The Late Bloomer

by Falkin, Mark;

  When he moved his elbow off the armrest, I noticed the pistol on the chair. He saw me looking at it and smiled. “Goodnight.” Looked back at the book. “Progress today, eh?”

  “Mmmm,” I answered, too tired to care whether we had made progress or not and too tired to appreciate the need to stand watch. Such was the way of this new world. “Yeah. You got the conch tonight. Thanks.”

  He lifted an eyebrow at that, but kept reading.

  Kodie’s wheeze was there, but muted, the war buglers of her sickness trailing off and though I was falling into the tumult of dreams, I clung to my belief that I was right about her, that her illness was just that: an old-world one that ignited, flared its orange spikes but now was snuffed.

  This offered some comfort through the night in which I dreamt I was a chrysalis in a diaphanous sac through which you see my knees and elbows rolling and twisting in gestation’s dull agony.

  The chrysalis dreamed within the dream and it was this: Johnny standing in an open field wearing Man U’s red home kit, shin guards, cinched cleats. His arms are outstretched and his chin is lifted with pride and his eyes are closed in basking. The children pool around him, hug him and jostle him, but he maintains his messianic stance.

  I’m seeing this scene as a flying thing, hovering just above, then I swerve off through brightness and come upon maroon raw meat centered on a white plate on a pine table in the house with the winter cowboys. The meat starts to shudder and jump and maggots burst from the middle and spill out like white lava from the puckered flesh. In the background I hear frantic Spanish being spoken but I can’t make it out. It’s as though the disembodied Spanish speaker is calling a tight soccer match yet I know he’s describing to an audience what I’m seeing.

  I watch the maggots flow out, too many and too much for one piece of meat to hold. A magic clown car of maggots.

  Again, I’m flying and now I’m whipping through the air high above Lake Austin. I’m darting down for the waving bald man. In the corners of my many eyes I see that wave coming. I skim the water. It’s coming on my left and just when it gets to me, I lift myself over it and it moves past. I’m still looking at him, feeling it roll under me. But it’s not just water. It entrains an unfathomable power with it. I feel heat come off it as it passes under me. The bald man is waving like a sugared-up kid. His smile is profane. I zoom to him and hover.

  His face loses its smile. His waving hand falls to his side. His torso goes slack. His mouth drops open on a rusted hinge, and his eyes droop and I see red crescents under the corneas. Dark, viscous blood falls from his slackjawed mouth.

  He produces a glock just like Martin’s, the one I now have with me at all times, and puts it to his head and he fires and buckles to the ground. The lake water forced ashore by the wave comes up to his body and surrounds him once before receding, pulling a thin current of the man’s blood away.

  It is then I find myself standing in the man’s yard. I turn to watch the wave seethe and hiss north.

  I turn my head downriver and I feel profound doom and destiny.

  There’s an echo within the river canyon. The frantic Spanish—now I understand it to be coming from Bass’s ham radio—has slowed to something the speaker wants me to understand. I shake my head, unable to. Then the voice says in heavily inflected English—they cannot do it alone. The voice lets me consider this. In my thoughts, I assent: I can help. No, they need more than that, señor.

  That’s the chrysalis dream.

  Now, Johnny stands over me and Kodie while we sleep. Dreaming? Unsure. Johnny says, “We do need you. I’m sorry I had to leave. You were learning to dream the dream of sleep and I couldn’t disturb that. Because you’ll need that, probably more than anything, the dream of sleep.” In his pause he became more himself, my little brother. His shoulders relaxed, his tone his again. “There’s no point in worrying, Kev. Okay? Trust me. No point. We’ll see each other soon.” And Johnny strikes that pose again, arms outstretched, palms up. His eyes and mouth become orbs of white light. My eye draws to his clenching right hand. He breaks from the pose, drops his arms, and immediately goes into a throwing motion, kicks out his leg and—

  Shattering glass, together with whalescreams.

  I see dawn and piles of stones on a beach.

  I startled awake at that, soon tumbling in wet echoes.

