T. Boyle - Drop City

And then, beneath the music-or threaded through it-he heard the human noise in the backyard, a wailing, a hush, then a clamor of voices, repeating now, slight return: wailing, a hush, clamor of voices. He took himself out the screen door and there they were, the whole tribe, gathered round the swimming pool and what appeared to be a very wet cloth doll stretched out on the flagstone coping. That was when the acid let go of him just long enough to record the scene: it was one of the kids, one of Reba's kids, and Jiminy was pumping at the kid's chest like a Marine Corps medic on the evening news and everybody else was wringing their hands and jumping in and out of the green murk that was the pool. He saw Ronnie inflate his cheeks and go down, and then Alfredo bobbing to the surface in a maelstrom of hair. “What's wrong?” he wanted to know, snatching at the first person his hand led him to, but he was so full of Norm and the accident he didn't recognize her, not at first.

“It's Che,” Merry told him. She was naked to the waist, shivering. She wore body paint, red and blue tendrils striating her limbs like extruded veins. Her eyes didn't seem to be in her head-they were just floating there, three inches to the left of her face. “He drowned, or he fell in or something, and we can't-I mean, nobody knows where _Sunshine__ is.”

A shriek cut the air, every mother's nightmare. “Sunshine!” Reba wailed, drawing out the last syllable till it caught in the back of her throat. “Sunshine! Come out, baby, come out! It's not funny!” She flung herself across the yard, beat at the stiff brush of the chaparral with angry hands. She was puffed up, furious, just coming on to boil. “It's not a game. Come out, goddamnit! Come out, you hear me, you little bitch!”

“She's not in the pool,” somebody said, and in the confusion, Marco couldn't see who it was.

“The river, what about the river?” He glanced up to register Verbie-she was perched on the wet coping, her eyes dilated, hair glued to her head. “Did anybody search the river?”

A look of helplessness swept over them, lost eyes, mouths agape, the slumped shoulders and agitated hands, and how could anybody be expected to do anything at a time like this? It was Druid Day. They were wiped, all of them. They didn't want to save children, they wanted to _be__ children. “What do you mean, the river?” Merry wondered aloud.

“I mean the _river.__” Verbie flung out her hands as if she were taking a bullet on a dark stage. “She could've drowned. Down there, I mean.” Up to this point, she'd been going fine, but now she seemed to falter. She looked to her sister, then to Marco. “I mean, right?”

That was when Star appeared out of nowhere, parting the crowd like a prophet, her face ironed shut, quick bare feet on the flagstones, her naked limbs, wet T-shirt, wet shorts. And then she was bent over the limp form of Che, clearing his tongue with a sweep of two fingers, pinching his nostrils and breathing her life into him. _CPR. Junior Lifesavers. Mouth-to-Mouth.__ It all came back to him in that moment, but all he could do was stand and watch, his arms dangling as if they'd been attached with pins, and what he felt was awe. He watched Star's knees grip the flagstones, watched her balance on the bridges of her feet. And her hair. It was a miracle, spread out over the child's head and torso like an oxygen tent, each curl like a finger, each finger willing him back.

People were pounding the bushes now, shouting out Sunshine's name as if it were the only word in the language, and Norm was down there bleeding like an animal somewhere on the road with the sheriff on his way and the citizenry up in arms, and still Marco didn't move. He watched Star's hair, watched her lips fasten to the boy's. Fasten and release, fasten and release. A year went by. A decade. And then Che's left foot began to dig at the flagstones, and Marco was released. In the next moment he was running again, generating a breeze all his own, the sweating cables of his own hair beating around his head, the cords of his legs fighting the descent that sent him hurtling down the bank of madrone, bay and knobcone pine to where the river took its light from the sky. He said it too, then, pronounced the name all the others were pronouncing, as if it were involuntary, called it out till his lungs burned and his throat went dry, “Sunshine! Sunshine!”

There was no answer. He took a path north along the bank, straining to see into the water, but the water was murky with its freight of sediment and deep here where the current sliced round a long garrulous bend. The water spoke to him, but it didn't calm him. Birds called out. The sky rose up and slapped down again. What had he expected to see-a pale arm waving amongst the river-run debris? The ghostly body pressed against a wedge of rocks six feet down? “Sunshine!” he called. “Sunshine!”

He was still calling when he found her. He was calling, but she wasn't answering. She was crouched at the foot of a deep arching bush hung with berries, a red stain of juice painted on her chin and exaggerating her mouth till it was like a clown's. Her red hands moiled in her lap. She was wearing a dirty white dress, no shoes, beads at her throat and wrist, and her hair was in two lax braids bristling with bits of twig and leaf. “Sunshine,” he said, just to hear himself say it again. She was staring past him, crouched there, just crouched. Maybe she was singing to herself, maybe that was it, because she was making some sort of noise in the back of her throat, and the noise made him uneasy. “Are you all right?” he asked her.

She didn't answer.

“Look,” he said, and the words were hard to extract, “everybody's been worried about you-your mother, she's been worried. And your father. And Norm and me and everybody.” He paused to let the breath go out of him, just for an instant, just to escape the tedium of breath-in and breath-out. “Been picking berries, huh?”

She didn't look at him, but she nodded her head, or at least he thought she did.

“Well, I'm going to take you back now, is that okay? I'm going to lift you up on my shoulders and take you back-you want a ride? You want to go piggyback?”

He came out of the woods to a hero's welcome, the whole clan gathered round him with their slow shy smiles and spooked eyes, yet another tragedy averted, and let's stir up the pot of mush and get it on in a major way, sure, and crank the music too. It surprised him to see the sun fixed overhead-it was early afternoon still, though it felt much later, felt like midnight in his mind. Reba came across the yard, slid her daughter from his shoulders without a word and carried her into the house as if nothing had happened. Che was gone-presumably he was in the house too, in bed, fluttered over by half a dozen women, and that was an image Marco wanted to hold-but the blurred outline of him still clung to the wet flagstones as if it were a piece of some elaborate puzzle to which no one had the solution. Jiminy settled into one of the chaise longues with a pair of bongos and started a slow lugubrious slap-palmed beat. A beer-still cold from the tub-appeared in Marco's hand, and then Star was at his side. She didn't say a word, just leaned forward and kissed him and held her lips there until he came back to life.

When the black-and-white sheriff's cruiser came nosing up the drive like some sort of mechanical hound, sniffing out the curves and drawing a bead on the main house, Pan didn't feel much of anything. The day had careened right by him. There was all that hassle and hysteria, diving and diving again till he damned near wound up drowning _himself,__ and then a lull that smoothed out all the wrinkles like a hot iron. Reba's brats had been saved and resurrected and either punished or rewarded or both-of that much he was sure, or at least he thought he was-and then at some point Norm had appeared with a bloody strip of cloth pressed to one eye and his glasses cobbled together with a white knuckle of masking tape. Norm was wearing his ask-no-questions look and went straight for his room at the top of the stairs, so that little drama was over before it began, and after a while the party or communal navel-gaze or whatever it was had recommenced in all earnestness.