The creature pulled free from the mud with a loud sucking slurp, and I tumbled to my ass with it cradled against my chest.
I quickly held it away from my body and got to my feet.
I hurried up the hill, and realized I had tears pouring down my cheeks.
I didn’t see anything, I thought to myself, shaking my head.
I reached the mower and said it aloud, “I didn’t see anything.”
I started to toss the baby alien to the ground, then bent down and gently placed it on the long grass directly in front of the lawn mower.
“I didn’t see a fucking thing,” I whispered.
And then I started the mower.
THE SILENCE of SORROW
1
He stood there for a long time, just staring out the upstairs bedroom window, listening to the sounds of a lazy spring afternoon. A dog barking somewhere in the distance; a chorus of lawnmowers; the sweet music of a child’s laughter; the soft hum of neighborhood traffic.
He stood there, unable to move, unable to breathe, unable to make sense of the thoughts whirling madly within his head. The sheer curtains, nudged by a gentle breeze, fluttered inward and brushed against his arms, and the scent of cut grass and fresh flowers was thick and rich in the air. It filled the room with the promise of summer.
He looked at the photos again, just a quick glance, and suddenly the sun felt unbearably hot on his face; blistering; suffocating. He took a step backward into the room. Closed his eyes. And it was then that his hands began to shake, and he discovered he could not stop them.
The photos slipped from his fingertips, tumbled soundlessly in a stream onto the carpet. Piled there like discards from a poker game. One by one they fell until his hands were empty.
Then he began to weep.
2
He hadn’t wept since the funeral service—a cloudless June morning six days earlier—and now the tears streamed hot and angry down his cheeks. He sobbed with great force, but silently, afraid the others would hear, terrified they would rush to comfort him. He sat down on the edge of the bed and took in deep, whistling gulps of air. After a time, the pressure on his chest eased and he felt less light-headed, but his stomach remained cramped and tight.
He had come here, to this house of death, with a mixture of dread and sorrow. It was such a horrible task—the toughest he had ever faced, in fact—but it was his duty. And he was not the only one. There were eight of them in total. Three (his daughters; all married and living in distant cities) were downstairs talking on the back porch, resting from a long morning of back-breaking work. The others (a son-in-law and three long-time neighbors) had gone downtown twenty minutes earlier in search of drink reinforcements and pizza and sandwiches. And so he was left alone in the house.
3
He’d found them in the bedroom closet. Hidden inside a shoebox, the box carefully tucked away beneath a tangled clutter of clothes hangers and worn-out jogging shoes. There were other things inside the box, but the photos were the worst. And there were dozens of them.
4
The accident had made the papers and the television news as far west as Emittsburg and as far east as Baltimore. Yes, sir; it was a pretty big story for a slow week in June. Nine cars and two trucks involved. A series of spectacular explosions. Seven gut-wrenching fatalities, including the owner of the Hagerstown Baysox (a local minor league ballclub; currently four games out of first), a twenty-year veteran of the D.C. police force, a young retarded boy, and a hometown hero.
It was inside this hometown hero’s bedroom that Frank Martin sat alone with a pile of photos and his troubled thoughts.
5
Frank, back in his mid-twenties, had once worked as a maintenance man at an apartment complex just outside of Pittsburgh. During his first month on the job, he’d been forced to help clean out a woman’s one-bedroom apartment after she’d committed suicide. The woman had had no family, no friends; no one to carry on her name, much less collect her memories. So the job had fallen to the employees.
Frank had hated it.
All morning and afternoon, while he boxed her personal belongings and piled them in the hallway for the others to carry outside to the truck, he’d felt as if the walls were closing in on him. He’d felt dirty, like a trespasser.
Even then, while he struggled with the cardboard boxes and the packing tape, he’d clearly known that the details of the day would haunt him forever; he would never be able to forget what kind of plates and utensils the woman had in her kitchen, the titles of the books on her shelves, the simple prints and paintings on the walls, her favorite color of shoes, the style of dress she preferred, what her handwriting looked like on a grocery list magneted to the refrigerator door. And so many other little things he had no right to possess knowledge of.
For days after the job, Frank had experienced such a profound feeling of sorrow that he’d broken down in tears several times with the memory, and his nightly routine of seven hours sleep became five hours, then three, then almost nothing. When his appetite began to diminish, Sarah (his wife of just over a year at the time) convinced him to take a weekend off and they’d snuck away to the country for two days of rest, relaxation, and magic.
6
Frank thought of that long-ago day and immediately realized the sad irony. Here he was, after all these years, once again cleaning up after the dead.
His hands still trembled, but just enough now to make picking up the color polaroids a slow process. He crouched to one knee and snatched them up with his right hand and collected them with his left. He did this without looking at the pictures. He had seen enough.
When he was finished he tossed them into the shoebox, which was now resting on the bed, and returned the box to the clutter at the bottom of the closet. He dropped a pair of folded sweaters on top, closed the door, and went downstairs.
