Rain came quick and sharp. It dimpled the river and made it flash where it had been the flat gray color of the clouds. You had to stop and think what it reminded you of. Then the rain stopped and the clouds broke and everything above the river stood mirrored in perfect detail in the river’s face. Except there, right where we were. Water dripped from a branch high above us, and when the drops hit the pool river, the picture scattered and blurred. When the pool calmed, you could see our two shapes, my round buzzed head, his long movie-star hair lifting and settling back in the breeze. We were standing the same way and looking in the same place. You look in the shadows to get past the glare on the water to see fish and crayfish and the like, but I wasn’t looking at that. I was looking at him. I’d just used the phrase “best friend” a moment before in my heart, though I was afraid to say it out loud. Vince was funny about things sometimes. There were so many ways he could take it wrong.
Forty feet farther down, the river spread out into a fan. Then it disappeared. You know it was going over the falls, the brown Wyona flashing suddenly white and gold in its hundred foot drop to the white stones, but it sure looked like it just disappeared. The rising cloud of mist is the Wyona saying goodbye. We were wary of going too much closer. Rumor suggested eddies and undertows that would shoot you over the falls as soon as look at you. Plenty of kids had vanished that way. People in town kept lists, and though the lists differed from one another, their cautionary effect was undeniable. “The Falls claims one each generation,” people said. People say a lot of things.
Tilden’s uncle was one the Falls claimed. If you go into their house there’s a picture of Tilden’s uncle—his mom’s brother or something—with dry yellow willow twisted around the picture frame. He looks like every other kid in the world, though with the funny clothes they had back then. I thought it was odd for him to be dead and all of us alive.
Tilden thrashed around over in the weeds pursuing something. A little nervous close to the brink, he did his fishing from the shore, poking through the arrowhead and cattails for anything that moved. He’d learned to cuss in an abstract, uncommitted way, so we heard him over there saying, in a normal tone of voice, almost politely, “bastard” and “son of a bitch” when something eluded his grasp. It was froggy in the pools for being so high up and so close to the falls. I guess the frogs came down from the hills, like the river did, except they knew when to stop.
Vince kept standing up and looking over his shoulder into the woods.
I knew what Vince would do. I knew how he would do it. We were one person, sometimes. There were photos of us playing under the sweet gum in Grandpa’s yard, the two of us in diapers and the leaves of the sweet gum like stars behind our heads. I must have known Mom and Dad and Grandpa and all them first, but I don’t remember anyone before Vince. Dark hair. Dark eyes, dark soul. Different from me. They put us together so we could have a friend from the first, and it worked.
Now he was looking over his shoulder in that way he had.
“He’ll come,” I said, though I wasn’t sure whether he’d come or not. We were waiting for Glen. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted Glen to come or not.
Two big hawks kept house in a pine overhanging the river then. The lady was out hunting. The gentleman stood at the edge of their nest screaming at us not to come any closer. We had no intention of coming closer.
I kept wondering if I would remember that moment, or any like it. Speaking of it now, forty years later, answers the question.
Vince took to Glen the minute he moved to town from St. Louis. I didn’t have time for him. He was citified or sissified or something I couldn’t put my finger on. A boy with a comb in his pocket, and with the willingness to use it in public, was an oddity in our neck of the woods. Glen would have had a bad first day at school, except Vince left the gaggle of boys he was the center of and walked to where the new kid was standing alone on the playground. This was not the usual way Vince worked. He liked being the center. He liked mocking those who weren’t at the center. In being peripheral, they were culpable of something, even if it was hard to say what. This time, it was different. I examined Glen to discover why the different treatment, but I couldn’t see it. Glen was as different from Tilden and me as a kid could get, so maybe Vince wanted to fill in whatever it was he missed in us. It was hard showing up in the middle of the school year, but that wasn’t our fault. Snow peppered the ground and everyone had to wear the stupid hats they’d gotten for Christmas. Vince walked over in his stupid hat and stood by Glen in his stupid hat, and pretty soon all of us in our stupid hats toddled over to bask in Vince’s radiance. Glen’s presence there was incidental to everyone but Vince. He was in, Glen was, by accident of proximity.
