The Late Bloomer

by Falkin, Mark;

  Really what I was on that morning was a heartbroken and stressed-out trombonist.

  So, I keep holding it in. I stifle a cough, feel my face go red, ropey veins popping out on my neck. I’m listening, lungs full of smoke, eyes toggling.

  At first, I thought they were testing the tornado sirens. The sounds started with this low shuddering boom, then came a wailing siren. A bomb blast followed immediately by sirens? Something over at the military installation, Camp Mabry? They do battle reenactments over there. But at dawn? Couldn’t be. No storm, no bomb, no war games. Had to be a test. But why at the stroke of dawn, waking up the city? Can’t be.

  Within seconds, the sound became so loud that I coughed out the smoke and stood up on the boulder. Smoke wisped above my head. I faced west, looking out over Lake Austin. What was called Lake Austin was really the dammed up Lower Colorado River. Moving south beyond Lady Bird Lake, the river flowed southeast through LaGrange, Bay City, to the Gulf of Mexico, dumping into the Matagorda Bay between Corpus and Galveston. The sound came from the downriver direction, my left. And the sound now, though constant and siren-like, was the deep and mournful tone of what I thought were the sounds made by whales. Whales in extremis.

  Whale sounds. In Austin, Texas.

  More than whale sounds. Otherworldly sounds; countless whales not just moaning and sighing and singing, but crying out.

  Screaming.

  I heard a distant tinny crash. To the upriver right, on the Pennybaker Bridge, this big rust-colored double arc, there are flames. So far away that it looks like an orange wink between two dots. The dots were cars and the fire bloomed. Had to be a big wreck to create a fire I could see from miles away. The sounds waned then fell off as quickly as they had come. The arc of first light was just up in the east, soon to be a red ball hanging next to the University of Texas clock tower like a counterpoint. Muscles in my shoulders relaxed from being hunched against the sound. I looked at the pipe in my hand, incredulous. What am I smoking, my God?

  I closed my eyes and shook my head with vigor to clear it. Surely, I was hearing and seeing things.

  Kept my eyes closed for a beat, another.

  A hawk cried down in the valley. I felt the breeze on my cheeks. I heard the whelming hum of a waking city. With your eyes closed you can really hear it all. The metallic clacks and low roar of a city all around you.

  I opened my eyes. Down on the bridge there was a line of smoke rising to the sky and in the distance I heard emergency sirens. Car and home alarms everywhere.

  Now something caught my eye to my left. It looked like a ripple coming up the river.

  Slowly fetching upriver, maybe five feet high, stretched entirely across in an even line. Weird because the Colorado is dammed in several places between here and Matagorda, including the big one right down there, the Tom Miller Dam. I’d kayaked around Red Bud Isle often with Martin and Johnny. Tom Miller is pretty high, maybe one hundred feet.

  Coming. Close, close, close.

  Trying to beat it, I jumped down from the boulder and ran up the rutted stone trail to the limestone overlook and watched it come. Riding, gliding on top of it was a large, pointed shadow. I glanced up to see what kind of cloud made that shape, moved that fast. Nothing in the sky but dawn’s blue.

  The wave rolled past. It lapped up onto the straight-edged shorelines. The water swept over jutting docks, leapt up and collapsed onto the golf-green yards, the water’s-edge swimming pools, the driveways and outlooks where cocktail parties were had.

  It just rolled by—so quiet. The shore got wet, the docks rose and fell, nothing broke, no noise.

  On it went toward the bridge with the line of smoke fingering the sky like calligraphy.

  As that wave came, I noticed a balding man across the lake walking out in his tighties. Skinny guy, knobby knees and elbows with a pot-belly. Stood out in his yard with his arms crossed. The water spread across his grass and must have inched to his toes because he backed up a step.

  Here’s where my heart begins to race.

  I’m really wishing I’d not come up here to toke as I told myself I needed to stop doing. Mr. English knew I was habitually smoking. He brings out the truth in me, even now, as I talk this book out, the very act of doing this the only thing keeping me sane.

