The Fourth River

Todd was fascinated by the water tower the first time he saw it, long before he ever knew a Bigfoot lived inside. The giant metal structure rose 200 feet above the small town of Deer Creek, South Dakota, silver and round on the bottom like a bowl with a red, cone-shaped top. Circling its tank in giant black letters, each one taller than a grown man, were the words DEER CREEK. It was a sweltering afternoon in the summer of 1975 the first time Todd saw those letters from the shotgun seat of his dad’s pickup, floating above them like sheets of newspaper snatched by the wind. His skin was damp with sweat everywhere it came in contact with the vinyl seat, and it occurred to him that someone ought to lift the red cone roof off the top of the water tower so everyone in Deer Creek could dive right in. He was eight years old, and to an eight year old, it seemed like a very practical idea.

“How would you get up there?” his dad asked.

“There’s a ladder on that leg. And another ladder goes up the side of the tank. People could just climb up.”

“That’s pretty far to climb. You think you could do it?”

The water tower loomed larger and taller as they got closer. Todd had to lean forward in his seat so he could see the top of it through the windshield. The closer they got, the higher the climb looked. “Um...probably,” he said. “Or someone could build an elevator. That would be better. Faster.”

His dad smiled and turned the knob on the radio until he found a station playing a Johnny Cash song. As they drove right by the water tower, Todd could see rust spreading out from every bolt and weld, snaking up the tower’s legs in a race to decide whether the tower would be silver or brown. Brown seemed to be winning. Todd turned around in the seat as they passed the tower and wiped an arm across his sweaty face. The truck windows were down, but the wind that came through was hot and dusty and offered no relief. “I think it looks like a big bug,” he said. “Or a rocket.”

“When you stand right under it, the legs look like the fingers of a giant hand reaching down,” his dad said. “It looks like it might grab a big chunk of Deer Creek and lift it right into the sky.”

“I still think it would be fun to swim in there,” Todd said as he turned back around in his seat.

“Only one problem with that idea,” his dad said. “There’s no water in there.”

Todd scoffed and looked at his dad as if he’d just told the biggest fib ever. The last time they had been together, two weeks ago, they had gone swimming by the Fort Ramsey dam, and he’d been tricked into believing that great white sharks could be found in the Missouri River. And how many years had he swallowed the lie that said pulling your eyes down and pushing your nose up to make a face will make it stick that way? A water tower without water sounded like another lie in a string of lies that parents told their kids. He wasn’t about to fall for that one.

“No water? You lie.”

“It’s not a lie. It got hit by lightning about ten years ago. The seams on the tank split and all the water ran out. Instead of fixing it, everyone went back to using wells.”

“Is there a well at your place?”

“There’s an underground water tank. It’s called a cistern. A truck comes out every month and fills it.”

“Can I swim in there?”

“Absolutely not.”

Todd folded his arms across his chest and grunted. “You’re mean.”

They drove on. Todd wasn’t entirely sure he believed there was no water in the water tower, but he closed his eyes and imagined it being hit by lightning anyway. Clearly the tank didn’t explode when it was hit, but in his mind it did, lighting up the sky for miles around like a bomb with a million gallons of lightning white water in it. It probably happened late at night, and no one even knew what had happened until the next morning when there was no water for their coffee and showers.

He looked out the back window again. Through the dust kicked up by the truck, he could see the tank and its red roof and the words DEER CREEK hovering above the trees behind them, as high in the sky as the sun or the moon. If there really was no water in it, if it really was as empty as an upside down glass, then what did it do? Why hadn’t it been torn down? Robbed of its purpose, it seemed threatening, scarier than even a big bug or a giant hand. Looking at it now, Todd had the distinct feeling that the tower was watching him, maybe even following him, and that no matter where he went, it would always be lurking right there behind him. For the first time in days, he actually felt a chill.

“So what’s in there if there’s no water?” he asked.

“Nothing,” his dad said. “Bird nests probably.”

