Marcel Tabasco stared into the bell jar, at the green, fluorescent swirls roiling inside their glass prison. He tipped his wide-brimmed preacher’s hat against the low sun to better see the woman sitting behind the rickety table of curiosities. A gypsy maybe, with her painted-dark eyes, heavy hooped earrings, and rude flock of black hair that fluffed out from beneath a paisley headband. “Spirit Catcher—Potions and Notions” read the sign on her trailer. She kept her gaze down and he looked back into the glass, at the pulsing green light. What was the song his mamou used to sing? About the railway switchman whose head was one night sliced from his body by the wheels of an errant boxcar. And how on certain moonless nights folks would see an eerie light way down the tracks, maybe a lantern, swung by a vaporous torso—Just a-looking for his head, as the song went.

Marcel fingered the crucifix around his neck. “Give you two dollars and ten years off your purgatory.”

She looked up as if noticing him for the first time. “I ain’t goin’ to purgatory, and what’s your stake in all that anyway?” Her silver bangles jingled like tambourines and the light in the jar seemed to rear up as she pulled a burlap sack down over it.

“You think your life’s been so pearly white you’re going straight to heaven?”

“Didn’t say that either.” Her eyes lit up. “How about you pay me three dollars and I make my own way to the here’s after, merci beaucoup.”

Marcel laid down two bills, then pulled out one more crumpled dollar and smoothed it out.

“Don’t suppose you know where the missing head is,” he said.

“If I did it wouldn’t be missing.” She unwrapped her bandana and shook out her black mane. She gave Marcel a slow, long-lashed blink. “Come back next week, and maybe we’ll see.”

 “Maybe we will.” Marcel tipped his hat, then carried his newest treasure to the rusted yellow Model A pickup parked in the dirt driveway. Ronny sat alone in the front seat.

“Where’s your brother?” Marcel asked. He slid the carboy into the pickup bed and roped it tight against the Vesuvian fumaroles that rustled inside their canvas bags. It had been a long day foraging, with the boys at each other all afternoon in the hot truck, but visitors to Mysterioso House were entitled to more than the same tired curios. He whistled for Barry, who had a twelve-year-old’s way of coming and going. With Beth gone, his boys had replaced her as his biggest mystery.

“Daddy!” Barry ran out from the river willows waving a dead muskrat by the tail. Marcel yelled to get rid of that thing and get in, wasn’t anybody gonna pay money to look at some stuffed rat. Barry hopped in the driver’s seat and reached around to turn the key, like he always did since Marcel’d shown him how to work the clutch. But Marcel didn’t trust him on the rutted road that lurched down from the dam into the Hollow, so he edged Barry over next to his brother and curled his own long frame up behind the wheel. The ancient truck belched and rattled when he started it, and as Marcel ground it into gear and pulled away from the little trailer, he thought he might be back next week, without the minister’s garb which probably fooled no one.

At the Hollow the boys unloaded while Marcel unlocked the door to Mysterioso House. He always told his visitors how the tilting farmhouse shadowed in the old oaks—with its stairs that led nowhere, the basement that exited to the second floor, the rooms bigger on the inside than out, with its sideways-hanging chandeliers and dark closets that went on and on—had originally belonged to a farmer named Starr, until the house, and maybe Starr himself, were twisted up in the Vortex that sprung from some crack in the southern Missouri limestone. He never failed to mention to the tourists about the three-year-old boy who’d stepped into one of those closets and never found his way out, how on foggy evenings you might hear him crying for his mama.

There was a crash and he saw Ronny behind the truck, standing over a scatter of broken glass. Tendrils of green gas snaked across the dirt and into the shrubs.

“Way to go, shit for brains,” Barry said.

“Wha’d I say about you and your brother,” Marcel said. “He’s only seven, goddamit, so what’re you letting him—”

“He said he could carry it.”

“’Cause you told him he couldn’t. You think I don’t see what’s going on?” As Marcel pulled off his belt he looked right into Barry’s face, saw Beth’s high brow and hawkish nose, and stubborn tilt of the chin, and it almost could’ve been her looking back, thinking I’m done with this shit. His hand shook as he pointed the looped belt at Barry. “Next time.” Then to Ronny, “Get a broom before you slice your damn fingers off.”

 

That night Marcel tucked the boys into bed. Ronny still wanted a story, so Marcel continued with the next chapter about the Overlords that he was making up a night at a time, but Barry turned away and pretended to sleep, and it was only after Barry’s breathing had shifted that Marcel could lean over and kiss his forehead and smooth his ratty hair. Then, as he often did, Marcel walked out into the knee-high weeds surrounding the bullhead pond where he lit his tomahawk pipe and smoked for a while in the company of the night creatures, watching the skeeters zig-zag across the water’s oily moonlight. He thought about Beth. She’d tried, bless her, but never really understood.

