Sam wrapped the woman in a scratchy green blanket, and Carla watched her eyes close briefly, pressed together in a mass of wrinkles. The woman’s eyes opened suddenly, fixing Carla in their gaze, and the sudden eye contact startled Carla so much she nearly fell out of the boat.
Carla did not know how to feel, and so she just felt guilty, as she always had. She moved to sit beside the woman, and she was rendered helpless as usual by the sheer amount of the world’s heartbreak. She was powerless against this tide: wave after wave of cruelty and sadness. What could a single person do? Carla had done nothing but isolate herself, but now she leaned her shoulder against the woman’s, touching but just barely, a point of human contact. The sound of Carla’s feet on the bottom of the boat was hollow, and it echoed up her legs, shivering into the joints of her knees and hips.
Sam said nothing, steering gravely from the back. Whenever they saw a new group of people, he drew the boat alongside them and made sure they were safe, that they weren’t experiencing medical emergencies. He gave them bottled water and granola bars and held their babies for them. Carla watched how he nodded while he listened, head bent toward the people. He, too, was shocked by the suffering. Sweat beaded above his red eyebrows, a sheen slicking his entire freckled face. Carla hoped he’d put on sunscreen.
She had not known so many people were in the Hill Country, or that they were so different from her. They seemed from another time, standing on the banks in their bare feet, drawn to the river by the spectacle of the boat, the soft whir of the outboard motor a snake charmer’s song. Some lacked teeth and one lacked a right hand and some were in wheelchairs and on crutches and others sucked at inhalers and others were covered in sores like a pox and some had eyes swollen shut. The farther the boat went downriver, the more Carla looked, and the worse the people got, until Carla thought that the Colorado was some sort of river Styx and the soldier some sort of Charon. Some she could see take their first steps to the edge of the water; some had feet sunk into the mud, as if they had been standing, waiting, for a very long time. Some looked at the johnboat and its occupants with hopeful eyes, some cynically, some blankly, tired and dead-eyed from what they had seen.
What had they seen? The storm had been odd, revealing how tenuous the layer of civilization stretched over the world was. Next to Carla, the woman began to shiver, even though it was warm, the humidity its own kind of blanket. Carla, in a move that surprised herself, put an arm around the woman’s shoulder.
“She’s in shock,” the soldier said, as if the woman weren’t there. “She’ll need a doctor when we get back.”
Carla wondered where they were getting back to, though she said nothing. She was unsure about the soldier’s mission in general. He seemed to be intent on finding Boyd, but that could hardly be the goal of the U.S. National Guard. He seemed to have a lot of autonomy and little oversight. If he were a different man, a man with a scarier temperament, the type of man Carla was used to, then he could do some real damage out here with the full authority of the U.S. military. Instead, he was like some kind of benign helper, traveling up and down the river and distributing bottled water but no real aid, letting people know that civilization was on its way.
After a while: “How do you know Boyd?”
“I’m her neighbor.”
The soldier was quiet. He already knew this. “Where do you think her friend is? The one she was following?”
Carla had tried to tell him that she had no idea. “I’m not sure.”
“She okay, you think? She seemed pretty determined when I saw her.”
Carla turned to look at him, lifting her chin stiffly over her shoulder. “I don’t have any idea what she ran into. But Boyd can take care of herself. Boyd”—Carla hated to admit it—“Boyd is pretty resourceful.”
The soldier nodded. Carla guessed that he was twenty-two, twenty-three tops, a baby. “So you think she’s still alive?”
Carla blinked, drawing her chin back. “Alive? Why wouldn’t she be alive?”
Sam tilted his head, wanting to say more than he ended up saying. “A lot of people aren’t.” He was quiet again, deciding what to say. “This storm, well—I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Carla wanted to tell him to give it another twenty years. She didn’t trust the absolutes of the young. They were uninformed, didn’t have enough experience. “Okay.”
He went on, “Yesterday—” He let the word hang there a minute. “Yesterday, I pulled two children out of a basement. A boy and a girl.”
“Then you’re a hero.”
“No. We were too late. They didn’t make it.”
The three of them were quiet, listening to the outboard motor and the velvet sounds of water. Carla was shocked by the story of the dead children and turned this new information over in her mind.
The old woman, shivering in her army blanket, turned to Carla. “They’re not the only ones either.”
Carla, surprised to hear the woman’s voice, met Sam’s gaze. He felt the same way. After a minute, he looked back at the swollen river, and Carla, surprised at their connection, settled back into her seat, looking at the water with fresh eyes.
They watched the banks, avoiding the trees in the river. After another half hour, they ran out of bottled water and granola bars and no longer stopped for every group of storm refugees emerging from the wilderness. The soldier stopped for the infirm ones and rendered whatever medical attention he could, but they should have turned back by now. There was no point in their being on the water any longer; they should go back for more supplies, more men, more boats. It occurred to Carla that this was hardly a professional operation, and she realized suddenly that the boat was painted pale blue, almost white, no sort of army color at all. The gas can resting near the soldier’s foot was one you could buy at a convenience store: red plastic with a black-and-yellow spigot. Back at the commune, he’d said there was a list of the missing and he’d written Carla’s name down as if he were going to see if she was on it, but he had not checked his notebook or anything else since then, not with all these people, not even with the woman in the bottom of the boat. The National Guard hadn’t sent him upriver at all; he’d worn his uniform for some other reason, but she didn’t think he was a threat. She watched him; he was unaware that she’d realized he was not what he claimed to be.
