River Runs Red (The Border Trilogy) (17 page)

They had come across the mountain lions as they drifted, silent as sycamore leaves on the current, around a sharp bend. A mother and her cub were standing on a sandy bank, sipping from a shallow pool. As soon as she saw the raft, the mother’s ears twitched, she opened her mouth in quiet protest, and then she turned and bounded onto a flat boulder, then up the slender side canyon they must have come down. The cub followed, and within seconds, both were out of sight, leaving behind no indication that they had ever been there.

The boys—Wade had been twenty at the time, Byrd twenty-one—sat in the raft, stunned by the sight, until the raft had drifted around another bend. Then, as if released by the fact that they could no longer see where the lions had been, both began whooping with the sheer joy of what they had experienced.

“They were beautiful,” Byrd said. “Just amazin’.”

“They were,” Wade agreed.

“See, here’s the thing, Wade,” Byrd said. “I had that moment.
We
had it. And a hundred more like it. Shit, a thousand. Not with lions, but the things we’ve seen? There aren’t two luckier fuckers in the world, Wade. Think of all those people in New York and L.A. and Cleveland and everywhere else who’ve never even seen a
tenth
of what we have. Not to mention people in the rest of the world. I can go easy, Wade. Anytime. It don’t get better than we’ve had it.”

“You’re right, Byrd.” Wade nodded his head, convinced. Nothing he had experienced in these last ten years of his life had come close to the things he and Byrd had done together. He could have happily skipped the whole Iraq trip. Maybe Byrd made sense after all…maybe they would both have been better off if they’d simply aimed their boat into a wall inside some canyon or other, or flipped it in a rapids.
Would have spared Byrd a lot of pain, anyway.

“We’ve seen some special things,” Wade added. “No doubt about that.”

“Some pretty fucked-up ones, too,” Byrd said.

Wade waved his hand dismissively. He knew what Byrd meant. He didn’t want to talk about Smuggler’s Canyon, and he didn’t think Byrd really did either. If he wasn’t half-stoned on painkillers, he never would have brought it up. Painkillers and chocolate chip cookies.

“How about this one, Wade? ‘Am I dying or is this my birthday?’ Lady Astor, when she woke up on her deathbed to find that she was surrounded by her family.”

“If it was your birthday, there’d be cake.”

“Yeah, you’re right. No cake here.”

After a slightly awkward silence, Wade excused himself and went down the hall to the men’s room, hoping to bring his raging sorrow under control. He stood in the bathroom (it smelled like bubblegum, which was an improvement over the smell in Byrd’s room), gazing at the mirror and listening to the buzz of the lights. He wasn’t surprised to hear a pattern in the seemingly random noise. He’d noticed a lot of patterns lately: in the hum of the air conditioner at the Hilton, in the the rush of traffic on the roads, in the trilling of crickets outside at night. It had begun on the flight from Baghdad to Frankfurt, listening to the rumble of the jet engines, although he hadn’t become consciously aware of it until this morning.

Earlier in the afternoon, he had been in the shower when he realized that the whole time he’d been listening to these patterns, hidden just beneath the hums and buzzes and roars and clicks, a voice had been speaking some secret language, trying to communicate with him. He had almost said something about it just now, to Byrd, but stopped himself just in time. If he tried to explain, he would sound like a head case. So he kept quiet and listened. He hadn’t yet reached the point that he could understand what they were saying to him, but he would soon be able to. Already he had figured out that (although he couldn’t understand the language, had never heard it in his life) it was an ancient tongue, unspoken for centuries. But he recognized it. Its name was on the proverbial tip of his tongue, or stuck in his brain someplace he couldn’t quite dislodge it.

Even the night before, at dinner with Molly, he had thought she had said something in this language. What was the word?
Kethili
, or something like that. And she had thought he’d said it. What did
that
mean?

