Yes, the River Knows
1
October, 2024
Remy knows what the tapping on the window means.
“Remy?”
Tap tap tap…
He growls and drags the pillow down over his head.
Tap tap tap…
“Remy?”
“Go away!”
For a few blessed seconds, he thinks she does. Is certain she does. The whale of sleep swims out of the cool black depths to swallow him once again. There’d been a girl down there. She was tall and lithe and dark-haired, and in the dream she’d been standing, naked and glistening, on a riverbank. Not his river—no, this river had been wide like a lake, its waters the luminous blue of a gas flame, the far shore a distant and indistinct blur. The girl had turned and looked over her shoulder at him, and—in that glorious half-second before the tapping began—her lips curled into a thinly inviting smile.
Tap tap tap…
“Remy?”
He throws the pillow before he can stop himself. It sails the length of the 22-foot Shasta trailer, whips through the kitchenette, catches the handle of a copper tea kettle that he’d dug out of Abuelita’s pantry last year. He spent hours working on it, polishing off the grime and gently tapping out the dents, making it almost like new. It’s the one kinda cool, kinda hipstery thing he owns. It topples and hits the trailer’s linoleum floor with a BONG!
Tap tap tap…
“Remy?”
The kettle’s side will be all bashed in now and—even though he understands that it isn’t really Olivia’s fault—he allows himself a single, delicious second to imagine taking her by the neck and shoving her face into a shit-spattered toilet until she heaves and sputters and begs for him to stop.
Tap tap tap…
He rolls over and presses his face to the back window.
“Give me a minute!”
Olivia reels back, blinking. “I… uh… okay.” She holds up her hands. “No problem.”
He kicks the old Navajo blanket off himself—not caring at all that he’s naked and that she can see every dangling bit of him—and digs around next to the bed for his pants.
Remy knows what the tapping on the window means.
“Remy?”
Tap tap tap…
He growls and drags the pillow down over his head.
Tap tap tap…
“Remy?”
“Go away!”
For a few blessed seconds, he thinks she does. Is certain she does. The whale of sleep swims out of the cool black depths to swallow him once again. There’d been a girl down there. She was tall and lithe and dark-haired, and in the dream she’d been standing, naked and glistening, on a riverbank. Not his river—no, this river had been wide like a lake, its waters the luminous blue of a gas flame, the far shore a distant and indistinct blur. The girl had turned and looked over her shoulder at him, and—in that glorious half-second before the tapping began—her lips curled into a thinly inviting smile.
Tap tap tap…
“Remy?”
He throws the pillow before he can stop himself. It sails the length of the 22-foot Shasta trailer, whips through the kitchenette, catches the handle of a copper tea kettle that he’d dug out of Abuelita’s pantry last year. He spent hours working on it, polishing off the grime and gently tapping out the dents, making it almost like new. It’s the one kinda cool, kinda hipstery thing he owns. It topples and hits the trailer’s linoleum floor with a BONG!
Tap tap tap…
“Remy?”
The kettle’s side will be all bashed in now and—even though he understands that it isn’t really Olivia’s fault—he allows himself a single, delicious second to imagine taking her by the neck and shoving her face into a shit-spattered toilet until she heaves and sputters and begs for him to stop.
Tap tap tap…
He rolls over and presses his face to the back window.
“Give me a minute!”
Olivia reels back, blinking. “I… uh… okay.” She holds up her hands. “No problem.”
He kicks the old Navajo blanket off himself—not caring at all that he’s naked and that she can see every dangling bit of him—and digs around next to the bed for his pants.
#
One minute later, he slams open the Shasta’s aluminum door and thunders down the ramshackle steps to the dirt patch he supposes is his yard. He managed to pull on jeans that are only moderately stained with motor oil, along with a pair of mud-crusted black rain boots. He didn’t bother with a shirt.
Olivia stands at the mouth of a twisting dirt path that runs between his Shasta and the rest of the RV park, wearing a flannel shirt and jeans and boots that—her smaller size aside—almost exactly match his.
The sun has just started to peek shyly over the eastern Sacramento Mountains. A pair of cottonwoods flank the path, surrounded by clumps of yellow grass and tanglewood. He can smell something cooking—sausage links, eggs, maybe a ham steak. Instant Folgers boils above a camp stove.
Voices murmur beyond the trees. Someone wheezes a phlegmy laugh. The Winnebago people are almost uniformly old, and they’re always up early.
It’s not early, he thinks blearily, his gaze drifting to the corona of sunlight rimming the Sacramentos. It’s late.
The idiot squawking of snow geese fills the sky. The birds are taking their morning flight. The musical trill of sandhill cranes lays beneath that. The cranes are Remy and Olivia Herrera’s bread-and-butter; the big birds with their gray feathers and the bright red crests on their brows have just finished their southern migration from Canada back to the Bosque. The tourists have started to follow. And it’s not just the Winnebago people, neither, but families from as far away as Phoenix and Denver and Amarillo. Trust-fund hippies down from Santa Fe and Taos. Day trippers from Albuquerque and up from El Paso. They come, following the cranes, and they bring the money that keeps the park limping along for another season.
And, of course, there’s the other thing. It comes with the cranes. Or, more likely, it’s the season that brings it. It takes just a few days—a week, tops—after the cranes’ arrival for Olivia to come tapping at Remy’s window. And then he’ll have a job to do.
Here she is, like clockwork.
“Sorry,” she says.
He shakes his head; now that he’s awake, the anger has melted off like morning frost. This is no more her fault than his, and dealing with it is his responsibility. Because he’s the big brother and she’s the little sister—even if the Herreras had any patience for all that new-fangled, big-city, cable-TV wokeness that says share and share alike and the lady-folks are just as capable as the mens… well, everyone knows Olivia Herrera is a little bit dull in the brains department and far too soft-hearted for what’s got to be done now. Even Olivia knows that. And ever since Abuelita had her heart attack, and Mom and Abuelito died of the big C (Mom the kind in her tits, Abuelito the kind in his ass), and their cousin Johnny got blown up in Iraq and their little brother Diego got himself smeared to jam by that Budweiser truck outside of Datil… well, it’s just Olivia and Remy and Dad now. Dad can’t do much more than mumble through his drool and shit into his Depends and wait for Olivia to come along and clean him up. That’s on account of the stroke which dropped him like a stone six years back. So this part falls to Remy now—and will for the foreseeable future, until he or Olivia happen to get married and have a kid or two to pass the job down to. Remy wouldn’t say that’s a prospect looking altogether likely for either one of them.
He grabs the back of Olivia’s neck, roughly kisses her forehead.
“Don’t worry about it,” he says.
She wrinkles her nose and wipes his spit away. But she smiles as she does it.
“Is it still in the tent?”
“Yeah,” she says. “Or, I mean, it was. When, you know, I checked. Like. Ten minutes ago. And—”
“Yeah, okay,” he says. “I get it.”
Olivia licks her lips and nods. In the thin light, the copper skin she inherited from their Hispano mother looks like polished mahogany. Remy’s complexion is much fairer. His hair is the thinning and unimpressive red-brown of their white, redneck father.
“I’m sorry,” Olivia says again as they start up the path.
“I said don’t worry—”
“No… I mean… I’m really sorry,” Olivia says.
He stops and looks at her.
“Why?”
“This…” She licks her lips again. Won’t meet his gaze. “This one’s different.”
The geese scream. The cranes trill. Up the path, some old man barks at his granddaughter or grandniece or whatever to stop hitching up her skirt and scratching her ass and to start acting like a lady, goddamnit.
“How?”
Olivia’s eyes flick toward the path, where there’s an unremarkable—and almost unnoticeable—break in the grass. A second, mostly unseen path leads through the marsh down to the river.
To the bridge.
And, past that, to the tent.
“You’ll see,” she says.
Olivia stands at the mouth of a twisting dirt path that runs between his Shasta and the rest of the RV park, wearing a flannel shirt and jeans and boots that—her smaller size aside—almost exactly match his.
The sun has just started to peek shyly over the eastern Sacramento Mountains. A pair of cottonwoods flank the path, surrounded by clumps of yellow grass and tanglewood. He can smell something cooking—sausage links, eggs, maybe a ham steak. Instant Folgers boils above a camp stove.
Voices murmur beyond the trees. Someone wheezes a phlegmy laugh. The Winnebago people are almost uniformly old, and they’re always up early.
It’s not early, he thinks blearily, his gaze drifting to the corona of sunlight rimming the Sacramentos. It’s late.
The idiot squawking of snow geese fills the sky. The birds are taking their morning flight. The musical trill of sandhill cranes lays beneath that. The cranes are Remy and Olivia Herrera’s bread-and-butter; the big birds with their gray feathers and the bright red crests on their brows have just finished their southern migration from Canada back to the Bosque. The tourists have started to follow. And it’s not just the Winnebago people, neither, but families from as far away as Phoenix and Denver and Amarillo. Trust-fund hippies down from Santa Fe and Taos. Day trippers from Albuquerque and up from El Paso. They come, following the cranes, and they bring the money that keeps the park limping along for another season.
And, of course, there’s the other thing. It comes with the cranes. Or, more likely, it’s the season that brings it. It takes just a few days—a week, tops—after the cranes’ arrival for Olivia to come tapping at Remy’s window. And then he’ll have a job to do.
Here she is, like clockwork.
“Sorry,” she says.
He shakes his head; now that he’s awake, the anger has melted off like morning frost. This is no more her fault than his, and dealing with it is his responsibility. Because he’s the big brother and she’s the little sister—even if the Herreras had any patience for all that new-fangled, big-city, cable-TV wokeness that says share and share alike and the lady-folks are just as capable as the mens… well, everyone knows Olivia Herrera is a little bit dull in the brains department and far too soft-hearted for what’s got to be done now. Even Olivia knows that. And ever since Abuelita had her heart attack, and Mom and Abuelito died of the big C (Mom the kind in her tits, Abuelito the kind in his ass), and their cousin Johnny got blown up in Iraq and their little brother Diego got himself smeared to jam by that Budweiser truck outside of Datil… well, it’s just Olivia and Remy and Dad now. Dad can’t do much more than mumble through his drool and shit into his Depends and wait for Olivia to come along and clean him up. That’s on account of the stroke which dropped him like a stone six years back. So this part falls to Remy now—and will for the foreseeable future, until he or Olivia happen to get married and have a kid or two to pass the job down to. Remy wouldn’t say that’s a prospect looking altogether likely for either one of them.
He grabs the back of Olivia’s neck, roughly kisses her forehead.
“Don’t worry about it,” he says.
She wrinkles her nose and wipes his spit away. But she smiles as she does it.
“Is it still in the tent?”
“Yeah,” she says. “Or, I mean, it was. When, you know, I checked. Like. Ten minutes ago. And—”
“Yeah, okay,” he says. “I get it.”
Olivia licks her lips and nods. In the thin light, the copper skin she inherited from their Hispano mother looks like polished mahogany. Remy’s complexion is much fairer. His hair is the thinning and unimpressive red-brown of their white, redneck father.
“I’m sorry,” Olivia says again as they start up the path.
“I said don’t worry—”
“No… I mean… I’m really sorry,” Olivia says.
He stops and looks at her.
“Why?”
“This…” She licks her lips again. Won’t meet his gaze. “This one’s different.”
The geese scream. The cranes trill. Up the path, some old man barks at his granddaughter or grandniece or whatever to stop hitching up her skirt and scratching her ass and to start acting like a lady, goddamnit.
“How?”
Olivia’s eyes flick toward the path, where there’s an unremarkable—and almost unnoticeable—break in the grass. A second, mostly unseen path leads through the marsh down to the river.
To the bridge.
And, past that, to the tent.
“You’ll see,” she says.
2
The path between Remy’s Shasta and the RV park runs north, roughly parallel to I-25, which thunders by to the West. The Rio Grande lies to the East. The river is fifty yards or so off the path—not that you can see it through the knee-high grass and tanglewood. The cottonwoods have mostly been thinned to stumps on the river’s western bank, where most of the people are, but they rise in a gnarled and foreboding thicket on the eastern side. Beyond that lies more desert and the blasted expanse of the White Sands Missile Range, where—back in the summer of 1945—scientists detonated the world’s first atomic bomb.
Abuelito was off fighting the Germans when it happened, but Abuelita (just sixteen at the time) saw the blast and the big red cloud that followed. Mijos, she’d told a wide-eyed Remy and Olivia and Diego, I never seen a thing in all my life more terrible than that.
The horizon in both directions is a seemingly endless flatness, where blue sky joins earth at a knife’s honed edge. That flatness is interrupted here and there by mountains that bulge tumorously out of the hazy distance like warts, or cut from the ground like irregular, shattered teeth. There are the Sacramentos to the East, Timber Peak and Mount Baldy to the West. The blackened blisters of the Gilas rise to the South. You can’t see the northern Rockies from here; indeed, you’d scarcely believe they exist if someone were to describe them to you.
The river’s name conjures something majestic but, in truth, the mighty Rio Grande isn’t all that mighty. It’s not like the Mississippi, or the Columbia, or the Ohio. The river doesn’t roar. In fact, it barely flows in dry seasons. The name comes not from its width or its power to impress, but from its length; it’s a muddy brown trickle that meanders for almost two thousand miles from the high Colorado mountains down along Texas’ southern border, to its terminus at the Gulf of Mexico. It’s not until it flows past Fort Quitman—where the Conchos and Pecos and Devil Rivers piss into it—that it becomes something you might think twice about wading across.
Until then it oozes a placid, unimpressive course through the mountain valleys and gorges, and then across the imposing hardpan of the New Mexico high desert, where it’s flanked for three-hundred miles—from Santa Fe to just north of El Paso—by the swampy green ribbon of the Bosque.
Wander out into the surrounding desert and you’ll find creosote and cacti, mounds of rock and dirt, and a whole lot of death. Go into the Bosque and it seems like there’s nothing but life. It’s not just the big cottonwood trees with their droopy, leaf-leaden branches and the desert willow shrubs with their bright pink flowers. The river wetlands sprout mesquite and scrub-oak bushes, vines upon vines of poison ivy and virgin’s bower. Hackberry and graythorn and Mexican elder all flourish in the Bosque. And there are animals, too; cottontail deer with their twitching noses, North American beavers with their thumping tails, hissing bobcats and spraying skunks and quill-shooting porcupines all make uneasy home in the Bosque. The river itself holds schools of silvery minnow and rio grande sucker and alligator gar, and those ugly brown turtles known as Big Bend Sliders. Not to mention the snow geese and the cranes that bring all those tourists.
