The Evening Hour

by A. Carter Sickels

  He looked at Glenn. “Man, you better not say who you work for.”

  As Cole turned, Glenn grabbed his shoulder, hard. Cole spun around, fist drawn, but then stopped. Glenn didn’t want to fight. “Wait, you got to listen,” he said, his voice breaking. “It was my job. I needed to make a living, just like anybody.”

  Cole shook his hand off him, then started down the hill. He scrambled over uprooted trees and rutted-out earth, running over to the people. He looked at their frightened faces and did not see Lacy. He went to where her house used to stand, but it was gone. Just gone.

  Then there was a scream. A woman screaming. A man next to her held something in his arms. Cole went closer. It was a child. Smothered in sludge. The man said, “She was a neighbor, she was just a wee little thing.” Cole looked at the dead child and felt dizzy and dropped to his knees and the retching came without warning, huge dry heaves. Then a hand on his shoulder. He looked up and saw his mother and she helped him stand.

  Some people were digging along the hillsides, using shovels and tree limbs and their own hands. Digging out people, digging out the dead. Cole approached a couple of men and they asked where he was from and he said Rockcamp.

  “Is it bad there?”

  “It’s not like this.”

  They looked like they could be brothers, one short, one tall. “I reckon it will be a while ’fore they get us any help,” the tall one said, wiping rain from his face.

  “They might not ever send it,” the other said. “Might just think we all got swept away.”

  The tall man spit. “Probably that’s what they want. For us just to be gone.”

  Cole was afraid to ask, but had to know. “Lacy Cooper, you seen her?”

  They shook their heads. “Not yet.”

  “Someone’s over here,” an old man yelled.

  Cole ran with the brothers. A slimy hand stuck up from under a pickup. He fought down the urge to vomit again. They tried lifting the truck, but it was too heavy. So they dug frantically and finally pulled out a body that didn’t even look human any more. Cole turned away, blinking. He thought of the old people. His customers, his friends.

  People walked around dazed, searching for their loved ones. Wondering when help would arrive. All of the telephone lines had been destroyed and if anyone happened to have a cell, it didn’t matter, there was no signal. Everyone was hungry and cold and scared. They kept finding more people, more bodies. Cole was there when a young boy, clutching a mattress, washed up on shore—his clothes were shredded like wolves had been at him, but at least he was alive. He helped dig out an old man whose legs were broken. He saw a drowned teenager who was tangled up in a mess of cable wires. A woman holding a dead girl walked over to him.

  “She went right under,” she said, her voice taut. “I tried to hold on to her, but she was swept out of my hands.”

  Cole had seen plenty of death in the nursing home, the waxy faces and blue skin and puckered mouths. But everyone he’d seen up until now had been old. Now he saw swollen, drowned children. A body hung up in a tree. A man’s mouth stuffed with black sludge, eyes matted shut. They laid out the bodies like memorials. They needed help, or everyone was going to go crazy.

  “How many people live here?” he asked.

  “I’d say a hundred.” An old woman nodded. “Yeah. Used to be. Maybe a couple hundred.”

  Now there were around fifty or so people standing around and coming down from the hillsides. Cole made himself look into every face. He wiped away the sludge and blood from the dead and each time expected to see Sara Jean or Lacy, but each time, it was someone else, nobody he knew, but faces he recognized.

  Ruby came over and said she was going back to the truck. “I want to check on Mama.” But just as she said that, Cole’s grandmother emerged from the path they’d hiked, using a large branch to help her along.

  She stopped in front of them. “I couldn’t just set up there and do nothing. I don’t know what you think of me.”

  Cole tried to get her to sit down and rest, but she saw an old woman she knew and went to comfort her.

  The rain finally stopped and the sun broke through the clouds as if it was a normal day, but what continued to float downstream was incomprehensible. Trailers, sofas, baby dolls, TVs, shoes, cats and dogs, and the dead who’d been dead for years. “The cemetery’s washed out,” a teenager explained.

