The Falls of the Wyona

by David Brendan Hopes

  My mom said, “Coffee?”

  Both of them accepted coffee, and held the cups out front in their two hands a second as though they had to inhale the vapors before they could speak. The old pro said, “You all seem to be going somewhere. Or getting back.”

  Dad said, “One of ours is missing. We thought we’d try some likely spots.”

  The old pro said, “Do you think maybe you should let the police handle that?” Over his shoulder the kid, Andy’s classmate, winced. The older guy had brought some of his city ways with him, and they weren’t working particularly well that night.

  The kid tried to say, “What we mean is—”

  Dad interrupted, “Oh, we know what you mean. Figure there can’t be too much help in a situation like this, is all.”

  The pro was not learning fast. He said, “Yeah, but if we spend all night getting in each other’s way—”

  Dad interrupted again. “I wonder who it is looking for the boy with you in here jawing to us.”

  The old pro shot Dad a look that was meant to be a threat, but didn’t come off that way. Andy’s buddy tried again.

  “Oh, Dadlez has things under way. Andy’s already out there with a search party. I guess you figured that. But we wondered if there were . . . you know . . . places we should be sure to look . . . things the boy might have said to you that would indicate . . .”

  “Vincent,” Sherry said, “His name is Vincent. Vinny. If he had said anything like that I bet we would have phoned it in like greased lightning.”

  The two cops looked uncomfortable. I felt sorry for them. Dadlez had sent them to put the fear of God into us, and keep us out of his way, without warning them what they were up against. They finished their coffee in perfect unison and turned to the door. The young one said, “Well, if you think of anything, I know you’ll—”

  “We sure will.”

  The young cop let his partner exit, then stopped dead, looking at Dad. “You’re Andy’s dad, aren’t you?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “I’m sure glad he’s with us. I surely am. He is the one all of us think of first at a time like this.”

  Dad beamed at the kid’s back as he disappeared out into the storm.

  Wherever Dad and the adults would go, we would go to the Falls. We knew that, separately, from the first moment, and as we came together, one by one, the truth of it didn’t have to be spoken. It was a complicated moment. If the cops didn’t know about the Falls, then they weren’t meant to. Worse still was another thought. Suppose we said, “Try the Falls,” and Vince was there, broken on the stones as Clarence had been, a sad pale object in a barrage of cop flashlights? Then it would be over. Then there would not be even an hour or a few moments of hope. It would be finished. But there was something more. The Falls was sacred ground. If Vinny were there, he would not want to be found by just anybody. Tilden and Sherry and I would find him ourselves. We knew without a word among us that this was how it would have to go down.

  Tilden said, “What did Vinny say to you?”

  “That he knew where Glen was. Always had. But he didn’t go to him. He was torn up because he didn’t go to him.”

  A tear formed at the bottom of Sherry’s beautiful eye. She said, “I’m afraid he’s going to him now.”

  Tilden said, “Mother of all fuck,” in a way so gentle it sounded like a benediction.

  We buckled the last buckle, tied the last string. We waited for the cop car to disappear completely. Three or four of the neighborhood men called for Dad. He got up and went to the door, looking over his shoulder at Tilden and me.

  “You boys ain’t coming with us, are you?”

  We shook our heads. He understood.

  As Dad tromped away into the raging night, it dawned on us that the neighborhood men had parked in our drive, boxing my car in, and Sherry’s too. Sherry said, “Bikes, then.”

  Mom heard us. She said, “There will be no riding of bikes on a night like this. Why, one gust of that wind—” It sounded like she was out to thwart us, but if you watched carefully, it was a different story. Mom was tying on her rain hat. She was digging her keys out of her purse. She was going to drive us.

  Tilden said, “Mrs. Summers, if you could just take 414 up to—”

  “I know where you’re going.”

  Mom left the light on, the door open, the coffee singing in the percolator. People were used to coming to our house for coffee in times of disaster, and she saw to it that they still could.

  The rain slackened as she drove, even stopping for the space of a few minutes from time to time. The moon tried to break through the flying wrack of midnight blue clouds. Away off over the Smokies, lightning flashed blue and white-gold and the rumble of it shook the road under our tires.

