The Loudness

by Nick Courage

  “Ready,” Mom says, not asking so much as stating.

  “Ready,” I say, half-waving at the hard-hatted man walking briskly toward us. He calls her name when he’s still too far away for conversation and then breaks into a jog.

  “Sarah,” he says again when he makes it to the car door, opening it for her. “It’s good to get to thank you in person. You know, you saved us, comin’ down here last night!”

  She gets out of the car, shoes crunching on the oyster gravel. “And where were you?” Her voice is shaking and accusatory. The man steps backward, raising his hands up to show that whatever she’s angry about, he’s not to blame. “It was out for days,” she continues. “Days.”

  I stay in the car, looking out at the water, not wanting to see their faces.

  “It wasn’t,” he says, and then backpedals. “We were in the floodway, checking the levels, making sure the pressure . . .”

  “Show me,” she says, and they walk together toward the warehouse, the engineer animated, explaining something with exaggerated gesticulations that Mom doesn’t see because she’s looking straight ahead. Given the choice of following them or joining Dad and Grammy on the concrete promenade, I decide on the latter and jog out to where they’re standing on the water, next to the wall. When I reach them, they’re in the middle of another conversation about the wall “definitely being closed.”

  “Water level’s down, nothing going through it, all right,” Dad says, verifying the assessment he made in the car.

  “So,” I ask, “what’s this whole thing about?” Both Dad and Gram start talking at the same time, then stumble over themselves to defer to each other.

  “The spillway’s been here for over a hundred years now—and this is only second or third time I’ve seen it full,” Grammy finally says, gesturing toward the middle of the lake. “That out there, that was just marsh. Called the spillway ’cause when the river got too high and was gonna flood, we’d just spill the water out into here. . . . But it was never always full.”

  Only a few times, in emergency situations, Dad explains; keeping the spillway open for more than a day or so was always a big decision—even during the first Tragedy, when the Zone was mostly drowning. Not that it helped much then. People worried that if we kept it open for too long, the river would slow down enough to get stolen by another river further north, which would just compound the disaster. The smaller river, swelling with our river’s deadly current, would overflow its banks and writhe across our neighbors like an angry snake—saving the city at everyone else’s expense.

  “It’s a bad idea to mess with the flow of big old rivers,” Dad says. “They’re powerful. Took us centuries to get ours under control, with levees and dams and weirs.” Of course, those neighbors aren’t really there anymore, so Dad says it doesn’t matter if we open the spillway full-time and divert the river for power; if that changes where the river meets the sea. It’s all marshy wetlands anyway, and better marshy wetlands that power street lights and radios than marshy wetlands that just sit there marinating mosquito eggs and alligators.

  “Anyway,” Grammy says, cutting Dad off. “Since there’s no one to worry about but ourselves, we’re opening the weird.”

  “Weir,” says Dad. “But this is more of a dam, really.”

  “Whatever.”

  Dad points toward the dam in question. It’s not your typical wall—the bottom ten or so feet are solid concrete, and the top ten are lined with massive sheets of rust-red metal. Even though they’re technically closed, water from the river sluices through the seams in choked intervals. “See that, where the water’s getting through,” he says. “That’s where the dam funnels the river to the spillway—inside of those gates, that’s where we built the turbines that’re gonna power us back up . . .”

  He says this with confidence, in full teacher mode. I can feel my headache coming on again, but when he gets this way, you just have to wait it out. Mom and the engineer, done arguing, are standing by the warehouse staring out at the wall. Seeing me, she waves. Dad’s still talking, but I figure this is as good a chance as any and jog over to her.

  “Hey,” I say, and the engineer holds out his hand like he wants to shake. I look at Mom, who smiles and nods, and I take him by the hand. I must be pretty normal, charge-wise, because he barely feels it, not like Tom on the Other Side. It’s a good sign.

  “Hey,” he says, his voice half gruff and half sweet, like a grown up kid who isn’t really a grown-up.

  “Nice to see ya, Guv,” says Dad, who crunches up behind me, holding out his hand to the engineer.

