Thirst

by Benjamin Warner

  She was a tough old bird, he thought. He wouldn’t be able to live alone at her age. Just getting the pots from the stove to the sink. It took a certain kind of person to last that long.

  She certainly didn’t need another five-gallon jug of water just sitting in her basement. Eddie would go to her if the water didn’t come back on soon.

  Laura was reading a copy of Field & Stream that had been sent to their house as a promotion.

  “Why are you reading that?” he said.

  She didn’t move her eyes from the pages. “There’s an article about gophers.”

  If Eddie held on to the jug for Mrs. Kasolos, it would be safer, and he could move it around, for one thing. No way she was lifting forty pounds up those stairs. She wasn’t that tough.

  “Mrs. Kasolos has more than enough to drink over there,” he said. “I think I’ll find a jar or something and have her fill it.”

  “We should be the ones helping her,” she said. “Please don’t take anything from that old woman.”

  “Okay,” he said. “But she has extra she doesn’t need.”

  Laura went back to reading, but the image of the jug floated in Eddie’s mind. The more he pushed it down, the more it bobbed back up to the surface.

  If he wasn’t the one to get it, it would be somebody else. In his mind, that person had no form. But then he saw it was a man. It was Bill Peters. Eddie could see him doing it. He could see him pushing his way in, babbling on about his son.

  “I’m going to take that walk with Mike Sr.,” Eddie said.

  “Okay.”

  “It’ll be good to know what’s going on.”

  She moved on the sofa in a way that suggested she was coming with him, but Eddie put his hand on her shoulder to keep her there.

  “I think he wants it to be just me and him. You know how Mike Sr. can be.”

  “That’s silly,” she said, but slid back to a comfortable spot.

  “I don’t want you to worry. You’ve got Patty right there if you need anything.”

  “I’m not worried,” she said.

  He went to the basement and took the flashlight off the workbench. Then he went to the shelf and held Laura’s silver pom-pom to his face. He breathed it in again, as if he could find traces of her there. Still, there was nothing. Then he squeezed it in both of his fists and pulled until some of the strands strained and disconnected. It was a strange feeling. He held the severed strands between his thumb and forefinger, examining them as though they were a memento of her having once been young. He put them in his pocket.

  “I’ll be back soon,” he said at the door. “Don’t worry about me.”

  No one was out next door and he walked past the Davises’ with his breath held in.

  At Mrs. Kasolos’s there was no response, and he went around knocking on the windows. When he got to the backyard, he heard her voice through the wall. “What in the hell?” she said.

  “I’ll go to the front!” he hollered.

  She was wearing a thin nightgown, the kind that Eddie’s own mother had worn, and she spoke very loudly—as though she’d never seen him before: “I don’t know what to tell you! I don’t have anything for you!”

  “It’s Laura Gardner’s husband,” Eddie said. He made his voice as loud as hers. “I’m Eddie Gardner. Remember? I checked on you before?”

  “I’m waiting for my daughter,” she said.

  “Did you eat?”

  “What the hell do you care?”

  “I’m going to help you move that water upstairs. You said you had water in the basement? From the watercooler people?”

  “I need it for my daughter.”

  “I’m going to bring it up the steps for you in case you need it,” he said. “Can I come in?”

  “Come in, don’t come in. I don’t care.”

  It was hard to see inside; the walls and furniture were the same brown color.

  “Down here?” he said, tapping on the door at the other side of the living room.

  “That’s my basement down there.”

  She shuffled past him into the kitchen, and Eddie opened the basement door. He clicked on his flashlight. The stairs creaked beneath his weight with a wooden springiness that threatened to launch him forward into the dim space below. He wondered when she’d been down there last. If she were to try it now, she’d fall to her death. The uneasiness he’d felt at being in her home had settled into resolve. It was important to help old people, however set they were in their ways.

  When his eyes adjusted, he saw the pale blue jug sitting by itself on the cement floor. He hefted it to his chest and made his way back up the stairs again, setting it down against the wall beside the watercooler.

  “Mrs. Kasolos?” he said. He walked through the kitchen and stood in front of the bathroom door. He heard the clink of something hard on porcelain. “You okay in there?”

  She was moving around. He could hear that much.

  In the living room, he examined the jug already installed in the cooler, no more depleted than it had been earlier in the day.

  “Mrs. Kasolos?” he called.

  Even if her daughter came, they wouldn’t need ten gallons of water. A woman her age—she probably didn’t need more than a couple cups a day.

  He lifted the jug from the floor and shouldered it, walking outside and down the steps. By then it was dark and the shadows were as thick as curtains beneath the trees, but he kept the flashlight in his pocket. He sat the jug by the side of the house among the bushes. Then he walked around in both directions to make sure he was alone. He was sweating and thirsty, and thought of going back inside and taking a coffee mug right out of the kitchen cabinet and filling it at the cooler … but what was in the cooler was hers, he thought—there was enough in there to keep her safe, and he would leave what was left alone.

  He stood there in Mrs. Kasolos’s dark yard. Laura would expect him back soon, but she wouldn’t start worrying if he was gone a little longer. She wouldn’t allow the jug in their house, no matter how much he explained. That much he knew. She’d make him give it back.