Returning to Byrd’s room, he watched his friend sleep, fully aware that it didn’t just
sound
crazy, it
was
. Someone speaking to him in a dead language, hidden behind, or layered into, everyday noises? Why him? Why now? None of it made sense.

And yet…and yet he couldn’t deny the truth of it either. He could almost grasp what the fluorescents were getting at. If he could just listen better, clear his mind of distractions, he could rein it in and bring it home.

While his friend slept, he sat in the visitor chair and listened, straining to make sense of it. He scratched his dry forearms.

And the lights in the hallway jabbered on…

EIGHTEEN

Outside Ginny Tupper’s room at the Palo Duro Motel, an orange cat rubbed up against her door. He wasn’t feral; he acted perfectly tame, but he had perhaps been abandoned by travelers passing through. Sometimes he jumped up on the brick ledge and tapped on her window with his paws. Once she had made the mistake of inviting him in, thinking a little feline company might be entertaining, but he had made himself at home, stalking across the bed where she had been trying to organize her father’s papers. He trampled and strewed and mixed up until Ginny was able to nab him and haul him back outside.

That was all it took, though, as far as the cat was concerned. They were friends for life, and he seemed to lurk around the parking lot until she returned to the room at night. Then he raced to intercept her between her car and the room. She usually stopped and scratched him for a couple of minutes, glad
someone
was there to greet her, before she went inside and closed him out.

He was out there now, bumping against the window, letting her know he craved attention. She was intent, however, on trying to find any references in her father’s writings to pictographs that glowed or gave off heat or electrical charges. She didn’t remember any, but there were boxes and boxes to look through, some contained in notebooks, others in letters or notes scrawled on whatever he had available. She had tried to cross-reference it, but that seemed an endless task, and given the chaos of all the individual sheets of paper, hard to achieve with any finality.

He had always sent his papers home to Mission Viejo from whatever site he’d been working at, for Marguerite, Ginny’s mother, to transcribe and file. Her mother had done so willingly, if without a lot of enthusiasm. When Ginny was fourteen, years after her father’s disappearance, someone had broken into the house and stolen some of his original notebooks, but missed the transcriptions. Now she went back and forth between originals and transcriptions, trying to interpret his scratchy handwriting and Marguerite’s frequently misspelled renditions of the same.

Making things more challenging, she thought that her father might have been going mad toward the end of his life. It had started after a trip to South America, where he had experimented with some of the local hallucinogens. The things he wrote about stopped making sense, as if instead of reporting his own observations, he had started writing down his nightmares. Some of the craziest stuff she had practically committed to memory, having studied it again and again, trying to comprehend it.

“Raven kept me up all night again, dancing and clattering beads on the cliff. Three nights in a row, now. The only thing that quiets him is if I chant with him, and then only for a while.”

“Masks that aren’t masks, eyes that see, lips that tell stories of ancient days, nights of fire, the desecrated temples of warring gods.”

“Kethili ra, kethri chil chilitonate, kethoon ke kelindiri.”

“Today I flew. Into the air, a foot, two, a dozen. Then more, higher, until the canyons spread out before me like a map, the river only a line. I stayed up for a couple of hours, then lowered gently to the ground, a drifting leaf, and went to sleep for three days and nights.”

Entries like that, frequent in the last year or so before he vanished, were hard for Ginny to read. For most of his life, Hollis Tupper had been a respected anthropologist. He hadn’t written a lot of books, but he had published monographs and often spoke at universities and professional gatherings. He had married late in life, wanting to solidly establish his career first. When Ginny came along, the whole parenthood thing seemed to take him by surprise, according to the stories her mother told. He had stayed close to home during her pregnancy, but after trying his hand at fatherhood for a few months, he began going back into the field much more often. When he finally disappeared, Marguerite assumed that he had simply decided he couldn’t handle it anymore, and chose not to come home.

Even as a child, Ginny couldn’t buy that explanation. She remembered her father being awkward with her, but loving. He hadn’t been the world’s greatest dad—no one would have bought him the mug or the plastic trophy—but he wouldn’t have abandoned his only daughter.

