Boyd rested her own hands over Carla’s, not pulling those damp palms off her face exactly, but getting ready to. “Carla, I need to borrow your truck.”
Carla nodded as if she hadn’t heard. “Of course, of course. But first …” She removed her hands from Boyd’s cheeks and led Boyd into the living room.
The furniture—two couches and a coffee table—had been pushed back against the wall, and in the center of the polished concrete floor was the source of the smell: a pile of herbs and grasses, not quite on fire. A black spot was spreading on the concrete’s varnish, a spot that would remain long after this time, long after the electricity came back on and the water fell. The subtle scent of sage would be a permanent resident of the house from this point forward. Boyd looked at Carla, at the black stripe on her face, at the extra clothes.
Carla caught the look. “It’s a sweating ritual. I can’t turn on the heat—there’s no power—but I’m cleansing this house, protecting it.” She shrugged sheepishly. “It sounds stupid. But it’s true.”
Boyd said nothing.
“And of course you can take the truck. But first, Boyd, help me do something really quickly, even if you think it’s stupid.” Carla motioned for Boyd to sit by her, on the floor next to the smoking grass.
Boyd glanced over her shoulder. “I—I can’t. I have to go.”
Carla took Boyd’s hand. “Boyd. You won’t be successful until conditions are set right.” Carla smiled, knowing that Boyd would not believe her. “Sit, and I’ll let you have the truck in a minute.”
So, despite the urgency of Isaac caught in a tree, Boyd sat, cross-legged, and Carla continued, “I don’t know how to do whatever it is I’m doing exactly. But it doesn’t matter. It’s the invocation that counts. It’s one that I’ve never done before, but I saw the snakes this morning and I knew.”
“Carla,” Boyd stopped her, thinking of the Nike footprints in her tent. “What are you invoking?”
Carla blinked, surprised not to be talking for a second. “Why, the serpent.” At Boyd’s jump, Carla said, “Not the serpent in the Garden of Eden, if you’re worried. Or maybe it’s the same serpent. It’s the serpent that created the world.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Oh, I could tell you stories, but I won’t. You have to go and I’m too busy. Here, Boyd, put your face over the smoke.” Carla pushed Boyd’s nose inches from the smoldering pile. Smoke stung her eyes and tears fell, great drops, landing with a faint sizzle, sending up steam. The tears were from the stinging, not any emotion, though she felt Carla’s tinny nervousness as flutters in her fingers.
Carla was not crazy, Boyd didn’t think, although this ritual was far beyond what Boyd had expected, dedication-wise. A book was open on the floor beside Carla, a fat, large paperback, and Carla read from this book now: “ ‘She who observes the water, who studies the dew from the drop, who knows the course of the stars. Her heart is like a serpent.’ ” Carla closed the book and Boyd saw the title: The Great Cosmic Mother. Underneath this, it said Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth. Carla reached into the smoking pile and pulled out a stem of smoldering sage. Showing no evidence of pain, she ran her fingers over the black part, staining them with soot, then she leaned forward and traced a spiral in the center of Boyd’s forehead. Another swipe of the sage, then a spiral on her own forehead, above the black stripe at her eye line. “There.”
“Why are we doing this?”
“This morning, outside, the snakes in the front yard. A hundred of them, maybe more. I stepped outside to see if there was any damage, and there they were, all headed the same direction, toward the dam. Toward the high water.”
“What kind?”
Carla sat back on her heels and shrugged. “I didn’t know them all. Hell, I didn’t know half of them. But there were king snakes and rat snakes and skinny little garter snakes, and you could tell the coral snakes because they were so bright. Water moccasins, too, headed down to the water, so who knows where they’ve been. Rattlers. I’ve never seen a rattler uncoiled, on the move. It looked like it was naked.”
Boyd said nothing, thinking of her own morning discoveries.
