Twenty-eight
The hurting sound
Time passed.
Josh judged its passage by the number of empty cans that were piling up in what he thought of as the city dump—that foul area over in the far corner where they both used the bathroom and tossed the empties. They went through one can of vegetables every other day, and one can of a meat product like Spam or corned beef on alternating days. The way Josh calculated the passage of a day was by his bowel movements. He’d always been as regular as clockwork. So the trips to the city dump and the pile of empties gave him a reasonable estimation of time, and he figured now that they’d been in the basement between nineteen and twenty-three days. Which would make it anywhere between the fifth and thirteenth of August. Of course, there was no telling how long they’d been there before they’d gotten semi-organized, either, so Josh thought it was probably closer to the seventeenth—and that would mean one month had passed.
He’d found a packet of flashlight batteries in the dirt, so they were okay on that account. The light showed him that they’d passed the halfway point of their food supply. It was time to start digging. As he gathered up the shovel and pickaxe, he heard their gopher scrambling happily amid the city dump’s cans. The little beast thrived on their leftovers—which didn’t amount to much—and licked the cans so clean you could see your face reflected on the bottom. Which was something Josh definitely avoided doing.
Swan was asleep, breathing quietly in the darkness. She slept a lot, and Josh figured that was good. She was saving her energy, hibernating like a little animal. Yet when Josh woke her she came up instantly, focused and alert. He slept a few feet away from her, and it amazed him how attuned he’d become to the sound of her breathing; usually it was deep and slow, the sound of oblivion, but sometimes it was fast and ragged, the gasp of memories, bad dreams, the sinking in of realities. It was that sound that awakened Josh from his own uneasy sleep, and often he heard Swan call for her mother or make a garbled utterance of terror, as if something was stalking her across the wasteland of nightmares.
They’d had plenty of time to talk. She’d told him about her mother and “uncles,” and how much she enjoyed planting her gardens. Josh had asked her about her father; she’d said he was a rock musician but hadn’t offered anything else.
She’d asked him what it felt like to be a giant, and he’d told her he’d be a rich man if he had a quarter for every time he’d bumped his head at the top of a doorway. Also, it was tough finding clothes big enough—though he didn’t tell her that he’d already noticed his waistband was loosening—and that his shoes were specially made. So I guess it’s expensive to be a giant, he’d said. Otherwise, I guess I’m about the same as everybody else.
In telling her about Rose and the boys, he’d tried very hard not to let his voice break. He could have been talking about strangers, people he knew only as pictures in somebody else’s wallet. He told Swan about his football days, how he’d been Most Valuable Player in three games. Wrestling wasn’t so bad, he’d told her; it was honest money, and a man as big as he couldn’t do much else that was legal. The world was too small for giants; it built doorways too low, furniture too flimsy, and there wasn’t a mattress made that didn’t pop and squall when he lay down to rest.
During the times they talked, Josh kept the flashlight off. He didn’t want to see the child’s blistered face and stubble of hair and remember how pretty she’d been—and also, he wanted to spare her the sight of his own repellent mug.
PawPaw Briggs’s ashes were buried. They did not talk about that at all, but the command Protect the child remained in Josh’s mind like the tolling of an iron bell.
He switched on the flashlight. Swan was curled up in her usual place, sleeping soundly. The dried fluids of burst blisters glistened on her face. Flaps of skin were dangling from her forehead and cheeks like thin layers of flaking paint, and underneath them the raw, scarlet flesh was growing fresh blisters. He gently prodded her shoulder, and her eyes immediately opened. They were bloodshot, the lashes gummy and yellow, her pupils shrinking to pinpoints. He moved the light away from her. “Time to wake up. We’re going to start digging.”
She nodded and sat up.
“If we both work, it’ll be faster,” he said. “I’m going to start with the pickaxe, then I’d like for you to shovel away the loose dirt. Okay?”
“Okay,” she replied, and she got on her hands and knees to follow him.
Josh was about to crawl over to the gopher hole when he noticed something in the spill of light that he’d not seen before. He shifted the beam back to where she’d been sleeping. “Swan? What is that?”
