The Riverman (The Riverman Trilogy) (11 page)

It was baffling, but it was typical. We all see what we want to see.

“Thanks,” I said, and I left for school.

*   *   *

I didn’t know war. Skirmishes sometimes lit up our TV during the nightly news, but war was something that happened in other places at different times to faceless people.

I knew stories. My dad would sometimes tell the tale of an old friend named Herb who tried to dodge the draft by deliberately failing the psychological exam. He studied psychology texts so that he could answer the questions in a way that would make him seem woefully unstable. When the draft board called him in, an officer clasped Herb’s hand and said, “Figured it out, huh? No one’s ever scored so off-the-charts insane. You must be some special kind of brilliant.”

They assigned Herb to intelligence, and he spent years in the jungle trying to extract information from locals about underground tunnels and weapons caches. When he returned home, he refused a government job, choosing instead to move to Reno, Nevada, where he lived off of blackjack winnings. The dealers weren’t nearly as disciplined in Reno as they were in Las Vegas, and Herb claimed that when these novices drew a face card or an ace and had to check their hand for blackjack, he could read subtle clues in their eyes that would tell him whether to hit or hold. Odds tipped ever so slightly in Herb’s favor, but ever so slightly was always enough in the long run.

When his winnings were large, Herb carried a lot of cash, but also a holster that bulged in his jacket and made people think twice about pulling fast ones. He didn’t pack a gun, though. After what he’d seen in the war, he hated guns. Instead, he kept his winnings—his wad of twenties and fifties—in the holster.

One night Herb was grabbing a bag of cheese curls at a gas station when a fidgety cashier—also a veteran—saw the bulge and the flash of leather. The station had been robbed a few weeks before, so the cashier now kept a shotgun hidden in a box of candy bars beneath the register. As Herb stepped to the counter, the cashier buried his hand deep in the box and curled a finger around the trigger.

Just a few minutes before, Herb had slipped some bills to a man who had approached him in the parking lot. The man wore a camo jacket and carried a piece of cardboard with a message inked on it:
We gave our souls for your freedom. All we ask you to give in return is your spare change.

The cash Herb gave this other veteran was the cash he kept in his pocket so that he didn’t have to dip into the holster stash and startle the civilians. Luck goes as luck goes, and giving away all his pocket money was one of those things that made Herb’s luck go the wrong way. Because when Herb placed his cheese curls next to the register, he placed his other hand in his pocket. No cash there, so he went for the holster.

The shotgun blast didn’t knock him on his back or into the display of snack cakes, but it tore his shoulder open. The cashier didn’t keep firing. He ducked down behind the counter and prayed for things to end.

Herb stumbled outside into the parking lot and collapsed on the ground between the gas pumps. The panhandler was still there and he raced over to help, but when he saw the holster and the wad of bills sticking out from the bloody and shredded jacket, baser instincts took over. Soon the beggar was fleeing through scrubby and vacant lots with nearly five thousand dollars tucked into his pants.

Herb survived, but lost an arm, and now lives in a cabin in some state forest where he reads a lot and talks to truckers on his CB radio.

So, no, I didn’t know war. I knew stories about men who went to war, men defined by their decisions, decisions made out of desire or fear, or for survival, or simply because their spirits had been bent one way or another. And I couldn’t help but apply such stories to Fiona’s uncle Dorian. Was he a guy like Herb? Did he once have great potential, only to see it squandered by luck and consequence? Was he like the cashier? Perpetually scared? Paranoid? Quick to employ violence? Or was he like the panhandler? Broken? Desperate? Willing to do anything to satisfy his needs?

Maybe he was a little bit like all of them. It didn’t matter, really. What my mom said was the most important thing.
War will change people.
It must have changed Dorian into the type of man who carries a sharp blade, a man who stands in the backyard pretending to smother someone with a pillow. Maybe it turned him into something far worse.

This all led me to think about Chua Ling. Why Chua Ling? Did Fiona dig up some article about a girl who had disappeared all the way across the country just to make me believe she was having trouble at home? Not necessarily. She wanted me to see the story beneath the story. The Riverman was out there stealing children. He was someone she knew. In fact, she lived with him.

