So there was no way for Dad to get hold of us.
Teenagers without cell phones: Imagine that.
I had to promise I would call home later that night from wherever Cade and I got a room. We had a nine-hour drive ahead of us to northern Oklahoma and Dunston University. The school’s enrollment fair was set to open the next day, on Sunday.
When I hung up, I leaned across the Berlin Wall to see if Cade was still asleep. I considered phoning Julia, but only until Cade Hernandez’s muffled voice rose like hot sewer gas from beneath a sofa cushion: “Get the fuck away from me.”
“You told me to wake you up at six. It’s six thirty. That’s, like, thirty-six thousand miles past six.”
“Stop it,” Cade moaned. “I fucking hate math. I fucking hate everything when I’m hungover. Please get me some water, dude. Please. I stayed up too late finishing that goddamned book.”
Apparently, my dad’s novel was not the only thing Cade Hernandez finished after I fell asleep. Empty beer bottles lay scattered all over East Berlin.
I went to the bathroom and ran cold water into a motel glass I unwrapped from a crinkled wax-paper bag.
“Here.”
Cade, hair crazy and eyes glazed, sat up from behind the Wall and gulped all the water, spilling at least a third of it down his chest and onto his lap.
I took the glass and refilled it.
Cade said, “And how the hell could he end it like that? He can’t just leave you there—alone—and with all those fucking doors opening everywhere. It gave me fucking nightmares. I need to know what’s going to happen next.”
“Look: two things. First, it is not me. Second, you’re supposed to figure it out for yourself.”
“Horseshit. Make him write another book.”
“I can’t. He won’t. So deal with it.”
“When we go back home, I’m going to give him an aneurysm for fucking with my head like that.”
“Uh.”
Cade combed his fingers through his wild hair. “Okay. I’ll tell him if he writes another book, I’ll let him put me in it. He can even kill me if he wants.”
“That’s bound to work, Cade.”
I made a third trip to the bathroom sink to get my friend more water.
• • •
The First words of my father’s novel are these:
My dear child: When these immigrants arrive, they do not come as passengers carried in the bellies of mechanical whales.
There are no lights, no music of thunder.
One of the first arrivals lands in the calm center of an eye on a black Oregon lingcod lying curled, an orphaned parenthesis atop a pillow of crushed ice at a stall rented by a fishmonger named Mr. Otani.
The place smells of lemon and damp unfinished wood.
• • •
Everything served for breakfast at La Posada Restaurant came with a choice of hash browns or grits.
“What’s grits?” Cade asked.
After we checked out of the E-Z Rest, Cade and I stopped for breakfast before settling in to the final leg of our long drive.
“They’re made from hominy,” I explained.
“What’s that?”
“It’s kind of—I don’t really know. Gigantic white corn or something.”
“Does it taste like corn?”
“Not really.”
Cade Hernandez squinted and leered at me from the corner of his eye.
“How come you know so much about grits and hominy and shit like that?”
“Grits taste exactly like human meat.”
Cade nodded. “I thought that must be it.”
We both ate our first-ever grits with breakfast at La Posada. Our waitress, a short woman with ample breasts whose name was Florencia, according to the bright sombrero-shaped badge pinned to her pink apron, told us the way her husband preferred to eat his grits was with salt, butter, and a few drops of hot sauce.
The grits tasted very good.
Cade said, “If this is what human meat tastes like, it’s no wonder you fuckers all came through those doors after us.”
“Told you so.”
“Can you do that thing?”
“What thing?”
“You know—like the incomers do in the book—stimulate the Wiener area in my brain so I hear you telling me something you want me to do.”
“I think your entire brain is a Wiener area.”
“That kind of gives me a boner.”
“Can you hear me telling you to shut the fuck up?”
Cade Hernandez smiled and nodded. “Yep.”
• • •
Look: It can be proved by observing the motion of objects in the universe that wherever you are is the precise center.
