The Late Bloomer

by Falkin, Mark;

  I do remember the cemetery on the way home, the big one where Michener’s buried. The blond rays cutting through the trees to spotlight groupings of markers, the obtuse slants of the headstones’ shadows. And, though I thought nothing of it at the time because I was hauling ass home with more on my mind, now I remember seeing children meandering around in the parking lot of the little Montessori school across the street from the cemetery. Johnny went there for a couple of years. It’s a seventies strip mall converted into a school. Shops became classrooms. Oftentimes I saw them being led to the playground by their teachers, all walking in straight lines along the breezeways.

  But this morning there weren’t any teachers. The kids wandered around the parking lot looking dazed. The line of cars by the orange cones where the kids get dropped off stood still. An Odyssey had on hazards, the auto-sliding door wide open. A motionless woman’s arm hung out of the window of a silver Volvo midsize SUV.

  My street was partially blocked by a garbage truck. Being Friday morning, the city trucks should be rushing through the neighborhoods, their breaks squealing, their motors roaring, but this one on my street was stopped in the middle, its huge robotic arm frozen mid-grab. The doors of the truck were open and that beeping noise came from it. I could just squeeze by, my tire scraping the curb. As I got even with the truck’s cabin, I slowed. On the CB I heard a man’s voice screaming through static. I slowly slalomed down my street around felled trash containers, my teeth set on edge at the static-laced screams. Countless asynchronous sounds of car and home alarms filled the morning air now.

  In my car, the radio jingles had finally given way to someone speaking. The guy who normally read the morning headlines did so again but there was a personal, conversational tone to his voice. I turned it up. He said, something has happened this morning…everybody, something is definitely happening…this reporter can’t even begin to tell you what and I don’t even know if any of you are listening, or something like that. Then he said, “But something dire has befallen us and it isn’t just happening here in Austin. My station crew isn’t here. It’s just me. I don’t know where to begin and frankly I think I’m going to have to go. All I can tell you is that I’ve received reports that people are dying, and that there are mass numbers of accidents occurring, and, we, I don’t know if this is some sort of biochemical attack or a fast-acting virus…so this is probably my last broadcast for some time. I’m so sorry. I don’t know what else to say.” And that was it.

  Way up the street I see this man in gray coveralls and yellow reflective vest. A trash guy swaying curb to curb. I drive up slowly. He turns his head and there’s a rill of blood running down his face, staining his coverall, bright on his reflective vest.

  I asked if he was alright. My heart surged and snagged as I waited for the limping, bleeding, large garbage man to either answer me or lurch in my direction with his hands outstretched.

  What I really waited for in those seconds, I know now, was the smile. Would he smile or not.

  “Yeah, I just…hit my head. I got to get home. Don’t feel well.” He stopped walking and I stopped my car. “You know where home is?”

  “Yours?” I said out my window.

  “Uh-huh. Mine.” His voice, I remember, was higher in register than I figured for his size and it sounded injured. He was alone. Where were the other trash men?

  The one good thing about him was that his eyes weren’t wild and he wasn’t smiling.

  “No, sir. I’m sorry, I don’t.”

  “S’okay. I’ll find it. You need to go find yours.” He lifted his arm to point ahead as if he knew my home was down the street. He took a step closer to the car and I got a good look at his face. At the corners of his mouth, a white congealed spit seemed to keep his lips from moving fluidly. A step closer and I could see that the spit almost looked like webbing. When he spoke, his lips slicked with blood, it spread and striated but held fast.

  “You need to get home.” Close now, his breathing was stertorous. He sweated profusely. And though there was no glee in his eyes, they were wide and white with suffering.

  He reached inside and patted me on the shoulder and he said go on as if a finish line lay ahead and I was almost there but that he would never make it. I drove on, my house just up another two blocks. In my rearview mirror I saw the trash man bend over, hands on knees, shaking his head side to side like he adamantly told the street no.

