Natural Disasters

by J. K. Wise

  Mom laughed when I asked about her and Mr. Stillman. She told me I was crazy and that I watch too much TV. They’re just old friends, she said. So that’s all, I guess. She gave me a hug, and I let her.

  What was I seeing between Mom and Mel’s mom this morning? I know what I saw, I just don’t know what it meant. Oh well. This isn’t The Bachelor with old people. Just because they argued about something, it doesn’t have to be some big drama.

  Mom wouldn’t lie to me. She wouldn’t laugh at me and lie and tell me that everything is fine if it isn’t. Right? But that’s what people have been doing for days in this rubble-pile of a town.

  I’m wrapped in my head and my balls-loud music, and I don’t hear the landscaping truck until it rumbles past. I jump off the narrow street into the desert shoulder to get out of the way. Only a mile or so more, and then I’ll shower and head over to Stina’s place, for real this time.

  Damn. I don’t want to deal with breaking up with her, but it’s time.

  I wonder if Melanie talked to her dad.

  I’m thirsty; I should have brought a water bottle.

  Up ahead, the big truck is stopped in the street at the top of mailbox road. One of the Dockers-posse dads leans against the pick-up, talking to the driver, holding onto the muzzle of his semi-automatic.

  I slow up for cool down even as my eyes are stinging from salty sweat. From behind the mailbox cluster, a group of the same dads I saw this morning walk out onto the road, all of them carrying guns. They circle the pickup, and the workers sitting in the truck-bed shout in Spanish. I can’t hear every word, but I get the main idea, which is get out of my way so I can go do my job. They’re pissed off, and my stomach turns when I see the dads tighten their grips on guns they shouldn’t be carrying in the middle of a neighborhood street.

  As the landscapers yell louder, the Dockers-posse get closer to the truck. One of the landscapers jumps out of the bed and gets right in the face of the Dockers dads. I’m frozen to the pavement in my gym shoes. This is me and JT in the hallway this morning all over again, but these are supposed to be the adults. The red-hot rage from this morning floods me. They yell back and forth in English and Spanish.

  Maybe I can help out, like translate or something. I run closer to the truck. The landscapers shout the address of the house where they’re supposed to work today. One of the dads pulls out his phone and shouts that he’s going to call 911, like these guys are here to rob the neighborhood.

  “They’re landscapers, guys,” I call out.

  No one hears me, though, because everybody is yelling like angry brats on a playground, except half of these brats have guns.

  One of the workers calls one of the dads a pussy in Spanish and pushes his chest. The dad falls back a little. He’s pretty small in khakis, a short-sleeved dress shirt and a baseball cap. The worker is big, his arms and shoulders ripped like a linebacker. He wears Dickies and steel-toed workboots, and I can tell that the only thing keeping him from pounding the shit out of this dorky dad is the gun he holds at his side.

  By the time I jog all the way over to the truck, a bunch of guys are out of the back bed, and they are trying to walk past the guys with guns. But then, Kevin’s dad lifts his 12-gauge and points it generally in the direction of the truck and cocks it. I hold my breath like everyone else. My head is spinning. I can’t believe I’m seeing this. The worker who stands the closest to him takes two running steps and pushes him hard enough that he falls backward. Kevin’s dad drops the gun as he falls to the ground.

  There’s a moment of stillness.

  Then, from the other side of the truck, I hear a shot break the silence, the crispness of a .22, not a clunky rifle. I hit the dirt so fast, the ground knocks the wind out of me. When I crawl over to the side of the road to try to hide under a bush, I see a body drop to the ground. Oh my god, oh shit shit shit. It’s one of the dads, but I can’t tell which one. I don’t think it’s Kevin’s dad. But this guy is lying on the ground, and he isn’t moving.

  “Que has hecho? Que es?” a voice asks, thrumming with the shake of adrenaline.

