The Rivers Run Dry by Sibella Giorello

to accident. I yearned for rational fact, for certainty. It was the reason my father felt compelled to tell me about the two kinds of people in this world.
    I closed my eyes again. The preacher kept going, hours left in him. I listened to people sing out “Hallelujah!” and “Amen!” and the melodic voices of black people washed over me, rinsing away some of my homesickness, carrying me back, way back, all the way back to Virginia.

chapter eight
    O n Sunday morning, my mother slept in and I found Aunt Charlotte in the parlor, sitting in a green wing chair, reading the Seattle Times . The cats slumbered in her lap and the paper was draped over the high wing behind her right ear. The floor around her feet looked like the bottom of a birdcage. Rather than disturb the cats, she was releasing the paper as she finished the stories, letting it sail to the floor before reach-ing behind for another section.
    â€œGood morning,” I said.
    â€œGood morning.” She held out her coffee cup. “Get me another cup? I don’t want to disturb the cats.”
    I was in the kitchen when the phone rang.
    â€œI’m busy!” Aunt Charlotte called out.
    I picked up the phone. “Hello?”
    â€œDid you find anything on Cougar Mountain?” Jack asked.
    I blew across the dark surface of my coffee. “What do you care?”
    â€œI don’t, actually,” he admitted. “But make sure you check with your clairvoyant. Maybe she got a signal from space.”
    â€œJack, what do you want?”
    He wanted to know whether I’d seen the videotape of Osama bin Laden, the one where he’s sitting in front of a gray rock. “Yes, I’ve seen it.” The tape showed the terrorist leader looking like a malevolent third-world shepherd expounding on why the West must be wiped off the map and Israel shoved into the sea. “The tape came out after 9/11.”
    â€œYeah, that’s the one,” he said. “I heard a geologist watched that tape and pinpointed bin Laden’s location in Afghanistan, just by those rocks behind him.”
    â€œThat’s true.”
    â€œI need you to get to North Bend,” he said. “I’ll be waiting in the parking lot at Mount Si.”
    Then he hung up.
    I replaced the phone, leaning against the kitchen counter for several long moments considering my options. When I picked up my coffee, it tasted cold.
    â€œRaleigh,” my aunt called out. “How’s that coffee coming?”

    Mount Si stood like a geologic outburst, a dark and looming rock that rose more than four thousand feet from the middle of a placid green valley where farmers once grew hops. The evident release of an invisible fault line, Mount Si’s western end had the craggy face of an ill-tempered barrister, his misshapen head graduating to a humpback on the eastern end where an evergreen forest extended to the Cascade Mountains.
    The day was bright, with clouds high and distant as wisps, and I decided the best way to deal with weather in the Northwest was to remember mood swings of a manic depressive. At the base of Mount Si, I parked next to Jack’s Jeep and turned off the engine. The car knocked, shook, hissed, and I waited until the convulsions were over before opening the door. Madame leaped out.
    Jack stood at his black Jeep, his wide back blocking the sun. On the Jeep’s seamed hood lay one quadrant of a USGS map. I stood beside him. He didn’t turn, he didn’t speak.
    â€œJack?”
    â€œThe dog again. You take that mutt on all your assignments?”
    â€œFake some gratitude. I’m here. On a Sunday.”
    He folded the map. The trailhead’s path was strewn with dry needles that crunched softly under my boots, releasing a crisp scent of pine. My muscles still ached from yesterday’s hike, each step tight, kneading lactic acid through my legs, and within minutes Jack’s back had disappeared. I struggled to