Into This River I Drown

the man who fell from the sky

“Are you coming down with something?” my mother asks me the next morning

in the kitchen of Big House as she puts a cup of coffee in front of me. “You look really pale.” The Trio stop their chatter and lean in closer to me, trying to determine themselves if I am sick.

“Oh,” Mary says, glancing at her twin. “You do look ill.”

“Ill,” Nina parrots with a giggle. “So deathly ill. Sickly.”

“He just needs to take a day off,” Christie decides. “How many days have you worked in a row now?”

“Not that many,” I grumble. “I’m not sick. I just didn’t sleep well last night.” And apparently I was saved by a bird-man that I took a feather from and it became real. So… that’s a thing too.

“Thirty-two,” my mother says as she rifles through the desk calendar. “You’ve worked thirty-two straight days. No wonder you’re getting sick.”

“I’m not sick!”

“You need to take a break,” Christie says.

“Take a break and get laid,” Mary says as she sips her coffee.

“Totally get laid,” Nina agrees.

“Do we know any homosexuals? To help him out?” Christie asks her sisters, much to my horror.

“Like, on TV? Or in real life?” Mary asks.

“Real life,” Christie says. “I think we should attempt to start local before trying to go after celebrities. Maybe by the time he’s ready, Tom Cruise will have come out.”

“He’s too old,” Mary says with a frown. “Benji needs someone younger. And far more hip.”

“I don’t know any gays,” Nina says sadly. “I must not be very hip.”

“You are very hip,” Christie reassures her. “And you do too know some gays! You know Benji here. He’s obviously a gay. And what about that lovely he-she that used to do your nails back in Seafare? What was his-her name?”

“It depended on what day it was,” Mary says. “Sometimes he was Joe Workman. Other times she was Quartina Backhand, the most dangerous woman in captivity.”

“What a lovely name that is,” Christie says. “She-males are so amazing.” “I don’t think Benji wants a lady-man,” Nina says.

“You’re probably right,” Mary says thoughtfully. “He probably wouldn’t know

what to do with him-her.”

I groan and lay my head down on my arms. “Please, just shoot me now.” The Trio laughs.

Mom rubs her hand over the back of my head. “Girls, you’re embarrassing him.

You know Benji’s a bit of a prude.”

“A bit?” Mary snorts. “He’s the biggest prude we know.”

“I am not a prude,” I snap at them, still hiding my face, knowing I’m blushing. “How come your neck is turning red?” Nina asks. “Are you hot?” “What about Carl!” Mary says excitedly. “He’s strapping and available and only

one town over.”

“We tried that already, remember?” Christie asks. “It turned out he was into

some very kinky things.”

Understatement. Over dinner, Carl told me that he was into fisting and wanted

me to wear his arm and be his puppet.

“A prude,” my mother says lovingly. “You are taking the day off today. One of

us can take the store today.”

I shake my head as I yawn. “I can’t. I’ve got two oil changes and Abe is

convinced that there’s a rattling sound under the hood of the Honda, even though

there never is. Today is busy.”

My mom sighs. “Then tomorrow.”

“I’ve got—”

“Benji,” all four women scold at once.

I throw my hands up in the air. “Fine. Tomorrow.”

Mom grins at me as she takes my cup from my hand and pours the coffee into a

travel mug. All four women then stand in a line and I kiss their cheeks, the Trio

telling me not to worry, that they will find a homosexual or two, even if they have to

think on it all day.

I shake my head as my mom hands me my mug and motions for me to turn

around. I do, and she lifts my backpack up and sets it on my back. They treat me like

I’m twelve, but I like to think it’s more for their benefit than mine. Mom’s fussing

with the zipper on the back of my bag when alarms start ringing in my head. I’m

about to turn when she opens the bag to see what the zipper is caught on. A feather falls to the floor.

I bend to scoop it up, but Mary beats me to it. “Where in the crap did you find

this?” she asks, holding it close to her face.

Christie plucks it from her fingers. “This has got to be the biggest bird ever.” My mother grabs it. “Benji, where did this come from?”

