growing in volume and intensity and feel the tug of the river redirecting his course.

Suddenly, he and his children were sliding with the waves through the gap, rocketing through white water and geysers of foam, their own happy screams joining those of the other floaters, the sun overhead as blinding as an arc welder’s torch.

The whirlpool by the deep cut under the embankment disappeared behind them, powerless to reach out and draw Nick’s family into its maw.

They dragged their tubes out on the shoals and paid a kid with a truck to drive them upstream so they could refloat the river. They stayed in the water until sunset, whipping through the rapids like old pros. At the end of the day, Nick was glowing with sunburn, his hair and oversize boxing trunks gritty with sand, his heart swelling with pride in himself and in his children and the things he owned and the good life he had been able to provide for his family.

They ate the cake and peach ice cream on a blanket next to the river while the sun burned away to a tiny spark inside rain clouds in the west. He could smell the odor of charcoal lighter and meat fires on the breeze, and see Japanese lanterns strung through his neighbor’s trees and hear music from a lawn party someone was hosting on the opposite side of the river. The summer light was trapped high in the sky, as though nature had set its own rules into abeyance. Somehow the season had become eternal, and somehow all of Nick’s concerns with mortality had been emptied from his life.

He walked his children back up the stone steps to his house, then went into his office, removed the manila folder of photographs from his desk, and picked up a can of charcoal lighter and a book of matches from beside his barbecue pit. When he returned to the riverbank, the sky was purple, the sky filled with birds that seemed to have no place to land, and he thought he smelled gas in the trees. The surface of the river seemed thicker, its depths colder. The blue-green lawn of the house across the water was now littered with beer cups and paper plates, the band still playing, like a radio someone had forgotten to turn off.

The sunburn on his face and under his armpits ached miserably. He pulled the photos from the envelope, rolled them into a cone, and squirted charcoal lighter along their sides and edges. When he struck a paper match and touched it to the fluid, the fire crawled quickly up the cone to his fingers. He tried to separate the photos and keep them burning without dropping them or injuring his hand. Instead, they spilled into the grass, the faces of all the women and girls staring up at him, the heat blackening the paper in the center, curling the photos’ edges, dissolving hair and tissue and eyes and teeth inside a chemical flame.

The odor of burned hair on the backs of his hands rose into his face, and in his head he saw an oven in southwest Poland, its iron door yawning open, and inside the oven he saw the barest puff of wind crumble the remains of his daughters into ash.

A HISPANIC MAN had called in a 911 on an injured or drunk man stumbling around by the side of the state highway in the dark.

“Is this man a hitchhiker?” the dispatcher asked.

“No, he’s by a car. He’s falling down.”

“Has he been struck by a vehicle?”

“How do I know? He ain’t in good shape, that’s for sure. He’s trying to get in the car. There he goes again.”

“Goes where?”

“On the ground. I take that back. He’s up again and crawling inside, Jesus, a truck just went roaring by. The guy’s gonna get mashed.”

“Give me your location again.”

The caller gave the number on a mile marker. But evidently, in the poor light, he read the numerals wrong, and the deputy who was dispatched to the scene found only an empty stretch of highway, tumbleweed bouncing across the center stripe.

AFTER HACKBERRY HOLLAND had gotten the name of Pete Flores from Ouzel Flagler, he’d called the electric cooperative and been told a P. J. Flores was a member of the co-op and could be found up a dirt road fifteen miles from the county seat, living in a house where the electricity was scheduled to be cut off in three days for nonpayment of service.

It