We sat at the lacquered dining table listening to rain that seemed mad at us. I told him everything that had happened to me from Mount Bonnell on, including the reason why I was up there in the first place, point by point as a witness to my own small history.
A rather cold synopsis, really. I didn’t get into with him what I’ve gotten into with you, how I felt, how I feel, who I miss and how much. I didn’t tell him about Mr. English, my summerdreams, my story The Late Bloomers, the extra-credit essay, none of that. Mostly because he’s a little kid and wouldn’t get it. But also because that other stuff is between you and me.
He had stopped crying and gone stone-faced as he listened. He got lost at times in the narrative, and whenever I broke that spell it put him in, his face tensed up from the slack wonder it had fallen into.
Because he looked exhausted and because it hurt his head to remember, I couldn’t yet ask him what he knew.
Evening came, the rain continued but had lessened to a patter. I told him I was going out to feed the dogs. He nodded and said, “Kevin? I’m not like them, but I am…what I mean is they’ll know I stayed behind. I’m like a piece broken off, and they’ll…”
“What?” I let the screen door close, took a step back into the room. “They’ll what, Nate?”
“They’ll come back. They know you’re here. They won’t be coming for you when they come back. They’ll be coming for me. But I don’t want to go.”
I patted my gun. “Between this gun and all these dogs, I think we’ll be okay. I came out here to find those teens. But instead, I’ve found you and that’s something. Hang tight with Maggie, okay? She likes you. We need these others, so I’ve got to go out here and feed them so they’ll stay around. Understand?”
He blinked and put his hand down to Maggie for her to lick.
I found the dog food in aluminum trash cans up on a foot-high riser at the back of the carport. I filled several big pans for them. Making several trips like a harried waiter, I placed them down and each time the dogs waited until I had walked off before eating. When they did, they did so orderly and quietly, all standing around the bowls, heads down, no fussing or fighting.
When I came back in, I noticed how dark the room was now that the sun had gone down. It had descended faster than I expected here in the hills. The windows were purple and the trees and hills framed within them black silhouettes. I’m in a place I don’t know. As small and simple as it is, once it’s dark, it will become a cave of unknowns.
“Nate?” I called out.
I heard Maggie whine once, close in the room. “I’ll get you yours in a minute, okay?” I said, more to make myself feel better in hearing the sound of my own voice, like whistling past a graveyard.
I called out to her. “Maggie?”
Lingering light allowed me to find Maggie sitting next to Nate who lay asleep on the couch in a part of the room where there was a flat screen and some magazines spread on a coffee table.
“There you are.” Maggie stayed seated. “Nate,” I whispered the first time. “Nate,” I then said aloud. I shook his leg. “Nate,” I said even louder, my voice banking off the vaulted ceiling and tiled floor. He didn’t move. “Maggie, stay.”
Pleased with myself with how quickly I found candles and lighter the owners had laid into the first kitchen drawer by the door, I sang a bit (that graveyard whistling instinct). “Come on baby light my fire. Try and set the night on…fire . . .”
The candlelight lent a gothic cast to my wandering. I needed a flashlight. Badly, particularly when lightning lit up the rooms, throwing unfamiliar objects into relief, gave each a shadow.
Standing in this hall holding this candle, the lightning flash afterburn leaving matters even darker, I was maybe the most scared I’d been yet, even with Nate asleep nearby.
I had to make noise to stave off the fear, so I made busy, opened cabinets and closets looking for a flashlight. Nothing in those cabinets except dead scorpions stuck to glue board traps.
In the walk-in pantry, spaghetti crisscrossed the floor like pick-up sticks among all manner of cereal the dogs failed to eat. Top shelf, there the several flashlights were with packs of batteries stacked next to them. I put four flashlights on the kitchen counter. I tested them, replaced batteries. I lit three more candles and placed them on the bar, on the dining table and one over near Maggie and Nate. Place looked like goddamned Dracula’s castle now, less the cobwebs draping over staircases and the conspicuous lack of mirrors. It was indeed a dark and stormy night, dear reader. Candlelight, lightning flashes, hardened shadows, and, underneath, pulsing quiet.
