God, this is how his mom went. He was witness to it. “Hey. It’s all right. Listen, don’t try to remember right now, okay? Not right now.” Our feet scuffed the path. Some bird of prey overflew.
He burst out in a throaty cry, wiped at his eyes, and held his head.
Nate’s memories flooded him now. His face showed more panic than pain, his eyes wide and toggling back and forth at onrushing memory. I wanted to stop and hold him but we needed to keep walking. I called out loudly for Maggie, ripping the holster Velcro as I did. Then I whistled the theme to The Andy Griffith Show, my arm around Nate’s shoulders.
So there we were at the end of the world, seeking out hope and a future, striding fast, me whistling, eyeing the birds, watching the open spaces, gun drawn and held down to my side, my other arm around a boy who’s sobbing at the recall of his mother pulling a pistol from her purse and firing its bullet into her head—no doubt with a horrible crazy rictus on her face—and all along I’m deathly worried about Maggie, I’m deathly worried about what tomorrow brings. I’m deathly worried.
All our ersatz normalcy and rhythm dashed, once again we lived in the fearful moment. I knew this is how it would always be.
My whistles came back to us from the walls of the valley louder than they left.
Roaring fire inside, small flames on the grill outside and I’m cooking eggs in an iron skillet. The sun plummets and it’s cold enough that I’m seeing my breath. Nate looks down at me from the tall rectangular window of his loft.
I feel him up there. Watching me. I pretend to focus on the skillet, but in my peripheral vision, I see his forehead and palms are pressed to the glass. His stillness is palpable.
He’d gone mute since we’d returned. His eyes had retrograded on me, looking like they did when I first met him in the office holding that Polaroid in my hand.
After a few minutes of me pretending to not know he’s up there staring down at me, the eggs I’ve stirred together popping into a scramble I’m sure will bring in the dogs (hoping to Christ it does), I attempt to nonchalantly look up over my shoulder and feign surprise to see him perched up there.
He’s staring, his oceanic eyes wide. I force a smile. Because it’s false, his face doesn’t change. His gaze bores through me. I wave my spatula at him. He blinks the sea-stare from his eyes and tepidly waves back.
Then he suddenly pushes off from the window.
“I’m ready to talk now.” I’d just looked back at my eggs and then Nate’s voice was right there. Standing in the garage doorway, he’d materialized so suddenly that I jumped and spun around brandishing the egg-dripping spatula as a weapon.
This should be funny. We should both break down laughing to release the tension.
I don’t like how he came down, so quiet and fast. As I recall this now, I think of him moving in a sickening new-world blur from his window and down the stairs.
I don’t like the look in his eyes or on his face either. While he doesn’t beam malevolence, I know within him a battle rages. The urges belonging to a scared kid of the old world named Nate versus implanted directives of the new.
“Talk about wh—?”
He cut me off. “When we first sat down the other day and you made me a peanut butter sandwich, you wanted me to tell you what I know.” I could swear I heard a smidgen of that flange in his voice.
“You don’t need to explain anything to me. I doubt there’s anything you can tell me that would be worth your pain.”
“But I want to.”
“Do you think it’s important?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is it hard for you?”
He paused and said, “Yes.”
“Then I don’t need to hear it right now.”
“But—”
“I trust you, Nate.” Oh—how his face fell when I used that word trust. He lowered his eyes to the cement. I continued. “I think you’d have told me already if there was something I needed to know. I know you wouldn’t keep things from me that would hurt me.”
His pause before responding signaled calculation. His eyes drifted back to mine. “No, I wouldn’t do that.”
“We have tons of time. Okay?”
“Okay.” He slumped, plodded forward like any kid. “I thought you’d be mad at me.”
“No. We’re doing fine. One day at a time, all right?” I turned my back to him to evidence my trust.
It took a moment for him to speak. “I’ll go out in the morning to get the eggs this time, okay? I know how now.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. The chickens like me. I want to.”
“I’d feel better about it if Maggie went with you though, you know?”