  He hoisted it back onto his shoulder and walked, following the sidewalks until he saw that they revealed themselves too brightly in the moonlight. He walked on the dead grass of the lawns instead. The bubble in the jug slid back and forth in the corner of his vision as it leveled and unleveled with his progress.

  He’d go into the woods and hide it in the park. It would be safe there, and when the water came back on it wouldn’t matter. No one would know he’d even taken it. The park was less than a quarter mile away, but his shoulder ached beneath the jug, and when he reached the aluminum rails that marked the entrance, he was relieved to set it on the ground. It didn’t feel as though he were down the street from his house. It felt as if he’d been on a journey—as if he’d left Laura behind long ago. He stuck a hand into his pocket and squeezed the plastic strands of her pom-pom. All he had to do was hide the jug. Then he could walk back up the hill and he’d be home again.

  He set the jug back on his shoulder and clicked the flashlight on, walking slowly to keep from tripping over the roots and stones along the path. Still, his ankles gave way and pinched, and he teetered and had to grab hold of trees with his free hand. He tried to concentrate to keep from slipping, but his head buzzed. Only when he reached the bank of the stream, where the trees were charred and the ash was getting into his shoes, was he thinking clearly again.

  This was the stream that flowed over the spillway, and he crossed the sand of the bed and climbed the bank on the opposite shore. From his pocket, he pulled three of the silver strands, affixing them in the crust of a burnt tree trunk. He swung the flashlight quickly in front of him. At the edge of the flashlight’s arc, the strands glinted silver and white where they’d crimped. He would be able to find them again if he walked along the bank and shone his light. The woods were big and deep here and already he had to remind himself of the way he’d come.

  He climbed up the slope and
walked back among boulders larger than himself, finding three trees so close together they made a kind of fence. Behind it was a hollow place full of ash and sand, and he placed the jug down and tore at the ground with his fingers until he’d unearthed a deep enough trench. He laid the jug in and buried it, and then crossed the streambed and tucked three more silver strands beneath a low rock there.

  He walked back to the street and stretched his shoulders, looking up into the night sky. It was not hard to imagine that he was lost between the reflection of the stars and the concrete beneath his feet—though whether he’d projected himself into space, or it had cast itself down on him, was not as clear. He stooped and rubbed his hands in the grass of one of the yards to get the ash from between his fingers.

  It was not yet late when they went to bed, and Eddie touched the inside of Laura’s thigh.

  “I feel too grimy,” she said, but she relented. He held on tightly to both of her shoulders, their backs to the window, and when he was done, she said, “If it’s all the way in Virginia, my parents’ power could be out, too.”

  “That’s the other direction,” he said.

  “We don’t know how far it goes.”

  “There’s a bridge between us and them.”

  “So what does that mean?” she said.

  Through the window, they could hear people talking on the street. Eddie felt his heart quicken. He couldn’t make out the words and didn’t recognize the voices. He swung out of bed and pulled on some boxers. He moved quietly to the office, standing still in the middle of the room, listening for sounds in the backyard. But there were no sounds coming from there.

  “What are you doing?” Laura called.

  “Give me a second.”

  If Bill Peters was in the yard, Eddie would be able to hear him. There wasn’t much insulation in the walls—in the daytime, he could hear the squirrels jumping branches.

  “I’m going outside,” he said.

  He had a wooden bat that he kept in the corner of the office that he’d joked with Laura was for “protection.”

  “What are you going to do out there?” she asked, but he didn’t answer.

  He took the flashlight and went down the back steps very softly. He didn’t turn the flashlight on.

  On the grass of the back lawn, he smelled the overripe honeysuckle on the Davises’ bush. The ground was soft enough beneath his flip-flops that his knee didn’t hurt. The yard was empty, though he could still hear the chatter down the street.

  Something snapped behind him, and he knew it was a man.

  He spun and fumbled with the flashlight and felt the nearness of the footfalls as they passed him, the heat of a body, and the wind it stirred up. Tools crashed at the side of the house, and the beam illuminated the fabric of a shirt.

  “Hey!” Eddie shouted, but he stood planted where he was. His heart was doing something strange to the gravity in his chest.

  He hurried inside and took Laura’s wrist to pull her out of bed. He didn’t want to leave her alone in there.

  “What?” she said. “What?”

  They walked down the street in their nightclothes, Laura in a T-shirt and boxer shorts. They could hear the voices before they saw the group of people. It was just a block away. Patty was there. Eddie could see her outlines even in the dark.

  “Someone was just in my yard,” he said. The words came out too loudly and stopped the neighbors’ chatter.

  He was lucky Patty was there. “High school kids,” she said, in a way that made it clear she knew him, that he hadn’t been accusing them of being in his yard. “It happened in oh-eight, too. They ran a little wild. They broke into my car and took the change out of the console. I had CDs in there, but they didn’t touch those.”

  “They didn’t like your music!” someone quipped.

  Patty laughed until it turned into a smoker’s cough. “Ah, screw you,” she said.

  “Any of you have water yet?” Eddie said.

  “No,”one of them said.