No matter how fast you move, you will never get anywhere if that’s the case.
That afternoon, Cade Hernandez and I traversed the desolate panhandle of Texas and crossed over the line into Oklahoma.
It felt so distant from San Francisquito Canyon and home. And this was nothing—a moment of motion through space—but I wondered at all that distance above and below me, how big this universe might actually be; how fast it all moved.
Eighty miles away from Dunston—four seconds in Earth time—the first bullet-gray, thumb-size drops of rain plunked down all over the blacktop and Cade’s truck, pelting us with a staccato machine-gun peppering—thak! thak! thak!
Within a few minutes, the curtains of rain became so heavy and dark, we could not see more than ten feet ahead of us on the highway.
“It’s a fucking flood,” Cade said.
To be more accurate, Cade Hernandez practically shouted. The roar of the rain was deafening.
I did not know whether it was an actual flood, but I had never seen rain as heavy as what fell on us in Oklahoma that day. Comparing the rainstorms I’d seen in California with what we drove through that August afternoon was like comparing a parakeet’s birdbath with the twelve-billion-gallon St. Francis Reservoir.
The highway transformed into a slate-colored river, spiked and prickled by relentless fat globules of rain. Cade slowed the truck, or perhaps, I thought, the rain pushed so hard against us that surface gravity doubled on the planet of humans and dogs.
“This is ridiculous,” I said.
“I should pull over, but I can’t tell where over is.”
In fact, the road and all markings on it had been swallowed up beneath the rising black waters. Cade navigated by aiming his steering wheel toward two pinpoints of red—the taillights on whatever car was driving ahead of us. All around, everything else blended into an indistinguishable, borderless cascade of blurring gray streaks.
“Holy shit!” Cade swerved and braked.
An eighteen-wheel tractor-trailer rig—a whale in the rain—passed on our left, going more than double our speed. It sprayed a blinding sheet of rainwater that washed over Cade’s windshield and nearly swept us from the road.
“Maybe we should stop and wait it out,” I said.
But when the truck passed the next car ahead of us, covering it with spray, the two little red lights we followed veered sharply to the right and then vanished—winked out—completely.
“Did you see that?” Cade said.
He slowed his pickup to a stop and inched over to what I assumed was the shoulder of the highway.
“That car up there went off the road,” Cade said.
“I lost sight of it after that truck passed him,” I said.
“Dude.”
So we sat there for a moment, swallowed in an Oklahoma fire-hose rainstorm.
Twenty miles.
Twenty miles.
The rain roared, swirling like angry black bees in the wild wind. I imagined the force of it crumpling the metal husk of Cade Hernandez’s pickup.
“Is this normal for Oklahoma?” I said. “Because if it is . . . well, shit.”
Cade shook his head and shrugged. “Fuck if I know.”
He snapped his can of tobacco and packed a black wad be
hind his lower lip.
“Let’s wait till this shit lets up,” I said.
“If we have to, we can sleep in the back. We have plenty of beer and food.”
That was true. We’d also brought along our sleeping bags. Neither one of us was interested in pressing on to Dunston now that we had successfully come to a complete stop.
“Don’t you think we should go up there and see if the people in that other car are okay?” I asked.
Cade Hernandez spit a brown glob into his spittoon bottle.
“I was hoping you wouldn’t ask that,” he said, “but I guess there’s nothing else we can do. If you want to wait in the car, I can go look. No sense in both of us ending up half-drowned.”
Cade Hernandez could be such a hero at times.
Twenty miles.
Twenty miles.
“We’ll go together,” I said.
The rain hammered and hammered.
THE BOY, THE DOG, AND THE EPILEPTIC
We were drenched before we made it past the front bumper on Cade Hernandez’s pickup.
Who would have thought to bring along foul-weather gear?
