Danilo Thomas
Two slender folk stumbled out of the door and off of Tarin's sloping porch. Pudgy and plump in their middles, sharp at the knuckles and joints, they had the general aspect of fishhooks stowed in lumps of hamburger. These tender, dangerous morsels stood now in the street. These strangers, for these two were not friends of Tarin's, nor were they anyone she recognized, blew into their pointed fists to ward off the cold of the Montana winter. From the front seat of her car, Tarin thought the two identical, dressed in hooded sweatshirts with a tangle of blonde hair draped over thin, pale noses. Their only difference was that one carried a slight bust. Tarin shut off her car and moved toward them.
"Tarin Naranche?" one asked though it was difficult to say which. In the ancient mining camp nestled a hatchet-toss from the Continental Divide, the air sparked with the static cold, trapping sound and reducing it to broken glass in a sack in a river.
"Yeah," Tarin said. They all paused in the dim light. It was too late for whatever they wanted. Wasn't it? Far too late. "Well?"
The cold crisped a shining duff on the pavement and the pogonip wet Tarin's nose. It was all a bit unsettling. She moved closer.
"Got a smoke?" the boy asked.
His wet eyes, so green even in the streetlights, followed Tarin's pack of smokes from her pocket to her mouth. She plucked two from the package with wetted lips, spitting one into the boy's own patient hand. From her previous distance Tarin had mistaken for youth the twins' lithe bodies, but closer they were tall and stooped with arched scaly patches they'd licked around their mouths. Desiccated crow's feet bolted about their eyes. A stiff wind might have blown them to pieces. The street crunched under the spring-loaded heels in Tarin's shoes. She had worked on her feet too long to care about fashion. Tarin shifted her weight and the boy raised an eyebrow at their sprong and clunt.
"Orthopedic function," Tarin said. "Who are you two?"
"Thimbo Fuchs," the boy said. The girl did not speak. "And she's Colorado. Our dads grew up together. Or, I should say, your father and our father grew up together. We stopped through once as kids. We just stopped in to say hey to the old man. He's asleep now."
Thimbo ran a hand into his hooded sweatshirt and pulled out a lighter. Tarin could not recall the twins. It struck her as odd that she would forget so striking a pair. Anxiety bubbled at the back of her skull. The loss of memory was not something she took lightly. She squinted, trying hard to place the two conveniently in some old memory, like pretty stones in a broken box, but she could not.
Thimbo drew on his cigarette, reducing its length by half. Ash charred the filter and burned his fingers. Tarin gave him another. "It's been a long time," he said. "Since we came through."
Colorado stared into the streetlight, one hand raised to her brow in a shielding salute.
Tarin thought Thimbo might continue with that story, but he did not. Feeling the chill on her neck, she noted that it was too cold to stay outside, and she went into her house.
Inside, she sorted her father's meds on the kitchen counter and then drank some water. She could hear him breathing steadily, asleep in his quarters off the front room. He was either asleep or sleepwalking those days. He very rarely wore himself anymore, or at least the version of himself from before the accident. He hadn't taken off his suit of dull lethargy for a long while and Tarin knew it was slowly becoming who he was. She'd worked a double at the diner. Empty beer cans and undone dishes rattled around her, signaling the movement of the midnight ore cars rolling out of the mountain. She wouldn't sleep.
She doled out her father's pills, mostly anti-seizure drugs and blood thinners to keep his head from turning into a log jam. There was also the opioid for the skull fracture. Tablets, capsules, liquid-gels, they all rattled around in the shot glasses from which Tarin tracked and dispensed them. Circling, ringing, bouncing off the glass, they would all settle and still as was their purpose in the blood of her father. She put the shot glasses on a cookie sheet with a glass of cranberry juice.
Tarin stepped out of the kitchen and into the hall that led past her father's room to the nexus of the front door and stairwell. The front door was open. The twins stepped into the doorframe. Backed by the streetlamp, their silhouettes became a single, irregular void. Tarin squared her shoulders and ran her thumb along the edges of the cookie sheet. She pondered the lurking persistence of these two strange siblings. It was not a good night for guests. She took steps toward the door to tell them that, but her tread was interrupted by the porcine squeal of the floorboards. Her father, the Griz, ducked under the doorframe that led into the hallway. His massive torso blocked out the ceiling light and put the twins firmly in the dark. He pulled at his sleeves like a sleepy and nervous infant.
