The same river, twice.
Who was he to play with lives, past and present, as if he were a god? When people are not meant to remember. That’s why most of us don’t. People are meant to forget. Lethe: the river of forgetfulness. Only some lost souls had forgotten to drink from its healing waters—forgotten to forget.
And here he was, walking these suburban streets that were more alien to him than any of the Indian villages ever were, loosing a lost child’s name into the evening sky, tearing it out of his chest. His last child.
Noah, blond and buoyant, bouncing on the tips of his toes.
Walking and calling, a mouth, a pair of eyes; that’s all he was good for anymore. Lethe rising up around him until soon he’d forget everything, even the names of the lost.
Thirty
He had to get out of there.
Paul ran into the house. He could still hear the boy calling and crying outside.
He blew out the back door, straight through the yard, through the gap in the fence and out, running flat and hard across the field to the woods. When he passed the old well he gave it a wide berth, as if the bones inside might jump out and bat him around the face, that’s how crazy the movie was that was playing in his head, only it wasn’t a movie and it wasn’t in his head. He tore through the woods, his gait unsteady, feet slipping wildly on the pine needles but propelling him forward, onward, as if he could outrun June 14 once and for all when he knew he would never get away, it would always be there, that boy still standing there back in the yard saying, “Why’d you hurt me, Pauly?”
“Why’d you hurt me, Pauly?”
“Why’d you do it?”
And his own heart charging back I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know.
Thirty-One
He was sitting on the edge of her bed. His smooth, glowing skin. His radioactive smile.
Hi, Mama.
Denise opened her eyes.
It was dusk. She was alone in the room. Tommy wasn’t there. She had heard his voice in a dream.
The word still buzzing in her ears. Mama.
The room was dark. Voices not far away, pinpoints of light rolling through the fields.
Tommy!
She sat up quickly, dizzily. Her mouth was coated with a bitter medicine taste and her eyes hurt when she blinked. She opened her hand and saw the pills in it. Through the window she could see the flashing of police lights in the fields and the woods beyond. She hiked the window open for some fresh air. People on the front step were talking. Fragments of conversations pierced her ears.
“—we’ve got a dozen men in the woods now, Lieutenant—”
“Four years old, answers to Noah—”
She lay back down. All of it flooding back to her, swamping her mind: those people in her house, their words worming into her ears, talking about the hereafter.
*
That same old song. She’d heard it before, albeit with a different set of answers. She’d been born hearing it.
Seeing now the tent—that big tent in Oklahoma she hadn’t thought of in thirty-odd years. Sitting with her granddaddy whom everyone thought had gone ’round the bend. Her mother said they were all a pack of snake charmers, but she didn’t care, she was interested in seeing snake charmers and she’d wanted to go wherever her granddaddy went. The tent was big and high like a circus. It was filled to the edges with more people than she’d ever seen at one time in her whole life, rows and rows of them. The minister stood in front and talked so loud the whole tent could hear him. He was a tall, thin man with very dark brown skin and he seemed angry to Denise, but the people didn’t seem to mind much. Some of them sat still and listened to the minister and some of them laughed and sighed and called out.
She was sitting on the lap of her granddaddy, who loved her more than anyone. She didn’t know how she knew this, but she knew. He had his big hand on her head and every now and then he tugged on one of her braids, as if to say hello.
She remembered that there were some hymns that were pretty and then the minister started talking. He talked in that voice people used when they quoted Scripture.
And the Israelites were weary from their journey, their hope waning in the desert.
And they spoke against God, they said: Can God set a table in the wilderness?
And God rained down on them manna to eat and gave them the grain of heaven.…