And it would stay dark because, after all, were the strong, capable people at the power company working on it somewhere out there in the night, with gritted teeth and know-how? Nope.
Maggie sidled up to me and leaned against my leg when I sat down on the couch next to Nate. I tried to imagine his child terror but it wouldn’t form in my heart because whenever empathy kindled, my mind heard their roars and his flange enmeshed within it.
He hadn’t told me anything yet. He slept. I still didn’t know where he came from or even how old he was.
Maggie jumped up onto the couch and curled up next to me. Watching Nate’s diaphragm rise and fall, feeling the rocking of Maggie’s panting next to me, I drifted to sleep.
Thunder rolled down from the hills into my dream. I dreamed of Johnny and me playing soccer together under a low gray sky bringing rain, just knocking the ball back and forth. I wore new cleats. They felt good on my feet, all soft and formfitting. Johnny wore a red Man U jersey. When he turned with the ball, faking out a nonexistent opponent, I saw the name on the back of the jersey curl over his shoulders: Rooney. Johnny kicked the ball high and directly above him, as high as one of the trees lining the field’s chain-link. He did this show-offy twirl, and when his back was to me again, I saw the name wasn’t Rooney, but March, blazing white against that Old Trafford red. He trapped the ball to his feet like it was an egg, just taking it out of its sixty-foot drop and laying it gently at his feet. Johnny was a good player in the old world, but in the dream world, which felt part of the new world, he could do things with the ball that he never could have done in reality.
He passed it to me with crisp and assured pace. I swatted it back to him but not as well. He had to stretch to bring it in, and once he did, he dismissed me and started juggling. The ball a magnet to his feet, thighs and head, he moved it around his body and there was no chance it’d touch the ground. I watched rapt and proud.
In the sixty-foot trees behind me I heard Kevin! Kevin, help me!
I turned around quickly like someone had tapped me on the shoulder, my eyes scanning the trees. Johnny’s ball-work staccatoed its leather-on-leather thumps behind me. A shape in the trees. I knew it to be a kid nest. This one had the look and shape of a brown felt bag. The bag bulged and rolled like a third trimester belly and from it the cries came more muffled now. Ke-uhnn…Elllp eee.
“Heads up,” he said, and as I spun around I heard a thump unlike the others. I didn’t see the ball but rather felt my head snap back and then my feet flying out from under me.
Johnny’s shadow fell over me. I couldn’t move yet, still stunned. I rubbed my right occipital bone. In my periphery, I saw the ball in the grass.
“Sorry about that,” he said, stifling a laugh. “You okay, Kev?”
In my periphery, the ball was gone. I turned to look for it. Where it had been, a riven fist-sized stone.
He stood over me now, blocking much of the sky. He did Rooney’s Christ pose. “Helluva shot, eh? One for the books,” he said.
He puts his hands on his hips, looks down at me. “I’m your brother so I’m not scared of you, but the rest are. Scared of you yet needing you. When we’re near you, we feel more our old selves. You’ll be able to help us bridge the old world and the new. But right now is a time of change. We’re not
ready. And something…” Johnny’s eyes hollow out, his face falls into a terror mask, but then snaps back bright like a struck match. He sighs one of those oh-well, what’re you gonna do? sighs. “I can’t talk about it.”
I sat up on my elbows and squinted at him. My mouth felt stuffed with cotton.
Johnny looks at the sky and seems to draw from it. Then, the blue of the sky having transferred into his otherwise brown eyes, he lowers his head and stares into me. “You’re it, my brother. You have been for a long time.” He chuckles to himself, pops his cheek. “Don’t know why it’s a dork like you, but.”
The muffled cries grow louder. Johnny looks in the direction from which they come, narrows his eyes to slits. “Don’t listen to that, Kevin. They don’t understand.”
