The man stepped toward Kim and extended a hand. “National Guard, ma’am. How are you folks holding up out here?”
Carla saw in the base of the boat the cases of bottled water. He was here to help people, she realized, not to institute some sort of martial law.
Kim nodded. “We’re pulling through.” She jerked her chin back in the direction of the assembled crowd. “Everybody’s accounted for.” Now she saw Carla, making eye contact. “Plus one more.”
The soldier pulled a pen and a notebook from his pocket. “You’ve got an extra? We’re tracking down the missing. I’ll check if they’re on my list.”
Kim beckoned Carla forward with a twist of an outstretched palm. “Carla here showed up in the middle of the night last night.”
The soldier’s pen was ready at the notebook, but he paused at this information. “In the middle of the night?” He looked up at Kim, who was looking at Carla, and he followed the direction of Kim’s gaze until he and Carla were staring at each other, ten feet apart. Carla felt exposed, ridiculous. She crossed her arms in front of her, felt that this was too defensive a stance, and slid her hands into her pockets instead.
“I was looking for someone.” Carla didn’t want to tell the story; it wasn’t even entirely true, she realized. If she was looking for someone, why had she stopped? It hadn’t even occurred to her this morning to leave and start looking for Boyd. “I was lost,” she said, trying to circumvent the question. Then she wondered what she had told Kim the night before because she couldn’t now remember.
“Name?”
She didn’t want to give it to the soldier. “Carla Brownwood.”
He wrote it down. “I don’t think you’re one of the ones I’m looking for, but I’ll double-check.” He slid the pen and notebook back into his pocket. “It’s a mess out there. I’m impressed you guys came through so well, y’all being so close to the river.” He looked at the water’s edge, appraising. Carla saw that the river here seemed full but enclosed, as if it had never burst its banks, and the slope leading up from the water lacked the little ridges of detritus left behind when water retreated, curved deposits that always reminded Carla of rice paddies or the arched lines of topographical maps.
Kim smiled with her lips but not with her eyes. “No, we’ve had very minor damage. We lost part of a greenhouse from high wind, but that’s it. Well, and we’re a little muddy.” She looked down at her boots as if to demonstrate.
The soldier nodded, gaze distant. He was thinking about something else. After a minute, the distant gaze focused on Carla again. “You say you came in the middle of the night?”
Carla drew her chin back. “I don’t know what time it was.”
He considered this. “You drove?”
Now it would all come out. She looked at Kim, again trying to remember what she had told the women. Carla had done nothing wrong; why did she feel as if she were on trial? “No, I didn’t drive. I—I walked.”
“You walked.” He nodded as if this information wasn’t surprising at all. “From where?”
She rocked back on her heels. Everybody watched her now, all of the people she had met last night and this morning: Bess and Annie, and the two women in the bathroom with the purple Fabuloso. “From my house. On River Road.”
His eyebrows rose. “That bridge is out. How did you get all the way here? Or did you cross before the bridge fell?” Now he was talking to himself. “No. I would remember.”
She didn’t answer until he looked at her again and took a step toward her. He was not threatening her; something she’d said had interested him, though she didn’t know exactly what or why. “I followed someone. Down by the water. Across the dam.” He had said, No. I would remember.
He was taking more steps toward her, closing the distance. “Who did you follow?”
She stepped back. “My neighbor. A teenaged girl. Her name is Boyd.”
His lips parted and he drew in a breath. Carla could tell that he recognized Boyd’s name. Boyd was on the list of the missing. “Look, is there some place you and I could talk? Just for a minute?”
This place was not Carla’s, so she turned to Kim, and when she did, the soldier turned, too. Kim shrugged—No big deal—but as the people lined up behind her started to disperse, to go on about their daily business, they looked at Carla one last time, a new suspicion in their eyes. The morning sun rose in the sky, and the wet air hung heavy, the world’s new weight.
8:15 A.M.