  “Did anyone try the police?”

  The cluster of bodies was just a darker patch on the street.

  “The power must have done something at the pumping station.”

  “That didn’t happen before?” Laura’s shoulder was close enough to rub against him. Their hands brushed.

  “No, and I been here twenty years,” said a man whose voice was pitched as if by nose plugs. “Anybody fill their bathtub?”

  “Did you? Who saw this coming?”

  In the darkness, their conversation floated untethered around Eddie.

  “I’m just worried about Mrs. Kasolos. She’s eighty-five now.”

  “I’ll check on her,” one of them said.

  “My husband already did,” Laura said. “She’s okay.”

  “She has a watercooler,” Eddie said. “It’s almost full.”

  There was a silence as they contemplated Mrs. Kasolos’s cooler.

  “You know what the cops told me after those robberies on Keswick?” Patty said. “Don’t do anything stupid like leave your doors unlocked. Well, duh.”

  “But the cops aren’t around now,” Eddie said.

  “I’ve been here twenty years and I’ve never called the cops once,” the nasal voice said. “So what’s your point? This is a good neighborhood. Go to sleep, and when you wake up everything’ll be back to normal. They got crews for this sorta thing. They learned their lessons in oh-eight.”

  “I just think we should protect ourselves, is all,” Eddie said. “People act differently when they’re desperate.”

  “Who’s desperate? You’ve got a roof over your head. Trust me. This is not desperate.”

  Patty turned her shadow to address Eddie and Laura for the benefit of the others. Even in the dark, he could tell that she was smiling. “You two can bunk with me and the Mikes if you want.”

  Someone said, “Oh, now it’s an open invitation?”

  “I didn’t say you, Paul,” Patty said, and the mood was light again.

  Back in their yard, Eddie took Laura around and waved the flashlight over the grass. Having her with him settled his nerves. When the beam passed over the side of the house, he saw that his shovel and rake had been toppled. He didn’t say anything, and she hadn’t asked him what he’d meant when he told the group that someone had been in their yard.

  “The guy was right,” she said. “Let’s just go to bed. We’re exhausted. I’m exhausted. Let them do their work.”

  “Who?”

  “The electric people. The water people.”

  He walked ahead of her up the stairs. “What did you see after you left your car?” he asked.

  “What?” she said, and then added, “Nothing. People walking. Why? What did you see?”

  “That’s all you saw? People walking?”

  She gripped the rail, and he saw the strength in her arm. She was built like a track star. “Why?” she said. “If you saw something, you can tell me.”

  “I didn’t see anything. You said you saw a fight.”

  “Just the one lady who got mad at that kid.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I guess a lot of people were walking into the city,” he said. “Their tempers got the best of them.”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  They went inside and got back into bed.

  Laura said, “It’s okay to leave the window open. I’m hot already.”

  “We usually leave the window open.”

  “I just mean … if you’re nervous about anything.”

  “I’m not nervous. It’d be hard to break in through that window. We’re right here.”

  “I know.”

  But it made him think about the window in the back door, the one he’d broken with the rock. He’d never patched it up. Whoever had been in the yard could have doubled back.

  “Hold on,” he said to Laura. He took the flashlight and walked into the basement, poking the beam around where they stored their boxes. He
kicked at the base of one to see if anything made a sound, but it was just the sound of a box being kicked. They kept an old mattress leaned against the wall, and he lifted it away. There were some plastic bags behind it and some dust bunnies.

  He tore a cardboard flap off one of the boxes and went back upstairs to the kitchen and ripped a length of duct tape. He pressed the piece of cardboard up against the busted pane.

  When he went back into the bedroom, she’d lit a tea candle and placed it on the dresser. Eddie told her about the window. He was ashamed of himself for breaking it.

  “I saw that it was broken,” she said. “I mean … I knew. When did you do it?”

  Eddie thought about that. “When I first got back. When was that?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “You weren’t here and I left my keys in the car, I think.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “You didn’t say anything about it,” he said.

  “No,” she said.

  “What did Mike Sr. say to you? When he first got back?”

  “He didn’t say anything to me.”

  He thought about that. “How’s your head?” he said.

  “My head is fine.”

  “You don’t have a headache? Not even a dull one?”

  “No.”

  He went into the kitchen and took one of the juices in the plastic barrels off the counter.

  “Here,” he said, peeling back the foil for her. “Drink this.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “You’re dehydrated.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’ll have some, too.”

  Eddie’s head was pounding.

  Laura drank half of it down and handed it back to him. It left a red crescent on her upper lip. Eddie took a bottle of ibuprofen out of his nightstand and drank down three of the pills.

  “Okay?” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  She blew out the candle and joined him lying down in bed. Eddie could still hear the neighbors talking in the street.

  “A meeting of the minds down there,” he said.

  “Don’t get mad.”

  After a while, she said, “I remember when Hurricane Andrew hit Florida. I was driving in the car with my dad, and we were listening to the forecast. They were saying how terrible it was going to be and my dad said, ‘There’s going to be a lot of destruction and people are going to die, but it’s also going to be a little exciting.’ He told me it was okay if I got excited.”