The Late Bloomer

by Falkin, Mark;

  The first six photos in the stack are the portraits. Each of them has posed with the folk art wooden cigar chomping man standing here like he’s a spring break buddy, Mr. Party, the older weirdo guy hanging around spring breakers and nobody knows who he is but the intoxication is so total that nobody asks or cares. Old-world cupidity and sex is in their eyes despite having fled out to this dog rescue ranch at the end of their world.

  The next six are group shots, five people in each. They are petting the dogs out in the pens, sitting on chairs outside on the landing which gives a view to the thousand foot high hills. One guy carves a pumpkin in each of these, not looking up at the camera. No beer cans, not many smiles. One girl, Kimberly (cross-referencing the inscribed portraits), seems to really have it for one of the guys, a Lance—he of the backwards-set ball cap and throw-pillow pecs under Hollister tee—by her torchy glances at him in each. Lance, ever aware of the lens, smolders for it, for all the ladies out there, seeming to forget there’s nobody left but them. Old habits die hard for smoldering dudes. I understood. Sure I did. Probably had his shirt off later, prancing around after a couple of brews.

  And my nasty little brain uttered to nobody but me: Will the world miss these people?

  This must have been Halloween day, the day the ham operator, Chris, made contact. The last one, a thirteenth photo I found off by itself on the desk, is a selfie, taken here in this room, his face washed out from the flash. Deep black doom in the eyes. A selfie because he’s the last one.

  He has written at the bottom—I’m certain it’s Chris’s script, from his other, happier headshot—the two short words I used as the clever title to my extra credit essay for Mr. E’s English class.

  Both end with an O.

  You guessed it.

  Mr. E’s words, in his voice from his note at the top of the essay’s title page, echo here: You really saw this didn’t you?

  Mrs. Fleming’s shout from across the street echoes right after it: You knew, didn’t you?

  I put my hands flat on the desk at either side of the array, elbows locked, head thrust down, and I looked into each face, found the good in each, quickly came to know them as their mothers’ children and that they all had the same secret, sane, and simple desires of the heart as I do.

  Were the dogs heard on the ham just baying at the Halloween moon?

  “Who knows?” I said to Maggie, who twisted an ear at me. “No shattered windows. Nothing like what those little shits did to us.”

  Through the window I see a vulture swoop down over the empty pen. No shadow followed it. Its flight embodied patience, a scanning glide, knowing there always would be plenty of death upon which to feast. I pick up and look at the developed Polaroid I’d just taken. My brow creases and my stomach clenches. I angle the photo to the window to see it better.

  In the extreme top left corner of the photo, I see a foot. The toe of a small-sized tennis shoe.

  My heart thuds against the roof of my mouth.

  Prickles of gooseflesh shoot across my entire skin as fast as kid movements, a wave of it moving over me instantaneously.

  Before I could turn around—“I knew you’d come.”

  The child’s voice issued from the gloom. Maggie and I spun around. She growled deep and long and stayed put.

  The kid emerged from the shadow behind the office door. He stepped out, holding his hands behind his back. I never sensed him. Maggie hadn’t either. The somehow is what bothers me now. That boy had to have been standing there stone-still the entire time we perused the room. That Maggie didn’t notice his presence still confounds me, confirming that he and they are of a thoroughly different kind.

  The boy was maybe ten, and though younger than Johnny, he was taller, having brown straight hair that looked neat as if he’d just combed it. He wore the clothes of a young lad off to school, clothes maybe his mother had laid out for him after he’d fallen asleep on his bed populated with stuffed animals, something she didn’t do much anymore because he was such a big boy now. His long-sleeved light blue oxford, which still held the shape ironed into it, was tucked into chinos a little big on him, his mother no doubt in the habit of buying her sprawling son’s clothes two sizes ahead now that his spurts seemed unceasing. His tennies had seen some wear but no time out in this recent rain.

  Though he had the voice of a normal child, there came a resonance with it, as if his voice were not simply on the cusp of acquiring preteen depth, but that it wanted to go straight to a young adult’s. It had a disquieting flange vocal effect to it, as if two voices issued out at once but at a slight timing difference so that it twined around itself. Twined and swirled. It sounded…wet, and made me dizzy.

  “Are you going to hurt me?” he asked. The layered voices entwining tighter. His voice made me want to scream.

  I shook my head. “No,” I said, clearing my voice. He blinked at me with inquisitive calm. Oh—he unnerved me.

  Maggie, though rigid with fury, had no inclination to move. A standoff, us three.

  The boy broke first, his hands relaxing at his sides, and as he stepped more into the light of the office, I noticed deep indentations on the bridge of his nose. Only then did it occur to me that not one kid I’d seen since the morning of, other than Simon, wore glasses. In looking at them through binoculars, something else had bugged me. That was it. No glasses. Mr. Fleming had mentioned this as well in his note.

  The boy glanced down at Maggie. With effort, he lifted his chin and looked back at me. He hid his terror of her deep in his blue eyes. His nostrils flared, venting his pent fear.

  “Your dog?” he asked, his voice normal now.