Todd’s parents had been divorced for just over a year by the summer of 1975 when his dad picked him up to take him to Deer Creek for the summer. A year ago they had been a family, everyone under the same roof, in Bozeman, Montana. Then suddenly they were packing all their belongings into boxes and moving out of the married student housing on the Montana State University campus where his dad was a graduate student studying ent…entama…lolobagy—studying bugs and grasshoppers—and his mother was a student nurse. They drove to South Dakota, then just across the border into Iowa, Todd and his mom in her yellow Volkswagen beetle, his dad in his pickup, and when the moving van showed up and the boxes all were unpacked, everything was different. He and his mom lived in an apartment in Sioux City, and his dad lived two hours away in Wilder, South Dakota, with his own parents. Todd’s mom had jumped through all kinds of hoops to keep from using the word divorce around him. “Sometimes moms and dads end up getting . . . separate homes,” she said when he asked her why his dad didn’t live with them anymore.

It was a two-hour drive from Sioux City to Wilder, and that first year Todd spent every other weekend with his dad and his grandparents. His mom and dad seemed to get along perfectly during the brief meetings where they passed him and his little red suitcase back and forth, which only added to his confusion. Sometimes moms and dads end up getting . . . separate homes, his mom had said. But why? It didn’t make any sense to him why his dad wouldn’t want to live with them and would only want to see him every other weekend, and why he would want to do all that driving. Two hours this way and two hours that way. Todd hated that stupid drive.

They were several months into their new arrangement when the Coffee Cup Incident occurred and Todd finally learned the meaning of the word divorce. By that point Todd had decided he hated Sioux City, and he hated school, and he hated their apartment. He especially hated the old man, Mr. Culver, who lived in the house their apartment was built over. Mr. Culver was wrinkled and bald, his skin was splotchy, and he always wore a cowboy hat. He was a mean, ugly, three-hundred-and-fifty-year-old cowboy. He pounded on the ceiling with a broom when Todd was being too rambunctious indoors, and he threw Todd’s bike on the lawn whenever he left it blocking the driveway. One day he stuck his head out the front door and yelled at Todd for kicking a soccer ball against the garage door. “You kick that ball against that door again and I’ll hog tie ya and hang ya in the basement,” said the world’s oldest, splotchiest cowboy. Todd didn’t know what “hog tie” meant, but he knew he had no interest in seeing Mr. Culver’s scary, old basement, which was probably full of animal traps and rusty car parts and maybe even the dead bodies of the people who rented the apartment above his house in the past. Todd took his ball inside and made an effort not to cross paths with Mr. Culver again.

A wet, dreary fall led up to his birthday at the end of October. He hadn’t made any friends in school so there was no one to invite to a birthday party. His dad called to wish him a happy birthday and said that he would see him on the weekend. His mom baked him a cake and made a tall stack of the presents from her and his dad and the ones mailed from his grandparents. She tried hard to put on a big show, but behind the candles and underneath the frosting it was just the two of them in an apartment in Sioux City, the dumbest place on earth. Birthdays were supposed to feel special and this didn’t feel special at all. They could have been eating creamed chicken on toast and picking their noses for as special as it all felt. It was the worst birthday ever, and when it came time to blow out the candles, Todd made a wish: I wish everything would go back to the way it was. He opened his presents and ate a piece of cake, then went to bed early. As far as he was concerned, the sooner his birthday was over, the better.

Three days later, when his dad came to take him for the weekend, Todd climbed into the truck, put on his seatbelt and said, “Dad, when are you coming home?” Then he started to cry.

If he had been old enough to notice the look on his dad’s face at that moment, Todd would have seen a man who looked like he had just been stabbed in the heart. But he didn’t notice. He was eight and he was crying and everything was wrong. His dad looked at him and looked out the window, then got out of the truck without saying a word and climbed the wooden stairs that went up the side of Mr. Culver’s house to their apartment. He left the truck running and the heat on. Todd snuffled some snot and cried. He untied the string under his chin that his mother had tied too tightly and pushed back his hood.

