Winged thing. A long thin tail, something from the fantasy pulps lining my wall. Or Dante.
I startled and swung my face to the sky behind us to try to see it.
“What?” Bass asked, facing me, his back turned to the woods.
“Nothing.” My mind scrambled for an answer. “Thought I saw…your buffering symbol swirling.”
“The way you jumped.” He shifted his weight and cocked his helmet. “You toke up?”
Apocalyptic paranoia brought on by skunk weed. That’s all . . .
“I did just a little at dawn. Like, one hit. Then things went to shit.”
But then I did see movement. In the trees.
As I slowly handed him back his phone, my stricken face to the woods, Bass whipped around. “What? You see them?”
Bass didn’t see me nod.
“How many?”
My voice low and sure. “Looked like one kid—”
—Hey! Hey you guys come here!
A boy’s voice coming from the woods, an echo tailing it. We jogged toward the voice, both of us understanding the voice to be earnest. My heart swelled and thumped high in my barren throat. I forgot all about Kodie and Johnny. When we got to the Bronco, it was dinged and webbed cracks spread across the windshield and windows facing the woods.
You’d think weeks of lifting your knees high while playing a trombone would benefit one’s cardio fitness, but you’d be wrong. Out of breath, I asked Bass, “You go chasing one of those nasty fall hailstorms again?” I put my hands on my knees and scanned the woods.
“Nope,” answered Bass who wasn’t winded in the slightest. Though hanging onto the edge of the game roster by his fingernails, he had done the two-a-days, the man-killers. His head panned back and forth along the wall of green.
Not even birds scratched out their call-and-response language of warnings. That intense and intentional quiet thickened.
It’s not just the quiet attendant to an ended world. It’s a quiet of being watched, being tracked. A quiet that wicks into your marrow’s sponge.
Feeling it too, Bass pulled his keys out of his pocket and made toward the Bronco with long strides and tossed the helmet through the open back seat window. “Screw this. Let’s get out of here.”
“Hold on.”
There.
Down low in the green I saw the flash of his spectacles and I could make out a face in the ivy and wild shrubs that fortified the tree line. The boy knelt on both knees and he pushed his face through the foliage like he emerged from another dimension, a turtle forcing its head from its carapace.
“Hey,” I whispered loudly to the boy. He hid from the others. From his face, he held a secret.
The boy waved us over while looking over his shoulder. When he turned back to us, the dread in his face made me stutter-step.
We knelt down to his level.
“I’m not supposed to do this,” he whispered, his lips sticking, his throat clicking with fear. Though I saw his eyelashes flapping, I couldn’t see his left eye through the webbed lens of his wire-rims. “They’ll be here quick.”
“Not supposed to do what?” I asked him.
He padded the air downward with his palm as if to quell my volume. He looked over one shoulder, then the other. The boy and Bass met eyes, and by the transmission between them, Bass knew to watch behind the boy for others.
“Who are you? What’s going on?” I asked in a clipped whisper.
Clear-eyed and with a response that seemed readymade, he whispered, “There’s no time. They’ll be here. I’m Simon. I know what’s going to happen next. And I think it concerns you.” He pointed at me.
Simon looked to be maybe eleven, his ginger bangs sweat-plastered to his forehead, his freckles popping through his ruddy cheeks. I was so stunned at the surreality of a little boy from the green telling me this I could hardly think and certainly couldn’t talk. Simon seemed to intuit this and he nodded his head with understanding.
“Here.” Simon produced from behind him a plastic bag with something in it and tossed it to me.
I picked up the bag, felt the weight of it, holding it between knuckles by its knot. I recognized it to be a grocery bag, one of those you put your fruit or vegetables in before weighing, just like one from Central Market. I lifted it up thinking the kid had offered me some food. I lifted it up to get a look at it. My stomach freefell.
This Simon kid said, “Don’t let your brother go. Keep him with you.” And he looked dead level at me, tight-lipped and blinkless. I dove into his eyes but couldn’t wrap my mind around why it mattered that I keep Johnny with me.