  His body looking the size of an apple stem from way up here, the man lifted his chin to look up at me. When his face locked on to mine, he waved at me real excitedly like a little kid who recognized me and was about to go down a big slide. Kind of a hey, watch me! I could just make out his smile. It was grotesque and wild and I turned my face away.

  What I saw fifty yards up the path was what looked to be a purple-green (scaly?) firehose being pulled into the brush, a hose that tapered and ended in a black tip that swayed and flicked before it disappeared. Much like a tail.

  I blinked. I swallowed hard.

  When I looked back down at the man, he was returning to his house. I’m staring down at his yard and thinking, what the hell have I just seen? when I hear a pop and see a flash in the grass. A firework-sounding pop that echoes up the ridge. I know it’s a gunshot, having been out with Martin pheasant hunting twice, neither time liking it.

  That flash in the grass, that faraway pop. It came from that guy’s house.

  Granted: a little high, but not stoned. The weed’s not that good. Stuff me and Bastian grew ourselves and we don’t know what we’re doing at all. Yet I’m reeling. Did I just see a twenty-five-foot-long tail belonging to fuck-knows-what slither into the cedar pines and that man way down there wave at me and then go inside and shoot a gun? Did I just hear that huge sound at daybreak?

  That sound. The thing swelled, crescendoed, then wound down beyond hearing, yet I knew it didn’t stop. It had moved on. Like a siren, turning its blare at you, then away. Like a wave.

  Car wrecks happen on bridges. Emergency sirens come with rush hour. But this rolling, shadowed wave? This waving dude? His gun’s report. Indeed, what did it report? It reminded me very much of a race’s starting gun.

  Oh, how prescient. Because I haven’t stopped running since.

  And that wave? A tiny tsunami, the aftershock of a giant heave. But I hadn’t felt an earthquake. Even if that was the cause, how in the hell did that wave come here from the sea? All the way up the Colorado, hundreds of dammed-up miles?

  How would I assume it came from the sea? It just felt that way. No matter how improbable it was for me to be standing at Mount Bonnell in Austin, central Texas, to have experienced what I did, I did. And something deep within me knew—down there in the “mandala of my solar plexus,” what Mr. English called it, my visceral reaction—it came from the sea. Every instinct cried out that truth.

  It did. It came from the sea. I know, sounds like a fifties horror film. But what proceeded was exactly that, and worse because it didn’t end, hasn’t ended, the terror. The not knowing, which is so much worse than knowing. Things being over, as awful as the over is, is the better place to be. I know that’s true if I know nothing else. Because right now I really don’t know what’s going to happen to me, but I know it’s a when, not if. And that’s the terror.

  I wasn’t late for school, but a tight panic in my chest made me feel like I was late. The eeriness of faraway sirens and the otherwise quiet of the mountain pervaded, spooked me, and I grabbed my bag of shake, stuffed it, my lighter, and pipe into my pockets as I ran past the viewing platform to the stone stairs.

  I remember looking at my watch, 7:47, and I thought: airplane preparing for takeoff. That’s what I did. One hundred limestone stairs, burnished by time and many soles. Flying down those steps two at a time, my hand on the rail running down the middle, a canopy of oaks forming a tunnel which would lead me down into another world, my life as I knew it not only altered, but erased.

  Normally, in a half hour or so, people, alone or breathlessly yammering with a friend, wo
uld be running these stairs. The moms in their tight lycras. Tourists mounting the steps, looking up to see how far they still had to go and would-it-be-worth-it on their faces.

  These people weren’t coming today.

  I’d be hearing the marching band practicing soon. Hoped I would.

  Whatever buzz I had acquired was gone, my adrenalized blood having overwhelmed the THC. I had to get home. Though it was my job to take Johnny to middle school and on the way pick up his classmate Travis, a nice kid but a confirmed nose-picker, this wasn’t a regular day anymore. Friday’s morning rigmarole no longer applied.

  I ran down Mount Bonnell road to where my car was parked on a side street so as not to invite a cop’s attention. I jumped in my beater beige Accord, fading and peeling W window sticker from however-many-years ago included. Martin had agreed to give me his car if I’d pay for the amount insurance went up because a man-child with a nascent brain was its driver.

