Kodie looked at me in agreement with what she saw on my face—the sense that we were exposed.
“How’d that…? How did we not…?” mused Kodie, her fright blooming. It felt claustrophobic even in this open, bright parking lot under that blue sky.
“Look.” I pointed at the CVS.
She saw the pile now. “Kevin?”
“You didn’t see it?” I asked.
“No. I’ve been at the back of the store.”
“There was a man’s body over there in that parking lot when I drove by. Now, as you can see, there’s a pile of rocks.”
Kodie crossed her arms, shot her hip, and furrowed her brow. She’d have looked cute as hell if I wasn’t feeling ill with dread. Woo takes a distant back seat when the world’s ending and you’ve got a gun strapped to your ribs.
We only did it the once. Rain slipping down her window, pattering the roof. Her folks were home but she lives in one of those garage apartments like you see all over Hyde Park. She closed her eyes and her lids fluttered. For me, much in life doesn’t match the hype but that did and now I just think about Kodie all the time.
Kodie looked over at the nearest pile and kept her attention there. I stepped over to her and put my arm around her. “What are you thinking?”
She didn’t answer. Kodie took a few steps toward the pile, hesitated, retreated back the same number of steps, keeping her eyes trained on it.
Kodie, detached, questioning her own sanity, “What’s this covering bodies with rocks?”
She turned to the big jack-o’-lantern’s grim rictus in the Dollar Tree’s window, its brows screwed down in a scowl. Some things you can’t continue to question, even when you want to. Some things just…are the way they are.
A memory of Johnny during one of his sleepwalks into my room interjected. “They’re going to be waiting at the shore.” He had flipped on the lights. He wore burnt orange Texas Longhorn PJs. I squinted. He didn’t. “You think I want this? I don’t,” he’d said, more awake then. He burst out a single sob, swallowed it back and said, “It’s not a task I want, Kevin, you have to know.”
We stood stock-still. My throat and ears full and hot. I sniffed hard and spat far, shuffled my feet to keep from getting woozy. Kodie squinted in the sun glinting off the store’s metallic sign. With one eye closed against the glare, she said, with maximum cool, “We need to get out of here.”
I nodded.
Walking briskly to me, taking my elbow, she said, “We need information. We need to figure out what’s going on. We need to try to find others.”
“Food in the store,” I said. We headed toward the door, agreeing that we needed to get inside and think, get this spooky exposed feeling off of us.
We had walked into the shadow of the store when we heard a man’s voice behind us. “Hey! Stop!” The man in the big car that had struck the Hat Creek sign listed across Burnet, ran a tire up onto the curb, and came to a stop. His passenger window down, tinny music just discernable, his arm outstretched, fingers splayed like he’s drowning.
Which he was. Drowning on pearlescent crystalline stuff that looks like home insulation. It sparkled like fake snow through its sheen. I found myself glued to the cement. Kodie too.
“Help!” the man croaked. The whine of the old car’s door hinge. The radio jingle wafting across the lot to our ears, an Andrews Sister-like take on what to do when you need a sub sandwich. He had difficulty keeping the door open. He kept kicking it and it kept bouncing back and slamming closed. The jingle as background to his exit fit.
Under her breath, Kodie said, “Let’s hold here for a sec. See if we can help him.”
I didn’t respond, fixated on the man.
The man made his way around the front of the car, bumping his hip, his face locked onto ours even as he stumbled over the curb. Choking noises came from him, sputtered and popped.
“Help,” he scratched out. He lurched with one hand to his throat, one hand reaching out. You’d have thought the streets would be filled with such people, the near-dead stragglers choking and crying for help. Thing was, he’s the only person up and down Burnet.
“I’m going,” and I started jogging to the guy. I’m not sure why I headed for him. I couldn’t watch from afar. It may be my last chance to see it, I’d thought. Turns out, I was right.