Glen became one of us. That was OK, because most of the town gangs had at least four and there were things we couldn’t accomplish with just the three of us that had been. I liked Glen before long. He was smart, and certain things you could talk about with him that you couldn’t with others. You could hear longhair music from the station in Charlottesville sometimes, and he could tell you what it was and why it sounded like that. Tilden liked everybody, or didn’t mention it if he didn’t, so that was not a problem.
Vince brought Tilden into my life. It was winter, and I’d been scolded for something—I couldn’t have learned much of a lesson if I didn’t even remember what it was—and I’d been staring out the window for a while feeling sorry for myself. Hearing my big brother two rooms away talking in that man’s voice he always had didn’t help. I would never grow up. I would never be like Andy, never be the boy my parents apparently wanted me to be. They always said, “Be yourself,” but that was clearly not what they actually wanted. I stared into the darkening gray light. After a while I saw shapes materialize far down the street, where it curved away into a sweep of familiar hills. They were the same hills I’d always known, but in my misery they might have been the Caucasus. The two moving shapes seemed small in the vastness of the coming storm. They made me think of the Magi on the Christmas cards, processing through the moonlit wilderness, from where one knew not, toward what one could only suppose. They moved slowly, steadily, getting bigger as they came. When they moved close enough, I saw two boys, one in a snowsuit, one in a heavy green army jacket with a floppy hat pulled tight over his ears. As their feet touched the edge of our drive, snow began to descend, carefully and beautifully, everywhere. I waved. They waited while I got my snowsuit and boots on. Of course they were Vince and Tilden. They must have walked a long, long way. They had pulled on their snow suits and ugly caps to come to me in the teeth of the blizzard.
The new boy said, “Tilden.”
I said, “Arden.”
Vince and Tilden filled the time waiting for me to don my snowsuit by sticking their tongues out into the falling snow to catch the flakes. Coming through the door I stuck my tongue out too, automatically, before a word had passed between us. Tilden said, “They’re different flavors, you know, depending on whether it’s before or after Christmas.” I never doubted it.
“Vince-and-Tilden” would be one name to me forever after. To the rest of the town we were “those three.”
I thought our community closed then, but it didn’t. We met Glen, too, in winter, and though the snowsuits vanished, the absurd hats did not. Our shadows on the snow made us look like Mongol horsemen in vast headdresses. I would have voted no on him but there was no vote, and afterwards I was glad, for Glen brought something new to the group. I couldn’t say what, except that adults seemed to like him and that might come in handy. Glen was older than the rest of us without actually being older, if you know what I mean. He was finished. Just like Tilden would be finished perfect when he reached fifteen, and never after in his life be older than fifteen. Me? I have no idea. You have to ask somebody else.
Glen had never been to the Falls. We discovered it ourselves the summer before he came, but kept it secret. All the neighborhood gangs thought they had discovered it themselves and nobody else knew. The Falls of the Wyona were sacred. Set apart. So it had been for generations of boys since the town was settled, and probably before that for the Indian boys. I wasn’t sure of inviting a boy who’d just moved to town. A boy didn’t go to the Falls just because he wanted to. He might stumble upon it himself, in which case destiny gave him a kind of celebrity, or he might be invited by those who’d been there before. That was the usual way.
Glen wasn’t woodsy, so the likelihood of his finding it himself was slight. We had to give him the Falls or he would have done without. It was up to him to give us something back. We waited to find out what.