  Every trashcan toppled into the street. Five houses before mine the man who I only knew as a retiree living alone stood stock-still in his robe holding his bundled newspaper in both hands. His front door gaped open and his head turned with my car as I passed. He didn’t move but for his head. The cool autumnal breeze that had whipped the nurse’s hair ruffled his robe around his legs. After passing him, in my side mirror I saw he still looked at my car, jaw agape, unmoving.

  A fully dressed woman lay flat on her face in the yard across the street from my house. God, it must have been Mrs. Fleming. I couldn’t remember what she did, I want to say something at UT, maybe in the Spanish department? That doesn’t seem right. She tutored me in Spanish some in grade school. She left for work at about seven forty five every morning. We’d always exchange waves as I left at the same time. It looks like she was walking to her little grey wagon like she does every morning, keys out, and collapsed facedown in her yard. One of her legs was bent at the knee like she was taking a nap, but her arms weren’t visible underneath her. Her purse lay a yard past her head. Her woolen skirt flapped up onto her buttocks revealing tussled, and soiled, undergarments.

  Any other morning I would have run over to see what was wrong, or I would have run into the house and yelled out at Mom that something was wrong over at the Flemings’. But this morning...everything everywhere was already wrong so yelling about one thing across the street seemed pointless.

  My concern then was what would be wrong at my house.

  Mom and Martin were used to me being out of the house early on Friday mornings because they’re game days (today is homecoming), and the marching band always got together before school on early Friday mornings to practice new routines. In this case, it was the one we were going to do at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Mr. Yancy, the band director, was all excited and so were we all. We didn’t mind early rehearsals while having New York on our minds.

  But I haven’t told Mom and Martin that I’ve been kicked off the squad. To keep up appearances, and delaying reality, I got up early and, instead of just going to sit in my car somewhere as I’ve done the last couple of Fridays, I got it in mind to drive up to Mount Bonnell. I had to tell them and was going to today because I knew Mom was trying to get time off and book a flight and hotel. Not Martin, though. He was to stay in town with Johnny and said he was going to watch on TV from his folks’ place on Thanksgiving. I doubted he would. He’d make a point to watch the pre-pre-game football nonsense, grown men in suits tossing the ol’ pigskin around a studio-sized gridiron, yucking it up like the overpaid idiots they are. But I knew Johnny and Grandma would sneak into the back room to watch.

  I got up early and made like I was going to band practice but instead went up to Mount Bonnell to smoke my crappy weed.

  This is why I got kicked off the squad. The crappy weed.

  Mr. English was not only my AP English teacher but he was also my advisor, so when Coach Numbnuts had me by the elbow in one hand and my pipe in another as we marched into his office, his face fell, more from fatigue than from disappointment. A little of both. Maybe disappointment that he had to deal with such petty little things instead of revising his big important novel.

  Coach Numbnuts is a moniker Bass first applied to Assistant Coach Weir. There was this Oklahoma-committed lineman who declared kicking off was easy and that kickers were pussies. Numbnuts gave this lineman several chances to kick off at practice, each one shanking like foul shot from the sky. The last hit Weir in the balls so hard
that he fell down and didn’t talk much the rest of the season.

  We were all trying to work it out, but as of now I was off the squad. Maybe, just maybe, I could get back on. Numbnuts wasn’t so mad much as he said his hands were tied. If he didn’t report the incident, he’d be fired. The incident: He found my reeking pipe in the pocket of my jacket in the locker room in front of my locker. The jacket didn’t have my name in it, but he stood on the bench in the locker room before practice and held the jacket up in the air and threatened to cancel our parade trip if somebody didn’t fess up right then.

  His hands were tied.

  I fessed up.

  This is what I’d hoped to see: Mom’s and Martin’s cars gone and Johnny on the porch with his backpack waiting for me to pull up to take him and his nosepicking friend to school. But Mom’s car was still there, and Johnny wasn’t, and if I wasn’t scared before, and I was, now it was official and now it was really real because as out of touch with my family as I’d become, it, whatever was going on, had touched my family, my home. My bowels got heavy and that awful adrenal buzz hit me again. Johnny wasn’t there waiting for me with that put-out look of his. A look I now wanted to see more than just about anything.

