LITMIR.BIZ

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shakes his head, but they can’t stop here, that much is apparent. The ground is a mess. Turtle thinks, say something, say something to them, point the way for them, but she cannot seem to say anything. The only glimmer is the treacherous light of glowworms, nearly the same phosphorescent green as the tritium sights on her Sig Sauer, and she puts her hand on it now, thinking, I am not afraid of these boys, and if I have to make my way in this dark, I will. But she is afraid of them. She knows just from wrapping her hand around the Sig Sauer’s comforting grip, that grip that says, no one will ever hurt you, just from her own willingness to brave this flooded dark alone, she knows that she is afraid of the boys.

      Jacob hitches his backpack up on his shoulders and they continue down the hillside, following the stream, which has overrun its narrow trough and flooded the nearby banks so that the boys splish-splash through ankle-deep water. She thinks, I will wait and see if we come to a road. And if we do—I don’t need to do anything; they will go one way, and I the other. But if there is no road, then they’re going to need me.

      They descend into a basin where the stream forms a pond before pouring over the edge, the marshy banks thicketed with cattails. The pond is full of chorus frogs, and when Brett pans the pale yellow beam across the water, Turtle can see their hundreds of eyes, the distinct ridged shapes of their heads breaking the surface.

      “Let’s strike out that way,” Jacob says, and motions west across the side of the drainage, not down it. “If we follow this stream, it is gonna be too steep.”

      “Dude,” Brett says, “this stream takes us to the road. That’s what the guy said. We aren’t good at, like, improvising this navigation thing.”

      “What possible reason have I ever given you to doubt my navigation?” They both laugh, Jacob looking down into the gulch, nodding. “All right, bud, all right, you wanna go right down this stream?”

      “Yeah,” Brett says, “that’s the way he told us.”

      “All right, lead—”

      “Shh!” Brett says, and turns and swings the flashlight almost onto Turtle. She sits embowered in ferns, grinning. You fuck, she thinks, delighted. You fuck! She thinks, what gave me away? She can feel it in her own face; her pleasure; her eyes slitted with happiness; she thinks, you fuck, did you hear me, did you see me, some movement? She is delighted with herself, and with him, for almost having seen her, thinking, ahh, ahh, Easy Cheese Boy isn’t blind after all.

      Jacob looks at Brett.

      Brett says, “Sorry, man, I just had this, like, feeling—I don’t know. I just had this feeling.”

      “What feeling?”

      “There’s nothing out there,” Brett says, panning the flashlight across dripping ferns, across the tangle of cattails, almost over her.

      You bastard, she thinks, delighted with him, you motherfucking bastard. She is full of joy.

      They go through the pond with their backpacks held above their heads, crushing their way through cattails. They climb to the muddy edge, with the waterfall pouring down beside them, and the two boys look down into the gulch. Turtle cannot see what they see, but Jacob leans out, says, “It looks pretty steep down there, bud.”

      Brett nods.

      Jacob says, “All right.” He sheds his backpack and goes down over the lip. Brett passes him the backpacks one at a time, Jacob carefully banking them into the hillside. Then Brett climbs down. They help each other with the bags, and then drop out of her sight. When they have gone, Turtle crawls through the water after them. The muck of the pond bottom is knotted with water lily tubers. They are as thick as her arm, their flesh ridged and scaled, textured almost like pinecones not yet sprung. The drifts of algae feel like thick, sodden spiderwebs. She comes to the pond’s edge and climbs out, shedding water in curtains. Below, the gulch is dark except for the blue glow of Jacob’s headlamp and the lance of Brett’s flashlight. Over the sound of the rain and the torrent of the waterfall, she can hear them calling out to each other. Their heads cut above the ferns like rats through water.

      Brett pauses and looks back in Turtle’s direction, and Turtle lowers herself into the weeds. Jacob plays his headlamp through the dark. Brett says, “I swear, I just—I had this bad feeling.”

      She lies perfectly still and looks right back at them.

      “Like what?”

      “Something,” Brett says.

      Jacob wades out toward her, moves the headlamp in meticulous search. “There’s nothing here,” he says.

      “Just a bad feeling, a spooky feeling.”

      Jacob stands, turns a slow circle, peering into the dark. He looks back at Brett helplessly.

      Brett says, “If there’s nothing there, then there’s nothing there.”

      “I don’t see anything.”

      “I just hope it’s not that guy.”

      “It’s not that guy.”

      “I just hope he’s not, like, following us through the dark.”

      The gulch narrows and grows steeper, spanned by fallen redwoods, the banks scarred by mudslides. Twenty feet below, it is finally blocked by an impenetrable wall of poison oak. Brett’s flashlight grows pale, dim, and then dies. He slaps the light into the palm of his hand and it glows to life, a sullen filament lit for a moment before it dies again. Turtle waits above, nervous, thinking, just do it, Turtle. She thinks, nothing for it now, but still she cannot. She is going to have to get down on hands and knees and beg Daddy’s forgiveness, beg, and maybe then he will let her off.

      She hears Brett work the cap and dispense D-cell batteries into his hands. He cups them in his palms and blows on them.

      Jacob says, “If there’s a road, we’ve got to be right on it.”

      “Shit,” Brett says, “oh shit.”

      “There’s no alternative.”

      “That’s a lot of poison oak we’d have to go through.”

      “The road’s gotta be right past it.”

      Brett hunches over the flashlight, whispering to the batteries. “Come on, come on, come on.”

      In the moment of silence, all they can hear is the rain, soft, padding on leaves, and the crackling of the wet soil, the sound of the river.

      “He said,” Brett says, sounding betrayed, “that we just go this way, and we’d hit the road.”

      “We must be right on it,” Jacob says, “we’ve got to be right goddamn there.” He starts precariously down, clutching at ferns and shoots of poison oak, each step sinking into the mud. Turtle can see that he will never make it down the hillside, and before she can stop herself, before she can hesitate, she rises out of the weeds and steps up onto a log above them and says, “Wait.”

      They both turn and search the dark for her, and then suddenly she is bathed in Jacob’s bright LED light, standing among cow parsnips and nettles, conscious of her ugliness, her lean bitch face and tangles of silt- and copper-smelling hair, half turning away to hide the pale oval of her face. For a moment, no one says anything.

      Then she says, “Are you lost?”

      Jacob says, “Not so much lost as unmoored from any knowledge of our location.”

      Brett says, “We’re lost.”

      Turtle says, “I don’t think that’s the way.”

      Jacob looks down the gulch. The light pans over the riot of poison oak, the mud, the water sheeting the ground. He says, “I don’t know what would make you think that.”

      Brett says, “Are we above a road?”

      “I don’t know,” she says.

      Brett

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