Bass stood as we pulled up, holding the pipe down to his leg, smoke filaments stretching up from the bowl. First thing he says with that radio-DJ deep voice of his: “Hey, want a binger?” like we’d just shown up at a house party and he’s bored in the back room with his weed and remote control. The guy’s a young Howard Stern with less hair and wearing a helmet.
Kodie laugh-snorted. He stood and again extended his arm out in offer. I threw the car into park and jumped out. “Bass, Jesus. You’ve been here since you texted?”
He shrugged and nodded, the unstrapped helmet jostling his skull. He relaxed his arm. “Mostly.”
“You okay?” I asked. He acted strange. “Why here? Why’d you’d want to meet here?”
He peered at me through the face mask. “Not here. Down there at Terrapin. Where we always meet. I dunno, man. First thing I thought of. Felt safe, I guess? Our secret place. Didn’t think kids would follow me in here.” He turned his head one way, then the other, searching. “I was right.”
“Your folks?” I asked. “You know for sure? I mean, we don’t, me and J. Not…for sure.” I glanced up at Johnny sitting in the car. He stared with a set jaw over at the church playground on the opposite side of the cemetery.
“Yeah,” Bass muttered and sniffed, his voice full and wet. A step closer and I could see he’d been crying. “Yeah, man. They, uh, they…” His skinny frame shook and his shoulders rolled with racked sobs. We took a step to each other then. He dropped the pipe in the gravel and we hugged, my ear meeting his sternum. I let emotion fill my throat for the first time but fought it off, swallowed hard.
I attempted humor as we peeled off each other. “What’s with the helmet?” He picked up the pipe, crushed the carbon on the gravel under his huge Converse toe. “That our stuff you’re smoking?”
He nodded.
“Any good?” The stuff I’d smoked that morning was sour old shake.
“S’okay,” he shrugged. He pointed his chin across the grounds. “Little bastards were throwing shit at me. Sticks and rocks.”
“Where? Who was?”
“Dunno, little kids. That’s why I came here. They were doing it as I was driving around earlier to see what was going on. They came at me from out of nowhere near Butler Park as I cruised down Barton Springs. I hightailed it here and texted you. I sat for a while, then got freaked and impatient so went to check on the plants and there some more were, throwing stuff at me.” Now I saw the back end of his Bronco way back there just inside the tree line bordering that edge of Terrapin Station. “They won’t come in here, though. I was all like come on, come get some, and was backing up waiting for them to rush me. They didn’t. I’ve been seeing them here and there around the parameter.” Bass jutted out his hand holding the pipe and pointed. “There! There’s one of those little turds.”
I followed his gesture and saw a boy in a red shirt and jeans walking by the chain-link fence at the church parking lot about seventy-five yards away. The boy stopped and looked at us looking at him but he didn’t look unnerved in the slightest. He didn’t look at us; he marked us. He kept walking along the fence line and then veered off into the daycare playground, where deeper within the swings were alternating back and forth, two other kids on them kicking their legs out for height and speed. The boy in the red shirt walked over to them. The swingers both dragged their feet to stop and they stood up to look at us. The boy in the red shirt pointed at us. Then they all turned and walked out of sight around the other side of the church.
Did these kids who were all alone now try to reach out to us for help? No.
Did they so much as wave at us, the only older people they’ve seen all morning? No.
Did this fact scare us? Yes. It did me, and I could see in Kodie’s face and Bass’s that it scared them too.
Bass said, “I notice you don’t want to go try and talk to them. No more than I do. You know what’s up. They throw stuff at you?” When I gave no immediate answer, Bass searched my eyes. “You’ve seen something, haven’t you?”
“I’ve, we’ve, seen quite a bit this morning. And not one adult.”
“What’d you see?”
I paused to think of a way to describe my trepidation. “We went to this house to see if we could help this dying man’s daughter. Just over there in my neighborhood. About ten of them, sitting in a back room, chanting. Then they locked Kodie in with them after shoving me out. I had to bust down the door.”
