Tilden borrowed some of my old climbing clothes and an extra slicker. Dad pulled on his black boots, as every man in the town over the age of thirteen might well have been doing right then. Sherry drove home and back again with her slicker on and her yellow middle school boots with the floppy buckles. When the door opened she took only the merest step in. She stood where the stream of water from her coat would go mostly outside. She said, “Well, aren’t we going?”
Dad filled his pockets and Tilden’s with extra flashlight batteries and lengths of rope. Mom and Sherry huddled over in the corner talking in whispers about whatever it is women talk about at such a time. We were all moving in slow motion. Anxiety added weight to everything. We were almost ready when a whirl of red came to the driveway, like quiet lightning. It wasn’t lightning. We knew what it was.
Chief Dadlez was old, but he learned new tricks when he needed to. He probably felt unwelcome in the Summers house, under the circumstances, so he sent two deputies, one a kid Andy went to school with, a few years older, one a cop from Ohio who had moved south for a rest from big-city violence. I don’t think he was getting that rest tonight.
The old pro came in first. They were dripping wet, so they huddled together by the door so as little water would get in as possible. We were all in the kitchen anyway, so that was fine.
My mom said, “Coffee?”
Both of them accepted coffee, and held the cups out front in their two hands a second as though they had to inhale the vapors before they could speak. The old pro said, “You all seem to be going somewhere. Or getting back.”
Dad said, “One of ours is missing. We thought we’d try some likely spots.”
The old pro said, “Do you think maybe you should let the police handle that?” Over his shoulder the kid, Andy’s classmate, winced. The older guy had brought some of his city ways with him, and they weren’t working particularly well that night.
The kid tried to say, “What we mean is—”
Dad interrupted, “Oh, we know what you mean. Figure there can’t be too much help in a situation like this, is all.”
The pro was not learning fast. He said, “Yeah, but if we spend all night getting in each other’s way—”
Dad interrupted again. “I wonder who it is looking for the boy with you in here jawing to us.”
The old pro shot Dad a look that was meant to be a threat, but didn’t come off that way. Andy’s buddy tried again.
“Oh, Dadlez has things under way. Andy’s already out there with a search party. I guess you figured that. But we wondered if there were . . . you know . . . places we should be sure to look . . . things the boy might have said to you that would indicate . . .”
“Vincent,” Sherry said, “His name is Vincent. Vinny. If he had said anything like that I bet we would have phoned it in like greased lightning.”
The two cops looked uncomfortable. I felt sorry for them. Dadlez had sent them to put the fear of God into us, and keep us out of his way, without warning them what they were up against. They finished their coffee in perfect unison and turned to the door. The young one said, “Well, if you think of anything, I know you’ll—”
“We sure will.”
The young cop let his partner exit, then stopped dead, looking at Dad. “You’re Andy’s dad, aren’t you?”
“Yes sir.”
“I’m sure glad he’s with us. I surely am. He is the one all of us think of first at a time like this.”
Dad beamed at the kid’s back as he disappeared out into the storm.
Wherever Dad and the adults would go, we would go to the Falls. We knew that, separately, from the first moment, and as we came together, one by one, the truth of it didn’t have to be spoken. It was a complicated moment. If the cops didn’t know about the Falls, then they weren’t meant to. Worse still was another thought. Suppose we said, “Try the Falls,” and Vince was there, broken on the stones as Clarence had been, a sad pale object in a barrage of cop flashlights? Then it would be over. Then there would not be even an hour or a few moments of hope. It would be finished. But there was something more. The Falls was sacred ground. If Vinny were there, he would not want to be found by just anybody. Tilden and Sherry and I would find him ourselves. We knew without a word among us that this was how it would have to go down.
Tilden said, “What did Vinny say to you?”
“That he knew where Glen was. Always had. But he didn’t go to him. He was torn up because he didn’t go to him.”
A tear formed at the bottom of Sherry’s beautiful eye. She said, “I’m afraid he’s going to him now.”
