Adrian McKinty - Hidden River

“Whadda ya want?” he asks suspiciously.

“Hi, I’m from the, uh, Campaign for the, uh, Wilderness, we’re in your neighborhood tonight campaigning to save the forests.”

“Yeah?” he says, and I show him the literature on the clipboard. The pictures of the trees before and after deforestation. The quotes from logging company executives and politicians. The list of endangered species in the Amazon.

“What are you selling?” he asks gruffly.

“Nothing. I, er, I’m campaigning to save the trees, the old growth forests. There’s only—”

“Do I have to pay anything?”

“No, not really. It’s a—”

“Ok, where do I sign?”

I give him the clipboard and he takes a pen out of his lapel pocket and signs the sheet next to his door number. He gets oil all over the acetate cover.

“Ok?” he says.

“Yes, and if, er, you’d like to, um, make a donation?” I say to him, with a great deal of embarrassment.

“No, don’t think so.”

“Ok, well, thanks again.”

“My pleasure, glad to help.”

I turn and walk down the path. He closes the screen door behind me.

Shit, I say to myself, and mark zero on my sheet. I walk to the next house. I ring the bell and no one answers and I write down “N/H.”

No answer in the next four houses and in the fifth house an Asian girl comes to the door, wearing a Girl Scout uniform.

“Are your parents in?”

“Not allowed to talk to strangers,” she says bravely, and shuts the door.

I turn and walk back down the path. Smart kid, I say to myself.

Next house, no one home. Next house, no dice. Next house, old white guy in a crumpled suit, standing behind a patched screen door.

“Rain, finally, cool us down,” he says.

“Yeah, listen, I’m in your neighborhood tonight campaigning to save—”

“Blue steel.44,” he says. “Used to have that.”

“What?”

“You know what gun I got now?”

“No.”

“A Walther PPK,” he says, his eyes narrowing.

“Really?” I say.

“Uh-huh. Never be too careful opening the door to strangers,” he says.

I look down and I notice, sure enough, that he’s holding a firearm in his left hand, bouncing it there on his hip.

“You know who has that gun?” he asks.

“Uh, no. No, I don’t.”

“James Bond. That’s James Bond’s gun,” he says, and gives me an off-putting smile.

“Well, that’s terrific, thank you very much, I’ll have to go,” I say.

“What do you want, boy?”

“I just wanted to leave you a leaflet, here you are.”

“Are you Scottish?”

“Irish, Irish. Well, look, thanks very much.”

“Irish, Scottish, isn’t it all the same thing?” he says.

“No, no, quite different. Well, thanks anyway, have a good night,” I say hastily, and back down the path.

When I meet up with Charles at the end of the street, I have signed up no one. I don’t tell him about the man with the gun in case he thinks I’m hysterical. But I take twenty bucks of my own money and pretend that I got two donations of ten bucks each.

“That’s pretty good, Alex, that was a more difficult street, tough test. Look, we’ll do a few more houses together and meet up with the others, ok?”

“Where’s the film crew?” I ask him.

“Oh, they ran out of light, but I think they got enough for tonight,” Charles says.

He doesn’t elaborate about who they were or what they were doing, so I let the matter drop.

Charles takes us back down to a more affluent street and I wonder if this was all a deliberate ploy to blood me on a lot of rejections to see if I got downhearted.

Sure enough, back in the richer street we get three more memberships and even a life membership.

The rain has eased and when we pick up the others, everyone is excited and happy. They’ve had a good night and a third of the money they raised will be going to them. We drive back to the city, everyone talking, laughing. We stop for pizza in a grungy-looking place on a slip road close to the highway.

We scrunch together several tables. The lights flicker. The pizza bakes.

Charles is in high spirits. He talks and, eventually, the attention turns to me, as the new boy.

“Alexander, what would you be doing right now in Ireland?” Charles asks.

“Well, it’s five a.m. there, so I’d probably be sleeping,” I say.

“No, no, no, that’s not what I mean, what do you do over there, at night, for fun, are there pizza places like here?”

“Uh, not that many and they’re expensive, pizza is more of a restaurant thing,” I say, a bit disconcerted to be the center of attention.

“So what would you do?” Charles asks.

“Go to the pub, I suppose,” I say.

“Are the pubs really full of musicians and music and stuff?” Amber asks.

“Some of them, but most aren’t, they—”

“I was in this pub in Dublin and it took forever for my pint of Guinness to come, I thought they’d forgotten about me,” Charles says. “They were so slow.”

“It’s supposed to be slow, Guinness has to be poured very slowly,” I explain.

“Well, it was slow, and the smoke in those places, terrible, I felt sorry for the bar staff, really awful,” Charles says.

“Don’t they play that game with the sticks?” Abe asks me.

“Hurling,” I say.

“Do you play it?” Abe asks.

“No.”

“Charles was the lacrosse champ at Bright,” Abe says. “Kind of a similar game, no?”

Amber and Charles look briefly at each other.

“What’s Bright?” I ask.

“You ever read A Separate Peace, Catcher in the Rye, any one of those?” Abe asks.

“No.”

“Well, it’s a bit like their school, Colorado version, Charles and Robert both went there. Very snooty, play cricket and everything,” Abe says. Clearly, he’s trying to get under Charles’s skin, wind him up a bit, tease him, but he’s overstepped the line somehow. Amber scolds him with a look that stops him in midsentence.

“Alexander, do you have any hobbies or anything like that?” Amber asks, questioning me with those big glacial eyes.

“No, not really,” I say. “I go to football matches, soccer matches, I mean, sometimes, I’m not very athletic or anything.”

Mercifully, the pizza finally comes.

I don’t eat any. Instead, I find myself staring at Amber Mulholland as she spills Coke on her white blouse. I hand her a napkin and she thanks me with a beautiful smile. Something about that smile, though. Beautiful like a sun-drenched cornfield above a missile silo.

How much does she know about what happened to Victoria? Would she even care if her husband or brother-in-law was a murderer? I examine her closely. Maybe I’m wrong. There’s something vulnerable about her too. A touch of the Marilyn or the Lady Di.

We drive back to Denver. I’m freezing, but no one else is. I try to get warmth from a cup of coffee. Charles is talking, but I’m not listening, ticking off the seconds till I can get home. We’re all exhausted. Amber, in a whisper, asks Charles how the filming went. He says it went great and gives her a kiss. The kiss makes me wince.

They drop me on Colfax Avenue.

A few hookers, a few gypsy cabs, their lemony headlights distorting in the rain.

I stand under the overhang at Kitty’s East Porno store. Still a few blocks to our apartment, but I’m so tired. Junkie tired. Drizzling still. The last rain for weeks to come.

From now on a continuation of the drought. Drought until August, when freezing rain would fall in Fort Morgan. And I would beg it to come down, invoking Vishnu, Storm Bringer, Lord of Night, begging him to cover me up as I lay there in the graveyard with gunshot wounds, wondering if it was too late then, to live, to survive, to avenge yet another horrible murder in this sorry, sorry excuse for a case.