Maggie growls. Nate’s talking. My eyes fly open. Nate is sitting up, staring ahead unblinking, mumbling in his sleep. He doesn’t react to the flashlight when I point it at his face, but his pupils contract to pinpricks and his speech clears. “You have to go, Kevin…you can only go one way.…you already know. You must go alone.” Then in a faraway disembodied flange voice he says, “It’s only me, brother. No other.”
Those six words are said in Johnny’s voice.
I detect that he’s conflicted. He’s breathing hard.
“Nate, wake up.” Barely awake myself, I find it hard to separate Nate’s words from Johnny’s, the dream world from this one. They overlap and I am unsure. “Please, Nate, wake up and talk to me for real.”
This kid sitting up and staring past the flashlight glare speaking in monotone had my pulse going, the reality of now thrumming through me.
I yelled at him. “Nate! Wake up!”
I beat on his legs with my open palm. He blinked, turned his face toward me. Growling from Maggie. Maggie leaning into me, ready to pounce.
Nate’s face gathered up into a fearful shudder. He recoiled and pulled his legs away from me. “Oh, no! It’s you!” His eyes grew wide and he shook his head with petulance like the child he was. “No. I don’t want to. I don’t want to.”
“Don’t want to what, Nate? C’mon, it’s me. Kevin. You’re okay. You’re safe here.”
“No, I’m not safe. Never safe.” The voice wavered between old and new.
“That’s not true. Don’t you remember? We’ve been together all day today. I’ve told you all about me.” I reached out to touch his shoulder. He jumped back onto his heels on the couch, his knees at his chin. Maggie startled but I made sure she stayed put with my other arm.
“Why did you come here?” he asked in a whisper.
“I told you.”
“They’ll find me!”
“Nate—”
“And I don’t want to go back to them and I don’t want to be with you because you make my head hurt. I just want to be left alone.”
“Nate—”
His eyes shot back and forth and his breathing shallowed in rapid hitches. He huffed his breath and whimpered in abject pain, overwhelmed.
My presence confuses things for him.
“When they find me, they’re going to…”
“What?” But I already knew. I flashed onto Simon’s freckled face, fish-belly white, peering through the curtain of green.
“Because I’m not…I’m not…complete.”
He looked up at me and his eyes implored that I believe him. I took the flashlight beam off his face, no longer interrogating him. “And they’ll just kill you for it.” I remember saying this without derision. I said it quietly, stating fact.
Though he did not respond, his face was grim.
The night’s black didn’t allow me to see that puddles in the gravel quivered with droplets until I waved my beam out across the drive. Lifting the light up, I saw the dogs’ eyes spark yellow. They sat still, watching, ears perked to our conversation. I lit new candles on the bar. Sleeping no longer occurred to us.
I sat and slumped back into the couch next to him. Nate sighed deeply, chin to his chest.
“You’ll stay with me. Here. I like it here,” I said.
“You can’t protect me.”
“Worked so far.”
“They wait.”
“For what?”
“For you.”
“I’m not leaving.”
“Yes you are.”
“No I’m not.”
“Yes you are.”
“Forget it, Nate. We’re staying here. We’ll wait them out. Things’ll settle. They’ll stop being so scared and after a while we’ll be able to make contact and work together.” I embellish that line a bit, because right now, floating along, I feel this is true.
“No. You don’t understand. They’re not scared of anything anymore. Except you.”
“Hush—”
“Haven’t you ever needed something so badly that you were afraid of it?”
There’s need and there’s want. Wants came to mind. Publishing my first book, the bookstore letting me play my trombone at the first reading. I thought of wanting to be with Kodie, watching her ring up customers, wanting to be with her. No, that felt more like a need.
I thought of Grandma Lucille with her eyes closed listening to me play, then eyes closed laying in her coffin. I thought of how badly I wanted the world to be different as I sat up on that boulder smoking…and then here came that single rolling wave…
It needs you to need it.
“Of course,” I said.