Tilden said, “Mother of all fuck,” in a way so gentle it sounded like a benediction.
We buckled the last buckle, tied the last string. We waited for the cop car to disappear completely. Three or four of the neighborhood men called for Dad. He got up and went to the door, looking over his shoulder at Tilden and me.
“You boys ain’t coming with us, are you?”
We shook our heads. He understood.
As Dad tromped away into the raging night, it dawned on us that the neighborhood men had parked in our drive, boxing my car in, and Sherry’s too. Sherry said, “Bikes, then.”
Mom heard us. She said, “There will be no riding of bikes on a night like this. Why, one gust of that wind—” It sounded like she was out to thwart us, but if you watched carefully, it was a different story. Mom was tying on her rain hat. She was digging her keys out of her purse. She was going to drive us.
Tilden said, “Mrs. Summers, if you could just take 414 up to—”
“I know where you’re going.”
Mom left the light on, the door open, the coffee singing in the percolator. People were used to coming to our house for coffee in times of disaster, and she saw to it that they still could.
The rain slackened as she drove, even stopping for the space of a few minutes from time to time. The moon tried to break through the flying wrack of midnight blue clouds. Away off over the Smokies, lightning flashed blue and white-gold and the rumble of it shook the road under our tires.
Mom skidded to a stop in the pitch-black parking lot. It was disorienting to be there in the dark and rain. We were in a desperate hurry, so everything took longer. Our clothes caught on things when we tried to exit the car. The trunk lid stuck and I had to open it with a flying kick. We looked for our flashlights, missed them, thought we left them behind, then found them in pockets where we had already looked. Curtains of rain swept the pavement, though whether new rain or wet blown from the trees by the big wind we didn’t know. Mom said, “You know why everything is going wrong?”
“No, why?”
“Because you’re in a hurry. You know why you’re in a hurry?”
“No, why?”
“Because you know Vince is still alive. You know there is reason to hurry.”
I thought of the night we searched for Judy Herman in the same kind of downpour. No one was in a hurry. We were men moving in dreams, or in lead, or in an old movie where they can’t get the speed right. Yes. We knew Vinny Silvano was alive.
We asked Mom to stay in the parking lot, so she could be seen if anybody passed. We might need help by then. We had no idea what a storm like that would do to the gorge, where the paths would be, what trees would block them, what streams submerge them. If we didn’t come out after a time, she would have to go for help.
“It’s a full tank,” she said, “I’ll keep the engine running. I’ll keep the lights on.”
We made for absolute darkness with the blaze of Mom’s headlights at our back. That made it harder, actually, harder to acclimate to the dark, but we wouldn’t have done without it. We walked along the beams of light as if we were pearls and it the string.
The ground fell about five feet into utter black. The headlights shot over our heads into the trees. Sherry yelled over the sound of many waters, “Try it without the flashlights!” With flashlights you see only what the lights sees, missing things along the path, things at distance. For Vinny or any sign of him to be right along the path lay beyond the realm of hope.
It took surprisingly little time to learn to see in the dark. Glisten and utter blackness alternated. Light came from somewhere, though we couldn’t figure it out exactly. Flashes of lightning came and went, but between them an ambient gleam allowed us to proceed without moon or stars. I took the lead. I felt along the rock wall until pretty certain we were headed the right way. At least the position of the river was never in doubt. It roared and thundered to our left sometimes and sometimes directly before. Every now and then sounded a louder noise, of a tree hitting rock, or a stone easing off its shelf into the torrent. We were astonished that any sound could be louder than the sound of a million gallons of plunging water. I led us to the vantage point from which, long ago, the three of us had first descended, it being the likeliest route for a drop into the gorge. Unless, of course, one meant to jump. You could communicate only by pressing your mouth against the other’s ear and shouting. I pressed my mouth against Tilden’s ear and said, “We have to go down.”
Tilden backed away. Maybe he didn’t hear me. I pressed my mouth against Sherry’s ear and shouted, “We have to go down!”
She shouted back, “Yes, yes we do!”