The water had risen during the night, and Ruben King woke Lucy Maud up by shouting. The morning was cool. They were exposed on the ridge and the wind swept over her, the moisture in the air clinging to her skin. Ruben yelled again—“Hey! A little help?”—and she opened her eyes and struggled to place herself. The sunshine: unfamiliar. Clouds in a sky just beginning to take on the blue of day.
She heard another voice now, her twin sister, speaking quietly. Lucy Maud had been dreaming—about what? Something troubled her, some remnant of the dreamworld, and then she remembered the image in her dream. Boyd, the daughter she had carried for nearly ten months, three of those months over a brutal summer in a garage apartment in Austin with only a box fan and a swamp cooler as Kevin taught Greek to freshmen and worked on his dissertation on Linear B. Her own child—a part split off from her own body, the single most precious thing from a marriage whose loss she still mourned—lying on her back in a grave, loose clay and limestone piled above her. The dream had seemed so real, and Lucy Maud was having a hard time letting go of it. She sat up and dusted fine pebbles from the back of her hand.
“Are you still up there?” Ruben’s voice was small and far away.
Aunt Fern, in an orange plaid housedress and tennis shoes, was in front of Lucy Maud, and Lou was up beside Fern, black T-shirt and unflattering jeans showing off her middle-aged spread. Lucy Maud blinked at them.
“Are you going to help that man?” Fern asked. When Lucy Maud didn’t answer, Fern crouched beside her and took her shoulders. “Lucy Maud,” Fern said with total recognition, and Lucy Maud almost cried. Aunt Fern was lucid, her memory slipped back on track. Lou said that it often happened in the morning, when it was just the two of them in the house on the other side of the lake, after Lou had returned from her AA meetings. Fern looked at Lucy Maud, let go of her shoulders, and reached out a hand, as if that waif of a woman could pull Lucy Maud off the ground.
Lucy Maud took the hand and rose, putting most of her weight in her heels so she wouldn’t pull Aunt Fern over. Lou had also registered Fern’s lucidity and had visibly relaxed, a nervous awareness replaced by a slumping weariness. They were all tired; they were all too old for sleeping on the ground.
Fern watched Lucy Maud for a minute, making sure she was okay, then turned to lean over the mine shaft. Fern cupped her mouth with her hands to amplify the sound: “We’re all here. What do we need to do?”
A strangled noise from the bottom. Now Lucy Maud and Lou both leaned over, too, blocking out the light. Lucy Maud saw the flashlight’s beam on the wet limestone walls looked thin and weak. She didn’t know if it was because the morning sun was brighter in comparison or because the battery was wearing out, but the anemic light on the rock made her nervous.
The stone on which Ruben King had perched overnight was nearly submerged. The water lapped at his heels and toes, and he stood now, looking up at them from ten feet of open room and ten feet of narrowed shaft. They’d have to pull him up twenty feet.
Aunt Fern took a quick appraisal of the situation and said, “We’ll have to get a rope,” as if Lucy Maud had not suggested that same thing a few hours before. Lucy Maud found it hard not to roll her eyes.
“What are you going to do with a rope?” Ruben asked, eyeing the water that lapped at his shoes. “I don’t remember anything to tie it to. Are y’all going to pull me up?” His tone was doubtful, frustrated. “Call somebody to pull me out. Call the authorities. Someone with a winch.”
Lucy Maud could feel her blood pressur
e rise. Too many cooks. Stiff and achy after her night on the ground she rubbed sleep from her eyes and fished her phone from her pocket. But the battery was dead and she nearly chucked the phone down the shaft. “My phone is dead,” she told the other three. “Do any of you have a signal?”
Fern shook her head.
Lou shrugged. “I left it at home. I didn’t even think about it.”
Lucy Maud swallowed her frustration with a sigh that she made sure her twin sister heard. “Well, we sure could have used it.”
From the shaft, Ruben shouted, “I don’t know where my phone is. I haven’t seen it since yesterday.”
