“You might.” It was midnight in August, and still as hot as day; they were naked and neck-deep in the motionless dark waters that fill an abandoned quarry up Mount Merrow.
“Dark like you?”
“Blond. Well sort of amber honey; maybe it’ll darken.”
“Dishwater blond.”
“And his eyes too. Honey.” Made by the bees upon Mount Hymettus, the ones they sing of.
“Not like his dad.”
“Not in any way.”
Pierce had expected that his imaginary son and lover (he had not told Rose about that part) would vanish, fast or slowly, from his life as Rose came farther into it. But Robbie hadn’t gone when Rose came. He had only grown denser, glowed more honey-warm as throughout that summer Pierce and Rose coupled. Indeed he was with them (though seen, or perceived, only by his father) on that same hot midnight at the Mount Merrow quarry. A laughing Caravaggio boy, naked on a stela of granite at the water’s edge, one knee drawn up to rest his cheek on.
“Warm,” she said. She let herself sink down till her chin met its pale reflection on the water’s surface. “At first I was so hot and the water was cold. Now the air feels cold and the water’s warm.”
He swam ponderously to her. Her face was dim, her hair spread out behind her over the black water. The depth beneath them was palpable, its weight solid like its darkness. Why at night does deep water seem so much more a beast, a being, and why when you swim naked?
Those quarry waters are deep, fathom on fathom certainly, though maybe not so deep as some believe. Down at the bottom is the red Impala in which two lovers drowned in the year 1959; the trunk is open, for the suitcases they were fleeing with were seen floating on the surface next morning, that’s how it was learned they’d gone together over the cliff above. You hear it told that the lovers are still inside, up to their chins now in muck, she at the wheel, he beside her (his hand on the door it may be, too late, too deep). But that’s not true. Divers got them out, and they are buried now in earth, like most of us, and far apart.
Up on the height, the road that the Impala drove in on, long closed, has nearly disappeared; lovers and swimmers now leave their cars out by the highway and walk in, past the nearly illegible No Trespassing signs, to reach the quarry’s edge. That’s how Rose and Pierce had got there. Still the only convenient way of entering the water is to leap. So Pierce had taken Rose’s hand (for what other woman would he have had to be so brave?) and they went in together, feet first and looking downward, crying out.
“Here’s my plan,” Beau said to Pierce, and laughed lightly at himself. They could already see the glow and pulse of blue lights out around the bend across the bridge out of town. They approached slowly and not by the straightest way while Beau explained. It seemed simple enough, though Pierce’s heart shrank somewhat in his bosom, he had never been able to negotiate easily with the earthly powers, did not usually assume they could be negotiated with, only bowed to or evaded.
Beau stopped his car opposite the overturned turtle of Rose’s car and set the brake. The cops turned to take notice of them as Pierce got out.
He had driven her home, no picked her up at the party and driven her homeward or townward when. No he had driven her safely to his place (where she yes now was) and then returned alone back up the mountain because she had left her, had left behind her contact lenses, which he had volunteered to go back and get. And couldn’t find. And so then on the way back into town, here, he had encountered something in the road. A raccoon he thought, or maybe a. Something anyway crossing before him. Unfamiliar car, too, his own was a Steed sedan, big American. And.
Beau was there to say how he, Pierce, had come to his, Beau’s, house in a state of bewildered disorientation. Not hurt no, a thump on the head maybe. Doctor? No no. Momentary. Fine now. Why had he left before calling the police? Pierce (not for the first or the last or the worst time) pleaded ignorance. They studied Pierce’s license, asked if he could step into the light here, and they looked into his face with a fierce flashlight; then they made him walk the white line that edged the road.
He could do that, and did. He had stepped forward to take her place here, and would do what further was required of him; he would substitute his (momentary, transient) innocence for her guilt, and would take the fall too, he guessed, if there was a fall to take. There wasn’t: there were things to do he had never done before, get a wrecker (they worked through the night, apparently) and fill out forms; and Pierce’s blameless if brief record was now spotted, he would see the result when he went to pay his next insurance premium. But he knew nothing of that then.