I’d found the Falls for us. That will be a matter of pride for me until the end of days. It happened as I was leaving my piano lesson with Miss Phoebe. I didn’t like piano that much, but I liked Miss Phoebe, a high school girl who gave lessons for a while until she could go off to the conservatory after graduation. The high school had a conservatory, but it was full of plants and botany experiments and it was a while before I could figure out what that had to do with piano. Anyway, I was standing on her porch with my hand in her hand. She was giving me final instructions for the week, holding my fingers in the arch she wanted to see over the keys next time. That’s what she thought she was doing, but I thought she was holding my hand, and the thrill going through me was difficult to understand, much less to express. When I pondered it afterward, I wondered if her intentions were as pure as they seemed, or if maybe she was flirting just a little bit. Anyway, I cast my eyes away so I wouldn’t have to look at her as well as have my hand in hers on the front porch, when I saw, way off, a cloud that looked like a tornado in the pure yellow evening sky.
“What’s that?” I said. I had to pull my hand away to point, and so the moment came to an end.
“You never saw that before?” Miss Phoebe said. “Something about the river. About the Falls. It happens almost every night, as far as I can tell. This is a good place to watch it from.”
I swear I had never heard the word “Falls” associated with the Wyona before that minute. Little tiny falls punctuated the length of it flowing through town, but nothing to raise a cloud like the one I saw. Two days later was Saturday. I packed myself a lunch and headed out toward the twisty cloud. I started right at Miss Phoebe’s porch, where I’d seen it, and where she could see me, and maybe admire my adventurous spirit. We knew the encircling woods pretty well, and when the paths I knew came to an end, I felt confident to take the new, strange ones, dead reckoning the ones that led to the river. I’d almost never gone anywhere without Vince, or without Vince and Tilden together.
Roaring told me when I neared the river. The Wyona made a sound flowing through town, of course, rippling past the bridges and the stands of green reeds, but nothing like this: thunderous, deep, cataclysmic. If I hadn’t had the classroom maps to tell me different, I would have thought I found the edge of the world, where the oceans pour into the void.
When I came into the clearing I’d wished I’d brought Vince and Tilden, for it was too big for me alone. The forest opened on a keyhole of blue sky—that lustrous sad china blue that leans toward evening—with the Wyona flashing at the bottom of it. The river ran through trees and grasses in town, but here it ran over pale yellow stone and, at the western edge of the clearing, disappeared. The roaring came from the point of disappearance, as did a cloud of mist sometimes hesitant among the rocks, sometimes billowing over and back into the river’s face. I didn’t need to go there right away. I knew it was the Falls. No one ever spoke of it. It couldn’t have opened over night, but maybe it did, and mine were the first mortal eyes ever to take it in. I entertained that thought.
I was a kid, but I wasn’t that dumb. I knew the Falls must be a secret kept by the adults for reasons at the moment past telling. The cloud blowing back from the rocks under the Falls was formidable, but not dark like the cloud I saw from Miss Phoebe’s porch, and lacked its own twisting life. Maybe a trick of evening light? I didn’t know. But that day I’d seen enough. I needed to scurry if I were going to get home before dark. The paths past a certain point were unfamiliar and I was, after all, very small under those looming trees.
Vince flat out didn’t believe me until I took him and Tilden there the next Saturday. He was used to being the big man, the pioneer. He nearly always got there first, wherever we were going, whatever new skill we were trying to master. I decided not to gloat over this, our single greatest discovery, all mine. On that second trip, Tilden and Vince and I, we discovered the mystery of the cloud.
Glen likely didn’t know he was being tested, but he was. Glen was tall, frail-looking, pale, with hair that was nearly white then but would darken some before high school. His gray eyes were a plus. A lot of heroes had gray eyes. Writers are very specific about that. They made him a possibility, the eyes did, though the rest of him, his frailness, his trace of sissy, made it seem unlikely at first that his companionship would be rewarding. We told him how to get to the Falls, giving the precise instructions only boys know how to give. We told him when. We told him everyone had to go alone the first time. This was a lie, but I insisted. I suppose it was my subtle way of emphasizing that I had first gone there alone and had some right to make the rules. The rest was up to him.
I assumed he’d get lost and have to be brought out by us at a later time, but there he was, not too long after Vince had started anxiously to look for him.
“Glen,” Vince said under his breath.
