The Late Bloomer

by Falkin, Mark;

  I felt like I peered into a scene in an unvisited corner of Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum. The large kitchen knife buried to the handle just under the woman’s sternum and the hardened black that had poured forth to collect in a pool on her lap. Only the TV light on her. If she had been smiling at Dorothy’s Technicolor world, the smile no longer graced her face. Her eyes were open but the lids drooped like a zenned-out Buddha and her hands still had a loose grip on the armrests like she’d just come to a stop after riding a roller coaster.

  We didn’t want to go exploring old-world buildings anymore if we didn’t have to. We knew what we’d find.

  Though the fuel had burned off by now, it did seem to be smoking more. The trees all around looked like they had burned but the fire hadn’t spread. The rain earlier in the week defanged the roaring tinderbox established in August. One of the wings looked to have decapitated a house backing up to the creek. Only a rill of water ran under the plane through the creek bed. The fuselage acted as a slanted bridge of sorts. The windows were all burned out. The thing was so big as we neared that we feared getting much closer. You could smell fuel. You could smell cooked flesh and smoke. With small switches in the breeze, on top of everything, you could smell that port-o-potty sanitizing smell that had leaked from the flying toilets.

  Our curiosity forced us down the embankment and into the creek. We’d jumped across a yard-wide run of water and stood on a limestone island strewn with faded aluminum cans. We could see coyotes on the other side of the plane standing in the creek looking at us, their eyes flashing yellow in firelight.

  Bass roared and thrust his hands into the air. The coyotes didn’t bolt. The alpha considered Bass and then calmly turned and walked away back up the creek. The others followed him into the tunnel of gathering dark, disappearing behind the fireglow.

  We drew closer. The plane looked like a giant black alighted insect. Only in a few places did the silver of the fuselage show through the black matte carbon patina.

  “The pilot tried to avoid as many houses as possible,” Bass said

  “Looks like he did a pretty good job, all things considered,” Kodie said.

  “But where are the bodies?” asked Johnny.

  “Burnt up,” I said. “Look.” I pointed at the fuselage. Evening light hung in there though we spun toward night with increasing speed. You could just make out the charred humanoid figures sitting in their seats. I thought of the choking pilot trying to call out May Day to the tower but nothing coming out of his mouth but whistling. His eyes wide. His neck veins standing up. I thought of the air traffic controllers fallen out of their chairs. I thought of the world coming to an end while I toked up above it all because I was all sad about my little life. Idiot.

  “What’s that fire over there?” asked Kodie. “Looks relatively new.”

  “Probably debris caught from spilt fuel or something,” said Bass.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “That fire was set.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Looks like a pile of luggage.”

  Bass and Kodie squinted. None of us dared walk any closer to this colossus.

  Johnny held up binoculars he’d grabbed from our cache of gear on the living room floor. “Here, Kevin, you look.” He said this like he couldn’t bear to see it confirmed.

  The fire did eat away at luggage and it was clear that it had been gathered then set afire. The flames were too far away from the plane to make sense, too new and blazing. This is the added smoke we saw from the window.

  The binoculars still to my eyes, I whispered, “Why?”

  Johnny sighed and said, “To make us come check.”

  “To draw us out here,” Kodie said.

  Bass pointed along the top of the embankment.

  All along both sides of the embankment, set against the dusky sky, were the silhouettes. They stood equidistant from each other, still and soundless as statues.

  Johnny stood up on his toes, leaned into me and whispered, “They want me to go with them.”

  “You’re not going anywhere,” I said. I put my hand into my shirt, scratched out a single beat of ripping Velcro, and unsheathed Martin’s Glock 9.

  “That’s loaded?” Bass asked out of the side of his mouth.

  “Oh, yeah.” I pulled back on the slide. The sound ricocheted nicely throughout the creek bed.

  “Okay, good. I thought I was the only one.” Bass pulled a handgun from his waistband and held it down to his side.

