mail.
Nevertheless, until the postman comes, be happy. There is no other
rational response but happiness. Despair is a foolish squandering of
precious time.
Now, here, on this cool spring night, past the witching hour but with
dawn still far away, chasing my sherlock hound, believing in the miracle
of Jimmy Wing’s survival, I cycled along empty alleys and deserted
avenues, through a park where Orson did not pause to sniff a single
tree, past the high school, onto lower streets. He led me eventually to
the Santa Rosita River, which bisects our town from the heights to the
bay.
In this part of California, where annual rainfall averages a mere
fourteen inches, rivers and streams are parched most of the year. The
recent rainy season had been no wetter than usual, and this riverbed was
entirely exposed, a broad expanse of powdery silt, pale and slightly
lustrous in the lunar light. It was as smooth as a bedsheet except for
scattered knots of dark driftwood like sleeping homeless men whose limbs
were twisted by nightmares.
In fact, though it was sixty to seventy feet wide, the Santa Rosita
looked less like a real river than like a man-made drainage channel or
canal. As part of an elaborate federal project to control the flash
floods that could swell suddenly out of the steep hills and narrow
canyons at the back door of Moonlight Bay, these riverbanks had been
raised and stabilized with wide concrete levees from one end of town to
the other.
Orson trotted off the street, across a barren strip of land, to the
levee.
Following him, I coasted between two signs, sets of which alternated
with each other for the entire length of the watercourse. The first
declared that public access to the river was restricted and that
anti-trespassing ordinances would be enforced. The second, directed at
those lawless citizens who were undeterred by the first sign, warned
that high water at a storm’s peak could be so powerful and fast-moving
that it would overwhelm anyone who dared to venture into it.
In spite of all the warnings, in spite of the obvious turbulence of the
treacherous currents and the well-known tragic history of the Santa
Rosita, a thrill seeker with a homemade raft or a kayak or even just a
pair of water wings is swept to his death every few years. In a single
winter, not long ago, three drowned.
Human beings can always be relied upon to assert, with vigor, their
God-given right to be stupid.
Orson stood on the levee, burly head raised, gazing east toward the
Pacific Coast Highway and the serried hills beyond. He was stiff with
tension, and a thin whine escaped him.
This night, neither water nor anything else moved along the moonlit
channel. Not enough of a breeze slipped off the Pacific even to stir a
dust ghost from the silt.
I checked the radiant dial of my wristwatch. Worried that every minute
might be Jimmy Wing’s last if, indeed, he was still alive i nudged
Orson, “What is it? ” He didn’t acknowledge my question. Instead, he
pricked his ears, sniffed the becalmed night almost daintily, and seemed
to be transfixed by emanations of one kind or another from some quarry
farther up the arid river.
As usual, I was uncannily attuned to Orson’s mood. Although I possessed
only an ordinary nose and mere human senses but, to be fair to myself, a
superior wardrobe and bank account i could almost detect those same
emanations.
Orson and I are closer than dog and man. I am not his master. I am his
friend, his brother.
When I said earlier that I am brother to the owl, to the bat, and to the
badger, I was speaking figuratively. When I say I’m the brother of this
dog, however, I mean to be taken more literally.
Studying the riverbed as it climbed and dwindled into the hills, I
asked, “Something spooking you? ” Orson glanced up. In his ebony eyes
floated twin reflections of the moon, which at first I mistook for me,
but my face is neither that round nor that mysterious.
Nor that pale. I am not an albino. My skin is pigmented, and my