The man says nothing. His red eyes stare. They’re a painting. His skin doesn’t look like skin at all—plaster of Paris, or maybe bone.
Seabrook looks at the ground. So does Kang.
“Hurry it up, Roy,” the stocky one says. He shifts his weight from side to side and winces. “We’re going to miss our turn if you don’t watch it.”
“What are y’all doin’ out on a boat near Blysse?” says the tall one.
Seabrook says nothing for a moment, and the tall one jabs him lightly with the gun. “You can answer,” he says.
Seabrook looks him in the eye and freezes. “Fishing,” he breathes.
For another long moment there’s no noise. The weather vane whimpers in the dying breeze. A newspaper flutters past. The short man shuffles in place. The tall man continues to hold Seabrook in his stare.
“Ain’t no more of you, are there?” the tall man asks. “It’s just the three of you?”
Seabrook nods.
The man says nothing. He raises a calloused finger and buries it into his beard, scratching some part of his face. Then he clutches his rifle and presses it firmly against his shoulder.
“Good,” he says, cocking the gun. “Then all there is to take care of is y’all.”
Seabrook’s jaw unhinges. He backs away. He loses his footing on a heap of stone and falls on his back. Kang’s eyes flash, but he stands frozen.
The short one grabs me by what’s left of my turtleneck, pressing the barrel of his gun into my chest. Movies suddenly dissolve. Even the Grizzlies seem hollow. Hold on to hope, baby . . . What hope? What do you hold on to when there is no hope?
The tall one clicks the lever on the rifle backward, cocking it.
“What’s in your pocket, boy?” the short man screeches. “Out with it. What you got there?”
“It’s nothing,” I say. I dig into my pocket and pull out the snarling cat patch. I hold it up for the short man to see.
The short man releases his grip and stumbles backward. His red eyes blink.
“Why, you’re . . .” he starts. “You’re . . . Hey, Roy! Take a look!”
The tall one glances over his shoulder and instantly relaxes his rifle. A hollow black space appears beneath his beard as his mouth hangs open.
“It’s you,” he murmurs. “Well, why din’t you say nothing? You come to fix it, didn’t you?”
Both men lower their rifles. The short one grins. “Well, c’mon. Maybe you can fix her before my turn,” he says.
They start up the steps and beckon us to follow.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
the winds
The winds never knew the name of the towns through which they blew. They only knew that here in the flat part of the country, they could whip with ease through the canyons of brick and metal and stone the men built, carrying paper and hats and kites and voices away in their arms.
When the snow melted and the ice receded every year, the winds in this part of the world wreaked havoc, sometimes turning over and over on themselves until they became what they sometimes heard the snatches of voices they carried call Fingers of God.
Spring had passed. It was not the season for the Fingers of God. But when the thought came, they rose from lazy summer slumber and chased one another round and round until they formed a point.
The point plowed northwest through forest and fields until it sliced into the town. It uprooted houses, consumed buildings, livestock, trees, and gardens. It cut into stone and blacktop until it reached the place the thought had ordained.
It meant nothing to the wind—just another of the stone boxes men build. It had seen stronger and it had seen much weaker. But the thought had ordained this place, so the winds went round and round and round and round, faster and faster.
The stone box did not budge, so the Finger of God rolled onward until it died.
Amid the wreckage of the town, the stone box was one of few surviving structures.
And what was inside remained unharmed.
george romero
Seabrook was right about the tornado. Roy says it was a category F-5 bastard that started out in Alabama and burrowed its way northwest. It took a right around Memphis and tore into Missouri, hugging Pemiscott, Butler, Carter, and Oregon counties before it hit its first town: Blysse. It roared through at about two a.m., leveling nearly everything in its path, and withered and died almost immediately after exiting the city limits.
No one in Blysse died in the tornado, Roy says.
The first things we see when he leads us in through the front doors are large storage containers stacked to the ceiling of the lobby. They’re piled between the receptionists’ desks and copy machines and take up most of the first floor. Some are marked Campbell’s Tomato Soup, others Bounty Paper Towels and Ramen Noodles.
“Come on,” says Horace, the short one. He leads us up a flight of steps lined with boxes of toiletries and Deer Park water.
The staircase leads to a long hallway. At the end of it, a metal detector flanked by two folding tables arches over a mammoth wooden door. A brass sign hangs over the door, etched with the words: Parish County Court of Common Pleas.
“We got her set up in there, but then you knew that,” Horace says. “Y’all wait here a spell while Roy and me let them know you’re coming.”
Horace and Roy go through the door and close it behind them.