  “Tellin’ your son all about our evil plot to save the city?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I know all about the weird.”

  Dad starts to correct me, and then notices me holding back a smile.

  “And the water wheelers?” Guv asks.

  Dad hadn’t told me about the water wheelers, but Guv likes to talk almost as much as Dad and is happy to pick up the slack. The whole point of channeling the river through the dam is to catch its current and funnel it through the warehouse, where it’s supposed to be translated into electricity. Guv and the rest of the engineers had set turbines—“water wheelers,” like the Other Side’s pinwheels—into the dam and connected them to an industrial-sized generator occupying three-quarters of the warehouse.

  “Anyway, that was the plan . . . but turns out we can’t really store the energy after all.” Guv shakes his head and looks apologetically at Mom, who’s looking apologetically at me. “Not even if we just open the spillway a little bit. It’s just too much.”

  He pats the corrugated tin wall of the warehouse, which makes a warped booming noise, and breaks out into a smile. “You wanna see its guts?”

  The inside of the warehouse is like the stomach of an enormous mechanical beast. The structure itself is huge—three stories high with vaulted cathedral ceilings. But the space is dwarfed by the generator, a massive tangle of dripping brown pipes and cement vats, levers and counter levers, and—in the far corner of the room—nothing except cracked floors and broken windows, black blast marks on the wall behind.

  I stare for a moment at the empty space, not realizing how much it’s affecting me until I notice that I’m clenching my teeth. The air in the warehouse is thick and wet; I can feel it settling on my hands and face, working its way into my pores. I’m hesitant to take a gulp of it, but I can’t help myself.

  That empty space almost killed me.

  “That’s where we were trying to store the electricity,” Guv says, following my gaze. “We scrapped it after your mom made us close up shop last night.” He wipes his nose with the back of his hand, then scratches his head. “Didn’t even think to look back here with all the excitement of opening up the spillway.”

  Mom looks at him with slit eyes, then pats him on the back, joking: “Water under the bridge, Guv.” Guv looks like he doesn’t know whether or not he’s supposed to laugh, so I try to break the awkwardness of the moment by doing it for him, but it feels wrong and falls flat, echoing sharply against the sweating metal walls of the warehouse.

  I suddenly wish I was anywhere but here.

  Freckles and Conor and Scott are probably already back in the attic, bubbly off the bottle of orange soda they’re spinning again. Mouse may finally be getting her turn. They might all be frenching.

  It doesn’t really bother me, though. So much has happened since yesterday that I can barely remember it. I look back to the scorched corner and try to hold my breath, listening to Dad quiz Guv about the dam (“Can’t store that much power,” Guv says. “Gonna have to route it straight to the Zone’s grid when it’s all hooked up.”) until I can’t take it anymore. Too much talking and standing around. Too much almost dying.

  Even the generator’s just sitting there, dripping.

  Still holding my breath, I run outside, back into the sunlight. But it’s raining, a sunshower. They’re not that uncommon here during the summer, but even so, it feels unnatura
l. The sky over the spillway is blue, but both sides of the dam are wavy, the gaps leaking more aggressively than before. The hard-hatted men still on it walk briskly to shore, not bothering to cover their rain-streaked faces.

  I jog to the car, where Grammy’s resting, and fall into the backseat next to her. “The devil’s beating his wife,” she says, staring at the spillway.

  “What’s that even mean?” I ask.

  “You know?” she answers, holding her gaze and then looking slowly over at me. “I don’t even know. Just something my Grammy used to say.”

  The sun is gone by the time my parents are done in the warehouse. The bruised green sky gives the swelling impression that it’ll never shine again, and just as they walk outside, it starts storming in earnest. Black clouds churn overhead and the rain comes down in hot, hard sheets that break against the windshield like they’re trying to crack it. I don’t think they can do that, but I get goosebumps thinking about it regardless. Only, it’s not goosebumps from the thought per se.

  It’s goosebumps from my heart, which buzzes at the thought.

