Part 6
“It’s shallow,” Dana said. “I can make that.”
“Stop the car.”
She didn’t stop. She didn’t speed up either. Her foot hovered over the pedal and the hatchback rolled forward at walking pace, the headlights on the water.
“Dad, it’s six inches. I’ve driven through worse in the clinic parking lot.”
“That’s not the water you have to worry about.” Walt’s voice came out level, the way it did when a drill rod started to bind. “The culvert’s plugged. Look how it’s coming over the top instead of through. All that fill is soaking. It looks like a road, but it’s a dam made of gravel, and it’s about to quit.”
Dana’s hands tightened on the wheel. In the back seat Mateo had stopped singing.
“If it goes while we’re on it,” Walt said, “we go with it. Turn it off, Dana.”
She looked at him. He watched her decide whether to trust an old man’s reading of a pile of gravel in the dark against everything she could see with her own eyes. It took about two seconds, and it seemed longer than the whole drive down.
She turned the key.
The silence afterward was enormous. Without the engine they could hear the water, a hiss and grind across the road ahead. Under it, from somewhere far up the gulch, came another sound, too low to name.
“Where?” Dana said.
Walt pointed out the side window. Two hundred yards west, the old railroad grade ran along the riverbank, a long embankment fifteen or twenty feet high built from mine waste a century ago and topped now with snow. It ran straight downstream past the culvert and all the way to the bridge.
“The ore spur. It’s the highest thing on the flat. We walk it to the bridge.”
“With the kids? In this?”
“Yes.”
Tess was already unbuckling. She didn’t ask anything. She zipped Lucia into her coat against her chest, pulled the hood over both their heads, and handed Mateo out to Dana. “He’s heavy,” she said. “He’ll tell you he can walk. Don’t let him.”
“I can walk,” Mateo said.
“I know you can,” Dana said, and lifted him onto her hip.
Walt took the flashlight and went first. The snow on the flat was knee-deep and crusted, and every step broke through. He could hear Dana behind him breathing hard with the boy and Tess behind her, murmuring to the baby. He kept the light on the embankment ahead and didn’t let himself look back at the gulch.
The sound grew. At first it was like wind in the tops of the lodgepoles, though nothing was moving. Then it became a grinding, endless and low, like a gravel truck dumping a load that never ran out.
“Dad.”
“Keep walking.”
At the foot of the embankment, the snow had drifted against the slope, soft and deep. Walt went up first to kick steps, and on the third one his right hip gave out the way it had by the woodpile last February. He felt the joint shift, and his leg folded, and he slid back down on his side into the drift.
He still had the flashlight. He jammed it butt-first into the drift beside him and aimed it up the slope, along the steps he’d kicked, so that the light lay on each one like a rung.
“Go,” he said. “Follow the light. Go up.”
Tess went up past him on her hands and one knee, the baby held tight, setting her boots in his steps. Dana went past with Mateo and set him on top of the embankment beside his mother.
“Hold him,” she said. “Don’t let him come down.”
Then she came back down for her father.
“Dana, go up.”
“Shut up, Dad.” She got her arms under his, the way she must have lifted a hundred people off a hundred floors. “Good leg. Push with the good leg when I pull. On three. One—”
He pushed on two. She pulled anyway. They went up the slope together, a foot, then another. His hip ground like a bearing run dry. Her boots slid and caught. Above them Tess had wedged Mateo behind her and was reaching down with her free hand, and Walt grabbed it, and the three of them dragged him over the lip onto the flat top of the grade.
He rolled onto his back in the snow and looked up the gulch, and he saw it come.
At first it didn’t look like water. It looked like the mouth of the gulch moving. A dark wall came down out of the trees and spread onto the flat, shoving a ridge of broken ice ahead of it, along with whole lodgepoles tumbling over and over and slabs of snow and mud the color of rust. It came on slower than he’d imagined, and heavier, like something too big to hurry.
It hit the Haugen place first. The Christmas lights along the porch blinked red, green, red, then went out from one end to the other. The water climbed the porch, the windows, the white siding. Mateo saw it and said, very clearly, “Our lights,” and Tess put her hand over his eyes.
Then it reached the fill. For a second the road held. Then the whole middle of it slumped and opened, and the culvert went somewhere under the dark water, and Dana’s hatchback, its dome light still glowing, tipped forward and rolled slowly onto its side. It slid off into the current and was gone. Down at the foot of the grade, the flashlight’s beam swung once across the snow and went dark.
The embankment trembled under them. Snow sifted off its edges. The water piled against its foot and climbed four feet, then six, then stopped two yards below where they lay, grinding along the old grade toward the river.
Nobody spoke for a long time.
Out on the highway, red and blue lights came over the rise toward the bridge and stopped. A minute later a second set of headlights pulled in behind them, a pickup, and someone got out and started running along the shoulder, shouting a name over and over across the dark.
Tess stood up with the baby in her coat. “Marco,” she said, then louder. “Marco! We’re here!”
Dana sat down hard in the snow beside her father. She was shaking, and he understood it wasn’t from cold. She reached for his wrist without asking.
He let her. He lay still and watched her count, her lips moving.
“You stopped the car,” he said.
“You told me to.”
“I didn’t think you’d listen.”
She kept her fingers on his pulse. “I didn’t think you’d ask.”
He looked past her, up the gulch. Somewhere in all that dark were the house, the knoll, and an old mare he had turned loose…
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