Now there was nothing to do but go for help. Lucy Maud could not drum up much sympathy; of the two people she was worried about, Ruben King was the least important. Her dream about Boyd troubled her. The Texas Hill Country was one of the friendliest places on earth—the first letters of the names of the streets in sequence in Fredericksburg even spelled out the word welcome—but some people everywhere waited for an anarchy, waited until nobody was looking so they could do all the things their hearts secretly desired. Lucy Maud was afraid Boyd had run into one of those people, a person who seemed normal when the world was normal, but who privately couldn’t wait for the world to slip. Lucy Maud had to figure out how to help Ruben because she needed to go find Boyd, though she didn’t know where to start.
8:30 A.M.
Boyd, now backpack-less, ruined clothes barely covering her body, set out across the open country once again. The high ground—the ridge on which she found herself after leaving the juniper grove—had been scoured in the night, and everywhere she marked the path of water, the power of gravity. She had no way of knowing about the destruction on the Blanco River, just a little way up the road. She was headed to a different river, a river that had been tamed by a series of dams that corralled the water into a succession of highland lakes. Here, on the ridge, the destruction was minor and could be tallied by what was missing—and not much had been here to begin with—instead of what was moved or broken or added.
But that scrubbed-clean feeling started to vanish as she made her way down into the valley, guided by some internal compass that pointed her to Isaac. At first, things looked not quite right: tree branches lying on the ground, leaves still fluttering as if they did not yet know that they had been separated from the trunk; a child’s pink plastic chair perfectly positioned and waiting for the missing little girl; a silverware drawer on its side in the mud, and over the forks and spoons and knives, a wild turkey, trotting. The bird was not afraid of Boyd, and she did not know if the bird didn’t react because the world was different after the storm or because she was different after the night spent underground. If the bird hadn’t turned its head a certain way as Boyd passed, she might have started to question her visibility, to wonder if her body had become as faded as her clothes.
She was pulled down, down from the high country to the riverbed, the pecan trees standing sentry in a nearly imperceptible grid, letting her know that here was the bottomland, the floodplain. Soon she would reach the river, but she knew that already: she could smell it, and she could see where the water had passed through. A stainless steel refrigerator lay on its side in the mud, sinking. She thought that in a day or so it would be submerged, the ground so soft, and then nobody would ever even know that it had been there. Only imagine: a family eating a picnic, a father and son hunting white-tailed deer, a kid on a four-wheeler. They would all be standing on top of a buried refrigerator and would never even know. Perhaps one day a metal detector might find it, and wouldn’t the excavator be surprised: Someone buried a refrigerator? She remembered Ruben King telling her that whenever archaeologists didn’t know what some artifact was for, they always said it was for a religious ritual: only think what crazy ritual could be invented to explain a buried refrigerator.
Now trees were on their sides, roots exposed, and in the canopies of the trees, which were also on the ground, were the contents of people’s lives. Everything paper had started to disintegrate; a flaky paste of off-white wrapped itself around branches and twigs. Blankets and sheets, shredded and dirty, caught as if somebody had made a bed there. She saw a toothbrush on the ground, and the toothbrush seemed to go with the blankets; perhaps they shared a provenance; perhaps they had come from the same source.
As she walked, her clothes fluttering around her, she remembered suddenly the ring she had taken from her mother’s bathroom. She had put the band of tricolored roses in her pocket only four nights ago, before she had pitched her tent with Isaac on the shore. Now she was certain that the ring had been lost, given what had transpired since then, both in the world and to her clothes. But when she felt her hip pocket, she felt the outline of the ring, and she slipped it on. It was the only thing in those pockets; her phone had been lost. It had been dead anyway. There was nobody to help her. She wondered whether her mother had yet noticed that she wasn’t at home. Oh, she thought with an uncharacteristic absentmindedness, her mother was probably worried. But Lucy Maud knew how Boyd was, that Boyd could take care of herself.