Past the pond, black hedgerows reached their fingers into the sparkling sky-dome, and Marcel extended his own fingers as if to nudge the stars, to dislodge them and peer behind the darkened scrim . . . He looked at his fingertips, at the blue haze that was condensing into sputtering sparks, knew what was going to happen a half-second before the lightning bolt exploded in his head.

 

He woke sometime later, feeling the rain pelting his cheek, and the chilly sog of his clothing. Pain squeezed him as he pushed up out of the soaking weeds. There were no stars to reckon by, but the gray indicated a coming dawn. He limped back to the house to write down the thing he’d seen between the flash and his collapse.

Ronny was standing in the kitchen. “I had a bad dream.”

Marcel picked the boy up and set him on his lap at the kitchen table. “It wasn’t you, it was me,” Marcel told him. “Like I said before. Like I explained, didn’t I?”

“There was a lot of water,” Ronny said.

“I know. Too much water. Come on, let’s tuck you back in.”

Marcel didn’t know why Ronny’s dreams and his own visions were always the same, and it heavied his heart to think about all the things a seven-year-old shouldn’t have to see.

 

“You’re no damn gypsy,” Marcel told the woman, whose name was Marie, the following Saturday. They were sharing an afternoon beer on her makeshift porch, listening to raindrops pinging off the tin roof in the spongy air.

 “I’m as much a gypsy as you’re a man of faith.”

“You got to think twice before you question a man’s faith.”

“So, what’s your faith in?”

“Nothing we can see.” He swigged from the bottle then pressed the cool glass against his cheek.

“Must be some long nights if you believe in nothing,” she said.

“I believe in plenty, and most doesn’t matter. It’s what I don’t know that calls out my faith.” He felt her gaze moving into him. “How did you ever get to be in this place?”

She took a slow, tired breath. “Oh cher, it doesn’t matter. Long ago the world dreamed me away and here I am. In this tiny trailer next to nowhere.” She gave him a tilted smile and reached into the cooler for two more beers, handing him one.

 

The rain continued into the evening as Marcel nursed his truck back down the muddy road into the woody narrows of the hollow. He felt annoyed. Not annoyed, but bothered in some way that he couldn’t get at. This woman with her easy familiarity. Like she could ever understand.

 Back at the house he hurried into the kitchen, shaking the water off the brim of his hat, and yelled for the boys. He found them in the Imaginarium, playing with the dancing grasshoppers.

“Just make sure they don’t take off on you,” he said. “Maybe run them through their routine once or twice, while you’re at it.” He liked the boys showing an interest, towards the day he could ease back a bit, let them run the show. If they didn’t kill each other beforehand.

 

Marcel invited Marie to dinner the following Sunday. He warned the boys off any shenanigans and told them to clean up the little dining room while he was gone up the Hollow to get her. She stepped out of her trailer and hurried through the drizzle toward his truck. She had on wide-hipped blue jeans, a pearl-button cowboy shirt, and rattlesnake boots, her hair woven into a braid that whipped around as she ran. She slipped into the front seat and sleeved some drops off her forehead. She’d left off the gypsy eye shadow and rouge, and Marcel took in her no-nonsense face, her jawline and cheekbones that he guessed were part Osage, her ruddy clay skin. He kissed her lightly on the lips and snapped back, surprised by his own presumption, but she leaned into him for a deeper taste. She smelled like the rain after a long deluge, when the water has churned up the rich fragrance of black earth.

They rumbled down the Hollow in silence, Marcel a little flushed with embarrassment. Marie sat up stiffly and looked straight ahead, but when the truck bumped, she put a hand on Marcel’s arm. He released his hand from the wheel and took hers.

“These roads’ll knock you around pretty good,” Marcel said, and gave her hand a little shake. She answered with a tight squeeze.

“Hang on,” she said. And suddenly he was flying, no more than a paper kite shifting in the winds. He squeezed her back, afraid of spinning away into some unnamed darkness.

At the house they sat around the table like family and ate in silence. Afterwards, when Marie stood to gather the plates, Marcel’s head indicated Barry, who cleared the table, while Ronny stood on the wooden stool and washed up. Afterwards, Marcel toured her through the Imaginarium—she’d seen water run uphill but was intrigued by the gravity bones she could scarcely lift, and how she could feel right through the gassy fumaroles with their steam materializing out of nowhere. He then led her upstairs to the third floor of the house, which was off limits to the tourists. Too dangerous. He got a tight grip on her arm and opened a door into a long, dark hall. At the far end a picture window framed the sight of a cheerful cottage garden, shafts of sunlight playing through hedges of climbing roses, hummingbirds dashing; but of course, they hadn’t seen the sun in some days. Marie took a step forward, but Marcel held her back.