  I heard my name shouted. I heard pounding. I shook my skull side to side trying to rid it of the words, the screams, the dawn beach.

  I sat up and there in my room I saw a head on a stick, the eyes Buddha-lidded, flies crawling and buzzing. I can’t make out the face it’s so covered. The buzzing pierces.

  Truly awake, in my room. Kodie’s deep asleep. I get up slowly so as not to rouse her. I check to see if Johnny is in his room, what I’d do every morning, but it’s just Wayne on the wall doing his Christ pose in the gloom.

  The world came back, the one I lived in now. It’s dawn. Spanish comes over the ham radio in the living room.

  Ciudad de Mexico—

  Eeef anyone ees dere, pleeese—

  I made my way to the front of the house expecting to see Bass hunched over the ham. Light from the front door windows filled the hall.

  A late bloomer’s voice: Hello, hello, estamos aquí, is anyone there? Weee are de Ciudad de Mexico—

  I flick on the hall light switch. It does not come on. My footfalls quicken down the wooden floor of the short hall.

  Los niños aquí, dios mio—

  “Don’t.” Bass’s sonorous voice, aggrieved and wracked, from the front room before I even get there. “Don’t, Kevin.”

  I step through the doorway. Before I turn to him, I see Mom’s car through the front door. It’s riddled with dings, the glass starred in constellations.

  There’s a boy standing in the neighbor’s yard beyond the back of the car looking straight at me, still as a rabbit, a sentinel spy. His hair is blond. It moves in the breeze. He’s bigger, older, yet a boy.

  Bass is naked. He holds the pistol. His face is red, his eyes are swollen from crying. He shivers blue-lipped, yet he’s starting to smile. His face forces this smile upon itself. A mucosal laugh barks from his throat when his eyes shift to look at me, then he says as if answering, “I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know.” He shakes his head each time he says this and each time the smile seems to spread.

  “Bass,” I said. I didn’t move. “C’mon, man.”

  “Don’t.”

  “I won’t, okay?” I stepped forward, my foot gingerly finding the floor as if it might contain a landmine.

  “Don’t!” Bass shoved the barrel under his chin, gouging his skin. He breathed quickly, his nostrils flaring.

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “No.”

  “What do you mean, no?” But for my mouth, I didn’t dare move. He held the gun to his neck like he was his own hostage.

  “The opposite.”

  He shook his head, closed his eyes and gulped. The sheen of sweat of his neck shone in the light as he swallowed and spoke. He kept shaking his head in denial, sniffing, his lower lip quivering, the gun still very much there. “Close to sunup. I couldn’t sleep, I was listening to the ham and then…”

  “I’m not moving, Bass. Okay? Just…put it down? Please.”

  He lowered it from his throat, holding it flat and diagonal against his chest looking like a confederate soldier posing for a daguerreotype. He rocked back on his heels and leaned his shoulder blades against the wall.

  “Why didn’t you come tell us?”

  “I kept calling for you!”

  I’d heard noises, but they were interpolated into my nightmare.

  Two boys now, towheads, their twitching thatches of hair all that move. They stand under the magnolia tree with their arms to their sides. One wears a green long-sleeve T-shirt, the other a grey hoodie. />
  “Who’re the trick-or-treaters?”

  Bass said, “Been there since right before…I…wasn’t feeling…well. They show up. When I picked up the gun, they just stood there.” He glanced at them and shivered. “I think they’re waiting for me now.”

  Kodie stepped up behind me and coughed. “What’s going on?”

  “Don’t,” said Bass. He stood erect again, gun wavering between us and him.

  Kodie peered around me, saw Bass. “Oh my God,” she whispered. She seized my upper arm, her knuckles brushing my gun.

  “No,” said Bass. “Definitely not.”

  I asked, “Bass. What are you doing?”

  “I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know.”

  “Are you…do you want to…?”

  He nodded vigorously. “Yes. I want to.” He burst out a single wet cry.

  “Can you tell me why?”

  “Feels right. Feels…good.”

  “Don’t,” I said.