“It’s a long way,” Glen said when he came into in range, pushing out of the scrub trees at the edge of the stone. Tilden said, “Hell,” appreciatively.
Vince held out his hand to steady Glen across a gap.
“Not that long. You get used to it.”
“Your directions were pretty good.”
Tilden slipped into the river and said, “Son of a bitch.” Since his shoes were wet anyway, he stayed in the water, looking for a shallow place to ford over to us.
A dragonfly buzzed the top of Glen’s shoes. The dragonfly was so blue it made the sky look green. Glen watched while the bug lit on his boot toe and then zoomed away. I could see Vince’s face taking on the same expression as mine. Glen stood for a moment, looking around, taking everything in. One had to do that his first time at the Falls, just look and look. He put his hands on his waist and turned slowly, like a lighthouse that had to cover the whole sea.
“Damn,” he said, “The river just disappears.”
“Yeah it does,” Tilden called from the midst of the river. He was making a face because the water had something brown and slimy on the bottom of it. “Go on and look.”
Glen moved along the bank some, rolled his cuffs up, then dropped into the water, quieter and smoother than Tilden. It was August and the river ran very low. The water looked more transparent when something was in it—the brown bottom made it look like it was brown all through—and a boy’s white legs shone golden underneath. You had to go slower as the water deepened. Glen went ceremonially slow. The dragonfly followed him to the middle of the stream, glancing off his shoulder, wheeling away, circling back again. We hadn’t warned him of the eddies and undertows, but somehow he eluded them and came to the very lip of the precipice.
“The brown slimy stuff is really slick,” Tilden said. Glen nodded.
He stood there at the brink a long time, looking. Still, he couldn’t have taken it all in. This was the great gorge of the Wyona. The river writhed under him like a wounded dragon. Two states moved out from the gorge in green wilderness and white mountain rock. Far off there was a glitter of sun glancing off a moving car, in the remoteness where there were roads and cars and people other than ourselves.
Glen looked a long time before he moved again. Two steps the wrong way would have sent him over the falls. He didn’t move his feet, but put his hands on his knees and began to bend in tiny increments, easing ever more of his weight over the brink. He looked like a diver readying for the dive. He balanced on the very edge. He did a handstand, feet in the air, hands on the slick brown rock at the very lip of the Falls. The three of us recognized the motion from gym class, from Mr. Lecheck’s everlasting obsession with tumbling and gymnastics. Glen did a handstand on a slippery boulder, one side of which was probable and the other side certain death. Up he went. It looked effortless. I always had to kick a little. He hit the handstand and just hovered there like it was nothing at all. He looked like an odd little Atlas, holding up the sky with his feet.
Vince tensed beside me. I heard him say in a tiny voice, “Glen—”
Glen understood without being told (and that’s the way it had to happen) that some high deed was necessary for full acceptance of an outlander to the Order of the Falls. None of us had thought of a handstand. I liked this kid better and better. Glen hung suspended between the river and the empty air. The dragonfly landing on his shoulder could send him down. Then he just stopped. He folded down and stood on his feet again. The stream ran almost uninterrupted for a wide space as it leapt over the cliff, but a few big rocks studded the edge of it. Glen made for one of these. He leapt from one to the other. He maneuvered himself around to find accommodation in the current, and he sat down.
Vince dropped with a loud splash into the river. The weight of the water hindered his effort to run, so he looked a little stupid thrashing through it with his elbows up. Tilden and I laughed before we realized how serious he was. He got to Glen, reached out and pulled him by his shirt. He said, “Enough.”
Glen smiled a big smile. He knew whatever the game was, he had won. He was in. We were the best gang in town, and he was in.
Vince’s face was white, the skin under his sideburns pouring sweat. He waded back without Glen like something in the river embarrassed him.
Glen and Tilden stayed out in the middle of the river talking. Once Tilden got in he didn’t want to get out. They were out there talking, play-pushing one another to see if they could get the other to fall into the stream. They were laughing like little boys. I suppose that’s what we were, but the Falls made you feel different. Vince came up close to me, the way he did when he wanted to tell something that was just between us.
