Entropy in Bloom

by Jeremy Robert Johnson

  No, she was content to play with the electricity in the air between them. Better to turn this into a fantasy. Reality could be so unpleasant.

  Laura pretended to yawn, pushing her chest forward with her arms raised above her head, moving her legs slightly so that her pleated tan skirt hiked up even further.

  It was her turn to grin as she saw Tony shifting in his seat. They were both swimming in tension, nerves on full alert as the stereo blasted and the air that rushed in through the windows grew cooler.

  The road became thin and curvy as they approached the entrance to the Tolaquin County Forest, but Tony didn’t slow the car for a moment. He slammed through the corners. The rear right tire spit out gravel as it caught the soft shoulder. Laura wanted to tell him to cool it on the alpha-male stunt driver shit, but she didn’t want to disturb the chemistry of their little game.

  This was a game she had to win. Till now, it had been easy. Asking around town, finding out who the local dealer was. Getting his name. Tracking him down.

  In another life I’d make a great cop.

  Earlier that day she’d met Tony at the Chevron. Marco at the pool hall had said that Tony kept the Chevron job for appearances, and it was an easy place for people to drive through and buy whatever Tony was selling.

  Laura saw Tony squeegeeing the window of a mini-van, checked out his broad shoulders, his jet black hair, his olive skin, the way he filled out his oil-smeared jumpsuit, and shouted, “Hey, nice ass!” She loved playing the aggressor.

  Tony walked over and scoped her out in return. He let a slow, straight-tooth smile bloom across his face, and said, “Thanks.”

  Laura licked her lips, slow, and said, “What’s your name?”

  “Tony.”

  “Well, hi, Tony. You got a pen?”

  He pulled a pen from his shirt pocket and handed it to her. She wrote her name and cell-phone number on a twenty-dollar bill, folded it, and slipped it in one of his front pants pockets.

  Two hours later her cell phone rang. “Hey, Laura, you wanna do something special?”

  It now appeared to her that by “do something special” he meant “drive out to Benham Falls and get naked.” At least that was the subtext to the tension that hung heavy in the speeding car. Laura was just happy her plan was working. Her dad and home were over a hundred miles away. She’d need a place to sleep tonight. Hopefully Tony had a nice, big bed with a down comforter and some thick pillows. Hopefully Tony had a heavy, hidden shoebox, and slept like the dead.

  Hopefully we can head back to town soon, and get the hell out of this place.

  The Camaro rolled to a stop as they approached the gate between the paved road and the dirt passage that led to Benham Falls. He hopped out, swung the gate open, and slid back into the car.

  He turned to Laura. “They don’t want people up here in the spring. It’s still pretty cold at night, and the area around the waterfall can get icy.”

  “So?” she said, trying to maintain her attitude even as she cringed at the idea of stepping into the freezing cold in a short skirt and thin, black tank top.

  “So,” he said, “people have died up here.”

  She pictured her own little brother, five years old, smiling in front of the waterfall on a sunny afternoon.

  Is that my last memory of him? Has to be. This is the last place I ever saw him.

  Laura tried to stop remembering, but the echo of her parent’s panicked voices screaming her brother’s name still entered her mind. Instant gooseflesh, shivers.

  “Don’t worry, though, I’ll make sure we stay warm.”

  Tony slid a calloused hand over her knee, then drew it toward the inside of her thigh. As his hand shifted a feminine-looking bracelet, with blue and black beads, slid down his forearm to his wrist, jangling on its way down. The beads formed the outline of a horse’s head, raised and proud. Laura wondered if it was a trophy from another conquest, or if he just felt comfortable wearing pretty jewelry. Either way, this guy was different enough to be interesting, and the warmth of his fingers made her cheeks rosy. Laura didn’t expect these feelings. Romance, so far, hadn’t been par for her twisted course.

  She smiled at him and said, “Just make sure I’m taken care of.” Laura laughed, trying to come off sly, to ignore her urge to hop in the driver’s seat once he got out and drive as far from here as fast as she could.