The flies gathered around them now, sucking moisture from the corners of the old woman’s eyes, though the world was full of moisture. Carla waved the flies away from both of them, and finally the woman, who stared at something none of the rest of them could see, began to talk.
The woman took a deep breath, readying herself. “I’ve seen it flood before but not like this. No, not like this.”
Carla looked at her, surprised by the sudden conversation. She looked back at the impostor soldier, but his eyes were on the water.
“It always happens on Memorial Day weekend, too. I wonder how many people have died in Memorial Day floods around here. Hundreds, I bet, over the years.” The woman nodded to herself, a private gesture. “Imagine all those people nobody ever found. All on Memorial Day weekends, but all those weekends years apart.” Now she turned to Carla. “I ought to call my grandson. You got a phone?”
Carla shook her head—her phone was still at her house on River Road. But Sam the soldier fished his phone out of his pocket, keyed in his pass code, and handed it to the woman.
Carla watched her, unaware that there had been access to a phone this whole time. Whom did she call to report a rogue soldier?
The woman dialed and put the phone to her ear. Carla heard the muffled ring, how it went on for what seemed a good minute. The woman held out hope until the voice mail picked up, then she handed the phone back to the soldier without leaving a message. “Oh, well. He’s in Houston. Probably not even raining there. He’s probably out to breakfast.”
Carla didn’t have the heart to tell her that she had seen the news footage on the night of the wedding, that it had rained in Houston, too. Carla looked away
, looked at the gray people lined up on the banks, trying to pin down exactly why they made her nervous.
9:10 A.M.
Isaac tumbling end over end in the water, less than twenty-four hours after his car had entered the low-water crossing. This time his head went under and he couldn’t help it—he opened his mouth to breathe, and in the flood came. He knew from his hospital internship that he would not swallow too much of this—soon, his larynx would spasm and he would begin to choke, preventing the water from entering, but also preventing him from breathing. Next would come hypoxia, his brain and heart and all of his other tissues being starved of oxygen, the slow wasting of everything he had ever thought or learned, and that would be that for him—he would be just another piece of debris in the river.
After that first second of panic—the fall, the crash through the branches, the sinking into the water—he had become curiously detached. In that moment of panic, he had thought desperately of Boyd, with some odd belief that she could somehow help him. But the rational part of him knew better—whatever Boyd understood of the world, she was no superhero.
On one of his turns, his head breached the surface, and even in his detached state, even as he gasped for air, he was astonished to see the banks lined with people. He went under again quickly and didn’t trust what he had seen. There had been so many—hundreds, even. And something about them was weird, was off, but he thought no more about them, preoccupied instead by the idea that he was drowning and by his curiosity about this process.
He was trying to swim but he couldn’t. He had stopped turning, but he was still being pushed by the current: as he was swept forward, he was also swept under. Mostly, he tried to push himself to the surface, but this did little good. And there were things in the water with him—an unbelievable number of boat hulls and rafts, tarps and buoys and furniture, and at one point something huge bumped into him, and in the murk of the water, he thought it was a cow, but could not tell if it was dead or living.
He didn’t know if he would lose consciousness before his larynx spasmed, but he knew he was close to something. What was happening was untenable—he could not continue to float on unharmed and under the water. What would happen when he lost consciousness? Would he know the moment when his soul or spirit or consciousness left his body?
How odd it was to lack emotion in such a circumstance. The only thing that made him feel anything at all was Boyd. He remembered the way he had looked forward to the comfort of this summer, to the time that they would have together. He remembered the light movements of her wrist as she had shaken the gold pan, the look on her face when she had palmed the small nugget. This was the real loss, he knew—not any fear about death or pain, just the end of possibility, all of those years left to them. Years of what? He did not know if they would have ended up together. But there would have been years of their both being out there in the same universe, years of hope and potential. If Boyd died, what a hole she would leave in his world. He couldn’t help but wonder what his loss might mean to her, and this also made him sad—that he would never know.
The current swept him upward suddenly, some accident of river topography. His face above water again, his mouth open, sucking in as much air as he could. His eyes open, too, and he was shocked to see that the people on the bank were now in the water, and before he went under again, he was dismayed to see their arms extended, as if they were reaching for him.
9:15 A.M.
Boyd, wondering if she had finally gone crazy, doubting what she had felt. Now Isaac was gone, as if he had never needed her at all, as if she had imagined all of it: the pressure on her chest, the feeling of being wet. A distressing emptiness in the wake of that feeling, but Lily was before her, so Boyd shook her head and turned her attention to the girl, though Isaac never left the back of her mind.