“Where?” Her gaze moved along the light.
Josh put aside the shovel and pickaxe and reached down.
Where Swan customarily slept were hundreds of tiny, emerald-green blades of grass. They formed a perfect image of a child’s curled-up body.
He touched the grass. Not exactly grass, he realized. Shoots of some kind. Tiny shoots of… were they new cornstalks?
He shone the light around. The soft, downlike vegetation was growing in no other place but where Swan slept. He plucked up a bit of it, to examine the roots, and he noted that Swan flinched. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t like that sound.”
“Sound? What sound?”
“A hurting sound,” she answered.
Josh didn’t know what she was talking about, and he shook his head. The roots trailed down about two inches, delicate filaments of life. They’d obviously been growing there for some time, but Josh couldn’t understand how the shoots had rooted in tainted dirt without a drop of water. It was the only bit of green life he’d seen since they’d been trapped here. But there had to be a simple explanation; he figured that the whirlwind had carried seeds in, and somehow they’d rooted and popped up. That’s all.
Right, he thought. Rooted without water and popped up without an iota of sunlight. That made about as much sense as PawPaw deciding to emulate a Roman candle.
He let the green shoots drift down again. At once, Swan picked up a handful of loose dirt, worked it between her fingers for a few seconds with single-minded interest, and covered the shoots over.
Josh leaned back, his knees up against his chest. “It’s only growing where you lie down to sleep. It’s kind of peculiar, don’t you think?”
She shrugged. She could feel him watching her carefully.
“You said you heard a sound,” he continued. “What kind of sound was it?”
Again, a shrug. She didn’t know how to talk about it. Nobody had ever asked her such things before.
“I didn’t hear anything,” Josh said, and he reached toward the shoots again.
She grasped his hand before he got there. “Like I said… a hurting sound. I don’t know exactly.”
“When I plucked them up?”
“Yes.”
Lord, Josh thought, I’m just about ready for a rubber room! He’d been thinking, as he looked at the pattern of green in the dirt, that they were growing there because her body made them grow. Her chemistry or something, reacting with the earth. It was a crazy idea, but there they were. “What’s it like? A voice?”
“No. Not like that.”
“I’d like to hear about it”
“Really?”
“Yes,” Josh said. “Really.”
“My mama said it was ’magination.”
“Is it?”
She hesitated, and then she said firmly, “No.” Her fingers touched the new shoots tenderly, barely grazing them. “One time my mama took me to a club to hear the band. Uncle Warren was playing the drums. I heard a noise like the hurting sound, and I asked her what made it. She said it was a steel guitar, the kind you put on your lap and play. But there are other things in the hurting sound, too.” Her eyes found his. “Like the wind. Or a train’s whistle, way far off. Or thunder, long before you see the lightning. A tot of things.”
“How long have you been able to he
ar it?”
“Since I was a little girl.”
Josh couldn’t help but smile. Swan misread it. “Are you making fun of me?”
“No. Maybe… I wish I could hear a sound like that. Do you know what it is?”
“Yes,” Swan answered. “It’s death.”
His smile faltered and went away.
Swan picked up some dirt and slowly worked it, feeling its dry, brittle texture. “In the summer it’s the worst. That’s when people bring their lawn mowers out.”
“But… it’s just grass,” Josh said.
“In the fall the hurting sound’s different,” she continued, as if she hadn’t heard him. “It’s like a great big sigh, and then the leaves come down. Then in winter, the hurting sound stops, and everything sleeps.” She shook nuggets of dirt from her palm, mixed them with the rest. “When it starts getting warm again, the sun makes things think about waking up.”
“Think about waking up?”
“Everything can think and feel, in its own way,” she replied, and she looked up at him. The eyes in her young face were very old, Josh thought. “Bugs, birds, even grass—everything has its own way of speaking and knowing. Just depends on whether you can understand it or not.”
