Dark Water - Laura McNeal [74]
He couldn’t hear the ring over the motorcycle engine.
He couldn’t hear the ring over the motorcycle engine.
I spoke into whatever is listening when no one answers. I said, “It’s me, Pearl.” I was quiet for about ten seconds. Then I said I was by the De Luz bridge.
My impulse after saying these things was to erase the message, but I had reached a point where I didn’t know a way to make things better and I feared making them worse. I didn’t erase the message. I just hung up.
Amiel looked at me, and in my life that was not a fable, I told him that my uncle was looking for us at his house. “That way,” I said, and pointed in the direction of the fire, which was also the direction of Amiel’s house. “I’m afraid,” I said, “that he won’t leave” (punctuated by useless tears), “until he finds me. And he’ll burn.”
I wondered, as I tried to call my uncle again, what a phone that has burned in a fire would do with incoming calls. Did the fact that his phone didn’t ring at all, that it went right to a recording of his voice saying, Hello, hello, hello, please leave a message, mean he was talking to someone else or listening to my last message? I hung up.
The water flowed fast and dark beyond the reeds. I looked down at my dirty shoes, pressed hard on my eyes, and wondered what would make this all come out right.
“Ven,” I heard Amiel whisper, “Come,” and he stood up. “To find him.”
He walked, sure-footed, ahead of me, and I stumbled along, my hand in his. The rhythm of a story my mother used to tell me got stuck in my aching head:
Going on a bear hunt,
We’re not afraid.
What a wonderful day!
Over and over, through the not-wonderful dark, scared and stumbling, between branches and trunks, going on a bear hunt. My hand stayed gripped in his hand, we’re not afraid, and at last we thrashed our way through a stand of willows and What a wonderful day we were breathing hard and shivering at the edge of the grotto, so I called out, “Uncle Hoyt?”
We’re not afraid.
I listened for a motorcycle engine and then remembered that on these narrow, rocky trails, in this smoky darkness, he would surely have to be on foot.
I pushed the button on my phone, but nothing happened. The battery had died while I was walking.
“Hoyt!” I shouted. Darkness, smoke, heat, and water swallowed the words.
Two things happened next that are still hard to believe, so dreamlike and monstrous did they seem. Amiel plunged into the water, and I, still connected by his hand, plunged in after him. The air was quivering with heat, and it smelled different. I became aware of a crackling sound and a rosy, hazy, blossoming glow. It was pink and orange and lathery. I was looking at the glow, which I knew was the fire, and I was sinking down into the water, which came only to my waist, when a light-colored shape streaked along the path where we’d been standing and was gone.
“El léon,” Amiel said, pulling me lower into the water.
I wanted to laugh and tell him there are no lions in California. What did he think? That we were in Africa? Then I remembered the stuffed mountain lion in the glass cage of the Museum of Natural History. The air was so hot that I couldn’t think about the lion anymore, and I could see the flames now fingering the tops of trees.
What a wonderful day.
The fire cracked branches like bones, and then flames reached for another tree, and we sat in the cold water up to our necks, our legs straight out on the slimy river bottom, and then Amiel pushed my head under, which made me cough and strike out, but when I could see again, vaguely, he was ducking his own head under and I thought, with what little reason I still had, that he was dousing my head so it wouldn’t be the next candle, and I felt so very sick, as if I were a hot air balloon that had to go on sucking up the heat of a fire burning directly beneath me. I swallowed the heated air because I had no choice, and my head went high into the darkness and became heavy and came back down. The fire went on cooking and eating the trees and we stayed where we were, hiding from it, hoping