  Blisters rose on Cole’s hands, his back and neck burned. He didn’t know how much time had passed. There was just too much water, too much sludge. A woman told Cole, “Them trailers and houses, you could see people trapped in them. I could see faces. I could see them.”

  Two figures weighed down with gigantic backpacks were walking toward Cole. He’d forgotten that Michael was staying up here. Trip was with him. They looked weary and beaten up.

  “Cole,” Michael said, grabbing him.

  Cole stepped back and asked if they’d seen Lacy.

  “No,” Michael said. “I was hoping she was with you.”

  “We’ll find her,” Trip promised.

  They told Cole that they’d had to climb onto the roof of their trailer to escape the rising water. When a mattress floated within reach, they grabbed on to it and used it as a raft, until it was shallow enough to walk.

  “The sludge dam up there busted,” Michael said. “That’s the only explanation.”

  They unloaded their backpacks. Michael’s was stuffed with bottles of water, granola bars. “We grabbed as much as we could,” he explained, and started handing out the provisions.

  “Saved all of this too, thank God.” Trip opened his pack, revealing a couple of cameras, lenses, some kind of recorder, and other equipment that Cole didn’t recognize. He took out a camera, but Cole stepped in front of the lens.

  “I don’t think you ought to be taking pictures of people.”

  “Are you crazy?” Trip said. “You’re crazy.”

  “This is too important,” Michael said. “Really fucking important. Heritage will try to cover this up.”

  But Cole looked around. Kids crying, a woman hugging herself, men staring helplessly. Bloated bodies on the hillside.

  “You can’t,” he said. “Not right now. It ain’t right.”

  Trip looked at Michael. “What do you want to do?”

  “Cole, we’ve got to document this,” Michael said.

  “Not like this,” he said. “Don’t do it.”

  Michael glared at him. “Fuck,” he said, shaking his head. “Shit. You’re serious?” His face and hands were clenched, but after a moment, he signaled to Trip, and Trip lowered the camera.

  Michael got in Cole’s face. There was dirt all over him, and his cheeks were red from the cold. He looked like he’d been crying. “It’s a big fucking mistake,” he said.

  Cole did not say if it was or wasn’t. He had to get away from him, from all of them. The sky misted with more rain. He walked farther up the valley, and he searched as well as he could under broken homes and furniture, and then he came upon a foot, and he kneeled down and dug out the body, first with the shovel, then his hands. He was slick all over from the sludge and rain. He saw wrinkled skin and felt thin bones and then he came to a face. He used his shirt to wipe away the muck. The old woman Arie Webb. Who’d been saving her money so that she could move to the coast of North Carolina. When he lifted her, she was light, a sack of bones, but he was tired and worn out and weak, and it was hard work. He carried her like a baby in his arms. Like a bride. He carried her up to the hillside and laid her out next to the others and thought of prayers his grandfather might say. His granddaddy would believe that this was the end, the evening hour was upon them. But there were no angels meeting them in the air, no by-and-by, no heavenly light. Only this cold toxic sludge, these broken people.

  The police and rescue teams and the National Guard started arriving between three and four o’clock. There was a helicopter to take away the badly injured, and a few army trucks. They’d cleared a part of the main road, an
d started transporting people to shelters that had been set up in Stillwell.

  “It didn’t get hit?”

  “Just some flooding,” an officer told Cole. “If it had come down a different way, there’d be a few thousand people killed, I expect.”

  Cole took a few extra people with him; they rode in the back of his pickup. He drove slowly, avoiding fallen trees, scattered boulders. It took nearly two hours to get to Stillwell, and by this time it was dark. His headlights shone over the blackness that marked tree trunks, fence posts, basketball hoops. The town was quiet like a morgue. He pulled into the high school, now designated as an emergency shelter. There were cots set up in the gymnasium. Blankets, bottled water, food, and toiletries. His grandmother clutched his arm. She’d hardly spoken; he wondered if the flood was what she’d seen in her dreams, or if it was worse.

