27

“The twins were interesting to me from the very start. They had a connection I’d always missed. Hell, I didn’t have any family besides my mother, and by then, I didn’t even have her. I had no friends. I’d never had a girlfriend. Savanna. That was her name. The sister. Of the two, she was the more confident one. She seemed to be the dominant one in their relationship. She was always sure of herself, never timid, but she still made you feel important, like she genuinely cared about you. It’s how she treated everyone.” He shook his head. “Crazy, but it was the sexiest damned thing I’d ever seen. If only it had been real.”

He laughed and turned his head up to the rafters, breathing in the scent of the place again. “Of course, she could have acted just about any old way and still been sexy to me. I was hard up by that point for female companionship, and she was like sex on wheels. Long, blonde hair, legs that never ended, a smile that lit me up. When she showed it, I felt like somebody was flipping a switch inside me. My pecker went hard as a two-by-four and nearly as straight. You ever been just sick for a girl before, Earl? When she’s all you can think about, all you can see? That was me.”

I started to explain that’s how it was with Mary, but I never got the words out. It wouldn’t have sounded believable after the shit I’d just pulled. He pressed on, his head still turned toward the rafters. I followed what his eyes would have been looking at if he’d still had the use of them, and I saw there was a loft up above. No way to access it, but it was there nonetheless, and I wondered if it had been the site of some memorable romantic encounter with Savanna.

“The only thing that kept Savanna from being absolutely perfect in my mind was something I couldn’t put my finger on. These days I know more and could name it. Then, there just seemed to be something slightly off about her. I didn’t see it as much as Harriet complained about her. According to Harriet, she was cruel. Everyone thought they were close, with a connection only twins could have, but in reality Harriet just wanted to get away from her. I suppose that should have been enough to warn me, but I was so smitten by her beauty, by the attention she eventually began to show me. You know …” He trailed off, shaking his head. His eyes seemed filled with light, and for a moment it was as if he almost focused on me directly. He did that sometimes. He could figure out just where a person was in the room and track them. It was uncanny, but almost everything about Rufus was uncanny. This whole story he was revealing seemed almost the stuff of legend. I looked around, trying to imagine him sleeping in this old barn, tried to imagine a young Rufus freed from the shackles of my father’s church, couldn’t quite do it.

“You know,” he went on. “The way she fooled me isn’t too unlike the way your father fooled me, the way Randy Harden and Steve Deloach fooled me. They all saw my weakness. I was a kid who knew nothing about the world, a kid who needed human connection, but even more I needed to understand how everything worked, how it fit together. I found out all right.”

“You okay?”

“Sure. It’s just … Well, shit. You know enough about regret to understand what it can do to you. It’s like carrying around that old millstone. Just gets a little heavier year after year.”

“Yeah,” I said. I did know about regret. I just didn’t know about his regret yet. I hoped I would soon, though. I felt myself getting a little impatient with his slow and detailed delivery.

His eyes seemed to find me again. For a moment, I believed he really saw me, or maybe I was the one seeing him for the first time. It was a different Rufus. Not the old blind version that liked whiskey and politics and being a grumpy wiseass, and not the choirboy version of himself he’d been when I’d known him a long time ago before his blindness, before he’d decided to be an atheist and, ironically, a better Christian than just about anybody I’d ever known. This was none of those men, and yet somehow all of them. This was the Rufus who’d broken free of the shackles of one institution only to find himself ensnared in something even more powerful. It was a Rufus I’d never known, one who’d had to create himself out of nothing, just as we all had to do. That he’d become such an original, such a distinct vision of himself, was a testament to his doggedness, his creativity, and his “fuck all” individualism. The version I was seeing of him now was not these things, not exactly, but rather the potentiality of these things. The version I was seeing now was timeless, at once a ghost from his past and a man haunted by his present and all possible iterations of his future.

“Before I go any further, I need to tell you about the waterfall near the school. Have you ever seen it?”

“Yeah. When I went out there with Ronnie a few weeks ago. It’s beautiful.”

He grinned, seeming to remember it in his mind’s eye. “That it is. Do you know why they call it Two Indian Falls?”

“No, but I’m going to guess two Indian lovers jumped to their deaths there.”

“Wrong. The story says two boys challenged each other to see who could jump across to the other side.”

I remembered standing on the large rock a few weeks ago. So much had changed in that short time. I’d learned about Eddie Walsh and Weston Reynolds. I’d lied to the significant other of the man I buried. Jesus, just thinking of Joe’s face did something to me I couldn’t put into words. It felt like I’d been betrayed, except somehow I was the one who’d betrayed myself. That was exactly what I’d done when I’d slept with Daphne. I’d betrayed Mary and myself. And now Mary was gone. And here I was standing in the past with Rufus. I thought about the chasm near the falls. I thought about what a monumental leap it would be to make it to the other side. Monumental, but maybe not impossible.

“The story says a bunch of people gathered to watch, and the two boys both prepared to jump. One of the reasons the boys wanted to do it was no one had ever been to the other side before. There’s no way to get to it short of being dropped in by a helicopter. The Native Americans believed there were answers to be found on the other side. Answers to great mysteries. Who knows where. Maybe they were written on the inside of some caves that could only be accessed by jumping across.”

It was a tantalizing thought, but if acted upon, I couldn’t imagine it not ending in disaster.

“The boys waited until dusk, because there was some legend that said there was a wind at sunset that would blow you across. The first boy paced off his steps, standing on the broad flat rock that juts out into the falls. He backed up as far as he could and sprinted toward the gap. They say he jumped too high, and not far enough. His hand slid down the rocks on the other side as he tried to gain purchase, and he fell to his death. The crowd went wild with grief. They begged the other boy not to try it, pleading with him, telling him how foolish it was and that the first boy was faster and stronger and he hadn’t even come close. But the story says the second boy was honorable, that he told the gathered crowd he had no choice but to honor his friend’s death by keeping his word.

“‘To not jump,’ he said, ‘would be to die.’

“An old woman broke free from the crowd and clambered up on the rock beside him. She blessed him, saying a prayer to the spirt of the wind, that it might guide him across. Then they helped her down, and the second Indian was alone.

“He paced off his steps, once and then again, and then held his hand up, checking the wind. There was none. He waited for some time for the wind to return, but it seemed as if it had given up for the evening. The sun was gone; a darkness held sway over the land. The story says a quarter moon hung in the sky, but its light was dimmed by heavy clouds.

“Soon, the people began to chant his name, which was Yaholo. It means ‘one who shouts,’ because Yaholo was known for his great cry while playing with the other children. Over and over, they chanted it, and all the while the sun disappeared over the horizon.

“When he finally made the leap, no one could see. They heard his signature yell as he flew over the waterfall, and some claimed to see a dark shape make it across to the other side. Several people described seeing him in midair, and others swore he fell through the dark gap between the bluffs. No one could agree. The next day, when the men went down to the bottom of the waterfall, all they found was the body of the first Indian. They never found the second one.”