River Runs Red (The Border Trilogy)

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  It could be years before anyone bothered.

  SIXTEEN

  Outside, a fierce wind blew sand against the walls and windows. Maha Yamani lived in Riyadh, in the old Al-Bathaa district near the center of the city, but when it blew hard enough, the Saudi Arabian desert seemed to rise up from its bed and blanket the entire city, from the newest high-rise buildings to the ancient mud-brick structures.

  She had been scrying, or attempting to, at any rate, hoping to determine which of the two possible courses of action her client was considering might prove more favorable to his business. Her specialty was hydromancy, and it seemed particularly ironic, in the midst of one of the world’s great desert regions, to use water as a means of divination. Her copper basin was full. She meditated to the point of trance, staring into the water, waiting for the spirits to use it to send their messages.

  After a time, the water started to churn, as if it was beginning to boil. Maha peered into it, willing it to reveal something, to settle into images or impressions of some kind. Instead of settling, though, the water merely bubbled more ferociously.

  Something wasn’t right. The water had no heat source beneath it, so there was no reason for it to literally boil. She came out of the trance, held her palm out over the basin. Water spat against it, scalding her. When she snatched her hand away, it seemed to leap at her face, and she felt it strike, like tiny hot pokers stabbing her skin. She bit her lower lip and jumped from her chair and backed away from the table. Still, the water churned and roiled.

  On the other side of the room, away from the plain table and chair at which she did her divination, Maha had a modern, Western-style living room set up, with leather couches and a steel-and-glass coffee table and, most importantly at the moment, a cordless phone. She snatched it from its cradle and hit a speed-dial button, then listened as it beeped through all the digits necessary for an international call.

  Eduardo Pinedo answered on the third ring. “Hello, Maha,” he said. He was telekinetic, not clairvoyant, so she supposed he had caller ID.

  “Eduardo.” Neither knew the other’s native tongue, so they always conversed in English. He lived in Ipala, Guatemala and spoke Spanish. “Are you well?”

  “As well as can be,” he replied. He was ordinarily effusive, and such a noncommittal answer was unlike him. It was a dodge, and a transparent one at that.

  “I wish I could say the same.” She had called him, so she didn’t plan to be similarly evasive. “I’ve had a problem.”

  “What is it? Something I can help with?”

  “I don’t know if anyone can help, Eduardo.”

  “What is it?” he asked again.

  “I…I have been trying to do some scrying, and something is…blocking me. It attacked me just now.”

  He was silent for so long she began to wonder if she had been disconnected. Just before she said his name again, Eduardo spoke. “Ever since that night, Maha, my talents are virtually useless. I believe the ley lines are still in some sort of disarray. The frequencies that our powers utilize are off, somehow. It’s like I’m trying to operate a gas oven on an electric line. Is that how it’s been for you?”

  “I worry that it might be more than that, Eduardo. More serious.”

  “What, then?”

  “Eleven years ago, I had a client who I could not help. I tried all my scrying techniques, but nothing worked at all. Finally, she left, furious, calling me a cheat and a fraud. In the street outside, still angry, she didn’t pay attention. She walked in front of a truck. It dragged her nearly a block before it was able to stop. The street looked like someone had painted a wide red stripe down it.”

  Eduardo remained silent.

  “What if the reason I cannot divine the future,” she asked, straining to find the words, “is because there is no future? What do we do then?”

  SEVENTEEN

  Wade set the digital clock for seven thirty. He hoped to wake up early, grab some breakfast in the hotel, then get over to the hospital to see Byrd. Molly was taking good care of him, but that didn’t mean there weren’t errands he could run. He wanted to do whatever he could for his friend while there was still time.

  When the alarm buzzed, he slapped it into silence. His eyeballs felt like lead fishing weights in his skull. His eyelids were sandpaper. He pulled a pillow over his head, shielding it from the faint light leaking in around the curtains.

  By the time he looked at the clock again, its display showed 12:35. Only the daylight limning the curtain convinced him that it was still daytime. “Jesus,” he said softly. “Guess I was more tired than I thought.”

