complexion somewhat dusky even though the sun has rarely touched me.
Orson snorted, and I didn’t need to understand the language of dogs to
interpret his precise meaning. The pooch was telling me that he was
insulted by my suggestion that he could be so easily spooked.
Indeed, Orson is even more courageous than most of his kind.
During the more than two and a half years that I’ve known him, from
puppyhood to the present, I have seen him frightened of only one thing,
monkeys.
“Monkeys? ” I asked.
He chuffed, which I interpreted as no.
Not monkeys this time.
Not yet.
Orson trotted to a wide concrete access ramp that descended along the
levee wall to the Santa Rosita. In June and July, dump trucks and
excavators would use this route when maintenance crews removed a year’s
worth of accumulated sediment and debris from below, restoring a flood
preventing depth to the dry watercourse before the next rainy season.
I followed the dog down to the riverbed. On the darkly mottled concrete
slope, his black form was no more substantial than a shadow.
On the faintly luminous silt, however, he appeared to be stone solid
even as he drifted eastward like a homeward-bound spirit crossing a
waterless Styx.
Because the most recent rainfall had occurred three weeks in the past,
the floor of the channel wasn’t damp. It was still well compacted,
however, and I was able to ride the bicycle without struggle.
At least as far as the pearly moonlight revealed, the bike tires made
few discernible marks in the hard-packed silt, but a heavier vehicle had
passed this way earlier, leaving clear tracks. Judging by the width and
depth of the tread impressions, the tires were those of a van, a light
truck, or a sports utility vehicle.
Flanked by twenty-foot-high concrete ramparts, I had no view of any of
the town immediately around us. I could see only the faint angular lines
of the houses on higher hills, huddled under trees or partially revealed
by streetlamps. As we ascended the watercourse, the townscape ahead also
fell away from sight beyond the levees, as though the night were a
powerful solvent in which all the structures and citizens of Moonlight
Bay were dissolving.
At irregular intervals, drainage culverts yawned in the levee walls,
some only two or three feet in diameter, a few so large that a truck
could have been driven into them. The tire tracks led past all those
tributaries and continued up the riverbed, as straight as typed
sentences on a sheet of paper, except where they curved around a
punctuation of driftwood.
Although Orson’s attention remained focused ahead, I regarded the
culverts with suspicion. During a cloudburst, torrents gushed out of
them, carried from the streets and from the natural drainage swales high
in the grassy eastern hills above town. Now, in fair weather, these
storm drains were the subterranean lanes of a secret world, in which one
might encounter exceptionally strange travelers. I half expected someone
to rush at me from one of them.
I admit to having an imagination feverish enough to melt good judgment.
Occasionally it has gotten me into trouble, but more than once it has
saved my life.
Besides, having roamed all the storm drains large enough to accommodate
a man my size, I’ve encountered a few peculiar tableaux. Oddities and
enigmas. Sights to wring fright from even the driest rag of imagination.
Because the sun rises inevitably every day, my night life must be
conducted within the town limits, to ensure that I’m always close to the
safely darkened rooms of my house when dawn draws near.
Considering that our community has a population of twelve thousand and a
student population, at Ashdon College, of an additional three thousand,
it offers a reasonably large board for a game of life, it can’t fairly
be called a jerkwater burg. Nevertheless, by the time I was sixteen, I
knew every inch of Moonlight Bay better than I knew the territory inside
my own head. Consequently, to fend off boredom, I am always seeking new
perspectives on the slice of the world to which XP confines me, for a
while I was intrigued by the view from below, touring the storm drains