“Boyd, I have never seen anything like that in my life. They were running to something, or from something. I tried to think what it was like, and you know what I thought of? Indiana Jones in the Egyptian temple. He would have hated this. They were like their own water, flowing. And this”—Carla waved her arm to the herb pile—“I don’t know. The serpent, she is evil or not evil, depending on who you ask. But she’s always female.” Carla reached over and traced the spiral on Boyd’s forehead. “She may or may not hurt you. But she’s here.”
Boyd rose, wading through the hypnosis of Carla’s steady voice, the smoke, the house stale with a lack of electricity, the air uncirculated by fan or air-conditioning.
“The truck keys are on the kitchen counter. I’d offer to make you some coffee, but, well …” Carla opened her palms. “If you want some water, though.”
“I’m fine.” Boyd swayed on her feet. It was darker in the house than when she’d first come in.
“Where are you going?”
Boyd was suddenly aware that her own mission would sound just as absurd as a serpent ritual in a living room. “I’m going to get Isaac. I’ll bring your truck right back.”
Carla smiled again, tilting her head as if she was deciding whether to believe Boyd. “Of course. What’s a truck, really? Just a thing.” Carla studied Boyd for a minute. “You’re really something, aren’t you, Boyd? I don’t know what. There’s something about you. Was I ever like you? No, I don’t think I was.” Carla pushed her glasses up her nose. “I’ve loved it out here. You and your mom, you guys have been kind to me.”
Boyd didn’t know what to say. She didn’t know why they would be anything different.
Carla walked her to the door, and before Boyd got in to the truck, she turned back to look at Carla framed in the doorway: thin, wiry with years of yoga, curly hair going every which way. When had Carla first appeared? Boyd wondered, and then she remembered: Carla at their dining room table after Boyd’s father had left. Carla in Kevin’s spot. Boyd headed to bed to read Stephen King and Larry McMurtry, and Carla and Lucy Maud halfway through another bottle of red. In the morning, the empty bottles on the counter next to the sink.
The army men and their trucks were gone, along with the cypress. So was the bridge.
The two arched supports were still standing like sentries in the cascade. But the concrete of the bridge had fragmented into the water, rebar dangling like the spines of prickly pear cactus. The gravel aggregate was exposed at the broken edges and still flaking off, looking to Boyd like a crumbling granola bar. Boyd stopped Carla’s Ranger and got out.
She could not cross here. Boyd knew better than that. Water frothed around the two remaining pillars, filled with branches and debris. Boyd saw the body of a possum go by, tail limp and naked, and she shuddered in revulsion. The rain still fell; the wetness that had marked her jeans at her ankles was now at her knees and still climbing.
She drove to the low-water crossing, but immediately gave this idea up. Water was still several feet over the road. One foot of fast water could take a car, and this gauge said that five feet of water was across the road. If she tried to drive across, she would never come back out.
How, then, to get off what had essentially become an island? To get above the dam and up the river? She had no doubt she could find Isaac; she was drawn to him like a magnetic pole, reading his distress like a Geiger counter. She could find him, she thought, as long as he held on. She hadn’t been able to sense him for so long, and then, suddenly, he’d been there. He would try to get off the tree soon, she was sure, and she wished she could tell him to stay put. That image again—a stone dropped in the floodwater, the wake left behind when something she loved slipped from sight.
She went back to the bridge, or what was once the bridge. When had it crumbled, breaking apart? All of that
stone now in the water, heading toward the lake, the remnants of a bridge that had stood for three quarters of a century. She’d read once that many, if not most, of the bridges in the United States were too old to be structurally sound, were disintegrating just as this bridge had, only at a much slower rate. Waiting for one final stress to bring them down. Had it been the cypress? And now, was that cypress in the water, or had the army men cut it up enough to pull it out? She saw a pile of lesser branches on the opposite shore, but no sign of the central trunk.
In her pocket was the soldier’s phone number. She pulled out her phone and dialed. It rang four, five, six times and then disconnected. Of course. Hadn’t she known that she was not yet going back to the other world? Hadn’t she known that this raw wetness would keep her for a while yet?