Yes. The Bosque is just full of life.
All kinds.
Abuelito was off fighting the Germans when it happened, but Abuelita (just sixteen at the time) saw the blast and the big red cloud that followed. Mijos, she’d told a wide-eyed Remy and Olivia and Diego, I never seen a thing in all my life more terrible than that.
The horizon in both directions is a seemingly endless flatness, where blue sky joins earth at a knife’s honed edge. That flatness is interrupted here and there by mountains that bulge tumorously out of the hazy distance like warts, or cut from the ground like irregular, shattered teeth. There are the Sacramentos to the East, Timber Peak and Mount Baldy to the West. The blackened blisters of the Gilas rise to the South. You can’t see the northern Rockies from here; indeed, you’d scarcely believe they exist if someone were to describe them to you.
The river’s name conjures something majestic but, in truth, the mighty Rio Grande isn’t all that mighty. It’s not like the Mississippi, or the Columbia, or the Ohio. The river doesn’t roar. In fact, it barely flows in dry seasons. The name comes not from its width or its power to impress, but from its length; it’s a muddy brown trickle that meanders for almost two thousand miles from the high Colorado mountains down along Texas’ southern border, to its terminus at the Gulf of Mexico. It’s not until it flows past Fort Quitman—where the Conchos and Pecos and Devil Rivers piss into it—that it becomes something you might think twice about wading across.
Until then it oozes a placid, unimpressive course through the mountain valleys and gorges, and then across the imposing hardpan of the New Mexico high desert, where it’s flanked for three-hundred miles—from Santa Fe to just north of El Paso—by the swampy green ribbon of the Bosque.
Wander out into the surrounding desert and you’ll find creosote and cacti, mounds of rock and dirt, and a whole lot of death. Go into the Bosque and it seems like there’s nothing but life. It’s not just the big cottonwood trees with their droopy, leaf-leaden branches and the desert willow shrubs with their bright pink flowers. The river wetlands sprout mesquite and scrub-oak bushes, vines upon vines of poison ivy and virgin’s bower. Hackberry and graythorn and Mexican elder all flourish in the Bosque. And there are animals, too; cottontail deer with their twitching noses, North American beavers with their thumping tails, hissing bobcats and spraying skunks and quill-shooting porcupines all make uneasy home in the Bosque. The river itself holds schools of silvery minnow and rio grande sucker and alligator gar, and those ugly brown turtles known as Big Bend Sliders. Not to mention the snow geese and the cranes that bring all those tourists.
Yes. The Bosque is just full of life.
All kinds.
#
The Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge—where the cranes make their summer roost—lays just south of the tiny village of San Antonio, where you can find an adobe old church, a couple gas stations, and (as everyone in Socorro and Sierra Counties knows) the world’s best green-chile cheeseburger.
The Herreras’ RV park lies a little further down I-25, in the no-man’s land between the Bosque del Apache and the looming volcanic plug of Elephant Butte, which hulks out of the surrounding man-made reservoir like the beast that lends its name.
The first Herrera to come up from Mexico was Eusébio Francisco Bherrera, a 17-year-old immigrant to Zacatecas from the Portuguese seaside region of Cabo Carvoiero. Once he arrived in the New World, Eusébio Hispanicized his name to “Herrera” and, in 1598, joined the conquistador Juan de Oñate y Salazar on that first brutal expedition along the Paseo del Norte to what would become la Provincía de Santa Fe de Nuevo México. Family lore holds that Eusébio—ill-trained as an arquebusier in Oñate’s army—fell in love with an Apache girl and dropped off near what would later become San Antonio to marry her and start a family. Others said Oñate himself expelled Eusébio for drunkenness and blasphemy, after giving him twenty lashes by his own hand.
Either way, the Herreras have been in the Bosque, working as ranchers, farmers, traders, grocers, gunfighters, mercantilers, cowboys, bandits, trappers, marshals, miners, priests, rodeo clowns, soldiers, teachers, road-crew workers, mechanics, bus drivers, warehouse foremen, politicians, restauranteurs, car salesmen, and—later—as campground and RV-park owners/managers ever since.
The old ranch house—the one Abuelito’s abuelito built in 1908, where Olivia and Dad still live—is on the river’s east side, away from the interstate, tucked in the moss-coated cottonwoods and pushing up from the river mud like a toadstool. No road connects the house to the RV park, which resides on the river’s grassy western bank. This is by design. If you want to drive directly to the ranch house, you’ve got to take a bumpy, unmarked desert trek down from US-380 that runs for miles along the chainlink fence flanking the missile range, before cutting back west into the Bosque.
A rope bridge sways across the river between the house and the hidden path. Dad strung that bridge himself, not long after he married Remy’s mother. Before that, if a man wanted to go between the house and the park, he had to wade across the river and get wet to his waist, or take a boat and risk bottoming out if it was a droughty autumn and the water was low. In truth, the bridge isn’t a whole lot better; step wrong and it’ll dump you head first into the river. It’s happened to Remy more than once.
A sign—first hand-painted on a square of plywood, then replaced by one bought at the Home Depot in Socorro—tells anyone wandering down from the park to stay off the bridge and away from the ranch house. “PRIVATE PROPERTY,” it screams, in big red-on-black letters.
The park is for the tourists and the Winnebago people. Even the birds are for them, in a way.
The house, the bridge—and the brown river that cuts like a dribble of watery shit beneath it—are not.
The Herreras’ RV park lies a little further down I-25, in the no-man’s land between the Bosque del Apache and the looming volcanic plug of Elephant Butte, which hulks out of the surrounding man-made reservoir like the beast that lends its name.
The first Herrera to come up from Mexico was Eusébio Francisco Bherrera, a 17-year-old immigrant to Zacatecas from the Portuguese seaside region of Cabo Carvoiero. Once he arrived in the New World, Eusébio Hispanicized his name to “Herrera” and, in 1598, joined the conquistador Juan de Oñate y Salazar on that first brutal expedition along the Paseo del Norte to what would become la Provincía de Santa Fe de Nuevo México. Family lore holds that Eusébio—ill-trained as an arquebusier in Oñate’s army—fell in love with an Apache girl and dropped off near what would later become San Antonio to marry her and start a family. Others said Oñate himself expelled Eusébio for drunkenness and blasphemy, after giving him twenty lashes by his own hand.
Either way, the Herreras have been in the Bosque, working as ranchers, farmers, traders, grocers, gunfighters, mercantilers, cowboys, bandits, trappers, marshals, miners, priests, rodeo clowns, soldiers, teachers, road-crew workers, mechanics, bus drivers, warehouse foremen, politicians, restauranteurs, car salesmen, and—later—as campground and RV-park owners/managers ever since.
The old ranch house—the one Abuelito’s abuelito built in 1908, where Olivia and Dad still live—is on the river’s east side, away from the interstate, tucked in the moss-coated cottonwoods and pushing up from the river mud like a toadstool. No road connects the house to the RV park, which resides on the river’s grassy western bank. This is by design. If you want to drive directly to the ranch house, you’ve got to take a bumpy, unmarked desert trek down from US-380 that runs for miles along the chainlink fence flanking the missile range, before cutting back west into the Bosque.
A rope bridge sways across the river between the house and the hidden path. Dad strung that bridge himself, not long after he married Remy’s mother. Before that, if a man wanted to go between the house and the park, he had to wade across the river and get wet to his waist, or take a boat and risk bottoming out if it was a droughty autumn and the water was low. In truth, the bridge isn’t a whole lot better; step wrong and it’ll dump you head first into the river. It’s happened to Remy more than once.
A sign—first hand-painted on a square of plywood, then replaced by one bought at the Home Depot in Socorro—tells anyone wandering down from the park to stay off the bridge and away from the ranch house. “PRIVATE PROPERTY,” it screams, in big red-on-black letters.
The park is for the tourists and the Winnebago people. Even the birds are for them, in a way.
The house, the bridge—and the brown river that cuts like a dribble of watery shit beneath it—are not.
3
October, 2006
“Remy.”
Remy grunted and rolled over. He’d been dreaming about a girl. A really hot girl. A naked girl. He didn’t want to give her up. He thought she might be waiting for him still, standing by that big blue river. If only he could get back to sleep--
“Goddamnit, boy, move your ass.”
A rough hand grasped hold of his left ankle, and before he could say goodbye to the girl—before, indeed, he could say anything—that hand yanked him from the narrow bed and dumped him to the floor.
“Ow! What?”
Dad loomed in silhouette against the crooked bedroom door. Remy couldn’t see anything through the curtains, but he could feel in his bones that it was early. TOO early--
And just like that, he understood. The sleepiness sucked off of him like smoke through a pipe.
He sat up.
“Is it—?”
Dad nodded. “Fucker’s out there makin’ a ruckus. Hurry up.”
“Yessir,” Remy said. He bounded to his feet. Excitement thrummed in him like an electrical wire. He’d just turned thirteen in August, which meant he was old enough. For what, Remy didn’t quite understand. Not yet.
But he was about to find out.
“Remy.”
Remy grunted and rolled over. He’d been dreaming about a girl. A really hot girl. A naked girl. He didn’t want to give her up. He thought she might be waiting for him still, standing by that big blue river. If only he could get back to sleep--
“Goddamnit, boy, move your ass.”
A rough hand grasped hold of his left ankle, and before he could say goodbye to the girl—before, indeed, he could say anything—that hand yanked him from the narrow bed and dumped him to the floor.
“Ow! What?”
Dad loomed in silhouette against the crooked bedroom door. Remy couldn’t see anything through the curtains, but he could feel in his bones that it was early. TOO early--
And just like that, he understood. The sleepiness sucked off of him like smoke through a pipe.
He sat up.
“Is it—?”
Dad nodded. “Fucker’s out there makin’ a ruckus. Hurry up.”
“Yessir,” Remy said. He bounded to his feet. Excitement thrummed in him like an electrical wire. He’d just turned thirteen in August, which meant he was old enough. For what, Remy didn’t quite understand. Not yet.
But he was about to find out.
#
Remy met Dad in the kitchen. Mom and Olivia still slept. Diego was awake, though, and he watched them through the sliver of his bedroom door. Dad snarled at him to “scat,” and the door snapped closed.
Abuelita sat in her rocker by the dining-room window, wrapped in a faded, white-and-turquoise woven blanket. Her iron-gray hair went every which way. Her eyes were sharp in their creases as she watched them get ready.
Remy nodded, unsmiling. Abuelita nodded back.
“Grab your heavy coat,” Dad said. “It’s cold enough to freeze the balls off a donkey out there.”
Abuelita sighed, gently disapproving. Dad ignored her, like he always did. He didn’t have much use for Abuelita, and she had less use for him. El gringo, she still called him, even after all these years. Pain-in-the-ass old bitch, he called her. They tolerated each other, just barely.
After Remy shrugged into the oversized canvas-and-down coat his mother had bought at the Salvation Army, Dad shoved a thermos into his hands. Remy hoped it was coffee, not hot chocolate. If he was old enough to do what they were about to do, then surely he was old enough for actual coffee, right?
He took a sip and frowned, disappointed.
“Come on.” Dad threw open the back door. An arctic blast coughed into the kitchen. Remy was glad for the heavy coat. He reminded himself to put on his gloves before they got going.
“Make yourself useful,” Dad said as he clomped outside, “and grab the shovel by the stairs.”
“Yessir,” Remy said. He followed.
Abuelita sat in her rocker by the dining-room window, wrapped in a faded, white-and-turquoise woven blanket. Her iron-gray hair went every which way. Her eyes were sharp in their creases as she watched them get ready.
Remy nodded, unsmiling. Abuelita nodded back.
“Grab your heavy coat,” Dad said. “It’s cold enough to freeze the balls off a donkey out there.”
Abuelita sighed, gently disapproving. Dad ignored her, like he always did. He didn’t have much use for Abuelita, and she had less use for him. El gringo, she still called him, even after all these years. Pain-in-the-ass old bitch, he called her. They tolerated each other, just barely.
After Remy shrugged into the oversized canvas-and-down coat his mother had bought at the Salvation Army, Dad shoved a thermos into his hands. Remy hoped it was coffee, not hot chocolate. If he was old enough to do what they were about to do, then surely he was old enough for actual coffee, right?
He took a sip and frowned, disappointed.
“Come on.” Dad threw open the back door. An arctic blast coughed into the kitchen. Remy was glad for the heavy coat. He reminded himself to put on his gloves before they got going.
“Make yourself useful,” Dad said as he clomped outside, “and grab the shovel by the stairs.”
“Yessir,” Remy said. He followed.
#
The sky was black, just shading to an eggplant purple above the Sacramentos. High-desert frost choked the air. It was already cold enough in October, but being this close to the river made it worse. It made the air wetter. All that wet turned to ice, and the ice turned to needles that speared past Remy’s warmest layers and dug into his skin.
Remy clutched the thermos in one gloved hand, the flat-bladed shovel in the other. Dad strode confidently through the trees, the cold white flashlight beam swaying in front of him. Remy hustled after him, picking his way more carefully through jagged clumps of grass and tangles of half-frozen vines.
About halfway between the house and the bridge, Dad stopped and turned back to Remy. His face—sheathed in a fleece muffler from the nose down—was dark, featureless. But a chip of starlight sifted down through the winter-dead canopy overhead and caught his eyes.
“Take a breath,” he said. “Make sure you’re ready. I don’t need you getting down there then having some kind of panic fit. Got it?”
Remy breathed deep. The frigid air seized his lungs as if in a tight fist and squeezed. The sensation was alarming, almost painful. But after three or four such breaths, his heart had stopped pummeling his ribs.
“It probably won’t be able to get by me,” Dad said. “But if it does, you’re gonna brain it with the shovel. You got it?”
“Yessir,” Remy said. Then: “But…”
“But what?”
“You’ve got the Mossberg back at the house,” Remy said. “Whyn’t we just—?”
“Think on it a ‘sec and then you tell me.”
Remy considered the question. He knew the answer must be glaringly obvious, but it skittered just out of reach.
Then it clicked.