He didn’t actually see the coffee cup come crashing through the kitchen window, but he heard the sound of breaking glass and looked up in time to see the cup land on the front lawn like a foul ball. A large shard of glass quivered in the window frame, then dropped and shattered on the dormer roof beneath it, skittering in a wave of broken glass down the shingles and into the rain gutter. Todd undid his seatbelt and rose up on his knees. Just beyond the hood of the truck, the white mug sat on the lawn, unbroken and shameless, as if coffee mugs were made to be thrown through kitchen windows and land on front lawns, and were doing so, at that moment, all over Sioux City.

A minute later his dad slammed the apartment door and came down the steps quickly. He stooped to pick up the mug, then got in the truck and tossed it on the floorboard.

Todd kept quiet while they backed out of the driveway. He could feel his dad steaming next to him like a teakettle. He wiped his eyes and bit a fingernail. Finally, he nudged the cup at his feet and said, “Dad, this cup broke the kitchen window.”

“Did you see it?” he asked.

“I picked it up, didn’t I?”

“Is it your cup?”

That was all the explanation Todd got and he didn’t ask for any more. Apparently, if you forgot something that was yours, sometimes you threw it through a kitchen window so you could get it back. Todd was pretty sure he would have been in more than a little trouble had he been the one to break the kitchen window, but he was already old enough to realize that some rules applied to kids that didn’t apply to adults. This surely was one of them. They rode half way to Wilder before they spoke again, and when they did, it was about the trials of being a second grader and making new friends, and not about why coffee cups went through kitchen windows, or why some dads never came home.

His mother’s attempt to explain the concept of divorce coincided with Todd’s return home at the end of the weekend following the Coffee Cup Incident. For the longest time, he’d had no word for the new arrangement between his mother and father; the separate houses, the alternate weekends, and all that driving back and forth. The first time his mother used the word divorce, she made a face when she said it. She let the word dribble almost soundlessly out of her mouth like a bite of food she couldn’t bear to swallow.

“Your dad and I love you very much. But we . . . don’t . . . love each other the way we used to. Sometimes feelings change. And that means we can’t be married anymore. We can’t live together.”

Todd was sitting on the floor with his legs in a wide V and a row of Matchbox cars lined up perfectly between them. His mother sat on the couch, elbows on her knees, looking down at him. He pushed the ambulance out of the line and made a quiet siren sound.

“Are you listening to me?” his mother asked.

“Yes, I’m listening,” he said. He was listening, but all he heard was a jumble of words and scary ideas. How could you love someone but then stop loving them? He tried to imagine not loving his mom or his dad or his dog, Fred, but it was impossible. It was more likely that he could shrink himself small enough to climb behind the wheel of one of his Matchbox cars than just stop loving someone. Who could do that?

Even after his mother tried to explain divorce to him, he still didn’t really understand what it meant, which wasn’t much of an improvement over not knowing the word. He struggled with the idea for a short period, then let it go. Yeah, divorce. His parents were divorced. They were married, now they were divorced. Divorce, divorce, divorce. After a while, it became just another word, one he used casually and dismissively, the way people do when they talk about things they don’t understand.

Todd had thought the two-hour drive to Wilder was bad, but it seemed like a quick trip to the grocery store compared to the four-hour drive to Deer Creek. “Four hours!” he had said once they were on their way. “We could drive to the moon in four hours. Why don’t we just drive to the moon while we’re at it?”

His dad reached across the seat and tousled Todd’s hair. “Just be glad we’re not making this trip every other weekend.”

Todd jerked his head to one side, frowning. “Why can’t we just go to grandma and grandpa’s?”

“Because I live in Deer Creek now. I’m starting my new business and that’s where I live.”

“What business?”

“I’ll show you when we get there.”

Todd sighed. Fine. He didn’t want to know anything about a business anyway. Just the word business sounded boring to him.

He looked out the truck’s rear window to make sure none of his stuff had blown away. His dog, Fred, a fat female Corgi, lay in the back, her head down and her ears flat, out of the wind.

His dad had balked at the idea of Fred coming with them for the summer. He said, “Now wait a minute, let’s talk about this” when Todd dropped the tailgate and lifted Fred to put her in. Todd stood there, holding Fred, ready to call on tears in an instant—there was no way he could leave both his mom and his dog for two months—but his mom intervened before he could make a sound. She came from the open garage with a large bag of dog food and Fred’s dishes in her hands. “Fred’s his dog, his responsibility. She goes with him.”