“No way. See, that’s what I’m saying. What’s going on, man? I’m losing it. You seem all calm. If you all hadn’t shown up, I swear…I don’t know. I would’ve stayed here all day. I was too scared to even go back and get the Bronco with them just over the fence running through the woods there.” He put his hand on my shoulder. “Hey, come with me? Let’s get my car.”
I waved to Johnny and Kodie to stay here for a sec and we headed out. Bass kept his helmet on.
“Who’s the chick?” he asked.
“We work together at the DT. You know.”
“Oh yeeaah. Kodie. That makes sense.” He spun as he walked to look at her in my car, turned back. “She’s what, how old?”
“Nineteen.”
“Well. She’s the oldest live person I’ve heard of or seen.”
“You didn’t see your folks . . .”
He shook his head. “Found them.” He said this in a curt whisper and I remember it making my neck skin gooseflesh. Though I had become fast friends with Bass—you could say he was my best friend—and I didn’t yet know all his mannerisms and ways, this sounded to me like he was lying. I didn’t want to push.
“Sorry.”
“S’okay.” Bass sighed and restarted. “So, you’re almost eighteen, she’s nineteen. I’m seventeen. I’ve seen no teenagers. I mean nobody. And I drove around before coming here, like I said. Nobody. Open car doors and piles of rocks. I’m afraid to even go over to the school.”
“I doubt anyone even made it to school.” I wonder if you did, Mr. E. I know you went in early to work on your book. Are you there now?
“How are we the only ones, then? Two teens close to you are the only ones alive in Austin? What the hell?”
It took Bass’s stoned logic for me to see it. His point was well taken. Me and my two closest friends going into the dawn of this day are the only older people we’ve seen. Isn’t that way too bizarre a coincidence?
I know what Grandma Lucille would’ve said—there are no coincidences. She had told me that only once.
She dropped that on me one night in early June. I had been practicing The Saints, you know—oh when the saints, come marching in. Been practicing it a lot. I could play it real well right from the start. My ’bone’s slide hitting those slots spot on, my lips and cheeks finding their proper pressures. The Saints.
Okay, it’s more than that. I’d heard its faraway echoed strains at the edges of my summerdreams. And Johnny hummed it when he sleepwalked into my room. Sometimes I heard him humming it at the dreams’ peripheries themselves. I’d wake up with a start, feeling his presence in my room but he wasn’t there, the pain in my head above my right eye quickly subsiding.
Grandma Lucille hadn’t been feeling well, so I went over to her house for dinner, trombone in hand, on the promise of her gumbo. The woman could make it, having grown up in way southeast Texas, a tiny Gulf border town north of Port Arthur. Her gumbo? Meal of the gods when coupled with homemade hushpuppies and followed by her pecan pie.
When we were finished eating—me having had thirds and slopped up every last dollop of roux with the puppies—but before we settled in to watch Mystery! on PBS with our pie plates heaped, she asked me to play something. She knew we’d already started rehearsing for the next football season and probably expected to hear me play something from that. But for no reason at all, other than I’d been rehearsing it all day and that it had burrowed into my mind like an earwo
rm, I ripped into this sublime jazzy version of The Saints, trying to ape the way I’d heard Trombone Shorty do it at a Tulane commencement I’d seen on YouTube.
Oh—how her eyes lit up. She clapped with her hands barely touching to the beat of the song and she swayed in her chair and when I came around to those refrains her eyes closed and then came that beatific smile of hers, the thing I maybe loved about her most, her eyebrows lifting convex, searching for that highest note just before I hit it.
When I was finished, she sighed and said that was her favorite song and asked did I know that? I shook my head and said no, that I’d just picked it up the other day and couldn’t get it out of my head. Wasn’t that a coincidence, I’d asked her. She shook her head and said stonily, “No, sweetie. No. There are no coincidences.”
Four days after that, she had a stroke. She died a week later.
