barely got back to the bank himself, half-drowned and vomiting, and racked with guilt—for letting the children play on the spit, for his inattention, for not acting faster, for not being a better swimmer, and—knowing this now—for not staying in the center of the river. And Penny, who'd been fighting her way along the bank with Andy and Tricia, when she reached him stopped in her tracks and her face wrenched with horror at the truth. Nicole was gone, snatched away from her. Her one hand twisted in Tricia's hair. She sank to her knees and clutched at Tricia, and moaned, “Not in that cold.”
Tricia looked up at her father. Andy, standing to one side, looked up. The children's eyes grew huge in their faces until it seemed they would blow out into the sky. Lafleur's knees buckled and he went down, sobbing uncontrollably. “Alone,” Penny wept. “So lonely for a child. It's no way,” and that night, a mother still, clinging to a mother's sense of a child's welfare even in death, she would say, “Not that way, it's no way for a young one to die, not Nicole, not taken like that in the cold, alone. Not without me!” She sat up straight in the bed and tore at her hair.
They'd called the fire department. The river was searched, but the body was never recovered. Nicole was utterly gone. She'd been sucked down to Portland, maybe, or was tangled in the locks, or dragged out to sea, or devoured, or atomized into water. That death was what Lafleur and Penny had always between them. Together they were gripped by that cold.
The mare and donkey circled the corral. He felt them and heard them blow air as they passed. He gazed at the heron. It was as if it were the same heron he had seen as a boy on the spit, an unchanged element in all the years, an intaglio, something as permanent as death incised through the skin of time, a masquerade of death dressed in baby blue, the exact and strange essence of time. The heron's long neck folded toward its body and unfolded again and swayed gracefully. It tipped its head to the side and froze, watching. Lafleur watched it. It was just the blue heron he was watching. He instructed himself in that: to watch, to be unafraid.
If one watched a heron closely when it caught a fish, one could sometimes see the head come up with the fish sideways in the beak, and then see the heron flip the fish acrobatically in the air, then swallow it headfirst. It was a good trick. Lafleur watched, thinking the bird was about to stab for a fish. The heron did not move. If he looked away for an instant, he knew, the heron might catch a fish. Or it might vanish altogether.
“She's about to accept him,” Mrs. Good said.
He turned. “Oh?”
Mrs. Good grinned. “You bet.”
He looked into the corral. The donkey appeared almost small next to the mare. He was wiry, long in the legs, high in the withers and straight in the back. He moved like silk, like a killer, and his tea color rippled as he moved in and out of the deepening shadows. Lafleur glanced at the heron. It hadn't moved. Its long legs, blue body, and extended head were poised against the silver cocoon of mist. It looked like a picture on a coin. The sky was turning pink. He looked back at the donkey. The donkey held his head low, his ears flat, and had an almost disconsolate expression. He looked sullen like a Spanish dancer, straight and tensed like one who is about to handle his partner brutally. The mare playfully bumped her hindquarters up against the donkey, then she slowed. The donkey slowed. There was a moment in which they were moving but seemed to have stopped, a lucid moment like a long inhalation of air in which their strength visibly gathered. Suddenly, the donkey lunged and bit into the mare's neck. The mare whinnied and stopped. Mrs. Good made a rattling sound in her throat. Standing there with the two women became too much for Lafleur's sense of propriety.
“I should just let myself in?” he said.
“Huh?” Mrs. Good said without looking at him. “In?”
“To use the phone,” he said.
“Oh, that,” Mrs. Good said. She chuckled. “I guess you know the way.” The donkey pawed at the mare's back and moved adroitly around her on his hind legs. Lafleur turned away. The daughter glanced up at him as he passed. Her eyes were wide and glassy. He walked up to the house and climbed the steps to the deck. Jones followed. He went inside to the kitchen. The black telephone hung on the wall near the sink, where his mother had wanted it to be. He located the phone book and searched for Blaylock's number. When he found it he put his finger on the name and paused. Jones sat on the deck, peering in the window at him. Mrs. Good was no longer at the corral, but her daughter stood there. He leaned over the counter and looked down and to one side of the house for Mrs. Good. She was nowhere to be seen. The girl looked small, and the mare and donkey looked small at the extreme end of the corral. They stood facing each other. Their heads overlapped. The coitus had stilled them. The heron had vanished from the spit. The twilight air had turned pink. The cocoon of mist above the river was pink. The trunks and limbs of trees on the opposite bank were faintly visible through the mist and made it look crenelated like a sheepskin. The surface of the river was like smoked glass. A dark beam floated into sight from behind the trees, cruised by, then vanished.
During the winter floods, it was not uncommon to see entire trees hurtle down. If they caught on the bank or on rock, they heaved like matchsticks. He had seen shattered boats, stoves, and parts of car bodies kept off the bottom by the speed of the water, and turkeys, pigs, and sheep, bloated cow carcasses dancing on the surface like balloons. Once, he'd seen a herd of Holsteins, one black-and-white cow after another, bouncing by. Exquisite, chaotic, and horrifying, the river was full of its trade with the earth. It was a sometimes macabre telemetry of everything upstream. It brought things by and sometimes it snatched them away.
He looked over in the direction of his toolshed, which was now utterly invisible. He looked back down at the phone book. The number was right there. He caught sight of a figure in the corner of his eye, and turned. Mrs. Good stood in the doorway to the living room. She looked directly back at him. Her hands hung at her sides and her red lips, without the matchstick now, were parted. Her abdomen swelled as she inhaled. Lafleur's breath jumped. He sank into the pit of his late, protracted abstinence. He was suddenly filled with desire, but he caught himself, thinking: No, no, not with you. He passed his eyes down her body, then turned away. His hand shook as he dialed the number.
The telephone rang at the other end. He looked down at the churned-up, blackened earth inside the corral, at the motionless animals, at the girl. A gust of wind made the girl's hair flutter and flipped up her shirt, baring the hollow of her back. He heard Mrs. Good's footsteps going away. He considered himself an idiot for having allowed himself to step into that situation, and an idiot for not capitalizing on it, and also an idiot for being tempted to do so. He made himself think about this other thing—the desert, and what he still assumed was a government project.
A voice came on and snarled at him: “Yeah?”
3
FOUR DAYS LATER Lafleur stood knocking at the door of the pink-and-gray house. The door swung open and Ned Blaylock appeared. He had the greasy welder's skullcap on his head and a cigar in his mouth just as in the old days, but his skin was pallid and he'd put on weight. He leaned forward, making Lafleur lean back, and he peered out toward the drive and past the machinery stockpile toward the road as if checking to be sure nobody else was out there, then he held the door open and told Lafleur to come in. Lafleur stepped inside. The door sucked shut behind him. He followed Blaylock gingerly, unsure of his footing. The living room was in near darkness. No lamps were on and the drapes were drawn. What light there was seeped in around the drapes from the overcast sky outside. The chairs and couch, he made out, were covered with sheets, and the air of the place had the brackish reek of cats.
They moved down a hall and past the kitchen. Lafleur saw a bent figure flit by the stove and vanish through a doorway like the tentacle of something withdrawn. He remembered that. Blaylock's wife was never glimpsed except in retreat. On the stove a pot of liquid was boiling. Blaylock opened a door at the end of the hall and went into a room. Lafleur followed. In the center of the room stood a desk, and on the desk a lit gooseneck lamp, a pile of papers, an old-fashioned adding machine, a half-full bottle of Scotch. The window blinds were pulled. There was a single bed at one wall, the blankets on it in a heap, and along the edges of the room were shadow and chaos, piles of papers