While his mom and dad stared each other down, Todd put Fred in the truck and hoisted the tailgate. “Let’s go already,” he said. He kissed and hugged his mom (she smelled nice, like shampoo) and promised to be a good boy. She waved from the edge of the lawn as they backed out of the driveway. She was barefoot in cut-off shorts and a yellow tank top, her long brunette hair restrained beneath a blue bandana. Todd thought his mother was beautiful and he thought that he was going to miss his mother more than he had missed anything in his whole life ever and the thought was almost enough to make him cry as she waved and he waved and she got smaller and further away. Todd turned in his seat and waved through the back window and blinked his wet eyes and remembered the smell of her shampoo until she was out of sight.

It was this image of her, barefoot and waving and pretty as wildflowers that he would remember during the worst moments of the summer to come, and that he tried to forget all the way to Deer Creek as he thought about spending two months away from her in a place he’d never been. It was almost enough to make him cry. Again. If they had been heading to Wilder, at least he would have known what awaited him. He had friends in Wilder. He played Kick-the-Can with the girls who lived in the big house next door, and whose parents were so rich they owned their very own sailboat. There was a public pool across the street from his grandparents’ house and a bowling alley with pinball machines a block away. His grandma made him fried egg sandwiches for lunch whenever he asked and played gin rummy with him at the kitchen table while she smoked her cigarettes and listened to the Yankees on the radio. He could climb the mulberry tree in the back yard by the alley and eat from it until his belly protruded, or hang out in the basement while his grandpa puttered around in his underwear and a pair of leather slippers and made walking sticks from long branches of diamond willow. There were cherries to be picked, pitted, and turned into sun jam, books to check out from the library, and Saturday night baseball games to attend.

There didn’t seem to be anything in Deer Creek. Very little differentiated the corn fields of Deer Creek and the long stretch of straight road they were on from all the other corn fields and miles of road they’d put behind them in the last four hours. He wouldn’t have known they had reached Deer Creek if hadn’t been for the water tower announcing the fact in tall black letters that circled its tank, which, according to his dad, had no water in it. Stupid water tower with no water. It stood in a grassy field at the end of Main Street, down from the three buildings that made Deer Creek an actual town rather than just another empty intersection: a post office, a gas station, and a bar called the Deer Creek Tavern. The water tower was the tallest thing for miles around. The second tallest was an American flag whipping atop the flagpole outside the post office.

The water tower was a good mile behind them when Todd finally realized he had just seen, in its entirety, the town that he’d be calling home for the next two months.

“That was Deer Creek back there by the water tower?” he asked.

His dad laughed. “Yep. Not much to it is there?”

“No,” Todd said emphatically. He lifted the front of his T-shirt and used it to wipe the sweat on his forehead. “I didn’t see a swimming pool or a bowling alley or anything. Three stupid buildings and a stupid water tower is all? That’s so stupid.”

“You’ve been living in the big city too long, son,” his dad said. “I’m about to show you a whole world away from houses stacked on top of each other and big stores and busy freeways. We’re in the country now. And the country, my boy, is not stupid.”

“I think the country is boring as hell.”

“Hey. Watch your mouth.”

Todd was about to ask for a mirror to watch his mouth in, but stopped when his dad slowed and shifted the pickup down to second gear. Just ahead of them he saw a gravel driveway and a big black mailbox with his last name stenciled on it in white paint.

“Welcome to your new home,” his dad said. “The county poor farm.”

Two hundred feet above the ground, the Bigfoot smelled Todd long before he shared his opinion about Deer Creek being boring as hell. Sweaty little boys don’t exactly smell like wild flowers and cotton candy, but they smell distinctly different from what the Bigfoot was used to smelling, namely old man stink, bad breath, car exhaust, cow manure and dog farts. It had smelled the man with the boy before. The Bigfoot had no concept of Irish Spring soap and mustache wax, but that’s what it smelled. That and something else familiar but strange coming from the man and his truck: honey.