"Who's that?" the Griz asked. His eyes were placid and afraid. Tarin thought he might run and hide under the covers.
"We're the Fuchs twins," the boy said. "Todd's kids? We just spoke with you."
"Thimbo," the Griz said. He put a palm to his forehead and winced for memory. "And Colorado."
The twins came in. They shook Griz's hand for what Tarin supposed was the second time.
"We were just catching up with Tarin," Thimbo said. "She arrived just as we were leaving."
"Leaving? I thought I told you to stay." The Griz took his pills in quick succession and downed the glass of cranberry juice. The glass rolled about on the burned metal.
"Well, we didn't want to put you out . . ." Thimbo said. Tarin thought she understood. What would happen if her father, a man of incredible size and strength who had suffered from cranial trauma, woke to two strangers in his front room?
The Griz decided that they'd be staying the evening. Tarin nodded. She grabbed a pizza box and filled it with empty rye bottles and crushed beer cans. The kitchen had been dirty, but this trash had not been there when she left for work that morning. Tarin realized that the twins must have already been there a while. She threw it out and fished in the fridge for a few cool cans of beer. The twins took the couch, and her father sat on the stool. Tarin sat cross-legged on the floor. They all sat in silence. To break the ice, Colorado shook a few redbirds into her palm from an orange medical vial and offered them around. Never one to deny himself the healing properties of medication, the Griz raised the platter of his hand up to Colorado's face. She tilted some pills out. Nearly panting, the Griz put them in his gullet with the beer.
The effects set in quickly. The tension relaxed in the Griz's brow. His breath evened and slowed. The haze through which he had been searching the room cleared from his eyes. He focused his gaze on each of their faces. Seeing the Griz transform back into her father, Tarin gave him her beer, too. She took one of Colorado's pills and put it in her pocket. Maybe later, if she could get comfortable.
"Shit," the Griz said. "I don't even recognize you two. What are you now? Twenty-two?"
Thimbo looked to Tarin, his face twisted into a worried question. Does he not remember? Thimbo didn't understand her father's dementia. How from one minute to the next he lived two lives. The past was constant with him, but it was also the snare in which his second life, lived in the mutable and flexible now, became trapped, abandoned, left to starve. This second life vanished daily and Tarin went along with it.
"Yeah," Thimbo said. He turned to face the Griz. "Been about thirteen years. We were pulling off I-90 on our way to see Granny. Dad introduced us all."
The Griz shook his head. Toothless gears of thought and memory ground against each other. The friction and the pressure built up behind his eyes and made his neck sweat. There was a time, years ago, when his old buddy Todd had given them some cash on the side of the interstate. Tarin remembered the Griz's embarrassment and the bad spiral that followed it. What she could not place were these twins. Not in that memory, not in that context. No, the twins did not remind her of Todd Fuchs, but of water and trees and colored light, some nameless promise of peace and calm. She could not place the when and the where of that remembrance. It was perplexing. She could see the Griz's brain was working hard at placing them, too. Possibly working wrong. So, of course, Tarin was not surprised when her father avoided her eyes, faked a cough, and lied.
"I was so embarrassed," he said. "To see your dad after all that time, and with you all along with him. Me with my bucket. Shit, I could have died."
"No," Colorado said. Tarin jumped. The willowy girl's voice was cheerful, though unexpectedly low, roiling from deep in her chest. "Dad wouldn't stop talking about you for the rest of the trip. We even went back to see if you wanted to come to dinner, but you weren't there."
"Yeah," the Griz said. "I'm not always there." He laughed and pointed to his head. "You look just like your old man did at your age. A little smaller is all."
"We can get bigger if you like."
They all laughed.
"Look," Thimbo said. "We just pulled in from Everett. We got it in our heads to go camping. We were going to call you, but figured we'd just stop by." He pulled something from his pocket. "Have you seen this?"
In the photograph the Griz and the twins' father, Todd Fuchs, pose in front of a lake. Todd has taken a bite out of a raw trout, and the Griz is pulling the muscle from the leg of a squirrel. They smile in disgust. A cloud of flies swarms the small streams of blood on their chins. To the left, there is a small lean-to made of notched pine boughs, twine and fishing line. Tarin recognized Sheepshead Lake from her earliest years when the Griz had sometimes taken her on fishing trips.