But her phone rang in her hand, and when she looked down, she recognized the number she’d just dialed. When she answered, the voice on the other end said, “I missed a call?”
She nearly wept with relief. “Sam! It’s Boyd. The girl from the bridge. I’m trapped and I need out. My friend needs help up the river. Can you get me across? Or can you help him?”
Silence on the other end, then: “Yeah, I can probably do that. I don’t know how we’ll get you across, but we’ll figure something out. Let me talk to my sergeant.”
Again, relief that watered her eyes. “Thank you.” She leaned her forehead against the steering wheel, sure for a second that things were going to work out. “Should I just wait here? I’m on the other side of the bridge, in a truck.”
Quiet as the man calculated. “You better go on home and wait. I … I’ll be a while. Maybe first thing in the morning? I don’t know when I can get out there.”
A coldness in her throat. She lifted her head from the steering wheel, looking out over the space where the bridge had once stood. “Tomorrow?” Fear crept over her. “Tomorrow will be too late.” The water was rising, and she had to find him.
“Hang tight at your house. Nobody can come today, but I promise—promise—to try to get to you tomorrow. The storm was bad. The things we’re seeing … Unless you’re in distress, like life-threatening distress, we need the resources for those who are. Boyd, there are kids missing. Old people in wheelchairs. Stay where you are.”
She could not tell him why she needed to get across, how she knew Isaac was in trouble. But she had to tell him about Isaac. “My friend needs help. I need to help him. He’ll die if I don’t.”
Silence as he considered this. “You need to call the fire department and tell them where he is. If they have somebody, they’ll send rescue personnel.”
“I don’t know where he is.”
“Boyd, I can’t get there today. Even if I could, I don’t know how I’d get you across that bridge. I tried to get you to stay on this side of it.” He breathed heavily into the phone. “You have to hang tight.”
Already her mind was working: sheets of plywood, she thought, spanning from bank to pillar to pillar to bank. The downed trunk of a tree. She’d walk out to the main road and beg for a ride. Sam was still on the phone, but she’d forgotten him until he spoke again.
“Boyd, go in your house and lock the doors. I will call you first thing in the morning.”
Her battery was at 20 percent with no way to plug in her phone. It wouldn’t be working in the morning unless the power came back on. “Yeah, okay. Take care of yourself.” She hung up, still assessing the river.
She half slid, half scrambled down the bank and stuck a tentative toe in the water, gauging how difficult—how dangerous—it would be to cross the river.
Her toe, still in its shoe, hardly felt any pressure from the river. Almost as if there were no current at all, no difference between the slow river of late August and this churning beast from the end of May. So she put weight on the foot in the water, lifted her other foot, and took a large stride across.
The river took her, and for a second, her head was underwater, her feet higher than her face. The current had been like a hand that had reached out and grabbed her, like fingers on her ankle. She tumbled along the bottom and then spread her fingers wide on the riverbed and dug for purchase as the river pulled her away. But she held, and she drug herself out, and when she lay gasping on the bank, several yards from where she’d started but still on the same side, she realized that she had, at most, been in two feet of water. If the river had pulled her just a bit farther out, she would have been much deeper, with no hope of pulling herself free.
Now the river seemed to lap at her feet, and she noticed she was missing a shoe. She tucked her feet up under her and regarded the river. It was stupid, she knew, but she felt as if the river were alive. As if it were hungry. As if it wanted her especially.
And, too—she thought she heard something, like men shouting and working, like the grinding of a mill wheel. She tried to follow the river up, but the trees blocked both her way and her sight. She abandoned the crazy idea that something was up there, but she could not shake this feeling that the river was somehow sentient. She walked back to the truck, drove to her house, and sat in the driveway, thinking.
There were fresh footprints, and she could see from where she sat that the scarecrow was no longer in the garden. Taken by the wind, maybe. Washed out, maybe. But the size 7 Nike was walking away from the house this time, heading up the river toward the dam. Up the river. The shortest distance, as the crow flies, between her and Isaac. She went inside and packed a bag: water, a lighter, almonds, and granola bars. She changed into her mother’s L.L.Bean duck boots, then went outside and followed the prints. The boots were the same size as the tennis shoes, and then she thought, of course they were. Both pairs of shoes had once belonged to her mother. Rain fell into the prints, threatening to wash them away.