Discussion proved impossible, so it was well we were all thinking the same thing: Vinny would have gone into the gorge. He would have sought the door open at the bottom of the river. If we could climb down in this downpour, it meant he could have too.
I leaned over the stone parapet and aimed my flashlight. The beam was startling after the walk in the darkness, startling and yearning and beautiful. Its light struck the crest of the river as it pushed up over the lip of the pool into a great wave before the plunge down. The river shone slimy brown in the lamplight, huge and cresting, like a breaker of the sea. If you watched even for a few seconds you saw debris, some of it recognizable, hurl with the water into nothingness, trunks and brush and trash, sometimes whole trees with their branches shivering in the dark, stalling here and there, snagged on rocks, building up a mass of the river behind them, until irresistible force broke it free and it sailed out and over into the darkness, sometimes large enough to crash at the bottom with a sound to top the blast of the flood.
Tilden shouted, “Vince? Vince?” once or twice, but the syllables were blown back by the roar of the waters. I said, “Don’t waste your breath.” We’d have to go down.
Sherry and I stuffed flashlights and other bits of apparatus into our backpacks, handing things back and forth by sheer touch in the darkness. Tilden stood there with his hands at his sides. I assumed he’d gotten his backpack together beforehand, and was watching us fumble. I didn’t know what the other two were thinking, but I was thinking we had not brought enough rope, and the climb down—and up again, God willing—would have to be hand-over-hand, like monkeys on a wall. We had enough rope to truss something up and drag it back with us. Plenty for that.
I felt I should try to lighten the mood a little. I put a flashlight under my chin, turned it on fast, made a face at Tilden and growled like a monster. The effect was not what I anticipated. He yelped and cowered. When he took his face away from his hands I saw that he was crying. We had known each other most of our lives, and I never knew Tilden was afraid of the dark.
“Til, man, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”
“No . . . it’s not you. It’s . . .”
He was crying pretty hard now. Shaking. I had no idea what to say to him. I said, “We’ll find him, man; he’ll be OK.”
It was hard to get oriented after that. Tilden was my strength. I wished I had not articulated the phrase “afraid of the dark,” for now I was too. This dark was very dark. Tartarus. Deep roaring hell. The flashes of fire and the weird reflections just made it worse. Sherry peered fiercely into the gorge, following the beam of her lamp, so I couldn’t see if she was afraid or not.
I lowered the flashlight to the tangle of dampening gear on the damp grass. Worms crisscrossed the ground like tossed red thread, squirming a little in the flashlight beam.
“You stay here,” I bellowed. “Man the flashlights. Show us the way as far down as you can.”
Tilden nodded, relieved to have something to do.
Actual rain had nearly stopped. The wind kept strong, tearing away at the clouds, and every so often enough the ascending moon appeared that we could climb by it. Moonlight was better than flashlights, for it allowed us use of both hands, and didn’t leave a pool of blackness on all sides where the beams didn’t reach. Tilden stood topside and aimed the mini-sun of the big Coleman lantern at places where we needed him to. He kept aiming the lantern out and turning in a circle, as if he expected something to come at us from the darkness. Soon the path would bend and the light wouldn’t, and Tilden wouldn’t be able to hear us over the thunder of the Falls anyway. In daylight you didn’t realize how terrible the Falls is, a presence, a thundering, hulking wall beyond which looms utter night. Sane people would not have gone down like that, without sufficient ropes, without a plan, without sure knowledge that what they sought lay at the bottom. I almost didn’t, but for the sight of the top of Sherry’s head disappearing over the ridge of dark stone, descending into nothing. I followed her.
I knew the ways down pretty well. Sherry knew them better than I expected. Glen was the one who knew them, though. If he had been trying to get away from us, we would never find him. Every time my leg brushed a fern or my arms grazed a dangling blossom, I knew Glen had keyed it out and recorded its name in his diary. Maybe that’s what he was doing. Maybe he got distracted by a bug or a liverwort or something and he—
A voice screamed, “Arden?”
“Yeah?”