I reached him as he fell to his knees and grabbed his throat with both hands now. His sweaty face turned magenta. His eyes bulged. Something popped. The noise cracked loudly enough to make me take a step back, like you would when a firework’s fuse has burned down but hasn’t gone off.
And that’s when the white cottony substance reared from his mouth, stopping at his lips. A ring of blood at the lips. Reminded me of the time Martin had me fill a few small holes in the wood around the house with that spray foam that puffs up and quickly hardens. On his knees, still just able to whistle in air, he looked like he’d just sprayed whipped cream into his mouth and was tasting it full and sweet before swallowing, that fun moment of being gluttonous and gross. I imagined him swallowing and wiping his mouth with his sleeve and exclaiming, ‘You try!’ The substance didn’t smell as it effervesced from the man’s throat. Coming from where? The stomach, the lungs? It was less bilious than airy. It seemed from those fractal bronchi, deep down beyond the microscope’s vision.
He shook his head back and forth and gagged, drool slinging, looking like a diseased farm animal in its last throes in the shadow of a barn, not here in the parking lot of a Dollar Tree in the up-and-coming Burnet Corridor (Martin calls it BuRo, like SoHo), his eyes not really looking at me anymore. He reached into his back pocket, yanked out his wallet, and with shaking fingers marbling from oxygen lack, he tugged out a photograph.
Kodie joined me, bumping me aside. “How can we help? Tell us how!”
His eyes wild, his pallor hectic, scarlet lips working around the full mouth and spreading teeth, he managed to force out in a wheeze, “Pluh…eeshe!”
She took the picture and wallet from him as he collapsed to his hands and knees. He shook his head back and forth with rigor now. I looked over her shoulder. The wallet photo depicted a little girl with a natural smile posing with her chin on her fist, her elbow propped on a mound of blue cloth drawing out her crystal eyes.
“Your daughter?” I spoke loudly to him with a hint of disbelief, his daughter’s beauty belying his homeliness. In my shock, I regarded this man as a specimen, not as a human to whom I could provide succor. Plus, I didn’t want to get within arm’s length of him. Arm’s lurch.
But Kodie did.
His face to the cement, I could see he nodded. She squatted down. I followed her lead. He managed to lift his head, his face meeting ours. “She’s here?” I took the wallet and flipped the flap up, showing the license through its window to him. His eyes swirled and rolled in their sockets and he coughed a cough that had nowhere to go, making his back recoil up into a hump where it stayed. He fell over. Upside down to us now, he pointed to the items in my hand, what was left of his life, and then his face froze and his arm fell.
We stared. Kodie, somehow burying her emotion, asked rhetorically if not clinically, “What is this in his mouth?” I shook my head. I couldn’t tell her I thought that some transmission issuing from a black zone between distant stars called forth a process by which from deep in the lungs arose an ancient death mold.
“Wants us to find his daughter.” I handed the picture back to Kodie. She inspected it, turned it over.
“Rebecca.”
“How old you think?” I asked.
“Five, six. Her cheeks still have that rounded baby fat look to them.”
The man’s open car door still chimed and from the radio blared an ad that required the trumpeting of the University of Texas fight song behind what sounded like ex-football Coach Mack Brown’s nasally voice.
The man’s throat looked
solid now, the stuff looking as though it had hardened, forming a cylinder from mouth through the throat and down into his body cavity. You could hear a cracking sound, like ice solidifying, or bones splintering. His face had swollen in the minute we’d been standing here, the substance still expanding and hardening.
“We need to at least try,” she said. I thought of the little girl I’d left amid bus fumes. “Maybe she’s there.”
I looked at the license. “I know this street.”
“I do too,” she said. “It’s near your house.”
I inhaled a deep breath and felt the gun resist against my ribs. “My car.”
“She’s probably all alone. She could hurt herself.”
We didn’t go into the store. With this man dead before us, the notion of hunger didn’t exist.
“Where’d you get the bat?” We drove in my car to the address on the guy’s license. Lawrence Shields. DOB: May 16, 1969. DOD: minutes ago.