I make a move to take it back, but she holds it away from me. “Near Little

House,” I say defensively. “I just like it, okay? Give it back.” I can’t tell them the

thought of anyone other than me touching the feather makes me want to snarl and

lash out. I can’t tell them I spent the remainder of last night sitting in a chair in the

corner of the room, my knees curled up against my chest, watching the feather as it

lay on my bed. I can’t tell them where it came from, but somehow I know it is mine,

that it is for me.

“Can I see it?” Nina asks quietly.

My mother looks to me. I shrug, every fiber of my being screaming for me to

take it back, that no one else should touch it, but I don’t want to be forced to explain

these ridiculous feelings, seeing as how I don’t understand them myself. Not so ridiculous, I tell myself. It’s mine. It’s mine because it came from my

dre—

She hands it over to Nina, who moans softly as it touches her fingers. “It’s so

pretty,” she whispers. “And so, so blue.” Her eyes flick to mine at this last. I look

away. “Did you see him?” she asks me.

I close my eyes.

“See who?” Christie asks, baffled.

“The bird?” Mary asks, confused.

“It must have been huge,” my mom said.

I open my eyes. All are watching me. But it’s Nina I look at. “No,” I say. “I

didn’t see him.”

She nods as if she’s received the answer she expected. She watches me for a

moment longer before handing the feather back to me. There’s a burst of heat as it

touches my fingers, and I know she can feel it too when her eyes widen, when a coy

smile dawns on her face. “It’s blue,” she says after a moment. “Isn’t that right,

Benji?”

“Yes, dear,” Mary says, smiling at her sister. “The feather is blue. That’s very

good!”

I shove it in my backpack and turn to walk out the door, unable to take her

knowing eyes on me anymore. My mother calls after me, reminding me that I’m

taking the day off tomorrow, that she’ll open the store. I wave without looking and

then am out the door into the cool morning air.





“This whole area used to be gold!” Abraham Dufree tells me a few hours later,

standing above me while I lean under the hood of his ’89 Honda Civic. “That’s why Roseland was founded, you know!”

I know only because Abe tells me the same thing almost every single week when he brings in his car for a rattling he’s sure he hears under the hood, or how his tires seem to be low, or he’s sure there’s a brake problem because they feel squishy to him. More often than not, there’s nothing wrong with the car. “He just needs someone to talk to,” my father had told me once. “After Estelle died, he got lonely. It’s what happens when you’re with someone for over sixty years, Benji. When that is suddenly gone, you’re lost. He just needs help finding his way back.” After Big Eddie, Abe still brought his car in and transferred all his stories over to me. I don’t know when it happened, but I suddenly found myself with a best friend who was an old man.

“In 1851, right?” I say, tightening the spark plugs that I loosened only moments before to make it look like I was doing something.

“That’s right! This place was just empty fields and hills, and then they found gold! Over the next year, over two thousand people made their way up here, thoughts of riches flashing through their eyes, wouldn’t you know. O’course, once the railroad moved south, the town pretty much dried up along with the veins buried under the rock.”

“But somehow it’s still here, right?”

“Oh, sure. There’s something special about this place. There’s something about Roseland that kept it alive, even when everyone else thought it would die.”

“What makes it special?”

He laughs, as he always does at this point. “The people, o’course! I’ve lived here all my life, Benji. It’s always the people. They’re the ones that kept it alive. You and I have kept it alive.”

“And what was it Estelle always used to say?” I ask him, even though I can tell him verbatim. “What did she used to tell you about the gold?”

He grins and nods, his dentures sturdy and slightly yellowed. “She used to say, ‘Abe, there’s still gold up in those hills, I can just feel it! I’ve almost a mind to head on down to the hardware store and pick up a shovel and a pickax and just start hitting rocks to see what I could find!’ That’s what the missus used to say. Sure as I’m standing before you, that’s what she said.”

I don’t know why, but I choose to deviate from our usual conversation. I’m supposed to tell him that I wouldn’t be surprised if his late wife was right on the money, that there were nuggets of gold the size of footballs just waiting to be discovered. Then we’d move on to the weather and how it seems to get hotter and hotter every summer and the season approaching should be a doozy. It was March and already in the seventies? Gosh!

But I don’t. Somehow I know things are changing, and I can’t stop myself. I’m thinking of the feather when I say, “And did she ever?”