  Kodie unsheathed a bowie knife I didn’t know she had. Flames danced on its blade.

  “Okay, listen up,” I spoke loudly up the embankment, my voice echoing and carrying to the other side.

  Kodie interjected. “We’d like to help you boys and girls. We are not going to hurt you and we know you’re not going to hurt us. We can all help each other, okay? But right now we need to get back home and you all need to clear out and go back to your homes or someplace safe.”

  “You can come with us if you want to. Tomorrow’s a new day. Okay?”

  Dark invaded everything now, in just those last seconds, as my last okay echoed and washed out. The fire up ahead blinded us to everything beyond it. There could’ve been five hundred coyotes and an army of kids behind that fire. “We are all scared, all right? We know. But let’s help each other,” Kodie demanded. I looked up at one side of the embankment, then the other, staring into the voids of their faces.

  All stood in silent standoff for maybe ten seconds. Then I muttered under my breath, “Okay, fine,” and popped off three shots into the air and they scattered. You barely heard their scuffling.

  I got the sickening feeling they possessed feral patience that belied their momentary fear of gunfire. Time is something they had. You felt they owned time. This was only the first night on the day of. They’d be less skittish soon, like those coyotes.

  We made our way back up the switchbacked embankment, a switchback created by generations of neighborhood kids.

  Though I didn’t say so to anyone else, I still felt uneasy. It felt too easy, their sudden scatter. Less a reaction to the violent noise than a signal.

  I had my gun drawn moving up that embankment in the lead like some sort of half-assed hero. A pot-smoking high school trombone player. Then, halfway out of the creek, we heard the home alarm blare high and urgent in repeated bursts.

  We ran. Dark now. They’d busted the sodium-arc lamps. The glass sparkled on the street. Only the porch lights and whiteout TVs pressed back the dark enough. The alarm grew louder as we drew closer. At the house I jumbled the keys from my pocket with one hand, the other holding the gun, and keyed the door. I ran to the back of the hall and entered in the code.

  The abrupt quiet was as starling as the alarm’s onset. The others had gone into Johnny’s room and when I skidded into the doorway, there Rebecca was, sitting in bed, crying as Kodie held her. The sliding windows were large and tall along the bedside. One was broken. Glass arrayed in a puzzle on the bed and floor. At my feet, a stone.

  Through her sobs, Rebecca managed to say, “…tried to get in.”

  “We know. We’re sorry we left you alone,” said Kodie.

  “It tried to get in!”

  Johnny spoke up. “What do you mean ‘it’?”

  Rebecca shoved her face into Kodie’s shoulder. Her voice muffled and wet, she said, “You know what it is, Johnny March. Don’t act like you don’t.”

  “Screw it,” said Bass. I was with him on that, joining him in the laundry room. He sat on top of the washer, me on the dryer and below us the keg in a full red ice chest. We drank Warsteiner from Martin’s best frozen beer mugs and after a minute of downing and burping, I uttered my profound retort.

  “Yeah, screw it.” I hopped down, the shift in me causing the release of a massive belch landing on the burp scale somewhere between old gaseous lion and
horny walrus. It echoed in the room’s tight confines.

  “Nice.”

  I took the gun out and put it on the kitchen counter and leaned against the door jam. We both wanted to stay in this tiny room, a respite from all that space and quiet. “Man…so tired. Aren’t you?” He nodded with the mug at his lips.

  “This will help,” I said as I bent down and refilled. I got back on the dryer and stared forward just as he did, jaw jutted out, eyes lidded. We looked like a couple of defeated caged monkeys wary of too many sugared children. But it had been a day of defeat, the longest day of all. I didn’t want to think anymore, and put the mug to my lips, closed my eyes, tipped it up, and began to chug.

  “Can you believe this?” Bass asked, beer-wet lips shining.

  I chugged. His question felt rhetorical. When I finished, I wiped my mouth with my arm and belch-said, “No. The very definition of surreal.”