“You all right?”
It was Tilden’s voice from above, sounding a thousand miles away.
“We’re fine.”
“I couldn’t see your light.”
“Better to climb by the moon.”
“What?”
“Moon. We don’t need them. Don’t need the lights.”
Sherry stood a little lower than I, on a flat-ish space. She held her right hand over her eyes against the Coleman lantern, peering into the black of the gorge for signs of Vince. Unless he was on fire she couldn’t have seen him. Her hair was short now, only a little longer than Tilden’s and mine. With her breasts concealed under one of my flannel shirts, and that under her slicker, she could be taken for a boy. She was bold as a boy, anyway, swinging herself from rock to rock while I edged down gingerly, wondering sometimes why it all couldn’t wait till morning. I caught up to her and we climbed side to side, down the wall slick with rain, but sturdy and rooty and broken enough for there to be more handholds than one might have feared.
We slid under a ridge that cut us off from the glare of the Coleman. There for a moment reigned absolute black. Tilden’s voice shouted from above, but it was impossible to hear what he said. Did he drop the lantern? Did he find something? Sherry and I were paralyzed, not knowing which way to move to keep from plunging over the remainder of the cliff into the full body of the flood. Sherry pulled her flashlight out of her pocket and shone it toward the center of the noise. It caught the moving body of the falls, about thirty feet off. The cold wet that beat against us was not rain, but spray from the fierce brown column of turbulent water. She moved the light up toward the top of the falls. The light grew dimmer as it spread to illuminate a wider swath of, essentially, nothing. As her light mounted, Tilden’s Coleman appeared again, whiter and more diffuse than the flashlight, and infinitely welcome. The moon came too, breaking through the ceiling to beam broken silver into the heart of the plunge pool. Surrounded by stone, our ears throbbed with the many-times multiplied noise of the river. When all three lights—Tilden, Sherry, the moon—seemed to meet into one almost sufficient illumination, something appeared at the lip of the pool high above. It was a huge tree, a log mostly, but with a few limbs still attached. It jerked forward, then hesitated. When it stalled in the river, the back-up water flowed over it, submerging it invisible for a moment. Then it rode high on the water again, edging forward. Sherry was pushing hard, backwards against my chest. She screamed at the top of her lungs, “This time it’s going to go!”
I didn’t know why she was so excited about that until I realized that the log would hurl like a spear into the plunge pool, and like a torpedo across it, and if it followed the course it looked like it must, it would come crashing into our little hollow of a cave. This is why Tilden had moved the lantern, to have a better look. This is why he shouted; he saw it coming.
I pushed Sherry out of the cave, dragging her by the slicker to a ridge of wet stone which the prevailing current in the plunge pool made an unlikely target. We’d just reached its morsel of shelter when the log broke free. It took a surprising amount of time to pass down the front of the falls into the pool. We had not appreciated how shallow the pool was, for the log struck bottom on one end, and, like an acrobat, threw its other end into the air, the hurl and rebound taking its three or four tons exactly where we feared it would, like a battering ram into the mouth of the cave we had just exited.
Tilden screamed from above. I pulled my flashlight out, finally, and moved it across the falls so he would know we were all right. The log whirled around in the chaos of the water, then headed neatly downstream. We heard it bumping and crashing on its way, until it was lost in vaster bumping and crashing further down the gorge. At the place where the tree hit, our little cave was unrecognizable; Sherry and I would have been a stain on the stone.
We had no time to congratulate ourselves on our escape. We assumed that Vinny would have tried to find the space behind the falls—the swifts had to go somewhere—and that unless he was dead and swept down the river, he was there, and if he went there, we could too. The log, aside from nearly killing us, had shown us that the plunge pool, if it was deep at all, was not deep everywhere. We could find a way through it, perhaps even a way around it if the rebounding spray would allow us to search the gorge walls. We’d climbed down as far as we could. We climbed to the Falls as near as we could without being smashed and drowned. The spray pounded a constant shower in our faces, cold, sometimes stinging with debris.
