.

At first, I think he’s talking about Soldier, and I know I don’t want Soldier with Lum that near the edge.

Lum takes the skull and holds it out. “What do you see?”

Truth and Bright Water have disappeared in the fog and all you can see is a soft grey swirl that floats on the water. Soldier backs away from Lum and gets ready to bark.

“Did you think she was going to come back?” Lum brings the skull close to his face. “Did you really think she was going to come back?”

“She won’t be back tonight,” I say. “It’s too late.”

“She throws you away, and you think she’s going to come back.” Lum rubs the skull against his face. “Silly baby,” he says. “Silly baby.”

“Probably should get back to camp.”

Lum sticks his finger in the hole in the skull and spins it around. “Don’t cry,” he says, and he turns to me. “You hear the silly baby crying?”

“Sure.”

“He’s crying for his mother.”

“My grandmother says it’s a girl.”

“Stupid baby.”

Soldier stands up quickly and begins to bark. Lum tosses the skull into the air. “She’s not coming back!” He catches the skull and throws it up again. “She’s never coming back!”

Soldier and I hear the danger at the same time, but it’s too late. Lum wheels around and grabs my shirt and pulls me in close. “Can you hear it?” he says. His eyes are black and slitted. His mouth trembles. I nod, but I don’t say anything. Lum smiles and presses the skull against my ear. “Have you seen my mummy?” he says in his tinny voice and gently rocks the skull against my neck. “Do you know where my mummy is?”

I close my eyes and stand as still as I can. So does Soldier.

“Answer the baby!”

“Nope,” I say, my eyes still closed. “I don’t know where your mother is.”

I don’t think Lum is going to hurt me, but there’s always the chance of an accident, of something happening when he’s not paying attention.

“There,” he whispers, and I feel him move past me. “There.”

In the distance, the lights in the church have come on, and the tall windows glow in the night. Lum holds the skull up so it has a clear view of the church. “Oh, you think that’s where she went,” he says. “Is that what you think?”

I’m thinking we should go back to camp and go to sleep, but I know that isn’t going to happen. Lum heads for the church and Soldier and I follow. As we move along the top of the coulee, the moon rises, and suddenly, everything is quicksilver and light. Soldier is calm now. He doesn’t run after Lum, and he doesn’t race down the side of the coulee. He walks beside me, silently, and keeps pace all the way to the church. We’re halfway there when the moon goes behind a cloud, and the lights in the church go out, and for an instant, the building disappears in the night. I stop and wait for the church to reappear and to see what Lum is going to do now, but he
keeps walking, as though he knows where he wants to go and what he wants to do.

When Soldier and I catch up with Lum, he’s sitting on the tailgate of Monroe’s truck. He smiles and bangs the side of the pickup. “You’d think that a big-time artist like him would be driving a BMW or a Mercedes,” says Lum.

“Looks like he’s gone to bed,” I say. “We should probably get back to camp.”

“Aren’t you curious?”

“About what?”

“The lights,” says Lum. “He turns the lights on, and then he turns them off.”

“Maybe the woman will show up at the Horns with more bones,” I say. “We don’t want to miss her.”

“Come on,” says Lum. “No sense walking all this way and not saying howdy.”

Monroe hasn’t gotten to this side of the church yet, and it looks fine. I think about taking Lum around to the front to show him the part that’s missing, but before I can say anything, Lum finds a thick board in the grass and leans it against the side of the building beneath one of the windows.

“What are you going to do?”

Lum begins working his way up the board sideways, his arms out for balance. I stand on the bottom of the board so it doesn’t move or kick out from underneath him. The moon comes out again, and now I can see the window itself. It’s the stained glass window of the man in the robes carrying the book. Soldier wants to follow Lum. He sniffs at the board and even puts one foot on it, but that’s as far as he goes.

“All right!” Lum’s voice is a low, enthusiastic whisper.

“What is it?”

“You won’t believe it.” Lum presses his face against the glass. “Monroe’s got a woman.”

“No way.”

“You can see her tits!”

“Bullshit!” I say. “You can’t see a thing.”

“Suit yourself.”

Getting up the board looks easier than it is. “Let me see.” The plank is wide, but it rocks as I work my way up, and it’s hard to keep my balance. The hardest part is near the top. Just before I get to the window, the board twists and Lum has to grab my shirt to keep me from falling.

He is smiling as we work to keep our balance. “Easy, cousin. You seen one, you’ve seen them all.”

It’s a little tricky, both of us on the board, but Lum shifts to one side and turns away from the window. “Hold onto the sill,” he whispers. “Look through the book.”

All of the glass in the window is dark and opaque, and even up close you can’t see through it. But the glass that makes up the book is clear, like a regular window pane.

“What’s happening?” Lum grabs my belt and tries to swing in behind me. “You see her?”

I can just make out the bed at the far end of the room. The blankets are messed up and piled in mounds, and if you didn’t know better, you might think that there were a couple of people in bed under the covers.

“Very funny.”

“What?”

“There’s no woman.”

“You blind?”

Lum turns back and leans over my shoulder, and both of us try to look in through the glass at the same time. Which is a mistake. The board twists suddenly and throws me against the side of the church. I hold onto the sill, and for a moment, I think I’m okay. Then Lum grabs my arm and we’re both flipped off the board and land on the ground in a heap.

“Jesus, cousin. Wake up the dead, why don’t you?”

The drop isn’t far enough to hurt, but it does knock the wind out of me, and I have to lie in the grass until my head finds my body. “You think he heard us?”

“All of Truth heard us.” Lum gets up smiling. “Not to mention Bright Water.” He starts jogging away from the church. Soldier goes
with him, and I limp along as best I can. Every so often, I look over my shoulder to see if the lights in the church go on. They don’t, but Monroe could be standing at a window right now watching us.

When we get back to the camp, Lum starts a fire, and we eat the crackers and the apples. Lum goes on about the woman in the church. “She had nipples as big as my thumb.”

“Yeah, sure.” If Lum wants to play this game, so can I. “Hey, maybe it was the woman from the Horns.”

“Hard to tell.” Lum rolls up in his sleeping bag and turns away. “She was on her hands and knees most of the time.” Soldier crawls over, crowds in against him, and starts snoring almost immediately. I stay awake and watch the fire until it’s cold ash and dead coals, and I go to sleep thinking that maybe Lum wasn’t kidding about Monroe’s having a woman with him. But my dreams are about the woman on the Horns. She’s pale blue, like the pad, and in the moonlight, as she rises out of the water and wades ashore, she looks cold and lonely.

In the morning, when I wake up, the world is soft and wet, and the fog clings to the sleeping bag like sweat. Soldier is snuggled up against me now, and his body feels warm and comfortable. I roll over to tell Lum about my dream, but he has already gone. The river bottom is quiet, and all along the banks, the shadow shapes of the cottonwoods lean out over the water like sad people weeping.