The Late Bloomer

by Falkin, Mark;

  Austin lore, Driskill lore, says a ghost lives on the top floor. I knew that’s what Bass was doing. Stoned in the dark spaces of Memorial Park, he’d get all mystic and delved into gothic what-ifs. He was superstitious too, or liked to pretend he was. We’d be standing too close to a grave and I’d be coughing up a lung due to some harsh smoke and he’d say, “Let’s walk on. We need to let this guy sleep.”

  “Right now?” I whined.

  “What, Kevin? What’s the hurry?” Bass said, annoyed. “Seriously, take a breath.”

  I blinked hard at his logic, laying the smartassery on thick.

  He exhaled loud. “Just…gimme this. A coupla minutes.”

  “She’s just up there waiting on you. Today’s the day.”

  “I’ve got a feeling. Given what’s happened, I’d like to think there’s lots of ghosts walking around. Whole damn planet’s haunted now.”

  I hated to tell him that it already was haunted. Always was.

  “We’ll run into some on the way home. C’mon. Power grid’s going to go anytime. We gotta—”

  “We don’t gotta do anything. Not anymore. We’re the survivors,” he pontificated, “and we don’t got to do a damned thing.” He stood astride the steps looking like a VIP telling off a hounding reporter. “Hell, I may sleep here tonight. Armed to the teeth, of course, and drunk on the Driskill’s top-shelf hooch. Come up with me.”

  “No, man. I’m not into it. I want to get a plan going, get organized, then we can screw around.”

  “Jeez. I mean, Kevin, the world’s already…It can’t get worse.”

  “The hell it can’t.”

  “We’re still here. Let’s live, dammit. You and your Warsteiner last night and now you’re all taskmastering?”

  I shook my head, a look of bewilderment, I’m sure, on my face.

  He waved me off and went in. The smoked-glass doors to the Driskill swung open. I figured he’d come running right back out, his face white after seeing the concierge rotting on the lobby’s marble floor before the doors even settled back into place. But he didn’t.

  When did bodies begin to smell? Mr. Fleming had within twenty-four hours. This became the topic while we waited on Bass. Kodie didn’t answer. She went mute and I felt horrible for asking now.

  “In a week and it’ll be unmistakable,” she said. “Do we pile and burn them? Bacteria and viruses will have nowhere else to go once they’ve burned through all the flesh. Rotting bodies don’t cause disease in a population unless it gets into the water. We stay away from them, we should be okay.” We knew we could never build enough pits to bury the world’s bodies. The earth will just have to eat them all up and the dried bones will just have to sit there for time immemorial, or at least until the kids grew up some and decide they want to clean up the place.

  But I was glad at least we were now firing off questions, brainstorming the new world. The stun was wearing off and now we needed to get with it. Bass didn’t seem to think there was a clock ticking, but I knew there was.

  I gritted my teeth with impatience now, my body’s glands flaring and shoving its chemicals through my veins.

  That was the old-world survivor in me competing with the part of me saying screw it, why bother? Roll with it, like the kids do. I think of my jazzier trombone pieces which makes me think of that saying heard around Mardi Gras—laissez les bontemps roulez. Let the good times roll.

  There would be no more Mardi Gras. All the world’s traditions, holidays moot. The Great Zamboni had come and all that scratched ice and those little piles of shavings and blood droplets gone, glazed over into a surface so mirror-like that yesterday’s games are forgotten.

  Martin had taken me to a bunch of Texas Stars hockey games. I feigned not wanting to go but I always relented. Looking back, I know that I desperately wanted Martin to take me. To cheer stupidly at the swirling red lights when a goal was scored and to pretend like we were father and son. Sometimes, in din of cheering and noise from the arena’s speakers, I’d tear up wishing it was my real dad who took me to hockey games and high-fived me, our hands smacking in the cool air.

  The how and the why don’t matter. Only survival matters. The kids, when they grow up, will have the burden of trying to figure it out. Then again, when I see them move and act as they do, I’m not sure they have any designs to do any such thing like figuring it out, trying to divine goddamned meaning all the time. Honestly, when I saw that wave moving up Lake Austin coming fast on the heel of those sounds, I wasn’t surprised. It knew what it was. I couldn’t put it into words, but I knew. I’d dreamed it. I’d written it in a story already. A version of it. The way it felt. Not the wave or the whalesounds, just the doom. Seeing it, my mind screamed, there it is!