Sherry turned and screamed into my ear, “Maybe he hitched a ride.”
“What?”
“On the log! The log! Like in the cartoons. Maybe he—oh, never mind.”
We saw where the little shelf of rock ended and where you had to enter the pool or go home. The stone was broken, and perhaps fifty feet of water separated the jagged edge of it from the plunging face of the falls. The bit of pool there had a little shelter from the fallen stones, so the water was not hitting the wall with the velocity it did elsewhere. It was our best bet.
I reached the jagged jumping-off place first. We’d looked carefully enough to know there was no way farther down other than the six foot jump into the pool. I might have done it merrily in daylight, but not then. Here dwelt utter night. No one ever came at night. Nobody sane. If they did, I didn’t want to know them. If they did, they likely never came back. I had trouble getting my breath. What might lie in the inky waters? Strange crystals that stabbed, strange rocks that closed over your head . . . Scavengers with bright eyes waiting for fools and suicides to tumble from the cliffs . . . Glen’s door, maybe, but a door that didn’t lead where he thought it did, but rather into some place horrible and forlorn . . . I don’t know that I could have gone a step farther even had I heard Vinny down there crying for help. I’m glad I didn’t mock Tilden, for I was paralyzed myself, ninety feet farther down the cliff than him, but still a long way from the bottom.
Sherry screamed, “You ready?”
“He’s not down here.”
“I think we should see. We’re so close.”
There was silence. Sherry read my thoughts. I knew she understood when I heard her murmur, “Oh,” under her breath. She knew I was terrified. I could go no further. Will was not a factor. Love was not a factor. I could not.
I assumed that was the end of our rescue operation, but Sherry pushed past me and said, “I’m going to try it, then. Will you hold the light on me?”
“Sherry, I don’t think—”
Tilden shouted something from the sky. That distracted me, so the next thing I heard was a splash under the myriad splashing, and Sherry crying, “Oh!” as she hit the cold water.
“Sherry!”
“It’s so fucking COLD! Where’s that light?”
I fumbled around and got the flashlight aimed over the rim of the plunge pool. I trembled with panic. I felt vomit rising in my throat. But when the beam hit the water, making a patch of turbulent brown in the midst of black, I was all right. Sherry was visible and standing. It was only so deep. It was not a hole at the bottom of the world. Panic drained out of me. All I needed was to know what lay beneath. All I needed to know was the farthest one could fall. Sherry was still screeching about the cold while I swept the surface of the pool, trying to find her a way closer to the falls. Her yellow slicker lit up like flame. The water wasn’t deep, but the drop to it was high as a man, and Sherry was soaked all over.
“You OK?”
“Except for dripping wet, yes. It was farther than I thought. A little dizzy.”
“You jumped without knowing how far it was?”
I could see the shoulders of the slicker shrug.
Something loomed out of the darkness and hit the plunge pool with surprisingly little splash. It had said fwooosh all through the air until it said FAAAAASH at the surface of the pool. A limb tossed over the falls by the flood waters eddied for a moment, as if deciding which way to go, then headed downstream, gathering speed as it neared the next set of swollen rapids. We had forgotten that, on top of everything else, we should expect a hail of debris from above. Sherry moved away from the center of the pool. She might be safe.
I said, “Hold on.” She had jumped and not died. I would too. Before I could think more about it, I launched off the ledge, trying to get as close to Sherry as possible, in case she had hit the one spot without a drop-off.
“You’re right. It’s fucking cold—”
“What?”
Sherry laughed a little tinkling laugh. She swept her arm through the air and said, “Fwoosh,” in imitation of the debris hailing from the brink of the Falls. Triumphantly I’d kept my light above the water, and she said, “Aim it this way. I can see a hole.”
“What?”
“I can see a hole at the side of the Falls. A seam. At the bottom. Must be where the birds go in at night.”