“That’s how we, they, feel. They need you but they’re scared.”
We sat there looking at each other in a bit of a standoff. The tension of the moment tormented Maggie and she jumped down and looked back and forth at both of us and whined. I found myself questioning this kid. He’d stayed behind, sure. But now I’m really wondering why. Is it even possible that they’d let him, that they’d not notice? Or did they leave him here to serve a purpose?
In the old world we’d call him a plant, a spy, or in this case, a double agent.
These thoughts bearing questions had no answers. If I asked him, I don’t think he could give me a real answer if he wanted to.
“When you were talking in your sleep you said something to me. Do you remember what you said?”
“What did I say?”
“I’m asking you.”
“Uh . . .”
I scrutinized his face. He seemed confused by my behavior.
“Um, I think I said, ‘oh no it’s you’?”
I shook my head. “Before that.”
He shook his head back at me, shrugged. If he was lying to me, he was a thespian extraordinaire. If he was lying to me, it wasn’t intentional.
“I don’t remember saying anything before that. What was it?”
“It doesn’t matter, okay?” I could see trying to remember pained him.
“Tell me.”
“No, Nate.”
“Why won’t you tell me?”
“Because it doesn’t matter and because I don’t think it was you telling me. It wasn’t you talking.”
His shoulders hopped up and down as he immediately began crying. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry...”
“For what?”
“For what I told you. Whatever it was.”
I slid over and hugged him. He hugged back hard and desperate. His mouth was to my ear and mine to his. “I won’t ask you to remember, okay?”
His chin drilled into my neck as he nodded. He sniffed loudly in my ear and deep in his throat his little boy voice whined. He tried to contain it but he burst out in a hoarse cry.
“It’s all right, Nate. I’m glad I came here. I’m glad I found you.”
His chin dug in more, his grip on me tightened. His whispers came out wet, not in his new-world voice, but in his old-world mucosal little boy’s voice, the voice he’d have used if talking to his da
ddy after he’d taken a nasty fall off his bicycle. I felt his breath there, and into the swirl of my ear he pleaded, “Please don’t leave me. You can make my head hurt. I don’t care. Just don’t leave me here.”
He clung and his body shook.
The morning is an amethyst sky that melts away into blue by full dawn. November cold comes with it. Here in the hills, winter’s prelude arrives early. Uncontrollably shivering on this couch, I understand what it means to need wood. The steel wood rack lining a wall of the carport stood empty save for maybe enough wood to burn through in one cold day. Today, the front and the rain having passed, was that cold day. Halloween’s celebration of the harvest, of mocking the death promised by winter, was over. Now, the cold.
We could see our breath indoors. We’d need wood to keep warm and to cook, there being neither power nor gas. We’d need it for flickering comfort.
My old life had its fires and fireplaces, but those were always novel, weren’t they? Winters in Austin got below freezing, sure, but we didn’t really need a fire. It was extra. A blazing hearth in the room was for atmosphere, a First World aesthetic.
This morning is the first time I’ve ever felt the cold as a threat. It’s a threat when you’re not sure you can escape it, that it might seep into your bones and remain.
Cold had infiltrated my bones overnight. In the purple dawn, it wasn’t leaving. Dawn light tickling my eyelids, stirring my circadian stores of serotonin, didn’t wake me. Cold did the waking. My body announced via biological bullhorn: wake up, you might die if you don’t find warmth soon.
Layering helps. In a hall closet next to the bathroom I found a skuzzy sweatshirt someone had clearly used for a smock while house painting, and an old peacoat that fit me well, that and a burnt-orange longhorned scarf and one of those hunting caps with woolen ear flaps. I pulled a smallish jean jacket from the closet and set it next to Nate along with another one of those caps that looked too big.
I covered him up with a blanket I’d found draped over an armrest. I let him sleep. He lay there with his breath pluming out into cartoon dialogue balloons. In each, his hold on me tight and bony: just don’t leave me here.
The Late Bloomer Page 27