Gabriel Tallent - My Absolute Darling

“Well,” Brett says, “I admire that, but I have to ride the bus to school. No other way to get there.”

“Me too,” Jacob says, “though sometimes I drive. But you’ve given me something to think about.”

Turtle doesn’t know what to do. She watches, relaxing her finger on the trigger, but she doesn’t lower the gun. After a silence broken only by the stranger’s sumptuous chewing and by the boys firing the lighter, Brett says, “Do you know where we go next? We’re a little turned around.”

Jacob says, “Our path to glory has been swift and clear, but our destination eludes us.”

The stranger nods down the gulch. “That way, keeping to the stream,” he says, and then turns and nods back the way they came, “or that way back.”

“The stream will take us to a road?”

The man nods, either agreeing or seconding the question, it isn’t clear to Turtle. He says, “There’s roads down there.”

“All right,” Jacob says, “thanks for the advice, man.”

“Yeah, dude, we appreciate it,” Brett says.

“Well, off you go,” the man says.

Brett and Jacob begin down the slope, following the stream. The man taps out the pipe, puts it away, turns and forges back through the bracken. Turtle tracks him with the Sig until he is gone. Then she looks south, into the gulch. The plan is a bad one. I should go back, she tells herself. Then she thinks, what will Martin do? It will go badly for me, but the hell. I am a girl things go badly for. A light rain begins to fall, and Turtle holds out her hands and looks up at the sky, huge, misshapen towers of clouds, and then the rain begins in earnest, wetting her hair, wetting her shirt, and she thinks, well, we’re in for it now.

Turtle stands on a fallen log in the pouring rain. Fifteen, twenty feet below her the flickering yellow beam of Brett’s flashlight plays across the seamed and shaggy bark of redwoods, sword ferns, thimbleberry, the scaly, fluted trunks of western hemlocks, across the stream swollen high above its banks. She picks her way down to them. Water runnels, tea-colored with tannins, wind down between the knotty fern rhizomes, cutting dollhouse waterfalls, the soil spangled with something golden but not gold, tiny wafery minerals that circle the tiny catch pools, reflecting what light there is. The flooding washes millipedes out from beneath the logs, some trick of the current sorting dozens of them onto muddy washes so they lay stacked together, nearly all curled up, blue and yellow and glossy black.

She thinks, these useless boys, useless. She needs to leave, she needs to go, but they are lost and won’t make their way down this hillside without her. Still, finding her way back home is easier said than done. Walking cross-country under a bright moon and a clear predawn sky is something entirely different than finding your way through this cloud-throttled black. It would be hard going.

Beside her, Brett says, “I don’t know, dude.”

Jacob says, “Yeah. I don’t know either, man.”

Turtle boosts herself up onto the log and backpedals quietly into the ferns, going on hands and feet just before Brett sees the log and moves to it, leans against it to take some of the weight off his pack.

“Keep going?”

Jacob 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.