Thirst

by Benjamin Warner

  “They’re keeping everybody awake, though.”

  “Everybody but us is out there.”

  Eddie tried to hear past the side of the house into the backyard. But all he heard were the voices in the street. It wasn’t long before Laura was breathing deeply. He could feel the ash on his body where he hadn’t been able to wipe it away. When he ran a fingernail across his eyelid, it was filmy. He was falling asleep, too, and sleep came softly and soundlessly. The ash had filled his ears. He was walking through it in the cold. Snow had piled up, and in the spreading landscape of it, he saw the flash of Bill Peters’s shirt. He swung a flashlight and it illuminated the white of Bill Peters’s face. It was Bill Peters rushing toward him.

  He woke and couldn’t breathe, not knowing whether to suck in or push out. He sat up, coughing. Laura was silent next to him.

  When he touched her side, his breath came back. “Hey,” he said, and she groaned a little.

  He took the flashlight and quietly got out of bed. He went to the basement and looked behind the boxes again. Then he looked behind the mattress and shone the beam around the furnace, too. There were some old pieces of plywood in the furnace room, and he took a short piece and some screws and his drill. When he tested the drill, it whirred, but not convincingly. Upstairs, there was just enough juice to screw it over the broken pane, but the screws didn’t go all the way in. There was a space, too, where he could still see a strip of the cardboard taped beneath.

  He found his phone on the table by the front door. If he could get the police, he’d tell them a man named Bill Peters had tried to force himself into his house. His phone was dead, though. He picked up Laura’s. It was alive, but the screen had an uninterrupted photo of the two of them at Broadkill Beach: no bars of service or the AT&T insignia cutting through them. He dialed 911 and hit SEND, but it never even went to CALLING.

  He took another juice and swallowed a few more ibuprofen pills. There were ten juices left.

  In the bedroom, he shook Laura’s shoulder. “Hey,” he said. “I’m lighting up the candle.”

  He dragged his thumb over the lighter, and she sat up in the shadows that it made. She was frowning. Pieces of hair were plastered to her cheek.

  “Drink the rest of this,” he said.

  She closed her eyes and made a sour face.

  “Come on,” he said. “You’ve barely had anything.”

  “I had one with dinner, too.”

  “That’s not enough.”

  “I’m going back to sleep.” She slid down and tucked her head beneath the pillow.

  “Fine,” he said. “Make sure you have one in the morning.”

  He tipped the juice to his mouth and drank the rest of it. It was sweet syrup, only a few big mouthfuls’ worth, meant for children’s picnics. It nauseated him a bit.

  In the morning, he went to the shower and tried the handle for hot water. Then he set all his dumb hopes on cold.

  “Fuck,” he said, hoping that she’d hear. He banged the sink handle up and down, up and down.

  They ate dry cereal and each drank a juice.

  “If I have another of these, I’m going to be sick,” Laura said. She opened and closed her mouth dramatically, letting her tongue make a sticking sound.

  “What are our options? You’d rather have that lemon juice in the fridge? We’ve got a bottle of it.”

  There was a knock at the door, and when Eddie flinched, his chair legs squeaked against the kitchen floor. He held up both his hands, palms facing the floor, as if to say, Quiet. Stay put.

  Laura sat where she was, and Eddie went to the office for the bat, deciding how he’d hold it. He stood in front of the door, and then leaned the bat against the wall. He’d only have to bend down a little if he needed it.

  Outside were two men. The one standing at the door had a face pink from shaving. Behind him, a second man was supporting the arms of a wheelbarrow. It had half a gallon of orange juice and a blue-tinted water bottle with liquid at the bottom. There were five or so bottles of water with the seals unbroken, too.

  “Hello, there,” said the pink-faced man. Eddie could smell the bathroom chemicals on his gleaming cheeks. “We’re making the rounds, collecting whatever people can give for the elderly families on the block. The Cartwrights, for example.”

  “The Cartwrights?”

  “They were there last night. We had a conversation? I’m Paul?” the man said. “We met you on the street.”

