The Riverman (The Riverman Trilogy) Read Online Free PDF Page B

into bits of ash, and tossed it into the air, where some of it fluttered and landed on Fiona’s face and painted black freckles on her cheeks.
    “You’re ridiculous,” I whimpered, and I threw the coffee can at her feet, partly in anger, partly to keep her eyes off mine. “I’m through with you.”
    I trudged to the house, fighting the urge to look back.

 
    T HURSDAY , O CTOBER 19
     
    I didn’t sleep. I lay under my covers, on my back, drawing out my breaths to keep myself calm. That image of water floating in the air was too much. It was too familiar.
    It took me back to when I was six years old and I won a goldfish at a school fair. I named the fish Humbert and kept him in a bowl on my dresser and fed him flakes twice a day. Humbert died after four or five months, and I took it badly. There was a coffin made of cardboard and a funeral in the backyard. Charlie attended and played taps on a recorder. Charlie’s brother, Kyle, called us “a coupla wusses,” but we didn’t see it like that. Humbert was our friend, the sea monster in our action figure battles, the shark under our model race car bridge.
    I didn’t want to be alone on the night of the funeral, so I asked Charlie to stay for a sleepover. We curled up in our sleeping bags on the floor next to the TV and faded off within its glow. That night I had what I always thought of as the most vivid dream of my life.
    I was called from the sleeping bag by the voice of Humbert. I’m not sure why I thought it was Humbert’s voice, but I did. The voice led me back to my room, where the fishbowl still sat on my dresser. There was only water left in the bowl, but I spoke to it like Humbert was inside.
    “I’m sorry for not feeding you enough, or feeding you too much, or whatever I did wrong.”
    Without warning, the bowl disappeared and a globe of water was floating over the dresser. I was tempted to reach out and touch it, but I didn’t. I marveled at it, for it was both the loveliest and scariest thing I had ever seen. I closed my eyes.
    When I opened them, I was back on the living room floor, neck-deep in my sleeping bag. A rainbow of colored bars glowed on the TV, announcing that programming had ended for the night and dead air would be broadcast until morning.
    At dawn, I dumped the water out of the bowl and put it in the trash. I didn’t tell anyone about the dream because I didn’t want to revisit Humbert’s passing. It was time to move on, a sentiment echoed by my dad that night after he dragged the trash to the curb.
    “You’re growing up, bud,” he told me. “Becoming a little man. I’m thinking it’s time you had some chores.”
    *   *   *
    I feigned sickness the morning after Fiona met me on the edge of the swamp. Keri wasn’t buying it, but “stomach stuff, uncontrollable and unpredictable” was more than enough detail to convince my parents. My dad treated me like I was a mugger, sidling to the door with his hands up and toast in his mouth. “Yikes,” he mumbled. “I carry that plague to the hospital and I’ll wipe out the entire east wing.”
    My mom was more sympathetic. Before leaving for her job at the post office, she handed me a box of saltines and some ginger ale and told me, “Take it easy, on your belly and on the dragons.”
    There were no dragons in the video games I played, but I knew what she was saying. She didn’t want me ending up like Charlie, under the spell of television and computer screens every waking hour of the day.
    It didn’t make a difference. Video games, TV shows, books—none was a sufficient distraction. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t shake Fiona’s story and the memories of that dream from years before.
    I paced.
    The house seemed smaller, more sinister. Lightbulbs seemed to flicker. White walls seemed subtly filthy, streaked with faint tea-colored stains. Acid climbed the cliff of my throat. I needed fresh air.
    I was leaning against a tree in my front yard, counting the shingles