“Look, I’m not going to put down your precious Grizzlies anymore. I mean, hello? It’s just a rock ’n’ roll band.”
“That’s what I’m talking about. Just a rock ’n’ roll band.”
She snorts and puts her hand on my arm. “Okay, okay,” she says. “Look, I just obviously don’t take that stuff as seriously as you do. I’m not going to say anything bad about them anymore. All right?”
I look at the chewed-up fingernails grasping the turtleneck. “I don’t think we should be going to California with someone who doesn’t take the band seriously.”
“Winthrop, why do you, like, hate me? What the fuck have I ever done to you, man? Are you jealous or something?”
“No!”
“Well then, why . . .”
“Forget it,” I say. “At the next town, let’s all just go our separate ways, okay, Arthur?” I want them to beg to come along.
Arthur frowns and shakes his head.
“Look, I don’t need this,” I say. “You guys don’t follow me from here on in, all right?”
“You’re a whiny little prick, aren’t you?” Esmerelda growls.
You’re not supposed to hit chicks. Movies tell you that women are supposed to be weaker, softer, and protected like babies or an endangered species—even the ones with big biceps who look like they could unwrap and eat a man like a Hershey’s Kiss.
Video games contradict that, though. In Heckenluber the female ninjas like Jade kick some serious ass, and I can punch women in the head, only to have them pummel me with throwing stars.
And Esmerelda is a good head taller than me.
“Shut up,” I mutter. I go back to sweeping the deck.
Esmerelda opens her mouth to say something else when Seabrook shouts from the cabin: “We’re coming up on something, ladies and gentlemen. Looks like it could be that town, Blysse, Mr. Brubaker. Get Kang and tell him we’re pulling in.”
Around a bend in the small creek, I see wooden docks poking out from the shore. The trees part, and there are a handful of rowboats bobbing up and down in the current. A whitewashed marina hugs the rear of the docks. From its empty parking lot, a road climbs up a stone and dirt embankment and disappears over a hill. I can’t see over the embankment to the rest of the town.
The Reverend Doctor guides the boat past the town and down river for about three miles. Then he anchors on the bottom side of a small island.
The engine hisses and makes popping sounds as Seabrook shuts it off. He darts from the cabin to the aft side, stands before the engine, and clasps and unclasps his hands. When it stops, finally, he exhales.
“You’re not coming?” Seabrook smiles at Arthur and Esmerelda when he sees them huddled in their corner.
“No, Doc,” Esmerelda avoids his gaze. “We figured we’d hang back and watch the boat.”
Bastards.
The radio cackles: “We’re out to kill the fuckers. We’re simply trying to eliminate them. Our goal is to destroy environmentalism once and for all.”11
Kang, Seabrook, and I wade through the shallow river to the opposite bank and climb up the flat rocks and into the forest. We hike upriver through the woods until we come upon a single-lane dirt road that winds past the trees in the direction of the town.
By this time, the clouds have piled in and weigh heavily on us as we march down the road, stones crunching beneath our feet. The weeds on both sides are tall, and bees and crickets pulse within them. No one says a word.
The road turns back and forth. Eventually, over the crest of a hill, we come upon a fallen tree. It’s an oak, gigantic and leafless, and it forms a waist-high barrier across the road.
Seabrook frowns as he approaches it. He studies the tree, placing his hand on its side. Then he marches into the woods and looks at the part of the tree that’s still poking up from the ground.
“There’s moss growing in that stump,” he says. “This must have happened months ago.”
“So?” I mumble. I don’t care. I stare at my Timberlands and let the wind from the incoming storm cool the sweat on my scalp. Back at the boat, Arthur is getting some. Little son of a bitch.
“So this road isn’t navigable, Mr. Brubaker. Why would someone just leave this here?”
Behind Seabrook, the forest floor is strewn with the corpses of fallen trees, snapped from their roots and left to rot.
“Evidently there was a storm of some sort,” Seabrook says. “And yet no one has cleared the mess.”
Rain begins to fall, and the sky rumbles. We march faster down the winding road. Bolts of lightning knife through the clouds, and then the storm really kicks into gear, lashing us with hard sheets of rain.
