A STRAIGHT AND STEADY rain began to fall the day after the twins disappeared, the vines growing thicker and greener with each drop. Myer and his deputies and deputies from neighboring counties met in the parking lot of the Baptist church at daybreak each morning and volunteers joined them to form the search parties. Myer would divvy the numbers into several groups and each group approached the valley from a different side and then they all tromped and tripped across the valley, aggravated by the rain and the dogs getting tangled in the vines and the rain making the leaves slick and shiny and the footing beneath slick and slippery.
Red Bluff had gone from being nowhere to being somewhere in only hours. The fear and heartbreak had awakened the sleepy town with gut punches of emotion and the television crews that came and the reporters who asked questions to whoever they could get to talk on the sidewalk and the police and detectives who moved in and out of the café and post office and gas stations in their white shirts and black ties were all symbolic and clear in their message—we would not be here unless tragedy has befallen. A constant stir among the townspeople. What happened and how did it happen and I wonder if they’ve figured out anything and lock your doors and watch your children.
They read about it in the newspaper. Heard about it on the radio. Talked about it during Sunday school and at the counter in the café. No one knowing anything and as the days went by without answers, the stories began to form. The suggestions of a greater evil lurking about in the depths of the valley. The suggestions of worlds unknown beneath the kudzu where man or woman or child could disappear. Suggestions that were shot down by those who sat within earshot with their children or who wanted no part of the supernatural when there were real hands who had done the real snatching and that’s what the hell we got to find.
Myer could not fight the vines with his lanky frame and the tweaks in his back so he would observe from the roadside above the valley, aggravated at having to watch the younger and stronger men. He held an umbrella and watched throughout the morning. An investigator would stop by and they would talk or a reporter would stop by and Myer wouldn’t talk. He paced around the cruiser and waited for the radio to call him and say we got them. Or we got something. Any goddamn thing would do but there was no such call. At noon the men would climb out and eat sandwiches that the café had made up for the search parties. There were only bits of conversation as they ate and then smoked as the rain fell on them and they stared out across the kudzu with their expressions a little longer each passing day. Time moving on. Not one shred of evidence. The battle being lost to the mangle of the vines.
In the afternoons he began his own search. Driving the countryside and stopping at abandoned houses or trailers. Going inside and opening closets and moldy refrigerators and deepfreezes and then crawling underneath and swatting away spiderwebs and shining his flashlight. Calling for the twins and getting aggravated by animals nested in the crawl spaces, their movements making Myer’s heart thump with hope that it was the twins and not some hairy four-legged thing. He would crawl out and then have to bend and stretch before he climbed back into the cruiser and drove again. Going down skinny dirt roads he hadn’t been down before, the trees thick and reaching over the roads and the feeling of driving through a green and shadowed tunnel. He came upon barns that were barely standing, crippled by time and the weather. He climbed over and around stacks of haybales whose ties had dry-rotted and the hay fell slumped like melting snowmen and he kicked away snakes and looked into horse stalls and climbed broken ladders into lofts but there were no twins and when he called out for them his voice fell dead in these deserted worlds.
At night he would stand out by the pond behind his house still wearing his widebrim hat, the rain tapping against it. The rain tapping against the brown water of the pond. The rain tapping like some finger on his shoulder in a steady reminder of their inability to find the twins. Hattie would call to him from the cover of the back porch. Come in, Myer. Come sit up here with me. But he would pace around the pond, the heels of his boots sticking in the soft ground of the banks and the rain still falling and the clouds pushing down against the earth in a thick gray cover. He would finally cross the yard and sit down with her on the porch. Take off his hat and shake it. Take off his coat and shake it. She would have the bottle and a glass sitting there waiting for him and he would pour himself a short drink. She asked if there was anything new and sometimes he made up something to give himself optimism and other times he only shook his head. She would leave him and he would drink another short pour and then another and finally go inside. He did not sleep in the bed but instead he lay on the floor. The stress triggering the pain in his back and the hardwood floor a better spot, lying there flat with his knees up, listening to Hattie sleep and watching the rain trail down the bedroom windows.