“This one we’ll have to take on faith.”

That night, with Marie delivered back up the Hollow and his boys at least pretending to sleep, Marcel forewent his usual pipe and laid down instead on his too-large bed. He closed his eyes and reached for the ghost limbs of Beth next to him.

 

The downpour continued all week, so Marcel put the boys onto their lessons while he attended to his collections, polishing the glass cases that held his formaldehyde-preserved treasures and fine-tuning the temperature and air mix in the incubators. On Saturday he took advantage of a lull in the rain to patch some leaks on the slick farmhouse roof. But within the hour the clouds returned, shrouding the horizon in a sickly green, until the rain resumed its senseless drivel.

He came off the ladder and went looking for the boys. In the shed he saw one of the empty fumarole bags wriggling and untied the top where he found Ronny.

“No, I’m supposed to get out by myself. Barry said—”

“Where is Barry?” Marcel asked, then heard the truck engine rev up outside and the scrunch of grinding gears. Marcel grabbed the shotgun propped next to the shed door and walked into the downpour where the truck was starting to U-turn. He stood in front of it and pointed the gun straight at Barry, then raised it up and fired a shot, which flashed bright as a lightning strike and reiterated off the slopes of the hollow. The truck stopped and Barry stumbled out, slipping to his knees in the mud while Marcel walked toward him, the gun shaking in his hands.

“Get up.”

“I was just gonna pull it into—”

Marcel fired a shot into the mud, which sprayed them both as Barry rolled away. He reversed the gun in his hand and gripped it like a bat, feeling the hand of God and His terrible purpose—

“Dad!” It was Ronny, who jumped onto Marcel’s back, stopping him long enough for Barry to struggle to his feet. Marcel felt warning tremors move from his shoulders down his arms as he looked into Barry’s frightened face. He’s still just a baby, he could hear Beth’s voice.

Marcel tossed the gun down into the mud.

“Get in the house,” he said, peeling Ronny off his shoulders. “Both of you.”

 

“Sometimes I worry I might kill him, unless he kills me first.” Marcel sat in Marie’s kitchen the next day, sipping at one of her foul herbal brews and holding his wet, wool-socked feet near the Franklin stove. They’d been outside filling sandbags, worried about the water pooling up next to the trailer. “He never listened to his mama either.” He hadn’t said much about Beth to Marie, and she hadn’t asked. Now she bent down and peeled off his wet socks and began to rub his white, wrinkled feet. Her fingers felt invasive, and Marcel recoiled, but she softened her touch and moved up his legs, massaging his calves, then slid her fingers along his outer thighs. Marcel closed his eyes against the intensity, and felt her climb up and straddle him, felt her loose hair brushing his cheeks, felt her lips on his forehead, his cheek, his own lips. He had trouble breathing, as if a huge stone lurked in his chest, and he began shaking like he couldn’t get air, but then the stone shattered, and he sucked in a great gasp. He reached out his arms to embrace Marie but stopped when he felt the dreaded tingling move from his shoulders down toward his fingertips, but she leaned in and wrapped him in her arms and rocked back and forth, shushing him, cooing, kissing his neck and drawing his head into her soft breasts, and Marcel felt something give, felt himself collapse, felt his current draining to ground.

Marcel was dreaming of water when he woke, gasping as if he’d been drowning, but the dream scurried away and left him alone in sweat-dampened sheets with the sound of the deluge pounding against the trailer’s roof. The fading light said it was late. His clothes had been properly folded and placed on the wicker chair next to the bed. He pulled on his trousers and buttoned his shirt, aware of a smell other than himself. He was putting on his dry socks next to the stove when Marie came in and shook out of her poncho. She gave Marcel a studied look.

“You need to get home to your boys,” she said, “before you can’t get down the gully.”

“Well, that’s a fine ‘howdy-do’,” he said. He stood and reached for her, but she put her hands against his chest.

“Go on. You don’t have any real business here anyhow.” She turned away from him and stared across the sink and out the window, where Marcel could see the willows whipping sideways, felt something tipping in himself.

“You said a lot in your sleep,” she said, “and my bed isn’t big enough for three.”

“She’s gone,” Marcel said. “After Ronny was born, and she saw how he was like me, one day she up and left.”