The grin slides from Abe’s face. He looks confused. “Did she ever what, Benji?”

“Did she ever get a shovel? Did she ever get a pickax? Did she ever head into the hills and split rocks until she found gold?” My hands feel cold, even though it’s warm; wet, even though they’re dry.

His old face wrinkles further as he frowns. I wonder if I’ve made a mistake. I wonder if things are supposed to always stay the same. I wonder if it’s too late to take it back. Then, in a quiet voice, he says, “No. She didn’t. It was just something she always said. She liked to talk big sometimes, you know. I think we all do.” He sighs as he looks out the front of the garage, sunlight dancing through the trees. The shadows sway along the ground. “But that was her talking, the old girl. Something she said when she was dreaming out loud. Do you ever dream out loud, Benji?”

Now he’s changing the script. I’m immediately on the defensive, attempting to resist the blinding, fiery urge to run into the shop, to check my backpack to make sure the feather is where I left it. It’s probably gone, I think. It’s probably gone because it was never there to begin with. It was just a dream. It was only real to me because I dreamed it out loud. I dreamed it real.

I stand up and close the hood of the Honda gently, pressing down until it latches. I grab an old rag off the workbench and wipe a smear of grease off my left hand. Some of the black is caught under my thumbnail.

And still he waits. He pulls out a pocketknife and starts twirling it deftly through his fingers. It’s an old thing, scuffed and tarnished. Estelle had given it to him on their first wedding anniversary he told me once, reverence in his voice. They didn’t have a lot of money, he said, but she knew they would only ever have one first anniversary. So she had taken some of her savings from her little jar on top of their old green fridge and marched out one pretty fall morning and had come back with the beautiful knife. Engraved in gold on the side were the words I love you, my husband. Forever, Este.

My heart is a little sore at the thought, but I can’t ignore his question. Not now.

Do you ever dream out loud?

“Sometimes,” I say. All the time, I really want to say.

Abe nods. “I thought you might. You and I are the same, you know.”

“How do you figure?” I ask, even though I already know the answer.

“We’ve lost,” he says simply, but what I hear in those two words is my half is gone, my everything is gone, and Big Eddie… wasn’t he almost the same to you? Wasn’t he just almost the same? There’s a hole, isn’t there? Some hole in your chest or at the pit of your stomach that is not filled, that won’t ever be filled.

A bell dings overhead. Someone at the gas pump.

Abe glances out the windows. He narrows his eyes. “This can’t be good,” he mutters.

“What is it?” I follow his gaze out the window. A nondescript black sedan is sitting next to the gas pump, its engine ticking loudly as it cools. There’s no movement that I can see, but the tinted windows are just dark enough to block any views to the inside.

“Government,” Abe says.

I laugh. “What? Abe, you’ve watched too many movies. Let me go take care of them and we can finish up here. They’re probably just lost.”

“Not like us,” he says as I walk out the front of the garage.

The driver’s door opens and a man climbs out of the car, maybe in his late thirties, early forties. The sleeves of his dress shirt are rolled up to his elbows, his tie loosened around his neck. His black hair is short, his eyes hidden behind mirror shades.

“Help you?” I ask.

“You the owner?” he asks, his voice higher pitched than I would have thought. “Yes, sir.”

He sizes me up and down and glances up at the sign spinning overhead, and I

wait for it to come, as it does with all outsiders. “Big Eddie, huh?” he says, sounding amused.

I shrug. “My father.”

“Is he around?”

Sometimes I think so. “He’s dead.”

“My condolences.”

“Sure. Thanks. Did you need gas or….”

“When did he die?”

“I’m sorry?”

“When did he die?”

I pause. It seems outside has gotten brighter and I squint. “Who are you again?” A thin smile reaches his lips before he reaches back down into the car and then

stands back up, closing the car door. He walks toward me until only a few feet separate us. He raises a badge. Joshua Corwin, it says. FBI.

You win that one, Abe.

“Your name?” Agent Corwin asks.

“Benji. Benjamin Green.”

“How’d your dad die, Benji?”

My throat is dry. “Car accident?”

He hears the inflection in my voice. “Are you asking me or telling me?” “Car accident.”

“Oh? When?”

“Five years ago. Five years this May.” A little over a month away. “That right?”