On one such trip, maybe the last one, the summer before he fractured, the Griz had told Tarin all about the races that he used to have with his friend Todd. Todd and the Griz were the only two among their cohort who had gone on to feel the limelight. Somehow, the two of them had been able to beat the mines and the booze and get out of their small corner of the world to achieve an inkling of fame and fortune. Todd as a powerful attorney. The Griz in the NFL. Tarin already knew the story. The Griz kept his Pro Bowl jersey framed and hung next to his College All-American plaques, and his Montana East/West Shrine Game helmet. But this, her father told her, was where it started.
He’d smiled out at the lake back then. "The kid moved like a greased eel."
Tarin could not hide her pride. She stared wide-eyed leaning against her fishing pole thinking that her dad was the coolest. The two had stared at each other for a moment, as was their game. The Griz mussed her hair. He was solemn and brooding at the water's edge, and even back then Tarin could tell he had something on his mind. She had wanted to be included in his story and the places that were most important to him, and so she challenged him to a race, across the lake and back, just like he and Todd used to do.
The Griz tried to stop her, but Tarin believed he was just trying to get an advantage. She twisted free and crashed off the sand into the lake as the Griz hollered something about the water. She had never been in the lake before and the water was warm and a bit greasy. She yelled for her father to catch up, and with a shrug of resignation the Griz followed.
Tarin started out strong, keeping pace with her father until they reached the far shore, but coming back her body tired. She was only eight years old, but somehow it seemed to her then that the water thickened and clung more heavily to her stroke. Her arms and legs stiffened and then cramped. Bile stung her throat when she called out. Going under, she saw the sun all aflutter in netted diamonds on the surface of the water. She kicked but did not move, laughter in her ears. She looked down. The bottom was not far away and there among bottles and logs she saw the hoofprints of a horse.
Her father's body suddenly loomed above her. And this is the clearest part of the memory. He paused. He did not dive immediately down but treaded water and let her sink. For a moment, Tarin thought he'd let her. She thrashed wildly toward the surface, and the movement caught his attention. Down he dove to her.
The Griz dragged her onto shore and worked the cramped knots out of her legs with his massive paws. Wrapped in a blanket, she recovered while the Griz fished. He told her not to sweat it. His friend Todd was the only one that could ever beat him. He told her that someday she would make it back on her own. He couldn't look at her. Tarin felt his shame.
Tarin cracked a knuckle. Time had slipped away from her in some regard, almost as if her body were a room that she'd left and then returned to. A conversation was carrying on without her.
"It's just a tiny little horse in the water," the Griz said.
Tarin thought she must have misheard. Had she been talking out loud?
"What is?" Tarin asked.
"What's what?" Thimbo asked.
"A tiny little horse in the water."
"Hope."
"How?"
"It looks funny but swims just fine."
The twins nodded. Her dad punched his hand for emphasis and patted Tarin's back. Tarin flinched with the smack. The Griz rubbed her shoulder. "Sorry."
The memory of the lake had left her dizzy, short of breath, a little lost. Her father grinned, spools of phlegm uncoiling in his beard. The twins looked excited, too.
"So, I was saying to the twins that we need to do a little moonlight fishing," the Griz said. "Up at Sheepshead. They came all this way."
Tarin dismissed the idea. She searched the Griz's eyes like a physician, looking through them for reason. The fog had returned. He had drifted back into some other time that had set him sparking. Short bursts of light smoked quickly out.
"These are Todd's children, remember?" she asked. She knew the Griz would put her in danger, but she hoped he'd think twice about endangering the children of his friend.
"I know it," Griz said. "I just said that. I said that to Thimbo there as soon as I saw him. Ask him. I told him they couldn't be anybody else's kids but Todd's own." The Griz put his heavy hand on Thimbo's shoulder. "It's great to see you. Me and your old man go way back." The Griz paused to reconsider the two beings in his front room. "Anyway, I think we got some poles in the shed. Tarin, why don't you see what you can find."
"All right," Thimbo said. "This is all right. But are you sure? It's pretty late."
"Sure, I'm sure," the Griz said. "Nothing like night fishing. Got whiskey?"
"No," Thimbo said. "We don't have that."
"Tarin, get us a bottle," Griz said. "And get them poles."
"Dad," Tarin said. "It's after midnight."
"Can't night fish less it's night," the Griz said. He turned to the twins for back up.
"Yeah," Colorado said. "He wants to go. We want to go. It sounds fun."