When we’re alone I show Seabrook and Kang the patch and tell them it was in Shwo-Rez’s cigar box. Seabrook says Horace and Roy think we’re there to fix something, that the patch must be a repairman’s logo. I don’t buy it, because why would His Eminence have it on his wall at home? And why would Charlie Lee have carried on about it? And why would it have been in Shwo-Rez’s box? But Seabrook says we’d be nuts not to play along like we’re the repairmen. Maybe we’ll be able to fix whatever they need and make it out of here with our hides.
Just then the wooden door swings open, and a bespectacled man steps out. A rumpled suit billows down from his shoulders, and a long beard clings to his necktie. His eyes are as red as Horace’s and Roy’s. A smell follows him. It reminds me of the time in seventh grade when the starting linebacker on the varsity team at Primrose held me down and forced me to sniff his unwashed jock. I cover my nose.
A smile flares beneath the man’s beard. “You’ll be the repairmen, then,” he says. “I’m Lawrence Peckwood, the mayor of Blysse. Glad y’all could make it. A lot of folks here will be glad to see you.”
Mayor Peckwood frowns at me. “You’re awful young, aren’t you, son?”
“A prodigy,” Seabrook says, clapping me on the shoulder. “The kid’s the best in the business.”
I try a His Eminence smile on for size.
“Well, no matter. Let me take you to it.”
The mayor turns and swings the door open.
Inside, stained wooden benches stretch across the center of the room, parted by a narrow aisle. At the front, a mahogany desk towers over the room, and a smaller one, a witness stand, stands next to it. Latin phrases are etched into the wood trim just beneath the ceiling. Light streams into the room from windows behind the desks.
Everywhere—lying on the benches, milling in the aisles, seated atop the judge’s bench, and sprawled on the tables—are people. Some sleep, splayed across the seats and floor like they fainted. Others sit cross-legged and slurp cold Campbell’s tomato soup from the can or munch dry ramen noodles. Children sit looking at nothing in particular, their fuchsia-colored eyes motionless, as if they’re waiting for something a long way off. All the men have beards. All the women looked disheveled, and those who wear makeup have acquired a crusty shell or a bright sheen.
All have the same red-rimmed eyes.
The blast of warmth from the room feels like someone turned on a heater. Sweat hangs rancid in the air, and the only noise, since everyone sits nearly motionless and no one speaks, is the loud buzzing of flies.
“We can fit about three hundred in here,” Peckwood says, weavin
g between the prostrate forms. Glancing over his shoulder, he gives us a yellow-toothed smile. “The rest we got put up in the municipal offices and in the hallways in the back. Things are a lot better now that we got the store owners to agree to move their stock here. Since the storm the supply chain has been cut off, but y’all got through, so maybe that’s changing.”
We step over and around the people, who don’t seem to notice we’re there. I trip over a little girl, curled at the feet of a woman who is sitting on a bench near the front of the courtroom, staring into space. My head strikes the woman on the rib cage, and I nearly throw her to the floor. I struggle to push off of her, but in doing so pull myself up so that I’m sitting in her lap.
The woman hasn’t moved. She continues to stare, jaw dangling, red eyes dazed. She doesn’t look at me.
“Excuse me,” I say.
The woman continues to stare.
“Holy shit!” I say to myself. “This is some horrifying stuff. This is major league George Romero.”
Without changing her expression, the woman’s mouth begins to move. She whispers: “George Romero. George A. Romero was the writer and director of Night of the Living Dead. Of his movie Diary of the Dead, Desson Thomson said, We want to high-five Romero for finding new ways to off his lifeless marauders . . .”
Even her tone is like a zombie. I push off of her and follow the mayor and my crewmates out of the room through a door opposite the entrance.
“. . . so we allow our shop owners to hook up their service bells to the fire alarm system here, so they can attend to their stores when someone rings the bell,” the mayor is saying. He steps over people either sleeping or deceased, thrown rudely into the dark hallway outside the courtroom. “We’ve got it going in shifts, you see. The best place for it was in the judge’s chambers here, on account of the fact that it’s soundproof and we can lower the blinds. Trouble is, we can only fit about twenty at a time in there. Blysse has about two thousand residents, which means we can grant them about twenty-four minutes apiece on a rotating basis. We’ve found it works best if we rotate on the half hour, shuffle folks into the courtroom as the main waiting area, then out and around from office to office as each shift ends. We’d love to do more, but hell, this is the biggest venue in Blysse that’s dark enough.”
We make our way down the hallway, rounding the sleeping forms that line the way to a door at the other end. The door is marked Judge’s Chambers.
The mayor leans against the door and rubs his chin. “All right,” he says. “I reckon only one of you will fit in there right now. I guess that’ll be you . . . Winthrop was it?” He looks at his watch. “The next shift don’t come on for another fifteen minutes, so when you’re in there, hush. You’ll be able to see what the problem is once you’re in. Horace and Roy will come in there and round everybody up. If you have to shut her down, just try and keep it to five minutes when the next group comes in.”