The sun beat down on the water tower relentlessly. Brave shafts of light pierced the darkness through splits in the tank’s seams and in spots where rust had eaten holes through the metal. The heat trapped inside could have boiled a brain in its own juices, but it was cooler in the round bottom where the Bigfoot lay stretched out on a pile of dried corn stalks.

That the Bigfoot could smell anything over its own stench was no small feat. The inside of the water tower smelled like it was home to the biggest, wettest dog on earth, only worse. It smelled like it was home to the biggest, wettest dog on earth that had rolled in a particularly rotten pile of road kill. After its first whiff of the boy (he smelled sweaty and green like mowed grass), the Bigfoot sat up suddenly. Its nostrils flared to the size of golf balls as it inhaled the scents of the boy and the man again. Quickly and quietly, the Bigfoot scrambled up the curved bottom to a small ledge that circled the inside of the water tower. It skirted the inside of the tank, sniffing, looking for an opening, and stopped at a gap in one of the seams large enough to fit the fingers of one hand. Metal groaned and birds perched on top of the water tower took to the air as the Bigfoot effortlessly widened the opening. It pressed its black nose to the hole first, then a huge yellow eye. The pupil irised almost completely shut in the bright sunlight. From that high up, it could see for miles, over the tree tops moving in the breeze and across the fields of corn greening and growing in the sun. Far below, the truck with the man and the boy inside streaked away from Deer Creek, trailing a comet’s tail of dust. The Bigfoot inhaled again and watched the truck carrying the boy away.

>It already knew where they were going.

“What’s a poor farm?” Todd wanted to know. He’d heard of all kinds of farms—hog, horse, chicken, vegetable—but never a poor farm. What grew on a poor farm?

“It’s like welfare housing for people in the country. People without jobs or money used to come here to live and work on the farm.”

The gravel driveway they turned onto made a long, gentle curve around a giant oak tree with a tire swing dangling from one limb, and stopped beside a large brick house. A grand front porch of brick and concrete faced the road and ran the length of the west side of the house. On the backside, a short set of concrete steps led to a more modest entrance. Todd climbed out of the truck and shielded his eyes as he stared up at the house, one, two, three stories high, all the way to its green copper roof. The house towered over him, square and solid, looking as if it had been thrust up through the earth like a giant boulder a thousand years ago and planned to stay there for at least another thousand.

“Did you see the tire swing?” his dad asked as he lifted Fred from the back of the truck. Fred gave herself a good shake and set off with her nose to the ground. Todd said he did see the tire swing. His dad said he hung it just for him. Todd said thank you.

He stood on the rear tire of the pickup, hauled himself into the back, and stared across a sad yard struggling to maintain its territory against patches of parched dirt. Tire tracks cut through the property in the direction of an old white barn with a peaked roof and a missing door like a square black eye that looked down from the upper hayloft.

Todd picked up his red suitcase and a black garbage bag that held the rest of the clothes his mother couldn’t fit into his suitcase, and threw them on the ground. “Why do you live on a poor farm, Dad? Are you poor?” he asked.

“Son, don’t throw your stuff on the ground,” his dad said, as he lifted Todd’s bike out. “You want that I should throw your bike on the ground?”

“All right then.”

His dad rolled his bike towards the house. It was red with a yellow banana seat and red, white and blue streamers that hung from the ends of the Y-shaped handlebars. Todd jumped out of the truck, picked up his suitcase and the garbage bag, and followed him.

“Are you poor? Is that why you live here?” he asked again.

“It’s not really a poor farm any more. It’s just a farm. I’m renting it.”

“So you’re not poor?”

“Depends on how you define poor. We have a roof over our heads, and it’s highly unlikely that we’ll go hungry this summer. But we won’t exactly be wiping our butts with hundred dollar bills.”

Todd laughed. Anything to do with butts or farts or poop or pee or disgusting noises or bad words was guaranteed to get a laugh. And making jokes about diarrhea and boogers and other stuff that made his mom put her hands on her hips and say, “Oh, honestly,” was one of his dad’s specialties. Todd laughed but he had enough of his mother in him to pretend to be disgusted.

“Dad, don’t talk about wiping butts.”

