Take Me to the River Read Online Free Page A

got into bed.
    I slept like the dead until I was awakened by the rapid beating of my heart. The room was pitch-dark. It was the middle of the night.
    I flicked the flashlight on, pointed it all around. Not a scorpion in sight. My heart was still racing. Bad dream? Suddenly I remembered: bad dream, indeed, and it came rushing back. I was perched at the edge of a vertical mineshaft while Rio was lighting Roman candles and tossing them in. Suddenly I had lost my grip, and was falling, falling, falling.
    Now that I was awake, my lower lip was itching something awful. I kept touching the spot to try to figure out what that was about. It was all I could do not to scratch it. At last my weariness won out and I was able to fall back asleep.
    I slept well enough until the stillness of the night was shattered with what sounded like the wails of a lunatic. I bolted upright like a caveman with a lion at his throat. What was it, and where was I?
    As the wails were followed by yips and barks, I came up with the answers, which were (A) coyote, and (B) my flaky uncle’s place in Terlingua, Texas.
    It was a quarter after five. Dawn was beginning to filter through the screen window along with the bedlam. My lip still itched, and it felt swollen. I tried to get back to sleep but no such luck. Half an hour later the lunatic coyote was still carrying on.
    Rio had left the door to the bedroom open so the cool air entering through the screens could circulate through the house. A coffeepot began to burble.
    The bathroom was attached to the house, but you had to go out the front door to get there. “There’ll probably be a scorpion in the sink,” Rio called as I stumbled out the open front door. “Go ahead and annihilate it.”
    His prediction proved correct. I looked for a weapon and found a book on the back of the composting toilet. It was entitled The World Without Us. No doubt it said that scorpions would do nicely in a world without people. “This one won’t get the chance,” I muttered as I mashed it with the spine of the book.
    The scorpion dispatched, I checked myself out in the mirror. My lip was swollen something awful. I washed my face and hands with less water than my mother uses on one of her African violets. A gallon or two was all you really needed for a shower, Rio had told me the night before. The ghost town had finally gotten a water supply, but his house wasn’t hooked up to it. Too expensive, Rio said. They collected rainwater from the roof and hauled water when their cisterns ran dry.
    Rio and his dad had enough electricity to power the lights, the stereo, a TV, and a DVD player. They didn’t actually get TV; the TV was for watching DVDs. The electricity came from solar panels on the hillside behind the house. They cooked on propane; their fridge and their hot water heater also ran on propane.
    As I returned from the bathroom along the edge of the flagstone patio, I was keeping my eyes down on account of my bare feet and the scorpions. I didn’t see any, but I did notice a huge, hairy tarantula climbing onto the threshold of the open door.
    â€œAnnihilate it?” I asked. Rio was sipping coffee from a Mexican mug and watching the arachnid come in.
    â€œNo way,” he said. “That’s Roxanne.”
    I soon learned that tarantulas make excellent houseguests, are virtually harmless, and pay for their lodging by eating insects, flies, conenose bugs, and sometimes scorpions. “I’ll show you what happens if I put her out,” Rio said. He carried Roxanne outside on the palm of his hand and gently set her down on the far side of the patio. “You drink coffee?” Rio asked as he returned.
    â€œNot really. Gimme some.”
    We sat at the kitchen table, drank Zapatista Blend, and watched the huge black spider turn herself around. She began to march back to the front door. Rio said that a tarantula moving indoors was a sign that the thunderstorms would come