Prophet of Bones (3 page)

Paul shrugged. “If I can think of something,” he said. He knew instantly that his mice were the answer, though he wasn’t sure how exactly.

It wasn’t enough to just have them, to observe them, to run the Punnett squares. He’d need to do real science. He’d need to do something new. And because real scientists used microscopes and electronic scales, Paul asked for these things for Christmas. His parents were pleased with his sudden analytical interest and bought him what he asked for.

But mice, Paul quickly discovered, did not readily yield themselves to microscopy. They tended to climb down from the stand.

The electronic scale, however, proved useful. Paul weighed every mouse and kept meticulous records. He considered developing his own inbred strain—a line with some combination of distinctive characteristics—but he wasn’t sure what characteristics to look for. He imagined that his special new strain would be useful to science someday, a genetic model destined to play a role in some far-future discovery, but he didn’t know where to start.

He imagined winning the science fair. He imagined his father proud of him, clapping him on the shoulder with his big hand.

Paul was going over his notebook when he saw it. January-17. Not a date but a mouse, January-17. The seventeenth mouse born in January.

He went to the cage and opened the door. A flash of sandy fur, and he snatched it up by its tail—a brindle specimen with large ears. Over the previous several months he’d become good at handling the mice. It was a knack you picked up without realizing it—the ability to hold the mice softly, so that you didn’t hurt them, and yet firmly, so they couldn’t get away. This mouse was not particularly fast or hard to catch. There was nothing obviously special about it. It was rendered different from the other mice only by the mark in his notebook. Paul looked at the mark, looked at the number he’d written there.

Of the more than ninety mice in his notebook, January-17 was, by two full grams, the largest mouse he’d ever weighed.

*   *   *

In school they taught him that through science you could decipher the truest meaning of God’s word. God wrote the language of life in four letters: A, T, C, and G. A family of proteins called AAA
+
initiated DNA replication, genetic structures conserved across all forms of life, from men to archaebacteria—the very calling card of the great designer.

That’s not why Paul did it, though: to get closer to God. He did it because he was curious.

It was late winter before his father asked him what he spent all his time doing in the attic.

“Just messing around,” Paul answered.

They were in his father’s car, on the way home from piano lessons. “Your mother said you built something up there.”

Paul fought back a surge of panic. The lie came quickly, unbidden. “I built a fort a while ago.”

Paul’s father glanced down at him. “What kind of fort?”

“Just a few pieces of plywood and a couple blankets. Just a little fort.”

“You’re almost twelve now. Aren’t you getting a little old for forts?”

“Yeah, I guess I am.”

“I don’t want you spending all your time up there.”

“All right.”

“I don’t want your grades slipping.”

“All right.”

“Your grades are what you should be focusing on right now, not screwing around with kids’ games in an attic.”

Paul, who hadn’t gotten a B in two years, said, a third time, “All right.”

The car slowed to a stop at a red light. “Oh,” Paul’s father added, almost as an afterthought. “There’s something else. I don’t want you hanging out with that girl from up the street.”

“What?” Paul said. “Who?”

“The Nearhaven girl.”

Paul blinked. He hadn’t realized his father knew.

His father added, “You’re getting too old for that, too.”

The light turned green.

They rode the rest of the way in silence, and Paul explored the walls of his newly shaped reality. Because he knew foreshocks when he felt them.

He watched his father’s hands on the steering wheel.

Though large for his age, like his father, Paul’s features favored his Asian mother; he sometimes wondered if that was part of it, this thing between his father and him, this gulf he could not cross. Would his father have treated a freckled, blond son any differently? No, he decided. His father would have been the same. The same force of nature; the same cataclysm. He couldn’t help being what he was.

Paul watched his father’s hand on the steering wheel, and years later, when he thought of his father, even after everything that happened, that’s how he thought of him. That moment frozen. Driving in the car, big hands on the steering wheel, a quiet moment of foreboding that wasn’t false but was merely what it was, the best it would ever be between them.

