One of Gerry’s kids pointed a black feather at the river. “The water,” he said.
Before our eyes, the river began moving visibly faster.
We set down our quills to watch, and we didn’t chase after them as, one by one, they blew away. The water was really moving. You couldn’t take your eyes off it. Soon, it was sucking itself from its own banks, retreating into a deep channel of accelerating froth. Entire ice shelves cracked off and were thrown downstream like panes of glass.
“What is it?” a kid asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
The water was literally sprinting, faster than a man could run. Trees, barrels, boats, docks and piers — anything that had been drawn into the channel simply shot past us. Humps and valleys formed along the river’s surface, like a dragon’s back, and you could hear a deep rumble as the current pushed large, unseen boulders along the bottom of the channel. The bridge pilings began to vibrate against the rush of water, and by the time white spray was blasting off them, the trestle’s black girders were shuddering.
“Run,” I yelled to Trudy and Eggers.
“Run,” the kids shouted. They didn’t understand why, but they knew something was terribly wrong. “Faster,” they called when Trudy and Eggers made for shore.
“What is it?” the biggest kid asked. “What’s happening?”
I looked at him. “The dam’s gone out in Parkton,” I said.
The kids looked downstream, though we were hundreds of miles away.
Another kid asked, “Is everything okay there?”
“Parkton is gone,” I told him. “I’m sorry, but everything there is gone.”
The oldest boy nodded his head, as if he understood what “everything” meant, but he didn’t. How could he imagine the prison being washed away, the university, and the casino? Could he picture ten thousand bodies surfing the wave’s crest, or conceptualize the river casting the ivory dice of a million hogs’ teeth? In that frothy wall of water turned poker chips, Odd Fellows bricks, chained-up hot rods, and the warden’s meteorite. Roiling along would be the glitter of bullet casings, the glimmer of spectacles torn from people’s faces, and the life’s work of Hitchcock, unreeling in ribbons of celluloid a hundred miles long. Deposited across the cornfields of Iowa and Kansas would be titanium turbine blades, white-roofed school buses, ana the statue of Harold McGeachie, “The Farmers’ Farmer,” perhaps dropped side by side with Janis’ plaque. Liberated was the man who was cemented alive while constructing the dam. Freed finally were the lake’s petroglyphs, appearing suddenly, as if carved in one night.
The train trestle, after Trudy and Eggers left it, dropped to its knees.
There was nothing to do but sled on, following the exposed plains of mud where the shoulders of the river had been. The retreating river exposed rocky outcrops, some of which looked excellent for fossil hunting. I marked on my GPS unit a rare outcropping of ochre-colored rock from the Devonian period, the age in which the first tetrapods crawled forth from primitive seas. That night, a mist rose from the mud that smelled of turtles. From camp, I heard an owl call, but I figured it was Farley having one over on me, so I didn’t tell anyone.
We moved through the Sioux Reservation, windy and quiet. If only they’d harbored an atavistic gene of immunity, passed down from Keno, there would have been some delicious justice. But no, the reservation was windy and quiet.
Over the next week of sledding, I came to understand the power of Trudy’s theory. I’d always seen a simple elegance to her postulation that spear points were the Clovis people’s chosen art form. As we made our way into North Dakota, I saw firsthand how art and necessity are the same thing in primitive technologies. There was art to the way you’d shape a new sled strut. There was art in the way you stacked kindling for a perfect fire — airy enough for ignition, yet tight enough to produce a hot, compact burn. When I carved a ladle for our broth pot, I couldn’t help whittling the face of a Pomeranian into the stem, just to give the kids a kick. There was even art, Eggers taught me, to butchering an animal. You didn’t just disassemble the thing, the way I’d imagined — slicing all the muscles into steaks and fillets. Instead, you studied the animal’s anatomy, and after saying thanks, you traced the tendons to the joints, then snipped them there, so the sinew wasn’t wasted and the bones revealed their uses. You learned to remove the liver so perfectly that you could see your reflection in the hepatic membrane.
We’d been gone nearly two weeks when Gerry called for a day of rest for the dogs. I wanted to push on, but when Gerry showed me how tender the pads of their paws had become, I understood. We stopped on the lee of a small hill. We all had our routines at this point. Gerry began pulling off harnesses and putting the dogs down for the night. The kids teamed up for firewood. Dad got to work on the sleeping quarters, while Farley began assembling the menu. At this time each evening, Eggers and Trudy would splash doe urine on their arms and legs, then set off to hunt. If they returned late with a certain symbol painted in blood on each other’s faces, I figured they’d had sex.
I was the guy who got the fire going, drew a pot of water from the river, and, once it started simmering, went fishing with my father in the last light. Our culture had ended, the people who called themselves “Americans” were no more, but the fish of South Dakota cut us no special slack. The night we rested the dogs, my father and I returned with one measly perch, nothing more than seasoning for the water. Coming back from the ice, we could see the fire in the distance, playing on people’s faces. The moon wasn’t up yet, but its light was in the sky.
“What do you think the afterlife is?” I asked my father.
We were walking close. Our snowshoes kept clacking.
“You mean, like heaven?” he asked.
“Could be,” I said. “Could be anything you want it to be — heaven, paradise, something else.”
He thought about that. “Well, if afterlife means to keep living on after life is over, don’t you think that’s us? Aren’t we doing that?”
I neared the fire with that thought in mind. If this was the afterlife, it was a place where you performed hard work for a good cause, with those who populated the center of your life. I’d have had another person or two with us if I could, but you can’t just order up an afterlife like a tuna-melt special. You don’t get to bargain. If there’s no Corvette, so be it. If there are no martinis or shrimp bowls, so it goes. The voices of our friends were reflected large off the hill. They were big-spirited people with much to give. We were embarked on a grand endeavor, together. Nearing them, I wondered if there hadn’t been a way to make something like this happen before. Couldn’t we have made our lives matter more during our before-life?
We rested and ate leftovers. When the dogs were finally harnessed up again, they wouldn’t budge. They planted their feet against the traces, and even if we’d still had Peabody’s whip, I doubt it would have worked. I assumed the dogs had been spoiled by their rest, figuring we’d have to run the indolence out of them all over again. But when we finally shouted and prodded them forward, the crest of the hill showed us what the trouble was. Below was the city of Croix, and roving snowy plains between us and its small-town streets were gangs of feral dogs.