Days after that, Grandma Lucille’s beatific smile morphed into the dark smiling teeth within the recesses in my mind and thus began the summerdreams. I’d go to bed after the rising shrieks of new cicadas lulled for the night, and those dreams came—night after night, the same thing. And in the background, a muted soundtrack—The Saints.
At her funeral I played The Saints. Not a dry eye in the church. I barely got through it, my emotion catching in the instrument, but I plowed on with verve determined to see it through as if Grandma were sitting next to me, lightly touching her fingertips in a silent clap to the beat. I played it in a standard way, leaning toward a dirge, keeping the second line version between me and her.
I felt safe with Bass walking next to me across the sloping field of what would have been an expanded cemetery even though he was wearing his football helmet and was stoned to the bejesus. Bass was security in bulk, an entire head taller than me with gladiatorial shoulders and calves.
“I have no idea,” I’d answered to his what the hell? I still don’t, not really.
The distance was much farther than I remembered. We walked an incline and then sloped to the treeline. Johnny and Kodie would be out of sight.
“Really a dumbass thing to do, smoking. Okay, I need to sober up.” He clapped his hands together hard once and then rubbed them, getting down to business. As if in pregame psych ritual, he smacked his palms on the sides of his helmet and huffed and puffed. Not that he ever played beyond kick coverage when the Paladins had some team so by the throat that the scrubs got in. “So, what we know is: one, everybody who’s hit puberty but me and you and Kodie look to be dead. I mean…the whole world??” Bass wasn’t the only one to talk glibly. We all did at times. Subconscious comic relief.
He continued, “Do you think it’s possible it’s just the US? Maybe once we get communication going—”
“No,” I said, my tone flat and certain. “Did you see TV at all? I didn’t really.”
“A bit just before I took off exploring. Net, everything crashed quick. Then I came here. All I saw was cable news running raw footage. People on their knees in the New York subway, choking.”
I didn’t even want to get into what Professor Fleming had told me. “It’s worldwide. It’s…just got to be. It’s too…”
“What?”
“How can…? You saw how people died?”
Bass drew in a measured breath. “Saw my folks. Watched them.”
Our banter quit. We stopped walking. “But you just said—”
“I know. I don’t know why I said I found them.”
“Sorry. I’m so sorry. You don’t have to tell me.”
“No. We’ve got to fetter this out. What we know because that’s all we have. No matrix in the sky is going to tell us anything.”
I nodded, tight-lipped, already a frocked member of the choir to which he preached. We walked and talked. Bass said, “We’ve gone soft. That’s what my dad used to say. I used to think he was just a crank talking about self-reliance, the grid going down one day. He wasn’t a shelter-digging survivalist, but he was definitely sympathetic—the economy collapsing, and with it society; sun flares knocking out the world’s power; some super-flu or whatever. Bet none of them saw this coming. How could you?”
“No kidding. I still can’t believe I’m awake. That you and I walk through a graveyard talking about what happened to the world. Still in shock I guess.” I’d say this is still true. Nothing’s worn off, just grown more profound.
“Tell me about it. I’m the stoned one wearing the helmet. Ever seen a more textbook specimen of shell shock?”
“PTSD.”
“Yeah, that.”
We shuffled a few more steps. I checked back over my shoulder, my car still in view. Residual morning dew collected flecks of new mown grass on our shoes and made their smoother parts glisten.
Bass readied himself. “Okay.” He straightened up and took in a deep breath and blew it out. “My parents both died within minutes of each other. They…suffocated…God, I don’t even know. I couldn’t help them.” We heard a low faraway boom and lifted our heads to it but kept walking. “Both of them still in their sleepwear, they said they didn’t feel well, were going to call in to work sick. At first I thought it was kind of funny, the two of them such a pair. I put them in bed but within minutes they grew restless. They couldn’t lie still and then very quickly came the wheezing which became too much. The panic in their eyes. Oh, God, Kevin. It was… I cannot believe it. I just can’t.”
We walked in silence for twenty yards or so. After sniffing, sighing, and clearing his throat, he continued. “They tried to hug each other and be together, and to be with me, because they knew something was very wrong, but their struggle was too much and they ended up going outside, separately, Dad to the backyard and Mom to the front. Like, they had to go outside.