  I’m calm right now. Talking to you helps me. You’re like my shrink, dear reader, my analyst nodding at my problems. As I talk this out, I feel warm and soothed like I’m floating in the womb of the world. I think I’ve said that before, the womb of the world. Of course, I am actually floating southbound on this turgid river.

  Water. Womb. World. Whalesounds. Waves. Warm.

  Not a whimper but a whuh!

  We made our way down Sixth and zoomed up onto MoPac. No merging. It was all ours and its emptiness made my stomach sour.

  “You see her, Bass?” I asked.

  “Who?” Bass had spaced out a bit, snapped back. “Huh? Oh, uh, no. No suicide brides on the fifth floor.”

  I’ll never forget the way he looked at me after he said that. It came out as such an obvious lie that I laughed out loud at him. When I saw his face, I stifled it. Though my heart raced with his look, keeping things light, I’d said, “Well, thanks for wasting our time.”

  The windows are down, for we are ever listening, and we’re flying up MoPac and he turns and looks at me again, his face pallid and drawn, his eyes saucer-huge. It was enough to shut me up.

  Such weirdness compounded here at the end of the world: My eyes whipping open this morning and then I’m chasing a train. Bass U-turning and running upstairs into an old hotel to see a ghost. Kodie and I compelled to go to Rebecca’s house. Some random dying man’s request. Now Johnny’s gone. But for Rebecca, he’d probably still be with us.

  What will be the repercussions of my compulsion to train-chase, Bass’s attempted ghost-spotting, Kodie’s need to stay with Rebecca, her siren’s dance to Legend: The Best of Bob Marley and the Wailers?

  We knew they were coming and we waited for them—the repercussions. That’s all we could do.

  Belaboring how things looked in the days after, the bodies, the piles of stones here and there, the slow degradation of things—little things at first like the accumulation of trash and leaves in places where you’d normally not see it, at places of business, hospitals, and here, the Lowe’s—gets monotonous so I won’t bother with the apocalyptic tourism.

  The corpses and the stink and the fear. It’s all there, know that. That ever-increasing deathsmell hangs as omnipresent fog. The sweetness, the tang. So thick you almost think you can see the amalgamated fumes.

  So there we were at the Lowe’s up on Shoal Creek. Our talk and cries of shock and disgust at the sights echoed throughout the massive still building. Lowe’s opened at 6:00 a.m., so folks had been here at daybreak. Employees and all those early-risen construction workers and painters in their speckled chinos. The handful of bodies were mostly chokers-of-the-white, but there were a couple of suicides (nail gun, saw).

  We acquired two generators, an ass-load of batteries and flashlights and lanterns, a couple of those big portable space heaters (November cold after Halloween), and then we got gasoline in about fifty red plastic two-gallon containers. It took all afternoon. But we were doing something. Being proactive, Martin would say.

  Doors unlocked, we just walked into the Hummer dealer, found the drawer where they kept all the keys. No bodies and no piles.

>   Our shoes squeaked on the glossy cement showroom floor. We weren’t agog or excited. Acquiring some material thing in the new world held no meaning. It was big, shiny, so what. Maybe we should just go take over one of the palace homes overlooking the lake. We talked about it. Maybe we would, some place that’s all windows facing west and a wine cellar and beer fridge stocked to make Bacchus blush. Take over the W Hotel downtown, run amok, stay drunk. Maybe we would.

  “There she is,” Bass said with put-on drawling pride in his voice. The Hummer Bass chose was black on black, tinted windows, a tricked-out, violent rap video’s ride. Bass hopped in. Over the harsh echo of the door slamming shut he put his wrist on the steering wheel, looked out the window and said, “Dig my ride, bitches?” I didn’t answer. Kodie shook her head slowly, smirking at Bass.

  We figured out how to roll up the front garage door. Before driving off, Bass stopped, powered down his window again, and threw me the Bronco keys. I bobbled and dropped them. As I bent over, he said, “It’s yours, bud. But, I don’t get it. Why don’t you just take one of these? Get something else tomorrow? The next day. I mean, who cares?”