  Mom skidded to a stop in the pitch-black parking lot. It was disorienting to be there in the dark and rain. We were in a desperate hurry, so everything took longer. Our clothes caught on things when we tried to exit the car. The trunk lid stuck and I had to open it with a flying kick. We looked for our flashlights, missed them, thought we left them behind, then found them in pockets where we had already looked. Curtains of rain swept the pavement, though whether new rain or wet blown from the trees by the big wind we didn’t know. Mom said, “You know why everything is going wrong?”

  “No, why?”

  “Because you’re in a hurry. You know why you’re in a hurry?”

  “No, why?”

  “Because you know Vince is still alive. You know there is reason to hurry.”

  I thought of the night we searched for Judy Herman in the same kind of downpour. No one was in a hurry. We were men moving in dreams, or in lead, or in an old movie where they can’t get the speed right. Yes. We knew Vinny Silvano was alive.

  We asked Mom to stay in the parking lot, so she could be seen if anybody passed. We might need help by then. We had no idea what a storm like that would do to the gorge, where the paths would be, what trees would block them, what streams submerge them. If we didn’t come out after a time, she would have to go for help.

  “It’s a full tank,” she said, “I’ll keep the engine running. I’ll keep the lights on.”

  We made for absolute darkness with the blaze of Mom’s headlights at our back. That made it harder, actually, harder to acclimate to the dark, but we wouldn’t have done without it. We walked along the beams of light as if we were pearls and it the string.

  The ground fell about five feet into utter black. The headlights shot over our heads into the trees. Sherry yelled over the sound of many waters, “Try it without the flashlights!” With flashlights you see only what the lights sees, missing things along the path, things at distance. For Vinny or any sign of him to be right along the path lay beyond the realm of hope.

  It took surprisingly little time to learn to see in the dark. Glisten and utter blackness alternated. Light came from somewhere, though we couldn’t figure it out exactly. Flashes of lightning came and went, but between them an ambient gleam allowed us to proceed without moon or stars. I took the lead. I felt along the rock wall until pretty certain we were headed the right way. At least the position of the river was never in doubt. It roared and thundered to our left sometimes and sometimes directly before. Every now and then sounded a louder noise, of a tree hitting rock, or a stone easing off its shelf into the torrent. We were astonished that any sound could be louder than the sound of a million gallons of plunging water. I led us to the vantage point from which, long ago, the three of us had first descended, it being the likeliest route for a drop into the gorge. Unless, of course, one meant to jump. You could communicate only by pressing your mouth against the other’s ear and shouting. I pressed my mouth against Tilden’s ear and said, “We have to go down.”

  Tilden backed away. Maybe he didn’t hear me. I pressed my mouth against Sherry’s ear and shouted, “We have to go down!”

  She shouted back, “Yes, yes we do!”

  Discussion proved impossible, so it was well we w
ere all thinking the same thing: Vinny would have gone into the gorge. He would have sought the door open at the bottom of the river. If we could climb down in this downpour, it meant he could have too.

  I leaned over the stone parapet and aimed my flashlight. The beam was startling after the walk in the darkness, startling and yearning and beautiful. Its light struck the crest of the river as it pushed up over the lip of the pool into a great wave before the plunge down. The river shone slimy brown in the lamplight, huge and cresting, like a breaker of the sea. If you watched even for a few seconds you saw debris, some of it recognizable, hurl with the water into nothingness, trunks and brush and trash, sometimes whole trees with their branches shivering in the dark, stalling here and there, snagged on rocks, building up a mass of the river behind them, until irresistible force broke it free and it sailed out and over into the darkness, sometimes large enough to crash at the bottom with a sound to top the blast of the flood.

  Tilden shouted, “Vince? Vince?” once or twice, but the syllables were blown back by the roar of the waters. I said, “Don’t waste your breath.” We’d have to go down.

