The Rivers Run Dry Page 8

  “Where is she now?” I pushed myself off the bed.

  “She’s putting on fancy clothes. Now I ask you, what kind of a church holds Saturday night services?”

  I drove the rusting black Volvo down Broadway, feeling the warmth from my bath dissipate into a misty rain that shrouded street lights and produced amber halos like visible half-lives of radioactive minerals. On the sidewalks, men and women clad in fleece and jeans talked and laughed and ducked into restaurants. Nobody carried an umbrella.

  Except my mother. I parked on Fifteenth Avenue and locked Aunt Charlotte’s car, running to catch up to the umbrella that was a brutal shade of orange, a napalmed Caribbean sunset, that matched the flame-hued toreador pants and the high heels that gave her a mincing step.

  “The sign said it’s a Holy Spirit church,” she told me. “I was driving by with Charlotte the other day and realized I’m suffering a bad case of the ordinaries.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Have you noticed how people dress in this city? It’s like living inside the L.L.Bean catalogue.”

  “I like L.L.Bean.”

  “Please, do not tell me that. Those clothes are for women who can’t dance.”

  A rainbow of tempera paint smothered the front window, the finger-painted words proclaiming “He lives!” The aluminum edge of the window was torn, as though pried with a screwdriver, and next door was a Thai restaurant where a homeless man slumped against the building. He looked as if he had fainted on the spot. I opened the church door and my mother closed her umbrella, shaking loose the light mist of rain. For several moments, she stared at the homeless man, then walked in her tiny steps to where he lay and tucked dollar bills into his torn coat pocket. The man never stirred. As we stepped inside the church, I could smell curry and lemongrass and the moist troubled breath of people who have been crying. The room was crowded with swaying bodies and lifted arms and voices singing “Holy, holy, holy.”

  “Thank you, Jesus!” somebody shouted.

  My mother handed me the umbrella and clicked toward the front of the crowd. I took a seat in back on a metal folding chair, stretching my feet out. The row in front of me was empty.

  My father used to say there were two kinds of people in the world: those who believed in coincidence, and those who had the courage to recognize God. Believing in coincidence, he said, was like a baby in its crib, staring up at a mobile, continually surprised by the objects that floated past. The person who recognized God also admired the beauty of the mobile, but with a more refined perception; they acknowledged the same delight while realizing that such order only comes from creative design.

  So I should not have been surprised when the tinny electric organ died down and the crowd swayed to repeating refrains in minor keys and the preacher began speaking about water. He was a man of indeterminate age. Thirty, perhaps fifty. This preacher’s brown skin was soft and pliable and his dark eyes shone with a luminosity often seen in small children. He wore pale blue slacks, and his determined strides crossed the abbreviated room, his arms flying as he thanked God for the rain, for a break in the drought, for whatever fell from the sky.

  “The Bible says rain is a blessing,” he said. “And it says drought is a curse. Most of the time Seattle is very, very blessed.”

  “Amen!” somebody hollered.

  “But this city’s been operating under a curse. That’s why we had us a drought. We got to pray through the spiritual battle.”

  “Tell it, preacher!”

  “That’s right, I’m tellin’ it. And I’m gonna remind you tonight about water, about the blessing of water. Because no matter what the weather, no matter rain or no rain, we got water that don’t never run dry. And to get that water, all you gotta do is believe. That’s right. Believe. When the rivers run dry, you call on him. He fills you up again. Can I hear an amen?”

  “Amen!”

  My mother’s hand shot up, the familiar gold jewelry sparkling, her fingers splaying like a student with the correct answer. She cried, “Amen!”

  “Jesus came to that woman at the well,” the preacher said, “and how did he talk to her? Did he say, ‘You filthy Samarian, go on home’? Did he say, ‘How dare you take five husbands, what’s wrong with you?’ No, he didn’t shame that woman for her life.”

  “Praise Jesus!”