  “Jay,” a voice screams, strangled and strange, in English, and then, as easy as paper ripping, I hear another shot and low screams. This shot is the boom of a shotgun, and blood spatters the truck.

  Time stops. The street tilts in front of my eyes. Things go grey. I can’t breathe. If the world still has sound, I can’t hear it. This isn’t happening. I can’t believe what I’m seeing. I’m on my street. I’m a few yards from my house. This isn’t happening.

  There’s yelling now in Spanish and English; everyone is screaming over by the truck. I snap back into my body. Men hunker down and spread out into the desert, ducking behind rocks and cacti, cocking and aiming their guns. One Docker-dad stands in the middle of the road, looking at the ground and shaking his head until his buddy grabs him and pulls him off the road and out of sight.

  I roll around to the side of a mesquite bush and peel myself out of the dirt, but no one is paying attention to me. A woman stands in a driveway just a few yards away from me. She holds her phone, recording the scene in the street.

  “Call 911,” I yell, but she doesn’t move from her place, and she doesn’t look away from her phone to glance at me. I run now, through the space between a brick house, cutting through the desert and sprinting towards my house in the most direct path I can.

  Behind me, I hear another shotgun blast, a crack. I trip over desert rubble and fall, sliding through the dirt and stopping just before a prickly pear really does some damage to my face. I’m choking and bleeding from my hands as I try to wipe the tears and dirt off my face.

  The earth shakes, a beam breaks, and a girl bleeds from her head onto the carpet.

  A man lifts his hand and throws a can of tomatoes, and a woman’s head snaps back at impact.

  A gun fires, its shell rips, and skin and guts fly off bones.

  And I stand, watching, unable to move or to stop objects from moving through space, fast as sunlight and heavy as lead.

  The truck and the men are about fifty feet behind me, I’d guess, as I lie here on the floor of the desert. Fifty yards, five football first-downs. Screams and shouts, the roar of the truck engine and the squeal of the breaks.

  I roll over onto my back, and the clouds move slowly against the blue sky. My head rests heavy on the ground like an anchor. If I fix my eyes on one tower of fluffy white clouds, I can track its slow, lumbering movement. I hold up my hand to block the sun, and big, gooey drops of blood run down my arm in a random pattern, twisting around freckles and veins, flushing out a pattern through the dirt that dusts my dark skin.

  I need to get home. That’s what I need. I stand without looking back. One foot in front of the other. I’m starting to feel sore. I put my earbuds back in my head to block out the shit behind me in the street. Nothing I can do about any of that. Nothing I can do about anything.

  The ringing in my head makes it hard to hear the loud music.

  I’ll go through the desert instead of cooling down back on the streets. Like how the crow flies.

  Moving in a line from one point in space to the other.

  How a crow flies. I heard my dad say that once.

  Before I can get through the ocotillo and prickly pears in front of my house, I hear sirens. I can imagine the path of the cop cars, winding through the narrow, potholed street that Melanie and I walked down the other day after the riot.

  I run into the house as the sirens get closer. “Mom?” I yell. I swing around the corner to the kitchen. Mom is standing near the island, but she’s not alone. Mel’s dad is holding her, his hands on her shoulders. She’s crying.

  “Is there something wrong with Dad?” I ask,
my voice high and strange.

  “Jared, honey,” Mom says, pulling quickly away from him.

  Oh no. I get it.

  “No.”

  “Jared,” Mom says. I hold up my hands in front of me.

  “Are you kidding me? You’re in our kitchen? Together?” I ask, shaking.

  “Jared,” Mom says again, stepping towards me.

  This can’t be happening.

  I turn and punch the wall as hard as I can. Mom screams. Pain splinters through my hand and wrist. I yell like an animal as I pull my hand out of the hole in the drywall.

  “Fuck you, Mom,” are the only words I can form through this red-hot pain. I can’t get out of the house fast enough. I kick the door open with the same foot that I bruised the other day when I kicked the pole outside of McDonald’s. One jolt after another keeps me here, not floating away from what should be a bad dream. Check that, it’s more like ten bad dreams in one.

