The Buffalo Soldier

by Chris Bohjalian

  VERONICA ROWE (FORMERLY POPPING TREES),

  WPA INTERVIEW,

  MARCH 1938

  Alfred

  Just as there were people at the spot along the river where there had once stood a bridge, a small group had gathered just to the east of the first great fissure in the paved road. Again some had driven and some had walked, and he counted nine grown-ups and five teenage boys. They stood wondering at the sight of the canyon, and he realized as he listened to them talk that their awe wasn’t driven simply by the crater’s size—easily twenty feet deep and twenty feet wide—or by the high water that even now was carving away the ground in the hollow, but by the reality that nature was pummeling them once again.

  There was no one on the other side of the chasm because no one had wanted to risk crossing the water in the bottom or hiking into the slippery woods on the far side of the road. He guessed the teenagers might have tried, but two of them had their parents with them and the grown-ups were not about to permit them to even attempt a crossing.

  It was clear from the conversation around him that everyone believed there were other breaks in the road, too: If there weren’t, by now cars would have come this far east from Durham, and they would have seen them before the vehicles would have had to turn back. But none had made it this far.

  Think people are trapped? one of the teenage boys wondered, and it sounded as if he was reveling in the ghoulish possibilities.

  You mean like the Willards two years ago? someone—the boy’s mother, Alfred suspected—asked. Even he had heard the tale of how this septuagenarian couple had found themselves on the road between Durham and Cornish when the river had destroyed the pavement before and behind them, and forced them to hike across one of the pits it had hewn from the hillside.

  Yeah, the teen said. Like that.

  Instantly he thought of Laura, and he wished he knew more about jumping. He wished he knew anything about jumping. Briefly he imagined himself riding the horse into the crevice and then leaping the span where the water was churning up rock and mud. But he could never do that. Not yet, anyway.

  He could, however, ride up into the woods. He’d go wide of the gorge, twenty or thirty yards into the melting snow and slick brush if he had to, and then he’d return to the road when he was west of the break. Quickly he sought out with his eyes the widest nearby gap in the maples and pine, and before anyone would be able to grab the reins and stop him, he prodded Mesa into the woods. He heard them calling after him—some calling him by his name and others just shouting Boy! and Son! and You there!—all of them shouting that he should come back. But he was in the woods now, lowering his chin almost to his chest so the thinner branches would glance off the top of his helmet, guiding the horse as best he could between the trees and the brush, aware that the animal was struggling on occasion for purchase beneath the melting snowpack.

  And then he was out and back on the road, well beyond the western lip of the crevasse. He could still hear people yelling for him to return, but it was going to be dark soon and so he soldiered on, and it was easier now because he was on pavement. He pushed Mesa harder—despite his sudden misgivings that she might yet slip and be hurt, and he would have injured an animal he guessed he loved more than most humans he had met in his life—and she started to run and the voices behind him faded beneath the sound of the rain and the river and the distance, and after no more than half a mile he saw another crater. This one was smaller than the first, perhaps a dozen feet wide and barely four or five feet deep. In the pocket there were slabs of asphalt, and while it was a barrier no vehicle could cross, the water had receded and so he slowed Mesa to a walk and the horse gingerly stepped down into the rubble and then climbed back up the other side.

  He’d ridden more than halfway to Durham, another two or three miles, he guessed, when he saw what looked to him like the searchlights at an airport taking aim at the sky. These weren’t as powerful, but he could see them through the fog and the gathering dark. Two of them, he realized as he approached, there were a pair of them. He wondered if he’d reach a chasm and find there a chain of cars on the other side, including one that held Laura.

  As he neared the lights, however, he understood by their angle that they couldn’t possibly be from a vehicle that was parked on the road. The ground was hilly here, yes, but it wasn’t so steep that a car would be able to shine its front headlights almost straight up into the air. Then he saw the break in the pavement and he slowed. The lights were beaming up from inside the rift. He rode to the very edge, and there below him he saw the vehicle that was generating the lights. It was flipped upside down against the side wall of a twenty- or twenty-five-foot-deep hole that less than an hour before had been a hillside with a road, and he could see the wheels and black and brown metal of the undercarriage and the engine. There was water pooling around the automobile and so he rode Mesa to the side of the road where there were trees, got off the horse, and looped the reins around a branch. Then he started down into the hole. He realized no one but him knew this car was here, because otherwise there would have been vehicles on the other side. Clearly there was at least one more break in the road between here and Durham.

  HE GROPED HIS way down the sides, careful to make sure the craggy chunks of asphalt were solid before lowering himself upon them, and digging his boots into the muddy ground wherever he could. He’d descended no more than five or six feet when he realized how quickly the water in the chasm was rising: It was now lapping at the rear wheels of the car—the trunk was completely underwater—and he was sure it hadn’t been that near them before.

  He couldn’t make out the color of the vehicle yet, but with relief he decided it was too dark to be Laura’s gray Taurus. He wondered if it was possible that whoever was driving had been thrown safely from the vehicle before the water had taken the road out from under it and sent it spinning into this canyon—or, for all he knew, driven the automobile backward into the hole, the water a wave that upended the vehicle like a seashell—but he didn’t believe that was likely. He had a sense there would be a person, maybe even people, inside the car. Still, he could hope, and he imagined the driver walking back toward Durham in the rain, cursing his bad luck at having been on this exact patch of the road when the wave had risen up from the river.