The seam presented as a deeper black inside the black. I aimed the flashlight. The beam burned strong on Sherry, but diminished with distance so that the Falls itself was a dim glimmer of black pearl almost outside the range of light. I began to move toward her, feeling the bottom with my boots for crevasses and monsters. The moon had climbed so that the top of the Falls was aflame with silver. It seemed curious to me that none of that pale fire flowed down the Falls to the bottom, it all seemed so liquid, the water and the moonlight, all so much one intermingling substance.
The water came a little above our waists, but was so turbulent with the storm that wavelets climbed almost to our shoulders sometimes. I never imagined there could be so much unevenness in water, so many lumps. In physics class they say that water tends to the level, but they must be talking about some other water. The pool grew shallower as we neared the bottom of the Falls, probably with shelves of shale broken from the cliff. Every time Sherry slipped on a loose stone she yelped a little yelp. Every time she yelped a yelp, I jumped a foot into the air, sure she’d been seized by something terrible. Once she slipped under the surface, came up spluttering and waving her hands in front of her face as though the water were a buzzing insect. I think this is the way heroes really are, yelping and bitching about the cold, but moving intrepidly toward the dark slit in the dark wall while the rest of us look on.
She waited for me to catch up. We had crossed the pool, and stood at the stony rise leading to the floor of the cave behind the Falls. She began to climb, hand over hand, toward a crumbly ledge visible beyond the door. She reached it. She tried it. It did not crumble. She pulled herself out of the water. The floor looked dry behind the falls. Of course it would be—where would the swifts go if everything were filled with water? I followed her exactly, gingerly up the wet stones. I didn’t know whether she was going to take the next step into the darkness or not.
Sherry waited until she had my attention. She put her flashlight to her face and made a monster face. Then she plunged behind the Falls.
Momentarily I saw her light behind the falls, dim golden and very beautiful, like a dark curtain shaken in a palace. I took a deep breath and followed.
Beyond the water gate lay blackness. Ravens eating licorice in a coal mine black. Pitch black, without a glimmer, roaring, terrible. I squeezed against the rock wall to get all the way in. It was not necessary to squeeze, for the gap was quite big enough once you were on it. Two could have gone in holding hands. But I wanted to keep my hand on the wall. I wanted something solid at the opposite side of all that resounding, horrible black. It was nothingness made into a world. I had never been more afraid. I figured if I pissed myself it would be OK, as I’d have to swim through the plunge pool to get out again.
“Sherry?” I shouted tentatively into the abyss. She made no answer. She couldn’t have heard me anyway in the roar, nor I her. It was like being inside an ear. I moved my hand along the wall. It was not damp. This was surprising. My hand began to hit the bodies of sleeping birds, so I lifted it off the wall and dragged it more lightly along. Feeling the warm backs of the sleeping swifts was better than feeling stone, though also much weirder. I wondered if they felt me, if maybe I entered their sleep as a spirit moving the dark. A few of them stirred or cheeped a little, but mostly I was as impalpable as a dream.
A sensation of openness and fresher air told me I had entered a larger space. I whirled the flashlight around, and though I could see the near wall—indistinct and fuzzy and gently pulsating with the bodies of a million birds—I could not see a roof or a far wall. I did see . . . something . . . I steadied my hand for a systematic investigation, moving tentatively forward in whispering abyss. A rivulet crossed the floor. I doubted it was part of the Falls, but rather a spring welling up from deep inside the cavern. It must flood from time to time, for the space on either side was clear of bird droppings and the bare gray stone shone through, glittering with mica as if with diamond. Beside the rivulet, on a little rise where an exhausted or dying person could lean over and get a drink of water, lay a skeleton. I jumped back, gasping. I dropped the flashlight, then grabbed it before it rolled too close to the bones. I allowed myself to think for one split second what I would have felt had the light gone out.
Over the skeleton, Vinny bent with his face in his hands. His body rocked back and forth. He was so black with muck from the descent only the rocking made you sure he was separate from the black floor of the cave. He rocked back and forth on his knees. You knew he was howling, though the Falls put all of that away.