  “Now she is. I saved her, brought her here with me.”

  “You came from one of the cities.” Though I preferred this voice to the other, the result of his deception was coldness. I nodded.

  Maggie stifled her growl. You felt the air move from her throat’s oscillations. I know the kid felt it.

  “How long have you been here?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Where are you from?”

  He shook his head. The dogs in the other part of the house made a scuffling noise and the boy shot his eyes in their direction. “You don’t know where you came from, how you got here. Where are your parents?” Me, the interrogator.

  “I don’t know.”

  He said this honestly, not seeming to comprehend they were dead. His ironed shirt made me sad for him.

  “Do you know what’s happened? Out there?” I gestured to the window. “Do you even remember your parents?”

  “I remember everything, but it seems so far away, a long time ago. Whenever I try to remember something, like my parents, or where I used to live, it’s cloudy. It’s muffled. As soon as I start thinking about back then, it feels like my head gets filled with cotton and it starts to hurt, so I quit trying.” Cotton made me think of the white stuff. He started to cry, and when he did that, his voice went wet and flangey again and while I wanted to comfort him, what I really wanted was for his throat to quit making that noise.

  “Hey, it’s okay.” I took a reluctant step forward. I put my hand on his shoulder. The moment my hand rested there, he stepped into me, put his nose to my collar bone and sobbed. That awful flange unabated closer to my ear now. “Hey, hey, hey it’s going to be okay, all right? Settle down.”

  I glanced back at Maggie. She hadn’t moved.

  “Have you eaten anything?” I asked. He shook his head in my chest. “You hungry?” He nodded and stepped back.

  “Very,” he said, and I thought a smile was about to emerge from his face now red with crying.

  “You couldn’t make yourself a sandwich?”

  His voice normalized again, he said, “I’ve been too afraid to even leave this room.” Dog tuss
le noises within the house made him blink and wince.

  “The dogs?”

  “Not just them.” He looked into the middle distance over my shoulder. “They know everything, feel all movement. They feel me and I feel them, no matter how far away, though it’s less and less the farther you go.”

  “The farther you go from whom?”

  “The kids I was born with.”

  “Born with?” Even Maggie perked an ear and tilted her head.

  “Yes.” Wetness to it—yessss. My mind reeled.

  “You mean you’ve been hiding around here since…?”

  He shrugged.

  “Jesus . . .”

  The boy looked at the floor, rubbed his nose with his palm, then back at me. “That’s what one of the girls yelled when they grabbed her and dragged her out. ‘Oh, Jesus .’”

  “Who dragged her?”

  “The ones I came with.”

  “You stayed behind?”

  He nodded.

  “Why?” I asked.

  He shrugged.

  “The dogs. What did they do?”

  “They’re why the kids couldn’t stay.”

  I turned and grabbed the Polaroid selfie of Chris and showed it to him. “And him?”

  He took in the photo, glanced back at me.

  “What happened to him?”

  “Walked out the door. I didn’t follow.”

  We walked into the kitchen. The kid moved slowly as if every step registered somewhere creating a beacon on which to be honed in. The dogs inside left, shouldering through the screen door. I grabbed the one package of bread that had been twisted airtight, waved away flies, pulled open drawers for a knife. “What’s your name?”

  He sat down gingerly at the varnished knotty pine table in front of a large window looking out onto the pens. I pulled up the blinds quick and loud. He blinked and squinted. “Nate.”

  The dogs sat out there looking at us. They sat out there in the rain and made not a sound, yet all their faces were directed at us and all their ears were perked.

  “Hi, Nate.”

  “Hi.” I was starving too, so I quickly made up PB&Js with the J I’d pulled out of the fridge just holding on to the last of its cold. I popped open a couple of warm sodas and set them before us. We took big bites and ate in famished quiet for a minute. Then I repeated, “Do you know what happened?”

  His cheeks full, he looked up at me and shook his head and I believed him. His eyes fell upon the gun at my ribs as I leaned over to take a last bite, my shirt falling open a bit. His eyes remained there even as I continued.

  “Do you miss your parents?” I buttoned my shirt one more up the chain.

  He swallowed and nodded. “When I think of them, my head gets cloggy and it hurts.”

  “Nate what?” I asked around smacks and strained gulps.

  “Huhm?” Breadcrumbs on his face stood out in the shifting light. The rain plowed down now. Maggie sat patiently equidistant from us. Crust awaited. Nate tossed her one and she made it disappear in a snap. He smiled a mouth-full smile.

  “What’s your last name?”

  He stopped chewing, toggled his eyes upward to recall it. “Dyer,” he managed.

  “Does it hurt even to remember that?”

  “Sort of,” in muffled chewing.

  “I know it hurts, but can you try to remember some things if I ask you?”

  He swallowed. “I can try,” he said with a solemn look. He looked up from his crumbs and empty can. “Why do you need to know?”

  “I’m lost. I need to find out what happened so I can go on. Figure out what to do next. But I need your help. You’re all I’ve got.”

  He nodded and sat up straight, got a fixed look on his face and creased his forehead. “Okay, I’m ready.”