12:30 P.M.
Isaac, in the pecan tree, was unaware that Boyd knew he was there. He was alone and felt certain that he would remain alone. His thumb pulsed with intermittent pain, a worse situation than if it had just hurt continuously in one solid block of aching. He had not yet made it to med school—though he had done an internship at Seton Hospital on Shoal Creek—but he knew this water was not good for his thumb and that he needed antiseptic. Even with the stitches, the wound had a gap where the edges had dried out, hardened, and shrunk back. He needed to get out of this tree.
But the thumb wound was the least of his problems. The water beneath him churned with a ferocity that seemed like hunger. Today, he was sure someone would go under and never come back up. This was not a prediction—Isaac was not given to predictions, preferring instead hard certainties—but a fact.
He would cling to this branch as long as he could, and he hoped that this would be long enough. Here he was: windswept, wet, cold, worried about the gap in his thumb. But he was not under that brown and roaring water.
When he looked down, he started, nearly knocking himself out of the pecan tree’s canopy. The lower branches were filling up as every animal that could tried to escape the water. Rabbits, raccoons, possums, daddy longlegs, field mice, cockroaches. All hanging on and sharing real estate. Soon, he imagined, they’d rise higher in the tree, so he looked up in the canopy and climbed. He came to rest on a slimmer branch, unsure how long it would support his weight.
Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here
So Many People Came and Went in Those Days
Also in the Hill Country was the counterpart to the hard-drinking, hard-fighting American West: the remnants of a Mormon colony, founded by Lyman Wight and his followers in 1851. They’d moved throughout the region, hounded by debt collectors, but they’d settled between Burnet and Marble Falls and built a mill, both gristmill and sawmill. They disbanded in 1858, when Wight died, but the mill remained until 1901. In 1902, the wooden part of the mill—the flume—burned, and in 1915, so did the homes of the remaining Mormons. If you were to go there now, if you found that forgotten historical marker on that lonely old road, you could walk among the foundations, grown over with
crabgrass, and visit the cemetery. You could listen to the mesquite rustle in that cemetery and imagine that it sounded like whispers, as if those few people left behind when the world moved on had things to say, but could only say them to one another. Nobody living goes there these days.
All over the Hill Country are things begun and abandoned: a colony of freedmen down the road at Peyton Colony, an old army post at Camp Verde, the old town of Calf Creek, the place where Jim Bowie had that fight with the Tawakoni in 1831. Nothing more than a bunch of abandoned buildings, slowly being bleached by the sun.
12:45 P.M.
In a Holiday Inn Express in Marble Falls, Lucy Maud sat on one of two queen beds, showered and teeth brushed, as her soon-to-be ex-husband called his new girlfriend, now fiancée. Lucy Maud didn’t know much about her, other than that she was one of her husband’s grad students. Kevin was in the bathroom, seeking privacy, but the door was ajar and she heard what he said:
“That storm was something else. Glad I rode it out in Marble Falls.” Lucy Maud realized suddenly that he was in the bathroom because he didn’t want the woman to hear Lucy Maud if she said something.
Why was she doing this to herself? Kevin had for so long been so much to her. He still was. She wondered for a minute if they would still be together if she hadn’t brought the infidelity accusations to him, if she had looked the other way. But no. Get real. She couldn’t have let it go. Something had been off, but not seismically off, in the marriage for a long time. She had reached an age when she didn’t want to be touched, and she had pushed him away, and so she felt that she bore much of the responsibility of the dissolution of her marriage. The final blow, however, was all his. An instinct had dinged, but no alarm bells had sounded. One evening, Boyd had mentioned Kevin’s girlfriend, and from that moment, confrontation had been inevitable.
Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here Page 8