Raising the flashlight again, I saw Sherry standing behind Vince, her hand on his back, moving with him as he rocked. Behind her the edge of a wall could be discerned, sharp and birdless. Maybe Vinny had scared the birds from that part of the wall.
I shouted to her, “Is he all right?”
She couldn’t hear me. She shrugged and then pointed frantically. I whirled around to see the creeping monster she pointed at, but there was nothing. I realized she was pointing at my flashlight. I looked at her carefully. Her mouth said, “Don’t lose the light!”
I crossed the cavern and gathered her in my arms. Somehow Sherry had lost her light and mine was the only illumination in the cave. She must have found Vince by touch, or he had found her when briefly the curtain of the dark wavered at the entrance. She seemed tired, or inert. I pulled her toward the door in the water. Finding the way in that direction was easy because of the cool wind sucking forever and forever from the cave into the air. If you were one of the swifts, all you’d have to do is drop down and let the wind carry you. Sherry was a hard pull because she herself was pulling Vince. He would not yet be budged. He kept turning back to the bones and howling, “I WILL NOT LEAVE YOU THIS TIME,” audible over all the waters of the world.
I couldn’t find a place to stand where I couldn’t see the bones. I was afraid of them. I thought they would keep us from ever leaving the cave. Then Sherry lurched forward. She’d finally yanked Vince free. I aimed the flashlight so the bones would see it one last time and know we would return for them.
I didn’t remember being so strong. Vince and Sherry both were hanging off me as though they were hurt, me praying to God that they weren’t. I dragged them. It was so dark in the cave that night itself seemed a blue blaze, and I dragged them toward that. Stone and wet unfolded into open air.
In the middle of a drama, you forget that things keep happening elsewhere. When the lights went out in the gorge, Tilden feared the worst. He shouted to us for a while, then turned and resolved to run back to the parking lot, hoping that my mother was still there.
None of us understood the immensity of Tilden’s fear of the dark. None of us had known about it at all, for when we were with him in the dark, we were with him, and company helped him get through it. He slept with a nightlight, but habit might be blamed as well as fear. During hikes to the Falls, it was he who usually urged an early return, arguing we should get home before the sun had set, but he was always the one with odd jobs and practice, and we assumed he was guarding his sleep. Alone on the ridge of the gorge, with just the Coleman lantern for protection, he was petrified. The shame of not being able to help us in the descent added to his misery, for if there was one thing worse than simple darkness to his heart, it was darkness added to height, the sheer drop into nothingness, the haunted air on all sides and only a few fingers and a few toes tying one to life.
But if he took the lantern we would have no orientation. We would not know where we were, climbing out of the gorge. Our lights had disappeared—he didn’t know why—and perhaps for us the Coleman was the only illumination in the world. Tilden swiveled his body in every direction to see what shade or monster might be approaching out of the blackness. He set the lantern on an outcrop of stone where its light would penetrate deepest into the abyss. Then he turned and ran. For a few strides the light of the lantern was with him, blazing the grass around him with the diamonds of after-rain. But then the bend, and utter darkness.
Tilden noticed two things at the moment of utter panic. First, that the low, fat chunk of moon still eked out enough pallor that if anything really formidable were hulking toward him through the trees, he could see it. The second was that the night came on fragrant and soft and beautiful, watery silver where the moon lay upon it, velvet and plush where it did not. A rabbit scurried ahead of him on the path. It was clearly panicked, too, so much so that it never thought to dart to the right or the left, but kept on like an arrow, stupid and stunned. Tilden ran so fast that the rabbit, thinking it was the object of the man’s speed, stopped in the path and gave up. It hunkered down, waiting for the fangs at its neck. Tilden leapt over the rabbit and kept running. As he ran he thought of the rabbit, how it had imagined something that was not, how it mistook another drama for its own, how it was never in danger, but crouched panting in the mud, recovering slowly from imagining it was. Tilden recognized himself. Everything that moved in the night moved for its own purpose, and none of it, likely, because of him. The things of the night heard him coming, and were afraid. He too was a dark shape passing in swiftness and power through the thick air. By the time he leapt like a stag over the chain fence around the parking lot, Tilden had become a creature of the night.