Finally, up a long stone driveway, the dormers of a farmhouse gape at us. A tin-roof barn stands next to it. We run up the driveway through the rain, sloshing through mud puddles. A screen porch wraps around the first floor of the farmhouse, and the door to it is unlocked. We go inside and stand dripping on the gray porch planks. Rain roars on the roof.
The porch is wide, with a pair of wicker chairs and a few wicker tables strewn about. Everything is gray, like a worn photograph, beneath a thin layer of dirt. Hanging from the eaves are potted plants held up by chains. The plants have long since died, and the brown curled leaves look like pubic hair. One pot has fallen and formed a mound of shards and black dirt.
“I suppose we should go introduce ourselves,” Seabrook says when no one comes to the front door. It’s made of wood and glass and looks in on a kitchen with a linoleum floor. White lace curtains bracket the view.
Kang raps on the door. Minutes tick past. No one answers.
“I guess nobody’s home,” I say.
Seabrook is still frowning. “Has it been abandoned?” Stepping in front of Kang, he tries the knob. It turns, and he pushes the door open.
“Hey,” I say, “what if you’re wrong and it’s not abandoned, and old Farmer Brown comes back? We’d be able to explain ourselves a lot better if we’re standing on the porch, not . . .”
That’s when the smell hits me. It’s worse than dumpsters behind the lunchroom at the Primrose School, a sharp smell I want out of my nose the minute it enters.
The Reverend Doctor’s heavy eyebrows push hard on the tops of his eyes. “Stay here,” he says.
Kang and Seabrook walk into the house and leave the door ajar. I move as far away as I can from the smell, stepping around to the opposite end of the porch. The rain is turning the driveway into a brown river, and at its end, the winding road where we’d been marching is no longer visible. I watch the rain. I wonder if Esmerelda and Arthur have to go belowdecks to do their thing among the bags of hemp. How does it feel to be next to her, to touch her, to feel her breath on your face?
After a while Kang and Seabrook reemerge. Seabrook holds a handkerchief to his face. Kang’s cheeks shine with tears.
“Abandoned.” Seabrook says. “Long ago. They left the larder full and the refrigerator stocked, and then someone shut the power off. They must have left in a hurry. And I believe they may once have had a pet of some sort—the husk of something lying in their living room.”
It doesn’t take long for the rain to fade to a drizzle, but it isn’t soon enough for me. When at last I can see the road again, I burst from the porch. The screen door slaps behind me. We make our way down the driveway and back to the road to town.
“I don’t get it, Doctor,” I say. “Why would they just abandon their house like that? With a full fridge and a cat or dog or whatever just left to die?”
“Who knows, Mr. Brubaker,” Seabrook mutters.
A few hundred yards from the house, the road turns into a steep hill. On both its sides, thick yellow weeds blow back and forth. I breathe deeply through my nose, letting the musty wet concrete smell of the rain replace the rotten odor from the abandoned farmhouse. At the foot of this hill sits the town we passed on the creek.
Or what’s left of it.
The town has three long streets bisected by several
alleys. Here and there brick and concrete houses poke skyward, but their roofs have collapsed. It looks a bit like that movie Stalingrad, where what’s left of a few walls make right corners where there might once have been buildings, and you can see the grid pattern of the streets.
Mostly, however, it’s a pile of broken brick, glass, board, and rubble.
Chapter Twenty
blysse
A baby cries. Nothing else in Blysse makes a sound, except the drip-drip of a busted pipe and the snap-crackle-pop of a bare wire. Heaps of rubble and broken glass lean over the streets.
It’s total bullshit, people, that after so much time in the woods dicking around with the trees, the first town without pot fields or Shrub People or seafood restaurant bombers is a pile of garbage. I know what irony is. We studied it in English. I hope God is laughing his ass off.
Here and there, a house has been spared from whatever smoked this place—Bricker’s Hardware Store and Home Cookin’ Diner haven’t been touched. But their windows are dark.