  “Right,” Eddie said.

  Laura stood beside him. “And you’re collecting these for who, exactly?”

  “We’ve got elderly people all over this neighborhood. A lot of them don’t have family nearby, not that they could even get here anyway. Some of us who’ve lived here a long time just want to make sure they’re okay.”

  “And people are giving you things to drink?” Laura said.

  “If they have it.”

  “And what are they drinking?”

  “If you’re young and you’ve got your health, you’re lucky. You’ll be okay until they get this stuff worked out. I’m not saying to give me everything you have.”

  The man behind him spoke up. Eddie had thought he’d stooped to hold the wheelbarrow, but now he saw he’d let it go—that his back was hunched. He wore suspenders. Whatever Paul projected, this second man balanced out. His cheeks were loose and stubbly. “Shouldn’t be more than a few hours till everything’s back and running,” he said. “Until then, we just want to make sure our neighbors are okay.”

  “How about I take it to them?” Laura said to him. “I mean, what I have to give.”

  “Sure,” Paul said. “You can just follow us there.”

  “Why don’t I just take it to them directly? The Cartwrights? I think I know where they are.”

  Eddie put his hand on her arm, as if to keep her from making good on the idea right then. “It doesn’t make sense for you to go,” he said. “They have the barrow.”

  To Paul, he said, “We’d help if we could. I guess we didn’t plan very well.”

  “No one planned for this,” Paul said, still smiling.

  “It’s okay,” Laura said. She went back to the kitchen and brought back four of the juices. Eddie met her a few feet in front of the door and tried to hedge her back. “We don’t have any to give,” he said.

  “We do,” she said. She held up the juices by their lids, two in each hand. “These.”

  She walked past him, down the walk, and put them in the wheelbarrow. The hunched man reorganized his feet and grunted.

  “We’ll let you know if you can be of more assistance,” Paul said. The other man hoisted the wheelbarrow and the two of them walked next door to the Davises’ house.

  “No way Mike Sr. gives them anything,” Eddie said.

  “Eddie, it’s for our neighbors. They’re old. What’s the big deal?”

  “Have the Cartwrights ever said hello to you on the street? Would they recognize you if you knocked on their door?”

  “It’s our responsibility to help them, not the other way around.”

  “You sound like such a saint.”

  “It’s done, okay? Just drop it.”

  The house was heating up, and his headache hadn’t gone away. When he went into the bathroom, he pissed an amber color.

  The last beer in the fridge was almost cool. He poured it into two whiskey glasses. Laura was lying on the couch, reading the Field & Stream, and Eddie put one of the glasses down on the table in front of her.

  “That doesn’t seem like a good idea,” she said.

  “It’s cool, at least.”

  They drank their half a beer. Eddie sat across from her in a reclining chair. He closed his eyes, but his thinking wasn’t clear. He balanced there between wakefulness and sleep. It was difficult—as difficult as real balancing—and it only tired him further. When he slept, he was at the edge of the embankment, beside the highway. The snow was so thick between the trees that he had to hold them to keep from sinking. Th
ere were voices behind him, in the woods. “Don’t tell,” they said. “There’s a reward.” Eddie took deep steps through the snow. He tried not to sweat. If he started to sweat, he knew he would freeze.

  “Come on,” said the man in the flannel shirts. He had no face, no hair. Just a mouth, though Eddie couldn’t really see what kind of mouth it was. “Wemmick,” Eddie said to him. Wemmick held out his hand and Eddie took it.

  “I thought you were dead,” Wemmick said.

  When he opened his eyes, he saw that Laura had fallen asleep, too. She was spread out on the couch with the magazine on her chest.

  “Maybe I should check on the cars,” he said.

  “No,” she said without opening her eyes. “What good would that do?”

  “Maybe mine’s cleared out.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I should go.”

  “Do you have the energy for that?”

  “It’s my car, Laur.”

  She rocked her head back and looked up, as if she were exasperated with the ceiling. “I understand that. But getting home was hell. I can’t imagine doing it two more times. There and back if it’s still stuck.”

