Dark Rivers of the Heart

the treacherous muck, the Explorer slid into the flood, protesting as noisily as a mastodon being sucked into a tar pit.
        "Sonofabitch." Spencer inhaled deeply and held his breath as though he were a schoolboy leaping into a pond.
        The truck splashed beneath the surface, fully submerged.
        Unnerved by the calamitous sound and motion, Rocky wailed in misery, as though responding not only to current events but to the cumulative terrors of his entire troubled life.
        The Explorer broke the surface, wallowing like a boat in rough seas.
        The windows were closed, preventing an inrush of cold water, but the engine had gone dead.
        The truck was swept downstream, pitching and yawing, riding higher in the flood than Spencer had expected. The choppy surface lapped four to six inches below the sill of his side window.
        He was assaulted by liquid noises, a symphonic Chinese water torture: the hollow paradiddle of rain on the roof, the whoosh and swish and plash and gurgle of the churning flow against the Explorer.
        Above all the competing sounds, a drizzling noise drew Spencer's attention, because it was intimate, not muffled by sheet metal or glass.
        The maracas of a rattlesnake wouldn't have been more alarming.
        Somewhere, water was getting into the truck.
        The breach wasn't catastrophic-a drizzle, not a gush. With every pound of water taken aboard, however, the truck would ride lower, until it sank. Then it would tumble along the river bottom, pushed rather than buoyed, body crumpling, windows shattering.
        Both front doors were secure. No leaks.
        As the truck heaved and plunged downstream, Spencer turned in his seat, snared by his safety harness, and examined the cargo hold. All windows were intact. The tailgate wasn't leaking. The backseat was folded down, so he couldn't see the floor concealed under it, but he doubted that the river was getting through the rear doors, either.
        When he faced front again, his feet sloshed in an inch of water.
        Rocky whined, and Spencer said, "It's okay."
        Don't alarm the dog. Don't lie, but don't alarm.
        Heater. The engine was dead, but the heater still functioned.
        The river was invading through the lower vents. Spencer switched off the system, closed the air intakes. The drizzle was silenced.
        As the truck pitched, the headlights slashed the bruised sky and glistered in the mortal torrents of rain. Then the truck yawed, and the beams cut wildly left and right, seeming to carve the arroyo walls; slabs of earth crashed into the dirty tide, spewing gouts of pearlescent foam. He killed the lights, and the resultant gray-on-gray world was less chaotic.
        The windshield wipers were running on battery power. He didn't switch them off. He needed to see what was coming, as best he could.
        He would be less stressed-and no worse off-if he lowered his head and closed his eyes, like Rocky, and waited for fate to deal with him as it wished. A week ago, he might have done that. Now he peered forward anxiously, hands locked to the useless steering wheel.
        He was surprised by the fierceness of his desire to survive.
        Until he had walked into The Red Door, he had expected nothing from life: only to keep a degree of dignity and to die without shame.
        Blackened tumbleweed, thorny limbs of uprooted cacti, masses of desert bunchgrass that might have been the blond hair of drowned women, and pale driftwood rode the rolling river with the Explorer, scraping and thumping against it. In emotional turmoil equal to the tumult of the natural world, Spencer knew that he had been traveling the years as if he himself were driftwood, but at last he was alive.
        The watercourse abruptly dropped ten or twelve feet, and the truck sailed over a roaring cataract, airborne, tipping forward. It dove into the rampaging water, into a diluvial darkness. Spencer was first jerked forward in his harness, then slammed backward. His head bounced off the headrest. The Explorer failed to hit bottom, exploded through the surface, and rollicked on down river.
        Rocky was still on the passenger seat, huddled and miserable, claws hooked in the upholstery.
        Spencer gently stroked and squeezed the back of the mutt's neck.
        Rocky didn't raise his bowed head but turned toward his master and rolled his eyes to look up from under his