“We got campers on t’other side of the river,” he said. “They hear a shot, it could be a problem.”
“Not could be,” Dad said. “WILL be. But not as big a problem as if the thing gets past and makes it across the water where someone’ll see it. So before that happens, you make sure you brain it. Pin it down and chop its ever-fucked head off if you have to. It’s not the way it’s s’posed to go, but it’ll do in a pinch. Understand?”
“Yessir,” Remy said.
“All right,” Dad said. “Let’s get it done.”
He stepped off the path and picked his way through a snarl of desert willow toward the river.
Remy followed. The dirt beneath his feet grew spongy. Icy water slurped over the soles of his boots. As they moved beneath the dead cottonwood branches, the air smelled different. Tasted different. It settled on his tongue and coated his nostrils, slimy and biological.
It was still fully dark beneath the bonelike canopy. Dad was nothing more than a suggestion of black solidity in front of him. The flashlight beam flitted over damp hillock and frost-encrusted bramble. It crawled across glistening, lichen-pelted tree trunks, slithered over tumps of black mud.
The soggy ground grew steeper, slippery, as it angled toward the river.
“Careful,” Dad muttered under his breath, more to himself than to Remy. “Careful… careful.”
Finally the ground leveled. Remy’s boots squelched into muck.
He saw the tent.
At first, it almost looked to him like a circus tent: maybe six feet tall and eight feet or more across at the base, thick and dark green, squarish and tapering to a point. It was tucked behind a big cottonwood that curved out over the river like a beckoning finger. Vines—stiffened by the winter and blackened by the night—hung from the tree’s lower branches.
Remy saw the initials—“U.S.M.C.”—stenciled across the tent’s flap. Abuelito bought it at a yard sale in Lemitar many years ago. According to him, when he’d first opened it up and crawled inside, there were bullet holes all along the backside and blood stains—dried to black and stiffened to flaky lacquer—in the far corner. Some jarhead got his ass lit up by the Cong, Abuelito said in his thick norteño accent, and croaked out his regular, snot-filled chuckle. I figured it didn’t matter none. It’d serve.
And serve it had, for longer than Remy had been alive. He’d never actually seen the tent before that night—this particular trail from the house to this spot by the river had always been forbidden, and for damn good reason. Nevertheless, the tent had been standing right here, hidden behind this tree and its drapery of vines, rotting steadily into the wet shingle and river sludge, collecting mud and mold and—not infrequently, according to Dad, when the things it birthed fought back—blood and hacked-off slabs of meat. Remy could see rips up its sides, frayed patches along the conical roof. The tent would fall apart soon and would need to be replaced. Remy was amazed it lasted as long as it did.
“Shhhh,” Dad whispered, and thrust his arm out. His hand thumped to Remy’s chest. Remy hadn’t said anything, but he didn’t bother to argue the point.
The stink was awful: swampy wetness and mildew and moist earth… and something else. Something tangy and rank, like spoiled fruit. The river itself remained silent and invisible, but Remy sensed its unsettled blackness beyond the tent and the bent cottonwood. It coursed by, meandering and oblivious.
Out past that—on the other side of all that black, no more than a quarter mile to the north—individual slivers of light violated the gloom. There was the flickering orange of a few hooded campfires, the buzzing white of electric lanterns, the cozy yellow glow of curtained windows. That was the RV park. Remy suddenly realized how exposed they actually were.
They waited. The flashlight beam trembled over the soggy flap.
Then Remy heard it: A high, anxious mewling. Like a kitten caught in a storm drain.
“Doesn’t sound too big,” Dad said.
“Yeah?” Remy said.
“Yeah.” Dad nodded. “That’s good. It’ll make it easy. Maybe. Here, set your thermos down and take the flashlight.”
Remy knelt and carefully set the thermos in a wet cluster of leaves. As he stood, Dad thrust the flashlight into his free hand.
“Keep the beam steady.” Dad unspooled a black garbage bag from his jacket pocket.
“Yessir,” Remy said, and aimed the flashlight.
“But if the fucker makes a break for it, you drop that flashlight and you fuckin’ brain it.”
“Yessir.”
The thing whined against the whispered rasp of their voices. The canvas bulged toward them, and Remy saw the unmistakable outline of a tiny, splayed hand as it pressed against the tent’s canvas side.
“Don’t you dare let it get past you and over to the trees, or into the water,” Dad said. “Then we’ll never catch the goddamned thing and Christ knows what kinda headache we’re in for.”
“Yessir.”
Dad gave him an appraising look, then sighed deeply, from his bones.
“This fuckin’ job,” he said.
He lumbered toward the tent. His boots made sucking sounds as he went.
The mewling stopped. Something ratcheted in the dark—like a tongue vibrating against the back of a throat. This was followed by a low, doglike growl. The canvas pushed toward them again. The hand raked against the canvas, fingers scratching as if trying to dig through the material.
“This fuckin’ job,” Dad repeated.
Remy clutched the thermos in one gloved hand, the flat-bladed shovel in the other. Dad strode confidently through the trees, the cold white flashlight beam swaying in front of him. Remy hustled after him, picking his way more carefully through jagged clumps of grass and tangles of half-frozen vines.
About halfway between the house and the bridge, Dad stopped and turned back to Remy. His face—sheathed in a fleece muffler from the nose down—was dark, featureless. But a chip of starlight sifted down through the winter-dead canopy overhead and caught his eyes.
“Take a breath,” he said. “Make sure you’re ready. I don’t need you getting down there then having some kind of panic fit. Got it?”
Remy breathed deep. The frigid air seized his lungs as if in a tight fist and squeezed. The sensation was alarming, almost painful. But after three or four such breaths, his heart had stopped pummeling his ribs.
“It probably won’t be able to get by me,” Dad said. “But if it does, you’re gonna brain it with the shovel. You got it?”
“Yessir,” Remy said. Then: “But…”
“But what?”
“You’ve got the Mossberg back at the house,” Remy said. “Whyn’t we just—?”
“Think on it a ‘sec and then you tell me.”
Remy considered the question. He knew the answer must be glaringly obvious, but it skittered just out of reach.
Then it clicked.
“We got campers on t’other side of the river,” he said. “They hear a shot, it could be a problem.”
“Not could be,” Dad said. “WILL be. But not as big a problem as if the thing gets past and makes it across the water where someone’ll see it. So before that happens, you make sure you brain it. Pin it down and chop its ever-fucked head off if you have to. It’s not the way it’s s’posed to go, but it’ll do in a pinch. Understand?”
“Yessir,” Remy said.
“All right,” Dad said. “Let’s get it done.”
He stepped off the path and picked his way through a snarl of desert willow toward the river.
Remy followed. The dirt beneath his feet grew spongy. Icy water slurped over the soles of his boots. As they moved beneath the dead cottonwood branches, the air smelled different. Tasted different. It settled on his tongue and coated his nostrils, slimy and biological.
It was still fully dark beneath the bonelike canopy. Dad was nothing more than a suggestion of black solidity in front of him. The flashlight beam flitted over damp hillock and frost-encrusted bramble. It crawled across glistening, lichen-pelted tree trunks, slithered over tumps of black mud.
The soggy ground grew steeper, slippery, as it angled toward the river.
“Careful,” Dad muttered under his breath, more to himself than to Remy. “Careful… careful.”
Finally the ground leveled. Remy’s boots squelched into muck.
He saw the tent.
At first, it almost looked to him like a circus tent: maybe six feet tall and eight feet or more across at the base, thick and dark green, squarish and tapering to a point. It was tucked behind a big cottonwood that curved out over the river like a beckoning finger. Vines—stiffened by the winter and blackened by the night—hung from the tree’s lower branches.
Remy saw the initials—“U.S.M.C.”—stenciled across the tent’s flap. Abuelito bought it at a yard sale in Lemitar many years ago. According to him, when he’d first opened it up and crawled inside, there were bullet holes all along the backside and blood stains—dried to black and stiffened to flaky lacquer—in the far corner. Some jarhead got his ass lit up by the Cong, Abuelito said in his thick norteño accent, and croaked out his regular, snot-filled chuckle. I figured it didn’t matter none. It’d serve.
And serve it had, for longer than Remy had been alive. He’d never actually seen the tent before that night—this particular trail from the house to this spot by the river had always been forbidden, and for damn good reason. Nevertheless, the tent had been standing right here, hidden behind this tree and its drapery of vines, rotting steadily into the wet shingle and river sludge, collecting mud and mold and—not infrequently, according to Dad, when the things it birthed fought back—blood and hacked-off slabs of meat. Remy could see rips up its sides, frayed patches along the conical roof. The tent would fall apart soon and would need to be replaced. Remy was amazed it lasted as long as it did.
“Shhhh,” Dad whispered, and thrust his arm out. His hand thumped to Remy’s chest. Remy hadn’t said anything, but he didn’t bother to argue the point.
The stink was awful: swampy wetness and mildew and moist earth… and something else. Something tangy and rank, like spoiled fruit. The river itself remained silent and invisible, but Remy sensed its unsettled blackness beyond the tent and the bent cottonwood. It coursed by, meandering and oblivious.
Out past that—on the other side of all that black, no more than a quarter mile to the north—individual slivers of light violated the gloom. There was the flickering orange of a few hooded campfires, the buzzing white of electric lanterns, the cozy yellow glow of curtained windows. That was the RV park. Remy suddenly realized how exposed they actually were.
They waited. The flashlight beam trembled over the soggy flap.
Then Remy heard it: A high, anxious mewling. Like a kitten caught in a storm drain.
“Doesn’t sound too big,” Dad said.
“Yeah?” Remy said.
“Yeah.” Dad nodded. “That’s good. It’ll make it easy. Maybe. Here, set your thermos down and take the flashlight.”
Remy knelt and carefully set the thermos in a wet cluster of leaves. As he stood, Dad thrust the flashlight into his free hand.
“Keep the beam steady.” Dad unspooled a black garbage bag from his jacket pocket.
“Yessir,” Remy said, and aimed the flashlight.
“But if the fucker makes a break for it, you drop that flashlight and you fuckin’ brain it.”
“Yessir.”
The thing whined against the whispered rasp of their voices. The canvas bulged toward them, and Remy saw the unmistakable outline of a tiny, splayed hand as it pressed against the tent’s canvas side.
“Don’t you dare let it get past you and over to the trees, or into the water,” Dad said. “Then we’ll never catch the goddamned thing and Christ knows what kinda headache we’re in for.”
“Yessir.”
Dad gave him an appraising look, then sighed deeply, from his bones.
“This fuckin’ job,” he said.
He lumbered toward the tent. His boots made sucking sounds as he went.
The mewling stopped. Something ratcheted in the dark—like a tongue vibrating against the back of a throat. This was followed by a low, doglike growl. The canvas pushed toward them again. The hand raked against the canvas, fingers scratching as if trying to dig through the material.
“This fuckin’ job,” Dad repeated.
4
October, 2024
It occurs to Remy, again, as he and his sister pick their way across the bridge toward the ranch house, that Olivia woke him up late. Before the stroke froze him to his diapers and wheelchair, Dad was always very clear that the job had to be taken care of before sunup. Otherwise, someone from the park—or maybe a random bird-watcher who’d pulled off the highway—might catch a glimpse.
If one of those people were to see Remy dragging whatever squealing thing needed to be dragged out of the tent, stuffing it into a garbage bag, maybe smacking it upside the head with a shovel or spearing it in the mouth with a sharpened stick as he wrestled it down the riverbank and into the boat—there’s no way they would understand what they were seeing. Police might be called. Warrants issued. Divers summoned.
“Why’d you get me up so late, O?”
“I had to get it some jammies,” Olivia says without hesitation.
Remy stops and turns back to look at her. The bridge swings alarmingly. He shifts his feet, grabs hold of the rope and steadies it.
“What?”
Her eyes flick away from him.
“It needed jammies. I had an old pair in the attic, but it took me awhile to find them. They were in a bag with a bunch of clothes for the Salvation Army, you know, which I been meaning to take—”
“—Wait.” He holds up a hand. The bridge swings again, less dramatic this time, the other way. “Jammies?”
“Yeah.”
“What the fuck, Olivia?”
Again: “You’ll see.”
He looks down at the river, then back at his sister. Olivia’s hair falls about her shoulders, black and lustrous. The sunlight dances all around it in dazzling shimmers. She’s beautiful, and this has always been a problem because she’s dull in the brains department and she’s soft-hearted, and the world is full of bad men. Bad men like their little brother Diego, if Remy is entirely honest with himself; Diego had been fleeing west toward the Arizona border on his Kawasaki rice rocket, running from a meth-dealing one-percent biker whose teenage daughter he’d been screwing. The biker came home one afternoon and caught the two of them red-handed. Diego went out the window, the biker rounded up the rest of his gang, and the lot of them were set to run their choppers right up Diego’s backside when he had his unexpected appointment with the Budweiser truck.
Last Remy heard, the biker’s daughter took off with some crazy hippies to a commune outside Show Low, and is right now living in some abandoned school bus out in the hardpan, crapping out babies like quarters from a Vegas slot machine. Remy isn’t going to let anything like that happen to Olivia. He’s had to shove his dad’s Mossberg under the chin of more than one handsy, crawl-eyed motherfucker and tell him to move it along down the road.
He shoves all these intrusive thoughts aside as he sets foot on the eastern bank, notices for the first time that Olivia doesn’t have a garbage bag with her. And she’s not carrying the shovel.
“O, for real, what the fuck’s going on?”
Again, she won’t meet his gaze.
“Just… you’ll see.”
It occurs to Remy, again, as he and his sister pick their way across the bridge toward the ranch house, that Olivia woke him up late. Before the stroke froze him to his diapers and wheelchair, Dad was always very clear that the job had to be taken care of before sunup. Otherwise, someone from the park—or maybe a random bird-watcher who’d pulled off the highway—might catch a glimpse.
If one of those people were to see Remy dragging whatever squealing thing needed to be dragged out of the tent, stuffing it into a garbage bag, maybe smacking it upside the head with a shovel or spearing it in the mouth with a sharpened stick as he wrestled it down the riverbank and into the boat—there’s no way they would understand what they were seeing. Police might be called. Warrants issued. Divers summoned.
“Why’d you get me up so late, O?”
“I had to get it some jammies,” Olivia says without hesitation.