  They drove for four more minutes and then he slowed, killing the lights and the engine. Laura could hear the roaring waterfall through the glass windows of the Camaro. She immediately hated the surging volume of it. It was the soundtrack to the worst day of her life. Laura pushed those feelings down. Right now had to be about Tony and nothing else. She had to earn his trust or soon she’d lose another family member.

  He could be dead right now. While you’re away robbing lowlifes for medical money, he could have wheezed out his final breath. Alone.

  Laura ignored the voice. Listening to her conscience was not an option.

  She stepped out of the car and slammed the door, instantly feeling the cold bite of the higher altitude and the dampness of the waterfall’s backspray. Tony walked over to Laura and grabbed her delicate left hand, enveloping it with his.

  “Follow me. I’ll show you something.”

  She followed him through the woods in the dark of the moonlit night, towards the sound of the waterfall. He walked with a sure-footedness and Laura briefly pictured herself as a notch on his bedpost.

  “You bring all your girls up here, Tony?”

  “No,” he said, through laughter, “just the special ones. My family and I used to live in a house bordering the park so I’m pretty familiar with the area. Used to play here as a kid.”

  Laura was surprised by how much she liked Tony’s voice. The first guy she’d stolen from, her old boyfriend Mark, and the second guy she robbed, Adam, they both had something nasty in their voices. A greasy sort of power. Tony sounded different. Still, she was cold. Her feet hurt. She wore platform shoes with crisscrossing straps on top, picturing this as more of a booze/cigarettes/dancing type date. She didn’t plan on this nature hike with Ranger Tony. Still, the firmness and warmth of Tony’s hand made her feel safer.

  Tony guided her past a patch of trees into a clearing. Laura hadn’t seen Benham Falls since she was small, and she was still stunned by its sheer grandness. The nearly full moon reflected off the water, giving the whole area a shimmering, light blue glow. The hundred foot wide river was raging over the lip of the waterfall, about three hundred feet above them. The water roiled furiously at the point of impact, sending out a spray that within seconds coated her like cold sweat.

  The memories—the sounds of her parents’ voices crumbling and growing hoarse as they yelled for Michael, the look of instant despair on the face of the park ranger who couldn’t help them—all of it wanted in to her head. Laura knew she had to stay in motion to keep from thinking. Maybe Tony could distract her.

  She leaned in, ran her tongue lightly up the salty skin of Tony’s neck and then whispered in his ear. “It’s beautiful.” Somehow it wasn’t a lie. The falls couldn’t be denied their majesty.

  His hands found the curve of her lower back and he kissed her. She could feel the beads of his funny bracelet pressing against her skin, strangely warm even through the fabric of her tank-top. Then they were kissing, intensely for a moment, then slowly pulling away. Laura found herself thrilled at the newness and willingness of Tony’s kiss. The kiss was good enough to make her think maybe this night could be okay; that maybe she was meant to come here and create good new memories to erase the old. The start of a new life. Tony pulled away.

  “You’ve gotta see the cavern.”

  He grabbed her hand and they continued down the trail towards the base of the falls.

  “This used to be called Sotsone Falls, after this Indian lady. She was a princess, like an Indian princess, with the Tolaquin tribe, and back when they were relocating her tribe, she came up here and jumped off the falls
in protest. Some way to go, huh? Well, supposedly, she’s in the falls, haunting them, cursing them, whatever. You’re supposed to be able to see her face in the falling water during a full moon. Anyway, people kept dying up here, falling and drowning and stuff, so they renamed the place Benham Falls in the thirties. Weird, huh?”

  “Yeah.” Laura said. “Pretty weird.”

  Inside she was trembling. She fought to keep it from showing; Tony was just starting to open up to her. She wanted to tell him that changing the name of the falls didn’t stop anybody from dying up here.

  Then she looked up to the top of the falls and for a second she saw the Indian woman up there, staring back at her, pointing at her with one long finger.

  She shook her head and turned away. A trick of the moonlight off the mist.