  The ignition keyed, I’m reversing, and immediately two police cars with sirens howling come whipping around the curve blowing by me. My heart thudded and rose in my throat as they came because of the old-world fears of being busted for having a baggie of shake and stinking paraphernalia on my person. So relieved when they blew past. Then it hit me why.

  They ignored some kid who, because he got kicked out of marching band despite being the key trombonist high-stepping on Friday nights, has been smoking bad grass before school lately, twice a week. They’re not stopping for that kid who works at the Dollar Tree to pay the man-child insurance premiums, that college-bound kid with the grades to qualify for automatic entry into UT, that kid with the sort-of girlfriend Kodie who also works at the Dollar Tree. Nobody of authority cares about that kid, won’t ever again. Not after what happened at dawn the day of.

  I snapped on the radio and found news-talk, expecting to hear bulletin voices. What I heard winding through the tony Balcones neighborhood of wide yawning lawns was a jolly jingle for some auto collision repair company. Then another for Thunder Cloud Subs. On every station an ad. No music, no talk. Not even on NPR carrier KUT, or the classical station, both airing calls for fundraising. No programming, no content. All smiles and jingles and shaking the moneymaker, we’ll be back in a moment after these brief words from our sponsor, nothing weird going on.

  In my rearview came a massive Suburban with blackout windows. It swerved around me and gunned it up the hill and gone. I gulped, put two hands on the wheel, and drove over to the right a bit. Another blackened SUV did the same thing, but this one honked once, then jerked around me.

  For a stretch there were no trees. I could see the whole sky. Though I didn’t know what was happening, I knew it was bad and I wondered how catastrophes happened on gorgeous blue-sky days like this, autumn crisp and perfect.

  At the first lighted intersection I get to, two cars are crumpled at front ends, steam hurling from under rent hoods, driver doors open. No drivers slumped in either car. As strange as this is, what’s more strange is that I’m the only other car here, save for yet another police car which just blows by.

  I pull over next to the coffee shop which is usually packed at this hour but which is deserted, no life but the neon blinking open sign in the shape of a mug. I flip on my hazards and walk over to the first hissing car I come to and peer inside. The door chime dings and the radio blares a jolly jingle. In the other car, a yippy little dog with a studded collar snarls at me, hunching down and baring its teeth.

  I considered the right thing to do here. Call it in? Nobody’s even here. No crowd streams from the coffeehouse to onlook. Nothing. Just this growling dog who now leaps at me, its teeth and nails scratching the window, its spit smearing the glass.

  Up the street I see a blue city bus parked at the side of the road atop the bridge crossing the MoPac expressway. Tall chain-link fencing curls over the pedestrian walkway.

  Dueling jingles going, apoplectic dog. I blinked my eyes hard at that fencing. It’s a couple hundred yards away and the sun is right there so I’m not sure, but what I think I’m seeing is something crawling, several somethings, crawling up the fence. From here it’s just black dots advancing upward.

  The way home is over the bridge so I run and jump back into my car and take off in that direction. In seconds I see that it’s people—people probably from the bus, which I see has its doors open—climbing the fence.

  Why in the hell are they climbing the fence?

  This sight made my heart thrash about inside me like it wanted out, that it knew something I didn’t yet and wanted no part.

  I stepped on the pedal, mounted the hill, engine roaring. Ten of them, giggling and laughing. I remember how confusing that was. I remember my mind doing flips and thinking to myself that I’d smoked someone else’s weed by accident and it was laced and now I’m seeing shit because this is insane, what I’m seeing. I jump out and yell up at them, “Hey! Hey!”

  None look down at me save one, a woman in green nurse scrubs. She looks down at me under her armpit as she reached up to get another hand hold of chain-link.

  The smile on her face, the wild glamour in her eyes.