  Bass nodded.

  “Sur is French for ‘on.’”

  “So, on real,” Bass said.

  “On real.”

  “We in danger? Tonight, I mean,” Bass asked, bent over at the tap.

  “Don’t think so. Just kids and they’re scared too. Nighttime. They’re not—”

  “They came here and broke that window.”

  “True. We weren’t here. I don’t think they’re coming back.”

  “There’s an arsenal in the living room,” Bass said.

  Two mugs down and now I was feeling it in my legs and throat, a flushness behind the ears. “C’mon. Let’s do what we said we would. Drink this here beer, try and relax for a bit.”

  “Until you guys drove up…I was gone, really losing it.”

  Quiet. Stifled belches.

  “Kevin,” Bass said. “Why won’t they come to us?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t—”

  He jumped off the washer. “Why are they against us? You’d think they’d need us—”

  “I wish I kn—”

  “—come running to us crying and tugging on us.” Bass exhaled an exasperated pshhh. “I do not get this. It scares the hell out of me, Kev.”

  I held up my mug to the flyspecked light and looked through the blond bubbles with one eye and redirected the conversation to the more hail-fellow. “You know, beer’s a good thing. A good good thing. I am so glad that I insisted on grabbing this bad boy from the store,” I said, kicking the cooler with my toe. “Did you know that in medieval times, Renaissance, when potable water was hard to come by, they drank beer for breakfast? Those beautiful churches all over Europe? Monks built those. Trappists, they made beer, man. They were drinking beer and building churches. Think about that.”

  Bass chugged a bit, bent at the knees, giving it a little body English. “Yeah. And the Rastafarians. They prayed using weed. God gave it to them so they could know him.” Burp.

  “I mean, wine’s the blood of Christ for chrissake. Turning all that water into wine.” I hopped down.

  We both nodded at the concepts we’d just unveiled upon human discourse for the first time and in the fog of a beer buzz coming on, we stood there quiet for a moment and thought of the monks and the Rastas and God, the water and the wine and the weed and the expanses of stained glass set into all those churches’ frames.

  “Speaking of,” Bass said. He looked at me and smiled.

  “No, man. Not in the mood.”

  “Not saying that. Left it under the tree. Pipe too. Crap.” He patted himself down to make sure. “No. Music is what I mean.”

  “Yes, good call. All day there’s nothing but ad jingles and dead air. I’m not wanting to watch a DVD or even read. No playing Monopoly, Cards Against…Humanity. I don’t think I can for a while, you know?”

  “Yeah. Same way. Institutions, days of the week, none of it makes sense. A whole new framework built.”

  “You sure you’re still not a little high?” I kidded and smiled.

  “No, man. You know what I’m saying, right? It’s like BC, AD, and now, whatever this is.”

  “I think we get to name it.” I stared into the floor, shook my head clear. “But we’re not going to think about it tonight, right?”

  “Music. Music I can do. In fact, if I don’t hear some music in the next minute I’m going to freak out. I’ve never in my life found it more necessary.”

  “Any requests?”

  “You know, I could listen to anything right now. Anything.”

  “I’ve got some killer Dead bootlegs, man, where I keep my weed, man, in that ornate wooden box with the etched mandala under my bed, man.”

  “Okay. Shut up. Not anything. Not the Dead. Of all days. Let’s not play the Grateful damned Dead today.”

  “Just kidding. Man.”

  Me and Bass raced to my room. Kodie jerked up and squinted at us. “What? What’s happening?” She looked down at Rebecca, the child who apparently just couldn’t get enough sleep. Badness teemed off her skin like heat. “I must’ve…What time is it?”

  “Bob Marley time,” announced Bass.

  “Quarter past beer.”

  “You guys are drinking,” Kodie said in this fantastic mock-disappointed mom voice.