  They reached the bottom of the falls and Tony led her across a series of lichen- and moss-covered rocks that played hell with her slender ankles. Soon they were behind the waterfall, standing close to each other beneath the low ceiling of a cavern carved out by the falls. The smell of minerals was sharp, and the sound of the falls was deafening. The cavern was barely illuminated with the thin, gray light cast by the moon’s reflection off the falls. A cold drop of water fell from the black cavern ceiling and splattered on Laura’s scalp dead center. She was about to complain about the cold and her shoes and the hike, to say, “Hey, this cavern’s just lovely but we should go now,” when Tony grabbed her and pulled her in for a deep kiss.

  Tony’s kisses were so sweet, so genuine in their urgency and attraction, that for a moment Laura was capable of forgetting again. He bit her lip playfully; he kissed her ears. He chewed at her neck and kissed the corners of her lips.

  She sighed with pleasure; the shaking exhalation turned to thin vapor. She watched her breath float upwards, away from the shimmering light coming through the waterfall.

  Tony kissed the hollow at the base of her throat. His lips felt so good on her skin, like a release from the ugly thoughts this place had forced on her, from the sickness that had permeated her new life with her father.

  She tilted her head back, exalted, smiling.

  That was when she saw the dead boy on the ceiling of the cavern.

  Michael.

  Her brother had black sockets where his eyes should have been, two holes in a pale, angry face. Thin trickles of blood ran from his open mouth. His little corduroy pants and yellow T-shirt were tattered and soaked dark crimson. He was floating down from the ceiling towards her, his arms and legs spread wide, and she was frozen with fear, oblivious to Tony’s urgent kisses.

  The little boy floated closer to her and one tiny hand reached out toward her face. She could not move as she felt four cold fingers press against her forehead.

  A black veil fell over her eyes and she couldn’t tell where she was, or who she was, or where Tony was. All she could do was see.

  A small boy, at the top of the falls, picking up an old, beaded bracelet. The child, attracted to the bracelet and its horsehead pattern, slid it on to his wrist. Little Tony was a lucky boy that day. All smiles.

  She saw that same boy pushing her brother into the river just north of the falls.

  NO! Where were my parents? Where was I?

  The vision provided no answers. It could only show her what her brother knew from that point on. The intimacy of his pain.

  Michael, in his yellow T-shirt and corduroy pants, went over the falls and hit the water so hard his eyes were forced from his head.

  Michael had yelled Laura’s name on the way down. She’d always been there to help him before. Helped him tie his shoes. Helped him reach the cookie jar. But at that moment, everyone had looked away. That moment was all it took. Nobody could have heard his voice over the sound of the raging falls.

  The vision shifted, became blurry and liquid.

  Somewhere much farther away she could feel hands around her throat.

  After putting on the bracelet, Tony had been a busy boy.

  She saw Tony throwing his new puppy dog over the falls. It yelped before the splash.

  She saw him return to the falls as a teen. This time he threw a woman over.

  Then another woman, and another. First he choked them, then he threw them from the top of the falls.

  It was ritual; Sotsone’s final protest repeating without end.

  The fall and the maelstrom beneath it tore them all to pieces, collapsed their lungs and filled them up until they sank, swirling in the current with all the others. With Michael. She could hear them all howling under the water, torn, and restless.

  She could hear Michael whispering to her.

  Wake up.

  Laura awoke from her vision to see Tony on top of her. While she’d watched the memories of her dead brother, Tony had pushed her body to the stony ground. The veins in his face bulged and he had his right hand clamped tight around her throat. The beads on his bracelet rattled as he choked her. She gasped for air and found none.

  LAURA REGAINED CONSCIOUSNESS AS her hand touched the icy waters of the river flowing beside her. Tony’s voice barely broke through the sound of her own blood rushing back into her head.

  “You know, Laura, you could stand to lose some weight. Do you know how hard it was to carry you up here?”

  Whatever it was she’d liked in his voice, it was gone, replaced by the same greasy confidence of the guys she’d hustled in the weeks before. That all seemed so distant and petty next to her need to pull in a full breath though her crushed windpipe. She couldn’t help thinking, “This is how dad feels when he breathes.”