  He clicked on the hotel’s TV, switching to CNN out of habit. War news still dominated the headlines, then politics, then celebrity nonsense. He left it on while he showered, rubbed lotion into skin that seemed to be drying out more every day, and got dressed. The news had been a constant in his life, the stories changing, the graphics growing more sophisticated, the business models shifting to include online dissemination. But it was still people, mostly white, mostly men, sitting in front of a camera reading whatever scrolled in front of them on the teleprompter without passion or nuance. Cynical, maybe, but he had earned his cynicism in those same trenches and considered it his due.

  He had lunch, not breakfast, in the restaurant, because that’s what they were serving when he finally got there. After that, he went back to the room and called Molly at The Voice. Her recommendation sent him all the way to the west edge of town, almost to New Mexico.

  When he finally saw Byrd that afternoon, he was startled all over again by how much his friend had shrunk. He wasn’t quite someone you could carry away in a shoebox, but he looked like he was heading in that direction. The cookies Wade brought from Cookies in Bloom, to which Molly had directed him, were chocolate chip, Byrd’s traditional favorite. Byrd just nibbled at his, holding it with both hands at his mouth, like a squirrel, as if one cookie was too heavy to lift.

  Byrd had laughed when he’d handed over the bag, though, which made it worth it. “Contraband!” he said. “I love it!” After a few minutes of casual back-and-forth, the conversation turned, as it always did, to rivers.

  “Sometimes when I’m lyin’ here and light reflects on the ceilin’, like from cars in the parkin’ lot or whatever, I feel like I’m out there. Like it’s noon and I’ve stopped beside the river for lunch, and the sunlight shafts down into the canyon and you can see the river movin’ in the reflection on the wall, remember?”

  “Yeah,” Wade said. He sat in a guest chair and absently started turning his yellow rubber bracelet around on his wrist. “I know that feeling.”

  “And then I’ll start to think my bed is movin’. Like I’m lyin’ in it and startin’ to drift away from the bank, then pickin’ up speed. The foot of the bed starts dippin’ and risin’, and there’s a little side-to-side motion, and I can see the walls of the room rushin’ past, and smell that dry-dusty river smell. You think I’m nuts, right? Hallucinatin’.”

  “Dude, with as many drugs as you’ve had pumped into you lately, I’d be shocked if you weren’t.”

  “The thing is, those are the times I sleep the best. I drift off to sleep as my bed drifts into the river. I don’t have any hospital dreams then, no sick dreams, just peaceful ones. River dreams. Outdoors, with maybe a coyote pack yippin’ or an owl’s call. Stars overhead and mirrored in the river. Times like that, I’m just about ready to go, you know? Just let go.”

  “Byrd…”

  “What, Wade? I should hang on? Why? What’s my future?”

  Wade bit back the simplistic answer he would have started to give. Byrd was his best friend. He didn’t want to start lying to him now. Byrd’s future was probably limited to staying in a hospital bed until the end. The fact that he was ready to die was most likely healthier than fighting it or pretending it wasn’t happening.

  At least Byrd was more awake now. He sat up in bed, eyes bright. “Right,” he said. “That’s the correct answer. Silence.
”

  “Byrd, I’m not saying that there are any good options. It’s just an instinctive reaction. You know. Until things are hopeless, there’s always hope, right? No matter how fast the rapids, there’s always an eddy up ahead somewhere. You just have to get there.”

  “I think this is my last class four, pal. It’s all whitewater from here. I don’t think I can bail the boat out anymore either. All I can do is hang on to the gunwales and ride it out.”

  Wade offered a smile. “You always were good at that.”

  “Fuck you, too,” Byrd said. Wade was glad to hear this—when Byrd turned profane, it meant he was feeling better.

  They were quiet for a few moments. Byrd stared at the ceiling, and Wade watched Byrd stare. “You remember the mountain lions?” Byrd asked after a while.

  Wade remembered. “In Cataract Canyon,” he said. They had just come out of the double whammy of Little Niagara and Satan’s Gut, fighting all the way down, and they were exhausted. It had just been the two of them in twelve-foot Vanguard inflatable, and they had both stretched out, limp and soaked, and let the easy current carry them downriver. After the pounding roar of the big water, the quiet stream seemed virtually silent. They drifted without speaking, oars in the boat.