  “Jesus said, ‘Woman, go ahead, get some water from this here well. And after you drink it, you gonna be thirsty all over again.’ Because that’s how it works with earthly things: you get some, then you want more. Jesus said, ‘I am the living water. You believe in me, you won’t never thirst again. That drought in your soul? That place inside where the rivers run dry? I’ll wash it clean and you won’t ever thirst again.’”

  “Hallelujah!”

  “God is good!”

  “Now, let me ask you,” said the preacher, lowering his voice, “which of those waters you gonna choose?”

  “Gimme the good water!”

  And then the preacher’s voice stretched out all the syllables, his tone rising and falling, hill and valley and hill again, and within his voice I heard the South, a background in Alabama or Georgia. I glanced at my mother. She was enraptured.

  I closed my eyes.

  “I’m telling you, you gotta choose,” the preacher was saying. “You gotta choose where you get your water. Don’t be relying on some weatherman. He can’t quench your thirst. It don’t work like that. You gotta call on the one, you gotta ask for the living water. And guess what? He’s gonna carry it to you!”

  The organ hit a high note and when I opened my eyes, the crowd’s arms were waving. I could still see my mother’s black curls, bouncing between the brown limbs. She was praising God, shaking off the ordinaries, and I knew there was no coincidence between this moment and the one two nights ago when I held a Gideon Bible in my hands and read this same story while Felicia Kunkel snored in the next bed. And still I felt the powerful undertow of coincidence tugging at my mind, a temptation to chalk everything up to accident. I yearned for rational fact, for certainty. It was the reason my father felt compelled to tell me about the two kinds of people in this world.

  I closed my eyes again. The preacher kept going, hours left in him. I listened to people sing out “Hallelujah!” and “Amen!” and the melodic voices of black people washed over me, rinsing away some of my homesickness, carrying me back, way back, all the way back to Virginia.

  chapter eight

  On Sunday morning, my mother slept in and I found Aunt Charlotte in the parlor, sitting in a green wing chair, reading the Seattle Times. The cats slumbered in her lap and the paper was draped over the high wing behind her right ear. The floor around her feet looked like the bottom of a birdcage. Rather than disturb the cats, she was releasing the paper as she finished the stories, letting it sail to the floor before reach-ing behind for another section.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  “Good morning.” She held out her coffee cup. “Get me another cup? I don’t want to disturb the cats.”

  I was in the kitchen when the phone rang.

  “I’m busy!” Aunt Charlotte called out.

  I picked up the phone. “Hello?”

  “Did you find anything on Cougar Mountain?” Jack asked.

  I blew across the dark surface of my coffee. “What do you care?”

  “I don’t, actually,” he admitted. “But make sure you check with your clairvoyant. Maybe she got a signal from space.”

  “Jack, what do you want?”

  He wanted to know whether I’d seen the videotape of Osama bin Laden, the one where he’s sitting in front of a gray rock. “Yes, I’ve seen it.” The tape showed the terrorist leader looking like a malevolent third-world shepherd expounding on why the West must be wiped off the map and Israel shoved into the sea. “The tape came out after 9/11.”

  “Yeah, that’s the one,” he said. “I heard a geologist watched that tape and pinpointed bin Laden’s location in Afghanistan, just by
those rocks behind him.”

  “That’s true.”

  “I need you to get to North Bend,” he said. “I’ll be waiting in the parking lot at Mount Si.”

  Then he hung up.

  I replaced the phone, leaning against the kitchen counter for several long moments considering my options. When I picked up my coffee, it tasted cold.

  “Raleigh,” my aunt called out. “How’s that coffee coming?”

  Mount Si stood like a geologic outburst, a dark and looming rock that rose more than four thousand feet from the middle of a placid green valley where farmers once grew hops. The evident release of an invisible fault line, Mount Si’s western end had the craggy face of an ill-tempered barrister, his misshapen head graduating to a humpback on the eastern end where an evergreen forest extended to the Cascade Mountains.