I’m uncomfortable, unable to see his eyes. “Why?”

He ignores this. “Sheriff Griggs still around, huh?”

“Sure.” It comes out bitter.

“Not friends, I take it?”

“Long story.”

“It usually is. Was your dad a good man, Benji?”

A short bark of laughter is out before I can stop it.

An eyebrow arches above the sunglasses. “Something funny?”

“If you knew him,” I say, my voice growing hard, “you wouldn’t have asked that

question. He was a good man.”

“Oh? He would have done the right thing, you think?”

“Always.”

He nods.

“Look, did you need something? I’ve got a customer waiting on me, so….” “Old-timer? Yeah, he hasn’t stopped staring at me since I got here.” Agent

Corwin waves at Abe, who is still standing at the window. Abe doesn’t wave back. “Nice guy,” Corwin says.

I wait.

Finally, “What’s the word on the wind, Benji?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

He cocks his head at me. “This is a small town, right? Doesn’t everyone know everyone else’s business here? Rumors usually spread like wildfire.”

“Maybe,” I say slowly. “But I’ve never been one to care about that sort of thing.”

He reaches back behind him, and I think for a moment he’s going to go for a gun, or handcuffs, and I think that maybe I’ve done something wrong, that I shouldn’t have looked into things like I did. I want to tell him I’ve left it alone for a while now, even though it is still there in the back of my head, white noise that won’t ever disappear.

He hands me a business card instead. The FBI seal. His name. His phone number is listed, and for a moment, I zero in on the last two digits: seventy-seven. “You call me you ever start to care about that sort of thing,” he says. He’s mocking me, but he doesn’t know that I know.

“Sure,” I say.

He asks me to fill up the car and I do. He pays me and leaves without another word. I return to the garage.

“What’d he want?” Abe asks me, sounding worried.

“I don’t know,” I say honestly, showing him the card. “Just asked about Dad and… I don’t know.”

Abe shakes his head. “Big Eddie?” he asked, his eyes wide. “Why’d he want to know about him?”

“Just… he asked me if I thought Dad was a good man.”

Abe snorts. “Good man. Big Eddie was the greatest man. Don’t you dare believe otherwise. I loved that man as if he were my own. Blast it all, he was my own. And the only thing you need to concern yourself with is to keep doing what you’re doing. He’d be proud of you, Benji. I just know it.”

I nod, unable to speak.

His eyes soften. “We’re the same, you and I,” he says again.

We are. I really think we are.

I assure him I’m okay.

I can tell he doesn’t believe me.





Throughout the afternoon, a spring thunderstorm etches its way across the

Cascades. It looked like the mountains would hold the storm off from dropping down into the valley, lightning flashing near the peaks, but as I start to close up the shop for the night, the air smells of rain and ozone. Ripples of thunder peal through the air, crashing and causing the ground to vibrate underneath my feet. There’s no rain, and the air is heavy with static.

My father was a great man.

It’s this I think as I sit at a stop sign. The wind is picking up around me, and the thunder has begun to sound angry. Arcs of electricity travel along the surface of the clouds, light up the world in purples and white. And blues. So many shades of blue.

My father was a great man.

Straight ahead is the way home. To turn left is to head toward Lost Hill Memorial.

To turn right? To turn right is to go to the highway. To mile marker seventyseven.

I told myself I wasn’t going to go there anymore, that there was nothing left at the river for me to see. There was no longer any trace that a man had ever died at seventy-seven. Someone (I don’t know who) had put up a small white cross on the river’s bank shortly after the accident. I saw it for the first time four days after the funeral. It confused me. BIG EDDIE had been written in a childish scrawl across the horizontal bar. I knew what had happened there. I knew now where my father lay. I was certain that having two memorials would trap him, that he’d be stuck between the two, forced to return to the river over and over again, unable to leave.

I tore the cross from the earth. I broke it in half, then in half again. I threw the pieces into the river.

No one ever put up a cross again.

But they could have, I think now, irrationally. These are strange days and strange nights. There are feathers and blues. Dreams and storms. There are things Nina sees that aren’t really there. The script has been broken with Abe. The FBI wants to know if my father was a good man, and I think Little House is haunted. I think I’m haunted and it’s not real. It can’t be real. I am drowning in this river and I don’t know how to stop. I haven’t been to seventy-seven in days. Weeks. Someone could have put a cross back up again.

