Gabriel Tallent - My Absolute Darling

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 says, “Who are you?”

“I’m Turtle.” She comes down and stands in front of Jacob, and he reaches out and they shake hands.

“Jacob Learner,” he says.

“Brett,” Brett says, and they shake.

Jacob says, “What are you doing here?”

“I live near here,” she says.

“So we’re near a road?”

“No,” she says, “I don’t think so.”

Brett looks wonderingly up at the hillside. “People live near here?”

“Sure.”

Jacob looks back at her, and she is blinded with the blue light again. “Sorry,” he says, angling the light away. “Can you lead us down to the river?”

Turtle looks away into the dark.

Brett says, “What happened? Is she still there?”

“She’s thinking,” Jacob says.

“Did we make her mad?”

“She’s speculative.”

“She’s still not talking.”

“Okay: She’s really speculative.”

“This way,” Turtle says, leading them in a muddy traverse along the hillside, looking for a clear place farther out.

“Holy shit,” Brett says, “holy shit. Look at her go.”

“Hey!” Jacob says. “Wait up.”

Turtle leads them across fallen redwoods and then descends to the river among grand firs on a low, sloping ridge, Jacob’s light casting her shadow out ahead of her, the boys crashing behind.

The river has flooded its banks and Turtle comes down into a great tangle of alders hip-deep in water, long whips of stinging nettle bent in the current and swinging like seaweed, submerged skunk cabbages nosing out of the torrent, rafts of dead leaves scummed up against every nook and cranny, eddies circling blackly with huge dollops of foam.

“Holy shit on a shitty, shitty shingle,” Brett says, and whistles.

“There’s no road,” Jacob says.

“We’re fine without it,” Turtle says.

“Maybe you are,” Brett says.

Jacob stands there, sheathed to the waist in mud, and laughs and says, “Man,” drawing it out into a long syllable, his voice giving it somehow a richness of humor and a depth of optimism that she is unused to, running his tongue along muddied lips with pleasure and saying again, “Oh man,” like he can’t believe the incredible good fortune of being so entirely lost beside a river so flooded, and Turtle has never seen anyone confront misfortune this way.

Brett says, “Oh man,” and he says it differently, and then he says, “We are fucked .”

Turtle looks from one to the other.

“We are fucked ,” Brett says. “We will never, ever get home. We are fucked.”

“Yes,” Jacob says in hushed awe, weighting his words with relish. “ Yes .”

Brett says, “It’s ironic, because we were fine before, we had the perfect campsite before, but nooooo , we needed water.”

“And look,” Jacob says. “Hashtag success! Hashtag winning!”

“We need somewhere to hole up,” Brett says, then, to Turtle, “Do you know where we are? Is there somewhere we could sleep? It’s all mud, isn’t it? There’s nowhere not covered in mud.”

It is still raining hard, and everyone, including Turtle, is cold, and there is nowhere level here, not with the river flooded, and to find a campsite, they would need to climb the ridge again, and though Turtle could, she doesn’t know about the boys.

“I’m so cold,” Brett says, “dude, so incredibly goddamn cold.”

“It’s chilly,” Jacob agrees with deep humor, trying to wipe the mud out of his eye sockets. He stands stiffly, in the way of people whose clothes are cold and for whom every movement brings new flesh into contact with gritty wet fabric. He looks at Turtle, and something occurs to him. “How did you find us?”

“Just ran into you,” she says.

The boys look at each other, shrug, as if to indicate they’ve heard stranger things.

“Can you help us?” Brett asks. He hunches shivering under his backpack. Rain sleets around him. Jacob finds a poison oak leaf stuck to his cheek, flings it disgustedly away into the dark. Turtle chews her fingers in consideration.

“Jesus,” Brett says, “you don’t feel any urgent need to fill the gaps in conversation, do you?”

“What does that mean?” Turtle says.

“Nothing,” Brett says.

“You seem very patient,” Jacob says.

“You move at your own pace,” Brett says.

“Speculative,” Jacob says.

“Speculative, that’s right, thoughtful ,” Brett agrees.

“Like, where did you study Zen Buddhism?”

“And was your Zen master the ancient, slow-moving reptile on whose shell rests the entire universe, known and unknown, fathomed and unfathomed?”