  “Who’s the devil beating now?” I ask, but Grammy’s back to looking at the spillway and doesn’t seem to hear me. I sense something out of the corner of my eye and jerk my attention back to my parents, who are running through the rain . . . not to the car, but after Guv, who’s running to the walkway.

  The dam—my mouth drops open, literally slack. The river is slamming up against it while the two hard-hatted engineers scramble to batten down the hatches. Through the roar of the storm I hear Guv yelling, “Come in, Come in!” but they don’t seem to hear him and aren’t making for the shore.

  Then: a thunderous rumbling, lightning touching every corner of the sky, and . . . something different. Something I can’t put my finger on. The whole scene reminds me of a German painting I saw in an art book in the attic, black and blue skies and a tiny man dwarfed in the foreground, easy to miss. One man.

  The other must have fallen over.

  I grip Grammy’s hand and she squeezes back, white-knuckled. My heart’s beating double-time again—I can hear it over the rain, pulsing in my ears. I know I’m buzzing Grammy, can feel the current coursing from me to her, so I try to pull away . . . but she holds on tight. Guv is on the walkway now, hot-footing through heavy machinery toward the remaining engineer, who’s on his hands and knees in the center of the dam.

  Mom and Dad are stopped at the foot of the walkway, drenched, calling out to Guv, their shouts drowned in the wind and the rain and the adrenaline of the moment.

  I try to make out what Guv and the other engineer are doing still out on the walkway, buffeted by the elements. It looks like Guv is laying down, the other man kneeling, holding his ankles, and then—after a few eternity-spanning seconds—helping Guv back up, lifting him by the shoulders, helping him pull the dead weight of the third engineer out of the river.

  A small flock of egrets flies over them, headed toward the north shore of the lake, while the nearly drowned third engineer, on all fours, vomits water back into the river. I exhale, and Grammy does the same.

  “Lucky,” she whispers to herself. “Lucky, lucky, lucky.”

  It doesn’t seem so lucky to me, though. That guy almost died. I say as much, and Grammy looks at me seriously, her eyes casting around my face as if trying to memorize it, and says: “He almost died. . . .” She pauses, deciding whether to elaborate. “I call that lucky.”

  Once Guv and the engineers are back on land—the one who got pulled out of the water walking shakily, propped up between the other two—my parents head back to the car. The rain is still coming down, but they walk slowly, and when they finally make it over to us, they slump wetly down in the front seat, leaving their front doors open.

  “Poor guy,” Dad says. “Idiot. River coulda taken him under in a second if he hadn’t gotten tangled in that wheel.” Mom doesn’t say anything, just sits there for a second looking out over the warehouse and the dam, the spillway and the swollen river. Grammy breaks the silence by saying lucky again. Everyone nods in agreement, including me.

  “Gotta catch that flight,” Mom says in a monotone, turning the key in the ignition. The engine flips over and hums, and Dad closes his door. After another long minute listening to the beat of raindrops on the roof of the car, in shock, Mom shakes her head and says “lucky idiot” under her breath, then shuts her door as we crunch back onto the slick black highway.

  Everyone is completely quiet on the drive back, which seems to take a quarter of the time it took to get out to the spillway. It’s a rush of grey and green, trees and rain, until we’re back in the Zone, where it’s barely drizzling. Mom and Dad couldn’t be any more wet. Their hair is matted to their necks and their clothes are heavy on their backs, but they don’t complain. Even though it’s probably eighty degrees, I’m cold and uncomfortable for them.

  Mom breaks the silence by saying, “We’ll get there.” Everyone nods again, me because I think she’s talking about getting home—and then she repeats herself, “We have work to do, but we’ll get there.” Her voice is confident, and I believe her. The dam almost killed me, but we’re lucky like that engineer, and we’ll get there.

  Meanwhile, we pull into the driveway and head toward the house, dripping and mopey but grudgingly hopeful. Before we go inside, Mom gives me a tight and soggy hug and whispers something into the crown of my head. “I love you too, Mom,” I say.

