The Crying Voice Near the Riverbank
People in town say you don’t walk the river when the air turns like glass. They say it in the lazy way of warnings passed down for too long, swatting a fly off their beer or tapping ash into a soda cap by the counter at Don Chema’s tienda. “When the crickets cut out,” one of the old fishermen told me once, pointing his chin at the bend everyone calls La Curva de los Pinos, “go home. Don’t look toward the water. Don’t answer it if it starts.” He didn’t say what would start. He didn’t have to. Everyone drifted their eyes to the window like they could already hear it slipping along the rocks.
Where the main road out of town clings to the river for a while, there’s a flat run of broken sidewalk and a scatter of concrete benches. The water fans out there, slow and wide, not quite a lake but big enough that night makes a pond of dark metal across it. Trucks push through with their yellow lights, tires worrying the cracked edge; on the other side, cane fields sit and breathe sweetness into the air. I’d been visiting my cousin for a week and walked that stretch most evenings after dinner. I told myself I preferred the river to the plaza—less noise, more sky. The old talk kept me company the way a song gets stuck in your head. Don’t look toward the water. Don’t answer it if it starts.
That night the heat broke just before ten. I knew it from the feel in my shirt, dry for the first time all day. The wind died with it, leaving an emptiness I could taste at the back of my throat. A stray dog had been padding a few steps ahead of me, nose down, too polite to beg. We passed the low wall where kids write their names with sharp stones, a faded shout in blue for Rulas y Nayeli ’05. Beyond that there’s the eucalyptus whose roots pull fissures from the concrete, and then the river opens, its smell the clean rot of wet leaves and fish.
It was only after the dog stopped that I realized what was wrong. The rasping choir in the trees had folded into silence. No crickets, no zzzk of cicadas. I could hear the tiny hiss of my own soles on grit. I could hear the water itself, slow and careful against the stones. Somewhere upstream a car door shut and a woman laughed, but it felt like a recording, too far in the wrong direction to belong to where I was. I told myself that if I counted to ten, the sound would come back and I could keep walking like nothing. I got to seven.
The crying started close to the bank, a sound like someone pinching back their breath, that wet, controlled kind of crying you do so it won’t come out ugly. It was right there, as natural as it would be to find a person kneeling with their hands in the water. I stepped to the low wall and peered down. The sodium lamp threw a sheet of light that cut a coin on the surface and left the rest in dark. Stones, reeds, a warped plastic bucket tipped in the mud—empty. The dog went rigid, his ears pricked too hard, too tidy for a mutt. I said, “¿Hola? ¿Todo bien?” My voice went flat in the stillness, like a pebble that skips once and sinks.
The crying did not break or turn. It moved. Not the way a sound drifts with the wind, but a neat relocation, a hand placing it three, maybe four meters down the bank. I shifted to keep it in front of me, and it slid again—further now, to the mouth of the culvert where a trickle slid from behind the cane. I walked a few steps, not fast. The dog refused to come, lowering himself to the ground like the shade had weight. “Señora,” I tried, the word tugging at my childhood manners by itself. “¿Necesita ayuda?” The crying thinned, not louder or softer, but stretched somehow, as if the water had drawn it long.
Every time I put my eyes on the place I thought it must be, it stepped sideways, ten meters, twenty, never rushing, only slipping away to a new corner as neat as a secret. At the bend by the eucalyptus, I lost the trick of believing it belonged to one spot. It was at the reeds. It was under the old footbridge with the missing rail. It was a few steps behind me too, up by the chain-link fence that keeps you from the cane. I felt it in my left ear and in the hollow under my right eye at the same time, and I turned in a clumsy circle that made my shadow sway on the wall. “¿Quién está llorando?” I asked. It felt like the wrong way to say it, like the words had a taste they shouldn’t have. The dog got up without looking at me and trotted back the way we’d come, a soft steady adiós that made me angry for a half-breath the way a child is angry when left alone, then something colder.