In the clearing, the light played over Lily’s face. The child couldn’t yet talk, but when she could—Boyd hesitated, because she didn’t know what would happen then. But she wanted to be there because she wanted to protect Lily. The world would try to claim her, and Boyd would be the only one who understood. Boyd’s mother had tried to help once she’d understood how the press of the world hurt Boyd, but by then it had almost been too late. Boyd would never be comfortable in any crowd, would certainly never be comfortable living in a city.
Who would take care of Lily? Boyd could not discern any answers, even after feeling for them. She had seen the vision of the trailer tumbling downstream, had seen the meals that the mother had prepared, but in these visions she had seen no other person present, no relative, no weekend father. This was not to say that there wasn’t one—after the storm a person might come forward. Boyd didn’t know what happened to unclaimed children, whether the law said that they went into the foster care system. But already Boyd was reordering her life: she would bring the child home to River Road, setting up a crib in her childhood bedroom.
As she considered all of this, she moved forward, still guided toward the river and to Isaac, still feeling that sense of urgency, but now, somehow, the feeling was muted. Whatever would happen had happened, and now they were living in the aftermath.
Somebody stepped in front of her, and Boyd was so startled that she almost dropped Lily. She had not realized that anyone was there, had not felt the person, had not sensed the person. Had she been so preoccupied with her own thoughts? Lily screeched in unhappiness; the stop had been abrupt.
Then Boyd saw what was before her, who had interrupted their pleasant reverie. It took her a minute to place the blouse with its cat’s-head buttons, the old jeans, and the mud-encrusted Nike, and at last she looked into the face of the scarecrow she had made in the dry spring season, which already seemed so long ago. The face was surprisingly ordinary to Boyd: a girl in the last throes of girlhood, with red hair and gray eyes, but Boyd blinked when she looked at those gray eyes, which held such a storm. The scarecrow shed straw, though a body was inside the clothes. Its head swiveled to look at the baby, and Boyd felt its absolute hunger, the need to consume. Boyd let out a breath, remembering the fingers of river water on her ankle, and how the river had pulled her, had tried to take her under in the space where the bridge had once stood.
Angie Mason was not yet shed of the scarecrow, of the part of the world that had animated her. Some straw still clung to her forearms, to her ankles where they snaked out of her pant legs, placed there by Boyd in the late drought. The girl was also the one in the bed, risen but not yet whole, the girl Boyd had wished to return to her mother. The girl reached for Boyd, and Boyd stepped back. If Angie reached her—if Angie reached Lily—it would be as if Boyd were saving something drowning. It would pull her under, and she would never resurface.
She clutched Lily to her chest and ran. Behind her, footfalls. Two feet and one shoe. She smelled the river ahead of her, and she didn’t know why she ran, except that she needed to.
Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here
This Is All There Is
Carl Sagan, in Pale Blue Dot, referencing Earth in a photo from Voyager 1:
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
9:20 A.M.
Kevin inched his way down the wall of the mine shaft, using his fingers and toes to bear his weight for as long as he could. He couldn’t put too much pressure on the rope around his waist; he didn’t know how much Lucy Maud could hold. He didn’t know h
ow she was going to be able to pull two men up. He shouldn’t have come down here. There was zero guarantee that he would come back up.
He’d been able to call Emily from Allen Potivar’s house, and she’d been upset, which was understandable: he’d left to go to a rehearsal dinner and a wedding and he’d now been gone three nights. Also, he was with his ex-wife, which bothered Emily, and he didn’t know that it should, because they were two different people and they fulfilled two different roles in his life, and he didn’t think Emily should be jealous just because he thought Lucy Maud was a good mother and also a decent person to be around—“She got shit done,” as he put it. He did think Lucy Maud might have a reason to be upset because what he got from Emily was that she was attractive, young, and small and a bit edgy, and also, she was brilliant, not just graduate-student brilliant, but actual brilliant, her obsessions with Iphigenia, Clytemnestra, and Agamemnon’s House of Atreus wound around her like so much stardust, and that—well, that attracted Kevin very much. She and Lucy Maud occupied different spots in heart and mind for him; he wished it were in the nature of women to understand this about men.
His face pressed against the rock as he climbed down, and it was cool and gritty on his cheek. He guessed that he was about ten feet down. Any second now and he would lose his foothold. He didn’t know what he would find down here, nor how high the water had risen. He feared the drop when the shaft opened into the room: he would have to let go, hoping Lucy Maud could handle the sudden yank on the line, not knowing what he would land on, or whether he’d land in water. This last possibility scared him the most—water underground seemed like a horrible and dangerous thing. What if he was swept away and pinned somewhere, in some low place with no air pockets?
He reached it, the end of the shaft. He stretched his foot to find the next toehold and there was empty air. He closed his eyes and breathed in, cheek against the wall, smelling the wet earth in his nostrils, feeling the grit underneath his fingertips. Such a leap of faith this was—he’d either end up submerged in cave water or crumpled on the ground.
Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here Page 25