  “You know we’d take you with us,” she answers in a low and reedy voice.

  She looks smaller wet. It’s the first time I can remember seeing her look vulnerable, and it scares me. She rests her hand on my chest, feeling for a beat, and smiles. “But you’d probably crash the plane.” I laugh, but want to cry. She squeezes my shoulders with cold hands and heads inside.

  I wait in the kitchen with Grammy, knowing it won’t take long for Mom and Dad to change clothes and grab their travel bags. Grammy’s absentmindedly opening and closing drawers, checking the cupboard, like she’s looking for something in a daze. “Can I get you anything?” I ask.

  “Growing pains,” she says, inspecting a pile of freshly picked squash on the kitchen counter. One of them is still home to a stray inchworm, fingernail-length and baby green. She picks it up, placing it gently on the back of her hand.

  “Pardon?”

  “When you’re laying in bed at night and you get that shot of restlessness, taut ankles and pins and needle knees, you know? And you just want to kick ’em around, do anything to make it stop?”

  The inchworm makes its way to her wrist and is making a break for her elbow when she turns it around. I can hear Dad jumping upstairs, probably pulling on a fresh pair of khakis.

  “There’s nothing you can do, though, it’s just growing pains. Your bones getting bigger in your body. Terrible feeling, but it goes away. Everybody needs to grow.”

  I know what she’s talking about, remember the need to stretch in the middle of the night, unsatisfied despite desperate contortions. My legs aching, keeping me up until morning. And as terrible as that feeling was, I wish it would happen more—Conor and Scott are both a head taller than me.

  Dad’s on the stairs now; I can tell because he takes them three at a time like me. It’ll be time to go to the airport soon, and for the first time I’m starting to feel a little uneasy about them not being home. Two almost-deaths in two days doesn’t bode well. Grammy walks over to the sink and rinses her hands, washing the inchworm down the drain.

  “Growing pains,” she says again, just as Dad bursts into the kitchen.

  “What’s that?” Dad asks, and then, not waiting for an answer: “Mom’s going to be down in a minute, we should probably go wait in the car.” I make to help him with his bags, but he’s just bringing the backpack on his shoulder, which puts me at ease—it’s going to be a short trip.

  The car smells musty from all the wet, so we crank the windows down to let it breathe. Even though it’s still early, probably only three in the af
ternoon, it feels like night’s coming on. The sky’s a burnt orange, and the air is unusually cool and refreshing. A consolation prize, courtesy of this morning’s storm.

  The trip to the airstrip goes quickly enough. Their plane to the City is a four-person puddle jumper that the Zone has on permanent Charter, one of those tiny planes with a propeller in the front. Since we’re not much of a travel destination anymore, the old airport—the one we passed on our way to the spillway—hasn’t been used in a while. Instead, the four-seater lives in a warehouse off the river and takes off and lands on what’s now an access road bordering the Grey.

  It would’ve taken us ten minutes to bike there, but Mom and Dad say they want to go over some last-minute odds and ends. Really, though, I get the feeling they want to reassure me about my heart. Or reassure themselves.

  “Because, really,” Dad says. “You saw at the dam. Everything’s down, totally blasted. And you’re feeling fine.” He takes a hand off the steering wheel, reaching back to feel my forehead. “You’re feeling fine, right? No more headaches or buzzes?”

  “No headaches or buzzes,” I say. “Not anything more than normal, anyway.”

  “And the thing is, that would never happen again anyway. Everything blew because they’d been leaking for a few days . . .”

  “The capacitors blew because the generator was hooked up to them instead of to the grid,” Mom jumps in, explaining it as if she had Guv go over it with her a hundred times. “And they couldn’t handle it. When we get back, we’ll make sure the spillway power goes directly to the Green, and it’ll be just like before—just power for the Green, with none left over to interfere with your heart.”

  “It’s a science,” says Dad, about to start off on another mini-lecture. Mom gives him a warning look, nipping any impromptu theorizing off at the bud.