  “You are correct,” I said, taking my phone from my desk and holding it up. “Damn thing’s still good for something.” I remember not even wanting to search the phone for clues about the outside world. I didn’t care about vigilance, survival, the connectivity that could maintain it. Didn’t care about people on the other end of the world who had figured out how to avoid the rolling death. The beer had claimed me into its short-lived euphoria, and I just didn’t care.

  Because I knew that there wasn’t anything to look for anyway.

  I wanted music. I wanted to live and to dance right then, not think about all tomorrow’s maybes. That’s all I’ve ever done, plan for tomorrow. Practice SATs, practice for Macy’s, preparing for this, getting ready for that, forever rehearsing some life to be fully lived in that mystical more perfect future.

  The old world’s future was gone. I will never sit for the SAT. There will never again be a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. There may never be parades again, with their pomp and symbols reflecting the past, foretelling a future, children’s lost balloons floating into specks in the sky. On the night of the day of, with a belly full of beer, I got to understanding that zen idea of living in the present. Because that’s really all there is.

  Right. Now.

  Martin was none too pleased when he knew I’d been messing with his stereo. God, he was such a dick! I touch his stuff and he freaks.

  Though later I would feel bad about feeling so good playing Martin’s stereo with impunity, it did feel good. We needed to feel good.

  Kodie closed the door on Rebecca and got a mug of beer. Johnny didn’t want to commit to bed after what had happened and had stretched out on the loveseat in what Mom called the reading nook of the dining room and was now asleep, looking like the cherubic little kid he was.

  The bass shook our bowels, thrummed in our chests, competed with our heartbeats. Bob Marley never sounded so full and glorious. Martin’s great speakers stood tall on the wood floor. The sound fanned out along the polished grain. Now rain had moved in with the night, the clouds blooming up from the Gulf. We danced to all The Wailers I had on my phone for long stretches without talking.

  Kodie had thrown her boots off as she let a third mug’s foam settle while Bob’s “I Shot the Sheriff” started up. She started in on this solipsistic dance, one where she closed her eyes and got lost in the music and spun slow with her arms twisted above her head, the knowing hip-sway and knee bends. It’s the dance of the nymph, and when you see it you understand how men’s ships let themselves be wrecked to wrack and ruin at the falling notes of the siren’s song.

  She was lost in her dance and me and Bass stopped whatever it was we thought p
assed for dancing and watched her.

  And in Bass’s eyes I saw what I hoped I wouldn’t see. He watched and bit his lip as Kodie dipped her hips, as Kodie twisted and flowed.

  She was showing off, proving so when she opened her dolorous avid blue eyes and smiled at us without a hint of self-consciousness, her cheeks flushed with the arousal that comes when all eyes are on you.

  I stepped up to her and moved with her and she slid and bent into my movements, rendering them less awkward.

  Bass went for his beer. Kodie and I danced to the thumping reggae and for the first time I felt myself grow jealous because I knew Kodie was watching Bass move across the room when I’m the one right here dancing with her. I lamely thought about something Martin used to say about loyalty—dance with the one that brung you. Like this was a date we were on, like she owed me. Absurd.

  I watched her eyes watching him, watched her flick her hair back with a snap of the neck, and knew the math was wrong now. Our ratio summoned up an SAT practice test word problem: When it’s the end of the world and you’re pretty sure you’re the last near-adults on Earth, what happens when there’s one pony keg of Warsteiner, one girl, and two guys with her?

  Fill in the appropriate bubble with your No. 2 pencil. And though this is multiple choice, don’t forget to show your work.

  A mouth twitched and spread open into a broad smile of dark shining teeth.

  I sat straight up in bed. My eyes shot back and forth in their sockets searching the moonlit room. Kodie lay beside me undisturbed, fully clothed as I. The alcohol trying to drag me back down but adrenaline overrode it.

  I whispered to Kodie, “You hear that?” Her breathing remained the same.

  The clock’s digital green said three thirty. I sat there in a beer sweat, breathing shallow breaths, not sure what made my body go on alert when my mind had yet no notion.