  I pushed open the ajar front door. It creaked and moaned in a way it never had before. I remember thinking at that time of acute stress that this was a joke, the creaking door, somebody’s putting me on.

  Please somebody say they’re putting me on.

  Martin’s always out the door before me, off to his job as a commercial real estate inspector. When the economy dove in 2008, he started his own business. You had to give it to Martin; self-made. An asshole, yes, but a formidable salesman. Maybe his assholishness paid dividends there. Type A personality. A for Asshole.

  So Martin wasn’t there as expected, his car gone. The silence of the house on a busy fall Friday morning jarred me. And the overall tenor of the house, the darkness, a pall over everything. That morning it felt like the very air carried an extra charge, that in it floated newness, stardust. Something was wrong here and I braced against what it could be.

  It’s not a big house, a well-appointed fifties ranch style, original wood floors throughout, with three bedrooms, two baths, an open galley kitchen great for entertaining (talking in Martin-speak now), newish deck, updated windows, a utility room and mudroom off the kitchen boasting a big yard for midtown, enjoying a canopy of large old live oaks and cedar elms.

  Martin, a couple glasses of wine in him before dinner, told me he’d bring me into his inspecting business, it was going so well. Hmmm. Let me think long and hard on that one, Marty. He hated it when I called him Marty. He glared, took a pull on the white he and Mom drank before dinner 2.5 times a week.

  My eyes found items on the entryway table. Yesterday’s junk mail stacked for trashing. A half-full coffee mug, probably Mom’s because Martin took a stainless tumbler with him like a toddler does a blankie. Mom’s phone.

  I make my way down the short hall, going straight to Mom and Martin’s bedroom, bypassing Johnny’s closed door. I flip on the hall light because though the sun is up now, this hall is dark. Way darker than it should be at eight on a weekday. Usually the house is an absolute hive of commotion; Mom’s hairdryer whining last-minute, me and Johnny quickly pulling on clothes, brushing teeth, scarfing down something passing for breakfast, news radio on.

  I could hear the clock radio through the bedroom door. Probably the fall pledge drive woman on public radio, talking gravely into the microphone. Nothing about making their fundraising goal for the eight o’clock hour. I stood outside the door and welled up, thinking about Mrs. Fleming laying in her yard across the street. Would Mom be sprawled on the bathroom floor under the glare of its lights?

  I knuckled the door open. A wedge of bathroom light fell into the room, against the unmade queen size. The radio woman saying she didn’t know what to say ladies and gentlemen it’s beyond words. A snatch of curled black electrical cord lay on the floor in the bathroom doorway. The hairdryer cord.

  I gulped and dashed to the bathroom. Empty. I checked the space between the bed and the far wall. I sighed short-lived relief as I remembered that her car was still in the driveway. Panicked, I hurried out to the car to see if she was sitting inside having gotten farther than Mrs. Fleming. But it, too, sat empty.

  I quickly went back to Johnny’s room. I envisioned him curled up and snug in bed under his red Manchester United bedspread, his life-sized precision-cut vinyl poster of Wayne Rooney looming over him. Wayne’s eyes are closed and he strikes the messianic pose he executed after his famous (in football circles) 2011 bicycle kick goal against Manchester City.

  I opened the door and flipped on the light, my heart absolutely pounding to where I almost couldn’t catch my breath. He wasn’t there. The room exuded the afterburn of exhausted energy.

  I swallowed hard, yearning to have a reason to say a version of what I always did: It’s five ‘til, dude. Forget breakfast. Gotta shit and get, go get Nose Gold. His Mom’ll wig if we’re late.

  On the floor at the foot of his bed stood a pile of athletic balls: a base of three basketballs and a few flat soccer balls, a found cherry ball, a couple of volleyballs, a bunch of tennis balls grayed with age and weather, a few of Martin’s yard-putter golf balls on top, the whole thing forming a pyramidal shape two to three feet high. I didn’t give it any thought. Just some silly thing he’d constructed out of boredom.

