Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

The visit was of obvious symbolic importance to his parents, and the son tried his best to make it a success. Not long after their Atlantic arrival they attended a national folk festival called Opening Day. His parents took him to his first baseball game, between what his father kept calling "the new New York team" and their bitter rivals from Chicago. They sat in the upper decks next to a Chicago family who, although it was the first day of the season, unrolled a bedsheet that read, WAIT TILL NEXT YEAR. Ricky asked his father to explain the banner but the man only sushed him, embarrassed.

The get-acquainted session with his national sport was a disaster. Ricky listened intently to his father's intricate explanation of such violences as the suicide bunt and the hit-and-run. He shouted out a few well-meaning Spanish encouragements to all the Latin American players. But he wound up, during the tense tenth inning, under the bleachers playing fighting tops with six equally bewildered foreign-exchange students from the Balkans.

Rebuffed but forgiving, the folks took him to Niagara. There, Ricky agreed enthusiastically that the falls were truly impressive in volume, although of course not anywhere near as tall as Angel or Cuquenan. He enjoyed putting on the raincoat to ride the Maid of the Mist. The spray and spectacle and liquid statistics were all staggering, but the thing that most entranced Ricky was a scrap of yellowed newsprint pasted on the wall of the gift shop:

MIRACLE AT FALLS

Boy, Age 7, Survives Pitch over Horseshoe

He carefully added the age of the miracle survivor to the age of the clipping. The numbers summed to precisely the figure he expected. A boy his age had fallen over the impossible water cliff in a two-person dinghy. The hundred-sixty-foot dead drop had been child's play; the consummate, stone-eating churn at the bottom had killed the boy's sister instantly. But Ricky's contemporary, after a three-minute gap lost in molten madness, had bobbed free, beaten into pulpy unconsciousness, each one of his body's twigs shattered, but fished out inconceivably alive.

No one except a child could possibly have survived the Horseshoe's pitch. Ricky reread the account, confirming in his mind the only available explanation of the miracle: those three unaccounted-for minutes, away. A boy his age, saved by falling not into the rock-drill undertow but somewhere right alongside it.

He asked to buy the clipping, but it was not for sale. So he stood in the gift shop, committing the account to memory. His parents had to come tug at his sleeve, pull, him away. He would not leave without a last look at the landmark chutes, one more for the road. But even alerted to the spot, he could not see where the boy had temporarily pushed through.

The family campaigned their way westward like Indian fighters, cutting a path through all the patriotic must-sees. They had had the Old North, Liberty, Independence Hall. Now it was on to Gettysburg, and out to the GM assembly lines. At the one-third point, in one of those C-cities in Ohio, after standing at polite attention through a guided tour of some presidential home, he talked his mother into taking him to the natural history museum, where he hoped to find some mummified birds. These had been a favorite of his ever since Egyptian days, when he had caught the school bus each morning next to the mouth of a cave network where teenagers had recently discovered seven hundred thousand embalmed ibises.

The museum's collection was woefully deficient in the sacred bird-corpse department. But the Egypt room did house the transfix-ingly tiny, bound body of a three-thousand-year-old juvenile. The three of them stood looking at the diminutive god-king, his father eager to get on with things American, his mother yanking him this way and that so as not to stand in the way of other families who might want a look. Finally, in his summarizing voice, Ricky's father gave a contrite shake of the head at this creature, five hundred years older than Socrates. "Not even a teenager!"

His mother sorrowfully replied, "Isn't that a shame?"

With this exchange, Ricky realized his parents were of no help to him. And in that moment, he became an adult. He was here alone, in the middle of the strange place name stamped on his passport. From all sides, Mayday snatches from lost boys bombarded and bathed him in garbled shortwave. He stared at the hieroglyphs on the inside coffin lid until they seemed to move. The oldest picture book in existence: he should have been able to read it the way he breathed. But he could not make out the first illustrated sentence.

Late in the summer, just before heading back overseas, the family took their now high-mileage rental down a demurely paved two-lane track running through the considerable empty bit between Mount Rushmore and the Grand Canyon. Ricky had greatly appreciated the enormous stone noses, large enough for a man to live in. He asked his parents ingenuously if the nation had any plans to add the current president to the mountain after he died. They laughed evasively.

They steered toward the southwest, following a connect-the-dots of Park Service gazebos laid out for public display. Glass cases the width of the entire desert displayed their attic residue: dinosaur teeth, arrowheads, pony express hand cancellations. Stereopticon slides of the mayor's wife playing at squaw, the redskin papoose slung from her head. The dress the little native girl was found in, made from a flour sack taken in the fatal ambush of settlers' wagons.

Several hundred blank miles from the nearest registered monument, the car began emitting soft, enigmatic chirps. They had driven the vehicle clear across the country and apparently it had had enough sightseeing for this combusting lifetime. Ricky's father nursed them another dozen miles into a station with no identifying trade sign. Its only marking was one of those movie marquees where battered black letters lined up like a brigade of unruly railroad-building coolies:

HAVE YOU HEARD THE ALL-SAVING WORD?

Snacks, Gas, Reading Matter

The ancient proprietor's wife took it on herself to entertain the boy while the other three adults puzzled over the intractable antiphonies of the four-stroke engine. The woman claimed to be one-quarter Indian, and he asked which quarter.

"Last folks to come through here," the woman told him, "had one curious story to tell. This was late last Thursday night. Young couple, newlyweds, out on a backroads honeymoon. Now just you think how astonished they must of been to see a lone girl, no older than you yourself, hitchhiking down this roadside hundred miles out in the middle of nowhere. In a beautiful Sunday dress. It so astonished them, they said, that against their better judgment, they picked the child up. Plain as a coyote's call, something had frightened this girl into running. They say she sounded like she come from far away too." The woman whispered sympathetically to him; her voice was full of a conspiratorial forgiveness. "Foreign as you yourself."

The boy did not correct her. Nor did he interrupt the quarter-Indian woman to say that he already knew the end of the story. How the girl hitchhiker insisted on getting in the backseat. How she sat in party dress, answering all questions politely with no more than a yes or no. How, when the couple turned to let her out at the requested crossroads, the backseat was empty. How there was no trace of the girl, nothing to indicate where she had come from or where she had gone. "Far as anyone could say, she dropped down on this stretch of road from out the Airy Above. Went back to it too, I bargain."

Ricky knew better. To his experience, very few girls his age dropped out of the sky, and fewer still turned around and vanished back into it. And when they did, they rarely needed to hitchhike in between. She must have come from somewhere. Everyone did; that was the one core geography agreed upon by every school he'd ever attended. More clearly still, the girl had been headed someplace very specific. Most certain of all, she had found it, arrived while her ride wasn't looking.