I use levity to take the edge off now.
I tried to explain. “Calvary’s where Jesus was—”
“—one day and they’re already meting out justice,” Kodie said. “Incredible.”
“That boy in the middle, Simon, he talked to us. They didn’t like that.”
“Yeah, no shi—” Bass said. “Hey. I just thought of something.” But he stopped talking, totally aghast.
I prodded, “Go on.”
“Simon said something about a beast? I mean, is this punishment or doesn’t this look like they’re being offered up for sacrifice? They’re tied up like Naomi Watts for Kong.” Bass continued, scanning the crowd now. “A bunch of piles around. I mean, wow, a bunch.”
“Stones?” I asked, hurting like hell for my little brother. He was out there, I’m sure. I almost yelled out for him right then.
“Yeah. Some of the little ones are picking them up and dropping them. Playing with them. Tossing them back and forth and smiling. Oh, wait, now. The crowd is…”
Moving. The whole mass of them moving in agitated waves I cannot even describe. But I guess the writer must try, right? So here: it surged forward and then back, over and again. It’s the best metaphor I’ve got—it’s waves. The whole thing is just fluid, not the movements flesh and bone on dry land are supposed to make.“They’re not moving their feet. They’re, like, bending at the waist. Their eyes are closed. Goddammit, Kevin, what the hell is this?”
“Are we dreaming?” Kodie’s eyes looked straight at it, wild-eyed and entranced.
Humming, as from a hive, rose up from Butler Park, became a single thing, moving the air in currents. I grabbed the binoculars back. All of them, even the toddlers, the infants, eyes closed and humming the low vibraphonic bottom-register hum, Ohm—
Electricity in the air. Pure harmonics.
Kodie whispered, “It’s like plainsong, but it’s not even singing. It’s . . .” She went walleyed and swiveled her head no in tiny arcs.
My mom used to get bad carsick sometimes. I never understood that. Now I did. The motion, the hum. I had to look away else I knew I’d puke. My head hurt too. Stabbing pain above my right eye. I bent over and put my hand over it. I stared down at the track with my left eye.
To the left in my periphery, I thought I saw movement up the track. Johnny? My heart rattled my ribs, making me even woozier. I looked down the track but didn’t see anything.
The sound they made swirled and augmented so oddly that it compressed your head. Maybe I won’t survive this after all, I thought. Maybe it just takes us late bloomers longer to die. My head pounded with my heart. I looked up at an awestruck Kodie, the rims of her nostrils ringed with dried blood. From earlier, I guessed. I could hear her wheeze over the hum.
Just when the children’s noise reached an almost unbearable intensity, it leveled off to a mellifluous buzz. A wave moving over and away.
Through the binoculars I watched their movements. “They’re all looking down now, searching for something. Why are they…are they uncovering bodies?” Like a flock, like a swarm, like a school.
“Hush. They’ll hear us,” Kodie said, but she said it as if she were aloft. An angel with belabored breath. “Ssshhh.”
Fixed in her eyes existed this meditative focus so serene it frightened me. She looked at inward galaxies and time and into the mind of God.
I’m essentially having an aneurysm above my eye, Bass is wigging, and Kodie has slipped away from us and so what came to mind was an old song Martin used to play real loud when we’d drive out to his real estate buddy’s hunting lease, the dawn gray and cold but he’s amped from his stainless tumbler of coffee (a song I really liked, Martin’s liking it notwithstanding): There’s something happening here, And what it is ain’t exactly clear.14
Danger. The feeling of danger flooded me when my mind played that song. The need to puke disappeared, the head pain melted and my heart found its rhythm, warm and bright in my chest with a job to do.
The song’s lyric continued in my head—stop children, what’s that sound, everybody look what’s going down, and with it I felt their eyes on me.
“Oh, crap, there’s a couple little girls who see us. They’re pointing,” I said.
And then a hundred thousand little faces turned to us. Their heads snapped and locked in on us like radar dishes. Cold, inanimate.
We ice over. We don’t breathe. I still held the binoculars to my face, elbows out, but I’m Tin Man stiff, knowing that the glare off the lenses, if moved, will not help our chances.