  The day was bright, with clouds high and distant as wisps, and I decided the best way to deal with weather in the Northwest was to remember mood swings of a manic depressive. At the base of Mount Si, I parked next to Jack’s Jeep and turned off the engine. The car knocked, shook, hissed, and I waited until the convulsions were over before opening the door. Madame leaped out.

  Jack stood at his black Jeep, his wide back blocking the sun. On the Jeep’s seamed hood lay one quadrant of a USGS map. I stood beside him. He didn’t turn, he didn’t speak.

  “Jack?”

  “The dog again. You take that mutt on all your assignments?”

  “Fake some gratitude. I’m here. On a Sunday.”

  He folded the map. The trailhead’s path was strewn with dry needles that crunched softly under my boots, releasing a crisp scent of pine. My muscles still ached from yesterday’s hike, each step tight, kneading lactic acid through my legs, and within minutes Jack’s back had disappeared. I struggled to climb the mountain’s face, a series of switchbacks crossing higher into the forest. After the first mile, the trees’ emerald boughs changed to lean brown trunks, the bark stripped and polished. Sunlight carved into the woods, flickering between the thin stands, and when I finally caught Jack, it was at the two-mile mark. He was flinging bright cusps of tangerine peel toward the brown trees. I pulled the water bottle from my pack, hands shaking, and filled a nylon dog dish I’d brought for Madame, setting it on the ground. She lapped until the water was gone, then turned for the shade, panting.

  From this plateau, I could see the town of North Bend below. Train tracks curved through lush fields, houses gathered on narrow country roads that wandered like river tributaries. The small town had a peaceful appearance, like a Christmas village waiting for its first snow.

  “Nice place, huh?” Jack said.

  I nodded.

  “That’s why the nut jobs want to blow it up.” He finished chewing, ran the tip of his tongue over his white teeth, and told me that several weeks ago a hiker was coming down the trail at dusk just as some men were starting to climb up.

  “It’s almost dark,” he said, “and these guys are hiking up the trail from the bottom. Weird enough, but it gets weirder. They walked in twos, each pair spaced about ten minutes apart. The hiker coming down sees one set, then another, and another.”

  They wore synthetic slacks and collared shirts buttoned high, he said, and the soles of their street shoes slipped on the steep path. They carried large aluminum-frame packs, the weight of which caused them to lean forward like men moving pianos, sweating profusely.

  “Pay attention to this last detail, Harmon. It’s important. They were all Middle Eastern. Every single one of them.”

  He waited for my response. I reached down, pouring more water into Madame’s bowl. “What’s this got to do with me, Jack?”

  “The hiker gets to the parking lot. No cars. Not one. The bus doesn’t run out here. Are you catching my drift?”

  “I’m not playing twenty questions with you, Jack. Tell me what you need.”

  “Shoulder-launched missiles dismantle into small pieces that fit in backpacks. The summit of this mountain puts a shooter one mile closer to air traffic. If this still isn’t rattling your brain, think about the flight pattern from New York or DC into Sea-Tac. It crosses right over North Bend. Taking down a commercial jet from here is like picking off ducks at the penny arcade. Imagine how many extra virgins they get for wiping out the infidels.”

  I closed my water bottle, placing it in my pack. “What do you need from me?”

  “I want a lynchpin for this case. I want evidence linking the suspects to this summit, just like that geologist did with bin Laden. They say you’re a smart girl. Figure it out.”

  Forty minutes later I reached the summit of Mount Si, a desolate cone of metamorphic rock, wind-stripped and ice-sheared. Jack stood beside a haystack-shaped precipice, the village below looking distant as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope.

  “Over here,” he said.

  I walked across the loose gray rocks to the haystack formation then kneeled for a closer look. The rocks’ sharp edges dug into my knee. This was tortured earth, rock that had been heated, cooled, sheared, and fractured, all before it was exposed to summit weather. Geologists would label this stuff mélange—the French word for mixture—because it contained everything from pale markers of marine sediment to dense volcanic crystals. And it was friable, eroded by the elements. I took several samples, placing them in an evidence bag.