“Under my bed.” Kodie eyed the streaks of plane crash smoke in the sky.
“You looked pretty tough walking through the store with that bat. All one-woman wrecking crew.”
“Look at you.” She pulled back my shirt to display the gun. Her smile waned from her eyes before it did her mouth. “You have bullets for that?”
I nodded. “Need to probably get more though.” I banged my palm heel on the steering wheel. “I mean, can you believe this? My biggest worry, what? Two, three hours ago, was telling Martin about band and pot. Now I’m thinking I’m not nearly armed enough to drive through town. Funny, when the world was full of people I didn’t even think about such a thing. Now that there’s nobody left—”
“We don’t know that.”
“C’mon. You saw TV. You saw that guy just now.” I flicked the driver’s license against the wheel like a playing card.
“We don’t know that for sure. It’s a big world. Maybe there are big bands of people who went underground, were out on a remote island.”
“This isn’t a virus, not a chemical.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t. Not for certain.”
“Then why do you—?”
“Because it’s pointless to think it’s going to be okay. Having hope right now doesn’t help us. We’ve got to survive and that’s it. And we for sure don’t need to fight about it.”
Kodie crossed her arms over her chest in what would have been a huff in the old world. Now, driving through our neighborhood to check on some little girl we didn’t know, it wasn’t a huff. It was just an end to a discussion that served no purpose.
Reasons didn’t matter. We were still here and the world howled with wind and emptiness. Trees bent over our car in the gusts and yellow live oak leaves shimmered down around us in a butterfly swarm. We drove through them at a funereal pace. I looked ahead at this October scene and wondered if there was anything more haunted than an empty backstreet without sidewalks, showering leaves, gutters packing with autumn’s debris.Kodie asked, “Why are you driving so slowly?”
We left the Dollar Tree in a hurry but now, as we approached, my legs got heavy and my head swam. I remember time and space warping out of tune in those moments.
“I don’t know. I feel like we’re about to see something that’s going to make all that’s changed change just as radically again. I’m in no hurry to see it.”
I thought about the long walk down the aisle to view my grandmother’s body lying in an open coffin in front of the offertory. This was last year. I felt like a child of single-digit age, scared and unsure, the dreamlike quality of the moment dizzying.
Me and Ma Maw—Lucille to the world, my mom’s mother—we were close. She’d lived in Round Rock, so I saw her a lot. She liked me to serenade her with my trombone, especially when I played The Saints. Boy, I could play that song. But she may have liked my stories and poems even more. Other than Mr. E, she’s the only one I ever read them to. When I did, she’d say “oh”—and her eyes would be moist, her nose reddening and sniffling.
I never had the chance to read The Late Bloomers6 to her, though. The one that wrote itself. Kind of like this, but that was, um, fiction. Glad I didn’t write it before she was gone, actually. This was a story I wrote this past summer, a story based on vivid, recurring dreams of a dry June. We’ll get to that.
Anyway, Martin, never deigning to get out of the car, would drop me off at Grandma Lucille’s house and she’d cook for me. We’d watch TV and laugh and she’d always tell me how strong a person I was and that I’d be okay even though that man (referring to my father) wasn’t there for me. Seeing her shrunken body lying on that puffed satin, her face darkened and turning inward, the brittle fingers of her hands clasped on her chest, I was so stunned and sick that I couldn’t move. Mom had to urge me away with a gentle tug on my elbow.
That feeling came again under the faux butterflies of autumn. The street darkened with the shade of overhanging trees, forming a tunnel.
But for the passive act of driving, I couldn’t move.
I was locked inside myself. Kodie touched my hand, like my mother did my elbow at the casket, and said under her breath, “I know.”
“You feel it too?” I managed to get out.
She nodded and gulped. “I feel sick. Here we are being pulled to this one little girl just because we randomly saw her dad die.”
“Random. I wonder.”