“What’s this about Johnny? How do you even have this?” I lifted the bag and noticed the SKU price sticker on it. Vidalia Onion, $1.49.
Through the opaque plastic swaying before my eyes hung a stone. The stone Johnny had bagged and thrown down the corridor of pallets.
He shook his head, not able to answer my barrage. “You know, when those sounds happened,” he said. He looked down at the ground, ashamed almost. “I saw this. Dreamed it, I mean. Now. Even this conversation we’re having, me explaining this to you. Me tossing you that bag.” His face churned into a howling sadness I’ll never forget. “The feeling I had was that this is the end.”
“We can see that,” said Bass who still hunted motion beyond us with his eyes. “Yeah. Ending. Okay. So?”
“But it’s the beginning, too.”
“Beginning of what?” I asked.
“Whatever comes after this. I don’t know.” He shrugged. “I’m just a kid.” His face changed, like he heard something.
“You see anything, Bass?”
“Huh-uh.”
Simon turned back to me and locked onto my face again. “I just know it’s the beginning. But the end has to come first, and it’s not quite over yet. There are a few things that have to happen…I saw an ocean. Then a beach, and then . . .”
“When? What did you see?” Did we see the same things when we dreamed, this kid and I?
“I don’t want to say.” He shook his head and burst out a single cry and immediately sucked it up so that his throat got caught up in itself and he choked for a second. “No. I don’t believe it.” He shook his head hard, trying to loose whatever was lodged there.
Oh—he gave me the most pitiable look. His chin muscle quaked.Almost pouting, talking more to himself than us, he said, “Not everything I dreamed has happened. Maybe it’s not true.” Satisfied with that logic, he continued to me, “But one thing I know is true because I’ve been around them, all the kids. They’re scared like you wouldn’t believe. Not just because all their moms and dads are gone but because…well . . .”
“What?” Bass asked, still looking into the woods.
“They think there’s a beast out… there.” He motioned his hand out and up.
“A beast,” I deadpanned.
He nodded and sniffed. “That it needs to be satisfied. Or else it will come for them. This is what the real end is. Satisfying it.” In half a day, all innocence had left this boy’s eyes. I couldn’t muster a response. The hard look in his eyes stopped me cold. I knew it to be all the truth I required.
“Satisfying?” Bass asked.
“Feeding. The kids think it needs to be fed. They think it will eat them all up if it’s not.”
My mind flashed on the great shadowed thing. I asked, “But what—?”
And then they started coming. We could hear them flooding the woods.
He hissed at us, “Go!”
We locked eyes for one shared heartbeat.
My eyes pleaded that he come with us. He shook his head with resignation.
Then me and Bass were in the Bronco and peeling out in reverse and then bounding over the cemetery dale, swerving around headstones.
I put my head out the window and craned my neck
to see the tree line. Though the Bronco’s motor roared, I heard screaming in the woods.
I remember snapping back inside, shoving my back straight against the seat and closing my eyes tight and not opening them again until we stopped. My mouth grew salty with nausea and Simon’s scream wouldn’t stop echoing between my temples. Bass concentrated on driving but he’d heard it too.
We pulled up to my car. Inside sat Johnny and Kodie. Rebecca hadn’t moved.
“Meet us at my house.” I jumped out and slammed the door.
“What happened to his car?” Kodie asked.
“Hailstorm,” I said.
“Nuh-uh,” Johnny said, incredulous.
“What the man said.”
“But you don’t believe that, right?” Johnny asked. Kodie knew I lied, felt the gravity of why I did, and, like Bass, said nothing. “Kevin, it hasn’t rained in weeks. We didn’t get hail last spring.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said as I turned the ignition key. Johnny looked past me into the faraway woods. From the corner of my eye I saw that he waved his hand reluctantly at whomever he saw there, and then quickly tucked it away. I didn’t ask.