  Not weird at all for him, really, with all the sleepwalking he’d been doing over the summer, coming into my room with his hands behind his back and mumbling. My head would hurt each time, a pounding above my right eye. Sometimes I could make out what he was saying: coming coming…close, close, close. His somnambulism eerily coincided with the vivid, recurring dreams I’d been having. One time I woke up suddenly to Johnny standing, seeming to hover, over my bed. I was so startled that I cried out. In glassy-eyed response he’d said, “It’s only me, brother. No other.” When I told him to get out, he peed down his leg. This scenario repeated itself several times last summer. One stretch in June it was every night for a week. Every night: It’s only me, brother. No other, in this mellifluous voice.

  Though at that moment I felt pulled in several directions, the urge to find my brother tugged hardest.

  Through the window I could see Mrs. Fleming’s skirt flapping in the increasing wind. It looked like she’d keeled over from a heart attack. We felt well-versed in sudden heart attacks as Martin’s father had died of one on Martin’s forty-sixth birthday. The candles had been lit and the song had been sung and then the phone rang and Martin had said, “Ignore it, I’m blowing out my candles here.” Then came the hectic message on the machine. Martin had a glittery conical birthday hat on. Smoke rose from the wicks.

  Vehicular emergency sirens wax and wane, the day brightening into full morning now out the window.

  Johnny gone, Martin gone, Mom gone, and out the window the trashman staggering down the street, his bald head a cap of blood, the edges of it looking like melted wax oozing down. The radio woman’s voice muffled and caught.

  I tried the TV but the cable was out. Mom’s phone at the entry table, I decided to try her at work. Sad to say that at that moment I didn’t even think to call Dad. Dad was too far away to help and it was in that moment when I fully realized that physical proximity may be the most powerful relationship element of all. Just how simple it all is.

  My room was neat as always. Stacks of paperback pulps and dreadfuls I’d digested stood along the far wall like columns. Bed as I’d left it, made and taut, if not to military hospital standards.

  For a burgeoning pothead with extracurricular activity attendance issues whose de rigueur look was rakish longish hair and post-ironic T-shirts from Goodwill and whose public posture and gait was meant to suggest slack casualness, in other words, cool, my room, my school lockers (my jacket on the locker room floor really
chapped my ass because that sort of disorder was not me), all my spaces, are tidy and organized. My phone sat on the desk next to an SAT prep book. It’s here and not on me because I’m not one of these people who needs to be tethered to the device jacking us into the matrix all the damned time. Or maybe I’m just aping Mr. E. I had started ostentatiously leaving it on my desk for Mom to see should she lean in to glance around, as all Moms do, every day, we know.

  Wind busts on the window, a low-hanging tree branch dips down to scrape the glass. I stiffen, rub my sweaty hands together. I pick up my phone. The messages are from Kodie and Bastian. Kodie’s text from twenty minutes ago—where are you? meet me at DT asap. Bastian’s—we’ve got to get out meet me at terrapin station. My throat flushed with adrenalized blood.

  She’s out there stumbling around with something going wrong with her mouth or there’s nothing wrong with her mouth because she’s smiling and…I couldn’t believe I had those thoughts. Especially about my own mother, but I guess that’s the thing about the survival instinct; you start distancing yourself quickly. No time to cry, knowing that the time for that had to be later if the now was to be survived. Like, I guess, if you’re a soldier at a battle line and in the concussions all around, you fail to notice that the guy next to you is still, and when you turn him over he’s got no face, you don’t break down right there and weep. The urge just isn’t there because you want to keep your face.

  Urgent texts from Bastian and Kodie were not what I needed right now. I needed to know that Mom was at the hospital where she worked as an administrator, that she was about to sit down and do some administrating after blowing the heat off the top of her coffee, glancing at the desk photos of her life, then the blinking cursor and somewhere deep inside smiling that she had this job in this place she knew so well and maybe even she believed she was doing some good in the world. I’d only heard from friends. I needed to know that the grown-ups were in charge, and, though Mrs. Fleming lay face down in her yard, emergency vehicles yet to arrive, the adults would take care of things. The shit had hit the fan and hit it hard, but, eventually, the grown-ups were out there Working On It. That they were Taking Care of Things.