Remy stops and turns back to look at her. The bridge swings alarmingly. He shifts his feet, grabs hold of the rope and steadies it.
“What?”
Her eyes flick away from him.
“It needed jammies. I had an old pair in the attic, but it took me awhile to find them. They were in a bag with a bunch of clothes for the Salvation Army, you know, which I been meaning to take—”
“—Wait.” He holds up a hand. The bridge swings again, less dramatic this time, the other way. “Jammies?”
“Yeah.”
“What the fuck, Olivia?”
Again: “You’ll see.”
He looks down at the river, then back at his sister. Olivia’s hair falls about her shoulders, black and lustrous. The sunlight dances all around it in dazzling shimmers. She’s beautiful, and this has always been a problem because she’s dull in the brains department and she’s soft-hearted, and the world is full of bad men. Bad men like their little brother Diego, if Remy is entirely honest with himself; Diego had been fleeing west toward the Arizona border on his Kawasaki rice rocket, running from a meth-dealing one-percent biker whose teenage daughter he’d been screwing. The biker came home one afternoon and caught the two of them red-handed. Diego went out the window, the biker rounded up the rest of his gang, and the lot of them were set to run their choppers right up Diego’s backside when he had his unexpected appointment with the Budweiser truck.
Last Remy heard, the biker’s daughter took off with some crazy hippies to a commune outside Show Low, and is right now living in some abandoned school bus out in the hardpan, crapping out babies like quarters from a Vegas slot machine. Remy isn’t going to let anything like that happen to Olivia. He’s had to shove his dad’s Mossberg under the chin of more than one handsy, crawl-eyed motherfucker and tell him to move it along down the road.
He shoves all these intrusive thoughts aside as he sets foot on the eastern bank, notices for the first time that Olivia doesn’t have a garbage bag with her. And she’s not carrying the shovel.
“O, for real, what the fuck’s going on?”
Again, she won’t meet his gaze.
“Just… you’ll see.”
#
A side consequence of doing this after sunup is that most of the October frost is melting off. Which means the mud and guck is all that much worse. The ground sucks almost sexually at Remy’s feet as they work their way south through the thicket of mesquite and cottonwoods that line the riverbank, trying with each step to tongue his boots loose. The air is redolent with that juicy, organic reek. And there’s a hot strangeness underneath. He knows that smell—has ever since the first time he came out here with Dad, a couple months past his thirteenth birthday. But it’s a little different this time. Fuller, somehow. Rounder. More developed.
It flashes him back to his abandoned dream: the naked girl by the big blue river, the coquettish smile, all that bright water surging past. He feels his prick trying to stiffen, so he makes himself think about that first one, with its bloodless pale skin and rubbery lips and all those spit-slick teeth yawing out of the darkness as it pawed its way up Remy’s prone body. He thinks about how it skittered, panting, toward his face. The huffing noise it made after he finally managed to hit it with the flashlight. The way it tried to scream at the end.
That deflates him.
This tent is a green camouflage Ozark Trail half-dome with an attached rain-fly. Camouflage because—even hidden behind the big arcing cottonwood and all the virgin’s bower—it’s almost visible from the RV park, if you just happened to be standing there looking south instead of north where the cranes roost. Abuelito’s old Marine Corps tent is long gone, as is its replacement. Remy picked this one up from the Walmart in Socorro two years back. He considered springing for something sturdier… but why? It’s just gonna sit out here, fouling over with mold and river filth until finally collapsing under its own rot. What does it matter if it takes two years, or four—or ten—to do so? The things using it sure don’t give two loose, runny stools what condition it’s in.
Speaking of…
Remy stops and holds out his hand. He senses Olivia lurch to a stop behind him.
He stares at the tent. It’s nestled onto a slightly elevated outcrop that juts into the river like a bent elbow. The cottonwood angles crookedly from its base, sagging out over the muddy water before curling back above the tent. Most of the leaves have fallen—both from the tree and the accompanying vines—piling in wet clumps against the tent’s curved walls, where they’re steadily turning to compost.
Remy opens his ears. Someone’s shouting from the RV park—a distant, wordless drone that means as little as the river’s idiot burble. Geese squawk. Cranes trill.
Inside the tent: nothing.
He looks at Olivia, raises his eyebrows.
You’re sure it’s in there? He mouths.
She nods.
You saw it?
She nods.
He looks back at the tent. Maybe it got out. Escaped somehow. That would be a problem.
But he can see that the flap is still zipped.
“Olivia,” he hisses. “Seriously, what the fuck is up?”
“I told you,” she mutters, and for the first time in their lives she’s talking to him like HE’s the stupid one. “This one’s different.”
Enough. If Remy has to go back to the house and get the Mossberg, he will. But for now he simply wants to know what it is he’s dealing with. He wants to understand why his sister is acting so weird.
He creeps toward the tent as slowly and as quietly as he can. Unfortunately, the way his boots squelch through the mud makes the silent approach pretty much impossible. But if anything hears him coming, it doesn’t react.
Remy kneels and tweezes the zipper between two ice-cold fingers. He ratchets it down slowly--tick… tick… tick… until a crack no more than six inches appears. He looks inside.
After a time—maybe seconds, maybe minutes—he makes a small, dismayed sound.
“Told you,” Olivia says, triumphantly.
It flashes him back to his abandoned dream: the naked girl by the big blue river, the coquettish smile, all that bright water surging past. He feels his prick trying to stiffen, so he makes himself think about that first one, with its bloodless pale skin and rubbery lips and all those spit-slick teeth yawing out of the darkness as it pawed its way up Remy’s prone body. He thinks about how it skittered, panting, toward his face. The huffing noise it made after he finally managed to hit it with the flashlight. The way it tried to scream at the end.
That deflates him.
This tent is a green camouflage Ozark Trail half-dome with an attached rain-fly. Camouflage because—even hidden behind the big arcing cottonwood and all the virgin’s bower—it’s almost visible from the RV park, if you just happened to be standing there looking south instead of north where the cranes roost. Abuelito’s old Marine Corps tent is long gone, as is its replacement. Remy picked this one up from the Walmart in Socorro two years back. He considered springing for something sturdier… but why? It’s just gonna sit out here, fouling over with mold and river filth until finally collapsing under its own rot. What does it matter if it takes two years, or four—or ten—to do so? The things using it sure don’t give two loose, runny stools what condition it’s in.
Speaking of…
Remy stops and holds out his hand. He senses Olivia lurch to a stop behind him.
He stares at the tent. It’s nestled onto a slightly elevated outcrop that juts into the river like a bent elbow. The cottonwood angles crookedly from its base, sagging out over the muddy water before curling back above the tent. Most of the leaves have fallen—both from the tree and the accompanying vines—piling in wet clumps against the tent’s curved walls, where they’re steadily turning to compost.
Remy opens his ears. Someone’s shouting from the RV park—a distant, wordless drone that means as little as the river’s idiot burble. Geese squawk. Cranes trill.
Inside the tent: nothing.
He looks at Olivia, raises his eyebrows.
You’re sure it’s in there? He mouths.
She nods.
You saw it?
She nods.
He looks back at the tent. Maybe it got out. Escaped somehow. That would be a problem.
But he can see that the flap is still zipped.
“Olivia,” he hisses. “Seriously, what the fuck is up?”
“I told you,” she mutters, and for the first time in their lives she’s talking to him like HE’s the stupid one. “This one’s different.”
Enough. If Remy has to go back to the house and get the Mossberg, he will. But for now he simply wants to know what it is he’s dealing with. He wants to understand why his sister is acting so weird.
He creeps toward the tent as slowly and as quietly as he can. Unfortunately, the way his boots squelch through the mud makes the silent approach pretty much impossible. But if anything hears him coming, it doesn’t react.
Remy kneels and tweezes the zipper between two ice-cold fingers. He ratchets it down slowly--tick… tick… tick… until a crack no more than six inches appears. He looks inside.
After a time—maybe seconds, maybe minutes—he makes a small, dismayed sound.
“Told you,” Olivia says, triumphantly.
5
October, 2006
The next fifteen seconds or so would burn themselves into Remy’s memory.
First there was Dad flinging back the flap with “U.S.M.C.” stamped on it, followed by the albino gleam of the flashlight blazing across a quivering slab of fishbelly-white skin.
There were wide eyes, milky and pink-tinged.
Thick, colorless lips tearing back from pitted, columnar teeth.
Dad lunged and tried to yank the garbage bag down over the thing’s swollen head. It spit out a catlike hiss and squirted between his legs. Dad grunted, surprised.
The thing shot toward Remy—who suddenly forgot everything Dad said and staggered backward.
The flashlight beam jittered across piglike eyes. Thick hands groped through the glare. Teeth flashed like chunks of exposed bedrock. A fleshy black mouth gaped like a wide, empty sky--
Remy meant to drop the flashlight, like Dad said to do, and swing the shovel. But something misfired in his brain and he dropped the shovel instead, then tumbled backward onto his ass. Cold mud spooged up the back of his shirt and jacket and slicked down his pants, sliming into his ass-crack like wet, probing fingers.
And then the creature was on him. Pudgy hands fumbled over his jeans, pinching his shins and cold thighs with stubby fingers. And then those fingers were tearing at his canvas jacket as the creature scrambled up his body. Its pulpous skin was freezer cold, but a terrible heat radiated from somewhere deep inside it. It snorted into Remy’s face, shoving its fetid breath up his nostrils, and he could smell that it was already rotting from the inside out.
Remy swung the flashlight without thinking. There came a meaty thwack and a plastic crunch. The lens shattered. The darkness that fell was total, and infinite, and suffocating.
The thing made a huffing sound and toppled away from him, taking its noxious warmth and spoiled-fruit stench with it. Remy pushed to his knees, dimly hearing its wet, blubbery snorts as it thrashed in the mud.
“Hit it again!” Dad shouted. Except it wasn’t a shout at all, but rather a toneless stage whisper. Because of the RV people.
Remy tried to blink back the darkness. Dad was nothing but a sort-of shape off to his right. But he could see the thing in the mud: squirming flashes of reflected starlight, smeared with black. It was on its back and trying to scoot away from him. Slither into the river maybe.
Remy raised the flashlight and brought it down again. He meant to cave in the creature’s skull with the flashlight—which was one of the those heavy MAG-lites, like what cops used—but he missed and the metal tube thumped off the thing’s doughy belly. It made a whoofing sound and curled into a fetal ball.
Then Dad was there, and he was grabbing the thing by an ankle. Remy dimly remembered how he himself had been so unceremoniously yanked from bed that morning, and he had to fight back the manic giggles that tried to bubble out of him like lava.
Dad picked the thing up shoved it into the garbage bag, looped the end around itself into a quick and dirty knot. The creature made a disgruntled moan and fell silent.
Dad and Remy knelt there panting, hands on their knees. The morning had gone from black to a slatey blue. The eastern horizon, where the blunted saw-teeth of the Sacramentos chewed roughly into the sky, glowed reddish orange.
As if on cue, Remy heard the blissful warble of the awakening cranes.
“Sorry,” he coughed. “I messed up.” He looked down at the flashlight and its unsalvageable lens. “I… uh, I broke it.”
But Dad simply dropped a mud-smeared hand to Remy’s shoulder and squeezed.
“Nah, Remy,” he said. Remy’s heart swelled. Dad reserved the use of his actual name for either the severest scolding or the rarest praise. “You did good. Goddamned thing got away from me, just like I said it wouldn’t, and it went right for you. Hell, I don’t think I’da done half as good if that happened my first time.”
“Really?”
“Sure. And I was twenty six, not thirteen, when your granddad first took me down here.” Dad chuckled. “Remember, I married into this mess.”
Remy looked at the garbage bag. It lay on the ground at Dad’s side. It moved a little, the plastic crinkling in and out like a gently expanding lung. The thing inside was stunned, but certainly not dead. Not yet.
“Would it have…?”
Remy didn’t know how to finish.
Dad shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Thing was more scared than anything, and when an animal’s scared who knows what it’ll do. But it wasn’t tryin’ to hurt you. It was just tryin’ to get away.”
Remy thought about what exactly he’d seen. The thing only presented itself to his memory in night-fractured pieces. But what he recalled was disconcertingly human—like a half-formed, albino toddler. Except for those teeth. He’d been told pretty much what to expect, but the teeth stood out to him. He didn’t know it would have teeth like that.
“Animal,” he muttered, unsure.
Dad squeezed his shoulder again.
“An animal, yes,” he insisted. “That’s all it is. All any of ‘em are.”
Remy glanced at the tent. The flap gaped like a weird, sideways mouth.
Or a birth canal, he thought. His mind turned to Patrick Potrillo—who wasn’t, like, any sort of reliable source or anything. Pat told him last year he’d actually watched a video of his older sister giving birth to his nephew. Her pussy was all, like, OPEN, Pat said, and grinned evilly at the shocked look on Remy’s face. It was, like, black inside. And then… all of a sudden…
The thing in the bag twitched. It made that pathetic, kittenish mewling again. From upriver, the geese took flight and began their squawking. The cranes continued their murmured conversations.
The RV people would be coming out soon with their cameras and binoculars.
“Come on,” Dad said, and stood. He snatched the garbage bag out of the mud. “Let’s finish this up and get on back. Maybe your gramma’ll scramble you up a coupla eggs when we’re done. You know she got all that fresh chorizo last week over’ta the farmer’s market in Magdalena.”
Remy wrenched his eyes away from the tent flap. He felt suddenly sick to his stomach.
The next fifteen seconds or so would burn themselves into Remy’s memory.
First there was Dad flinging back the flap with “U.S.M.C.” stamped on it, followed by the albino gleam of the flashlight blazing across a quivering slab of fishbelly-white skin.
There were wide eyes, milky and pink-tinged.
Thick, colorless lips tearing back from pitted, columnar teeth.
Dad lunged and tried to yank the garbage bag down over the thing’s swollen head. It spit out a catlike hiss and squirted between his legs. Dad grunted, surprised.
The thing shot toward Remy—who suddenly forgot everything Dad said and staggered backward.
The flashlight beam jittered across piglike eyes. Thick hands groped through the glare. Teeth flashed like chunks of exposed bedrock. A fleshy black mouth gaped like a wide, empty sky--
Remy meant to drop the flashlight, like Dad said to do, and swing the shovel. But something misfired in his brain and he dropped the shovel instead, then tumbled backward onto his ass. Cold mud spooged up the back of his shirt and jacket and slicked down his pants, sliming into his ass-crack like wet, probing fingers.