The ring was now on Boyd’s index finger; somehow she felt as if this would be safer. She held her hand before her face, palm out, examining the band that rested next to the tip of her thumb. What must her parents have once been like? Lucy Maud had been in high school when they met, Kevin finishing undergrad, and they had stayed together through her father’s PhD, through the first years at UT, all the way up through his tenure process. The family had crumbled in the associate professor years; when Kevin had celebrated his promotion to full professor, there had been two celebrations: one with his department, to which he’d taken the grad student, and one at the lake with his former family, with an H-E-B cake in the shape of a mortarboard with a tassel, even though that wasn’t quite right for the situation.
The ground sheared away—an old landslide—and Boyd had to climb down now, the wet limestone splintering under her hands. She would certainly meet the grad student at some point; the woman was to be her stepmother. Boyd thought the grad student was most likely pretty and stylish; Boyd thought this because the student was young, because her father had left her mother for her, and because her father had changed in the last year and a half, changed aesthetically. He’d turned in his old glasses with their nearly invisible frames for a dark, Buddy Holly–type pair. He’d started rolling his jeans at the ankles to show off his chukka boots. He’d attempted facial hair.
Ahead of Boyd, a house was caught in the debris—a single-wide trailer on its side, crumpled at one end. People were inside. She could not see them, or even sense and understand their emotions, as she had been accustomed to doing, but she could tell they were there, in the part of the trailer right before it crumpled, where the exterior was just beginning to bow. How did she know this? She stopped, unsure. This knowledge came as a surprise to her, as it was more than simply empathy. She looked around, trying out this newfound ability. This trailer had been in a hollow outside Kingsland until about two A.M. the night of the wedding. Boyd saw a shed and a four-wheeler next to it, and she knew those things still stood in the hollow outside Kingsland. She saw the trailer, too, how old it was, how it had once been derelict and a bobcat had found its way in through a hole in the floor, how it had been sold, and a woman had cleaned it up, had replaced the ratty carpet with linoleum, had scrubbed the walls and the counters. This woman was not the same woman who was now inside; Boyd could not seem to trace what had happened to the woman who had fixed up the trailer, only what had happened to the trailer itself. Wouldn’t the Kingsland woman be surprised that the result of her labors had landed here in the bottomland?
Boyd could see, too, what this bottomland had looked like before the pecan trees were planted: rolling, waist-high grass here where the blackland prairie of East Texas broke up at the foot of the hills. She had heard all her life that the mesquite trees in this area had been carried as seeds in cattle manure, but recently she’d read an article that claimed this was no
t true. Now she saw the cattle drives pass through this bottomland, stripping a path of grass and pounding the earth underneath, and now she saw the Comanche trading with the Spanish before the Germans even came.
The history she’d apprehended through books and through Ruben King’s stories now was so much more than just words on a page, and it came to her through a bodily knowledge and through a vision as if she were watching a movie. This movie now focused on a figure in the trailer, lying on the sodden floor, and on a baby, in a crib by the window, and Boyd imagined this baby watching her. Boyd raised her eyes to the window in question, seeing the blinds askew, but she could not see the baby that she knew was there.
The baby began to cry, and Boyd thought it sounded as if the baby was calling out to her, not as if it was in pain. She knew a woman was on the floor, but she also knew that the woman could not rise and help the child. The baby’s calling to Boyd was nearly unbearable, and she bit her lip in frustration.
No windows were open, and the trailer must be burning up. Who knew what it looked like on the inside, having tumbled down to the bottomland? What must the woman on the floor smell like now, in that heat and stifled air?
Boyd could not bear the crying. She moved toward the trailer. She put her hand on the tilted door and, fighting gravity, she yanked the door open.
8:35 A.M.
The soldier seemed like an ordinary guy. He just wore army fatigues. Even his hair wasn’t quite soldier-ish, too long around the ears, and an un-army-like shade of red.
He hadn’t taken Carla anywhere, just stepped to one side, while all the commune—she couldn’t shake that word—residents filed back to whatever jobs they had been doing before the soldier had landed on the beach as if it were Normandy.
Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here Page 22