“Something’s going on up at The Woods,” he said to Beau as they drove back. “I don’t know what. Something.”
“I know,” Beau said, unsurprised. “Yes. We know there is.”
Rose was asleep when Pierce got back; she had pulled down the covers of the bed but had not undressed, lay sprawled swastika fashion across most of the sheet, her long feet bare and her face hidden in her hair. He took off his clothes, suddenly stifled and too hot, and lay beside her. When he put out the light the wind seemed to expand, and filled the rooms; in the kitchen something fell to the floor with a papery rustle, and Rose awoke. She ascended as though from a deep pool, lifted herself and sat up as though on the pool’s edge, looking down within. Then she turned to see Pierce lying long and naked there.
“There wasn’t really any chipmunk,” she said.
“Raccoon, I thought you said.”
“Well there wasn’t any.”
He pondered what that could mean. That she had no excuse for losing control at that turn. That she had not lost control at all, not of the car anyway, which had done what she had asked of it. Why was the only question then, and he wouldn’t put it to her.
“Okay,” he said. She lay again beside him, and put her hands beneath her head.
The room was growing colder as the mass of air within it was exchanged for the incoming one. She slept; she rose again, tossed up and outward will-lessly to her feet, and went off to the john. He listened to the wind and the toilet’s flush. She padded back and was clambering again aboard the bed when he stopped her.
“Wait. Wait a sec.”
She stood before him where he sat on the bed’s edge. He undid her stiff jeans, pulled at the snap and the strong zipper; she rested her hands on his shoulders. He husked her, tugging the denim downward so she could step out. “There,” he said.
He unbuttoned and took her shirt from her too, and encircled her to unhook the bra in back; lightly stroked her freed breasts, looked into her absent eyes; let her back in bed.
“Scary wind,” she said.
It really had grown alarming. There were noises out in the world, a descant of bangs and thumps and whistles on the wind’s melody that could not be interpreted, would only next day be seen to be escaped lawn furniture or blown-away pickets.
“What if it’s the one?” she said.
“What one?” he said, but she seemed to be again asleep, anyway didn’t answer; he looked at her face in the dimness and couldn’t quite tell if her eyes were closed or still open.
He in fact knew what one, for it was from him that she had heard mythologies of wind, how it bloweth where it listeth, one part of Nature not under God’s thumb and therefore perhaps at the disposal of our Enemy; she had heard his stories about changer winds, how one had once blown away the Spanish Armada and thus saved England from Catholic conquest, a famous wind which if you went to look for it in the records of the time wasn’t there. He had told her of the wind that carries away the old age, and the contrary wind that brings in the new age, and of the stillness between. He had told her a lot of things.
God what a dream-tossed sleeper she was, her arm now flung across him and her open mouth making a child’s soft frightened whimper with each exhalation. He didn’t usually permit her to sleep beside him.
Not something in her path that she had swerved to avoid: more likely something behind and fol
lowing, which she meant to escape. Who flies so fast in the night and the wind?
He shuddered deeply, and drew the sheet over his nakedness.
When it was late, Robbie came from his daybed out on Pierce’s sun-porch to stand above his father. Pierce, who was fast asleep, was amazed at how clearly present the boy was to him, more than he had been since Pierce had begun to perceive him. The golden hair of his arms; the awful serenity of his smile, abashing and cheering at once, which Pierce had not often seen, which he had sought so often by spiritual and lowly physical means to see. Robbie bent and kissed his father’s cheek, and turned away, his duties here done and others and other games summoning him. Unable in the depths of sleep to cry out or call after him, Pierce felt him torn away, but he would not remember that: he would remember only how he had suddenly awakened, desolate, the woman only alongside him, and the wind enormous.