Josh grunted. Bugs, she’d said. He was remembering the swarm of locusts that had whirled through his Pontiac the day of the blast. He’d never thought before about the things she was saying, but he realized there was truth to it. Birds knew to migrate when the clock of seasons changed, ants built anthills in a frenzy of communication, flowers bloomed and withered but their pollen lived on, all according to a great, mysterious schedule that he’d always taken for granted. It was as simple as grass growing and as complex as a firefly’s light.
“How do you know these things?” he asked. “Who taught you?”
“Nobody. I just figured it out.” She recalled her first garden, growing from a sandbox at a nursery school playground. It had been years before she found out that holding earth didn’t make everybody’s hands tingle with a pins-and-needles sensation, or that everybody couldn’t tell from its buzz whether a wasp wanted to sting or just investigate your ear. She’d always known, and that was that.
“Oh,” he said. He watched her rubbing the dirt in her hands. Swan’s palms were tingling, her hands warm and moist. He looked at the green shoots again. “I’m just a wrestler,” he said, very quietly. “That’s all. I mean… damn, I’m just a nobody!” Protect the child, he thought. Protect her from what? From whom? And why? “What the hell,” he whispered, “have I got myself into?”
“Huh?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he said. Her eyes were those of a little girl again, and she mixed the rest of the warm dirt into the ground around the shoots. “We’d better start digging now. Are you up to it?”
“Yes.” She grasped the shovel he’d laid aside. The tingling, glowing sensation was slowly ebbing away.
But he wasn’t ready, not just yet. “Swan, listen to me for a minute. I want to be truthful with you, because I think you can handle it. We’re going to try to get out of here, but that’s not saying we can. We’ll have to dig a pretty wide tunnel to squeeze my blubber through. It’s going to take us some time, and it sure as hell won’t be easy work. If it caves in, we’ll have to start all over again. What I’m saying, I guess, is that I’m not sure we can get out. I’m not sure at all. Do you understand?”
She nodded, said nothing.
“And one more thing,” he added. “If—when—we get out… we might not like what we find. Everything might be changed. It might be like… waking up after the worst nightmare you can think of, and finding that the nightmare followed you into daylight. Understand?”
Again, Swan nodded. She’d already thought about what he was saying, because no one had ever come to get them out like her mama had said. She put on her most grownup face and waited for him to make the next move.
“Okay,” Josh said. “Let’s start digging.”
Twenty-nine
Strange new flower
Josh Hutchins stared, squinted and blinked. “Light,” he said, the walls of the tunnel pressing against his shoulders and back. “I see light!”
Behind him, about thirty feet away in the basement, Swan called, “How far is it?” She was utterly filthy, and there seemed to be so much dirt up her nostrils that they might sprout gardens, too. The thought had made her giggle a few times, a sound she’d never believed she’d make again.
“Maybe ten or twelve feet,” he answered, and he continued digging with his hands and pushing the dirt behind him, then pushing it further back with his feet. The pickaxe and shovel approach had been a valiant effort, but after three days of working they’d realized the best tools were their hands. Now, as he squeezed his shoulders forward to grab more dirt, Josh looked at the weak red glimmer way up at the gopher hole’s entrance and thought it was the most beautiful light he’d ever seen. Swan entered the tunnel behind him and scooped the loose dirt up in a large can, carrying it back to the basement to empty over the slit trench. Her hands, arms, face, nostrils and knees—everything that was covered with dirt—tingled all the way down to her bones. She felt like she had a flame burning in her backbone. Across the basement, the young green shoots were four inches tall.
Josh’s face was plastered with dirt; even his teeth were gritty with it. The soil was heavy, with a thick, gummy consistency, and he had to stop to rest.
“Josh? You all right?” Swan asked.
“Yeah. Just need a minute to get my wind.” His shoulders and forearms ached mercilessly, and the last time he’d been so weary was after a ten-man battle royal in Chattanooga. The light seemed further away than he’d first reckoned, as if the tunnel—which they’d both come to love and hate—was elongating, playing a cruel trick of perception. He felt as if he’d crawled into one of those Chinese tubes that lock your fingers, one stuck into each end, except his whole body was jammed tight as a monk’s jockstrap.