And then the creature was on him. Pudgy hands fumbled over his jeans, pinching his shins and cold thighs with stubby fingers. And then those fingers were tearing at his canvas jacket as the creature scrambled up his body. Its pulpous skin was freezer cold, but a terrible heat radiated from somewhere deep inside it. It snorted into Remy’s face, shoving its fetid breath up his nostrils, and he could smell that it was already rotting from the inside out.
Remy swung the flashlight without thinking. There came a meaty thwack and a plastic crunch. The lens shattered. The darkness that fell was total, and infinite, and suffocating.
The thing made a huffing sound and toppled away from him, taking its noxious warmth and spoiled-fruit stench with it. Remy pushed to his knees, dimly hearing its wet, blubbery snorts as it thrashed in the mud.
“Hit it again!” Dad shouted. Except it wasn’t a shout at all, but rather a toneless stage whisper. Because of the RV people.
Remy tried to blink back the darkness. Dad was nothing but a sort-of shape off to his right. But he could see the thing in the mud: squirming flashes of reflected starlight, smeared with black. It was on its back and trying to scoot away from him. Slither into the river maybe.
Remy raised the flashlight and brought it down again. He meant to cave in the creature’s skull with the flashlight—which was one of the those heavy MAG-lites, like what cops used—but he missed and the metal tube thumped off the thing’s doughy belly. It made a whoofing sound and curled into a fetal ball.
Then Dad was there, and he was grabbing the thing by an ankle. Remy dimly remembered how he himself had been so unceremoniously yanked from bed that morning, and he had to fight back the manic giggles that tried to bubble out of him like lava.
Dad picked the thing up shoved it into the garbage bag, looped the end around itself into a quick and dirty knot. The creature made a disgruntled moan and fell silent.
Dad and Remy knelt there panting, hands on their knees. The morning had gone from black to a slatey blue. The eastern horizon, where the blunted saw-teeth of the Sacramentos chewed roughly into the sky, glowed reddish orange.
As if on cue, Remy heard the blissful warble of the awakening cranes.
“Sorry,” he coughed. “I messed up.” He looked down at the flashlight and its unsalvageable lens. “I… uh, I broke it.”
But Dad simply dropped a mud-smeared hand to Remy’s shoulder and squeezed.
“Nah, Remy,” he said. Remy’s heart swelled. Dad reserved the use of his actual name for either the severest scolding or the rarest praise. “You did good. Goddamned thing got away from me, just like I said it wouldn’t, and it went right for you. Hell, I don’t think I’da done half as good if that happened my first time.”
“Really?”
“Sure. And I was twenty six, not thirteen, when your granddad first took me down here.” Dad chuckled. “Remember, I married into this mess.”
Remy looked at the garbage bag. It lay on the ground at Dad’s side. It moved a little, the plastic crinkling in and out like a gently expanding lung. The thing inside was stunned, but certainly not dead. Not yet.
“Would it have…?”
Remy didn’t know how to finish.
Dad shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Thing was more scared than anything, and when an animal’s scared who knows what it’ll do. But it wasn’t tryin’ to hurt you. It was just tryin’ to get away.”
Remy thought about what exactly he’d seen. The thing only presented itself to his memory in night-fractured pieces. But what he recalled was disconcertingly human—like a half-formed, albino toddler. Except for those teeth. He’d been told pretty much what to expect, but the teeth stood out to him. He didn’t know it would have teeth like that.
“Animal,” he muttered, unsure.
Dad squeezed his shoulder again.
“An animal, yes,” he insisted. “That’s all it is. All any of ‘em are.”
Remy glanced at the tent. The flap gaped like a weird, sideways mouth.
Or a birth canal, he thought. His mind turned to Patrick Potrillo—who wasn’t, like, any sort of reliable source or anything. Pat told him last year he’d actually watched a video of his older sister giving birth to his nephew. Her pussy was all, like, OPEN, Pat said, and grinned evilly at the shocked look on Remy’s face. It was, like, black inside. And then… all of a sudden…
The thing in the bag twitched. It made that pathetic, kittenish mewling again. From upriver, the geese took flight and began their squawking. The cranes continued their murmured conversations.
The RV people would be coming out soon with their cameras and binoculars.
“Come on,” Dad said, and stood. He snatched the garbage bag out of the mud. “Let’s finish this up and get on back. Maybe your gramma’ll scramble you up a coupla eggs when we’re done. You know she got all that fresh chorizo last week over’ta the farmer’s market in Magdalena.”
Remy wrenched his eyes away from the tent flap. He felt suddenly sick to his stomach.
6
October, 2024
The Ozark tent is camo-green, which turns the morning light inside into a sort of emerald glow. A smell reeks out through the six-inch opening: sour and earthy, like mold, dirt, and spoiled milk all mixed together.
But there’s something else—something new and muskily sensual, that makes him think of sweat-slickened sheets and hot-breathed kisses and the oily swell of a breast pressed against his chest. Again, Remy feels that not-so-subtle stiffening in his jeans, as his body responds pheremonically to this under-scent.
The girl lies in a fetal position on her side, her back to him. She’s put on the pajamas that Olivia brought her; they’re red and flannel and at least a full size too big. He can see why Olivia didn’t bother with a garbage bag. The girl is small, but—even curled up like she is—he can see she’s at least the size of a teenager.
What’s more, she has a full head of dark brown hair, pooling in oily tangles around her shoulders.
The fact that she actually put the pajamas on is a disturbing new development. It suggests something like intent. Human-like thought. And that throws open a window onto something that no one in the family had ever stopped to consider before.
An animal, yes, Dad had said. That’s all they are.
Abuelito had explained it to Remy, years before he came out that first time with Dad. Every autumn, going back untold generations, Abuelito said, right around when the cranes return, there’s this one spot by the river, and it coughs up something. At least one something a year… a half-formed, subhuman thing that squeals and kicks and needs to be taken care of before it gets loose and causes the Lord-only-knows what kind of havoc.
It’s like the mud itself is trying to make a person, Abuelito reasoned, but has never quite figured out how to do it right.
And, going back untold generations, it’s been up to the Herrera men to do what needs to be done. Probably since the Eusébio Bherrera himself came up with Oñate. Every so often there are no Herrera men—they’ve all been killed in a war, or felled by a sickness like what happened in 1919, or the Herrera patriarchs sire only girls like what happened in 1843—and then it’s up to whatever husbands the Herrera women manage to bring into the family. When that happens, to keep the tradition going, the husbands surrender their names and the children stay Herreras. That’s the price a man pays for marrying into this family.
That, and doing what needs to be done by the river.
At first, Abuelito said, they hung Navajo blankets from the branches of the bent cottonwood to hide what came out of the mud. Then someone built a lean-to out of logs and strips of canvas. That blew down at some point. It was Abuelito’s idea to try a tent.
Part of the unspoken deal, as far as Remy has always understood it, is that the… the things… are always abominations. Twisted, misshapen, and incomplete. Never once, as far as Remy knows, has the river ever given them something even close to an entire person. To do so would be the rankest sort of betrayal. It’s simply never happened.
Until now.
Remy swallows.
“Hey,” he says.
The girl doesn’t move.
He clears his throat.
“Hey.”
This time she seems to hear him. Her shoulders rolls toward him, and before he catches sight of her face he thinks please please please let it be some kind of fucked up mess, something WRONG--
But the horror of it is that it’s just a girl. A pretty girl: petite, maybe twenty, maybe a little younger, blinking at him, with neither fear nor much in the way of curiosity. It’s like she already knows him. And there’s that under-scent beneath the river’s vegetable corrosion—that almost-sweet redolence, that unspoken invitation—and now he’s not just stiff but hard, so hard that he’s straining against his jeans, so hard that it hurts.
Something nips at him—a foggy almost-memory. Something about another river, a bigger river, and someone now only half-remembered. She’s looking over her shoulder and she’s smiling, and the reflection of azure water glistens on perfect skin beneath a bright and beguiling sun.
The girl--this girl—sits up. She looks at him and blinks. He can’t quite tell in the tent’s green darkness, but he thinks she might have two pairs of eyelids—a whatchamacallit, a nictating membrane. Like a snake. Or maybe, beneath the undeniable arousal that’s making his head swim, he’s just freaking himself out.
“Um,” he says. “Hi there.”
“Umhithere,” she parrots back, and he jumps. Her voice is raspy—a reptilian croak—but not unalluring in its way.
“Told you,” Olivia says again from behind him. Remy ignores her.
The girl blinks again. He was definitely right about her eyelids. And—even though it’s still blazing green inside the tent—he can see that the eyes themselves are ice-chip blue.
They’re studying him now.
Christ, Remy thinks.
Because he wants her.
What the fuck do I do?
The Ozark tent is camo-green, which turns the morning light inside into a sort of emerald glow. A smell reeks out through the six-inch opening: sour and earthy, like mold, dirt, and spoiled milk all mixed together.
But there’s something else—something new and muskily sensual, that makes him think of sweat-slickened sheets and hot-breathed kisses and the oily swell of a breast pressed against his chest. Again, Remy feels that not-so-subtle stiffening in his jeans, as his body responds pheremonically to this under-scent.
The girl lies in a fetal position on her side, her back to him. She’s put on the pajamas that Olivia brought her; they’re red and flannel and at least a full size too big. He can see why Olivia didn’t bother with a garbage bag. The girl is small, but—even curled up like she is—he can see she’s at least the size of a teenager.
What’s more, she has a full head of dark brown hair, pooling in oily tangles around her shoulders.
The fact that she actually put the pajamas on is a disturbing new development. It suggests something like intent. Human-like thought. And that throws open a window onto something that no one in the family had ever stopped to consider before.
An animal, yes, Dad had said. That’s all they are.
Abuelito had explained it to Remy, years before he came out that first time with Dad. Every autumn, going back untold generations, Abuelito said, right around when the cranes return, there’s this one spot by the river, and it coughs up something. At least one something a year… a half-formed, subhuman thing that squeals and kicks and needs to be taken care of before it gets loose and causes the Lord-only-knows what kind of havoc.
It’s like the mud itself is trying to make a person, Abuelito reasoned, but has never quite figured out how to do it right.
And, going back untold generations, it’s been up to the Herrera men to do what needs to be done. Probably since the Eusébio Bherrera himself came up with Oñate. Every so often there are no Herrera men—they’ve all been killed in a war, or felled by a sickness like what happened in 1919, or the Herrera patriarchs sire only girls like what happened in 1843—and then it’s up to whatever husbands the Herrera women manage to bring into the family. When that happens, to keep the tradition going, the husbands surrender their names and the children stay Herreras. That’s the price a man pays for marrying into this family.
That, and doing what needs to be done by the river.
At first, Abuelito said, they hung Navajo blankets from the branches of the bent cottonwood to hide what came out of the mud. Then someone built a lean-to out of logs and strips of canvas. That blew down at some point. It was Abuelito’s idea to try a tent.
Part of the unspoken deal, as far as Remy has always understood it, is that the… the things… are always abominations. Twisted, misshapen, and incomplete. Never once, as far as Remy knows, has the river ever given them something even close to an entire person. To do so would be the rankest sort of betrayal. It’s simply never happened.
Until now.
Remy swallows.
“Hey,” he says.
The girl doesn’t move.
He clears his throat.
“Hey.”
This time she seems to hear him. Her shoulders rolls toward him, and before he catches sight of her face he thinks please please please let it be some kind of fucked up mess, something WRONG--
But the horror of it is that it’s just a girl. A pretty girl: petite, maybe twenty, maybe a little younger, blinking at him, with neither fear nor much in the way of curiosity. It’s like she already knows him. And there’s that under-scent beneath the river’s vegetable corrosion—that almost-sweet redolence, that unspoken invitation—and now he’s not just stiff but hard, so hard that he’s straining against his jeans, so hard that it hurts.
Something nips at him—a foggy almost-memory. Something about another river, a bigger river, and someone now only half-remembered. She’s looking over her shoulder and she’s smiling, and the reflection of azure water glistens on perfect skin beneath a bright and beguiling sun.
The girl--this girl—sits up. She looks at him and blinks. He can’t quite tell in the tent’s green darkness, but he thinks she might have two pairs of eyelids—a whatchamacallit, a nictating membrane. Like a snake. Or maybe, beneath the undeniable arousal that’s making his head swim, he’s just freaking himself out.
“Um,” he says. “Hi there.”
“Umhithere,” she parrots back, and he jumps. Her voice is raspy—a reptilian croak—but not unalluring in its way.
“Told you,” Olivia says again from behind him. Remy ignores her.
The girl blinks again. He was definitely right about her eyelids. And—even though it’s still blazing green inside the tent—he can see that the eyes themselves are ice-chip blue.
They’re studying him now.
Christ, Remy thinks.
Because he wants her.
What the fuck do I do?
7
October, 2006
Dad left the boat tied to a post jutting into the water just beneath the bridge.
By the time Dad and Remy approached it, the sun had fully crested the Sacramentos and the sky had gone from deep blue to a bloodless, empty gray. The geese were screaming, the cranes were fluting, and the RV people would be enchanted by all their flapping and sunning and—hopefully—wouldn’t notice the little boat drifting into the muddy, birdless marshes.
Dad threw the garbage bag up by the prow. It thunked to the floor and the thing inside grunted. Remy could see it trying to push through the plastic with its blunt fingers.
Dad climbed awkwardly into the boat. Remy followed. “All right,” Dad said and he sat at the prow and put a booted foot on the garbage bag. He handed the oar to Remy. “Push off.”
Remy did. They slid through reeds and clumps of wet grasses that grasped at the hull like the eager arms of sea anemones. Remy worked the oar up and down, up and down, through the murky brown water.
After a few minutes, the screaming of the geese dwindled to a distant warble. The cranes had long since faded. Now there was nothing but the gentle creak of wood and the thirsty slosh of the river.
“This next part…” Dad said, breaking the silence, and then fell quiet again.
“Yeah?”
Dad sighed.
“I’ll handle this next part.”