“My mom staggered into the middle of the yard when she collapsed to her knees and that’s when I ran out to her. She was on her hands and knees with her face to the ground. I thought she was going to vomit but it was a long thirty seconds or so of this crackling…wheezing…like I’ve never heard. I mean, Kev, she had bad chronic asthma, my mom, and I’ve spent many a day with her feeding her hot drinks to try to keep the breathing passages open, to keep her afloat until the prednisone I shot into her hip kicked in. I’ve seen her turn blue and heard her make deathly rasps before, but this…this was, ah, Jesus.”
I thought, lacking in specificity.
“It gripped her so fast she couldn’t even say goodbye to me. I was crouching down to talk to her and she was just shaking her head wildly…shit, Kev.”
I patted him on the back as he wept. He yanked off the helmet by the face mask and threw it ahead of him. It clacked and rolled to a stop. We walked down to it and he took a knee like you see them do, gripping the face mask and leaning on the helmet. I got up on my tiptoes to look over the incline to the car. I saw their two heads inside.
Still kneeling and looking off into the middle distance, Bass, stone-faced now, not stoned, said, “She grabbed my leg and held on as she struggled for breath. She fell over onto her side. I wonder if she thought it was just another asthma attack. Her eyes found mine, and we just looked at each other as I screamed out at her. And then the life left her eyes.”
I glanced at the church playground swings swaying empty.
“Then I saw it.”
“What?” I asked. That low boom-bang again, like someone throwing something heavy into a dumpster.
“The white stuff. It stopped at her lips. In the minute I sat there it seemed to harden. Made ugly splitting noises like when you step on thin ice.” He shifted his weight on the helmet. “I carried her into the house and then ran to my dad on the deck on his back. Same thing. Eyes open, that white hard foamy…glittery…stuff filled his throat and mouth. He died alone.” Bass looked at me and towered over me and asked me like I knew something, nostrils flaring, caging his rage. “What is it, Kevin? You tell me what that is, what does that. To the whole fu
cking world!”
He calmed. We walked. “Got a crossbow and a pony keg in the trunk of my car.”
“No shit?”
“No shit.”
“Well now. It is Friday afternoon, after all.” We sniggered and watched ahead, veering away from an outlying crop of new headstones which had jumped the road onto this new acreage. We neared the treeline and the Bronco. The church’s playground was clear to us now, but empty. That one swing swaying in the breeze. The breeze made me remember the plane crash and I looked over that way and saw thin smoke.
“Man, right about now, if this day was what it was supposed to be…Well, I take that back. This is clearly what it is supposed to be. You know what I mean? Tell me to shut up, I’m high.”
“Shut up. You’re high.”
“Thank you. Now, if this was the homecoming football game day it says it is on my phone.” He pulled it out, scrolled the screen with this thumb, turned the screen to my face as proof. “See? Says Homecoming vs CP, right? We’d be getting out of class early and the teacher would be all sulky about it because us jocks get to leave and there’s nothing they can say about it, and we’d be going to the locker room for a team meeting before going off to our absurdly early dinner at Luby’s.”
“Hold on,” I said. “Let me see that thing. Thought I saw something.”
“What?”
“Give it.” I thought I’d seen the phone’s reception bars moving and those buffering turning circles. If those things are moving, maybe the net or cell towers were working. On mine, on Kodie’s, all day they’ve been dead since I got their texts.
He gave it to me. Looking at it again, I see it must have been a trick of my vision, my eyes wanting to see movement. I tapped and scrolled but nothing moved. Glowing hockey pucks at this point. Pointless plastic and gla—But then something did move, in the reflection off the phone’s glass. Bass couldn’t see it as the screen was titled away from him. I saw it though. Just as I’d seen its shadow in that first dream in June, just as I’d seen its shadow riding along that wave rolling upriver like an arrow pointing the way.
The Late Bloomer Page 10