She let go of my hand and took one of those deep cleansing breaths one takes when they’re next to speak to a large crowd. In my peripheral vision I saw that her hand shook before she swooped it through her hair.
“Tell me we should just turn around?” I asked when we pulled up to the house matching the address, my brakes whining. “Please?”
The house recessed back into a lot dark with shade. Pecans moldered in the yard, on the sidewalk and the metal roof.
I turned off the engine and we sat. The quiet growing around us felt alive and stifling. It forced me out of the car for breath.
Kodie got out and closed her door softly using two hands like she probably did as a high schooler when she got home post-curfew after mugging down with some dude. A twinge of jealousy came with that thought. Just a twinge, because as we walked toward the house, we heard voices. Kodie and I looked at each other with wide eyes. She accidentally popped a pecan under her boot. The small firework sound of it startled us.
The voices stopped. We froze. I felt watched.
So quiet. I almost preferred seeing the Hollywood zombie horde come tear-assing around the corner in high dudgeon at the sound of that crushed pecan. At least that was something we could see. We could run, repel them, something. But this quiet creep, this world devoid and howling.
Not knowing is the worst of fears.
It was then that I felt I was part of an unspooling narrative, one over which I had no control. The world had taken a strange turn on its axis and we’d become game pieces on a board.
The voices started up again and they sounded in unison, like a classroom of pupils reciting a lesson, repeating it. We tiptoed around the mines of blackened nuts along the sidewalk.
I clenched Kodie’s hand for us to stop. I whispered into her ear, “Why’d you get that bat from under your bed?”
She carefully stepped to me and whispered, “These kids up the street I babysit, brother Eric and sister Sarah Jane, seven and five. They were standing in my yard looking in at me through the window. As I startled awake and sat up in bed this morning, they just stood out there still as statues, watching me, still wearing their pajamas.”
Though we hadn’t taken a step, the voices came louder. Something repeated.
Something chanted.
We peered through the windows. Nobody in the front room. I went to the door and opened it. Kodie had me by the hand. Their voices were many and metronomic. We made our way through the house, trying
to land our footfalls in a heel-toe that would’ve been quiet but for the groan of the wooden floors.
We got to the hall leading to a back bedroom. The door stood open. A single bed sat shoved in the corner. One of the two screened windows was open a foot.
In the middle of the room in a perfect circle sat ten, twelve children, crisscross applesauce, knee to knee, boys and girls.
And now they all turned their heads to us in unison and now we could hear what they were saying. I felt my heart lose its rhythm and my face flush with the effort of getting it back. What they said in synchronicity was, “They leap from high places with smiles on their faces.”
They locked their eyes onto ours and their moving mouths and jaws articulated it succinctly—they leap from high places with smiles on their faces, their tongues flittering and tripping on milk teeth soon to fall out of their heads.
I had heard these words before. In a summerdream? Graffiti? It was engrafted into my mind, but I couldn’t place it.
They recited this several more times as we stood there unmoving. I was hardly aware of Kodie though she gripped my hand. Then they stopped and that new-world silence descended. The girl matching the photograph stood up. Rebecca’s eyes didn’t blink. They shone like blue moons. She wore a red knee-length dress tied around her middle with a wide band of white. She was peppermint with enormous icy-blue eyes and she asked coy and sweet, “Did you see my daddy?” A prideful raise of her chin.
Kodie and I nodded.
“He told you to come find me?”
We nodded. “He asked,” I croaked, “he asked us to.”
The little girl shook her head several times. Her hair fanned out and the curls in it rolled. “Well, you’re tooooo late.” It was an adorable laugh line from a sitcom, the baby of the family showing some sass. The laugh track should have boomed here. But nobody moved beyond the autonomic movement of diaphragms, an eye blink here and there. Each little face held the grimness of the cancer ward. The light from between dancing tree limbs moved on their faces. A pecan knocked on the roof and rolled.
The Late Bloomer Page 6