  “This too,” Jack said.

  I walked over. On the ground near his feet, scraps of what appeared to be an old fire huddled in the jagged rocks, the twigs as wiry as pipe tobacco. I kneeled again, collecting pieces, wondering if this fire was just somebody’s bad attempt at a romantic moment. As I was collecting the pieces, Madame came around my side, licking my hand. I gently pushed her away.

  But she came around the other side. Again, she licked my hand.

  “Is that dog going to contaminate my evidence?” Jack asked.

  “Go on, girl,” I said.

  But Madame would not quit.

  She pushed her snout under my forearm, raising her head, flicking my hand off the rocks.

  “Madame, stop it!” My voice was harsh and she ran away, her claws scrabbling across the loose stones. I watched her turn behind the haystack outcropping. She started barking.

  “Here’s what I’m having trouble with,” Jack said. “You’re on assignment and you bring a clairvoyant, and you bring the dog—”

  “I didn’t bring the clairvoyant. And the dog won’t hurt anything.”

  I marked the evidence bag, placing it inside my pack, then stood. Madame was still barking from behind the rock, a sound that the wind captured and threw off the side of the mountain.

  “What’s her problem?” Jack said, seething.

  I walked across the stones, around the haystack, and found Madame at the summit’s lone tree. It had spindly limbs, the lopsided appearance of a divining rod, a shape cultivated by wind and rain and snow.

  “Madame, quiet,” I said.

  But she continued to bark. I saw a small bird, its dark talons clutching one of the tree’s emaciated branches.

  “Madame, hush.”

  At the sound of my voice, the bird tilted its head, the lidless eyes like polished ebony. It did not fly away as I approached. Its charcoal gray feathers were camouflage among the rocks. At the breast, the feathers turned white as fog.

  “That’s a Camp Robber.” Jack came up behind me. “Just a stupid gray jay but they’ll steal a sandwich out of your hand.”

  I stepped closer. The bird tilted its head again, black eyes clicking over the scene. Something cracked under my feet, the bird flew away.

  “I might’ve guessed,” Jack said, “you’d be the first person to scare one of those birds.”

  I glanced down, trying to see what I’d stepped on. The fragments gathered between the rocks, a sandy detritus produced by erosion. But when I kneeled down, I could see plastic pieces, their concave fractures forming along unnatural planes. I picked up a piece. Madame licked my wrist again.

 
“You better say something nice about my dog.” I held out the plastic fragments.

  He leaned down, placing his large hands on his knees. I collected pieces of burnt plastic and dented shell casings, and when I lifted a pile of rocks behind the haystack that were gathered in a mound that defied gravity and erosion, I found a black plastic bag. The corners were sealed with duct tape. I cut it open with a pen knife and held it out for Jack to inspect.

  He tapped his fingers against the granules, rubbing the substance between his fingertips before touching it to the tip of his tongue.

  “Gunpowder,” he said.

  I looked at Madame. She wagged her tail.

  “She’s a search dog,” he said. “Why didn’t you say so?”

  chapter nine

  Dry volcanic basalt drawled all the way across eastern Washington and on Monday morning I drove across it on Interstate 90, headed for the forensic geologist in Spokane. I carried with me the torn piece of fabric and the soil samples from Cougar Mountain, along with Jack’s evidence for counterterrorism from Mount Si.

  Although the highway ran straight as string across the desert, I could feel the road lifting and lowering, the rise so gentle, the descent so quiet that most people probably missed it. But those subtle shifts marked an earth-shaking scientific controversy, one that crystallized my views about science and man, and how we pursue the truth.

  For most of the twentieth century, geologists assumed gradual erosion over millions of years created the landscape of eastern Washington. The relatively flat desert is interrupted by dramatic canyons, or what the locals call coulees. The most famous one was sealed with rebar and concrete, then filled with water—the Grand Coulee Dam. These channels extended for miles and stretched hundreds of feet across.