“Arden?”
“Yeah?”
“I feel funny.”
“What do you mean funny? You sick?”
“I don’t know. It feels—funny.”
“What? Your stomach?”
“I guess so.”
“Vertigo, maybe, you were so close to the edge—”
I wasn’t a doctor, so I waited a minute to see if he had anything else to say, then I said, “He did great.”
“Who did?”
“Glen.”
“Yeah.”
Vince was holding his stomach, but I didn’t really think that’s what hurt him. The boy had slammed down a whole bottle of cherry pop on the way up and belched out the gas in a magnificent elk-bellow just before we hit the river. I didn’t think there was anything wrong with his stomach.
Then he said, “I felt . . . something . . .”
“What?”
“I’ve never been afraid before. Not like that.”
“If Glen . . .”
Vince was shaking a little. I pushed up hard against him so he’d have my warmth to calm him. I didn’t want to say what I was thinking, which was “good.” Vince could be a little harsh. He could put a distance between himself and the weakness of others. Cold, he was, sometimes. It hurt Tilden more than it did me. It hurt kids who weren’t one of us, because they didn’t know it was just normal and he wasn’t mad at them. It was good if concern for someone made him sick this one time.
“Anyway, he made it.”
I agreed, “Yes he did. Flying colors, I’d say.”
Vince would bunch up a fist and hold the fist against your rib cage when he was talking seriously about something. I don’t think he knew he did it. The touch was so light that you didn’t always know it was happening. Vince was worked up this time, and I could feel the fist there, warm and urgent. I never moved away. As long as the fist was there, it meant the issue had not been settled.
“Glen—” he said.
“Glen what?”
He might have said it. He might have said it right then and been done with it, but I felt his fist drop away from my side. Vince looked away from me and I looked where he was looking. It was too bright where Glen sat. I had to look away.
Changing my glance upstream, pondering all these things in my heart, I saw movement in the river that did not look like the river. The light made the water gold-brown, and the thing in the river was gold-brown, so it took a moment before I saw a dog, a golden Lab, struggling in the current. I was already moving toward the lip of the pool when I started shouting, “Glen! Tilden!”
The dog was a good swimmer, but the current was too fast, the rocks too slippery. She would muscle herself to the side and try to climb the bank, but her foothold would betray her and back she’d splash into the river. I was thinking if only she had hands, already aware beneath the panic that the hands she needed were mine. I hit the river’s edge. I jumped. Whack I went on the wet stone. A blaze of shock went up my ankles and was gone. I was all right. The dog came on at an amazing rate. You could see in her eyes that she had run out of ideas . . . except me . . . she saw me and began paddling wildly, clawing the slick rocks underneath when she could, trying to get to the spot where I could grab her. I knelt and reached my hands out over the river. I got as deep in as I dared, what with the red goo on the rocks like oil and the weight of the river pouring over the lip murderous and irresistible. I leaned over as far as I could. If she was heavier than I thought, I’d be plunging with her into the emerald gorge. Whack! I felt her. I grabbed. The dog relaxed into my arms, but I wasn’t strong enough to pull her out. She whimpered and licked my face, as if saying, “I know this isn’t going to work, but thanks for trying.”
I decided it was going to work. I slipped a few inches farther, but dug in my heels. I hooked my hands behind her front legs, pulling hard. She was not coming out of the water, but neither was she going over the Falls. I didn’t know how long I could hold on, or when I’d get another idea. Then Tilden came beside me, pulling on the poor dog too. I shifted my grip so he pulled her right leg and I her left. The three of us were enough. The Lab came out of the water and onto the white shingle, on top of us as we fell flat upon our backs. Glen cheered wildly from the wall. The dog was trying to lick our faces off.
The Lab was generous with her thank yous, but she had a life which she needed to take up again, just like everybody else. At last she waggled her way back into the forest, heading for town, stopping every now and then to look over her shoulder and bark one more thanks. We watched her go.