He started again, bringing a double handful of the heavy earth back and underneath him as if he were swimming through dirt. My mama raised herself a gopher, he thought, and he had to grin despite his weariness. His mouth tasted like he’d been dining on mud pies.
Six more inches dug away. One more foot. Was the light closer, or further away? He pushed himself onward, thinking about how his mama used to scold him for not scrubbing behind his ears. Another foot, and another. Behind him, Swan crawled in and carried the loose dirt out again and again, like clockwork. The light was getting closer now; he was sure of it. But now it wasn’t so beautiful. Now it was sickly, not like sunlight at all. Diseased, Josh thought. And maybe deadly, too. But he kept going, one double handful after the next, inching slowly toward the outside world.
Dirt suddenly plopped down on the back of his neck. He lay still, expecting a cave-in, but the tunnel held. For God’s sake, don’t stop now! he told himself, and he reached out for the next handful.
“I’m almost there!” he shouted, but the earth muffled his voice. He didn’t know if Swan had heard or not. “Just a few more feet!”
But just short of the opening, which was not quite as large as Josh’s fist, he had to stop and rest again. Josh lay staring longingly at the light, the hole about three feet away. He could smell the outside now, the bitter aromas of burned earth, scorched cornstalks and alkali. Rousing himself, he pushed onward. The earth was tougher near the surface, full of glazed stones and metallic lumps. The fire had burned the dirt into something resembling pavement. Still he strained upward, his shoulders throbbing, his gaze fixed on the hole of ugly light. And then he was close enough to thrust his hand through it, but before he tried he said, “I’m there, Swan! I’m at the top!” He clawed away dirt, and his hand reached the hole. But the underside of the surface around it felt like pebbled asphalt, and he couldn’t get his fingers through. He balled up his fist, the flesh mottled gray and white, and pushed. Harder. Harder still. Come on, come on, he thought. Push, damn it!
&n
bsp; There was a dry, stubborn cracking sound. At first Josh thought it was his arm breaking, but he felt no pain, and he kept pushing as if trying to punch the sky.
The earth cracked again. The hole began to crumble and widen. His fist started going through, and he envisioned what it might look like to someone standing on the surface: the blossoming of a zebra-blotched fist like a strange new flower through the dead earth, the fist opening and fingers stretching petal-like under the weak red light.
Josh shoved his arm through almost to the elbow. Cold wind snapped at his fingertips. That movement of air exhilarated him, jarred him as if from a long somnolence. “We’re out!” he shouted, about to sob with joy. “Swan! We’re out!”
She was behind him, crouched in the tunnel. “Can you see anything?”
“I’m going to put my head through,” he told her. “Here goes.”
He pushed upward, his shoulder following his arm, breaking the hole wider. Then his entire arm was out, and the top of his head was ready to press through. As he pushed he thought of watching his sons being born, their heads straining to enter the world. He felt as giddy and afraid as any infant could possibly be. Behind him, Swan was pushing at him, too, giving him support as he stretched to break free.
The earth parted with a sound like baked clay snapping apart. With a surge of effort, Josh thrust his head through the opening and into a biting, turbulent wind.
“Are you there yet?” Swan asked. “What can you see?”
Josh narrowed his eyes, his hand up to ward off flying grit.
He saw a desolate, grayish-brown landscape, featureless except for what appeared to be the mangled remnants of the Bonneville and Darleen’s Camaro. Overhead was a low sky plated with thick gray clouds. From dead horizon to dead horizon, the clouds were slowly, ponderously rotating, and here and there were quicksilver glints of harsher scarlet. Josh looked over his shoulder. About fifteen feet behind him and to his left was a large dome of dirt, mashed-down cornstalks, pieces of wood and metal from the gas pumps and cars. He realized it was the grave they’d been buried in, and at the same time he knew that if the tons of cornfield dirt hadn’t sealed them in they would have been burned to death. Other than that, and a few drifts of cornstalks and debris, the land was scraped clean.
1987 - Swan Song v4 Page 27