The next morning then, a tremulous blue one with flying clouds overhead, Rose sat on Pierce’s sunporch and thought and smoked cigarettes while Pierce loaded his boxes and furniture into the same truck (Brent Spofford’s) that had once brought it all out of the city and into the country. When they were done they all drove out of the Jambs (waving to Rosie Rasmussen, Pierce’s employer, coming out of the drugstore) and went out to Littleville, to the house to which Pierce was moving. He almost expected to find it had vanished, magicked away by the wind, but it was there.
3
At September’s end, then, Pierce was living by a running river, and Rose Ryder too, a different house by a different river. Rose was spending autumn in the summer cabin of an administrator at The Woods Center for Psychotherapy; when The Woods began to wrap up its summer programs the administrator moved back to her City house and office, and Rose had her cabin until the freezing weather, when she would have to turn off the water, bring in the deck chairs and the grill, board the windows with sheets of gray plywood, and look for somewhere else to live till the next fall, a roommate or a room. Meanwhile she could watch the woods along Shadow River color, and the deck fill with tattered leaves, and the river steam whitely in the mornings. She thought of the little house as hers.
Pierce’s new house in Littleville was by the Blackbury, the other river that runs through the Faraways, rising from different sources than the Shadow’s, springs and melting snows far up in the Appalachians, and eventually subsuming the Shadow on its journey to the sea.
It was Rose who had led him to the house, before he had even moved to the county, when at a moonlit party by a backwater of this river he’d invited her for a row, and they had come to this house, which was unoccupied then; and they broke and entered. She was with him too when he answered an ad for a house to rent, and found it to be the same one they had violated in the moonlight: they went together through the small and faintly smelly bathroom and into the unexpected bedroom, as they had before. Oh secret she said this time too, and Pierce embraced her as he had done before, and said to her Now you must remember. And she said Yes in a whisper.
And yet (Pierce thought, as he lay now on this late-September morning looking at that very bedroom from within his own bed, his own curtains now hanging at the windows and his own pictures dim on the walls in the dawnlight) maybe even then she had not remembered. She had answered Yes: but had he not made it a rule that in certain circumstances she never answer No to him?
In his broad bed in the midnight—not here, but on Maple Street in the Jambs—he had placed the rule on her: Don’t say no to me, Rose. You don’t want to say no. Only yes. Do you understand?
Yes.
Say it.
Yes.
So it may be that she had really not recognized the place, and therefore had not felt the queasy pressure of Fate on her inward parts as he felt it on his to have returned here. Perhaps she even chose not to remember it. She could do that. She had a talent that way.
Most secret of all is what’s forgotten.
He rose, wide awake—she in her bed in her cabin within the sound of the Shadow slept on—and stood in thought, long, naked and pale where his skin was not darkened by black hair. Tonight they would meet, dinner on her deck by her young cold river. He would have to lay some plans then for the evening, could not go up there all unready.
At that he lay down again to think.
Pierce had no alarm clock. He awakened when his dreams were done, plenty early. Lately he had ceased to sleep much at night: he commonly fell into a deep paralysis for two or three hours after climbing into his great bed, and then awoke as though he had been shaken, to lie alert and humming like a switched-on appliance for hours, thinking, thinking, weaving, weaving; sometimes rising to scribble, or smoke, or just stare out at the sinking moon. Another hour or two of sleep after first light began to touch the windows; then up and busy in the kitchen, at work already even while he clattered the coffeepot and skillet.
For a long time after he received the publisher’s advance for the book he was to write about magic, secret histories, and the End of the World, money that (along with some from the Rasmussen Foundation) bought his daily bread, Pierce had made no progress on it. He had climbed to the high diving board in proposing it, and thereupon found that he could neither jump nor back down. He scribbled notes and lined them out, typed pages and almost immediately crushed them. Why is it we believe that Gypsies can tell fortunes? he would begin; or There is more than one history of the world: and then he’d lie down, or go out, or give up.