Which meant his disappearance was a mystery.

Anthropology was all about mystery, about using clues to reconstruct what must have been. Even cultural anthropology involved people going into societies that weren’t their own and trying to understand them. The kind Hollis Tupper had excelled at was the other kind, physical anthropology. Virginia Tupper had followed her father into the same field, earning a doctorate because no one would offer meaningful grants to anyone with a lesser degree, and she had her own agenda, studying the pictographs of Smuggler’s Canyon to find clues to her father’s disappearance. Physical anthropologists tried to make sense of societies that had long since disappeared, to reconstruct their beliefs and the way they lived by studying the minute bits of evidence left behind: skeletons and structures, shards of pottery, scratchings on walls of rock.

Hollis Tupper had only vanished two decades ago, and he had left a voluminous paper trail. If she couldn’t figure out what happened to him, she needed to find a new line of work.

Then again, when the organization that had provided her a grant found out that she was at Smuggler’s Canyon for personal—not scientific—research, she might have to do so anyway.

She was deep into a paper that she had read before, but felt she needed a refresher on, when a loud thump from the window startled her. She dropped the papers onto the bed and jerked her head around. Through a gap in the curtains she saw the familiar orange cat pressed up against the window, mouth wide, looking as surprised as she felt. Had someone thrown him against the glass?

Well, maybe she needed a break. And that cat obviously needed comforting. She didn’t know how he had hit the window, maybe jumping at a bird or a cricket or something. However it happened, he remained on the brick ledge outside, yowling and looking completely freaked out.

Ginny went to the door, opened it, and stuck a hand out toward the beast. The parking lot was empty. Out on the interstate, a truck growled through its gears; its array of lights streaking against the night sky.

“Are you okay, kitty?” she asked. “What happened?”

The cat meowed, backing away from her hand instead of coming toward it.

“It’s okay, kitty. Whatever happened, I’m not going to hurt you.” She took another step closer, reaching to scoop him up.

Ordinarily the cat would have jumped into her hands.

Instead, he hissed and lashed out with his right front paw, claws bared. Ginny barely snatched her hand away in time. An inch closer and her flesh would have been lacerated. “Jesus!” she said. “What was that?”

The cat didn’t answer. He jumped down off the window ledge and stalked away, his back to Ginny, tail switching defiantly in the air.

Like he’s just vanquished an enemy,
Ginny thought.

An enemy who thought she was a friend.

NINETEEN

At twenty-three, Gilbert Ramirez was the oldest of them, and he had crossed over many times before so he knew the tricks. Where it was easiest to cross, how to dodge
la migra
, where to look for work—all of these things he had learned, and he was willing to share that knowledge with his friends from Taxco, Guillermo Romo (who had gone by the name Billy since he was nine) and Carlos Quintano.

This trip wasn’t even for real. Gilbert had a job in Ciudad Juárez, washing cars at a used-car dealership. It wasn’t the best job he’d ever had, but it paid okay, and he had met a local girl who liked him, and life was good. He had no particular interest, just now, in working on the other side of the line, dealing with all the crap that was going on these days, the anti-migrant forces, the vigilantes and the politicians who called it a crisis when a man wanted to pick vegetables or paint houses to earn a few American dollars.

But he and Billy and Carlos had been drinking cervezas they bought at Bip Bip, downing bottles and talking about the land they could see from the dirt embankment they sat on. Across the street, over the river that they called
Rio Bravo
and Americans called Rio Grande, across the canal and the fences and the barriers of the law, that was
los Estados Unidos
,
Gringolandia
, the promised land—at least that’s how some described it. Gilbert knew this wasn’t quite the case. Sure, there was work there, and money to be made, and places to spend it. He had been inside a mall in Houston that made him literally gasp with wonder at the sheer variety of merchandise one could buy, and the money it would require to truly take advantage of it.