Matt's Arc

Chapter 1 of 7

Matt had been back in Malpais two weeks, and the porch by the river was the third place that week to turn him away. Six men sat on the long swing outside the tackle shop, drinking coffee, and they went quiet when he stepped up. He asked again about the girl. He gave her name, the year she left, the street she had lived on. The oldest man looked at his boots and said they didn't know any such girl, and would he please move along. Matt did not move. He pulled the money clip from his back pocket, the leather stamped with his own name, and set it on the swing's armrest. From inside the clip he lifted a green hair tie, flat from years of pressure between folded bills. He said she gave it to him the summer they were eleven. He said he had carried it since. The men looked at the tie the way people look at a stranger's medication. One of them told him a piece of elastic was not proof of anything. He tried the woman at the diner next. He told her he remembered the girl's chipped front tooth, the scar under her chin, the name of her dog. The woman wiped the counter in slow circles and said half the town could guess those things from an old yearbook. She said she had heard he was asking everywhere. She said it was starting to sound like a man hunting, not a man missing someone. She asked him to finish his coffee and go. He walked out along the water to the place he kept returning to, the wooden loveseat swing his grandfather had hung between two cottonwoods behind the small house where both rivers met. He and the girl had sat there a hundred afternoons. He sat now alone and understood what the town had been telling him. Memory was not evidence. The tie was not evidence. To every stranger in Malpais he was a tall man with a story and a scrap of elastic, and stories and scraps did not open doors. Something moved on the far bank. A wolf stood in the shallows, lean, watching him without fear. It drank, lifted its head, and held his eyes for a long moment before it turned back into the brush. Matt sat very still. The girl had told him once, on this same swing, that her mother's people kept to the ridge north of town and that the wolves there were counted as kin. He had not thought of the sentence in twenty years. He thought of it now. He put the hair tie back in the clip and the clip back in his pocket. He would stop trying to convince strangers. He would go to the ridge and find the people who would already know her name. He stood up from the swing. For the first time since he had come home, he knew exactly where to walk next.