But then summer had come, hot as hell, fecund and various, inspiring in him maybe an imitative abundance. Robbie too, summoned by his powers, powers he hadn’t known he had, a being himself made of powers that Pierce did not know how to calculate. And then Rose, whom he was now nearly done thinking of for this idle morning. Like a wise investment, the more time he spent on Rose or with her the more returns he seemed to get; he pretended a lordly annoyance at her calls and impetuosities during his hours of working or spellbinding but he had grown superstitious about her too, couldn’t be sure his productivity didn’t actually depend on her, found himself talking her into forgoing other possibilities in favor of dates with him; and when she came at evening she would find him often enough still in his dressing gown, shaken and glowing like an athlete, with a new yellow pad filled that had been blank not long before; how do you go so fast, she would marvel, and he would laugh a great laugh and push her before him toward the bedroom.
Another possibility, which Pierce sometimes entertained as he lay abed, laughing there sometimes outrageously as well, was that Time was really decanting into his big brain, unfillable like the conjurer’s trick chalice, the wine of a new revelation, one that he was to impart as best he could to those who waited for it, a revelation that might only in this moment, this year of this decade, be worth imparting.
Meanwhile Rosie Rasmussen flew. She leapt from the top of the Ball Building on River Street, where four big stone balls are placed; she had always looked up at those balls but had never before been able to touch them, and the cold rough feel of them was gratifying as she pushed off and out above the river.
Whyever had she forgot she could do this? She remembered now, as the wrinkled river spread below her, that of course she could and had, many times, in certain seasons, which seasons? Flying weather maybe. She was a little rusty now but oh the easy bliss of it when you got your bearings and learned to bank and wheel, kick-turn, dive and rise again!
There was Butterman’s on its rock, should she alight there? No not where she was headed. She lifted her eyes. Beyond, the city of Cascadia spread, the paper mill pouring white smoke, the new treatment plant, the shining pelt of the river draped over the dam and gathering in foam at the bottom. No not far enough. She strained somewhat to rise, afraid momentarily that she was getting somehow heavier, airlogged, sinking. The straitened river opened again southward. Over earth’s curve came the tops of the twofold city, Conurbana, the many old towers on the left bank (gold dome of the Municipal Building catching the morning light) and the few higher cold-s
teel ones on the right bank.
Oh yes there, Rosie thought, losing altitude. That’s the way she would go. Duty and apprehension gathered in her breast. She wondered if she had been wrong, if actually she had been thrown or shot upward and was now not flying but falling: and she realized that to think so was to fall; and she began to.
Landing on her pillow in her bed in the predawn gloom, her eyes gulping light. The alarm clock on the table beside her just gathering force to go off, its whir what woke her. Rosie smacked it, forestalling it, and fell back. Groaned aloud in eerie horror then as she became aware of some living thing in the bed with her, oh yes Christ, Sam, who had awakened past midnight with the terrors and wouldn’t rest till Rosie took her in.
Oh I don’t want to go, Rosie thought or pleaded. She sat up and felt with her feet for her slippers, couldn’t find them, got down on hands and knees and felt under the bed for them (another shiver of eldritch fear as she groped in that dark den) and then gave up and went barefoot into the hall. Past Boney’s old room and to the back stairs. Autumn odors, of chilly air and last year’s fires waiting to be relit, cold old woodwork, past lives lived here and their meals and linens and furnishings, all for some reason vivid in this season. The stairs debouched into the kitchen. Rosie left the door open (why anyway did stairs need doors at all?) so she could hear Sam if she awoke; and she filled the teapot at the sink.
Remembering flying. You always seem to remember, in dreams, that you can, and have before. And of course you have: in other dreams. If she could fly today to Conurbana for this appointment she would fly.
The huge old kitchen, meant more for cooks and maids than a family, was still the place she liked best in this house to which she had come to live, and which was in some sense hers. Not hers to dispose of, but hers in trust: for it all belonged to the Foundation that Boney had long ago set up, which now possessed all the Rasmussen wealth. In his will he had named her to be its director.