  “I thought you said you didn’t see anything. What do you mean it was hell?”

  “The only thing bad I saw was you throwing someone down the steps. That’s all I saw.”

  “What are you talking about? I didn’t throw him down the steps. I was trying to get him out of our house. If you force someone down the steps, it looks like throwing.”

  “Fine,” Laura said. “What would you take with you on this journey to get your car? We’d need to bring supplies.”

  “You just gave our supplies away.”

  She flipped her legs around and sat up on the couch. “It’ll be easier once they fix the power.”

  They ate uncooked hot dogs with mustard for lunch. Laura didn’t think you could eat them raw, but Eddie said you could. They each drank a juice. Through the kitchen window, they could see Mike Jr. with the golf club. He was hacking at the grass in the manner of someone splitting wood. Eddie knocked on the glass.

  “Now you’ve done it,” Laura said.

  Mike Jr. spun around, looking for the source of the knocking.

  Eddie opened the window. “Over here, bonehead,” he said.

  Mike Jr. squinted at them. “Eddie!” he said. In a moment, they could hear him coming up the steps, and Eddie opened the back door.

  “What do you want?” Eddie said.

  “Ah,” said Mike Jr., catching on to the ribbing. He was smiling with his mouth wide-open. There was brown sauce on his face.

  “I bet I can guess what you had for lunch,” Laura said.

  “Barbecue,” Mike Jr. said.

  “Why are you beating up the ground with that golf club?” Eddie said.

  “I dunno.”

  “C’mere. Let me show you how.”

  He led him back outside and picked the club up off the grass. “First, you’ve got to hold it right,” he said. He took Mike Jr.’s hand and put it around the club with his index finger pointing down the shaft. He put his other hand so that it gripped the finger.

  “Now, you’ve gotta swing through,” Eddie instructed, standing beside him and making the gesture. “Wait!” he said, anticipating Mike Jr.’s backswing. “Let me get out of the way.”

  He stepped back and a fatigue enveloped him. Something cinched down hard on his lungs. He couldn’t breathe. He had to bend and put his hands on his knees.

  Mike Jr. swung and hit the ground. The club shivered out of his hands, end over end.

  Eddie looked up. The air was coming in again.

  Mike Jr. ran to retrieve the club.

  “Good,” Eddie said, standing up straight, regaining himself. “Let’s do it again.” He helped him with the grip. He was breathing fine. The air was close, but he was okay. He found the Wiffle ball lying at the base of some ornamental grasses. “Now try it with this.” The grasses were brown, but maybe they were supposed to be. Eddie couldn’t remember what they’d looked like before. He set up the ball and backed off beneath a mulberry tree at the edge of the yard. The branches drooped low, and Eddie grabbed one between his fingers. The leaves were as loose as dead skin. The light green undersides had curled up and around, making them look inside out. The same thing was happening to the leaves on the oak. Mike Jr. swung and clicked the Wiffle ball in a miraculous arc that landed in the street. He put a hand to his forehead, gazing into the distance the way Mike Sr. must have taught him.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Eddie said. “Beginner’s luck.”

  Across the street, a group of teenagers was walking through the front yards of his neighbors as if the sidewalk went straight through their lawns. They stepped on flower beds and broke through bushes. They held on to one another. Two girls laughed and doubled over in the way Eddie had seen girls laugh and double over when leaving bars in college. Something flashed in the sun. One of the boys held a knife—a long silver triangle.

  “Get over here,” Eddie said. He walked Mike Jr. up the Davises’ front porch and knocked on the door. Patty answered and cradled Mike Jr. to her side by palming his head. “He making trouble?”

  “No. Just playing golf.”

  “Hotter than hell out here,” she said.

  “Everything’s wilting,” Eddie said.

  She looked down at Mike Jr. “You gotta stay inside where it’s cool, little man.”

  “Is it cool in there?”

  “Cooler than out here. Not really, though. I’m sweating like a hog.”