Marie turned toward him. “She’s not gone. You’re not the only one who sees things.”

She looked at him sadly and placed a hand over his heart. “You are full of this woman.”

 

Marie’d been right about the gully, and Marcel had to maintain a reckless speed to keep the Model A from bogging down in the muddy remains of the road. A mile further toward home the rain thinned to a drizzle and bits of sunlight peppered through the clouds, raying out like a holy card. Glints of light danced in the ponds, creeks, puddles he drove past. A constellation of drops hung from the trees like tiny globes, each its own world, or galaxy, with its own nested mysteries. Marcel peered down the road, hoping to see outside of his own globe of sorrows. He tried to imagine Beth in one of those globes, but he could only conjure the image of Marie pressing her hand against his chest and giving him her sad look. He told Beth he was sorry.

 

* * *

 

Marie Gauthier listened as Marcel’s truck ground through the mud into a distant silence. She lit a candle and collapsed into an overstuffed chair, suddenly sick with the spins. She closed her eyes and forced herself to breathe, massaging her temples then tracking the contours of her face; the angled cheekbones and smooth forehead, the forthright nose. She cupped her breasts and traced her fingers around the nipples, enjoying the soft rub of her cotton blouse, and tried to relax into the familiarity of her own being. But it was not to be found. Whoever she was had vanished years ago, had disappeared into the woods with her fur-trapping father, lay with her abandoned mother beneath six feet of earth. Now there were only the phantoms who drifted by and purchased her trinkets without meeting her eyes. And the nightly visitors who ghosted the foot of her bed and showed her where the waters carved rivers into the limestone firmament, where blood surged within narrowing banks, where her pounding heart tracked the earth’s unparsed rhythms.

Marcel’s face appeared to her, craggy like a limestone outcropping, his dark brow, the rivulets of worry etching his cheeks. She reached her hand out to where she’d touched his chest, felt the bony contours, and pushed until the center folded around her hand and she sensed the pulsing of his heart, then her fingers were around it and she squeezed softly. Marcel’s eyes widened as if surprised, and tears flowed down his face, and she drank in the saltiness as the waters rose around them.

Marie woke, gasping for breath. Something was different. Everything quiet. The rain had stopped.

 

* * *

 

Marcel stood on the porch in the soft light of early morning and sniffed at the rain-washed air and gave thanks to the Almighty Whomever that he wouldn’t have to build an ark. After breakfast he got the boys shoveling the mud that covered the walk and entry, while he tinkered with the neon “House of Mystery” sign that had shorted out. A couple dry days and tourist cars would again be following the signs up the Hollow, filled with excited kids and their disbelieving parents on their way to the reservoir. But the long rain had put him behind, and he went to bed that night restless and filled with static.

 

He woke to a noise in the darkness, a rattling and rumble, and got out of bed to investigate, but after taking two steps he saw the sparks glowing at his fingertips and an instant later with a giant splintering sound the walls caved in and a torrent of water slammed him down and spun him over and over, drawing him into its deep turbulence, where everything became dark, then quiet.

 

Something pounding on his chest. It took him a few moments to see through the pain and recognize Ronny, beating his fist against him with a worried look.

“Dad. Daddy, wake up. Hurry.”

Marcel elbowed himself up from the floor and took in the undamaged room, dry and warm in the predawn glow. He rubbed his temple. The water. But the rain was over. What had he seen?

“It’s breaking,” Ronny said.

“What’s breaking, Ronny? Did you see?”

“I don’t know,” he said, white-faced, tears building.

Marcel tried to assemble the image, to recall the sound, a rumbling and cracking, but not like thunder. He went out the front door and peered out. The air was still, a few mourning doves cooing in the distance. Then he saw the slough, usually stagnant, but flowing now, its width creeping toward the house.

“Get dressed, right now, and get your brother.” Marcel said, reaching for his trousers, trying to sound calm, but his voice was low and insistent.

“But Dad­—”

“Just do what I say. It’s the dam. It’s not holding. What?”

 “Barry’s not here.”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know. He took the truck.”

Marcel hurried to the window and saw that the truck was gone. He looked up the gully towards where the dam was tucked into the forest of pines and cypress, everything as happy as could be on this lovely spring morning.

“Did you tell him what you seen?”

Ronny looked at Marcel with a lost expression and nodded. Marcel thought their only chance now would be to climb perpendicular to the gully, hoping to get high enough in time.