Tilden said, “You know, it could be that we were brought here at this day and hour so we could fetch that puppy from the river.”
Glen said, “It’s also possible that the pup was sent to us. A test, you know. She had the look about her. Like she was in control the whole time, waiting to see what we would do.”
Vinny said nothing. It wasn’t like him.
The sun moved and the glancing of it off the Falls changed to glory. You had to hold your hand in front of your eyes, or look away. From the air or from some point downstream it must have seemed a snow-white conflagration. Gulls from saltwater far away lived at the Falls, circling white upon white all day so far as we could tell. We threw shadows to the east as tall as trees. We sat and ate sandwiches and cookies in a cup of fire.
High in the north a cloud formed, fast, dark, undulating in a way unlike the wind. I elbowed Vinny and he looked. Tilden saw what we saw and pulled himself up on the bank to be standing on solid ground for it. Glen, oblivious at first, noticed all eyes on a certain spot in the sky. He turned his gaze there.
“What the—?”
It was the greatest thing that happened around our town—twice a day at that, once coming and once going. People talked about it sometimes, but many had never seen it. Some people don’t see anything at all. The cloud grew, darkened, and tilted toward us at about twice the velocity of the wind. It did not come direct, but detoured and looped and undulated, as though there were obstacles in the clear air we couldn’t see.
“What the—” Glen tried again, pulling himself up off his cozy place on the rocks as Tilden had done.
Vinny stopped chewing on the bit of grass he’d stuck into his mouth. I could see him looking up into the air like a contemplative calf, cud suspended. Something changed. Light thickened. The air condensed. Wind came up and began to make noise in the angles of the rocks and in the distant trees. Shapes appeared in the purpling vault of the sky, at first a few, then more, and then more. They approached, their dark mass hovering upon uncountable wings. Whatever one might have imagined, they were birds. As the first outriders circled high up in the air, they were joined by others, ten and then hundreds and then of thousands of others. Were there a million? We stopped counting or estimating. Except for far away, at the horizon, they filled the sky. The noise they made was as loud as the falls, though higher pitched and more varied. We were caught between two parts of a tremendous music. Glen covered his ears.
Black ribbons of birds joined and separated and interwove. It was more intricate than it appeared at distance, less a funnel than a great folded cloth weaving and raveling. What was remarkable close up was that there were no collisions, no tragedies midair, but a dance which never went wrong and never varied in grace. The black shapes darted and twittered. They began to whirl above the gorge like water in a draining tub.
“Birds,” Tilden said, unnecessarily. “A million billion birds. There’s a cave under the falls—I guess there is; nobody’s ever been there—and they sleep there at night and fly out through a hole in the water in the morning, and come back at night.”
Vince said, “They’re blackbirds.”
Glen corrected, “They’re swifts.”
The swifts circled for a while. Something boiled up from the gorge to meet them. We looked down and saw bats—hundreds, perhaps, but nowhere near the myriad myriads of birds in the air above us. Bats zoomed out of the falls as the swifts zoomed in, one battalion replacing another in the seething air. The bats did not go straight up into the whirling mass, but spread out into the gorge, low and cautious. A few flapped directly over our heads, so you could see the little smiles on their faces, the thin squeaking which is what a human can hear of their song. The swifts let the bats clear, then the whole mass of them leapt up a hundred feet higher into the air, like a diver bouncing on the board before descent. It was plain that one bird flew at the head, one bird leading them. Whether it was the same bird all the time or a new one each night, one didn’t know. When this vanguard bird judged everything felt right, down he fell, power-diving directly into the plunging face of the falls.
Twenty by twenty they entered the gap in the waters. We thought they could never be done at that rate, but they could. We watched until they were safe in, except for stragglers which kept arriving, one by one, two by two. Loners would be homing most of the night. We allowed our concentration to lapse, so we could talk of what we saw.
Tilden said, “Swifts. Is that really their name, or is that just how they are?”