Cade Hernandez and I wore improbable outfits for rescuers in hurricanes: mesh basketball shorts, sneakers, and baseball raglans—the blue-sleeved undershirts from our Pioneers uniforms—all of which sponged up the rainwater and plastered against our bodies, slogging and sloshing, weighing us down and slowing our pace, as though everything danced hypnotically in an underwater dream.
The only sound came from the gusting winds and spit-warm pregnant rain; there was no traffic at all moving on the highway. We splashed along the side of the road—fifty, one hundred feet ahead of the pickup—and with each step my sneakers drank more and more, growing heavier and heavier until the weight threatened to pull my shoes from my feet.
Cade found fresh tire ruts cutting across the muddy shoulder where the car we’d been following had slid from the highway. Ahead of us, something black and skeletal seemed to loom up from the middle of the road.
What I saw through the downpour was the metal truss frame on a bridge.
I grabbed Cade’s shoulder and pointed. “There’s a bridge here.”
I wondered if anyone ever jumped from it with elastic lashings wrapped around their ankles.
“They went down the bank,” Cade said.
It did not look good. Bridges, because they are usually sensibly planned civil-engineering projects, are only built to go over things—often, things with lots of water in them. And this bridge happened to cross Little Buffalo River, wide and dark, but not what anyone with eyesight would call “little” by a long shot.
Cade and I followed the muddy wheel ruts through the waist-high grass down the slope of the river’s embankment. As I might have expected, my shoes came off in the suction of mud and water, and I tramped after my friend in my drooping socks.
The rain never slackened in the least.
Thirty feet from the edge of the highway, we caught sight of the roof of a dark green van through the tangles of buttonbush along the river’s shore. The van was nearly submerged, drifting sideways and slowly sinking beneath the rain-boiled surface.
“Hey! Is anyone here? Can you hear me?” Cade shouted to see if maybe whoever was inside the van had managed to get out. But there was no answer. And we could both see that none of the doors on the vehicle were open.
A pale white hand slapped against the darkened glass of the van’s rear window.
Look: There are times when you can be faced with a situation that presents no alternatives between dothis and dothat. And if there was one thing the epileptic kid could do just as effortlessly as blanking out, it was this: I could swim.
Dothis.
At first, Cade Hernandez and I tried to get to the van by working our way through the tangles of brush that walled the shore, but the shrubs grew so thick, and the bank was too steep and soft from the swamping by the storm. Where the van’s undercarriage had mown down the brush, spiny branches jutted up like deadly spikes. It was impossible to get to the water.
“Let’s go up this way,” I said.
I pointed to the bridge above us.
“What the hell are you thinking?” Cade said.
“I’m going to jump from the bridge.”
I did not wait for Cade to reply. I scrambled back up the bank to the bridge’s abutment. On the way, the sucking mud stole my ruined socks from my feet, and then I squirmed out of my baseball sleeves and tossed the soaked raglan down onto the roadway.
Once I made it far enough out on the bridge, above a point in the river I’d estimated it would be safe to jump into, I considered the ridiculousness of my situation: the circuitous irony of my life—its perfect orbit at twenty miles per second, twenty miles per second. Caballito—the Little Horse—was jumping from a bridge.
Here I come, Mom!
It rained and rained.
The wind swirled and howled.
I didn’t know if Cade had followed me up onto the bridge or not; I wasn’t thinking about anything else at all.
Two deep breaths.
Twenty miles.
Twenty miles.
The van sank lower.
And I leapt.
• • •
And I hung in the air, descending more slowly than the rain, falling sideways, falling sideways.
The current was strong. The river clenched me in its fist, gritty and brown, much colder than I thought it would be. As soon as I came up to the surface, spitting and gulping air, I spun around to orient myself: There was the van, turning toward me so slowly near the bank, a flashing glimpse of a face and a flattened palm behind the rear window, tilted up in the pyramidal air pocket at the tail of the cabin. The face was like a ghost—sticky atoms refusing to give way and cooperate with the will of the knackery. Marjorie and Mazie caught in the sweeping demolition of William Mulholland’s mass-execution device.