"It does sound fun," Thimbo joined in. "Go up to the derby. First one across."
Thimbo's eyes creased when he said this and Colorado and the Griz looked to the ground.
"What did you say?" Tarin asked.
"First one across and back," the Griz said. "Yeah. Let's go. Todd'll be there."
"Why?"
"To go fishing."
None of it made any sense. The Griz was slipping. Muddling things together. He was peeking into old memories and dragging them to the surface in a confused tangle, and the twins were egging him on.
"Dad," Tarin said. "No. Not tonight. It's late. It's below forty. If you want to go, let's go in the morning. It's freezing."
Griz's fist landed heavily against the wall, cracking the aged drywall. A nail came loose above the door and the molding sprung free. Bits of paint and cobweb flecked the ground. Tarin, welling with fear, disappointment, frustration, went to the kitchen automatically. She opened the cupboard and took one of the bottles of rye down. She twisted the cap off and took a slug. It was no longer worth arguing. Arguing when her father got single-minded about something was like trying to stop a rolling train car. If she got in its way she'd get dragged.
A rime of frost curved along the bottom of the kitchen window and the orange light blushed under night clouds. All things took shape in the color of streetlight. It was the only certain thing. She shuddered from the cold and from the liquor. She needed to light the pilot light in the furnace. The space heater was low on propane. None if it mattered to anyone but her. She gagged, swallowed down a thick flood of saliva. They were going fishing. They'd need coats.
Tarin handed the bottle over to her dad and went to the closet. The Griz told the twins to take a knee.
"We're all ready?" Tarin asked.
"Born ready," Griz said.
"Born ready," the twins said together. They were having a lot of fun.
The Griz strolled out the door. The crisp hours echoed every wheeze of the boards that had slowly turned into a ramp under years of his weight. He slapped the fender of Tarin's Dodge Dynasty, and the reverb blasted across acres of runnelled mine waste like an emptied barrel of shot.
"We all going to fit in this thing?" the Griz asked.
They managed. Tarin turned the ignition.
Chewed by winter, the shifting roads had the tires biting into the passenger side wheel-well. The twins rolled down the windows and stuck the ends of the fishing poles out. The bobbers and lures dangled from the last eyelets on the poles and pirouetted in the wind. The Dynasty rode low, lower than the vapor smoking off the tailings ponds that snagged on the rusted fence nails. Tarin hoped for a flat. Out in the wastes, shadows in the shacks slowly fell into the mineshafts that yawned open behind them. Broken glass flared and burst anew across the pavement. In the gutters, small frozen stones pocked the arsenic silt. Tarin slapped her face. It stung. The night was bone on bone like any other.
Twenty miles up the road Tarin geared down where Homestake Pass steepened into its famous curves. The apocalyptic shoulder was littered with the carcasses of dogs and elk and deer, the fenders of small cars, trailer axles, ripped tires at the end of thick skid marks, and guardrails rent and twisted away by jackknifed, Jake-braked eighteen-wheelers. Every ten yards or so, small white memorial crosses clustered on iron poles. The Griz's huge hands lay flat on the dash, anticipating their exit at the crest of the ridge. He pointed toward the off-ramp that led to Sheepshead Lake.
The headlights lit up the ditches on the far side of the overpass. Tarin squinted at the glare coming off the frost on the frozen asphalt. Button knobs of boulders cast weird shadows on the freight traffic hustling by in either direction, the trucks' loads feathered with road salt and mud and crusted snow from somewhere further west. Up high, though, the orange clouds had thinned to wisps, and the cold blue night furred the edges of the stars and wilted the moon. The storm was behind them now, bogged down in the valley and too heavy to make a run over the Divide.
Her car bounced down the dirt road into the scraggle pine where the tires pulverized the duff branches and dried needles strewn on the road. So many had fallen from the trees that the road rolled out before them like a dimpled red carpet that rattled the fishing poles hanging out of the windows and pelted the oil pan with shell casings and small ridges of dirt that had been scraped up by the plow grate. They went slowly, passing reflectors and tamped grass where ATVs had veered into the brush. A set of eyes gleamed in the headlights. Tarin searched for the brake to let the deer pass, but before she could, the Griz reached across the cab and turned the wheel, pointing the car off the side of the road. Tarin expected to hit something, but the Griz had turned them down a hidden lane where two ancient ruts had been overwhelmed in scrubgrass.
