David Brendan Hopes - The Falls of the Wyona

a novel

DAVID BRENDAN HOPES

Red Hen Press | Pasadena, CA

The Falls of the Wyona

Copyright 2019 by David Brendan Hopes

All Rights Reserved

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of both the publisher and the copyright owner.

Book layout by Mark E. Cull

ISBN-13: 9781597098939

The National Endowment for the Arts, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, the Ahmanson Foundation, the Dwight Stuart Youth Fund, the Max Factor Family Foundation, the Pasadena Tournament of Roses Foundation, the Pasadena Arts & Culture Commission and the City of Pasadena Cultural Affairs Division, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the Audrey & Sydney Irmas Charitable Foundation, the Kinder Morgan Foundation, the Meta & George Rosenberg Foundation, the Allergan Foundation, and the Riordan Foundation partially support Red Hen Press.

First Edition

Published by Red Hen Press

www.redhen.org

For
Ruth and Harris Summers

______________

R ain came quick and sharp. It dimpled the river and made it flash where it had been the flat gray color of the clouds. You had to stop and think what it reminded you of. Then the rain stopped and the clouds broke and everything above the river stood mirrored in perfect detail in the rivers face. Except there, right where we were. Water dripped from a branch high above us, and when the drops hit the pool river, the picture scattered and blurred. When the pool calmed, you could see our two shapes, my round buzzed head, his long movie-star hair lifting and settling back in the breeze. We were standing the same way and looking in the same place. You look in the shadows to get past the glare on the water to see fish and crayfish and the like, but I wasnt looking at that. I was looking at him. Id just used the phrase best friend a moment before in my heart, though I was afraid to say it out loud. Vince was funny about things sometimes. There were so many ways he could take it wrong.

Forty feet farther down, the river spread out into a fan. Then it disappeared. You know it was going over the falls, the brown Wyona flashing suddenly white and gold in its hundred foot drop to the white stones, but it sure looked like it just disappeared. The rising cloud of mist is the Wyona saying goodbye. We were wary of going too much closer. Rumor suggested eddies and undertows that would shoot you over the falls as soon as look at you. Plenty of kids had vanished that way. People in town kept lists, and though the lists differed from one another, their cautionary effect was undeniable. The Falls claims one each generation, people said. People say a lot of things.

Tildens uncle was one the Falls claimed. If you go into their house theres a picture of Tildens unclehis moms brother or somethingwith dry yellow willow twisted around the picture frame. He looks like every other kid in the world, though with the funny clothes they had back then. I thought it was odd for him to be dead and all of us alive.

Tilden thrashed around over in the weeds pursuing something. A little nervous close to the brink, he did his fishing from the shore, poking through the arrowhead and cattails for anything that moved. Hed learned to cuss in an abstract, uncommitted way, so we heard him over there saying, in a normal tone of voice, almost politely, bastard and son of a bitch when something eluded his grasp. It was froggy in the pools for being so high up and so close to the falls. I guess the frogs came down from the hills, like the river did, except they knew when to stop.

Vince kept standing up and looking over his shoulder into the woods.

I knew what Vince would do. I knew how he would do it. We were one person, sometimes. There were photos of us playing under the sweet gum in Grandpas yard, the two of us in diapers and the leaves of the sweet gum like stars behind our heads. I must have known Mom and Dad and Grandpa and all them first, but I dont remember anyone before Vince. Dark hair. Dark eyes, dark soul. Different from me. They put us together so we could have a friend from the first, and it worked.

Now he was looking over his shoulder in that way he had.

Hell come, I said, though I wasnt sure whether hed come or not. We were waiting for Glen. I wasnt sure whether I wanted Glen to come or not.

Two big hawks kept house in a pine overhanging the river then. The lady was out hunting. The gentleman stood at the edge of their nest screaming at us not to come any closer. We had no intention of coming closer.

I kept wondering if I would remember that moment, or any like it. Speaking of it now, forty years later, answers the question.

Vince took to Glen the minute he moved to town from St. Louis. I didnt have time for him. He was citified or sissified or something I couldnt put my finger on. A boy with a comb in his pocket, and with the willingness to use it in public, was an oddity in our neck of the woods. Glen would have had a bad first day at school, except Vince left the gaggle of boys he was the center of and walked to where the new kid was standing alone on the playground. This was not the usual way Vince worked. He liked being the center. He liked mocking those who werent at the center. In being peripheral, they were culpable of something, even if it was hard to say what. This time, it was different. I examined Glen to discover why the different treatment, but I couldnt see it. Glen was as different from Tilden and me as a kid could get, so maybe Vince wanted to fill in whatever it was he missed in us. It was hard showing up in the middle of the school year, but that wasnt our fault. Snow peppered the ground and everyone had to wear the stupid hats theyd gotten for Christmas. Vince walked over in his stupid hat and stood by Glen in his stupid hat, and pretty soon all of us in our stupid hats toddled over to bask in Vinces radiance. Glens presence there was incidental to everyone but Vince. He was in, Glen was, by accident of proximity.

Glen became one of us. That was OK, because most of the town gangs had at least four and there were things we couldnt accomplish with just the three of us that had been. I liked Glen before long. He was smart, and certain things you could talk about with him that you couldnt with others. You could hear longhair music from the station in Charlottesville sometimes, and he could tell you what it was and why it sounded like that. Tilden liked everybody, or didnt mention it if he didnt, so that was not a problem.

Vince brought Tilden into my life. It was winter, and Id been scolded for somethingI couldnt have learned much of a lesson if I didnt even remember what it wasand Id been staring out the window for a while feeling sorry for myself. Hearing my big brother two rooms away talking in that mans voice he always had didnt help. I would never grow up. I would never be like Andy, never be the boy my parents apparently wanted me to be. They always said, Be yourself, but that was clearly not what they actually wanted. I stared into the darkening gray light. After a while I saw shapes materialize far down the street, where it curved away into a sweep of familiar hills. They were the same hills Id always known, but in my misery they might have been the Caucasus. The two moving shapes seemed small in the vastness of the coming storm. They made me think of the Magi on the Christmas cards, processing through the moonlit wilderness, from where one knew not, toward what one could only suppose. They moved slowly, steadily, getting bigger as they came. When they moved close enough, I saw two boys, one in a snowsuit, one in a heavy green army jacket with a floppy hat pulled tight over his ears. As their feet touched the edge of our drive, snow began to descend, carefully and beautifully, everywhere. I waved. They waited while I got my snowsuit and boots on. Of course they were Vince and Tilden. They must have walked a long, long way. They had pulled on their snow suits and ugly caps to come to me in the teeth of the blizzard.