*   *   *

I really needed to talk to Fiona alone, so I avoided her until the end of the day. After the last bell, I waited at the bike rack. Wedged in the maroon teeth of it was a solitary bike—Fiona’s. Snow or no snow, she was the only kid who rode to school this late in the year. To some that made her seem tough. To others, a little crazy. Like so many things about her, it was open to interpretation.

She exited the school through the rarely used east doors and followed the brick path past the dumpsters to the bike rack. As I had hoped, she came alone. I didn’t bother saying hello. I jumped right into it.

“There are others like Chua?” I asked.

She pursed her lips and nodded. I hadn’t abandoned her yet, and this seemed to please her. “He’s gotten others I know of,” she said. “Werner, obviously. Then there’s Boaz and Rodrigo. Can’t find the articles in the library yet, but if you make some calls, it checks out. Missing. No evidence.”

“I see.” I turned my eyes to the base of the rack, where the paint was chipped and exposing the rust.

“Do you not believe me?” she asked. “I can give you full names, hometowns. I can give you phone numbers. Newspapers, police stations. Long distance, unfortunately, but—”

I looked back up at her. “No, I believe you,” I said, and I did. I had no doubt that if I called those numbers I would hear stories of other missing children. What I didn’t believe was that there was anything supernatural about their disappearances. That’s not to say the disappearances weren’t connected. I figured if I humored Fiona, maybe she’d let more truth slip out.

“I’m trying to understand how he does it,” I went on. “How does he sneak into other kids’ worlds, again?”

Fiona’s feet shuffled in the gravel. “When you’re at the folds, it’s not easy to cross over to someone else’s world the first time. You have to be invited. You have to have something they need. One of the things that Chua needed was a friend like me. And I was there. So that’s how I ended up in her world. It’s not always so simple.”

“So if I needed, say, hamburgers, and I called out that I needed hamburgers, then I’d be inviting the Hamburglar to my world?”

Fiona reached over and patted me gently on the stomach. “If you needed hamburgers, you could have hamburgers, Alistair. This is Aquavania. Not a drive-through.”

Her touch made my muscles clench. “I was just—”

“It’s not about objects,” she said, pulling her hand away. “It’s more emotional. Things you can’t wish up yourself. Things that only others can provide. Encouragement. Debate. Love. Hate even, I guess. Werner needed to know what his father really thought of him. And I guess the Riverman was able to give him that, or at least the Riverman was able to
pretend
he could give him that. In Aquavania, you can create anything your mind can think up. You’d be surprised what your mind can’t create. It’s often the things you really need.”

“So the Riverman knew what they needed. But how? You said that he might be here, in the … Solid World?” I still wasn’t comfortable with Fiona’s terminology, but I was trying.

“Everyone else who visits Aquavania also lives in the Solid World,” she said. “So why wouldn’t he?”

“Do you think he met Werner and Chua in the Solid World? Do you think that’s how he knew what they needed?”

She ran her foot across the gravel a few times, as if she were using it to cross off theories that didn’t fit the facts. “At the very least, he knew about them.”

I’d never been to a police station, but I imagined maps with thumbtacks and threads connecting them to identify patterns. “What if he’s a drifter? A guy who goes from place to place and meets kids and tricks them into trusting him?”

I was laying it on thick and I was looking for the recognition in her eyes. Her eyes narrowed, but she didn’t give anything up.

“But how? How does he know where to find them? How does he know which kids in the Solid World have been to Aquavania?”

“Maybe he doesn’t,” I said. “Maybe he takes advantage of wherever he is at the time. Seeks out the easiest prey.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. He can’t randomly have found both Werner and Chua. He sought them out specifically. They were friends.”

There was no one else around. At the west entrance of the school, kids were lined up and piling onto buses or they were following the sidewalks into the surrounding neighborhoods. On the east end, it was us and us alone. I really wanted Fiona to finally confess, to admit that she was making this all up, that she was painting over the truth because the truth was too ugly to bear, or too dangerous to admit. But she didn’t do that. Instead, she grabbed the handgrips of her bike and pulled it from the rack.