  When he had climbed down so that he was even with the front grill, he looked beyond the headlights and he could see just enough of a front panel to realize the car was a deep olive green. It was a cruiser; he could see now the inverted lettering on the door and the chipped shards of blue plastic from the roof’s strobe lights that had been blown to the sides when the car flipped over. He craned his neck to peer into the driver’s-side window—the windshield was buried against the side of the cleft—and though he couldn’t see the man’s face, he could see someone was still inside. He knew it was Terry, it absolutely had to be, and he was afraid he was going to be sick: For all he had seen in his life, he had never seen a dead body, and he wanted to flee. But the water was continuing to rise and might eventually submerge the vehicle completely, and so he held on to a slab of rock and stepped tentatively onto the vehicle’s side-view mirror. He wanted to take a look and be sure that Terry was dead before succumbing to the panic that was swelling inside him, and allowing himself to run away. He bent over and glanced inside the window, recognized Terry’s profile instantly, and nearly screamed when the man turned slowly to face him and through the fogged glass mouthed the word Help.

  “I missed the west, but I was happy. Since I was a teenager I was an outsider, so this was not new.”

  VERONICA ROWE (FORMERLY POPPING TREES),

  WPA INTERVIEW,

  MARCH 1938

  Laura

  She sat in the midst of a line of cars on the notch way into Cornish, watching a backhoe pile earth into a hole that had formed when a mountain stream overran the culvert and carved an impassable trench across the road. She tried to be calm, and reminded herself she couldn’t have gone home via the River Road ev
en if she’d wanted to, because that route was gone and everyone was being detoured up here, anyway. She told herself that once enough dirt had been dumped into the crevice before her, she would continue on her way; she’d probably be at the house in another ten or fifteen minutes. Certainly no more than twenty. And though the cell phone didn’t work in the hills in this corner of the county, she’d stopped at the bakery in Durham and from there called Mandy Acker, Tim’s mother, and asked her to check in on Alfred and make sure he knew she was on her way home. She had convinced herself that he was only feeding Mesa when he didn’t pick up the phone at their own house, because even the briefest contemplation of any other possibility would have finished off her already scanty reserves of strength in the face of her memories.

  Still, this was just taking forever. There’d been a small fender bender in the corner of the commons in Middlebury, there’d been a power line down just south of New Haven, and she’d been slowed everywhere by the rain that had pooled in the potholes and troughs in the road.

  In her head she saw the high water in the Gale River, and she vowed when this was over she would move. With or without Terry, she and Alfred would move. Not to Boston—no, never there. And not to Burlington either, not to that small city where Alfred had almost been lost. But...somewhere. With or without Terry, she would leave this hill town with its flash floods and hard winters, the apparitions that could be conjured by wind and rain and the simple sound of the Gale as it lapped at its banks.

  But then she decided she was overreacting: She knew in her heart she was incapable of leaving her daughters. This was a storm. Yes, the River Road was apparently a mess, but she rarely took it, anyway. Soon she would be back at the house with Alfred, and the roof might or might not be leaking—Oh, who was she kidding? Of course it would be!—but that wasn’t cataclysmic. She was fine and Alfred was fine and Terry...Terry was fine, and whether she and Terry were fine together in six months or a year had nothing to do with a January rainstorm.

  She flipped on the radio, and whenever a newscaster or disc jockey wanted to report on the flash floods in northern Vermont, she pressed Scan and found a station playing music instead.

  “It was so humid, sometimes the air was like I imagined a jungle. That’s what I remember most about our first summer in the East. Maybe it was just that I was so big with our baby. But the air always seemed sticky. George, I think, would have remembered most how nice it was not to have to ride around all day in the hot sun, chasing my people. Instead he got to chase them at night in our home.”

  VERONICA ROWE (FORMERLY POPPING TREES),

  WPA INTERVIEW,

  MARCH 1938

  Phoebe

  Her skin, she saw in the rearview mirror, had an almost marmoreal whiteness, and the first thing she wondered was why the air bag hadn’t inflated. The second, following within seconds, was how in the name of God she could be alive. She glanced again in the mirror and saw that the back of her car was a mass of spiked metal—the gold skin of her own Corolla, the black steel that must have sat beneath the backseats and between her exterior roof and the interior ceiling, and the navy blue shell of the car that had slammed into her vehicle and was pinning it now against a telephone pole.

  The wind and the rain had seemed to have gotten louder, more vicious, but then she understood this was only because the back of her car was open and so the sound was no longer buffered by metal and glass. She realized she was cold, and she could see her breath.

  She rolled her eyes to her left, and the other driver—a man, a heavyset fellow in a black-and-white woolen jacket with glasses that were askew on his face—was pushing open his own door. He wasn’t more than a few yards from her because his car was entangled with hers, and then he was staggering to his feet in the snowbank. She could see his forehead was bleeding, a series of cherry spiderwebs that were pooling together just above those glasses, and for a long moment he stood right beside her, apparently oblivious to her presence. Before them another car was slowing, despite the ice on the road, and she saw its hazard lights starting to blink.