Remy thought back to how excited he’d been that morning. He knew this one kid at school up in Socorro. Stevie Kaplan. Stevie was a Jew. Maybe the only Jew in the whole county. Remy didn’t really know what that meant except that his family was from Chicago and that Stevie didn’t believe in Jesus. Stevie got to have this big party when he turned thirteen called a bar mitzvah. According to Stevie, the party meant that he was a man now. That mean you gonna have strippers and shit at your bar whatever? Pat Potrillo asked. Stevie laughed and said Jesus, I wish. Mostly I have to stand there and read a bunch of crap in Hebrew. Pat said what’s Hebrew? and at that point Remy lost interest. But he thought about that now, how the bar mitzvah meant that Stevie was a man. Because he saw the defeated way Dad was looking at him and he thought, this is my bar mitzvah. And all he got for it was the privilege of spending the next sixty years or so having to come out here by the river and clubbing some… some thing… into submission and then taking it to the water and…
The thing in the bag made a strange, chattering cry. It thumped the bottom of the boat.
“Over here,” Dad said, and nodded toward a deep spot near the shore, where the river had chewed away at the muddy bank. That—along with a haphazard tumble of rocks and an ancient fallen cottonwood—formed a semicircular, stagnant lagoon. The lagoon was maybe twenty feet in diameter. The water hardly flowed there; it just sort of idled about in a counter-clockwise loop, like a half-assed whirlpool. It lost its muddy complexion and took on an intense, mossy hue. “That’s the spot.”
“Always?”
“Always, ever since the Apaches had this land. Or so your granddad told me. Go ahead and steer right over into the middle there.”
“So…” Remy asked, as he worked the boat around the gnarled, petrified tangle of the cottonwood’s root ball, “this was the Apaches’ job before our people got here, then?”
Dad thought about it.
“I suppose it musta been,” he said. “Or maybe they just let it happen and didn’t worry about it none. Them bein’ Indians, they coulda seen it as just a part of nature, I guess. To your Ma’s folks it were all tied up with the devil.”
Remy heard something in Dad’s voice on the last word: a dissonant note, like a guitar chord played just slightly flat. Before he could stop himself, he asked “but that ain’t what you think?”
Dad frowned. He didn’t say anything at first, just watched as Remy oared the boat through the looping current and into the center of the lagoon.
“I made my peace with it,” he said finally. “All right. Here’s good.”
Remy pulled the oar out of the water.
The thing in the bag was wriggling now. Like it knew. Remy could see the outlines of its sausage fingers, pushing against the plastic in an effort to free itself. It wasn’t mewling so much now as keening a disconcertingly human-like warble. Remy could hear the desperation. The fear. It practically dripped off the long, wordless syllables like wax.
“Don’t turn away,” Dad said. “You watch the whole goddamned thing. Soon enough, you’re gonna be the one out here doing this, without me. Best you get used to it now.”
Remy licked his lips and nodded.
“And remember... it’s just an animal. Hell, it’s not even that. It’s a… a wrongness. Just a deep wrongness, and we’re making it right. Got it?”
Remy nodded again.
Apparently satisfied, Dad loosened the knot and upended the garbage bag.
The creature spilled to the bottom of the boat, landing on its stomach with its arms and legs splayed out. Even in the fullness of the morning light—Remy couldn’t quite settle it in his vision. Again, he had the sense of something like a deformed, albino toddler. But when it turned its face up to him—piggy eyes leaking greenish tears and lips twisted into a sneer—so unnatural was it that Remy’s rational mind tried to push the image away—tried to insist on its negation, its fundamental nonexistence.
And then Dad grabbed it under the armpits and held it above his head. Remy flashed nonsensically onto the opening scene from The Lion King, when the baboon priest holds up Simba for all the jungle animals to see. Except the thing in Dad’s hands had a massive, hairless cock dangling between its wriggling legs like the fat tail of a gila monster. The idea of this atrocity appearing in a Disney movie was so preposterous that Remy actually heard himself cackle.
The thing’s mouth fell open, revealing that black maw and all those slab-like, pitted teeth. A tongue wriggled around in there, thumping against the roof of the creature’s mouth like a soft mallet. It tried to scream. Before it could utter more than a squeak, however, Dad thrust it into the river.
“Don’t you look away,” Dad said again, holding the creature beneath the green-black water. Remy watched it thrash: a whitish blob of thrusting arms and legs and a lunatic spray of bubbles. He could hear it trying to scream under the water, but the sound came out as a gurgling sputter.
“You just keep watching,” Dad repeated.
“I am,” Remy said. And he was. He couldn’t have looked away even if someone set off a stick of dynamite behind him.
Finally, after what could only be a minute or two but what seemed like hours, the thing stopped thrashing. Its arms and legs floated free. Its mouth hung wide and slack, an inch or two beneath the surface. Its tongue protruded like a purple worm. Remy could see those pink eyes staring up through the ripples and into nothing.
“Okay then,” Dad said, and let go.
The creature sank into dark, verdant depths. After no more than two or three seconds, it was gone.
Remy would dispose of many, many other such monstrosities in the years to come, and in much the same way. Some of them fought back, and fought back hard. Others were dead before they even got to the lagoon. Some were bigger—fifty, even sixty pounds—and one was so small it was hardly the size of a kitten. Some had three arms, or four legs, insectile rows of black eyes, many sets of gnashing mouths. Some had penises, others vaginas, and a few were so smooth and featureless between their legs they might as well have been plastic dolls.
But he never forgot that first one, with its big teeth and its pink, piggy eyes. And when, infrequently, he dreamed of his and his father’s autumn duties, it was always those pink eyes he saw glittering wetly in the hydrous darkness, and it was always those pink eyes he brought back with him into the dry, waking light.
Dad left the boat tied to a post jutting into the water just beneath the bridge.
By the time Dad and Remy approached it, the sun had fully crested the Sacramentos and the sky had gone from deep blue to a bloodless, empty gray. The geese were screaming, the cranes were fluting, and the RV people would be enchanted by all their flapping and sunning and—hopefully—wouldn’t notice the little boat drifting into the muddy, birdless marshes.
Dad threw the garbage bag up by the prow. It thunked to the floor and the thing inside grunted. Remy could see it trying to push through the plastic with its blunt fingers.
Dad climbed awkwardly into the boat. Remy followed. “All right,” Dad said and he sat at the prow and put a booted foot on the garbage bag. He handed the oar to Remy. “Push off.”
Remy did. They slid through reeds and clumps of wet grasses that grasped at the hull like the eager arms of sea anemones. Remy worked the oar up and down, up and down, through the murky brown water.
After a few minutes, the screaming of the geese dwindled to a distant warble. The cranes had long since faded. Now there was nothing but the gentle creak of wood and the thirsty slosh of the river.
“This next part…” Dad said, breaking the silence, and then fell quiet again.
“Yeah?”
Dad sighed.
“I’ll handle this next part.”
Remy thought back to how excited he’d been that morning. He knew this one kid at school up in Socorro. Stevie Kaplan. Stevie was a Jew. Maybe the only Jew in the whole county. Remy didn’t really know what that meant except that his family was from Chicago and that Stevie didn’t believe in Jesus. Stevie got to have this big party when he turned thirteen called a bar mitzvah. According to Stevie, the party meant that he was a man now. That mean you gonna have strippers and shit at your bar whatever? Pat Potrillo asked. Stevie laughed and said Jesus, I wish. Mostly I have to stand there and read a bunch of crap in Hebrew. Pat said what’s Hebrew? and at that point Remy lost interest. But he thought about that now, how the bar mitzvah meant that Stevie was a man. Because he saw the defeated way Dad was looking at him and he thought, this is my bar mitzvah. And all he got for it was the privilege of spending the next sixty years or so having to come out here by the river and clubbing some… some thing… into submission and then taking it to the water and…
The thing in the bag made a strange, chattering cry. It thumped the bottom of the boat.
“Over here,” Dad said, and nodded toward a deep spot near the shore, where the river had chewed away at the muddy bank. That—along with a haphazard tumble of rocks and an ancient fallen cottonwood—formed a semicircular, stagnant lagoon. The lagoon was maybe twenty feet in diameter. The water hardly flowed there; it just sort of idled about in a counter-clockwise loop, like a half-assed whirlpool. It lost its muddy complexion and took on an intense, mossy hue. “That’s the spot.”
“Always?”
“Always, ever since the Apaches had this land. Or so your granddad told me. Go ahead and steer right over into the middle there.”
“So…” Remy asked, as he worked the boat around the gnarled, petrified tangle of the cottonwood’s root ball, “this was the Apaches’ job before our people got here, then?”
Dad thought about it.
“I suppose it musta been,” he said. “Or maybe they just let it happen and didn’t worry about it none. Them bein’ Indians, they coulda seen it as just a part of nature, I guess. To your Ma’s folks it were all tied up with the devil.”
Remy heard something in Dad’s voice on the last word: a dissonant note, like a guitar chord played just slightly flat. Before he could stop himself, he asked “but that ain’t what you think?”
Dad frowned. He didn’t say anything at first, just watched as Remy oared the boat through the looping current and into the center of the lagoon.
“I made my peace with it,” he said finally. “All right. Here’s good.”
Remy pulled the oar out of the water.
The thing in the bag was wriggling now. Like it knew. Remy could see the outlines of its sausage fingers, pushing against the plastic in an effort to free itself. It wasn’t mewling so much now as keening a disconcertingly human-like warble. Remy could hear the desperation. The fear. It practically dripped off the long, wordless syllables like wax.
“Don’t turn away,” Dad said. “You watch the whole goddamned thing. Soon enough, you’re gonna be the one out here doing this, without me. Best you get used to it now.”
Remy licked his lips and nodded.
“And remember... it’s just an animal. Hell, it’s not even that. It’s a… a wrongness. Just a deep wrongness, and we’re making it right. Got it?”
Remy nodded again.
Apparently satisfied, Dad loosened the knot and upended the garbage bag.
The creature spilled to the bottom of the boat, landing on its stomach with its arms and legs splayed out. Even in the fullness of the morning light—Remy couldn’t quite settle it in his vision. Again, he had the sense of something like a deformed, albino toddler. But when it turned its face up to him—piggy eyes leaking greenish tears and lips twisted into a sneer—so unnatural was it that Remy’s rational mind tried to push the image away—tried to insist on its negation, its fundamental nonexistence.
And then Dad grabbed it under the armpits and held it above his head. Remy flashed nonsensically onto the opening scene from The Lion King, when the baboon priest holds up Simba for all the jungle animals to see. Except the thing in Dad’s hands had a massive, hairless cock dangling between its wriggling legs like the fat tail of a gila monster. The idea of this atrocity appearing in a Disney movie was so preposterous that Remy actually heard himself cackle.
The thing’s mouth fell open, revealing that black maw and all those slab-like, pitted teeth. A tongue wriggled around in there, thumping against the roof of the creature’s mouth like a soft mallet. It tried to scream. Before it could utter more than a squeak, however, Dad thrust it into the river.
“Don’t you look away,” Dad said again, holding the creature beneath the green-black water. Remy watched it thrash: a whitish blob of thrusting arms and legs and a lunatic spray of bubbles. He could hear it trying to scream under the water, but the sound came out as a gurgling sputter.
“You just keep watching,” Dad repeated.
“I am,” Remy said. And he was. He couldn’t have looked away even if someone set off a stick of dynamite behind him.
Finally, after what could only be a minute or two but what seemed like hours, the thing stopped thrashing. Its arms and legs floated free. Its mouth hung wide and slack, an inch or two beneath the surface. Its tongue protruded like a purple worm. Remy could see those pink eyes staring up through the ripples and into nothing.
“Okay then,” Dad said, and let go.
The creature sank into dark, verdant depths. After no more than two or three seconds, it was gone.
Remy would dispose of many, many other such monstrosities in the years to come, and in much the same way. Some of them fought back, and fought back hard. Others were dead before they even got to the lagoon. Some were bigger—fifty, even sixty pounds—and one was so small it was hardly the size of a kitten. Some had three arms, or four legs, insectile rows of black eyes, many sets of gnashing mouths. Some had penises, others vaginas, and a few were so smooth and featureless between their legs they might as well have been plastic dolls.
But he never forgot that first one, with its big teeth and its pink, piggy eyes. And when, infrequently, he dreamed of his and his father’s autumn duties, it was always those pink eyes he saw glittering wetly in the hydrous darkness, and it was always those pink eyes he brought back with him into the dry, waking light.
8
October, 2024
Remy and the girl—or the thing that looks like a girl—float down the river and into the brindled shadows of the cottonwoods.
She crouches on the boat’s splintered and waterlogged center bench, her arms wrapped around her knees. She doesn’t look at him; in fact, seems to be barely aware of his presence. Remy sits at the stern, moving the oar silently through the water.
He studies her.
She’d come with him easily enough. He spent some time puzzling over how to get her out of the tent before simply unzipping the flap, reaching in and taking her hand. He expected her to snatch the hand back and cringe away from him—or maybe hiss and spit and attack like some of the others had done. But she didn’t. She simply stood and followed him.
Olivia wanted to come with them, but he sternly ordered her to stay behind. “What’re you going to do?” she’d asked. Remy saw the pinched look on her face and remembered the time they came across a stray mutt in the Super Mart parking lot in Socorro. There was no shortage of feral dogs around there, but for some reason that one laid hooks in her heart—probably because it was so obviously terrified as it huddled, shivering, beneath the wooden crate by the front door that held all the Halloween pumpkins. It was some sort of terrier mix, patched brown and white, and Olivia wanted to take the thing home. Dad said no, absolutely fucking not, no way am I gonna have that mangy goddamned thing begging for scraps at my fucking dinner table, nuh uh, no way, you drop it right now Miss Olivia. Olivia got that same look on her face, and kept it there for a week even after they left and the dog disappeared to wherever frightened dogs disappear to when you’re not looking. That look wasn’t petulance, exactly, or anger, or defiance—none of which were emotions Olivia held abundantly in her limited psychological reservoir. It was fear. Olivia wanted to take the dog because she was afraid of what would happen to it if they didn’t.
And now she was afraid of what was going to happen to the girl.
It’s not a girl, Remy reminded himself, and if he doubted that he needed only look at her and see that double, ophidian blink as she gazed—with something like wonder—into the frosty gray sky.
“I’m going to do what I’ve gotta do, O,” he said. “This doesn’t change anything.”
He could see that Olivia wanted to argue with him, but she couldn’t find the words. So he’d led the girl-thing to the boat and left his sister, sputtering, on the path.