“Oh my god,” she said, her voice breathy and incredulous. “I get it. I finally get it. Each kid he takes gives the next kid away. The next victim. That stuff in the pen? It’s their souls, but maybe their thoughts are part of their souls. And the Riverman knew what Chua needed because Werner knew what Chua needed. And now he has Chua’s thoughts too. Which means he knows about me. He knows that I know. But he doesn’t know what I need. No one does.”

She was off before I could say anything else. But as she pedaled through the gravel and past the tennis courts, I focused on that statement:
He knows that I know.

F
RIDAY
, O
CTOBER
27

I rolled over and checked my clock.
1:37. Holy crap. Is it possible that I overslept by more than six hours?

Consciousness pulled back from my head like the tide. Next thing I knew I was lying in the shower, curled up as if taking a nap. Naked, exhausted, I let the water massage my ribs while I worried about the classes I was missing.

Next I was in the hall, half-dressed, backpack slung over one shoulder. The tide pulled away again, and when it returned I was at the kitchen table, eating cereal. Outside it was dark, but that didn’t register.

“What on earth are you doing?” My mom, ensconced in a duvet, leaned against the kitchen’s entryway.

Milk dribbled down my chin as I looked up. I hated seeing her face like this. It wasn’t a mother’s face. It was the face of a person who was frightened and had no answers.

“I’m late,” I told her. “I’m so late for school.”

“It’s two in the morning.”

My shirt was soaked. I hadn’t toweled off after my shower. I didn’t even have jeans on. I was sitting there in my underpants and sneakers.
Is this sleepwalking?

“Everything okay, sweetie?” she asked.

“Yeah … I looked at the clock and … I was confused.” Embarrassed was more like it. I pushed the bowl away.

“You don’t have to be up for hours. Go back to sleep. You’ve had a tough week. What with Charlie.”

Charlie. I had forgotten about Charlie. He’d only been out of school since Monday, and I’d already screwed him over.

I burrowed into bed, but I couldn’t fall back to sleep. It proved Fiona’s point. I obviously needed something that my mind couldn’t give me.

*   *   *

“I forgot to bring your homework yesterday. I’m so sorry,” I told Charlie on the phone when the real morning arrived five hours later.

“You’ve got more important things goin’ on,” he told me, his voice difficult to parse. He didn’t sound angry or sad or annoyed. He was almost teasing me.

“It’s not that. It’s—”

“Don’t sweat it. You think I really care about my homework? I was expecting you to come over and we’d try to solve the necromancer’s lair.”

“I will. This afternoon. Right after school.”

“Sleepover?”

I knew how this would go. He was going to spend my guilt before it was banked away and forgotten. “You bet,” I said.

*   *   *

It was the end of the first marking period, and the teachers rewarded themselves by taking a breather. School was filled with filmstrips and games of Seven Up. Normally this would make for a carefree day, but my exhaustion and my anxiety were immune to such diversions.

It also didn’t help that I didn’t see Fiona. I was beginning to figure out her schedule, so I knew where in the hall to loiter after each bell. At lunch, I knew which tables to plot a course around. She was nowhere, and this was not a good sign.

I went to the bathroom stall where I’d posted my plea:
In the story of Aquavania there is a Riverman and a girl. Who is the Riverman? Is the girl in danger?

There were two responses.

Hey river man, I heard you got a river of diarea, uh uh, diarea.

The only danger is you’re greasy farts!

Poorly spelled comebacks weren’t a surprise, but they certainly weren’t a consolation.

At the end of the day, I collected Charlie’s homework and, since Keri had plans with Mandy, I walked home alone. Temperatures had climbed and the only remnants from the snowstorm were scattered chunks of gray ice that lined the road and burst like rotten fruit when you stepped on them. Passing Fiona’s house, I noticed that Dorian’s truck was the only vehicle in the driveway and every window in the house was dark. If her family had planned a vacation, she hadn’t told me, but it certainly seemed like no one was home.

All day I had been contemplating going to the police. It meant breaking Fiona’s trust, but if it kept her out of danger, then I figured it was worth it. The only problem was, how would they ever believe my wild, unsupported theories?