  I shrugged.

  “Maybe tomorrow.”

  I drove home in Bass’s Bronco. He didn’t even hang and wait for me. Kodie, clearly not feeling well, jumped in with him.

  Maybe Bass was right: Who cares?

  I followed them for a bit, but turned off. Guess they didn’t notice.

  Driving alone in someone else’s car, this muffler’s death rattle caroming off every building back into my ears, I felt what it may be like for me sooner than I wanted to believe: Roaming these streets alone, hiding from the children as if they’re killers, no girlfriend’s hand to clutch, no little brother to hug, no compatriot in Bass. Nobody.

  I had this impulse to drive away from everything fast but I jerked the wheel into the neighborhood where the elementary school where I used to play youth soccer was on a whim, to see if there were any kids milling around. Hoping there would be. Seeing anything like that, any humanness in them, confusion, fear, would have been better than to believe what we saw this morning at Butler Park.

  I circled the grounds. They contained no life, no death, not a single stone cairn in the parking lots.

  I wasn’t a great soccer player when I was ten, but I was decent. I wasn’t a thumbsucker and I tried hard. My coach liked that. This was when my dad was still around. He only came to about half the games. They were in the mornings on Saturdays and he and Mom seemed to always be at each other, if silently. But when he did come out, he got into it and cheered for me, saying nice job when it was over. He didn’t say ‘champ’ or ‘big guy’ like the other cheese-ass dads.

  But the cheese-ass dads came to every game and didn’t move to North Carolina forever with some bitch named Beth. In retrospect, I’d’ve taken a ‘way to go champ’ any day. Go ahead, cheese-ass dad, tousle my hair and tell me ‘we’ll get ’em next time, big guy.’

  I walked out onto a green field marked with faded lines for games that should have been played today and stood out among them. I paced a little and fought off despair. From my pocket I pulled out Mr. Fleming’s yellow note and reread it.

  I KNOW YOU WILL SURVIVE…. I KNOW THAT YOU’LL NOT BE STAYING HERE FOR LONG…. THE DARK SIDE OF THE HELIX…THE WORLD WILL STILL NEED ITS STORYTELLERS…. IT’S YOUR WORLD NOW…. STUMBLED ONTO SOMETHING WE SHOULDN’T HAVE?…. IT NEEDS YOU TO NEED IT….

  When I drove over there I had considered just driving away, never to return. Overwhelmed with that feeling, by those dark smiling teeth. But the turn into this neighborhood, then these fields, changed that. I’m glad I had his letter on me. The gist of his note wasn’t just ‘please bury us’ but ‘keep going, you’re the one who can’t give up’.

  Late afternoon when I pulled up to the Flemings’ house. I opened the Bronco’s tailgate and then went steaming in. The smell intensified on the way back to the bedroom, almost overwhelming now just hours later. The imminent rot of the world tormented me, how all was going to become a decomposing slush.

  He leaned against the wall under the window, his jaw unhinged and frozen. I grabbed his feet and through his socks I felt cold hard flesh and I bellowed in gall.

  The eyes show you things. The nose pronounces it with depth. But when you touch, you come to know certainty.

  I wrapped my fingers around his ankles and pulled. His head thumped to the floor from the wall. I didn’t look at his face as I dragged him through the house. There was no way I was going to get him up into the Bronco alone.

  This made things real, the weight of the dead. The earth pulling the flesh back whence it came. His wet suit and hair left a trail on his wood floor. I kept saying I’m sorry, Dr. Fleming, I’m so sorry. On the porch I paused and looked across to see Bass and Kodie standing in my yard. They didn’t offer help at first, just stared, not understanding what it was that had gotten into me.

  They asked themselves, I knew: Why did it matter? Who cares? Not in a crass way, just matter-of-fact.

  It mattered. Mr. Fleming’s note said so and I believed him.

  It matters. How we bury the dead, what we do from here. We can’t just throw up our hands and give up. This has happened and yet we remain. We continue. You’re here, dear reader, yes?

  I dragged him farther and was almost crying with the effort and frustration, not understanding why he was so heavy, this slight, intellectual man.