“No, it’s okay, really.”
“Swear?” I turned back to the grill. I had to turn around and ask again. “Swear?”
“Swear.”
It felt older brotherly. In his voice I could hear him wanting to please me. He wanted to do something on his own. He wanted to be an individual, and to stop being afraid. I thought it was a good idea. I’ll admit that gaining an extra half hour of sleep did appeal to me.
Though early evening, eager stars had winked into position. I spoke over my shoulder, “Eggs are nearly done. If you’ll go get some bread, I’ll toast it here and we can have breakfast for dinner.”
“Again?” he teased. Our thing.
“Again.”
Cue television laugh track.
I had incorporated their yipping and sniping into a dream before awaking, one of those dreams of a nebulous world at your periphery—blinded to it, you keep turning, your mind, your psyche, whatever you are, you’re spinning in a white void trying to connect.
The auditory connected because there was the yipping. A group of them, gathered outside. The feeling that they had returned woke me. Usually, I’d call up to Nate in his loft soon after I woke, but that morning I didn’t because I needed to know whether I had dreamed these noises or they had issued from the conscious world.
I sat and listened, moved my eyes back and forth in my sockets.
There—the yipping . . .
Sounding victorious and celebratory. There was also anxiety in it—wake up, come see.
I’d washed my clothes last night in the kitchen sink. They hung from a line of cooking twine I’d stretched across the front of the fireplace. As I slipped them on, dry and warm, the noises outside amplified.
The dogs had returned. I mumbled a missive out to the God that let this all happen, “Please let Maggie be among them.” I shrugged on my peacoat.
Beyond the ambit of the fire, I felt the morning cold before I reached the door. The storm door creaked. The dogs were gathered near the carport waiting to be fed. “Oh, so I guess you’re done carousing and you’re back to punch your meal ticket. What, hogs outrun you?”
Getting closer to them, I saw I was wrong. Each of their snouts, the fur on their chests, glistened red. A wave of revulsion moved through me. They froze as if gauging my reaction. I didn’t see Maggie. “I see you had yourselves a hunting lark after all.”
Their muzzles dribbled and dripped. Fresh kill. Standing among them now, they meandered all around me as if seeking praise, lifting their heads for my touch. Droplets of blood dotted my shoes. Some smeared on my hand-cleaned pants.
“Ack! Back! Back you fiends,” I kidded. The dogs scattered a bit, giving me room with laughter in their eyes and grisly smiles on their faces. Each had a gout of blood on its snout like they’d dipped it up to their eyes in red oily paint. They seemed to revel in it. I’d not seen them so happy and satiated since coming here.
“I doubt you’re hungry. Huh, you killers? Yeah, you guys are killers,” I teased and reveled with them as I arranged their food pans, looking forward to reestablishing the routine again, that rhythm we needed after yesterday’s scare. The coppery
tang sluicing from their mouths intensified as they dug into their food with abandon. “Guess I’m wrong. Famished. Famished from the glory of the hunt. You killers you.”
I turned around at movement I felt behind me. Up the path came Maggie in silhouette, the sky brassy with dawn breaking behind her through the crease in the valley. She sauntered toward me. I didn’t like her deliberation—she had the uneasy gait of a rabid, untrusting canine gone fey—but I ignored it, squatted down and opened my arms to her. “Mags! Where the hell’d you go? You went poof on me. Worried us.”
She didn’t come running. She came more into focus and I saw that her muzzle shone bloodslicked as the rest.
And something else. The shine on her muzzle. I looked back at the group of dogs eating. I walked over to them. Having breached the horizon, the sun poured light on the dogs. Now I saw how slick and splotched their muzzles were. Along with the blood, flecks of eggshell clung to their yolky smiles.
The chickens’ silence struck me as unusual for early morning. Dawn broke behind Maggie yet no rooster crowed.
Maggie stopped in front of me, her muzzle dripping of egg and blood viscous and vermillion. Unlike the others, Maggie didn’t wag her tail and didn’t seem to revel.