  She watched the man press the palm of his hand against the congealing blood in his eyebrows, stare at his fingers for a moment, and then abruptly notice her. Instantly he went to her and pulled open her door—she was surprised at how easily he did it—and she felt the rain stinging her face.

  Can you stand? he asked her. From that second car she saw another person approaching, a younger, smaller man with a mustache the color of hay.

  She wanted to answer she could, of course, why couldn’t she, but she was still so dumbstruck by the fact that she was alive that she was incapable of opening her mouth.

  Are you hurt? he asked now, adjusting his glasses, and the other man—a boy, really, he was no more than a teenage boy—was jabbering about whether they should touch her: He was saying he had a cousin on the rescue squad, and he had heard somewhere that you’re not supposed to move someone if you think there’s a spine or neck injury.

  She looked down at her belly and her legs, and then she held her arms before her as if she were sleepwalking. Actually, the only part of her that did hurt was her neck, but it was a soreness only, nothing that unduly concerned or alarmed her.

  Maybe you shouldn’t move, the man with the cuts on his forehead was saying. I’ve got a cell phone, I’ll call for help.

  She turned to talk to him, concluding that she really was uninjured and there was every reason to believe that her baby was, too. She wondered what would have happened if the front grill of her car had been involved and the air bag had exploded after all: She would probably be about the same as she was now, but her child? She couldn’t believe the small creature would have survived that impact, and she felt herself shuddering.

  You’re shivering, the man said. I think there’s a blanket in my trunk. Want me to go get it?

  No, I think I’m okay, she said. She decided she would have a stiff neck, yes, and though she had perhaps come within inches of being killed—if the car of this man leaning in toward her now had slammed into the front seat of the Corolla instead of the back, if her own car had angled differently into the telephone pole, if the vehicle had flipped onto its side or been toppled over—the truth was that she was okay. She was going to be fine. She dangled her legs out the car and then started to stand, swaying for a brief moment, and allowed the two men to each take an arm and lead her to the teenager’s car with its blinking red lights. There she sat in his backseat, looked out through the window at the spot where she had come so close to dying, and—much to her surprise—realized that her teeth had started to chatter.

  “I had my baby, and two years later I had another. They were both boys. I raised our children and George worked with his brother. They built houses. That was our life together, and mostly it was very good.”

  VERONICA ROWE (FORMERLY POPPING TREES),

  WPA INTERVIEW,

  MARCH 1938

  Alfred

  He stood on an upended piece of asphalt the size of the cruiser’s long hood, and though he didn’t believe he had a chance—he could see the great creases in the metal along the side of the vehicle—he tried to open the door beside the man. Twice Terry shook his head and murmured that it wasn’t locked, but Alfred knew he couldn’t see where the roof of the car had collapsed onto the top of the door when the cruiser toppled into the ravine. The vehicle was not merely positioned like a rocket before liftoff, as if it were driving up an impossibly steep hill, it was flipped onto its roof. Still he pulled, struggling as much with the looking-glass nature of the angle as he did with the battered door, because already the water was lapping midway up the rear window and it was clear that he couldn’t leave the man alone in the car. He could ride fast, but if the water kept rising, Terry would drown before he could return with help—assuming there was even a way for help to navigate the canyons in the road, which he didn’t believe there was. How could the rescue vehicles in Cornish or Durham drive over those holes? The fact was they couldn’t.

/>   Finally he gave up and crabbed his way back up and over the front grill to the passenger side, and when he saw the way the shell had buckled—the door looked like the metal saucers some of the kids at the school used for sliding on the snow at recess—he tried pulling the handle only because there seemed little else he could do, and so he was surprised when the door gave just a bit. He tried again and this time it opened, and he was able to push it up into the air, the metal groaning above the water—both the water in the river and the water in the hole that was rolling in waves against the vehicle’s exposed undercarriage—and there he held it open with his back.

  Hello, Alfred, Terry murmured, his voice tired and weak, when he poked his head inside the car. The vehicle smelled of sweat, and it was almost as cold inside the cruiser as it was outside. I’d wave, he went on, but I can’t really move my arms. I can move my fingers, but that’s about it.

  He saw Terry had managed to unclip his seat belt, but he’d been unable to draw the harness up and over his head and his shoulder, and the metal clip still rested in his lap. There was a ruby stain—a damp, viscous jellyfish—clinging to the right cuff of his jacket. He realized if the man’s legs or his back were broken, too, there would be no way in the world he could help him.

  He crawled inside and allowed the door to fall back against the frame, but he was careful to prevent it from clicking shut. Then he reached across the couch and lifted the belt over Terry’s head, and though he tried to be gentle, the man winced. He saw a red mark on the trooper’s forehead, just above his left eye. A bad bruise. Perhaps even a concussion.

  I think my left shoulder’s broken, he said softly, struggling for breath. And this arm—my right. The one that’s been bleeding.