There were no other people on the road. A single moto passed at a distance, its rider’s shirt flapping, and the puttering sound refused to spill into where I stood. The surface of the river shrugged once then stilled, as if the breath of the person crying had ruffled it and settled. I eased down the three concrete steps to the hard-packed sand. The fine grit whispered under my shoes. In the exposed strip near the waterline, there were heron prints like arrows and the crescent cuts of a dog’s nails. My light from the streetlamp put a trembling ladder across the water, and the crying threaded through its rungs like it wanted me to see where it knotted.
“No vengo a molestar,” I said because silence was starting to feel like consent. The air had weight. It pressed against my ears until I swallowed and felt something click and release. The crying had words in it now, but they weren’t words with endings or beginnings—breath hitching into an almost-syllable, then turning back. Not a child’s voice. Not the gripe of a drunk. Not the broken scrape of a cat in heat either. It wasn’t like anything I knew, except the particular way an adult tries not to cry in public. I took a step along the bank, following nothing, and it took a step ahead of me without moving, now calling from the stretch that curved out of sight.
The reeds clicked once. There was no wind. It reminded me of when you touch a tendon and your toe jumps. I stopped. In the place where the reeds thinned to a mouth of stones, a person stood ankle-deep at the edge, not moving. Their shirt was pale, or else the light bleached it to pale, and their sleeves hung with the seam turned toward me. The water at their shins made a dark cut on the fabric that climbed and fell with the tiny lap of the river. I couldn’t make out the hair. They weren’t turned exactly away, but not toward me either, their head set at a wrong angle where you think they must be listening to something else. The crying kept on in that same, even way, but it didn’t feel like it came from the figure’s open mouth. I say open because my mind filled in what I couldn’t see: the soft weight of it, the set feel of the teeth. What I actually saw was a pale head at the edge of the water and a body that didn’t shift under the small movements of the river.
Sometimes fear is a fast thing, the hit that sends you running. This wasn’t that. This fear came slow, leaf by leaf. I thought, if I say “Señor” and not “Señora,” will that be worse? I thought, if I name them, they are a person and then I must go to them. I thought of the old fisherman tapping ash into the cap, how he never said who was crying, only that when the air turns still you go home. I didn’t want to go down there and I didn’t want to turn my back to climb the three steps either, and so I stood with the ridiculous hot knowledge of my heartbeat in my gums. The figure’s calves did not tremble from the cold water. No steam lifted from their clothes. I could smell the rank sweetness that the river gives off when it turns its silt over to itself.
Somewhere on the highway a semi took the curve, laying on a long horn for a car that didn’t move. The sound reached us late and wrong, like a train in a dream, and in that second the figure changed—not by any motion I caught, only by not being in the place inside my mind where I saw them. The horn cut, and when the quiet came back and filled the gap, there was only the ladder of light and the reeds with their thin, careful clicking. The crying didn’t stop. It changed its distance, as if whoever made it had bent over a cupped pair of hands and called the sound into them, and then let it travel. It moved to the culvert again, no, to the low stones by the bridge, no, it was at my back at the fence, no, it was inside the space held open between my two feet. I took a step back that I don’t remember deciding to take, and my heel found the bottom stair, and I climbed them as if the steps could finish me some place else than where I was.
On the road again, the air felt thin. There was a burr to it, like the night had something caught in its throat. I walked, not running, careful to put my feet where my eyes already knew the ground. In the slush of dust that collects at the edge of the asphalt, I saw them: wet footprints, fresh enough to hold a rim. Bare, adult, toes splayed a little as if from silt. The pads sat firm, a shade darker than the powdered line of the shoulder. They came up from the bank between the eucalyptus roots and the lamplight and stepped onto the road. I could see six, seven, eight of them in a soft curve, each one shining at its edge where the streetlight touched the wet.
I counted without wanting to. Ten, eleven, twelve—the shape of the arch in the last one like the smile of a small animal’s jaw. They didn’t turn back to the water. They didn’t angle away into the cane. They led up to the place where I stood and stopped, the last print so close that when I looked down I could have put my own foot into it, could have borrowed its path. A single leaf had stuck to the ball of the foot and lay there like a tongue. While I watched, the sharp border of water and dust at the edges eased in a fraction and dulled. I put my hands into my pockets and felt nothing but my own heat. Somewhere in the reeds, a single insect remembered itself and rasped out one broken syllable. The other sounds never came back.