I’m thinking about the footrace to the Bronco. I’m thinking there’s a few of the boy-soldiers of the group already peeling away from the back of the pack and heading in that direction. When I say a few, I guess I mean a hundred.
“We need to go,” Bass whispered. The children looked at us in the huge mesmeric quiet. Kodie said, “If they wanted to do us harm, they would’ve attacked us already. They had their chances yesterday.”
“Today’s a new day,” said Bass. Which was oh-so-true.
“They could’ve invaded like locust last night. I think they just want us to go. Not to—”
“See,” I said. “They don’t want us to see.”
“Yeah,” said Kodie with distance and wonder in her voice. The question floated through our collective heads: See what?
As I sit here, or I should say, float here, talking into this thing, I don’t know what it is we saw that morning at Butler Park. I haven’t seen them amass quite like that since. I’m sure they have, I just haven’t seen it. Saw them at the pit, but that’s different. Later.
I’m pretty sure when I get to where I’m going, I will see them amassed again. Maybe then I’ll know why. I think I fear that most, seeing them like this again.
What did it do to Simon and the other two? What were they waiting on?
I think about that winged watching thing, its shadow moving over the house that morning. How it blocked out the sun for a second. I’ll get to that later, too.
“Let’s give these kids some privacy,” said Bass in comic relief. “Get ready to run. As soon as we move they may come tearing after us.” Think: the athletically gifted zombies trope, them tear-assing around the corner coming for us.
But I knew they wouldn’t. Kodie didn’t comment, confirming to me that she didn’t think they would either. They just wanted us gone.
“Ready?” Bass said. “Okay, let’s go. Go now.” I lowered the binoculars and turned to him. He had taken a few steps down the ties. “Let’s go,” he whispered through gritted teeth, his tall frame hunched. “What’re you doing?”
Kodie and I lifted our chins and gave the staring masses a last look.
We were making our way down the embankment to Barton Springs Road when we heard the roar come from the park that prickled the skin as it curdled the blood. We ran to the Bronco.
It came again and again as we ran, this hideous cresting surf-roar. Deep in the roar lived an inhuman screech. It hit the higher registers of our aural perception, pinged and tweaked them to the point that we flinched and clasped our hands to our ears, cowering as we sprinted across Barton Springs toward the big green elf.
They were still roaring as we shut the doors and rolled up the windows. The horrid noise muted, we looked at each other wide-eyed in the acknowledgement that it contained the sound of bloodlust.
Kodie had managed to keep her coughing in check on the track, but she began to cough now with the excitement and the running. Bass turned to look at her and I could see that he thought of his mother’s demise yesterday. The struggle in her face.
“You okay?” I asked. The question came out lame. Of course she wasn’t. She was older than me and Bass and now she struggled for air like the world’s adults did.
She put her fist to her mouth and furrowed her brow and nodded she was okay, managing to mutter
when she was done with the fit, “Yeah, just the running.” She noticed me looking at her blood-specked fist. She tucked her hand away and looked out the window.
“Kodie,” I whispered, “let me know what you want me to do. Okay?” She smiled and her eyes shone. A tear fell, then she coughed again. She took my hand and held it hard against her chest like a jewel she couldn’t afford to lose.
“I will,” she said, her voice a clipped-off wet whisper.
Bass didn’t peel out. We sat in idle, our heads all turned to a pile of stones sitting right below the takeout window at the McDonald’s next to Peter Pan Mini Golf. No car there.
Drawing your final breath on the oily tarmac of a McDonald’s drive-thru, looking at a huge purple Grimace (A pained facial expression is a monster’s name? And you sell food to kids with it?) and Mayor McCheese, the stench of hot reconstituted fat from the pickup window…This has got to be one of the worst places to exit this life. We stared as we passed. Just galling.
Roaring children, a cairn at a McDonald’s drive-thru. The wincing smile frozen on Grimace’s face as he waves his flipper, a smile which clearly says ‘help me’, Madness.
The roaring stops. It listens.
We’re all listening, turning around in our seats to look to see if they’re coming.
The seconds tick off and the swelling silence becomes unsettling. “Bass, go,” I whisper. That damned muffler blats even in idle.