“Oh, man! Tell me you didn’t get into the coop. Please tell me you didn’t just slaughter the hens and scarf the eggs.” Maggie averted her face from mine.
I strode through dewy grass to the coop, chuffing steam-breath into the air, yelling over my shoulder, the echoes highlighting my solitude, “Goddammit, you guys! This is our lifeline!” Maggie obsequiously loped behind.
When I got to the coop, I found it undisturbed. A couple of chickens came out of their holes and poked around. No blood, no signs of breaking and entering.
I circled the coop twice to make sure, thinking no feathers on the ground, no feathers on their snouts…
Maggie, tail tucked, scooted clear of me as I turned to run.
I didn’t call out. I topped the single flight in three bounds. The mattress on the floor of the loft lay empty, the comforter folded back, the pillow still impressed with his head-shape.
Downstairs, and I see the egg basket is gone.
The dogs weren’t disturbed as I tore out of the house. The storm door slapped the frame. I ran back to the coop. The chickens squawked and dashed back into their places when I barged in.
All the nests were empty.
My heart thudded between my ears and my stomach dropped.
He had wanted to do it himself. He didn’t want to wake me.
For hours I yelled out for him. I ran around the compound breathless and panicked.
Shadows thinned and slanted. I sat numb at the kitchen table and stared at its lacquered knots, black holes through which I tumbled.
I remember sitting there wishing I would cry. I just tumbled, I don’t know for how long, the silence of the world beating at my ears.
The dogs lay in a tight pack in the sun. A cool wind blew over them. Their bellies engorged with new-world blood, they all slept save for Maggie who sat at the front of them with her ears up, waiting for me.
I hadn’t made a fire. The room grew cold by noon. I tumbled.
I took the Bobcat around the property. About a quarter mile away in the other direction from the way we’d been walking—which means he must have been running from them because he wouldn’t have gone that way otherwise, not without me—up near the mouth of the creek which dumped into a small lake on the property, I found his egg basket, bent and slimy, a spray of shells like spent firework paper, his too-big hunters cap in a wet wad, and the grass all around matted with blood gone brown.
I stood there in the cold looking at the scene, wondering where the carcass was, wondering about what he had seen the morning of, wondering how much horror can a little kid see and still live on, wondering what kind of foulness had descended on the world to allow a little boy to witness his smiling mother blowing her head off with the pistol she kept in her purse.
I stood there and the sadness never came to me. The anger came. It came as an entity and swirled inside me under my breastplate, rooted itself and made a home there. My eyes stung with rage, and though I yearned to, I couldn’t scream out into the valley because it wasn’t a valley. It was a void which would only throw my own voice back at me in mockery, the void knowing that’s the most painful trick of all.
I searched all morning but never found him.
“How could you?” I asked Maggie as she recovered and reset herself in the seat.
The day shone bright but there was no hope in it as the Texas Hill Country scrolled past, its small burgs with no working stoplights blurred in the landscape. No distant smoke spires. They were done with that.
We drove fast down the middle of the roads and highways, the SUV straddling the dividing lines. Leaves, trash, and debris created a wake that swirled up behind us as we crashed through. The roads were no longer neat strips of access and egress. They rolled out before me cluttered and treacherous. The new world would cover them with organic matter until they were vague, ancient paths crossing the expanse.
But today I plowed through at high speed, my jaw set, my eyes level and hooded. Maggie sat in the passenger seat of the black Tahoe with the encircled SA sticker on the back bumper and panted, switching her eyes to me every time I spoke. Furious with her, every once in a while on the drive back to Austin, I tapped the brakes so she’d crash into the dash. Each time I did it, I yelled at her, my voice cracking, “How could you?”
I had dumped all the dog food out onto the garage floor cement, saying nothing to the dogs as they leapt around me like I was their piper. They didn’t understand. While I was upset with them, I didn’t berate them. What good would it do? They were only doing what came natural.
But I held on to my anger toward Maggie.