This doesn’t change anything, he’d said. But as he pushes the oar through the water and watches the girl, he knows he was wrong about that. Everything’s different. He doesn’t need the inescapable fact of the girl in front of him to understand that. He can feel the change, like an electrical charge pulsing through the air.
And there is the fact of the girl. Aside from those strange eyelids and the rasp-on-wood quality of her voice, there’s nothing obviously inhuman about her.
Do you really think you can shove her head under water until her lungs fill with water?
Yes, I better be able to. It’s my job.
What if she fights back?
Well, then, I’ll have to hit her with something. The oar, maybe.
Worse… what if she doesn’t?
He wishes he could ask Dad or (even better) Abuelito about it. But Dad’s—let’s be honest—a half-step removed these days from a vegetable. Remy would be lucky if he got a grunt and two comprehensible words out of him. Remy loves his father and, at one time, had practically worshipped the man. Now he avoids the house as much as possible; he knows it’s shitty and cowardly, but he just can’t stand seeing what’s become of him. He leaves his father’s care to Olivia, and he tells himself that maintenance of the park and completion of this annual, odious task makes it a fair trade.
Dad probably wouldn’t have had any ideas anyway; like he told Remy way back when, he’d married into it and, to him, this was never anything but an unpleasant chore. Abuelito would’ve known. He would’ve known if anything like this had happened before. But cancer took the old fella two decades back. Remy barely even remembers Abuelito’s face.
A breeze kicks up, sweeping across the water and carrying a dirt-choked, bitter stink on its back. The girl’s head tilts almost imperceptibly, and Remy watches her nostrils flare, like a dog’s.
Goddamnit. What is she?
The boat creaks. Wet grasses whisper against the hull. Remy looks away from her, watches the winter-dead cottonwoods glide past on their right. Twisted branches unfurl toward and above them like the beseeching arms of beggars.
He turns back to the girl. Her face is buried back in her knees.
“Hey,” he says.
Those blue eyes flick toward him.
“Do you have a name?”
She cocks her head. Double blinks.
“Um… I’m Remy.” He thumps his chest. “Re… my.”
“Remy,” she croaks.
“Right,” he says. “That’s me. Remy.”
“Thassmeremy.”
“Uh…” He doesn’t know where to go from there. Does she understand any of this? Or is she just repeating his mouth sounds like a parrot? He has no way to know.
“Do you… do you know where you came from?”
She lifts her head off her knees and double blinks again.
“Where. Are. You. From?”
“From.” She seems to taste the word, roll it around in her mouth like a sour candy.
The boat creaks. Water sloshes. Grass whispers. They come around a subtle bend and the old, fallen cottonwood appears, its root ball protruding from the russet water like the tentacled mouth of some undersea monster. The darker green waters of the lagoon glisten like a pane of flat, colored glass beyond it.
He dips the oar, pushes it through the water.
The boat creaks.
Water sloshes.
Grass whispers.
The cottonwood draws nearer.
“From,” the girl mumbles.
Remy angles the boat around the tree. It slices past the root ball and drifts into the lagoon.
“From.”
“Uh huh.” Remy pulls the oar out of the river and sets it aside. His heart thuds painfully, hammering blood past his eardrums as the boat lists to a stop in the center of the pond.
What are you going to do?
Thud…
Thud…
Thud…
He takes a deep breath.
“Please,” he says. “This is it. If you… I don’t know… if you know who you are… if you can think… tell me… or… show me… or… I don’t know…”
She blinks.
“…SOMETHING.” He finishes. “PLEASE…”
She sits up suddenly, drops her knees, and turns those azure eyes to him.
Her gaze, when she makes full eye contact, is intense; he feels it like physical pressure, pushing into him. The hammering in his ears doubles in power, then trebles. It’s not thud… thud… thud now, but BOOM… BOOM… BOOM. It’s as if each second drops a perfectly timed depth charge into the center of his chest.
Show me something.
Strangely, he finds that the sensation isn’t altogether unpleasant. It is, in fact, more than a little intoxicating. Each BOOM shudders through his body, alighting his nerves with renewed heat. He finds he’s aroused—and engorged—all over again. Her gaze drills into him all the while, and it’s like being shot up with something icy and galvanic, right between the eyes.
She points past him.
“From,” she says.
He opens his mouth, tries to breathe, finds he can’t. There’s fear mixed with all the excitement and thunderous sensation, but somehow that just makes it even sharper, even more exquisite.
Show me something.
He wants it to stop.
He never wants it to stop.
She’s still pointing—her finger twitching slightly, like a worm at the end of a fishing lure—and he realizes she isn’t pointing past him at all, but right at him.
At his heart.
“From.”
She drops her arm, thrusts her shoulders back. Arches her spine. She extends her gazelle-like neck. Lets her breasts press, lissome, against the flannel shirt.
Show me something.
Please.
BOOM.
Please.
BOOM.
Please.
BOOM.
He’s dimly aware that his mouth has fallen into a stupefied gape, and has gone as dry inside as a hanging ristra. He tries again to breathe, but there’s no air to be had. He tries to speak—to say what, he has no idea—but the words stick in his throat like a cluster of goat-heads. There may be a croak, but beneath the pounding in his ears he can’t even be sure of that.
In a single fluid motion, she pulls the pajama top over her head and lets it sail into the lagoon. It flutters down to be claimed by the water. Her skin is perfectly unblemished, the color of buffed ivory. Her breasts are fuller than he would have imagined beneath that baggy top. The nipples are nut brown and bullet-shaped, the dollar-sized areolae impeccably circular. He sees that she has no belly button.
His eyes go back to her face. Again, she’s staring. Again, he feels that pressure. It’s like a finger, hard knuckling into his forehead, just above the bridge of his nose.
BOOM.
BOOM.
BOOM.
Please…
He coughs, gasps, finds his breath at last.
“I can let you go,” he manages. “I’ll take you to the shore. No one will stop you.”
He gestures west with a shaking hand, toward the droning ribbon of I-25.
“Go that way. The road is over there. Someone will help you. Someone will...”
She smiles as she strips off the pajama bottoms, revealing long, muscular legs and a smooth, pink, hairless labia. The rush of Remy’s words oozes into a sigh.
His mind puffs up two images and lays them atop one another, like clashing film negatives:
The first is the girl from his dream. She stands on the shore of that wide, roiling, indigo river. The sun sparkles across her bare, wet shoulders, haloing her dark hair in a flaxen plume. She turns to look at him and—through the magical malleability of dream-logic and memory—she is this girl.
No. That’s not right. From, she’d said, and pointed at his heart, because she’d always been this girl. She’d lived right there from the start, nestled in the deepest furrows of his desire. It’s not the river that gave her to him, he realizes, but his own tender and unwelcome need.
The second image comes as the girl slips free of the center bench and slinks across the empty space between them. It’s of that first creature, from that first tent—the thing with the piggy pink eyes and the gray, tombstone teeth. It had pinched Remy’s legs as it climbed his body, and it smelled like wet and corrosion and river stench as it panted its sticky breath into his face.
The boat rocks placidly from side to side and the girl’s hands place themselves, serene, onto his knees. And then they slide up his bare, cool torso as she skims her body along his. Her touch is exciting and repulsive in equal measure, her fingers doughy smooth and slimy. They’re cold, but the heat leaching from the rest of her is febrile and strangely claggy.
Her breasts swell against his chest and her face hovers inches from his own. The air around her is moist and her breath—tickling his skin and lips and tongue like a feather—tastes like molasses. But beneath that viscid sweetness is that familiar gangrenous rot, that pungent whiff of carrion.
He wants her.
He wants to be away from her.
Those blue eyes poise above him, and then descend. They’re like something recently hatched--anamniotic organisms swimming out of hidden depths to--
—He puts his hands to her sweat-slick back—meaning to pull her close or to wrench her away, he’s not sure.
She makes a noise. It’s half a word, but too guttural for language, too toad-like, too slimed with mucus. Those amphibious eyes buoy there, floating in space inches from his own. The tips of their noses brush.
She snorts.
He feels rather than sees her smile.
And suddenly knows exactly what those teeth will look like.
Before he can push her away, her own hands clamp to the back his neck. Sharp nails tear into his skin, burrowing through fat and dermis, slicing into muscle. The shock of the pain is razored and blood-soaked.
He understands now. He opens his mouth to scream. To call for help.
But he knows it’s too late.
The girl-thing lunges into him before any sound can dislodge from his throat.
They topple backwards--
Remy and the girl—or the thing that looks like a girl—float down the river and into the brindled shadows of the cottonwoods.
She crouches on the boat’s splintered and waterlogged center bench, her arms wrapped around her knees. She doesn’t look at him; in fact, seems to be barely aware of his presence. Remy sits at the stern, moving the oar silently through the water.
He studies her.
She’d come with him easily enough. He spent some time puzzling over how to get her out of the tent before simply unzipping the flap, reaching in and taking her hand. He expected her to snatch the hand back and cringe away from him—or maybe hiss and spit and attack like some of the others had done. But she didn’t. She simply stood and followed him.
Olivia wanted to come with them, but he sternly ordered her to stay behind. “What’re you going to do?” she’d asked. Remy saw the pinched look on her face and remembered the time they came across a stray mutt in the Super Mart parking lot in Socorro. There was no shortage of feral dogs around there, but for some reason that one laid hooks in her heart—probably because it was so obviously terrified as it huddled, shivering, beneath the wooden crate by the front door that held all the Halloween pumpkins. It was some sort of terrier mix, patched brown and white, and Olivia wanted to take the thing home. Dad said no, absolutely fucking not, no way am I gonna have that mangy goddamned thing begging for scraps at my fucking dinner table, nuh uh, no way, you drop it right now Miss Olivia. Olivia got that same look on her face, and kept it there for a week even after they left and the dog disappeared to wherever frightened dogs disappear to when you’re not looking. That look wasn’t petulance, exactly, or anger, or defiance—none of which were emotions Olivia held abundantly in her limited psychological reservoir. It was fear. Olivia wanted to take the dog because she was afraid of what would happen to it if they didn’t.
And now she was afraid of what was going to happen to the girl.
It’s not a girl, Remy reminded himself, and if he doubted that he needed only look at her and see that double, ophidian blink as she gazed—with something like wonder—into the frosty gray sky.
“I’m going to do what I’ve gotta do, O,” he said. “This doesn’t change anything.”
He could see that Olivia wanted to argue with him, but she couldn’t find the words. So he’d led the girl-thing to the boat and left his sister, sputtering, on the path.
This doesn’t change anything, he’d said. But as he pushes the oar through the water and watches the girl, he knows he was wrong about that. Everything’s different. He doesn’t need the inescapable fact of the girl in front of him to understand that. He can feel the change, like an electrical charge pulsing through the air.
And there is the fact of the girl. Aside from those strange eyelids and the rasp-on-wood quality of her voice, there’s nothing obviously inhuman about her.
Do you really think you can shove her head under water until her lungs fill with water?
Yes, I better be able to. It’s my job.
What if she fights back?
Well, then, I’ll have to hit her with something. The oar, maybe.
Worse… what if she doesn’t?
He wishes he could ask Dad or (even better) Abuelito about it. But Dad’s—let’s be honest—a half-step removed these days from a vegetable. Remy would be lucky if he got a grunt and two comprehensible words out of him. Remy loves his father and, at one time, had practically worshipped the man. Now he avoids the house as much as possible; he knows it’s shitty and cowardly, but he just can’t stand seeing what’s become of him. He leaves his father’s care to Olivia, and he tells himself that maintenance of the park and completion of this annual, odious task makes it a fair trade.
Dad probably wouldn’t have had any ideas anyway; like he told Remy way back when, he’d married into it and, to him, this was never anything but an unpleasant chore. Abuelito would’ve known. He would’ve known if anything like this had happened before. But cancer took the old fella two decades back. Remy barely even remembers Abuelito’s face.
A breeze kicks up, sweeping across the water and carrying a dirt-choked, bitter stink on its back. The girl’s head tilts almost imperceptibly, and Remy watches her nostrils flare, like a dog’s.
Goddamnit. What is she?
The boat creaks. Wet grasses whisper against the hull. Remy looks away from her, watches the winter-dead cottonwoods glide past on their right. Twisted branches unfurl toward and above them like the beseeching arms of beggars.
He turns back to the girl. Her face is buried back in her knees.
“Hey,” he says.
Those blue eyes flick toward him.
“Do you have a name?”
She cocks her head. Double blinks.
“Um… I’m Remy.” He thumps his chest. “Re… my.”
“Remy,” she croaks.
“Right,” he says. “That’s me. Remy.”
“Thassmeremy.”
“Uh…” He doesn’t know where to go from there. Does she understand any of this? Or is she just repeating his mouth sounds like a parrot? He has no way to know.
“Do you… do you know where you came from?”
She lifts her head off her knees and double blinks again.
“Where. Are. You. From?”
“From.” She seems to taste the word, roll it around in her mouth like a sour candy.
The boat creaks. Water sloshes. Grass whispers. They come around a subtle bend and the old, fallen cottonwood appears, its root ball protruding from the russet water like the tentacled mouth of some undersea monster. The darker green waters of the lagoon glisten like a pane of flat, colored glass beyond it.
He dips the oar, pushes it through the water.
The boat creaks.
Water sloshes.
Grass whispers.
The cottonwood draws nearer.
“From,” the girl mumbles.
Remy angles the boat around the tree. It slices past the root ball and drifts into the lagoon.
“From.”
“Uh huh.” Remy pulls the oar out of the river and sets it aside. His heart thuds painfully, hammering blood past his eardrums as the boat lists to a stop in the center of the pond.
What are you going to do?
Thud…
Thud…
Thud…
He takes a deep breath.
“Please,” he says. “This is it. If you… I don’t know… if you know who you are… if you can think… tell me… or… show me… or… I don’t know…”
She blinks.
“…SOMETHING.” He finishes. “PLEASE…”
She sits up suddenly, drops her knees, and turns those azure eyes to him.
Her gaze, when she makes full eye contact, is intense; he feels it like physical pressure, pushing into him. The hammering in his ears doubles in power, then trebles. It’s not thud… thud… thud now, but BOOM… BOOM… BOOM. It’s as if each second drops a perfectly timed depth charge into the center of his chest.