I look around for the bawling baby, which turns out to be a hunk of metal moving around on its hinges—a weather vane. It must have once been on top of a building; it’s now lying on its side near a tall mound of stone, held to a slab of roof shingles by a black iron rod nearly as tall as me. The cast metal figure of a knight on horseback forms the working portion of the weather vane, his lance pointing in the direction of the wind. Written in raised type on the knight’s cape are the words: Town of Blysse, Mo., Est. 1855.
Nothing moves. Rats and snakes and creepy-crawlies probably live in the big piles, but they aren’t moving. Only the weather vane bawls.
“What the hell happened?” I say. My voice sounds loud.
“Had to be a tornado,” Seabrook says. “You can see the winding path it took.”
All I can see are piles of debris leaning—and in some cases spilling—over the road. The foundations of buildings still stand, and inside are couches, desks, and broken TVs. Poles and bits of wire mark where there were once traffic signals and streetlights. Reams of paper curl and dance in the breeze.
“What happened to the people?” I ask. It’s like that old-school Star Trek episode where Kirk and the gang beam down to the planet and find buildings and electricity and stuff, but all the people are gone. Only they’re not gone—they’re just moving so fast you can’t see them.
“Most likely they’ve evacuated.” Seabrook stops walking. A blue-and-white striped couch with a University of Missouri throw blanket still draped across it sits on the sidewalk in front of him, just sitting there like it was put there on purpose. Seabrook sits on it. “Odd that they’d abandon their town instead of rebuilding, right?”
“Maybe there’s somebody left,” I say. “Some of the houses are still standing.”
“Well, there was that hardware store in the center of town,” Seabrook says. “Maybe they know of a lumber store nearby or might be able to help us find steel plates for the cooker.”
The bell to Bricker’s Hardware’s front door jingles. Sunlight pours through the front window and makes long shadows on two rows of dust-covered boxes of nails and power tools. As the door swings shut, dust kittens scurry across the tile floor.
“Hello?” Seabrook calls, but the empty store swallows his voice. On one side, one set of shelves has collapsed onto another, spilling hammers and wood saws. No one is here. If it was a Toys ‘R’ Us or an FAO Schwartz, people, I would have shopping-spreed the Xbox department.
On the opposite end of the store is a lone checkout counter. Pasted on it are canceled checks from deadbeats who have bounced them, beneath a sign that reads: Do not—even under fear of death—accept a check from. A University of Missouri mug stuffed with pens sits next to an electric cash register. Digital zeros glow on the money display.
“Well, power is coming from somewhere,” Seabrook says.
An electric buzzer sits in front of the register. Seabrook tries it three times, leaning on the button. A metallic buzzing noise sounds from somewhere in the back of the store.
Seabrook shrugs. “Let’s try the diner across the street.”
The Home Cookin’ Diner is a metallic trailer with parking spaces in front. Inside, all the booths are empty. The giant vapor lamps over the grill are off, and no one is behind the counter.
Seabrook sits on one of the stools. “This is the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen,” he mutters. “When there’s a tornado, there are usually people around picking up the pieces afterward, right?”
“Maybe everyone died?” I offer.
“Impossible. Even in the most violent storm, only a small percentage of the population actually dies, Mr. Brubaker.”
Kang makes signs at Seabrook.
Seabrook nods. “Yes, I suppose we could look through the wreckage to see what we might be able to salvage to fix the hemp cooker.”
The sun is beginning to warm Blysse, and steam rises from the puddles. Seabrook selects a big pile, and we dig through the dissolving fragments of shredded wood and insulation in search of steel.
I’m still freaking on Arthur and Esmerelda. In 9½ Weeks, Kim Bassinger’s were pointy like lightsabers. I imagine Arthur having mad skills, doing all kinds of porno-sexy moves on Esmerelda with Seabrook’s refrigerated produce and Salisbury steak packets. Sweat gathers above my lips, and I fling a brick behind me with as much force as I can muster.
“What do you want?”
A voice from Bricker’s Hardware bounces off the heaps. It’s loud as hell and scares the crap out of me.