"Stop," the Griz said. He drummed the dash. His toes tapped the floorboard.
Tarin stopped and they all got out of the car and followed the Griz down a slight hill. At the bottom, in a dry spring, lay a large, flat stone. The Griz toed the stone, got a grip under it and flipped it over. Beneath it lay a corroded spike of rebar that had been notched crudely along one side. The Griz pulled up the spike and jammed one end into the ground. He found a round stone, ran it up and down the spike's serrated edge, ratcheting a muted click into the earth.
Tarin gritted her teeth and turned away from the irritating thrum. She ran her hands over her coat sleeves for warmth. She puffed a bright and gauzy breath over the moon. Clear-cut patches of forest surrounded them, and in those clearings the symmetry of the fallen trees and their moonshadows shaped and reshaped like dark clouds. A root system was a spider, and there, a huge pine shifted into a longhaired woman. A fish. A goat. The transformation quickened, and the silhouettes seemed to flicker and dance until they became a strange, black flame. Tarin blinked. She was tired. She turned back to the Griz. Around the stick, sluggish, freezing earthworms pulsed out of the soil.
"Get the big ones," the Griz said. He pointed to the twins. "Put them in your pockets."
Going over the pass, another round of Colorado's pills had crushed in the guts of the twins, and weird from the effects, they had not spoken for a while. But they moved at the Griz's command, shuffled around, and stooped low to the ground to run their fingers across the flailing nightcrawlers before filling their pockets with the largest of them. When they had gathered enough, the Griz put the stone back over his grunting stick.
“What'd you get? Some fatties?" the Griz asked. He buttoned his coat to his neck and slapped his hands together. "Hope that lake isn't froze up."
Not far from the car, the steely surface of the lake shimmered in the gaps between the trees. Squirrels or rabbits or nide of pheasant, something middling and fearful, crashed through the brace on Tarin's left. Something larger surged into the water and the ripples tossed around the moonlight on the lake's surface. The lake hadn't frozen. The quiet came, then their breath in it. The Griz led them through snags and stones. The twins lagged back to keep from jabbing the fishing poles into each other's backs. Tarin clung to the sleeve of her dad's jacket and tried not to breathe so loudly. She felt her breath, the blood moving through her veins. The Griz's blood pulsed in the arm she clung to, and for that moment Tarin was glad that they'd come. It had been too long since they'd been out of the house together, embarked on some ill-advised adventure. The trip would be worth it just to have walked arm-in-arm with her father through the forest again.
The Griz led them to the lake, then along the shoreline. Between two boulders, a small clearing opened. There was a campsite and a beach of small stones. A solid fire pit had been built of splintered shale and sat banked against the larger of the boulders. A tall char stain crept up from the pit and over the top of the stone. Near the pit, the weathered lean-to from the twins' photo sat broken and leaning, bruised by time and weighed down by years of duff and heavy snowfall. Tarin went inside and kicked around. A bed of punk and deadfall was made up on the floor and a rusted knife blade sat next to the woodland mattress in a neat pile of fish spines. Tarin put the knife in her pocket.
"There," the Griz said. He swept his arm in front of them. "We're out there."
"No, dad," Tarin said. "We're here." Her habit of correcting him had become impulsive. She kicked over the pile of fish bones.
"You all going to fish?" the Griz asked.
"Sure," Colorado said.
The twins produced the offerings from their pockets. Of the worms laid bare in their palms, they thread the fatter into writhing knots of bait on the prongs of their lures.
"Big bait catches big fish," Thimbo said.
The twins cast together. Six separate spheres, two for the sinkers, two for the bobbers, and two for the bait, rippled the surface of the lake. The twins reeled a bit to tighten the lines. Thimbo pounded two Y-shaped sticks into the bank and rested their poles in the saddles.
"Now we wait," Thimbo said. "And while we wait—" he pulled a lighter from his pant pocket and set it in the fire pit. He stepped through the cleft in the stones and crashed through the near woods on the other side.
"Lures won't do us much good just sitting," the Griz said, but didn't disturb the lines.
Their breath came out thicker and whiter as the temperature dropped, and the Griz lay down on the stones, rocking from side to side until he had made a small furrow where he could watch the tips of the fishing poles. Tarin leaned against the boulders. She'd swallowed her pill and opened the rye. The cold pressed on her. She could feel her body move inside of her clothing. They were two separate things, her clothes and her body inside them. She thought about what moved around in her. About what moved around inside what moved around inside, and where it might end if it ended at all.