It’s a reset. A do-over with the children while Grimace and a giant Peter Pan watch. The mass of children who move as an oil slick on troubled water. What had come that morning was not the destroying thing itself but rather the claxon call heralding the foaming white to bubble up. Triggering the fall, forcing smiling people to leap from high places.
I’m certain the children gathered as they did in Butler Park in every city and town the world over. They gathered in fields off the highway, or someplace behind the rows of tannin sorghum and tall fall corn in those places where we envision alienate crop circles. Back there, having their get-togethers like this, the roar not as loud but for the size of the crowd, but coming from the same impetus, and if you look real hard you can see how they move in synch just the same. Not a late bloomer among them.
Bass drove slowly and mused out loud, “I figure we’re just below expiration, though I doubt age-in-years has anything to do with it.”
“Three of us have already found each other within a day. You gotta figure there’s more of us out there.”
“I’ve been thinking. Let me ask you guys. Were you late bloomers? I mean, you know, relatively. Puberty wise,” Kodie asked.
I nodded. So did Bass. We shot glances at each other.
Though I intuited it was, I nonetheless asked, “You think that’s why we’re still here?”
Bass shrugged and nodded. “If so, we’d’ve seen a lot more of us, but there’s been nobody. Gotta be more than three in a city the size of Austin.”
“We haven’t been everywhere. We don’t know yet,” Kodie said.
“Would’ve run into them by now,” deadpanned Bass. He scanned the road with his eyes with both hands on the wheel.
“Not necessarily,” Kodie admonished. “They could be hiding. We haven’t tackled this with any systematic—”
“—Okay. Yes. You may be right,” Bass cut her off.
I continued to play golly-gee. Maybe it’s because I didn’t want them to think I knew something. The responsibility of that.
“It skipped over us somehow,” I said.
Kodie inhaled and exhaled rapidly once. “Maybe it didn’t skip us. Maybe it just takes us longer.” The Bronco got real quiet. The muffler’s blat and tire hum was all. I glanced at Kodie. She looked down at her hands, her face trying to conceal deathly fear. To hear herself voice it drove her eyes wild.
We drove slow now, crossing over Lady Bird Lake, and as we did it occurred to me that I’d never not seen a paddler down on the water until today.
I asked, almost rhetorically, “Why didn’t they surround us, you think? They saw us.”
Kodie curled a hair loop behind her ear. “I think it’s…they’re still just little kids, you know? They’re scared. Our world, our lives have been turned upside down. Theirs has been turned inside out. They’re clinging to each other. They’re very much about safety in numbers. Rugged individualists they aren’t.” She looked out the window at a Lamar without traffic, its places of business and apartments tombs now. Staring, she said, “They fear.”
“They are skittish. They haven’t come near us. Not at the HEB, not at the cemetery. When we went to Rebecca’s house, that was us going to them, surprising them a little I think,” I said. But they knew. Bass turned in his seat a little to face me and Kodie. “You saw them all together just now. Whatever happened…that’s the result. Kids acting as this one thing. No leadership structure. All stimulus-response, like a flock.”
I turned my head as we passed by the bookstore Bookpeople and saw on the marquee that Sarah Bird was to be reading from her new one tonight, an Updikean comedy set at a Westlake dinner party on Halloween. In monotone I said, “Birds. Yeah,” but I thought, oceanic quicksilver.
“A swarm. A hive,” Kodie said, again looking down at her hands which now formed themselves into a rounded, hive-like shape.
Bass nodded his chin her direction. “Hives. Man, that’s it. They’ve all gotten together into these mindless hives.”
I said, “I wouldn’t say mindless. Of one mind.”
Bass equivocated. “But hives have queens. I’m not seeing any leaders.”
I almost asked them right there if they’d seen the dark smiling teeth too.
“I felt kinda safe in the cemetery. Even though I was close to them. I didn’t want to move. They stay in a group, but I’ve seen a few stragglers. Rogues. Not many. Boys, mostly. They don’t venture far. I’ve seen them go off down the street and then come right back running. Eight, nine, ten-year-olds,” said Bass.
“You say rogues, but I bet there’s more to it than that. I bet those are the ones who act as hive police,” I said.