Behind me, the black underbelly of the bridge hovered, a monstrous vulture swooping thirty feet overhead.
Cade Hernandez stood atop the steel safety railing, barefoot and shirtless, white as vanilla ice cream, teetering to find a spot in the water where he wouldn’t land on me. It wouldn’t have happened anyway: The force of the current pushed me backward, dragging my body under the bridge.
I had to swim hard.
I caught a glimpse of midair Cade, a gangly pale missile diving headfirst through the rain, hands stretched toward the center of the muddy river. And I reached and reached, pulling massive armfuls of the water back along my sides as I kicked through the current.
It felt like I was swimming inside a cement mixer. The basketball shorts I had on dragged like sails, slowing me down, coaxing me away from the van.
Time expanded in every imaginable direction. Twenty miles will always be twenty miles, but seconds in that water exploded into hours, weeks.
The current seemed to cut around me once I wormed my way to the upriver side of the van. The van turned and tilted. I slapped my palm against the roof and yelled, “Hey!”
The windows were all below the surface now, swallowed beneath the brown water.
A knocking answered from inside the van. I saw Cade Hernandez’s arms frantically splashing toward me from the center of the river. I held my breath and went under, feeling along the van’s side panel until I found the handle of a door.
I pulled as hard as I could. My fingers slipped from the handle, and I realized the door had given only an inch because it was a slider door. The river world was all brown and shadowy forms—a universe of nameless undefined matter below the surface. I pushed the door backward and slipped into the van.
It was a ridiculous scene inside—an underwater recreation of the hovering garbage at Aberdeen Lake State Penitentiary. When I forced the door open, the van’s cabin lights came on, illuminating plastic grocery bags that floated and waved like jellyfish, a bundle of celery pirouetting like a compass needle, a yellow box of Triscuit crackers pinned to the ceiling. At
the front of the van, a motionless dark shape of a person—someone was belted into the driver’s seat. It did not look good; the driver’s arms fanned lifeless over the top of the dashboard as though playing an invisible piano.
Then I felt the bottom of a tennis shoe scrape against my ribs.
It was a kid I’d seen pressing his small hand against the back window of the van.
I pulled myself over the third-row seats and got my head up inside the tiny pocket of air in the rear corner. The kid was small and scared, about six or seven years old—maybe just four billion miles or so—with thin buckwheat hair that was plastered down against his ghostly skin. He tried to say something to me, but his jaw shuddered so bad, all he could do was gurgle and moan. And he held up a small dirt-colored dog that kicked its back legs like it was trying to swim free of the boy’s arms.
The planet of humans and dogs.
The van slid around and began to tip onto its side.
The pocket of air constricted, and we pressed our mouths and noses up into the fabric on the van’s ceiling. It smelled like cigarette smoke. Sticky atoms.
I grabbed onto the collar of the kid’s T-shirt.
“You need to hold your breath. I’m taking you out. Okay?”
The kid didn’t say anything; only stared at me with dollar-size eyes.
“You ready?”
I tugged and jerked.
The boy, the dog, and the epileptic kid all went under.
Look: I can only imagine what it must have been like to be alive in San Francisquito Canyon the night of William Mulholland’s great failure.
Atoms would be scattered.
• • •
Marjorie and Mazie Curtis lived in a small cabin built near the power plant, just below the towering dam. When the St. Francis Dam first broke, their mother heard the sound of it and woke the girls’ father.
Look: When a dam breaks, it doesn’t explode like a bomb. The first thing to happen is a fracture forms. Then twelve billion gallons of water molecules crowd for that initial escape vent, and they tear and chew at the structure until house-size chunks of it tumble down its disintegrating face.
Lillian Curtis’s father, who helped build the road to the dam—the same road that I would one day live on—warned the family that living beneath the massive dam was not safe; that they should build their home on the canyon rim. But the Curtis family was determined to live under the St. Francis Dam.