  “But it’s coming on slow. The need. I’m so afraid. I don’t really want to go, but—”

  “We can help you,” Kodie said from behind me.

  He shook his head violently. “No. You can’t. You should stay away. You should go away and just let me. Your being here makes it hurt more.”

  Kodie teared up and sniffed.

  “That doesn’t help,” Bass said. “If you don’t leave me alone…it seems so glorious. It’d be wrong to leave you here. To suffer in this…this cesspool of a world. It isn’t ours anymore. They’re just waiting us out.” He nodded to the front.

  Kodie got up on her toes and looked over my shoulder out the door. “It’s just like what they did that morning at my house. Goddammit, can’t they just leave us alone? Or…do…something.”

  “You could come with me.” He lowered the gun at us, then back to his chin. “Please stay away, Kevin. I’m not sure what’s going to happen next, okay? I’m feeling very strange.”

  “Bass? Now don’t get mad at me. I’m trying to help when I say this. Don’t shoot, okay?”

  He shot me a basilisk glance, started to nod.

  “What if I give you something to make you sleep? Knock you out? We could figure out what to do.”

  “What could you do? Fix me? When I wake up, I’ll be right back to feeling like this. Except you’ll probably have me secured and then I’ll just go crazy.”

  “You’ll still be alive—”

  “So? What’s so great about that? Look around, Kodie. This is a nightmare. We’re in hell. Why would I want to stay here? Why do you?” He pointed the gun at us again, his shoulders squared to us, chest heaving, nostrils flaring. The sweat on his skin had become a full-body slick. I wondered how long he had been standing there, there within eyeshot of the boys outside. In my peripheral vision, I saw the boys drop down, out of sight. Not turn and walk away. Drop down.

  Though frightened to have this gun pointed at me by my friend whose eyes held such terror and pain in them I cannot even begin to describe it, though to do so is the writer’s want, I felt impervious—calm, even. If bullets came, they’d miss. But I knew they wouldn’t come because I had an idea.

  “You have to let me do this,” said Bass. He sounded exhausted now. Ready.

  “Okay.”

  “Please just go away and let me do this. Then it’ll all be over.”

  “Okay. But can you go outside?”

  Bastian’s face fell downcast, turned confused.

  It was working. I wanted to get him thinking about it, to derail him. Though the white stuff seemed to be unstoppable, I wasn’t convinced the suicides were. It takes an intentional act to do it. I figured if I could disrupt Bass, get him thinking about something else, he could find a way to beat it back. I chose to act uncaring, resigned. I wasn’t, but that was my gut instinct: throw him off by doing something counterintuitive.

  Bass lowered the gun and placed it back flat on his chest. Thoughts whirring through his mind’s infinite passages. I stood sick with fear, hoping that my friend in his last despairing moment wouldn’t feel I’d abandoned him.

  Kodie nudged me in the kidney. “Kevin, what are you saying?” I counted on Bass hearing her and me not answering. I stood more erect and took in a deep breath to punctuate the fact that I meant business. I mustered a look that said go ahead, leave us, coward.

  On his face hung disbelief and hurt. As long as he felt something, he had a shot, as we all did, as long as we didn’t go numb.

  “Wait. What? You want me to go outside to…?”

  “That’s right. I can’t stop you, but could you just step outside to do it?”

  “I can’t believe you.”

  “What can it possibly matter to you? You’re leaving us behind. So what does it matter where you do it? It doesn’t.” Brief pause, pregnant as hell. “But if it does matter, then things matter to you, and if things matter to you, then life matters. Being alive matters.”

  Bastian held the gun in his hands like it was an alighted butterfly. He regarded it as an artifact of his past rather than a tool of his shortened future.

  He considered. This is what mattered. With consideration, there is hope.

  The three of us stood there breathing, our hearts beating, the moment turning back on itself over and over, not stretching forward into the next.

  He dropped his hands to his sides and began crying. The gun was still tight in his grip and he beat it against his hip.

  “Give it to me, Bastian. Okay? I’m going to step over there and you’re going to give it to me, all right? Slowly.”