  Lake Powell waited ahead. They shared the river rat’s disdain for that artificial lake, knowing it had drowned Glen Canyon, one of the Colorado River’s most beautiful natural wonders—and given that the Colorado also cut through the Grand Canyon, that was high praise indeed. The river had been dammed in 1963, before Wade and Byrd were born, but they had seen pictures, even old 16-mm movies, and it was one of those topics the old-timers bloviated about around campfires at night. Not so much on commercial river trips; some professional guides publicly bemoaned the loss of the Glen, but for the most part they were intent on making sure the paying customers had a good, safe ride, and complaining about days gone by wasn’t the best tactic. But when Wade and Byrd met up with longtime river rats—once, for one night, even sharing space around a fire with the infamous Ed Abbey, toward the end of his life—Glen Canyon almost invariably came up, and glowing descriptions of its attributes would follow.

  Like most river rats, Wade and Byrd looked upon dams in general with contempt, but they shared a special, burning hatred for the Glen Canyon dam.

  The Abbey meeting had been one of the high points of Wade’s young life. They were near Mexican Hat, Utah, and had fallen in with some people who knew Abbey. Wade had just sold a story to High Country News, his first professional sale since graduating from UTEP, and as soon as the check had come in the mail, he had taken it—and thirty bucks of his savings—and purchased a first edition of Abbey’s classic book Desert Solitaire from an antiquarian bookseller in El Paso. When he told Abbey that he’d bought it, the aging curmudgeon had chuckled. “I’ll never understand those prices,” Abbey said. “Most of my friends can’t afford ’em, present company excluded, of course, and my enemies wouldn’t pay a nickel for ’em.”

  He had agreed to sign the book the next time they met up. But he had died a couple years later, and Wade never got to see him again. It hardly mattered to Wade, who still had the book at his apartment in Atlanta, because the memory of Edward Abbey calling him a friend made it a prized possession, signature or no.

  Abbey spoke of Glen Canyon, too. Even the names of the canyon’s wonders were magical, Wade always thought: Cathedral in the Desert, Hidden Passage, Aztec Creek, Little Eden, Coyote Bridge, Music Temple. All of it lost, buried under the floodwaters backed up behind Glen Canyon Dam. The old-timers still called the Reclamation Bureau the “Wreck-the-Nation Bureau” in the dam’s honor, and still dreamed of ways to destroy the dam and free the canyon. A few years back, drought had exposed parts of Glen Canyon that hadn’t been seen for decades, and Wade hadn’t been able to get away from work. Byrd had made a quick run, and never stopped bragging about it.

  They had come across the mountain lions as they drifted, silent as sycamore leaves on the current, around a sharp bend. A mother and her cub were standing on a sandy bank, sipping from a shallow pool. As soon as she saw the raft, the mother’s ears twitched, she opened her mouth in quiet protest, and then she turned and bounded onto a flat boulder, then up the slender side canyon they must have come down. The cub followed, and within seconds, both were out of sight, leaving behind no indication that they had ever been there.

  The boys—Wade had been twenty at the time, Byrd twenty-one—sat in the raft, stunned by the sight, until the raft had drifted around another bend. Then, as if released by the fact that they could no longer see where the lions had been, both began whooping with the sheer joy of what they had experienced.

  “They were beautiful,” Byrd said. “Just amazin’.”

  “They were,” Wade agreed.

  “See, here’s the thing, Wade,” Byrd said. “I had that moment. We had it. And a hundred more like it. Shit, a thousand. Not with lions, but the things we’ve seen? There aren’t two luckier fuckers in the world, Wade. Think of all those people in New York and L.A. and Cleveland and everywhere else who’ve never even seen a tenth of what we have. Not to mention people in the rest of the world. I can go easy, Wade. Anytime. It don’t get better than we’ve had it.”

  “You’re right, Byrd.” Wade nodded his head, convinced. Nothing he had experienced in these last ten years of his life had come close to the things he and Byrd had done together. He could have happily skipped the whole Iraq trip. Maybe Byrd made sense after all…maybe they would both have been better off if they’d simply aimed their boat into a wall inside some canyon or other, or flipped it in a rapids. Would have spared Byrd a lot of pain, anyway.