4

Winter stayed late that year in the land of marshes and highways. A mid-March storm came howling down across Lake Michigan, laying waste to an early spring thaw. Murdered stalks of corn jutted from the snow, turning roadside farms into fields of brown stubble.

On most days, Paul lingered inside after school. But on some afternoons when his father wasn’t around, Rebecca would meet him, and on those days the two of them ventured into the woods. They explored the frozen marshes that sprawled behind the back fence of the subdivision—a wild place beyond the reach of roads and sidewalks and parents.

Instead there were cattails, and sway-grass, and old-growth oaks. Dark water hidden under whole plains of snow. And the marshes extended for miles.

On that cold Saturday afternoon, Paul and Rebecca walked the trail down to the river. The morning had dawned cold and windy—northern gusts raking through the trees, a twenty-degree temperature drop from the day before. Their breath made smoke on the frigid air. They didn’t speak as they walked; it was too cold to speak. They rounded a final bend in the trail, and the river lay before them: the Little Cal—a blank white ribbon that cut a swath through the heart of the wetland snowscape. Stubborn patches of dogwood and black oak clung to the riverside floodplain. In the spring, Paul knew, whole acres of lowland marsh would be transformed, submerged, become river itself. But in the cold months, the river retreated to its banks, dug deep, and capped itself over in ice.

It was a crazy thing to do, to play on the river ice. They knew this.

“Come on,” Rebecca said.

“I’m coming. Hold your horses.”

They walked the ice like a winding roadway.

Even in winter, the wetlands teamed with life; you could read the signs all around—animal tracks like lines of grammar on the snow. Sometimes deer came bounding through, graceful as dancers—just another shape in the woods until a white flash of tail drew your attention. Where one ran, the others followed, by some instinct staying clear of the ice.

Months from now this place would be unrecognizable. A burst of foliage, and the low shrubs would hide their bones in green. Everywhere he looked, Paul saw it—the endless cycle of birth, growth, and senescence. A cycle old as the first day. Old as God saying, Let it be.

The children’s feet crunched on snow. They hunted lures that day, knives in hand, serrated edges making short work of twenty-pound-test line.

For three seasons of the year, the river belonged to fishermen—casting their lines into coffee-colored water through a web of low-hanging branches. Inevitably, some lures got hung up, and the fishermen would curse and pull on their lines, until those lines snapped; the lures would dangle over the river like unreachable, low-hanging fruit. The anglers fished three seasons of the year, but winter belonged to the children.

So they walked the ice like a roadway, serrated edges parting twenty-pound-test like strands of spider silk. They gathered red-and-white bobbers, and colorful spinners, and desiccated egg sacks wrapped in white nylon mesh.

The first to see the lure earned the right to claim it. There was no running on the ice. No rush to grab. They moved slowly, six feet apart to disperse their weight. They respected the ice and worked hard to learn its rules.

Paul was larger and heavier than Rebecca, so some lures only Rebecca could dare.

That Saturday, they walked the river south.

Here are some of the rules of ice. The ice is thinner near the shoreline, so getting on and off can be difficult. The ice is thinner near bends in the river, where the water moves quickest. In places where the snow cover is darker, slushier, the ice beneath is sure to be rotten and soft.

Last year, when walking alone on the ice, in that last leap to shore, Paul had broken through, his leg plunging into frigid water up to his knee. He’d been close to home, but by the time he’d been able to peel off his boot, his foot had been blue. A warm bath had brought it excruciatingly back to life.

But today he wasn’t close to home. Today they were miles out to the south, and the day was colder. Today they walked in the middle of the river, like it was a roadway, knives drawn, tempting fate.

“Do you have science fairs at your school?” Paul asked as they rounded a curve.

“Yeah, every year,” Rebecca said.

“Have you entered?”

“No, never. Why are you asking?”

“Because I’m going to enter this year. And I’m going to win.”

“You sound sure.”

“Sure enough,” he said. His steps slowed. “Be careful, the ice is weak here.”

Their feet made crunching sounds on the snow.

Rebecca touched his arm. “I see one.”