“Bet those are the ones who busted up my car,” Bass said.
And I thought, and dragged off Simon and tied him up to a post atop Doug Sahm Hill.
Nothing more to say for a few beats. In the old world, we couldn’t take it, the building up of quiet like an explosive gas, and somebody would have to rush in to say something to fill the void. The old world abhorred a vacuum. Not anymore.
Bass said at the intersection at Twenty-Fourth, “God, there’s just nothing.” He lightly thumped the steering wheel with the meat of his palm.
I kept thinking I should be despondently sad, and a part of me was, but for some reason the tears just hadn’t come, at least not like the deluge I let go when Grandma Lucille died, like a damn breaking. You’d think I would’ve by then when I thought of Mom, Dad so far away, Martin, Johnny. My classmates, friends, bandmates, Mr. English. I saw their faces, flashes of them at least (amazing how quickly you start to forget even the most important faces in your life when they’re not there to be seen anymore), but that profound mourning had yet to arise in me. Watching the train slide by did it to me, though, and Mr. Fleming’s note. That’s something, I guess.
Maybe I’m being strong for something bigger. I get that feeling now. After all, why am I paddling coastward, answering a summons I cannot begin to describe?
My aloneness is total. It’s me and you, dear reader. And those who watch. I feel their eyes on me. It’s my journey to make. What? a pilgrimage, a vision quest, a…hell, I don’t know. Maybe I’ve tumbled full on into crazy. Me and Mags here. Ol’ Mags the Killer. Aintcha, girl, huh? A goddam killa.
None of us asked why those kids were tied up on that hill, or what we thought happened to them. I waited for someone else to ask. Obviously, everyone else waited too. Didn’t happen. Verboten topic
among the late bloomers.
The silence peppered with muffler blats was short-lived. Bass muttered to fill the void, answered unasked questions. “They don’t mill about. Total stillness, total discipline.” I liked Bass for his talkativeness, his old-world want to fill the void.
“They didn’t come anywhere near those train tracks. I don’t think they trust technology, you know? The old ways of doing things? You’d think they’d be going bonkers, playing with everything, burning stuff, just going wild. Or at least wandering around lost and crying, looking for Mommy and Daddy, any adult. Pounding on the doors of the Palmer, something. But it’s the opposite. They’re so…contained.”
Bass stepped on the gas and took a turn to the east. I assumed he was going to get on I-35 again. “Goddammit,” he said to no prompt. Just pissed.
“Waiting us out,” said Kodie.
I said, “If we insist, you know, assert ourselves as the elders and try to take charge, we’d be quickly dispatched out of pure fear. Like white blood cells taking out a pathogen.”
“Fighting off infection,” Kodie said. “We’re the germs. Old-world cooties.”
“I don’t know, man. Fear? Those little bastards seem just plain mean to me,” Bass said, stopping at the front of the Driskill Hotel on Sixth, throwing it into park but leaving the engine on. “Be right back.” In our talking we hadn’t noticed that Bass had backtracked to downtown.
“Wait, what? Where are you going, Bass?” Kodie asked out the window at him, worry in her voice.
He smirked. “I gotta go up and see about a ghost.”
“Oh, stop it,” I said. “We’ve got other things to do.”
“You wouldn’t understand,” he said. “Be back in a sec.”
Bass stopped on the steps fronting the hotel, an 1880s structure. I dunno architecture but it’s terra-cotta-colored and textured, one of the nicest hotels in Austin and certainly the most famous. You could say it was stately.
Martin took us to the Driskill Grille once, for a steak dinner. He actually said that. Let’s all go out for a fancy steak dinner tonight. He’d closed some deal and was feeling all magnanimous. A pretty great night, actually, near Christmas last, everything festooned and lit. Martin and Mom’s faces flush with wine, the rims of the wineglasses sparkling, the civility of the table talk, the family’s future seeming bright. Not that I had bad times—just first-world uptown teenage whiny sucky times, right?—but this was one of the good times. He insisted we all get steak and we did. He even let us have wine, and Mom said nothing about it. I’ll hold on to that memory of Martin: his face flush and candlelit at his whoop-de-doo steak dinner at the Driskill Grille.
The Late Bloomer Page 17