  There were at least fifty volunteers, maybe more, and about twice as many victims. A group of women had taken charge; they served bowls of chili and handed out blankets. A dozen or so kids ran around, while the adults talked in low voices and sipped coffee and stared at the TV. There were nurses, cops. Cole recognized many faces, but could not place anyone—it was as if he’d stepped into some community that resembled Dove Creek, but was not it exactly. He saw Ellen’s fiancé, Randy, one of the cops.

  “I don’t know much more than you do,” he said. “They ain’t saying shit.” Then he seemed to take in Cole and his grandmother and mother, and his tone softened. “You all should get something to eat. Rest up.”

  Cole led his grandmother over to a table and one of the volunteers ladled out chili into a paper bowl. Ruby went out for a cigarette.

  “Cole, you should eat something too,” his grandmother said, but he could not. He looked around the room. No sign of Lacy or Sara Jean.

  “I’m going to walk around,” he said.

  He made three passes around the gym, then went outside where the smokers convened. A couple of his customers nodded at him. Luke Cutter was there, comforting a young woman. Reese Campbell was there too, talking to an old man who wore a baseball hat that said POW. When Reese saw him, he patted the old man on the back and walked over to Cole.

  “I was worried.” Reese’s face was still slightly swollen and discolored with swirls of fading green, yellow. Just looking at him jolted Cole with shame, a reminder of how he’d left him.

  “I’m fine,” he assured him. “You ain’t seen Lacy Cooper, have you?”

  Reese said that he had not. His eyes were deep and blue and stoned.

  “How you been holding up?”

  Reese shrugged. But then he said in a low voice that he’d not been very good. He’d been sitting in his house for days, unable to sleep and afraid to go out. “I don’t have any speed left,” he said. He’d been eating pills like candy, whatever was left in Ruthie’s medicine cabinet.

  “You got to get off of all of it.” Cole couldn’t believe they were discussing drugs right now, but then yes he could.

  “I know it. Hell, I know it. I want to get the fuck out, I can’t take it anymore.”

  “What are you doing down here?”

  “I turned on the TV and saw what was going on, and I said, Fuck, Reese, get off your ass, and I came down here to see if there was anything I could do. But there are too many cops, making me nervous.” He lowered his voice, “Hey, you got anything on you?”

  Cole shook his head.

  “Just thought I’d ask.”

  Then the vet came over. “This is Charlie Paterson,” Reese said. “He was up there in Thorny Creek.”

  “Do you know Lacy Cooper?” Cole asked. “Have you seen her?”

  “No sir, no, I haven’t.”

  The man began to tell his story, how he’d seen people wash by. His eyes pooled with tears. He’d said he’d seen things today that were worse than what he’d seen in the war. Cole could not listen to any more. All he could see in his head were the bodies he’d dug out. He started to go, but Luke Cutter came over.

  “Brother Cole, you’re okay, praise God. How is your mama and grandma?”

  “All right.” He did not look Cutter in the eyes.

  “You a preacher or something?” Reese asked. “You look a little young for that.”

  “I got called young.”

  “I guess you’re in the right place. People are gonna need a preacher.”

  “It’s terrible what’s happened,” Luke said softly, tears in his eyes, just like yesterday. “But I want people to know that God is here, He’s gonna take care of us.”

  “Cole, we should go check on Mama.” Ruby approached them, her voice tight; she did not return Cutter’s hello.

  Cole felt Cutter’s eyes on them as they walked away, but he didn’t look back. He followed his mother, who told him that Cutter’s brother worked for Heritage.

  “So do my own cousins,” he reminded her. “That’s what you said before.”

  More people were filling up the gymnasium. Some were crying, but most just looked dazed.

  His grandmother was watching TV. “Twenty they’ve reported so far,” she said angrily. “Twenty people that’s been murdered.”

  Cole said he had to go. He offered to drive them to Esther’s, but his grandmother said that was too far. “We can just stay here, can’t we, Ruby?”

  His mother looked skeptically at the cots. “I guess so.”