His dad leaned the bike on its kickstand and took the garbage bag Todd was dragging behind him. “Why? Everyone wipes their butt. You do, don’t you?”

“My son, the butt wiper.”

“You’re a butt wiper!”

“Well, you’re the poop on the hundred dollar bill that wiped the butt.”

They went back and forth like this as they entered the house through the back door. It led into a large kitchen where everything—the walls, the cabinets, the ceiling, the light switches and outlets and baseboards—was painted sea green. The gray linoleum on the countertops matched the gray linoleum cracking and pulling up at the seams on the floor. A card table sat off to one side with four folding chairs tucked under it. A swinging door (the kitchen side painted sea green, of course) was propped open with a brick. Through it lay a large, empty room that no doubt once housed a dining room table big enough for all the residents of the poor farm to sit down and eat together. On the other side of the dining room was the living room with a single ratty couch and a black and white television set sitting on a stack of wooden boxes. Large windows with old glass that made the whole world look like it was underwater faced the thick windbreak of trees that surrounded the farm on three sides.

Todd walked slowly through the first floor, turning in circles and craning his head towards the high ceilings as he passed from room to room. His footsteps on the wood floors echoed back to him off the plaster walls. Even his breathing seemed magnified by the cavernous rooms and the lack of anything but the most basic furnishings. Just what he’d seen so far was twice as large as the apartment in Sioux City. He supposed it wouldn’t feel so big if they were sharing the house with a bunch of poor people, but with just the two of them there, it felt like a mansion.

In the entryway off the living room, Todd set down his suitcase next to a dark wooden staircase wide enough to accommodate five people. It led to the murky second floor. The steps creaked as he climbed them, each one giving off a slightly different sound, like the keys on a piano. At the top, a dark hallway stretched to the left of the landing past six closed doors, three on each side, and ended in a small bathroom painted, what else, but sea green. Todd figured whoever owned the poor farm must have had a friend in the sea green paint business. Or maybe he was just a big fan of the color of swimming pool changing rooms. A block glass window in the bathroom covered with ivy filtered the light trying to get through. Todd took a deep breath and scrunched his nose at all the dust in the air.

A crack of light about an inch high glowed beneath each of the closed doors lining the hallway. Todd stood on the landing and tried not to breathe. He wasn’t sure why he was being so quiet. Maybe because he couldn’t quite believe he and his dad were the only two people in such a big house. A poor farm without a bunch of poor people seemed rather odd. Kind of like a water tower without any water in it. He walked down the hallway and listened at each door for any kind of sound at all—footsteps, bedsprings, hair dryers, alarm clocks—but apparently no poor people had returned while his dad had been gone. He heard only his dad in the kitchen, opening and closing the refrigerator and talking to someone on the telephone.

So what was in those rooms if not people? He supposed they were empty like the rest of the house, but that was only one possibility, and a door closed on an unseen room offered a million of them. Behind any one of those doors could be an alien, a dead body, a giant spider, a robot, a space ship, a swimming pool, a candy factory, a secret garden, ten thousand broken radios, a library of comic books, a ton of fireworks, a TV dinner, a surprise party, or who knew what else.

He went to the first door and held his breath in anticipation of being amazed.

The cold metal knob twisted.

The door rattled in its frame.

Come on, swimming pool, he thought.

It wouldn’t open. Locked.

He tried the next door and the next door. He tried all six doors on the second floor. All of them locked. He took a smaller, less grand staircase to the third floor, which turned out to be a mirror of the second floor. Six more closed doors and another bathroom. It was darker up there, the air warmer and stuffier. Again he tried all the doors, and again not a single one would give up its secret.

The only thing different about the third floor was a large metal door at the end of the hallway opposite the bathroom. Todd approached it wearily. He’d been defeated twelve times already, but he turned the knob and leaned against this door anyway. To his surprise, it gave slightly. He looked up and saw that the door was wedged tight in its frame at the top but loose at the bottom. He used both hands on the knob and pushed again, harder this time. The door made a metal against metal sound and gave another quarter of an inch. One more shove and he’d finally have access to one of the poor farm’s mysterious rooms. He reared back and pushed again.