  Dad. No . . . I can’t die now.

  “I asked you a question.”

  She moaned, unable to respond with her maimed vocal cords. Tony continued.

  “You tasted sweet, when I kissed you. But then you started shaking, and your eyes rolled back in your head. I couldn’t keep kissing you like that. The look in your eyes was . . . wrong. I decided to take care of business.”

  Unable to speak, Laura raised a middle finger.

  “I’m not going to pretend I don’t enjoy this. I mean, she tells me to do it, she has ever since I found this bracelet, but I love it more every time. I kind of regretted pushing in that first kid, but it was just too easy. It’s like fate put him there. All alone. And she was whispering to me. Push him in. Watch him fall. Do it for me.”

  Laura hated Tony, the way he spoke of her brother. She wanted to say, “That wasn’t just some kid. That was my brother, Michael.” She wanted to kill Tony and knew that if she could find the strength she’d have no problem performing the act. She might even like it.

  She tried harder to breathe, to think a clear thought, to find a way out of Tony’s sight. He kept talking, enjoying the sound of his own voice. Something buzzed beneath his words. Something old. Something that had savored so much death it couldn’t understand anything else.

  “I like watching the women fall. That’s the best part. Just for a second, right when they go over the edge, they kind of hang there, like she’s holding them up, and then they drop so fast you wouldn’t believe it. Sometimes they look like they’re flying. Especially when they don’t scream on the way down. I don’t think we’ll have to worry about that with you, will we?”

  His hands dug into her arms, lifting her toward the edge of Ben-ham Falls.

  “You know, none of the bodies have ever surfaced. I guess the falls holds them down there. Keeps them hidden for me.”

  Laura felt his grip tighten as they approached the edge. The cascade here was raging as the river shot out and plummeted to the stormy water below.

  Vertigo reeled through her body as the swift winds above the falls whipped around her.

  She wanted to cry, to run, to scream at the madness and cruelty that brought her here. She hated her stupid plans, her father’s cancer. She wanted to escape, to get back home and save her father the misery of losing another child’s life before his own. Laura could not resign herself to this last, cold swan dive.

/>   Then she heard Michael speaking inside of her head.

  His voice a soft whisper, felt underneath her skin.

  “Let go now.”

  She trusted the voice. What else was there to trust?

  Laura let go. She let her body go limp and felt her ankles roll out from beneath her. She pitched forward, dead weight over the yawning precipice. Tony, who was still holding her arms vice-grip tight, had no chance to escape the fall.

  Gravity took them both. They fell faster than the river had in its thousands of years.

  On the way down, Laura saw the women.

  Their white faces were just beneath the surface of the water. Over a dozen of them, empty white faces with hair and skin floating loose around them. None of them had eyes. All of them had gaping mouths, teeth bared, locked in a scream.

  Tony and Laura’s bodies rotated in the fall, and Tony struck the water first, with Laura on top of him. His body crunched beneath her, and then they were underwater, with the women. Cold, loose skin pressed against her as the thundering waterfall pushed them all under. Hands, all bone and sinew, tore Tony away from her. Teeth scraped her skin as they chewed away his hands, releasing her.

  Her freedom from Tony’s hands did not matter. She was trapped in the plunge pool, struggling to reach air and being pulled farther and farther down.

  She heard a terrible tearing and popping sound, and the water around her grew warm. Laura could see that the dead, empty-faced women had chewed open Tony’s belly and torn his limbs from his body. His gutted torso was still in their frenzy, his mouth wide in shock.

  Laura struggled, trying not to inhale, but her lungs demanded it, and she pulled in a deep, liquid breath. Her lungs filled with water as the dead women swarmed.

  No . . . I brought him to you . . . I’m not dead yet. . . I have to get home . . . my dad. . . Michael. . . please . . .

  She could taste death in the water, and sank deeper until she felt a tiny, cold hand on hers, pulling with all its strength. The women’s hands clamped down like talons, but could not hold her. She closed her eyes and felt the water parting before her, then falling away.