We did a lot of that in those opening hours. We saw but didn’t say anything because we didn’t want to know yet what we knew we would soon enough.
The traffic light was changing as we pulled out. “Look, still got power,” Johnny said.
I heard him but didn’t listen, for Simon’s disembodied face was still screaming in my head.
The first thing we all wanted to do was eat. We locked the doors and looked at the weapons lying about the living room like Christmas morning gifts from a very different kind of Santa. Safety and sanity returned with all of this.
Safety in numbers, in being indoors, in at least wrapping our collective heads around what has happened.
We pointed and grunted, guzzled straight from large containers, lines of liquid rolling down chins. The microwave thrummed.
Our minds reengaged. It occurred to all of us with our stuffed mouths that we were trapped in this new world we didn’t choose. A type of rebirth had occurred, one we hadn’t sought, as we are forced out from the womb by cosmic fiat.
The children had been reborn too, but they probably weren’t examining the hows and whys like us. An old-world philosopher had said an unexamined life wasn’t worth living. What a bunch of crap.
We sat at the dining room table in front of the big picture window to the backyard. An old playscape Johnny didn’t use anymore rusted in the gloam. We kept glancing up at it. The swings swayed and the rust made the chains sing and we thought of children, the ones we used to be and all of them out there now. Those untold millions who didn’t seem to have any need for our help. That they were hostile to our remaining. We stayed quiet on that topic.
But about other things, I couldn’t stay quiet. “Okay. I’ve got to air this,” I said. “Before we can plan our next steps, I think we need to come to a consensus—”
“What’s a consensus?” asked Johnny.
“When everybody agrees,” answered Kodie, leaning into Johnny.
I nodded. “Right.”
“Agree to what?”
“I’m getting to that.” I hadn’t yet told Kodie what Simon had said to me. As the others put away groceries, I’d taken the bag with the stone in it and tossed it in the trash.
“We need to agree on something important. It’s about you, Johnny.”
Kodie’s pupils dilated to their blue retinal edges. She conferred with her plate, looked back up at me, bated.
“Me?”
Bass reached into a flaming bag of corn chips and answered Johnny with a crunch.
“When Bass and I went to get his Bronco, we talked to a kid.”
“A kid came into the cemetery?” he asked.
“He stuck his head through the brush at the edge of it.” This set Johnny on the defensive. “Why do you ask that? I mean, you’re a kid, and you were in the cemetery just fine.”
Johnny responded with, “But I was with you all. It was okay.”
Bass, Kodie, and I looked at each other with the shot eyebrows that come with a break in the case. What we were all thinking: there were these rules he intuitively knew. What we were all asking ourselves: had they been downloaded into him at dawn?
I just came out and asked, “Johnny, are there important things you think you want to tell me but don’t know if you should? Maybe you think I’ll be mad?”
He nodded. His eyes welled. Johnny sighed and said, “Tell me what you were going to tell me first. What about this kid?”
“The boy’s name was Simon. He told me to keep you with me.”
Bass and Kodie deferred to the brothers here, each of them being an only child. Bass crunched.
“But why? You weren’t going to leave me, were you?”
“Of course not.”
“So why does this kid who doesn’t know us say this?”
“I was hoping maybe you’d tell me.”
“How can I?”
“I think you know things. Things you want to tell me.”
He looked at his lap, ashamed. “I don’t.”
“But you just nodded that you did, just now.”
“I don’t understand what’s happening. I’m scared, Kev.”
In my head I’m yelling at him, Why don’t you tell me the truth?
“My head hurts,” Johnny mumbled.
Why’d you let them push me out of that room?
I asked, “Do you know Simon?”
He shook his head and grimaced.
“You don’t know a redheaded kid named Simon? Not at school, not from the neighborhood?”
He shook his head the same way while on his face was a mask of solemn duty which said: deny deny deny.
Kodie used her teacher’s voice. “Do you remember this morning?”
