The Rivers Run Dry (11 page)

And after my bath, I had a dream in which my father appeared so vividly I later doubted it was a dream. He was standing in the forest I had just hiked, his arms open. He was smiling, about to say something, when Aunt Charlotte walked into my bedroom.

“Did I wake you?” she asked.

“What's wrong?”

She wore an expectant expression, like someone who offered a present and wanted to hear the recipient's gratitude.

“Aunt Charlotte, about Claire . . .”

“Raleigh, she once told me something was wrong in my house and right there Beryl choked on a hairball.”

“Beryl, the cat?”

“She went into cardiac arrest.”

“Claire?”

“Beryl. I started screaming and Claire just picked her up, laid her on the table and started CPR. She blew the breath of life into that animal. I'm telling you that woman can sense trouble. That's why I asked her to go find you.”

“I appreciate the thought, but Claire's interfering with my work.”

She drew herself up. “What do you mean?”

“She's a civilian, Aunt Charlotte. She can compromise an investigation.” I didn't have the energy to explain how defense attorneys salivated over something like this. And the media that seized any opportunity to make the Bureau look chaotic or cracked. “Please don't ask her to help me.”

In the broad plain above her eyes, I saw my father's face, his thoughtful countenance. But then she looked away, staring at the bookcase directly across from the bed. The smell of incense from her store, an oily musk, clung to her cerulean blue tunic.

“Actually, I'm more concerned about your mother right now,” she said.

I froze. “Why is that?”

“This morning she told me her spirit's dying. I said, ‘Honey, you come work with me at the store. It'll lift your mood.' You know, like we said, give her something to do. I thought she was enjoying herself today, meeting people, helping ship orders. But in the car on the way home she asked if I wanted to go to church with her. ‘Nadine,' I said, ‘I haven't set foot in a church since David died and I only went in there because he was my brother.' After what the Episcopals put me through with my divorce? No more.”

“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

O
n 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.