  I remember how bright and insane her lipstick was, as if she’d applied it thickly just before departing the bus. I can imagine her giggling and huffing with delight on the bus, looking with wonder out the window at the MoPac below, applying her lipstick, laying it on so hard that it smears and then she rolls her lips over each other to spread it and gives these big satisfied smacks when done and she drops the lipstick and it rolls on the floor to the front of the bus, following her under the seats as she shuffles to the door.

  And I remember her wide eyes saying nothing but yes! Yes to what, I didn’t understand. I guess the look on my face questioned her. She nodded exuberantly. She reached out her hand and her eyebrows went convex with imploring.

  “Join us!” she yelled. The wind whipping her hair to and fro. She didn’t implore long before she was scaling again, and about to reach the part of the fence that curls back over the pedestrian walkway.

  “Hey! What are you doing?”

  Over the bus rattle I could hear them struggling with effort. These people were not young. A few were not thin. A couple of the men wore cheap suits and Florsheims which slipped in the chain-link diamonds. The driver was up there too, fat ass swaying back and forth with each frenetic step up, arms shaking from the effort of maintaining his girth against gravity. Their determination frightened me. I couldn’t wrap my head around what was happening. I didn’t have time. Everything I did was a reaction and my heart raced and my head cleared from any concerns other than the right now. That’s really where I still am today, except when I’m talking into this thing. I’m right now, past and future extending in both directions away from me, totally and equally unknowable.

  They climb and I watch, shouting, asking what’s going on, why. I ran to the bus door where I see a little girl, toddler age. She’d dropped her stuffed animal. I picked it up and tried to give it to her. She just looked at me.

  That’s when it really hit me. A mother climbing a fence over an expressway as her child stands abandoned in a bus door, the chug and exhaust of the bus and the expressway roar. This dead-eyed child.

  I had come down Mount Bonnell into a nightmare from which I would not escape. That’s what hit me with a flood of adrenaline flushing my brain and making me go a little weak in the legs, tingling at the extremities. I was in this now, whatever this was, until I was dead. Only then would it end.

  I thought my life had sucked before—unsure if Kodie felt about me the way I felt about her; getting kicked off the marching band squad (we were to play the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade!); Martin riding my ass; Mom not caring that he’s riding it, her disappointment in me; Dad two thousand miles away and caring even less; Mr. English so pissed at me that he’s no longer pressuring me to submit my stories to journals; the SATs coming up; a stack of
college applications on my desk.

  But now I would learn what fear was, as one of the younger men got to the top of the fence and sat in a crouch above MoPac and bobbed up and down as if he were attaining the momentum to—

  No.

  (I didn’t yell it. I thought it: [no!].)

  (Not a no for this man. A no that feared what this act meant.)

  — jump. Which he did. As if into a pool, a swan dive thirty feet down. He plummeted, I ran to the fence, heard tires screeching and I saw this man faceplant into the windshield of a swerving car. A doll crumpling, tossed, and car pulped.

  Yet the rest of them kept climbing.

  And a police car raced past this scene, too, followed by big black Suburbans, a black helicopter tracing the sky above them heading in the same direction.

  Then it’s the nurse who manages to get on top, having scratched herself bloody on the fence’s metal. She sits like a gargoyle right above me on the rounded top of the fence, bobbing in pre-dive. I shook my head fast, called out no and why and I cried out a wordless cry. She looked down at me and smiled that bright red smeared lipsticked smile, mouthing to me while vigorously nodding, it’s okay, it’s okay. Then she lifted her chin proudly, her eyes scanning the horizon, and jumped.

  Tires screeching with temerity and the metal crunching. I vomited.

  Remembering back now, what made me vomit was the sound that came from her as the first car hit her. It sounded like she had been punched in the stomach. Just had the wind knocked out of her. Whuh! Because I didn’t watch. I had turned my head and closed my eyes, but when I heard that sound along with the thud of her meat and bones slamming onto the vehicle. My mouth rushed with salt and I threw up and in there somewhere I cried but sucked it up quick.

  Though I don’t remember much after that until I got to my street, I do know that I had no qualm leaving that toddler. I left her on the MoPac pedestrian bridge, standing there continuing to watch the space in the blue autumn sky where her mother had just been.