It’s no question, of course. I turn right.





It only takes ten minutes before I am at mile marker seventy-seven. I pull up in

front of the sign and turn off the truck, the flares of lightning above illuminating the white numbers. They reflect back at me with each pulse from above and it’s like they’re calling me. Beckoning.

Just gonna make sure there’s no cross , I tell myself. Once I see there’s no cross, I can go home. I can go home and forget about all of this. I need to move on. After tonight, it’s time for me to move on. Just gotta check one last time. Make sure there’s nothing there.

I hesitate with my hand on the door handle. Before I can stop myself, I reach into my bag and grab the feather, then open the door out into the storm.

The wind is howling in my ears, almost drowning out the roar from the river below. Another arc of electricity shoots overhead, and I count to two before another crack of thunder blasts the world around me. Just gotta see, I tell myself. I’ll be quick.

I slide down the embankment, careful not to fall on my ass and roll down the hill. I reach the bottom as another gust of wind blows against me, almost knocking me back. The feather begins to slide from my fingers. I grip it tighter. It pokes into my flesh, giving me a small cut. I ignore it.

I am at the river’s edge. There is no cross. There is nothing here.

I breathe a sigh of relief.

Lightning flash.

There’s a truck in the water. Upside down. Back end sticking up, at an angle.

Another flash and it’s gone.

Another flash and the cry of an engine roaring down the embankment.

Lightning above and there’s nothing behind me.

I close my eyes.

I open them and there are thousands of crosses on the river’s edge, all white and glaring and blazing. Big Eddie! they shout. Big motherf*cking Eddie!

I close my eyes. I open my eyes.

The crosses are gone, but the world around me is filled with feathers, billions of them falling from the sky.

A hand on my shoulder. A breath against my neck. A flash of blue.

I fall to my knees and cover my ears, the feather in my hand stabbing my skin. I can’t do this anymore, I think, my own voice almost lost in the storm. I can’t do this anymore. I can’t face this on my own. I am drowning in this river and I am haunted in this house my father built and my mind is breaking. It is shattering. I am broken and alone and afraid. Please. Please. Help me. Help me. Oh. Oh, someone please help me. I can’t do this on my own. Not anymore.

Please.

There is a final crash of thunder and then silence.

I open my eyes.

The river flows in front of me, the surface covered in feathers.

The ground around me is covered in feathers.

A sharp pain pierces my head and I cry out, my eyes burning. I lower my head to the ground as my skull threatens to explode. Feathers press against my face. They smell of earth.

And just as suddenly as it appeared, the pain is gone.

I open my eyes.

The feathers are gone.

There are no crosses. There is no truck.

The river moves forward.

And from above comes a blinding flash of light.





Big Eddie and I sat on the porch of Little House, a few days after it had been

completed. He handed me a beer with strict instructions never to tell Mom as she’d kick his ass. I promised I wouldn’t. He knocked his can against mine and we both took long drinks and sighed. We sat side by side in a couple of lawn chairs. Every now and then, I’d feel his arm against mine.

We were quiet, each lost in our own thoughts. It got like that every now and then, when no words were necessary, more a hindrance than a help. Mom said she’d never known any other people who could just be content to sit next to each other and not say a word. It would drive her nuts, she said, all that quiet.

But there were times when important questions needed to be asked. And when they needed to be asked, we asked them.

He asked, “Benji? Do you believe in the impossible?”

I thought for a moment. “I believe impossible things can happen, though we may not always get to see them.”

He turned my words over in his mind. Then my father said, “I thought this house would be impossible to finish. On the day we started, I thought it would never get done.” He paused. “I thought the life I have now would not have been possible. Your mom. You. None of this seemed like it could be real. Like it could be mine. It seemed impossible.”

I looked at him funny. “But we’re real,” I told him. “We’re yours. Right? Me and Mom?”

He looked out across the yard, up toward Big House, a king surveying his domain. He must have liked what he saw, because the sigh he gave sounded of peace. “Yes,” he said quietly. “You are. Impossibly. Improbably. You are.”