  The red and blue lights flash silently at both ends of my street. My hand is already swelling up purple. I can’t hold my car key to turn it in the ignition. There’s no way that I’m going to be able to shift. I walk back inside the busted front door and grab my mom’s keys off the hook on the wall. Her Mercedes is an automatic. I’m not supposed to drive it, but then again, she’s not supposed to sleep with our neighbor.

  I drive to Robbins’s house, because I don’t know where else to go. He’s sitting on a pile of bricks in the carport. The other workers aren’t around, and it doesn’t look like he’s doing any work. He stands when he sees my car.

  I climb out from behind the wheel grimacing, but when I accidentally whack my hand with the car door, I yell out as I stumble and see stars.

  “What’s up, Portillo?” Chris says.

  I hold up my hand. “Got any ice?” I ask.

  He whistles. “Yeah, I’ve got ice, and you’re not going to believe what’s going down around here. But what about you? You caught up with Newton? I heard JT and his brother were giving you shit this morning.”

  “Jerkoffs. But naw. I punched a wall.”

  “How’s the wall look?” he asks. “Must have been a bad-ass wall.”

  “More bad-ass than Newton.” I follow him into his kitchen that’s still missing one side.

  “So why’d you punch a wall?” he asks.

  I just shake my head. I don’t want to talk about any of it. He doesn’t ask again, and instead, he grabs a plastic grocery bag, fills it up with ice, and sets it on my technicolor hand that’s as big as a bowling ball.

  “My dad got arrested,” Chris says.

  “Shit, was he part of all that went down in my neighborhood?” I don’t remember seeing his dad in that unholy mess, but I don’t think my brain is working right either.

  Chris looks confused. “What? No, the neighbors complained about his stakeout in our driveway. It’s bullshit. There’s no law against sitting in your own yard with a licensed gun. Anyway, that’s what Dad told the police when they came to talk to him last night. He’d had a few beers and he got in the cops’ faces. They took him away. It was intense. I was going to go with him, but he told me to stay with the house. My mom and sister are still at the hotel, and I didn’t go to school today.”

  “School got cancelled before it ever got going.”

  He nods. “Roberts texted me. I’m sick of sitting around here, but I haven’t heard from my dad, and I don’t know what’s going on.”

  “Maybe you should check the police station? You’ll have to drive, though.”

  He agrees, and we take off in mom’s car. Doing something is better than doing nothing, and since there’s nothing I can do to make my situation any better, we might as well try to improve his.

  I smoke out the window as Chris drives. It hurts to hold the cigarette in my broken hand, so I awkwardly hold it in my left, ashing in the general direction of the window. Most of the ash blows back onto the leather seats of my mom’s prized possession. We crank the music louder than her car stereo has probably ever played. Adults give us shitty looks at red lights as the four-letter words boom out of the Mercedes, but I don’t care. The rest of the world isn’t my problem.

  When we get to the police station, there’s no record of Chris’s dad’s arrest. We kick around the idea of driving to the Marana Police Station or one of the other townships, but we end up driving out to the Reynold’s place instead.

  We use the back driveway. The bonfire ring is even scrubbier-looking during the day. There’s no sign of life from the house. We sit on the same picnic table where I sat with Stina the night that I punched Newton and drove Melanie home. As if reading my mind, Chris asks me what’s going on with Stina.

  “Nothing. I just don’t have the energy to tell her that I’m done.”

  “Yeah, I figured,” he says, but he doesn’t elaborate. “How’s your hand?”

  “It hurts like hell.”

  Chris walks over to the storage structure and disappears inside for a minute. When he emerges, he has two beer bottles and a small bag of ice. “Extra fridge in there,” he says.

  “Well done,” I say, gladly taking the ice to lay over my bad hand and just as gladly taking the beer with my good one. “This day is shit.”