Show me something.
Strangely, he finds that the sensation isn’t altogether unpleasant. It is, in fact, more than a little intoxicating. Each BOOM shudders through his body, alighting his nerves with renewed heat. He finds he’s aroused—and engorged—all over again. Her gaze drills into him all the while, and it’s like being shot up with something icy and galvanic, right between the eyes.
She points past him.
“From,” she says.
He opens his mouth, tries to breathe, finds he can’t. There’s fear mixed with all the excitement and thunderous sensation, but somehow that just makes it even sharper, even more exquisite.
Show me something.
He wants it to stop.
He never wants it to stop.
She’s still pointing—her finger twitching slightly, like a worm at the end of a fishing lure—and he realizes she isn’t pointing past him at all, but right at him.
At his heart.
“From.”
She drops her arm, thrusts her shoulders back. Arches her spine. She extends her gazelle-like neck. Lets her breasts press, lissome, against the flannel shirt.
Show me something.
Please.
BOOM.
Please.
BOOM.
Please.
BOOM.
He’s dimly aware that his mouth has fallen into a stupefied gape, and has gone as dry inside as a hanging ristra. He tries again to breathe, but there’s no air to be had. He tries to speak—to say what, he has no idea—but the words stick in his throat like a cluster of goat-heads. There may be a croak, but beneath the pounding in his ears he can’t even be sure of that.
In a single fluid motion, she pulls the pajama top over her head and lets it sail into the lagoon. It flutters down to be claimed by the water. Her skin is perfectly unblemished, the color of buffed ivory. Her breasts are fuller than he would have imagined beneath that baggy top. The nipples are nut brown and bullet-shaped, the dollar-sized areolae impeccably circular. He sees that she has no belly button.
His eyes go back to her face. Again, she’s staring. Again, he feels that pressure. It’s like a finger, hard knuckling into his forehead, just above the bridge of his nose.
BOOM.
BOOM.
BOOM.
Please…
He coughs, gasps, finds his breath at last.
“I can let you go,” he manages. “I’ll take you to the shore. No one will stop you.”
He gestures west with a shaking hand, toward the droning ribbon of I-25.
“Go that way. The road is over there. Someone will help you. Someone will...”
She smiles as she strips off the pajama bottoms, revealing long, muscular legs and a smooth, pink, hairless labia. The rush of Remy’s words oozes into a sigh.
His mind puffs up two images and lays them atop one another, like clashing film negatives:
The first is the girl from his dream. She stands on the shore of that wide, roiling, indigo river. The sun sparkles across her bare, wet shoulders, haloing her dark hair in a flaxen plume. She turns to look at him and—through the magical malleability of dream-logic and memory—she is this girl.
No. That’s not right. From, she’d said, and pointed at his heart, because she’d always been this girl. She’d lived right there from the start, nestled in the deepest furrows of his desire. It’s not the river that gave her to him, he realizes, but his own tender and unwelcome need.
The second image comes as the girl slips free of the center bench and slinks across the empty space between them. It’s of that first creature, from that first tent—the thing with the piggy pink eyes and the gray, tombstone teeth. It had pinched Remy’s legs as it climbed his body, and it smelled like wet and corrosion and river stench as it panted its sticky breath into his face.
The boat rocks placidly from side to side and the girl’s hands place themselves, serene, onto his knees. And then they slide up his bare, cool torso as she skims her body along his. Her touch is exciting and repulsive in equal measure, her fingers doughy smooth and slimy. They’re cold, but the heat leaching from the rest of her is febrile and strangely claggy.
Her breasts swell against his chest and her face hovers inches from his own. The air around her is moist and her breath—tickling his skin and lips and tongue like a feather—tastes like molasses. But beneath that viscid sweetness is that familiar gangrenous rot, that pungent whiff of carrion.
He wants her.
He wants to be away from her.
Those blue eyes poise above him, and then descend. They’re like something recently hatched--anamniotic organisms swimming out of hidden depths to--
—He puts his hands to her sweat-slick back—meaning to pull her close or to wrench her away, he’s not sure.
She makes a noise. It’s half a word, but too guttural for language, too toad-like, too slimed with mucus. Those amphibious eyes buoy there, floating in space inches from his own. The tips of their noses brush.
She snorts.
He feels rather than sees her smile.
And suddenly knows exactly what those teeth will look like.
Before he can push her away, her own hands clamp to the back his neck. Sharp nails tear into his skin, burrowing through fat and dermis, slicing into muscle. The shock of the pain is razored and blood-soaked.
He understands now. He opens his mouth to scream. To call for help.
But he knows it’s too late.
The girl-thing lunges into him before any sound can dislodge from his throat.
They topple backwards--
#
--and hit the river with a splash.
Remy feels but can’t see the girl-thing as she pumps her muscled legs, propelling them down, down, down, further into the green-tinted darkness than he would have imagined possible. Silty water rushes past, plunges into his eyes and ears and mouth, stings as it abrades the fresh wounds now marring the back of his neck.
Still her fingers dig, through meat and tissue, removing parts of him, spinning them in red chunks into the river.
He’s dying, and he knows it. He wishes he wasn’t afraid, but he is. He forces his eyes to open. At first he can’t see anything because the water is as opaque as oil smoke, and all the river’s minerals and dead organic sludge burns his retinas like acid. He can only be thankful that the girl-thing is choking the life out of him, so that he doesn’t have to drown with its wretched, diseased taste pushing down his throat.
Then a face materializes from the murk, its features swirling together in a strange, unbearable, unresolvable visage, manic-grinning through a too-wide lattice of unthinkable teeth. Whatever is left of Remy’s rational mind tears apart like the gossamer filaments of a spider’s web in a hurricane gale. He’s grateful to let it go. He’s glad that the neurons in his brain are exploding in a cascade of oxygen-deprived supernovas—blocking out that terrible face—and that soon enough everything will be dark.
It never occurs to him to fight back.
His last semi-conscious thought is of Olivia—dull-headed, soft-hearted Olivia. What’s going to happen to Olivia?
Claws tear past muscle and esophageal tissue and pry into the gaps between ringlets of bone, and only after chunks of his spine have been flung into the lagoon’s churning darkness—along with pink jets of its accompanying fluid—does the girl-thing let Remy’s body go.
Remy—unknowing now, unthinking, unfeeling—drifts down, down, down, and eventually settles in the mud and weeds amongst the scattered bones of all the abominations disposed of in this place, across all the forgotten centuries.
And here he will stay, remembered only by the river itself.
Remy feels but can’t see the girl-thing as she pumps her muscled legs, propelling them down, down, down, further into the green-tinted darkness than he would have imagined possible. Silty water rushes past, plunges into his eyes and ears and mouth, stings as it abrades the fresh wounds now marring the back of his neck.
Still her fingers dig, through meat and tissue, removing parts of him, spinning them in red chunks into the river.
He’s dying, and he knows it. He wishes he wasn’t afraid, but he is. He forces his eyes to open. At first he can’t see anything because the water is as opaque as oil smoke, and all the river’s minerals and dead organic sludge burns his retinas like acid. He can only be thankful that the girl-thing is choking the life out of him, so that he doesn’t have to drown with its wretched, diseased taste pushing down his throat.
Then a face materializes from the murk, its features swirling together in a strange, unbearable, unresolvable visage, manic-grinning through a too-wide lattice of unthinkable teeth. Whatever is left of Remy’s rational mind tears apart like the gossamer filaments of a spider’s web in a hurricane gale. He’s grateful to let it go. He’s glad that the neurons in his brain are exploding in a cascade of oxygen-deprived supernovas—blocking out that terrible face—and that soon enough everything will be dark.
It never occurs to him to fight back.
His last semi-conscious thought is of Olivia—dull-headed, soft-hearted Olivia. What’s going to happen to Olivia?
Claws tear past muscle and esophageal tissue and pry into the gaps between ringlets of bone, and only after chunks of his spine have been flung into the lagoon’s churning darkness—along with pink jets of its accompanying fluid—does the girl-thing let Remy’s body go.
Remy—unknowing now, unthinking, unfeeling—drifts down, down, down, and eventually settles in the mud and weeds amongst the scattered bones of all the abominations disposed of in this place, across all the forgotten centuries.
And here he will stay, remembered only by the river itself.
9
The thing that pulls itself, pale and glistening, from the water and flops to the river’s eastern shore doesn’t look much like a girl anymore. It is smooth and sexless, its skin rubbery and vaguely saurian. Its face is long and ophidian, with a wide flat nose and gaping black nostrils. Its mouth is a featureless slit through which jagged teeth protrude in uneven, peg-like spurs, like the saw-teeth ridges of the nearby Sacramento Mountains.
Only its eyes—blue, thoughtful—remain passably human.
It uncoils, wormlike, and stands, arching its back and letting the water cascade off of its segmented body. It extends long, many-jointed arms and flexes thin, bony fingers.
It turns and looks over its shoulder at the river. Perhaps it recalls another river—a larger, much more primal river, its surging waters the searing blue of a gas flame, so wide the far shore is hardly visible against an unbroken cobalt sky. Perhaps there’s a city on that distant shore—narrow streets like the grid of a honeycomb, twisting between Brobdingnagian spires of blackest marble. Maybe there are other creatures in that city, crawling through tunnel and crevice and eeling over soot-stained rock, spitting and hissing and chewing across unbroken miles of stinking darkness.
It can’t quite remember.
It turns away—toward the cottonwoods. It doesn’t think as we do, but in some wordless way it understands that its purpose has been served. That it did its job. It knows it’s unlikely to last long in this strange, biotic world. But there’s a house somewhere in these trees, and in that house there’s another of these soft, beige man-things. This man-thing has murdered many, using its own hands to shove countless pleading mouths into this foul brown river, to fill countless lungs with loathsome water until the choking stops and the thrashing ceases and the light dims in countless eyes.
This other man-thing is almost dead now. But not dead yet.
Not yet.
A flock of snow geese flies in formation overhead, squawking.
It turns its blue eyes to the gleaming gray sky, opens its fleshy black mouth, and clacks past stony teeth. It’s the sound of a single finger, tapping gently on a window.
On the other side of this hated river, where there are no trees but only wet grass and mud and bush and unbroken sky, it can hear the not-too-distant mumble of the interstate.
There are more of these man-things over there. These bleating, bestial bags of meat.
More flesh to be rended--screaming—from bone.
It clacks again—a sound that might be a laugh, or might be nothing at all—and glides silently into the cottonwoods.
Only its eyes—blue, thoughtful—remain passably human.
It uncoils, wormlike, and stands, arching its back and letting the water cascade off of its segmented body. It extends long, many-jointed arms and flexes thin, bony fingers.
It turns and looks over its shoulder at the river. Perhaps it recalls another river—a larger, much more primal river, its surging waters the searing blue of a gas flame, so wide the far shore is hardly visible against an unbroken cobalt sky. Perhaps there’s a city on that distant shore—narrow streets like the grid of a honeycomb, twisting between Brobdingnagian spires of blackest marble. Maybe there are other creatures in that city, crawling through tunnel and crevice and eeling over soot-stained rock, spitting and hissing and chewing across unbroken miles of stinking darkness.
It can’t quite remember.
It turns away—toward the cottonwoods. It doesn’t think as we do, but in some wordless way it understands that its purpose has been served. That it did its job. It knows it’s unlikely to last long in this strange, biotic world. But there’s a house somewhere in these trees, and in that house there’s another of these soft, beige man-things. This man-thing has murdered many, using its own hands to shove countless pleading mouths into this foul brown river, to fill countless lungs with loathsome water until the choking stops and the thrashing ceases and the light dims in countless eyes.
This other man-thing is almost dead now. But not dead yet.
Not yet.
A flock of snow geese flies in formation overhead, squawking.
It turns its blue eyes to the gleaming gray sky, opens its fleshy black mouth, and clacks past stony teeth. It’s the sound of a single finger, tapping gently on a window.
On the other side of this hated river, where there are no trees but only wet grass and mud and bush and unbroken sky, it can hear the not-too-distant mumble of the interstate.
There are more of these man-things over there. These bleating, bestial bags of meat.
More flesh to be rended--screaming—from bone.
It clacks again—a sound that might be a laugh, or might be nothing at all—and glides silently into the cottonwoods.
10
The geese swoop overhead, screeching their constant arguments. The cranes coo and splash, unseen, up the river to the north. The Winnebago people will be watching them and taking their pictures.
Olivia stands silent, ten yards from the tent. She rocks from one foot to the other, her eyes on the river. Watching for any sign of the boat to come drifting back.
It doesn’t.
She knows she should have gone with Remy. She should have insisted. At first, she was scared about what he would do to the girl. But, as he led the two of them along the muddy shore and into the trees, the girl looked back, and Olivia thought she’d seen her smile. That smile drove a spike of fear deep into Olivia’s gut.
She doesn’t know how long he’s been gone now. An hour. Maybe more.
Long enough for the tent to cough up another one. It rustles in there, bare limbs whispering against nylon, panting deep and low and wetly masculine.
Olivia shuffles her feet. Something is wrong. She wants to leave. She wants to go check on Dad. Needs to check on Dad. He would’ve messed himself by now, for sure.
But she doesn’t dare.
“Remy…” she whines. “Where ARE you…?
The geese screech.
The cranes coo.
The river trickles by, keeping its secrets.
Inside the tent, something chuckles.
Olivia stands silent, ten yards from the tent. She rocks from one foot to the other, her eyes on the river. Watching for any sign of the boat to come drifting back.
It doesn’t.
She knows she should have gone with Remy. She should have insisted. At first, she was scared about what he would do to the girl. But, as he led the two of them along the muddy shore and into the trees, the girl looked back, and Olivia thought she’d seen her smile. That smile drove a spike of fear deep into Olivia’s gut.
She doesn’t know how long he’s been gone now. An hour. Maybe more.
Long enough for the tent to cough up another one. It rustles in there, bare limbs whispering against nylon, panting deep and low and wetly masculine.
Olivia shuffles her feet. Something is wrong. She wants to leave. She wants to go check on Dad. Needs to check on Dad. He would’ve messed himself by now, for sure.
But she doesn’t dare.
“Remy…” she whines. “Where ARE you…?
The geese screech.
The cranes coo.
The river trickles by, keeping its secrets.
Inside the tent, something chuckles.