  Cole’s heart hurt as he drove over to Lacy’s parents’ place. He did not see her truck. He cut the lights and the engine and thought about what he would say to them. He went slowly up the steps, and rang the bell.

  Nobody answered. But a light was on. He pushed the bell again.

  This time he heard movement, voices. The door swung open. He felt a gasp escape his throat. He wanted to pick Sara Jean up and crush her against him. But he was calm. He kneeled down.

  “You’re okay, honey?”

  She nodded.

  “Your mama?”

  The girl stared and Cole wanted to speak but his mouth was too dry and then he saw a shadow and looked up and there she was.

  They held each other and he could feel her heart pounding against his own chest.

  “I was at work, all this time,” she said. “I was at work and Sara Jean was here and we’re okay.” They drew apart, looked at each other shyly.

  “Come in,” she said. “Sit down, tell us what happened.”

  Her parents and her sister and her sister’s husband were sitting around watching the news. Sara Jean stood in front of him. “Is our house gone?”

  He was the bearer of bad news. He felt their eyes on him and he nodded. Sara Jean’s face darkened, Lacy covered her mouth. The sister said, “Ours too. We barely got out of there. We barely did.”

  “I’m sorry,” Cole said.

  “What about Snowball?” Sara Jean asked.

  “What?”

  “Her cat.” Lacy looked at her daughter. “I’m sure he’s all right, baby. He’s a tough cat,” she said, but Sara Jean’s eyes narrowed with disbelief.

  They wanted to know everything. He sat stiffly next to Lacy on the sofa and told them what he’d seen without really describing it, and they told him what they’d heard on the news. The dam above the processing plant had broke and what it was holding back had flooded Dove Creek and all of its little tributaries, but nobody knew how much had spilled or how many people died or how many homes were lost. For a long time nobody said anything else, just stared at the TV. The news ended, and a show about a bunch of rich people living in New York City came on. Cole felt Lacy’s hand on his own, and this brought him some comfort. But even sitting there, he felt apart from her and from the others. Maybe he would always be apart.

  An hour or so later, she walked him out. She said she was afraid of finding out the names of the dead, but needed to know. She asked him about her neighbors and friends, but he did not have answers. “What about Blue Tiller?”

  He just stared.

  “You know, the old woman activist. Sara Jean keeps as
king me about her, I don’t know what to say.”

  “I don’t know either,” he said.

  She held on to his belt loops and he pressed his mouth against her head, tasted smoke in her hair. “What am I going to do?” she asked. “Where am I going to go?”

  “It’s going to be all right,” he told her. “We’ll figure something out.”

  Then she drew back and lit a cigarette and the toughness that came off of her was too much for him to peel away. He said he’d call her tomorrow. She nodded. It was too much.

  He returned to the gym, walking past the smokers. He was surprised to see that Reese was still there. He was still talking with Luke Cutter.

  “Hey, Cole, where you staying tonight?”

  “Here, I guess.”

  “Why don’t y’all stay at my place?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come on. I got plenty of room.”

  “I’ll check with my grandma.”

  “Okay, wait up.” Reese turned back to Luke. “Hey, good talking to you, preach.” Luke called after him, “I’m here if you need me.”

  “I don’t know what the fuck’s come over me,” Reese told Cole. “That preacher said some things that made sense. I never listened to a preacher that made sense before.”

  “Well. None of it makes sense to me.”

  His grandmother and mother looked at him with dread. His grandmother’s face was pinched and pale, and Ruby chewed her bottom lip.

  “She’s all right,” he told them. “They’re both all right.”

  “Thank God,” his grandmother said. “Thank God.”

  He told them the new plans, and they were thankful that they didn’t have to spend the night in the crowded gym. On their way out, Cole went over to Michael and Trip. Trip was taking pictures, and Michael had out a notebook and a recorder. He started to defend himself, but Cole said he wasn’t here about that.

  “It’s Lacy.”

  Relief washed over Michael’s face when he told him.