  “Did you give those guys anything when they came with the wheelbarrow?”

  “We’ve got Mike Jr. to think about,” she said, and when he heard his name, Mike Jr. maneuvered his head from under her hand and smiled up at his mother. “They’ll be okay. Can’t be much longer now. The power company must have gotten a thousand complaints.”

  Eddie went back inside his house and took the knife block off the kitchen counter, placing it on the floor beside the bookcase. It was inconspicuous there. Laura was in the bedroom.

  “Let’s go to the stream,” she said. She stood with one arm up the doorjamb and canted her hips in a saucy way.

  “Why?” Eddie said.

  “We’ll take a dip. It’s roasting.”

  “You know how dirty that water is?”

  “How?”

  “That trail follows sewage pipes. Whenever they leak, guess where it goes. Not to mention the runoff from all of this.” He twirled a finger at the ceiling to indicate the network of suburban streets.

  “We can go down and see what’s there, at least.”

  “If you can’t swim in it, you don’t want to drink it. I think that’s a rule.”

  “Just for the walk, then.”

  “You can go. I was just out there. It’s a million degrees.”

  “Fine,” she said. “I can’t sit around here all day.”

  She went into the bedroom, and when she came back she was wearing shorts and a brown bikini top. Eddie thought of the burnt streak in the sand at the bottom of the stream and how the ash had piled in the spillway.

  “Don’t,” he said. He held her and could feel the delicate bones interlocking in her shoulder. Her skin was smooth and warm. “Please. It feels like we should just sit tight.”

  “What makes it feel like that?”

  “There were kids outside. Just now.”

  “So what?”

  “High school kids or something. I think they were drunk. They go down to the stream to drink. I’ve seen their empties there. One of them had a knife.”

  “You think they’re going to mess with me? Don’t worry, Eddie. I’ll defend the family honor.”

  “Why look for trouble?”

  “Eddie, this is ridiculous.”

  “It’s ridiculous? Really? You want to go take a dip in our local cesspool.”

  “People fish in it.”

  “They don’t eat what they catch.”

  There was a scu
ff of footsteps on the front walk, and Eddie waited for a knock to follow. The air in the room seemed to suspend them where they were. When the knock came, Eddie let his breath go out.

  Paul was standing on their doorstep. His face was dour and he’d clasped his hands behind his back. The second man with the wheelbarrow wasn’t with him. Bill Peters was with him. He stood down on the sidewalk, looking up at Eddie. He wore a head bandage like a Civil War casualty—gauze wrapped around his ears.

  Paul said, “Did you assault this man?” His eye contact was severe.

  Eddie let a short laugh escape him. “No,” he said. “I didn’t assault him.”

  “He says you did.”

  “Paul,” Eddie said. “What are you doing here?”

  “Did you assault this man?” he said again, more slowly.

  “I just gave you juice to give to old ladies. I’m your neighbor. I was playing with the little kid next door. What are you accusing me of?”

  Down on the sidewalk, Bill Peters shook his bandaged head. “He did it,” he called.

  “Do you know who he is?” Eddie asked Paul.

  “He’s a man trying to take care of his family. He says he’s got an unhealthy child.”

  “He was in my yard last night.” Eddie shifted his gaze and met Bill Peters’s. “I know you were here,” he said.

  Bill Peters shook his head again.

  “Look,” said Paul. “I don’t want to make this difficult. But for now I’m going to make a citizen’s arrest.”

  “A citizen’s arrest.”

  “The cops aren’t here yet. But they will be.”

  “Paul, do you know what a citizen’s arrest is?”

  “Just come sit on my porch. As long as I know where you are, it won’t be a problem.”

  “A citizen’s arrest.”

  “You assaulted this man.”

  “Go home, Paul.”

  Bill Peters called up from the sidewalk. “They’ll lock you up when this is over. I’m pressing charges to the full extent of the law.”

  Paul turned to Bill Peters for the first time, and lifted up his hand for quiet. “Bill,” he said. “Please.”