“Get your shoes on and let’s go,” he said. He thought of Marie, up in the shadow of the dam, and knew that even if he had the truck, it would be too late. Maybe she’d seen it too. But no, her talent didn’t work that way. He thought of that night at the pond, when he and Ronny had both seen the water for the first time, how he’d then thought it meant the rain. The rain that had congenially stopped, leaving only its remnants to converge on man’s puny attempt to hold back the flood plain.

Marcel tossed a sweatshirt to Ronny, and they raced out the door but by now the burgeoning slough swirled around the base of the house. They held hands and stepped into the current, scarcely calf-high, but with a force that knocked Ronny over, and Marcel had to pull him back to the steps, where the water was climbing visibly. Marcel heard a far-off cracking, like in his vision, and looking upstream he could see distant cypress toppling. A low rumbling grew, coming closer, and Marcel hugged Ronny to him.

He recognized the sound of his truck an instant before it peeled around the corner and planed into the rising water, then slammed into the porch. Hunks of driftwood banged against the truck as Barry forced the door open against the current and pulled himself along the fender toward the stairs. He was yelling something and pointing to the passenger side, which was jammed against the porch. Two arms reached out of the open window, and there was Marie, chest-deep in the water that was filling the vehicle. Marcel stretched for her, but the current began to turn the truck away from him. He waded in to yank at the jammed door, which wouldn’t give, but he could still grab Marie’s hands, and held tight as the truck drifted off and she squirmed out the window and into his arms, but he had no traction and the two of them tumbled into the quickening current rounding the side of the farmhouse.

Marcel heard Ronnie yell, a rope snaked out and he grabbed it with one hand, clutching Marie with the other, and felt the tug as his boys dragged him in to where he could grab a post for himself while Barry and Ronny pulled Marie out of the water, which was beginning to stream across the surface of the porch, and the four of them staggered into the house.

“Upstairs,” yelled Marcel, and they clambered up to the second-floor landing just as a surge of water ripped through the front door. Out the window he saw the barn give way, collapsing into shreds of lumber that slammed into the side of the house with a horrifying racket, and they felt the building shudder and sway against the onslaught. “Keep going,” he said and herded them up to the third floor. The house lurched sickeningly as they climbed up to the door that Marcel rarely touched. He threw it open and stared down the long hall that led to the wide picture window with its usual pastoral scene, the sun and birds and all things good. The house bucked like a wild horse and Marcel braced himself in the doorway. He looked toward his desperate tribe, then pulled the three of them through the door, heard a roar like a thousand trucks, and they all four ran down the hall. Water smashed through the door frame behind them and he felt the house collapsing. He took Barry’s hand tightly and with his other arm tucked Ronny up like a football, put his head down, and hurled himself through the pane glass window.

 

Marcel Tabasco lay on his back in soft grass and stared up at painterly clouds tufting a blue sky. His boys were lying on either side of him, asleep, breathing quietly. He pushed himself up on shaky legs and saw the house, the barn, the pickup, all as they should be. Birds chirped, and a slight breeze shushed through the oaks. He waved off a nagging horsefly and surveyed his surroundings—the woods and hedge-apple shrubs and pond and slough—then his eyes blurred, and he instead sensed the spaces between these things, felt a dreadful emptiness, a missing-ness, and knew with a leaden certainty that he could search the farm for Marie but would not find her.

 

*      *      *

 

Marie Gauthier arrayed her keepsakes and charms on the card table in front of the trailer, unsettled by a murky sense that she’d forgotten something. It tugged at her as she set out the green quartz crystals and river-smoothed love stones, the spirit catchers and the bottles filled with potions that could stir a man’s dreams. She stared at them for a clue to her unease, but whatever she was looking for wasn’t there.

It was a fine morning, and she expected to see some traffic along her little road, people curious about the signs pointing from the main highway. Families driving up the Hollow on their way to enjoy a day out at the lake. She glossed her lips and darkened her eyes, then clipped on the hoop earrings and tied on the paisley bandana that had belonged to her mother. Somehow it still smelled of her, of smoke and sweat and spring rain. She closed her eyes and tried to picture her mother’s face, but her reverie was disturbed by the crunch and rattle of a vehicle gunning up her gravel road.

Marie opened her eyes and watched as a rusted yellow pickup truck swung into sight and dusted to a stop at the edge of her driveway. A man uncoiled himself from the driver’s seat and walked towards her. He was tall and unnaturally thin, maybe a decade older than her, familiar in a déjà vu sort of way. Oddly attractive in spite of, or maybe because of, his expression of deep sadness. Something quivered inside her, and she knew this man had endured a terrible loss.

The man stepped to the edge of her table, and she stood up without thinking. He held one hand out to her and spoke her name.