Thimbo returned while she was thinking. He sucked his cheeks and rubbed his face and caught his breath.
"Do fish sleep?" Tarin asked.
"They do," Thimbo said. "They're probably asleep right now, actually."
He built his fire into a hardy blaze. The flames grew and Tarin and the twins stood to warm their butts. The Griz rolled nearer and re-entrenched himself in the pebbles and sand with a few wiggles. Colorado dragged a bough toward the fire and began pulling the limbs off. Tarin offered her the rusted knife she had found.
"Thank you," Colorado said. "Would you mind pulling the needles off?"
Tarin twisted the needles off the cut branches and stacked the duff between her sprawled legs. It was easy now, in the firelight, to make out the different colors of the needles. Some were brown, others green, and still others were deep copper. Colorado stripped bark away from the boughs in sticky coils that she wrapped around an end of the stick. The sap collected the needles to her fingertips and turned them into five little nests.
“You guys have been camping before?" Tarin asked.
She tittered. These guys were like Eagle Scouts or something. Watching Colorado weave her torch entranced Tarin, who, finally warm, felt all her tension calve from her shoulders, and avalanche down to the wonderful stones at her feet.
"Got to keep the wrap tight so the torch doesn't come apart once it's burning." Colorado roasted the torch on the coals. The sap cracked and hardened and burned into a small bright flame that flickered off the end of the bough.
The Griz stood to watch the lighting of the torch and hovered behind Colorado, rocking back and forth, impatient but waiting. Colorado turned to him. She handed him the torch, and they walked down to the lake, one side of each of their bodies aglow in the torchlight. At the shoreline, the Griz lifted the torch higher. Through the clear water, a few minnows flicked across the bottom of the lake. Colorado began reeling in the lines to replace the drowned bait but paused when the tip shuttered and then came to life.
"Fish on," the Griz said.
Colorado reeled. The rod bent steeply and she relaxed it, letting the tare crow in the reel. She fought the fish in a steady rhythm and eventually landed it, holding the trout up for everyone to see. It was a good-sized fish, about as long as her forearm. She smiled and snapped its neck. She cleaned it with the rusted knife and strung it up on a stick to cook over the flames.
The Griz, stumbling around on the stones, cast the lines back into the lake. He stuck the torch in a fissure in the rocks and they all waited for the fish to cook. The skin burned and peeled and the fish disappeared down their throats. They were all so hungry. Colorado set the carcass atop the scattered pile of bones in the makeshift shack.
"Well, how about it?" Tarin asked. She roused her chin from her collarbone. Her legs felt like they were made of cotton. Her arms like they had been shot up with Novocain. "I'm having a lot of fun. I am. I'm just so tired."
The twins stopped drawing circles in the beach. The torch had died and the fire had burned down. It was hard to make out their faces.
"Griz," Colorado said. "You want to walk? I want to walk."
The Griz, peaceful and drawing in the sand, only occasionally jerked his head toward the lake, or toward the lean-to, cocking his ear. He put the stick down and stood. It took a while for Colorado to light the torch in the cooling embers but in the end she was successful.
"Where you going?" Tarin asked.
No one answered, and she turned to Thimbo.
"I don't know," Thimbo said.
Tarin's face felt burned and dry from sitting too close to the fire, and now that the fire had died, the skin felt thin and raw. She watched the Griz and Colorado move into the forest, the light from the torch cast over them. When they had gone, she rested her gaze on the stillness of the fishing poles.
"How long has he been like that?" Thimbo asked.
Tarin threw a stone at the water.
"Sixteen years," she said. "Last seven of them real bad."
"Does he get sad?"
"He cries," Tarin said. "But I'm not sure if it's sad that does it. Tonight's as excited as I've seen him get, if that means anything."
Laughter worked through the tree limbs from somewhere down the bank.
"You're lucky," Thimbo said. Tarin couldn't tell if he was being serious.
Thimbo picked up a stick and turned the dead coals. They had passed their last bright energy to Colorado's torch and turned hard. Thimbo prodded them. They clinked and then broke. To the east, the morning threatened. The frost on the boulders softened and beaded and the first bird whistles came through a thick fog that had settled over the lake. The stones and the trees, all that had seemed so close in the dark, receded into the gray gloaming. Tarin stretched and was about to call for her father when Colorado stepped into the clearing from behind the boulders. She rubbed her hands furiously, scattering the last few pine needles stuck to her fingertips. Her hands had turned white from the cold. The Griz was not with her. Tarin waited to hear if he would come up from another angle. When he didn't, Tarin asked where he had gone.