I didn’t bother to wipe the scuzz from her snout. She licked at it enough so that by the time we hit Route 290, the red egg slime was gone, save for a smear of it on the dash where she’d face-planted. Her chest fur remained dyed red like she wore a scarlet letter of guilt. I wouldn’t help with that. Let her smell it, let its reek remind her.
Goddammed dog.
“How could you, Maggie? You of all? That sweet scared little boy? Didn’t you see he was different? How could you?” I tapped on the brakes and swerved. She tossed and plowed into the walls of the car.
But I knew how she could. Of course I did. As Kodie had said, packs of anything are dangerous. The pack, the hive, colony, marauding horde—they lose their individual minds, surrender it to the collective madness of the congregation and the riot.
Though I don’t want to, I suppose it’s nature’s way. We humans tried to ignore that such was our nature, always hubristically seeing ourselves beyond nature’s reproach.
The road makes you think. When you’re done being pissed at your dog, you think the things that need resolving and somewhere between points A and B, resolutions are made.
I stared at the horizon. The wind busted on the windows. Tuning the radio wasn’t worth it, its scanning roundelays yielding nothing but static. As much as I loathed the world’s silence, I couldn’t bring myself to rid it with music played with such verve before all this happened. I had tried to play CDs, what they had in the car. I couldn’t take more than a few bars of LCD Soundsystem’s dance punk, the chugging opening riff to that Toadies hit, the singer’s vocal a vampiric dare—make up your mind, decide to walk with me…
I listened to the wind and road sounds and Maggie’s nervous panting. She felt my wrath. Moreover, she sensed my fear.
“I’m sorry,” I eventually said to her. She lifted her eyebrows my direction, then back to the road, doing her own resolving, her own remembering.
Home was full of holes but it’s where my trombone’s buried. Austin’s where my mother lay down and died. If that isn’t forever your home, then
I don’t know what is. Maybe home becomes the place where you have and raise your own children. I’d never know that kind of home, so, the soil of the city upon which my mother collapsed and died was home. It’s where my friends died.
And, to be honest, it’s where I knew they’d let me go. I had a feeling that if I veered off and went in any other direction, I’d be thwarted.
The pumps didn’t work at a station I pulled into. I had to siphon gas out of a parked car using plastic tubing I’d found in the dark garage smelling of oil. No bodies, but when I opened the refrigerated units in the back I got a rush of warm rot in the face. I coughed and grabbed Gatorade and Cokes, some chips, and a whole display of beef jerky and ran out.
Maybe in Austin I could still find Johnny. That’s really the only hope I had left. Maybe I could wrest Johnny from them and bring him back as I did Nate.
But if I did that, wouldn’t the scavenging dogs—literally, figuratively—come to pull him apart too? Can I be so callous as to think otherwise? Maybe it wouldn’t happen days later, a month, but they’d come for him—the vulnerable one separated from the rest.
When Nate crept past me, did he know he went out to collect his death with that basket? Or was he trying to show me, and himself, that he had changed, that he wasn’t afraid to go alone? Did he think going out to collect eggs on his own at dawn was the threshold he had to breach to be old-world Nate again? Would his head not hurt when he tried to remember? Did he hope to convince the kids that they could do it, too?
Was it expiation? Self-sacrifice, throwing himself to the dogs to satiate the beast they feared?
Did the kids get into his head, force him into that vicious dawn? Never mind the dogs, go outside with the egg basket.
Maybe some are trying to break away, enduring the headache, looking for themselves again. Maybe Nate caught that wave. Maybe Johnny can.
It’s the ones looking for their old selves again. They’re the ones who need me. They’re the ones who sing and guide me downriver now.
Johnny was my objective. I gripped the steering wheel and smiled at Maggie.
Here we came onto the iconic green road sign: Austin City Limits. The headlights were on by default due to the gray day. When the light filled the sign in a flash of white, that’s when Nate’s flanged screams filled my ears, his panicked eyes beseeching the dawn sky for solace through gnashing teeth and flying fur filled my eyes.
The Late Bloomer Page 29