  “We’ve seen some special things,” Wade added. “No doubt about that.”

  “Some pretty fucked-up ones, too,” Byrd said.

  Wade waved his hand dismissively. He knew what Byrd meant. He didn’t want to talk about Smuggler’s Canyon, and he didn’t think Byrd really did either. If he wasn’t half-stoned on painkillers, he never would have brought it up. Painkillers and chocolate chip cookies.

  “How about this one, Wade? ‘Am I dying or is this my birthday?’ Lady Astor, when she woke up on her deathbed to find that she was surrounded by her family.”

  “If it was your birthday, there’d be cake.”

  “Yeah, you’re right. No cake here.”

  After a slightly awkward silence, Wade excused himself and went down the hall to the men’s room, hoping to bring his raging sorrow under control. He stood in the bathroom (it smelled like bubblegum, which was an improvement over the smell in Byrd’s room), gazing at the mirror and listening to the buzz of the lights. He wasn’t surprised to hear a pattern in the seemingly random noise. He’d noticed a lot of patterns lately: in the hum of the air conditioner at the Hilton, in the the rush of traffic on the roads, in the trilling of crickets outside at night. It had begun on the flight from Baghdad to Frankfurt, listening to the rumble of the jet engines, although he hadn’t become consciously aware of it until this morning.

  Earlier in the afternoon, he had been in the shower when he realized that the whole time he’d been listening to these patterns, hidden just beneath the hums and buzzes and roars and clicks, a voice had been speaking some secret language, trying to communicate with him. He had almost said something about it just now, to Byrd, but stopped himself just in time. If he tried to explain, he would sound like a head case. So he kept quiet and listened. He hadn’t yet reached the point that he could understand what they were saying to him, but he would soon be able to. Already he had figured out that (although he couldn’t understand the language, had never heard it in his life) it was an ancient tongue, unspoken for centuries. But he recognized it. Its name was on the proverbial tip of his tongue, or stuck in his brain someplace he couldn’t quite dislodge it.

  Even the night before, at dinner with Molly, he had thought she had said something in this language. What was the word? Kethili, or something like that. And she had thought he’d said i
t. What did that mean?

  Returning to Byrd’s room, he watched his friend sleep, fully aware that it didn’t just sound crazy, it was. Someone speaking to him in a dead language, hidden behind, or layered into, everyday noises? Why him? Why now? None of it made sense.

  And yet…and yet he couldn’t deny the truth of it either. He could almost grasp what the fluorescents were getting at. If he could just listen better, clear his mind of distractions, he could rein it in and bring it home.

  While his friend slept, he sat in the visitor chair and listened, straining to make sense of it. He scratched his dry forearms.

  And the lights in the hallway jabbered on…

  EIGHTEEN

  Outside Ginny Tupper’s room at the Palo Duro Motel, an orange cat rubbed up against her door. He wasn’t feral; he acted perfectly tame, but he had perhaps been abandoned by travelers passing through. Sometimes he jumped up on the brick ledge and tapped on her window with his paws. Once she had made the mistake of inviting him in, thinking a little feline company might be entertaining, but he had made himself at home, stalking across the bed where she had been trying to organize her father’s papers. He trampled and strewed and mixed up until Ginny was able to nab him and haul him back outside.

  That was all it took, though, as far as the cat was concerned. They were friends for life, and he seemed to lurk around the parking lot until she returned to the room at night. Then he raced to intercept her between her car and the room. She usually stopped and scratched him for a couple of minutes, glad someone was there to greet her, before she went inside and closed him out.

  He was out there now, bumping against the window, letting her know he craved attention. She was intent, however, on trying to find any references in her father’s writings to pictographs that glowed or gave off heat or electrical charges. She didn’t remember any, but there were boxes and boxes to look through, some contained in notebooks, others in letters or notes scrawled on whatever he had available. She had tried to cross-reference it, but that seemed an endless task, and given the chaos of all the individual sheets of paper, hard to achieve with any finality.