Dark Rivers of the Heart

to kid him. He loved old movies. I mean, he was almost obsessed with them."
        "Any particular kind of movies?"
        "Suspense flicks and dramas with old-fashioned heroes. These days, he said, movies have forgotten what heroes are all about."
        "How so?"
        "He said heroes used to have a better sense of right and wrong than they do now. He loved Nonh by No h7vest, Notorious, To Kill a Mockingbird, because the heroes had strong principles, morals. They used their wits more than guns."
        "No " Roy said " you have movies where a couple of buddies smash and shoot up half a city to get one bad guy-" -use four-letter words, all kinds of trash talk-"
        "-jump into bed with women they met only two hours ago-" -and strut around with half their clothes off to show their muscles, totallyfuu of themselves."
        Roy nodded. "He had a point."
        "Hollywood's favorite old movie stars were Cary Grant and Spencer Tracy, so of course he took a lot of ribbing about that."
        Roy was surprised that his and the scarred man's opinions of current movies were in harmony. He was less disturbed to find himself in agreement on any issue with a dangerous sociopath like Grant.
        Thus preoccupied, he'd only half heard what Donner had told him.
        "I'm sorry-took a lot of ribbing about what?"
        "Well, it wasn't particularly funny that Spencer Tracy and Cary Grant must've been his mom's favorite stars too, or that she named him after them. But a guy like Hollywood, as modest and quiet as he was, shy around girls, a guy who didn't hardly seem to have an ego-well, it just struck us funny that he identified so strongly with a couple of movie stars, the heroes they played. He was still nineteen when he went into Ranger training, but in most ways he seemed twenty years older than the rest of us. You could see the kid in him only when he was talking about old movies or watching them."
        Roy sensed that what he had just learned was of great importance-but he didn't understand why. He stood on the brink of a revelation yet could not quite see the shape of it.
        He held his breath, afraid that even exhaling would blow him away from the understanding that seemed within reach.
        A warm breeze soughed through the temple.
        On the limestone floor near Roy's left foot, a slow black beetle crawled laboriously toward its own strange destiny.
        Then, almost eerily, Roy heard himself asking a question that he had not first consciously considered. "You're sure his mother named him after Spencer Tracy and Cary Grant?"
        "Isn't it obvious?" Donner replied.
        "Is it?"
        "It is to me."
        "He actually told you that's why she named him what she did?"
        "I guess so. I don't remember. But he must have."
        The soft breeze soughed, the beetle crawled, and a chill of enlightenment shivered through Roy.
        Bosley Donner, said, "You haven't seen the waterfall yet. It's terrific.
        It's really really neat. Come on, you've got to see it."
        The wheelchair purred out of the temple.
        Roy turned to watch between the limestone columns as Donner sped recklessly along another down-sloping pathway into the cool shadows of a green glen. His brightly patterned Hawaiian shirt seemed to flare with fire when he flashed through shafts of red-gold sunshine, and then he vanished past a stand of Australian tree ferns.
        By now Roy understood the primary thing about Bosley Donner that so annoyed him: The cartoonist was just too damned self-confident and independent. Even disabled, he was utterly self-possessed and selfsufficient.
        Such people were a grave danger to the system. Civil order was not sustainable in a society populated by rugged individualists. The dependency of the people was the source of the state's power, and if the state didn't have enormous power, progress could not be achieved or peace sustained in the streets.
        He might have followed Donner and terminated him in the name of social stability, lest others be inspired by the cartoonist's example, but the risk of being observed by witnesses was too great. A couple of gardeners were at work on the grounds, and Mrs. Donner or a member of the household staff might be looking out a window at the most inconvenient of all moments.
        Besides, chilled and excited by what he believed he'd discovered about Spencer Grant, Roy was eager to