Mom still parked there, motor running, lights on—if pointing the wrong way—gospel music coming out of the radio as a fence against the great and terrible night. In one blast of speech, Tilden told as much as was tell-able. Mom whirled back down 414 toward town, to get help. Tilden raced back to the gorge. As he ran, he rejoiced in the darkness. It was not, perhaps the time to do such a thing, but it couldn’t be helped. He threw back his head and laughed out loud. The Coleman was like a star beaming on the edge of the precipice. As Tilden ran toward it, the first pale blue seeped into the mountains at his back, the first tentative footfall of dawn.
There was no good place to rest on the ledge under the Falls. Debris fell with the falling water. We danced to one side and then the other, hoping the Falls’ aim would be off this one night. I dragged Sherry as hard as I could, and she dragged the shape we had brought with us out of the cave. Back down in the water we went, into the roiling plunge pool. It seemed almost warm now, we had been out in the cold so long. The shape Sherry was dragging made a sound—oof!—when it hit the water. He was alive. I whirled with my flashlight and aimed the beam at its face.
“Vinny!”
“Of course ‘Vinny,’ you retard,” Sherry shouted over the waters.
I stalled us in the dangerous pool, looking at Vinny as though I’d never seen him before. It was ludicrous just standing there waiting for someone’s chicken coop to fall on our heads.
Vince said, “I went back for him.”
I responded, like a dumbass, “Oh.”
Suddenly, Vinny took the lead. He moved around us in the pool, still holding Sherry’s hand, so I was at the back. I’d been in favor of just lounging around until the firemen came for us, but Vinny hauled heavily out of the pool, tugging Sherry, she tugging me, up the first shelf of the stone tower.
The burst of decisiveness wore Vinny out. He was weak and tired—you could tell that by the way he stumbled—but he still knew the rock wall better than we did. I moved around Sherry to brace Vinny from behind, to catch him if he fell. Sherry held on to my belt, pushing impatiently if Vinny paused too long, considering the way. Dawn hit the rim of the gorge. It was not that far away, not so far as storm and darkness and fear would make one think. The sun shone so beautiful up there, the rain-pearled ferns become a shivery band of emerald.
Welcome hands pulled us out. The firemen arrived—Andy having pulled them from the duties Dadlez gave them farther up the river—and jumped down to help us the rest of the way. One tried to carry Sherry. I heard her say, about ten feet behind me, “I can manage on my own, thank you very much. Just give me your hand. That’s all I need.”
First thing I saw as we clawed our way over the rim was Chief Dadlez pulling up in his muddy cruiser. He and Officer Big City got out of the cruiser, surveyed the scene, and put their fists on their hips with exactly the same motion at exactly the same time.
“Is somebody going to catch me up?” Dadlez barked, as though everything had gone awry in his absence.
My dad, bless his heart, said, “Found ’em.”
Vinny had not spoken all the way up from the pool. I heard Lucas Mills the volunteer fireman, and my cousin in some complicated way—ask how he was, and Vinny had not answered. Behind my dad, Coach was bent over with his hands on his knees, like he’d been throwing up. Dad had his hand on his back, comforting him. He stood up, Coach did, and began to walk toward his son. Not many people heard what he said, or even knew that he’d said anything.
But I did. He said, “You find what you were looking for?”
Vince nodded.
I lost track of how long they stood there, looking at one another, but at last Coach said, “Son,” and pulled Vince against him so Vince’s face was buried in his shoulder. Vince sagged at the knees and his father held him up. The rain stopped finally, even way out over the green mountains. The men went down for the bones, then, Andy and Lucas and the firemen did, with a stretcher like the bones were still a man. I could see Vince walking a little ahead when the dawn broke, with his dad’s arm across his shoulders. The pack was on his back, the one with the Boy Scout patches, catching the first light sapphire and gold. Vince would abide there and wait for the bones, to be with them in the next part of their journey. We would wait with him until the next thing happened.