The Raven's Gift - Don Rearden [35]
The girl shot a dark ball of saliva over the embankment and into the swirling rusted-brown water below. “How long you guys going to live here? Will you leave at springtime?”
Anna smacked a mosquito against the soft skin of her neck. “We just got here! Who knows,” she said. “How can you not have a shirt on, Yago? Why aren’t the bugs eating you like they are me?
“’Cuz he stinks!” the girl said with a laugh. Yago slugged her in the arm.
“So dumb you are, Roxy.”
John looked down over the bank as a large wall of dirt upstream calved and splashed into the water. “Wow,” he said, “the water is really eating the bank up.”
“See that house down there?” Yago pointed to a rusting Quonset hut hanging over the edge of the bank. Wood, sheet metal, and weathered pink insulation dangled down the bank and dipped into the water. “That was my uncle’s house. Last summer, after they made him leave the village, most of it fell in the river.”
“We might have to move the whole village, like those villages on the coast. They have to move. Even the graveyards,” the girl said. “So scary, ah? To have to dig up those bodies? I bet they’ll be haunted.”
“Why are they moving villages?” Anna asked, pulling up the hood of her green fleece sweatshirt to keep the bugs off.
“The Earth is melting away,” Yago said.
“So stupid you are, Yago! The Earth’s not melting. The ice is melting and the water’s swallowing up the land.” She jerked her thumb at Yago. “He’s only in third grade.”
“My reading level’s higher than yours,” Yago said.
“My math level’s higher than yours, dummy.”
John looked downriver. He slipped his arm around his wife and watched a large flock of slender-bodied birds rise off the river and turn in a wide circle toward the grey eastern sky.
“Cranes,” Yago said. “Wish I had my 20-gauge.”
“You don’t got no 20-gauge,” the girl teased.
“Shut up. I can use my brother’s.”
Another large block of dirt crashed into the water downstream. The dirt disappeared beneath the surface, leaving only a ring of small ripples that shifted and vanished in the current.
Yago turned his bike around, unamused. “Seems like one of these days my dad will be able to park his boat right in front of my house if the world keeps falling into the river.” He started riding off and yelled back to the girl, “Then your house will float out to China! The school, too!”
THE GIRL AND JOHN awoke to the tarp flapping and smacking against their heads. He grabbed the edge of the tarp and pulled it down over them and held it tight against the frozen tundra with his forearm. Above them the early light of morning lit the blue plastic that popped and snapped with each gust.
The chill in the air the night before was gone. The warm winds worried him, but he welcomed the change from the previous days of sub-zero temperatures and constant cold. He peeked out from beneath the plastic sheeting and could see nothing but white. There was no distinguishing the sky from the ground.
“Sounds like a blizzard,” the girl said, lifting her hand out from her sleeping bag and holding the tarp off her face. She pulled her other hand free and began feeling around her bag. “My grass. Oh, no! Do you see it?”
John sighed and sat up. The tarp snapped open and a rush of wet snow and wind whipped against her face and against the back of his neck. She squinted and bolted upright and began feeling frantically around her.
“Don’t let it blow away! Please, John.” He spotted the bundle ten feet from them, poking out from a drift. Another gust hit and the bundle threatened to go flying across the open tundra.
“Grab the tarp and my bag!” he yelled as the next gust blasted them with a sheet of snow. He jumped out from the warmth of his sleeping bag and took two long strides. The snow and ice cut at his bare soles. He snatched up the grass just as another gust hit, and dove back under the tarp.
“Did you get it?” she asked.
“Yes. Of course,” he said, stuffing his numb, wet feet back down into the depths