  Sherry and I stuffed flashlights and other bits of apparatus into our backpacks, handing things back and forth by sheer touch in the darkness. Tilden stood there with his hands at his sides. I assumed he’d gotten his backpack together beforehand, and was watching us fumble. I didn’t know what the other two were thinking, but I was thinking we had not brought enough rope, and the climb down—and up again, God willing—would have to be hand-over-hand, like monkeys on a wall. We had enough rope to truss something up and drag it back with us. Plenty for that.

  I felt I should try to lighten the mood a little. I put a flashlight under my chin, turned it on fast, made a face at Tilden and growled like a monster. The effect was not what I anticipated. He yelped and cowered. When he took his face away from his hands I saw that he was crying. We had known each other most of our lives, and I never knew Tilden was afraid of the dark.

  “Til, man, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

  “No . . . it’s not you. It’s . . .”

  He was crying pretty hard now. Shaking. I had no idea what to say to him. I said, “We’ll find him, man; he’ll be OK.”

  It was hard to get oriented after that. Tilden was my strength. I wished I had not articulated the phrase “afraid of the dark,” for now I was too. This dark was very dark. Tartarus. Deep roaring hell. The flashes of fire and the weird reflections just made it worse. Sherry peered fiercely into the gorge, following the beam of her lamp, so I couldn’t see if she was afraid or not.

  I lowered the flashlight to the tangle of dampening gear on the damp grass. Worms crisscrossed the ground like tossed red thread, squirming a little in the flashlight beam.

  “You stay here,” I bellowed. “Man the flashlights. Show us the way as far down as you can.”

  Tilden nodded, relieved to have something to do.

  Actual rain had nearly stopped. The wind kept strong, tearing away at the clouds, and every so often enough the ascending moon appeared that we could climb by it. Moonlight was better than flashlights, for it allowed us use of both hands, and didn’t leave a pool of blackness on all sides where the beams didn’t reach. Tilden stood topside and aimed the mini-sun of the big Coleman lantern at places where we needed him to. He kept aiming the lantern out and turning in a circle, as if he expected something to come at us from the darkness. Soon the path would bend and the light wouldn’t, and Tilden wouldn’t be able to hear us over the thunder of the Falls anyway. In daylight you didn’t realize how terrible the Falls is, a presence, a thundering, hulking wall beyond which looms utter night. Sane people would not have gone down like that, without sufficient ropes, without a plan, without sure knowledge that what they sought lay at the bottom. I almost didn’t, but for the sight of the top of Sherry’s head disappearing over the ridge of dark stone, descending into nothing. I followed her.

  I knew the ways down pretty well. Sherry knew them better than I expected. Glen was the one who knew them, though. If he had been trying to get away from us, we would never find him. Every time my leg brushed a fern or my arms grazed a dangling blossom, I knew Glen had keyed it out and recorded its name in his diary. Maybe that’s what he was doing. Maybe he got distracted by a bug or a liverwort or something and he—

  A voice screamed, “Arden?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You all right?”

  It was Tilden’s voice from above, sounding a thousand miles away.

  “We’re fine.”

  “I couldn’t see your light.”

  “Better to climb by the moon.”

  “What?”

  “Moon. We don’t need them. Don’t need the lights.”

  Sherry stood a little lower than I, on a flat-ish space. She held her right hand over her eyes against the Coleman lantern, peering into the black of the gorge for signs of Vince. Unless he was on fire she couldn’t have seen him. Her hair was short now, only a little longer than Tilden’s and mine. With her breasts concealed under one of my flannel shirts, and that under her slicker, she could be taken for a boy. She was bold as a boy, anyway, swinging herself from rock to rock while I edged down gingerly, wondering sometimes why it all couldn’t wait till morning. I caught up to her and we climbed side to side, down the wall slick with rain, but sturdy and rooty and broken enough for there to be more handholds than one might have feared.