  “You’re telling me? My dad’s in jail.”

  “My mom is sleeping with our neighbor.”

  “Oh man. Sorry, bro.” He whistles low. “So that accounts for your brutal attack of the innocent wall?”

  “Ha. There’s no such thing as innocent.”

  “Cheers to that.”

  We drink our beers in silence. The wind whistles through the mesquite trees and blows dried leaves around in the dirt. I don’t feel like talking. I guess Chris doesn’t either.

  Chapter 21

  The Spin

  I grab a few things from my room and throw them into my backpack: shorts and shirts, goggles and my team suit, ipod and earbuds. I have to get out of here. Mom and Dad don’t try to stop me. I slip past the TV room where they’re arguing. Fueled by music and the need to block everything out, I fly on my bike through streets lined with orange groves, then up the last steep hill that curves around the foothills.

  Tucson stretches out beyond the bike lane. I stop to pour water into my mouth and to check out the view and catch my breath. Time off from training hurts, even after a week. Downtown is in the distance. Miles away, the wide hole in the side of the Citibank building gapes. The news stations run film from the Citibank fire every day. The death tolls for the earthquake keep climbing. Eight-hundred known dead, almost two-times the junior class, mostly in the downtown blocks that I can see from up here.

  I pour more water from my bottle to my mouth, and suddenly, I’m tired. It hits me hard, and I’m a sinking ship. My body is so heavy.

  I grab my phone to call Corrina and ask her to come pick me up. Luckily, she’s down the street with her aunt’s truck. She just dropped off Whitney, and I’m glad. I’m not in the mood to see them schmooze all over each other.

  The hill slopes easily down to the Circle K surrounded by barbed wire. I lean against a Palo Verde tree and watch the lanes of traffic as I wait for her in the shade. She pulls up a few minutes later in a huge white pickup truck, and I throw my bike in the bed and climb inside.

  “Where were you going?” she asks.

  “I was going to ride to the Red Rock pool, but I realized I’d never make it back up the hill. What about you?”

  “Whitney and I took the bus and got the truck. I have to pick up some groceries and water for the kids and some of their neighbors before I go back down there. It’s really bad. All the stores on the southside are destr
oyed or totally empty.”

  She makes me feel guilty. “You’re taking care of people. All I do is swim.”

  “Yeah, well, you’re training, you know what you want, and you’re completely badass. And I think Jared Portillo agrees with me, by the way.”

  I feel my face heat up. “What are you talking about?”

  “Well, he found you in the quad today. He wanted to give you a ride home.”

  “He wanted to talk about our parents,” I say, and my stomach twists. I lean my head against her truck’s ancient plastic headrest. “My dad is sleeping with his mom.”

  “What?”

  “Dad lied about it when I asked him, but then Mom said it was true. And she knew about it.” We drive past stripmalls, all painted the same color, brown like dirt. That look on my mom’s face. I can’t block it out. “God, I hate secrets.”

  “I can’t believe it,” she says as we drive past the Safeway, open again, but with cops outside of the sliding glass entrance. “Are they going to split up?”

  I shake my head and shrug. “I just don’t want to be anywhere near them right now.”

  “I hate secrets too,” Corrina says. “But once a secret is out, you can’t get it back in.” She should know. She kept her big secret for years before she finally came out earlier this year when she and Whitney got together.

  “Parents split up all of the time. I know that. I just didn’t think that would happen to my family. I always assumed we were solid. Boring, but solid. Can you imagine your parents with other people?”

  “Yuck, god no,” she says. “I don’t think people are looking for hot love from the over-fifty and fat crowd. If I ever get to move back into my house, it’ll be because we all find a way not to imagine each other with other people.”

  She sounds so matter-of-fact about her parents, but I’ve seen her cry a lot of tears since she came out to them. It’s got to be hard to go through this disaster when she’s dealing with her own. I try to sound reassuring.