  “Don’t hurt yourself,” I said, trying to lighten the mood.

  Failing. This Nate was not processing levity.

  “Okay,” I sighed deep and long, not sure I wanted to do this myself. “Do you remember the morning this all happened?”

  He shook his head slowly with big innocent eyes.

  I searched his face for duplicity, seeing nothing but the most scared and blameless waif’s face, skin still dewy from his tears.

  “Before I say…do you have any sisters or brothers?”

  “No.” He shook his head almost in shame.

  “Okay, well, what happened is…”

  He looked up at me, his face curious yet full of dread.

  I told him.

  He nodded like he knew, like I’d delivered a diagnosis confirming what in his heart he’d already known to be a lethal syndrome.

  “How do you know for sure?” he asked in a cracked but normal kid’s voice. It sounded the most normal yet, now that he was upset.

  “Because I’ve seen. And because the world is quiet.”

  “Mommy and Daddy?”

  I shook my head. “Nobody. Didn’t the teenagers here tell you?”

  He shook his head. “I hid from them. A large group of us came here. But the dogs were…they left. They took one of them, a girl. I stayed behind. The other teenagers left soon after.”

  “Do you know what happened?”

  “No. I saw one girl walk away down the road there. She held her throat and cried.”

  Silence for a few moments. A spindle of drool fell from Maggie’s jowl, her eyes fixed on our food.

  “We’ve tried with the radio, we’ve driven through the city, I drove out here from Austin and saw nothing, we’ve—”

  His brave face crumbled, his eyes filled with tears which spilled over his lids and rolled down to his chin where the drops collected weight and gravity.

  He burst out in a cry, a single loud one that echoed in the great room. I got upset too. I sniffled and swallowed it back, cleared my throat. I gave him a moment. His head hung and his emotion now so overwhelmed him that he went silent and he looked at me with his mouth open in that hideous pained way people do when their throats can’t even manage noise.

  I don’t think he had understood until just that moment. It had taken my presence to draw it out. Whatever happened to him, all of them, that morning, I don’t believe allowed for understanding or pain or loss.

  But here we were, these in-betweeners…falling through the fissure between the old and new world, feeling it all.

  Nate sat in his chair and sobbed. Maggie waddled over, sensing the boy’s fear of her had slackened, and licked the hand he’d let fall to his side when he put his head down on the table. He let her. She wagged her tail. He turned his head to the side, laying his cheek on the table. Then he raised his licked hand and pet her head, and she let him.

  One down, my head said.

  Maybe I’m the warmth that breaks their ice. Maybe they all just need a good cry, to remember, to have a dog lick their hands again. The clarity of it struck me then. It made sense: they didn’t want to remember. It hurt too much. Their heads literally hurt. They didn’t want to remember and whenever we older ones were around, it made them hurt, made them start to remember. Mommies, Daddies. Home.

  The pain was too much, and they fought against it not knowing why. Of course. This is why they stayed away and threw rocks. Pure reaction to stimulus.

  My job, I thought then, was to let them feel their pain, to remember. So that then we can all come together and rebuild.

  I float along now, and as if they agree with my thoughts, ratifying them, they sing to me, but not in words.

  Maggie licking Nate’s hand was the first time I’d had any real hope since hearing those sounds the morning of.

  My wonder grows more profound now as I get closer to the coast. I’ve plotted my course on a folded paper map I’ve sheathed in a Ziploc. This river, the flooded Colorado, has taken me through the south of Texas and now w
ants to deposit me at Matagorda Bay. It’s up ahead, maybe another day’s travel. I hope the travel remains smooth so I can keep telling you this story of my experiences during these first days. Once I get there, I’m not sure I’ll be doing any more talking because I think I’m going to be very busy. From what Nate told me, which I’m getting to, I know I will be.

  There’s not much I want to say about the river, my trip down here. This isn’t a story about that.

  Besides doing this for you, Mr. E, and you, dear reader, and for myself, I am doing this for them, so that they have a record of what my first days were like and how I came down to help them. Down to the place whence it came—the sea. They want me to come down, but to come down slowly, a pilgrimage, and in so doing take the time to record my story for them, for you, for you are, after all, one of them, aren’t you? You’re a new-world kid.

  Even though I don’t feel the need to describe this trip, for nothing terribly eventful has happened, I do want you to know this: Maggie lies asleep in the front part of this tandem kayak. I’m sure she’s tired of hearing me talk to myself. Know that when the rain comes, which it has every day, and it comes now even as I speak into this, these rainy times are my favorite times. I erect my umbrellas, one for me, one for my dog, I fasten them to the boat in the cup holders next to each seat. I keep paddling, steering really, this current carrying me down. I feel this story come out better and faster when it rains. I’m at ease when it rains. I’ve got my headset microphone on, the recorder in the Ziploc with the map, and I’m just yakking away.

  It’s raining right now, droplets hitting the water. You hear it? All those ripples moving out from each drop. Know this too: Though at one point during a rough patch of rapids yesterday I thought I might lose it over the side, I’ve still got my trombone.

  And know that I don’t believe in luck.