7
Lunch was a club sandwich, corn chips, and a frosty can of Coke. They ate outside at the picnic table and Frank forced himself to clean his plate; he knew they were concerned about him and would be watching. In fact, he didn’t doubt for a moment that Sarah had asked one—or even all three—of the girls to make sure he didn’t skip his lunch. He’ll need the energy, she probably told them. So you make certain he eats something, even if it’s just a candy bar.
My God, he thought, watching two squirrels play chase in an ancient weeping willow, he had himself one wonderful old lady.
As they’d done the day before, everyone remained in the backyard sunshine after lunch was finished, planning which area of the house to clear next and discussing which boxes needed to be moved where. Frank said very little. Instead, he found himself studying the faces of his friends and family, listening to each of their voices, watching their gestures and expressions, and he was surprised when he was almost moved to tears. God, how he loved these people. Loved their strengths, their weaknesses. Loved what they stood for after all these long years. He would have gladly faced death for each and every one of them—traded his breath for theirs—and he knew the feeling was mutual…yet at no other time in his life had he felt so utterly helpless.
So completely alone.
8
Eventually, as it had done so many other times during the past week, the conversation turned to fond reminiscing and favorite memories. Frank sat back in the tall grass, stretched his legs, and listened to the familiar stories:
The day when Chuck was six years old and he fell face-first into the wishing fountain at the Gateway Shopping Mall…
The summer day, a year later, when he ran away from home and ended up being sprayed by an angry skunk in the old Hanson woods….
The time he was almost suspended from school for freeing the frogs from the biology lab…
The summer he saved that woman’s life at the beach, springing to action and starting CPR when the teenaged lifeguard froze in terror…
The fine spring day he graduated from law school with honors and at the top of his class…
The afternoon he was married to his wonderful Mary Ellen…
The magical night the twins were born…
The day he was elected mayor of their small (“but growing”) town, the youngest ever at the age of thirty-three, and a hometown boy to boot…
Despite the midday sun, Frank’s hands felt clammy, his chest ice-cold. He listened half-heartedly, nodding when he felt it was appropriate, feigning laughter several times, mainly just smiling sadly.
Soon he found his thoughts drifting away from the conversation to one memory in particular: It had been Chuck’s eleventh birthday, and the two of them had spent the day together. That had been Chuck’s only birthday wish that year: to spend the entire day with his Dad; just the two of them. They’d planned the day for weeks, and when it finally arrived, they’d attacked it head-on like a pair of young brothers, instead of a father and son. First thing in the morning, they’d fished for catfish down at the big bend in Hanson’s Creek (and been quite lucky with their catch). Next, after a quick shower and a pizza lunch at the mall, they’d watched their Orioles and the Red Sox battle it out in an afternoon double-header at Memorial Stadium. It had been a perfect day, capped off by a post-game photo of father and son and Brooks Robinson, their favorite ball-player…
Frank, to his amazement and horror, felt a smile forming, and he choked it back in immediately. An enlarged and framed print of the birthday photo hung proudly in his den, a surprise retirement gift from Chuck two years earlier. In his mind’s eye, Frank imagined seeing the photo hanging side-by-side next to an enlargement of one of the photos from upstairs—a “that was then, this is now” comparison of his son.
His brain flashed this image in grim detail and, for one frightening moment, he thought he might be sick.
9
They were photos of naked children. Glossy, full-color polaroids.
Solo shots. Couples. Group shots.
Frank thought of the photos—images so perverse and unspeakable that nothing in his sixty-four years of life had prepared him for the sight of them—and for a moment he was sure that he had to be dreaming. That the feel of the grass and the sun and the breeze had to be part of the dream. That the faraway voices and faces around him were imagined, not real.
He closed his eyes and rested his head.
Felt the grass tickle the back of his neck.
Listened to the beating of his heart.
But he knew he wasn’t dreaming.
And he knew what he had seen: a brown shoebox full of shiny magazines filled with disgusting pictures, a worn datebook full of mysterious addresses and phone numbers and cryptic appointment notes, a pair of unlabeled video cassettes, and dozens and dozens of photos…several of them capturing the smiling image of his only son…
And in these photos Chuck was not alone.
10
Frank Martin stretched out in the cool grass and listened to the silence. The entire neighborhood seemed to be taking a midday break, and he was alone again with his thoughts. The others had all gone back inside, and from time to time, he could hear a muffled voice or the echo of footsteps or the soft thud of a box being moved. But mostly he heard nothing at all.
He sat there, staring up at the bedroom window, and soon his hands began to twitch. He clasped them together and squeezed, and it occurred to him that he was probably losing his mind.
A tornado of thoughts touched down in his head:
He thought of Sarah and the others. What would he—or could he—tell them? That Chuck was not the son, the brother, the friend they all thought him to be?
He thought of Mary Ellen, Chuck’s young wife, also lost in the accident. Had she been suspicious? Had she seen the warning signs?
