The River of No Return

angle of his walk to move parallel with the pair. He strolled along pretending to be talking on the phone, his eyes on Leo’s companion.
    At first he could only see the man’s back. His hair was thick and brown, blow-dried. He wore a wide-shouldered business suit as blue as the summer sky, which he filled with meaty precision. The tailoring was immaculate and expensive, but the suit was absurd.
    Nick, who tended to dress for the future in jeans and soft cotton shirts, smiled to himself. Maybe that terrible suit was why Leo was keeping his distance.
    Then the man turned, as Leo had—as if he knew Nick was watching him. He had a square chin and a thin mouth, and that blow-dried hair was styled up and off his forehead. He looked like the handsome, anodyne white men who predicted the weather on American TV.
    But there was something wrong with the way the man looked at Nick.
    Even from several yards away, Nick could feel the flat, frozen emptiness of that gaze. He lowered his phone and stared back unblinkingly, no longer pretending disinterest. Time seemed to stop . . . thought fell away. . . .
    Then Leo turned, too, and his expression recalled Nick to himself. Leo was communicating something. A more urgent warning. Nick blinked, pivoted on his heel, and walked in the other direction.
    When Nick asked Leo about it the next day, Leo said the man had asked the way to the amusement park, and Leo had led him there. Leo wasn’t telling the truth—or at least not the whole truth—but Nick didn’t push it. He’d learned in Spain. A soldier will tell you what you need to know when you need to know it.
    * * *
    Two weeks later, Nick, Leo, and Meg were floating in the pool outside Nick’s house, watching a custard-colored full moon rise over the mountains. Something akin to joy filled Nick’s heart. He was bobbing like a cork in a heated infinity pool in the Andes, his formerly stiff rump tucked into a plastic flotation device made to look like a spotted frog. His two friends were bobbing too, one in a dragon and one in a panda bear. He was happy—like the Frankish butcher had said he would be. He found himself employing a phrase he’d gleaned from TV: “You guys are the best.”
    They laughed at him, and Meg used her own new slang: “Sucker,” she said.
    “I’m not a sucker,” Nick said.
    “You are so.” She sipped at her cocktail—Sex on the Beach—through a straw and paddled her feet in the water. “You love the Guild.”
    “In that case we’re all suckers,” Nick said. “All we have to do is be happy and uphold the rules.”
    Leo, rotating gently in his panda bear, snorted. “That’s a pretty tall order,” he said. His slang was better than both of theirs, and he loved to show off.
    “What does that mean?”
    “A tall order?” Leo put his head back and let his three braids dangle in the water. His head was plucked bald except for a square patch of hair at the back, which was long and braided into three thin plaits. He had been told this hairstyle would not be acceptable in Bangalore, but he still had a few months in Chile, and Leo wasn’t going to reach for the razor until the plane was waiting for him. “A tall order is something that is nearly impossible. So you say that all we have to do is be happy and uphold the rules. I say, ‘That’s a tall order.’ It means that I’m not sure I can do it.”
    “Why not?”
    Leo rolled his head to the side and looked at Nick. “I’m disenchanted with the Guild.”
    “Why?”
    “Remember that guy, a couple of weeks ago? I was walking with him across the quad.”
    “Yes,” Nick said. “The man in the baby-blue suit.”
    “The Man in the Baby-Blue Suit,” Meg said. “It sounds like a song.”
    “He wasn’t anything like a song,” Leo said. “Unless it was a song about ominous government types.”
    “What was his name?”
    “He never told me.”
    “All right, so.” Meg thought about it. “We’ll call him Mibbs.”
    “They call me Mister Mibbs!” Nick was pleased with his joke.
    Leo didn’t laugh. “You saw him, Nick. He wasn’t funny.”
    “No,” Nick agreed. “Even in that suit he wasn’t funny.”
    “He walked at a distance from me,” Leo said. “As if he were afraid to come too close. He asked me about my experiences on what he kept calling the ‘warpath.’”
    “That’s nothing new. Everyone’s always asking you crazy questions about being an Indian,” Nick said. “Like that thirteenth-century Japanese