hanging in the ignition and the car roared to life. Light from the overhead dome filled the cabin.
“Get off,” Becka grumbled in a hazy lover’s gruff.
“Roll up the window, please,” Dan answered. “Sorry – I’ve got the front ones.”
The desperate quality in Dan’s voice made Becka comply. “Do you have a towel?” she asked, trying to be helpful but unwilling to give up the blanket she held against her nakedness. With the windows rolled up, she surveyed the damage. “That’s a lot of water. Holy shit.”
Lighting exploded just twenty yards away.
Becka jumped, alarm bells suddenly ringing in her head: something was happening that shouldn’t be. “What is it?” she thought, her mind screaming. Her nudity only served to heighten her anxiety. Scrounging for her dress on the wet floorboards, she muttered something about ruined silk and hastily pulled the fabric over her head.
When she looked up, Becka wondered why Dan was just sitting in the front passenger seat, his stripped chest wet, his breath coming so loudly that Becka could hear it over the wailing wind and pounding rain. His face was as white and as long as a penguin’s chest. Just as Dan began to recite a long-ago memorized sermon from scripture, she noticed the idol was broken in two halves, each of which Dan held in white-knuckled grips.
“Oh, my God!” Becka screamed, horrified by what had happened to the idol. She was on the verge of screaming again. She never had the chance.
Dan cried out as a wave of water lifted the Expedition like a conductor’s hands signaling for a dramatically building crescendo. The car lurched violently, the passenger side wheel well slamming into a boulder. Dan’s head smashed against a window and glass shattered in a shower of sparkling shards instantly lost to the rain. His body pitched sideways to the floor, where he shook uncontrollably. The two halves of the idol flew in opposite directions.
Becka’s yell was different than Dan’s.
Her eyes focused, like a cat looking for ground during a long fall, even as she felt herself hurtling backwards into the far rear of the truck. The Expedition had become a cork to the flashflood, surging back up the incline faster and faster as the water’s flow intensified.
Becka knew time was limited. She would have to get out, or hope for the best if she stayed in the truck: neither option was particularly appealing. Her gut told her to take a risk outside with the current, and instinct told her that if the truck rolled with them inside, she would be battered against the steel frame and hammered to a pulp. Water was a foot deep up front, pushing and pulling at Dan’s limp figure; his expression was distant, floating just above the waterline.
In a desperate bid to help him, Becka flung herself between the bucket seats, reaching for any piece of Dan in her tough little grip. “Dan! Fucking move!” she implored as the water rose faster, came harder.
Grunting and pulling with all of her might, Becka wrenched Dan backwards and onto the driver’s seat, where he slouched on his side. Lightning flashed. The river came alive around them. Blood tessellated from Dan’s head wound. Becka imagined herself diving from the broken window and fighting the river to its banks. “It can be done,” she thought, “it can be done.”
The dome light flickered and was gone, plunging them back into absolute obscurity.
“Any second it will be over,” Becka thought, as darkness overwhelmed hope.
Lightning burst over the bank. So bright, so close, so like an angel shining in a stained glass relief. “Come to take me away, have you?!” Becka shouted, defiant.
In the fraction of a second before darkness consumed the world again, Becka saw a horse with the dark figure of a man on its back. Then it – they – were gone.
The horse’s whinny was like thunder, only lyrical, its tone knifing through the tumult. Becka scrambled forward into the passenger seat, her weight causing the nose of the truck to tilt precariously downward as it spun through the roiling void. Violently, Becka pushed back against the seat. With one hand, she pulled at the top of the seatbelt mechanism at the base of the roof. She wrapped her fingers around the grey fabric and, with desperate hope surging in her veins as a guide, reached into the black water. Raging waves slapped her arm hard against the side of the truck, forcing her hand down and against the hull of their broken vessel. Becka yelled, fear creeping into panic.
Seconds to go, she thought, feeling the truck’s cab filling with water to her waist. Just then, the horse’s cry sounded not feet away. It filled her with courage. This time, she thrust her entire torso out of the car window. A wave cracked against her chest. She held her ground, reaching, clawing at the water, afraid to let go but terrified to hang on. Then she felt it: something was there. Something was out in the wild, flashing river. She scrambled for it, grappling, and then it was hers, her body sliding the rest of the way from the truck just as it spun away. Her hands were tangled in something thick and stringy, something attached to a body in motion, a horse.
The incalculable force of the river drove Becka’s head underwater.
She could feel the horse’s neck with her other hand as all ten of her fingers fought to hold on.
“Please God,” she thought, help me. At that moment a powerful force, something hard to differentiate from the water itself, lifted Becka by her dress and draped her on her back across the horse’s shoulders.
Lightning showered like machine gun fire over the land and Becka recognized the shape of a man above her. A joyous shock overcame her. “He’s an Indian,” she thought, smiling. And here I was expecting God.
CHAPTER 3
After an ugly night of disoriented travel, Nastas looked grim and older than his twenty-three years, slumped over his horse’s back, his grievous injuries a sharp contradiction to the morning warmth caressing the landscape after last evening’s tumult. Musashi moved carefully so as not to upset Nastas from his back. He was tired but glowed with purpose and strength, unscathed during the rescue of the girl. He knew Nastas needed immediate help and was frustrated that he didn’t recognize the terrain. A mile earlier, he’d caught a whiff of a cooking fire and started in its general direction. The scent was getting stronger. He quickened his pace.
The river had nearly claimed Nastas for herself. A deep gash through the meat of his left bicep still oozed new blood, and thick strands of his long, black hair dragged crosshatched through it like a paintbrush. His brown leather pants were torn and streaked with mud; his naked chest, hairless and tanned to a bottomless red, was bruised and covered with small cuts. In spite of his desire to focus all his efforts on not falling off Musashi, the perilous events of the previous night replayed themselves over and over again.
He could see himself riding into the dusk on the thirtieth day of a solitary journey that had taken him in a 250-mile loop around his hometown of Window Rock. He’d been within miles of his hogan, its worn but comfy mattress beckoning, when he felt an overwhelming urge to visit Black Rock. The desire was so sudden and so palpable, he’d felt the nervousness of a rabbit beneath a circling hawk. Nastas had only been there once before, as a boy, and then the power of the holy place so overwhelmed him, he had lacked the courage to touch Tsa-Zhin. Now its summons felt like providence, impossible to resist. Musashi, also dreaming of an easy meal of oats and fresh hay, had to be put to heel several times before he steered away from home. Six hours later, Black Rock finally at hand, the weary duo were abruptly treated to a storm which seemed to rage out of nowhere.
Soaked in seconds, Nastas laughed to himself when he thought of finding shelter. Then he’d heard it, clear as day above the slashing rain: a girl’s scream for help. Musashi heard it, too, and spun in the direction of the cry without Nastas’ touch. Off he’d galloped as fast as he could, almost plunging into the flash flood’s deepening current before Musashi could be reined in. They saw the red truck bob past, and the girl who must have screamed for his help struggling in the passenger seat. Nastas said to Musashi, “If this is the purpose Black Rock had in mind when it called to me, and we are to die in this river, I am sorry if