Free Dark Water by Laura McNeal Page A

day.”
    “Okay,” he said, cheerful about his new car or his intentions or maybe both. He had a little crescent-shaped scar on his cheek that he believed was my fault, though I didn’t remember scratching him when I was five. It looked deeper in the foggy light. The road twisted in and out of half-seen oaks, and we spiraled slowly down to the riverbed among the crows and hawks and chittering ground squirrels, but we didn’t pass Amiel. We passed no humans at all, in fact. We parked at the place where I’d seen Amiel last, and I stared up at every house that might be his.
    We began to hike past the dry meadow, waist high with fennel, and at the top of a hill, Robby stopped to read a Land Conservancy sign I hadn’t noticed before. “Agua Prieta Creek this way,” Robby said. “Is that where we’re headed? Dark Water Creek?”
    “Yes,” I said, not really sure it was the right way until I saw the arch of oaks and sycamores that led, like a living tunnel, to the river itself. “Yeah, this is right,” I said. Just then we caught up to a man, a border collie, and a little boy.
    “Look, Dad!” the boy said. “The hobos made a jump fortheir bicycle!” and he pointed to a steep, well-packed bump in the trail.
    For a while, we could hear him pointing out all the hobo improvements.
    “Look! The hobos have a swing!” he said, and that one was obvious: vines hanging down from a cluster of trees. I didn’t know what he meant by a hobo pineapple tree until I saw a funny little palm tree, no taller than my knee, with a trunk that was shaped just like a pineapple.
    “Hobo traps!” (Metal lockboxes someone dumped under a tree.)
    “That’s where the hobos keep their alligators.” (A stagnant algae-green pond.)
    “This is a hobo finder,” he announced before they took another path and headed out of our hearing. The boy picked up a forked stick that my mother would have called a water witcher. “They use it to find things,” the boy said.
    Once we were alone, Robby started pointing to stuff like a tour guide and saying, “Hobo fish farm.” “Hobo bathtub.” “Hobo slide.”
    “We should move out here,” I said. “The hobos are having all the fun.”
    Every year on Halloween until I was about eleven, my mother sewed, glued, and/or papier-mâchéd me into some complicated, uncomfortable costume, and then if I complained that it was scratchy and I didn’t want to wear it, she would say, “Fine. You can just go as a hobo, like I always was.”
    “What is a hobo, exactly?” Robby asked.
    “What adults used to be for Halloween,” I said.
    He frowned and took aim at a huge fennel plant, then whacked it with a branch he’d picked up along the way. The trees were green overhead now, and all the color was coming back into the world. “Unless they were French,” he said. “I don’t think my mother was ever a
le
hobo.”
    “Why is it that no one ever says he’s going to be a homeless person for Halloween?” I asked. “Or an illegal alien?”
    “Why can you be a pirate and not a Nazi?” Robby asked, using his branch as a tester for water depth. We were standing on the edge of a nice round virgin pool, green-rimmed and flecked with water skaters. A sun-bleached log formed a picturesque bridge, which Robby began to cross.
    We weren’t far now, it occurred to me, from the hammock.
    “You know what?” I said. “You won’t believe the hobo bed I found in here the last time I was hiking.”
    “Ew,” Robby said.
    “No,” I said. “It was a hammock, not a mattress. I’ll show you.”
    Everything is farther the second time. I led him under countless oaks and over countless anthills, through dappled shade, gnat clouds, and stuff I really hoped wasn’t poison ivy. Finally, we stood at the edge of the wide, rippling water, and I sat down to remove my shoes, so Robby obediently did the same, and we went sloshing through cool water under a sky that felt enormous and unspoiled. I led Robby into the grotto and