Tilden peered steadily down into the purple gorge. He said, “If you wanted to kill yourself, that would be the way to do it.”
I offered that it wouldn’t be like killing yourself at all, but a sort of sacrament. Diving into the middle of the world.
It was getting ever darker and we couldn’t see it very well, but Tilden’s voice said, “People do it all the time.”
“Do what?”
“Throw themselves over the Falls.”
“How do you know?”
“Stands to reason. My uncle did. I think that’s what happened. It’s there. The Falls and the gorge. It’s big, and nobody told us about it. They’re protecting us. Must be some sort of temptation. Must be people sailing off those rocks all the time. Nobody told us because we’re kids and they’re afraid it would put ideas into our heads.”
Glen said, “Would you do it?”
“No, not us. I didn’t mean that. It’s not for us. It’s for guys who got caught stealing money from the bank, or ladies whose babies died. That’s the kind of people who need it.” Tilden stood up and took a few steps toward the brink to illustrate. “You could spread your wings like one of those swifts. You could just lean over and swan dive in. It would be your greatest moment ever.”
I recalled, “Some lady at our church killed herself because of cancer. Mom said she didn’t blame her one bit.”
“The Falls?”
“Shotgun.”
“Ladies don’t usually use shotguns.”
“This one did.”
Glen had been thinking hard about something. “You said there is a cave, a space.”
“Has to be. Where else would all those swifts go?”
“Maybe they turn into fish.”
“Maybe you turn into fish.”
“We didn’t see the bottom of the gorge,” Glen went on.
“Not very well.”
“Can’t see it now anyhow.”
“What if there’s . . . I don’t know what . . . what if there’s a door there?”
“What do you mean a door?”
Glen arranged his face so it looked solemn in the birdy twilight. “What if it’s the one place where there’s a door out of the world, so you can go without having to die. So the people throwing themselves over don’t die. They knock upon the water, and it opens, and they walk through the door and start again. Somewhere else.”
We considered in silence.
Vince said, “Somebody would have to keep the big rocks out of the basin. They’d still kill you even if there was a magic door.”
“Maybe somebody does.”
A thought formed in my mind, a thought of such immensity I could barely get it out. “Maybe we will. We’ll clear the rocks away. Maybe that’s why we came here . . . why we were led here. Maybe we will be a secret society to keep the pool down there safe for all the sad divers.”
I knew by their silence that they were, at least, considering it.
While we bent over stone cliffs watching the entrance of the swifts, the moon rose in his first quarter, blue-white, almost hurtful in the clear air, brilliant for all his slender newness. We stood. We worked the cricks out of our backs and necks. Vince put his arms around us from the back and lifted us, one at a time, the way he knew how to do, cracking our spines and making the blood flow again. It was so dark in the shadows cast by the moon that we wouldn’t have known we were there, unless we knew. The bats probably could hear our thoughts with their sonar.
Tilden said, “The swifts leave too early in the morning for people to see. Usually it’s still dark, so nobody bothers with that. But you can see it at the end, in the evening, like this. People come just for it, just to see the birds.” He looked around to make sure. “I guess we’re the only ones tonight. That’s good. That’s the best.”
“How do you know all this?” Vince said.
Tilden answered, “Stands to reason.”
Silence settled, except for the twittering of the swifts. Then, “Sons of bitches,” said Tilden in a tone of awe.
Glen asked, “How many times you seen this?”
“Seven or eight,” Vince replied. “It never gets old.”
Glen said, “I want to live there.”
“Where?” I said. “In the cave?”
“Yeah, in the cave under the falls. Where the birds go. I bet it’s room after room. I bet it’s a palace.”
“You can’t live there.”
“Maybe you can’t, but I can.”
Tilden said, “It probably stinks of bird poop.”
I don’t think Glen heard him.
We decided we couldn’t stay until the last birds came home. We couldn’t see them anymore anyway, and the twittering we heard might be the settled-in birds singing in their sleep.