Downstream, their uncle Wallace sat with his watercolors and a pad of stiff, thick paper onto which he was transferring the creek, the trees, the mountains. Where the sun glinted off water and rocks, he left tiny voids of white. He was conscious of nothing but the movement of his eyes and brush. When he painted, he had no memory of ever having received two small wards, of having released them into the wilderness like a pair of dogs trusted to return eventually. If he worried about the children, he could not paint, and so he didn’t worry.
Still farther downstream, in the ancient glacial lake bed where Missoula sat, near the lower reaches of this creek, the Rattlesnake, was a gabled Queen Anne house with a screened porch and a round turret. Its inhabitants were Wallace and the twins and, most days, Berit, doing her best to stave off squalor. Though the exterior was shabbily kept, with flaking paint and missing shingles, and the furniture was old and threadbare, she made sure everything was at least well dusted, well scoured, well polished. Out back, a gray gelding called Fiddler had a one-stall barn and small paddock, and there was a cottage Wallace offered to his friends when they fought with their wives or ran short of money.
Past the house, the Rattlesnake flowed under the railway bridge to join the Clark Fork River as it swept through town and away to the northwest. By the time the Clark Fork ended in Lake Pend Oreille, the Blackfoot and Bitterroot and Thompson rivers had all joined, too, and from the lake they became the Columbia River, and from the Columbia, the Pacific.
Water was always on its way somewhere bigger, according to Wallace.
“Nothing’s bigger than the ocean, though,” Marian told him.
“The sky is,” said Wallace.
The twins knew if they kept going upstream they would find an old shack, then a stretch of white water, and then, best of all, a wrecked and rusted open-top Model T, which, depending on how high the creek was running, was sometimes on the shore and sometimes half submerged.
How the car had come to be in the creek was a mystery. The track the children followed was narrow and rutted, suitable only for travel by foot or horseback. Wallace didn’t know. Berit didn’t know. Wallace’s bohemian friends from the university made fanciful guesses but, in the end, didn’t know.
After Marian and Jamie passed the shack, they began to hurry, though both tried not to let on. Their hands stayed in their pockets, their postures suggested a leisurely stroll, but their legs moved faster. Each wanted to sit behind the Ford’s cracked wheel and pretend to drive. Whoever was not driving played at mechanic or bandit or servant, all fine roles but not as good as driver. Sometimes, for variety, the car was a ship, and they took turns pretending to be their father at the helm. Sometimes the ship sank, and they went with it.
They knew what people said about their father, and they were angry at him for making them contend with life as children of a famous coward. Their mother never figured into their games.
They rounded the last bend and took off running, swiping with skinny arms, shoving each other toward ruts and rocks （GUP GUP GUP）。 But when they burst out of the trees, instead of throwing themselves into the final sprint, both stopped.
The creek was high with snowmelt, and the car had been pulled deeper into the water, submerging the wheels and what was left of the floorboards. The remains of its front wheels had caught in the rocks, though not very securely; the body was swaying with the creek’s flow.
“It’ll be more like really driving the way it’s moving,” Marian said.
“Don’t you think it might get loose?” said Jamie.
“Scared?”
“No, but I don’t want to drown, neither.”
“You couldn’t drown. It’s just a creek.”
Jamie studied the water doubtfully. The creek’s slick brown middle was lumpy and choppy and whitecapped from submerged rocks and cold whip ends of currents snapping up underneath.
“We could go play in the shack instead,” he said.
“You’re scared,” said Marian.
For an answer, he splashed in. Water poured into his boots, but he pressed ahead, straining like a man dragging a boulder behind him. Ordinarily they swam naked, but the car was unfriendly to skin, all jagged metal and flaking rust, stiff shreds of leather and wisps of dank wool clinging to rusty springs. So: swamped boots, wet overalls. He lifted one heavy leg to the running board and clambered into the driver’s seat. The brake lever stuck up from the water like a reed.
Marian did not like the way the car shifted under Jamie’s slight weight, how white water was shouldering at the bumper the way Wallace did when his Cadillac got stuck in mud.