A woman stands in the doorway. She has one of those big schoolteacher ’dos, a monster hairsprayed fro, but it’s drooping to her shoulders, and long matted tangles poke out of it. She wears bulging jeans and a flannel shirt. Her arms are crossed and her eyes are bloodshot all to hell, like we’ve woken her up.
No one says a word.
“I said,” she snaps, “what do you people want? I ain’t got all day.”
“I beg your pardon,” Seabrook says. “We’re looking for . . . ma’am, what happened here?”
The woman rolls her bloodshot eyes and kicks the ground. “Y’know what, mister. I ain’t missin’ my turn for this. Y’all keep jawing at me and are gonna cost me my turn. Why don’t you just take whatever the hell you want to and then git?”
She spins around and marches into the store.
“Ma’am?” Seabrook offers again. He hurries after her into the store. Kang and I go after him.
The woman whisks past the cash register and heads through a door at the rear, closing it behind her. Seabrook tries the knob, but it’s locked. He mutters something about the possibility of a rear entrance, so we walk out the front door and go around to the back.
The woman is walking down the center of the street, picking her way over the fallen buildings. When she looks over her shoulder at us, she looks pissed and hustles.
We follow. She weaves and trips her way up the street. Soon she reaches one of the few buildings that’s been left intact: a large cinder block building with Roman columns. On a cast-iron sign above the door are the words Blysse City Courthouse. The woman scrambles up the steps and disappears into the long shadows created by the columns.
We stop at the foot of the steps.
“What’s her deal?” I ask.
Seabrook turns. “Perhaps we’d best get back to the boat,” he mutters, and starts back down the street. Kang follows.
“Hey, what’s the matter?” I stand there and watch them going. Seabrook trips over a mound of debris, but picks himself up and scrambles on.
“The city courthouse is a government institution,” he barks over his shoulder. “It’s probably best not to . . .”
“You there. Stop.”
Seabrook and Kang freeze.
The voice echoes from within the shadows of the columns. Two men emerge and walk down the steps. One is small and shaped like a bullet. The other is taller, clad in a flannel shirt, bib overalls, and a mesh John Deere baseball cap.
Both men hold hunting rifles.
Ever fantasize about what you’d do if somebody held a gun on you? Up until a few days ago, I always believed that if mugger or somebody threatened me with a piece, I’d poke out my chest and, at just the right moment, swing for the gun and run off. After all, how many baddies fire tons of shots at Sniper Dude X? And he’s barely been grazed.
Now I know different. I’ve been held at gunpoint two times in the past few days, so I know: Michael Bay has it all wrong, people. Adrenaline doesn’t make you pirouette and freeze in midair. All you do is stand there and hope you don’t get killed.
“Okay,” I manage. “Okay, man.”
The gun barrels peer at me as the men draw closer. I don’t want to make a move that might flip them out, so I pull my hands in. I start scratching the right front pocket of my shorts.
Both men speak to me through long beards and look at me with glazed red eyes. Have they been drinking? Smoking a J? They look like they haven’t slept in weeks. The tall one spits a stream of tobacco juice at my feet. The stocky one points his gun at Kang and Seabrook.
“Get over here,” he snaps in a high-pitched voice.
“Who are ya and what’s your business here?” the tall one says. He is all bones. The flannel shirt he wears hangs from his shoulders and gathers around his midsection as if there’s nothing there but air.
I keep rubbing my pocket. Beneath my fingers I feel the patch with the cat face. I stare at the tall man’s red eyes. They’re somewhere else. They’re not alive.
“Our boat,” Seabrook says loudly, not looking at the tall man, “was damaged during a storm. We’re looking for scrap metal to make some repairs.”
The man stares at Seabrook through his half-lidded eyes for what seems like minutes. There’s no noise but the soft whimper of the weather vane’s metal hinge.
“What boat?” he says. “Where is it?”
Seabrook frowns, and I can tell the tall man’s eyes have thrown him off his game. “We slammed into some rocks and parked it about ten miles upstream from here. Perhaps you could let us know where we might find some scrap metal, and then we’ll be on our way.”
We Are All Crew Page 20