Paul stopped. He looked to where his friend was pointing, up the river, near the bend. “Yeah, I see it. Green spinner bait.”

They walked slowly. Rebecca moved ahead.

“Getting thin,” Paul warned.

“I know.”

“Slow down.”

“Come on, Grandma. Don’t be a wuss.”

They inched forward. Paul stopped again. He studied the ice with his feet. Like Eskimos, they had a dozen names for ice, their own private language—the jargon of ice walkers. There was slick ice, and new ice, and chalk ice. There was rotten ice. There was ice-you-did-not-walk-on. You could feel the give, the gentle flex, a kind of sag. Ice on the river didn’t break without warning. It wasn’t like the movies: one minute you’re standing there, then a loud crack—and splash, you’re under. In reality, the ice had
flex
. And the sound … the sound was more of a creaking, like old leather, or the sound a tree makes in the two seconds between when it starts to fall and when it hits the ground—the low cry of rending fiber, of nature bending, failing. Of that which had been structured becoming unstructured.

In truth, you only heard a loud crack when the ice was good and strong. That’s when you hear the cracks like gunfire, invisible beneath a layer of snow—a shotgun sound that propagates forward so fast that you hear it beneath you and up ahead at the same time.

They advanced.

Near the bend, the snow was darker, revealing a cycle of freeze and melt.

Paul walked until the ice creaked like old leather. Rebecca looked back at him. The wind blew through the trees, clacking branches against branches.

“You should stop,” Paul said.

“It’s not much farther.”

“No, you should stop.”

Paul spread his feet. He watched his friend; he listened.

Rebecca inched ahead. The ice groaned. She turned and made eye contact with him, her cheeks rosy with the cold. Long brown hair spilled out from beneath her knitted hat. She smiled at him, and something fluttered in his stomach, and it occurred to him at that moment that she was pretty. Her smile shifted into a look of determination, and she turned back toward the lure.

The lure dangled just ahead of her, ten feet forward at chest level.

Ten more feet and she’d have it.

Rebecca shifted her weight and took another step as the ice creaked like an oak in a storm. She paused, as if unsure of herself, before stepping again—a slow, gentle sag forming beneath her feet, barely perceptible. She stopped. You’d only see it if you knew what to look for, but Paul
did
see it—the way the whole area beneath her seemed to
give,
just a little, as she stood balanced in perfect equipoise. A bare centimeter at first, then more, a slow downward flex of the ice. There would be no warning beyond this. Rebecca shot Paul another look, then shifted her weight again—

—and took a long step back.

And another, and another. Backing away, accepting defeat.

The lure would stay where it was for another season.

“Next time,” he told her when she was back on the thick ice again.

She shook her head. “It was this time or nothing.”

Paul clapped her on the shoulder, and together they turned and headed for home.

As they walked, the sky darkened, evening coming on. Paul looked at his friend and imagined what it would be like to die that way, to drown in the cold and dark, carried forward beneath the ice by the force of the current.

He imagined crawling out on the ice on his stomach and reaching for her through the hole, because he couldn’t have left her there to drown, not without trying—and he imagined the ice breaking and both of them going under.

The dark and numbing cold. An end to everything.

It wouldn’t be so bad.

*   *   *

An hour later they were at her door, shivering from the cold.

“Shut your eyes,” she said. It was dark now. The only light came from the streetlamp on the corner. Her face was a shape in the shadows.

Paul closed his eyes.

Her lips touched his. A gentle kiss. The first of his life.

She pulled away. “After today, I’m not allowed to spend time with you anymore.”

Paul opened his eyes. “Why not?”

“Your father visited my parents.”

“He
what
?” Paul stared at her, horror-stricken.

“He came and told them he didn’t want me over there.”

“But why?”

She shrugged. “He said we’re getting too old to be playing together. We should play with kids from our own schools.”

Paul looked at her. In their town, Catholics went to the public schools; Presbyterians, Baptists, and Lutherans all had their own private institutions. “But you came today,” he said.