Dark Water - Laura McNeal [17]
“You’d have to ask my great-great-granddaddy, I guess.” He shifted into gear and went faster than any intelligent person would drive on the tight sunlit curves. Huge oak and sycamore trees grow beside the road to De Luz, and the gullies are full of wild cucumber leaves. It was like traveling, much too quickly, down the green-glass tube of a waterslide.
“Hickey’s his last name, dummy,” Greenie said with what I guess was an affectionate tone. Her loyalty was with Hickey now. I could feel it.
“What’s your first name, then?” I asked, clutching the seats on every curve.
“You won’t believe it,” Greenie said, delighted with what she knew and I didn’t. She sucked horchata through her straw. “Try to guess his name.”
“Rumpelstiltskin.”
“Ha, ha. Guess again.”
“How am I going to guess his name?” I had gone from being panicked about missing school to being annoyed at how tightly I had to clutch the back of Greenie’s seat.
“It starts with O,” Greenie said.
“Ollie. Oral.”
“Oral Hickey! That would be hysterical! But no,” Greenie said. “Three wrong, none right.”
I was stumped, also carsick. I couldn’t think of any other O names. Mr. Hickey downshifted with one freckled arm to take the right fork to De Luz. We were less than a mile from the trailhead if we didn’t die in a fiery crash.
“What if a police officer sees us out here on a school day?” I couldn’t help asking. “Won’t they know we’re truant?”
“Truant,” Hickey repeated in a slightly mocking voice. Hooted, actually. “Where I come from, we just call it ‘ditching.’ ”
“Guess his name,” Greenie urged me. Her perfectly brown, perfectly smooth legs were pressed together underneath her denim miniskirt, which, like most things that Greenie wore nowadays, was millimeters from a dress code violation.
“Ohm,” I said.
“Now you’re not even saying names. Four wrong, none right.” She paused theatrically, then couldn’t wait anymore. “It’s Ormand,” Greenie said, dragging it out for full appreciation. “Isn’t that the closest you’ve ever come, in the flesh, to that guy who’s maybe a man, maybe a woman—Orlando?”
Ms. Grant was a big Virginia Woolf fan.
“Watch the comparisons to the half-women types,” Hickey said, though he didn’t sound that annoyed. He was flying into the dirt parking lot, sending up beige plumes and sprays of white gravel. A big middle-aged guy in a baseball cap was removing the harness from his horse beside a dust-streaked trailer, and I could tell he was making a mental note of the rules we were breaking. When Hickey and Greenie got out of the car, they didn’t walk toward the trail I always took with Robby, which was through a yellow stile about twenty yards from the car. Instead, Hickey pushed his burrito into a little white cooler that had been sitting beside my feet the whole time and headed with Greenie toward the road, which they then started to cross.
“Where’re you going?” I called.
“There’s a swimming hole over on this side,” she yelled back. “Hickey showed me.”
Except for the horse owner we were alone out there. The hills were covered with purple wildflowers and the green shrubs I didn’t know the names of then but can now rattle off like a rosary. The willows in the riverbed were doing that thing I loved, releasing their downy seeds like sideways floating snow. Greenie didn’t slow down but kept right on crossing the street, one hand entwined with Ormand Hickey’s.
I didn’t have a plan, so I followed. I slogged after them through deep sand and powdery dust and oak shade to a steep, crumbling bank where a creek joined the river and made a near U-turn. The water was deep but opaque and khaki-colored in the shade, sky blue in the sun. Reeds clogged the currents that flowed away from us and disappeared around another sharp bend. I felt like I’d reached a foreign river, one where I wouldn’t be able to find my way.
Greenie and Hickey kicked their shoes off and sat down in the warm sunshine, and that’s when I learned that what Hickey was carrying in his square white cooler was not just his Pedro’s burrito but a six-pack of Budweiser. Cold. Pre-purchased.