  We slid under a ridge that cut us off from the glare of the Coleman. There for a moment reigned absolute black. Tilden’s voice shouted from above, but it was impossible to hear what he said. Did he drop the lantern? Did he find something? Sherry and I were paralyzed, not knowing which way to move to keep from plunging over the remainder of the cliff into the full body of the flood. Sherry pulled her flashlight out of her pocket and shone it toward the center of the noise. It caught the moving body of the falls, about thirty feet off. The cold wet that beat against us was not rain, but spray from the fierce brown column of turbulent water. She moved the light up toward the top of the falls. The light grew dimmer as it spread to illuminate a wider swath of, essentially, nothing. As her light mounted, Tilden’s Coleman appeared again, whiter and more diffuse than the flashlight, and infinitely welcome. The moon came too, breaking through the ceiling to beam broken silver into the heart of the plunge pool. Surrounded by stone, our ears throbbed with the many-times multiplied noise of the river. When all three lights—Tilden, Sherry, the moon—seemed to meet into one almost sufficient illumination, something appeared at the lip of the pool high above. It was a huge tree, a log mostly, but with a few limbs still attached. It jerked forward, then hesitated. When it stalled in the river, the back-up water flowed over it, submerging it invisible for a moment. Then it rode high on the water again, edging forward. Sherry was pushing hard, backwards against my chest. She screamed at the top of her lungs, “This time it’s going to go!”

  I didn’t know why she was so excited about that until I realized that the log would hurl like a spear into the plunge pool, and like a torpedo across it, and if it followed the course it looked like it must, it would come crashing into our little hollow of a cave. This is why Tilden had moved the lantern, to have a better look. This is why he shouted; he saw it coming.

  I pushed Sherry out of the cave, dragging her by the slicker to a ridge of wet stone which the prevailing current in the plunge pool made an unlikely target. We’d just reached its morsel of shelter when the log broke free. It took a surprising amount of time to pass down the front of the falls into the pool. We had not appreciated how shallow the pool was, for the log struck bottom on one end, and, like an acrobat, threw its other end into the air, the hurl and rebound taking its three or four tons exactly where we feared it would, like a battering ram into the mouth of the cave we had just exited.

  Tilden screamed from above. I pulled my flashlight out, finally, and moved it across the falls so he would know we were all right. The log whirled around in the chaos of th
e water, then headed neatly downstream. We heard it bumping and crashing on its way, until it was lost in vaster bumping and crashing further down the gorge. At the place where the tree hit, our little cave was unrecognizable; Sherry and I would have been a stain on the stone.

  We had no time to congratulate ourselves on our escape. We assumed that Vinny would have tried to find the space behind the falls—the swifts had to go somewhere—and that unless he was dead and swept down the river, he was there, and if he went there, we could too. The log, aside from nearly killing us, had shown us that the plunge pool, if it was deep at all, was not deep everywhere. We could find a way through it, perhaps even a way around it if the rebounding spray would allow us to search the gorge walls. We’d climbed down as far as we could. We climbed to the Falls as near as we could without being smashed and drowned. The spray pounded a constant shower in our faces, cold, sometimes stinging with debris.

  Sherry turned and screamed into my ear, “Maybe he hitched a ride.”

  “What?”

  “On the log! The log! Like in the cartoons. Maybe he—oh, never mind.”

  We saw where the little shelf of rock ended and where you had to enter the pool or go home. The stone was broken, and perhaps fifty feet of water separated the jagged edge of it from the plunging face of the falls. The bit of pool there had a little shelter from the fallen stones, so the water was not hitting the wall with the velocity it did elsewhere. It was our best bet.

  I reached the jagged jumping-off place first. We’d looked carefully enough to know there was no way farther down other than the six foot jump into the pool. I might have done it merrily in daylight, but not then. Here dwelt utter night. No one ever came at night. Nobody sane. If they did, I didn’t want to know them. If they did, they likely never came back. I had trouble getting my breath. What might lie in the inky waters? Strange crystals that stabbed, strange rocks that closed over your head . . . Scavengers with bright eyes waiting for fools and suicides to tumble from the cliffs . . . Glen’s door, maybe, but a door that didn’t lead where he thought it did, but rather into some place horrible and forlorn . . . I don’t know that I could have gone a step farther even had I heard Vinny down there crying for help. I’m glad I didn’t mock Tilden, for I was paralyzed myself, ninety feet farther down the cliff than him, but still a long way from the bottom.