  As I took my first step toward him, the house went dark, as if the thickest of clouds swam before the sun. Eclipse dark. Just as quickly, that darkness lifted, and through the kitchen window I saw the massive shadow move along the garage, a neighbor’s roof and then gone. There was this final flapping flick to it.

  The house light again, Kodie screamed into my ear. Bass pivoted toward us, his eyes expanded and shining. He lifted the gun, aimed, and fired.

  I had closed my eyes. It happened so quickly, the shadow, her scream, his turning to us, I didn’t react. Maybe it’s because I thought I knew the bullet would miss.

  I heard glass shatter and felt a burst of air. When I opened my eyes, I saw a broken front door. Jagged shards of wood, glass daggers. On the porch lay a kid, clutching a sucking chest wound weltering through his fingers. He struggled and cried out, inhaled and exhaled rapidly for a few seconds, then went slack, the last movement belonging to his blue tennis shoes.

  “Oh—” uttered Bass. Though he had just shot a little kid to death, it had kept him from doing it to himself. That he cared he’d done it ratified his will to live. He dropped the gun to the floor. “Goddammit. I…I just reacted. He just appeared. Looking in. I don’t even know how to say what his face looked like. It was all…moving. His face wasn’t still.”

  I snatched the gun from the floor and took a step away from him. “It’s all right, Bass, okay?”

  He blinked at me like someone awakening from a dream. Looked at Kodie, down at his nakedness. He immediately covered himself. He brought his knees together and hunkered. “Man…what the hell? What was I…?”

  “You beat it, Bass,” I said. “You beat back what millions upon millions couldn’t.” Like I thought I had beat it back at McBride’s Guns. I think late bloomers have the ability to beat it all back. Adults didn’t and got overwhelmed with it. All conjecture, of course.

  “You did it. You saved me, Kevin.” When he said that, I specifically remember a wave of electricity coursing through me, numbing my hair, tweaking my pinky toe.

  I stammered, “I just reacted. I thought you were going to take us out. Are you…?”

  “Okay?” he asked, a look of amazement on his face. “Yeah. I feel great. I mean, oh my God I feel like something’s literally been lifted off
of me, a weighty fog. I can’t believe I was about to…” He shuddered.

  I flicked the gun halfheartedly at him. “Can you maybe get away from the rest of the weapons there and put your clothes back on?”

  “Sure.” His voice trailed away as he stared at the kid on the porch. “But I don’t know where they are just now.”

  “Let’s go look,” I said. “You don’t mind if I keep this thing on you for a few minutes until I’m sure you’re cool?”

  “Whatever makes you feel better. But I swear,” and he chuckled here, “I’m not ever going to get in that…place again. I can’t explain it. It’s gone, and it won’t come back. Thanks to you.”

  I believed Bastian. Mouths might, but faces don’t lie. He had defeated the feeling, whether it was with my help or not I’m not sure. The way he treated me thereafter, you’d’ve thought I’d taken the bullet myself and then risen three days later wearing a muslin robe and sandals.

  I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I gambled and won, that’s all. Fifty-fifty shot. You can’t tell someone that, shrug your shoulders and say yeah, well, I got lucky and so did you. Someone’s very life is worth more than that, the result of a coin toss. You want to believe that, anyway.

  His face and demeanor changed. He became the positive one. Convincing us things would get better.

  Something strange happening. He had this, what was it? A reverence for me. I’d catch him looking at me all starry-eyed. He was agreeable to anything I said and very solicitous. If I was bending down to lift something, he’d say, let me. Sometimes he’d look at me with his lips parted and all walleyed staring, like a dog looks at you when you’ve got too much of a meat sandwich on your hands.

  Maybe I did save him. It was lucky.

  Grandma Lucille. Well, you know what she’d say about that. Instead of saying ‘There are no coincidences, Kevin,’ she’d just as likely say, ‘There’s no such thing as luck.’ Same thing.

  Whatever it was, there was a dead kid on our porch. The kid wouldn’t be dead if I’d managed to get Bastian outside or if he’d just shot himself.