And then he thought of the very worst…the twins. Two bundles of joy and energy and hope, safe at home with their Grandma. What would their futures have held if not for the accident? Would he (sweet Jesus please please don’t let it be true!) find them upstairs in those photos? On those videos?
He felt smothered by these dark questions, but he ran them through slowly and carefully, a small piece of his heart breaking off and dying with each thought. After a long time, he got up and walked into the house, into a world that suddenly made no sense. No sense at all.
AFTER THE BOMBS
The old man was blind and had crumbs in his beard. He sat in a rocking chair with a half eaten biscuit resting on a paper towel in his lap. His left hand was shaking.
But he still felt dangerous.
I sat down in the chair opposite him and watched him and waited.
He took another bite of the biscuit and returned it to the paper towel. I noticed that his right hand was steady. His gun hand, if this was the man I believed him to be.
He chewed slowly and I watched crumbs tumble from his mouth and join the others hiding in his untended whiskers. I could hear men working the field outside the cabin, and farther away, the sound of a child crying.
Finally, after one more bite, he spoke and his voice was that of a man much younger:
“I apologize for not offering you something to eat. We plant these fields but nothing grows now. Like everywhere, the soil is tainted. But we keep trying.”
“No apology is necessary. Your daughter kindly gave me water. That is more than enough.”
“My daughter is still beautiful, isn’t she?”
I hesitated before answering. “Your daughter is very beautiful, yes.”
“She had a birthday last week. Do you know how old she is?”
I couldn’t even begin to guess his daughter’s age; everyone looked older than they were. The “old man” before me was probably only in his fifties. We were all lucky to be alive.
“She is younger than me, that is all I know.”
The old man laughed. “A politician’s answer. Or maybe just a kind one.”
“An honest one.”
“My friend told me you were an honest man,” he said, nodding. “And a historian.”
“Nothing that impressive, I’m afraid. I write down the stories I hear. It is up to those who read them to decide whether they are history or mere campfire tales.”
“And today’s story…my story, for which you have traveled all these miles…which shall it be?”
“I have a feeling it will be a little of both, no?”
The old man slammed his palm down on the rocker’s armrest and bellowed laughter. Again, the strength of the sound coming from within did not match the frailness of the body outside.
“I do like you, young man. By all appearances, you are every bit as wise as I have heard.” He readjusted himself in the chair with a grimace of pain. “Although, I am blind, so I am limited in that capacity.”
I laughed before I could stop myself. “I have another feeling…that perhaps you see things better than most men with healthy, even watchful, eyes.”
The old man nodded again, his tired smile fading.
“It wasn’t always this way…”
Before the bombs, I was a school teacher. Middle school English. The most “watchful” matters I attended to were keeping my eyes on students passing notes in class or trying to cheat on vocabulary quizzes.
For a time after the war, if you can call what actually happened a war, I was like so many other survivors. Scared. Angry. Confused. But, unlike many others, I was fortunate enough to have family that survived the initial catastrophe. So, despite the hardships, I considered myself doubly blessed. I wasn’t alone, and I had something to live for.
We lived in rural West Virginia, far away I suppose from anything of even moderate tactical value, and as a result, we were able to avoid most of the bombs’ impact zones and the heaviest radiation levels. As laughable as it now sounds, I once believed our little town to be one of the few safe havens to still exist after the bombs.
Not that our remote location mattered to many of the townspeople. Most of the others chose to leave, and they were never heard from again. Not even a single one of them ever returned.
&
nbsp; My wife and daughter and I decided to stay, along with eleven other families, and here we still remain all these years later. A bit the worst for wear, but most of us survived, and that is something I doubt many of the others can lay claim to.
We lived underground in the mines for the first year. Like starving ground hogs. We believed it to be the safest option, and over the course of those first twelve months, we lost only a total of sixteen people and took in strangers totaling twenty-three adults and thirteen children.
We ate canned foods and drank bottled water that we were able to scavenge from abandoned stores and homes in town. Everything was rationed from Day One; we knew what kind of a future we were facing.
Benjamin Travers and Frank Dodd assumed mutual roles of leadership, Benjamin having been a police officer before the bombs dropped and Frank, a retired Master Sergeant in the Marines. They took charge of assigning duties to both men and women. Cooking. Cleaning. Scavenging. Scouting. Weapons collection. Even guard duty.
This hierarchy seemed to work out well, until we were awakened one night by a gunshot near the mouth of the mine. Benjamin had killed himself without warning or explanation. Frank took over after that, and I still remained in the background, doing my daily chores along with the others.
But that all changed in the weeks leading up to the ambush.
“Do you mind if I write some things down?” I asked, reaching for the notebook inside my satchel.
He waved a wrinkled hand. “Just don’t expect me to slow down or repeat myself. This story is once for the telling.”
It was fifteen months after the bombs dropped, and the main group of us were still living like animals in the mines; but we had recently decided to rotate a group of ten of us above ground. Human guinea pigs to determine how harmful the remaining radiation might be, and what other factors might affect us if we decided to move ourselves back into town.
A Long December Page 6