He stood up, took his wife’s hand again, and nodded. Over there, under the shade of a maple tree, the young couple now sat at a table.
Past the park pavilion where children were gathered to buy ice cream at a concession window, their shrieks and cries echoing against the concrete, Brettigan and his wife monitored each other for balance as they walked forward, before descending the stairs leading to the base of the falls. Hearing birdsong, they both looked up to see a female cardinal hovering in the air above them and then landing on a branch, and above the cardinal…what was that? A hot-air balloon with rainbow colors on one side and a bearded man’s face on the other floated silently overhead, seemingly aloof and imperturbable.
“Look,” he said, as they stopped halfway down the stairs. He pointed at the balloon. “Aren’t there power lines around here?”
“Who’s the guy?”
“Who’s the guy who?”
“On the balloon. The face. It’s like an ad for something.” She held her head back, her right hand at her forehead, shielding her eyes from the sun.
Brettigan took off his glasses, breathed on the lenses before cleaning them on his shirtfront, wiped the sweat off his nose, and put the glasses back on as he said, “Jesus. That’s who it is.”
“That’s not Jesus,” Alma told him. “That’s the man on those, those cigarette papers. The ones you used to roll joints with. Remember? That guy? I can’t think of the brand. It’s been too long.”
“Zig-Zag,” Brettigan said loudly, still gazing at the hot-air balloon now drifting away in a northerly direction, obscured by trees. “Zig-Zag cigarette papers.” He thought for a moment. “What’s a hot-air balloon doing here? We’re close to the airport. That has to be completely illegal.”
“No.” Instead of shaking her head, she nodded. “It’s a good omen, don’t you think? That balloon? Come on.” She led him down the remaining steps, and they stood watching the falls for a few minutes before they turned and without speaking advanced down the pathway alongside the creek. Behind them and then on each side, the birds cried and sang as if they were announcing some important breaking news in bird-bulletins, some wonderful or terrible event that was about to happen and whose preview they had already seen.
Overhead, the illegal hot-air balloon advertising cigarette papers having drifted away, the trees on either side of Minnehaha Creek formed a canopy producing a shade so thick that Brettigan seemed to see dots of shadow wherever he turned his head, as one does with the onset of fever. Alongside Brettigan and his wife, the flowing water chuckled, and the still air had a supersaturated vegetative aroma with something angry and sour in it like the oxygen in a locker room after a losing game. A sparrow hopped from a maple tree to a blighted cedar, following them, it seemed, with interest. From a great distance came a low, thundering sound, the roar of an airplane clearing its throat, and the air moved, though not with wind, as the branches of the neighboring maples and poplars began to gesticulate in their direction—some kind of sign language, Brettigan suddenly thought, conveying secret information.
Alma turned to her left, took her hand from his, and, bending down, riffled her fingers in the creek water. “It’s not that cold,” she said, standing up and retaking his left hand in hers, the water from the creek and now from her hand wetting his fingers. They walked past a few other couples and some scattered children toward a slight leftward bend in the creek where a gap in the trees produced a thick rivulet of vertical sunlight, and after advancing into it, they were alone, standing in the brilliance produced by the absence above them both. Alma knelt, putting both hands in the flowing water, and Brettigan knelt down beside her. From his shirt pocket he removed a small hand mirror.
“What’s that?” she asked, nodding at it, the question directed not so much at the mirror’s existence as at its function. “You brought a mirror?”
“Take a look,” Brettigan said. Lowering the glass into the creek’s flowing water, he angled it so that he saw her face reflected, darkened and tinted by the moving current, which at first altered her expression so that she seemed to smile and produced a shimmering outline to her face, as if what he saw there had entered a time tunnel, a wormhole extended to the shadow side of an alternative universe where a previous Alma lived, no longer his wife but instead an anonymous beauty in blue jeans and penny loafers whom he had met at a college mixer in the university’s student union when he had walked up to her and said, “Wanna dance?” extending his hand as the bad local band had lurched into the opening chords of “Wild Horses.” She had nodded gamely before they nervously and urgently strolled toward the middle of the room where in the obscurity produced by the other dancers they would not be noticed. Instead of staggering around to the song’s shuffling lust-drugged rhythms, the anonymous girl who she then was had unexpectedly fallen into his arms as a refuge, before reaching around him in a clutching embrace as if she had known him all her life or somehow understood that she would know him for the rest of it, as was true now and would be forever.
It was her face from that dance that he saw gazing back at him from the hand mirror he had lowered into the flowing water of Minnehaha Creek, and now, with his sunhat fixed to the top of his head to protect his skin from the ultraviolet rays that inspired squamous cell cancers that were probably already taking root there, he drew his hand across the image of her nineteen-year-old face, touching the image, caressing it and washing it as she looked at him from the puzzled distance of forty-five years ago, and she smiled uncertainly, not exactly wanting to be a girl again, not now, not ever. Please stop. No, she didn’t want to be back there, her eyes said; she had been there, she had been young once, and now she wanted their precious daily lives unaltered, and she wanted Timothy, her son, to be safe and to be aboveground, somehow. This trick, this magic, had something decidedly terrible in it. The Fountain of Youth flowed only in one direction, toward you, with poison. You had to drink the poison to make it work. And as it did its work, it erased you. “What are you doing?” she cried out.
Brettigan turned to see Alma closing her eyes and then shaking her head to clear her thoughts, the age lines in her cheeks reinstated, the liver spots on the backs of her hands reappearing as soon as he looked down at them and as the music from the bad local band playing “Wild Horses” faded away. Turning her head slowly toward him, she said, “Something is wrong,” as she tried to stand up. In the static humming silence, the song of the birds now began to intrude, the show they had quieted themselves to watch being over.
“What is it?” he asked.
She stood momentarily before staggering a few steps backward, out of the direct rays of the sun. “I don’t feel well,” she told him, slurring the words. She bent, tilted, toward him. “Oh, Harry,” she said. He couldn’t help himself: he turned to the left to see the mirror he had abandoned in Minnehaha Creek, but of course Alma’s face wasn’t there anymore. It was beside him, her jaw working in spasmodic up-and-down movements. Seeming to recognize the trouble she was in, she raised her left arm around his neck, and she slurred, “Mister, do you love me?”