"Oh," Colorado said. She pointed across the water. "He kept on going. I got too cold."
Out, across the water, on the opposite shoreline of the narrow lake, the torch burned, its light jouncing up and down to the Griz's wide step.
"You can't just let him wander alone out there," Tarin said. "What the hell is he doing?"
"He ran off," Colorado said. "Said he saw something."
"Well, you can't just leave him." Tarin stood, alert and furious.
"He wanted to check it out. He's having fun. Leave him be."
The torch moved along the far shore. It dipped and surged. It seemed that the light bearer danced among the trees. Then the light hopped once, very high into the branches, and disappeared.
"Where'd he go?" Tarin asked. She stood. She willed the fog to part.
"I love this time of morning," Colorado said. "When everything gets murky."
"Did you see where he went down?" Tarin got to her feet. "Where was he headed?"
"The fish'll start biting." Colorado rubbed her eyes and thumbed the tip of the rusted knife. A tendril of the fish's guts had frozen to the blade. "You wait."
Tarin stepped away from her. Freezing water suddenly filled her shoes and made her ankles ache. Her breath stuck in her hair.
Colorado's thumb bled on the knife-edge. Her shoulders were slumped. She seemed so tired and was soaked through from her walk in the bramble. Strangely, compelled by the same withered expression Tarin had witnessed under the streetlights, she wanted only to touch Colorado's shoulder, to comfort her, to turn her away from the lake forever and have Thimbo build another fire. Colorado raised her hand, and like a chorus striking up at the wand of the composer, the tips of the fishing poles bent and the reels sang. Tarin and the twins' heads jerked toward the water. Out in the fog, the torchlight had returned and flared, a rising sun. The fog thinned. The Griz wailed across the water. Tarin shouted for her dad. Her head swam. The twins took up their poles, secured their lines and reeled furiously. The sun slowly rose. Tarin yelled again, but her voice, suffocated by the damp and the cold, stopped just in front of her mouth.
"He's not going to hear you," Colorado said. She leaned back against the tension in the pole. Its tip rainbowed, and she anchored her foot against a tree to haul the weight and counter her balance when she let the line relax.
"Keep reeling," Thimbo said.
"Why won't he?" Tarin asked. "Why won't he hear me?" Her breath came shorter and shorter. On the far bank, the light went out in a crash of water.
"Keep reeling," Thimbo said. "Here we go."
"What? Is he drowning out there?" Tarin asked.
"Sounded like he went in," Colorado said.
"Quit talking," Thimbo said. "Reel."
The line slackened on Thimbo's pole. Worry slackened his face. A tremor rattled through him. Defeat. Longing. Fear. They all danced in the creases that had appeared on his face, and Tarin suddenly thought him ancient, weathered like the bark of a downed tree, but then the line went tight again, winnowing down into the water. Through the murk, the twins pulled up something heavy, white and smooth for the most part, but furred in patches with lank, black hair. The twins crashed into the shallows to secure it and then pulled it on shore. Confused, Tarin thought the twins had landed an aspen log with long moss clinging to its bark, but the catch began to writhe.
"Here we go," Thimbo said. He kneeled and with tight jabs from his closed, biting fists, the strange form wriggled before it stood and stamped at the shoreline and shook out its mane.
"Oh, God," Tarin said. "It's terrible."
Another splash rippled out in the water. Tarin remembered the sounds of drowning. She tasted bile. Moving too instinctively to be afraid, she dove headlong for the water after her father and away from the nightmare foal and its keepers. The coldness of the water stole Tarin's breath, but it cleared her head. She knew that the lake was only so wide. Her shoes came off with two strong kicks, and she tread water every fifth stroke to listen. The foal on shore whinnied to the delight of the twins. Then Tarin's jaw quaked. Her father had come out of the forest to rejoin the twins. He wore a crown of branches. She heard him laugh. He sounded young. He sounded alive. Tarin took three strokes toward the opposite bank wondering what thing her father had traded, and to whom? When? But as the water began to thicken, she knew. Once, she'd been told that she would make it back on her own. She started swimming.