“Sort of, yeah.” Johnny swigged his soda and placed it on the table with a tinny bang.10
We just looked at him.
“Not really.” Johnny was still too young to lie well.
She continued. “Do you know what’s with the piles of rocks—”
“—Stones,” corrected Johnny.
“Excuse me?”
“Say it.” Johnny’s face fell into a baleful smirk.
“Say what, Johnny?” Kodie asked.
“Stones. Say it.”
“Why is that so important to you?”
“It’s just more…correct.”
“It’s more correct? Why does that matter, Johnny? See what I’m getting at?” asked Kodie.
“No, I don’t.”
“Now you’re being rude, J. Stop it,” I said. Johnny looked up me, snapped out of his malevolence. “She’s just trying to help.”
He dropped his chin a bit. He looked back at Kodie but without the nasty look. “Sorry, Kodie. I…I don’t know why. I don’t. It doesn’t matter. You’re right.”
“But…you felt compelled to say it, didn’t you? I guess that’s what I’m asking. Do you know why that is?”
He shook his head, drank, set the can down quietly this time.
I piled on. “Sleepwalking this summer, you said to me, and I do not paraphrase, ‘it’s not a task I want, Kevin, you have to know.’ You remember that?”
He started to get upset. “Can we please stop? My head really hurts.” He rubbed his temples.
Kodie sat back up straight, sighed deeply. “Sure, it’s okay. I just want you to know that you can tell us anything. You don’t have to be afraid to tell us anything you want.”
“We need your help,” I said.
Bass looked at Johnny and worked his jaw around his food.
Johnny slumped in his chair and nodded but evaded our eyes by looking out the window. We’d all scooted our chairs away
and were starting to clean up. I’d gone into the laundry room off the kitchen to tap the pony keg when Johnny muttered from his chair, “There’s more smoke.” We all gathered behind Johnny and looked up at the twilit sky above the backyard oaks.
Kodie was reluctant about leaving Rebecca sleeping in Johnny’s room with her shoes off and tucked under a blanket, her diaphragm sine-waving. I locked the doors and set the house alarm. If it went off, we’d hear it, even down in the creek.
The smoke our beacon, we walked to see the wreck. This stretch of neighborhood looked as it would on any other night. Most porch lights were still on, as well as many interior lamps, enough to maintain the appearance of a normal evening in central Austin in October. Sodium-arc streetlamps kicked on as if heralding our progress. Everywhere in evidence was that ancient harvest time screw-you to winter’s deathly approach: Styrofoam graveyards, some with boney arms piercing the earth’s surface, cottony spider webs spanning entire front porches, pumpkins waiting on steps to be carved and lit. Johnny pointed out, “Look, the Millers’ pumpkins. They always do great carvings.” We didn’t comment on his upbeat observation which so looked forward to the night when the neighborhood took on a Saturday Evening Post cast with the trick-or-treater traffic, some spaz-dad’s machined fog caught in the live oaks, billowing costumes in the dark, flickering ochre of the jack-o’-lanterns, the squeals of delight and laughter.
No cars, nobody took their evening walks under the canopy of trees. You could feel the death settling in. Other than Mrs. Fleming across the street from us, there weren’t any piles. The roaring quietude. The big fear residing inside it. Not with a bang but a whuh!
We ran over to a house with a front room filled with spectral flicker and looked through the front window, hoping that maybe we’ve been wrong in our assumptions, that maybe someone alive sat inside watching a news broadcast from a surviving corner of the planet.
Bass rang the doorbell repeatedly and we cupped our hands around our eyes to see in the front window. Looping in its DVD start menu was The Wizard of Oz.
As we heard Judy Garland singing that heartbreaking why oh why can’t I? I noticed the woman in the chair. I couldn’t gauge her age. Maybe fifty. We jostled each other to see her better. Bass continued jamming down on the doorbell. The violin interlude of Rainbow went on and then Kodie pulled away from the window and gulped and pulled Johnny by the elbow back with her.
The Late Bloomer Page 11