  Midway down the cement walk to the Bronco, Bass called out and they came jogging over.

  They stood and stared at him, the abstraction becoming real. We’d seen bodies. Bass had watched his parents both die. Yet this stranger’s corpse, that I was pulling it and wanting to bury it, came down on them. The fact that the old world had to be buried somehow. We couldn’t just leave it to rot. But how? The children…they were changed, they wouldn’t do it.

  “Help me,” I said through gritted teeth, pulling on him, putting my back into it. Bass took the feet. I went around and picked him up by the shoulders. His head lolled, his eyelids folded and I saw the death in them, the marbleized flesh of the man’s cold eyeball. Kodie supported in the middle and we managed to lay him in the back of the Bronco.

  “If we do this, what’s to keep us from doing others?” asked Kodie. It was the first time I’d heard distance and coldness in her voice. “Where does it stop? My parents? Your parents, Bass? What about them?”

  Bass looked at the street. “Yeah. Maybe later. Right now, I don’t know if I can even…”

  “I know. Me too. I’m sorry.” Pause and quiet. The silence of the world. “But that’s what I’m saying. We can’t bury them all. And don’t be melodramatic and tell me ‘but, we’ve got to try, dammit.’ I say no we do not.” She sniffed and coughed. “When I go, I won’t expect it of you.”

  We looked at her and froze, speechless.

  “You’re not going to die, Kodie, okay?” I said, still sucking a little wind.

  “No time soon,” said Bass with a wan smile.

  Her eyes cutting to Bass, then me. “You’re my guarantors, eh?” she said with a dangerous laugh. “Screw you guys. Don’t soft-handle me. Don’t pretend.” She met and held each of our eyes on each word.“I’m. Dead. You’re. Dead.”

  “Help me get Mrs. Fleming? Please?” I asked Kodie this directly.

  “We haven’t been spared!” she bawled. Her voice echoed. “We’ve been passed over, but it’s…it’s circling back to take us. You know it’s true.” She flapped her arms out and slapped her hands back onto her legs. “No. No, we haven’t been spared. We are not the lucky ones. We are the ones who get to suffer the most, that’s all. We get to watch it all crumble, think about it, feel it, mourn, then die.”

  Kodie refused to help more and walked back into my house. I heard her crying as she reached the porch. She closed the door and we began with Mrs. Fleming.

 
This was the first body I’d removed stones from, so its shock value was high though I tried hard to gird myself.

  I started with the head. Bass picked off stones from her body and legs. Lifting that second rock, I saw her eye. It bored through me with a fear in it unlike her husband’s. Once I cleared away the others from her face, the total expression wasn’t fearful. It’s just that her eyes were open.

  “Want to close those?” Bass asked. “It’s creeping me out.”

  Now I felt the prickles on my skin, thinking she could sit up any second, gawking at us like we’re ghouls disturbing her place of rest. I saw that image in my head—Mrs. Fleming sitting up board-straight, her mud-caked, leafy hair sticking out in all directions, her greening skin loose and purple-veiny, then swiveling her head to me, blinking sluggishly one time and then letting loose a cry of the damned. A cry sounding just like the whalesounds at dawn on the day of.

  Christ.

  I made a V of my fingers and touched her eyelids. The chill of her flesh, cold as the stone I just pulled off her, ran through my fingertips and coursed all the way to a place behind my ear. The lids wouldn’t go down. Kept flapping back up like cheap window shades. I tried several times, pushing down and then pulling with my fingers.

  “No go,” I said. “They won’t move.”

  “Guess she’s just going to have to watch us,” said Bass. We didn’t laugh at this but the attempt at humor made this bearable.

  No go, I thought, harkening back to the title of the extra credit essay on Lord of the Flies written for you, Mr. E. The words came to mind and got applied to the stiffened status of Mrs. Fleming’s eyelids. But there was more to those words; and the dark smiling teeth in my head—the ones spreading so wide within the mouth housing them that the glistening purple-black gums show too—and they say to me matter-of-factly: things are what they are. That quote, psionically-uttered by the head of a pig on a stick in the green island jungle as heard by the at-that-point disturbed character Simon—