He smiles weakly. “I understand y’all had a run-in with them outside. Sorry about that. They do a good job making sure we don’t have no others horning in and throwing a monkey wrench into the rotation. Twenty-four minutes apiece ain’t hardly enough time for anybody. Horace and Roy were sheriff and deputy back in the days before y’all introduced the device.”
He turns the knob on the door. “All right,” he whispers. “Quietly, now.”
sharpness
The door swings open, and I’m staring into a crowd of people. All their backs are to me, and they stand shoulder to shoulder. A blast of sound reverberates all around—a roar, like a million people clapping. I’ve never heard a sound like it, people, not even from the Red Grizzlies. It comes in through my ears and floods every part of my mind, makes a downward turn at my spinal column, and zips through every nerve ending until the tips of my fingers tingle.
In front of the people, something glows—a light that, even shaded by the forms in the room, sears my eyes. Mayor Peckwood and I push our way through the people toward the light.
“Tiger Woods has eagled the ninth here at Augusta, ladies and gentleman,” says a voice that seems to be inside my head. It washes through, knocking over old memories and filling in all the folds and wrinkles between my synapses.
“Golf today,” the mayor whispers in my ear.
“Shhhhh!” hisses one of the people.
The sound weakens my knees. I stumble forward, knocking into people who bounce off of me like saplings. Finally I reach the other end of the people forest.
Before me is an enormous flat-screen TV that is more like a gaping window: it looks out across an expanse of grass lined with tall pine trees.
Everything is sharp. The blades of grass all have sharp edges, sharper even than real blades of grass I’ve seen between strips of sidewalk back home. I can see each and every one of them, even blades of grass that must be a mile off. Every pine needle on every tree is a tiny dagger. Each needle is slightly different from the other, something I have never noticed even after a week of floating through millions of them on the river.
Stranger still, everything seems to be lit with a glowing inner light. The sun blooming in the top left corner of the window breathes warmth through me. The soft wind outside seems to thunder through my ears like a freeway full of traffic. A crowd of people stands near the trees—giants! I can even make out the textures of polyester shirts and the soft leather of shoes.
The brightness and sound fills every corner of my brain. I feel myself floating through the window and hovering above this bright, better world. Then I’m forced downward to the grass.
Inexplicably, words appeared in front of me. White and yellow words: Tiger Woods. 4 under par. Next to them, someone has painted a great yellow eye, and beneath it the letters CBS.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, the last portion that hasn’t been encumbered, thinks, It’s a TV. I’m looking at a TV. And then that last untouched crevasse of my brain is filled with sound and light.
Suddenly the image shakes. It wiggles for less than a second, as though the victim of a power surge.
“See there!” someone whispers. The mayor, again. “That’s the problem. That’s what we need you to fix.”
Then the screen goes dark, and the lights come on.
“All right.” It’s Roy’s voice. “Twenty-four minutes. Move on to Conference Room B down the hall.”
The crowd lets out a groan and shuffles out the door. The mayor and I are alone. Now that the sound and the light are gone, I ache. I feel hollow. Every part of me is empty. I ache like I’d carried an entire pallet of hemp up from the hold.
I look at the window, wanting more. It is about the size of a small billboard and an inch in width. The residents of Blysse hung the screen on the oak-paneled wall of some local judge’s office. Sound comes from an oblong set of speakers that stand on the floor beneath the screen.
“What . . . what the hell is it?” I manage to say.
The mayor frowns. “The flicker, you mean? We were hoping you could tell us! Started about a month ago. Sam Cook, our local TV repairman, can’t remember enough to even take a gander at the dern thing, so we remained hopeful one of y’all would come along. Been handling these mega high-def things long?”
“What?” I say.
“Mega high-def TVs. Ours is just a prototype, from my understanding. Has there been many changes in the past six months to these babies?” he asks hopefully.
I stare at a kid with the grungy hair and torn-up turtleneck and realize it’s my reflection in the shiny black screen. The set feels hot and smooth under my hand, nearly as warm as the sun over Augusta. The reflection of my hand rises to meet me.
In the lower right hand corner, a red button says On/Off. I press it.
The world hums. Fire blazes. I watch the most beautiful Coke commercial ever. What sounds like a choir of angels sings the lyrics to “Always Coca-Cola.”
When that’s over, a commercial for the Red Grizzlies’ new album flashes on the screen.
“Hold on t
o hope, baby.” Fang appears. I can see even the most minute blemish on his skin. Fang looks more real than he would probably seem in real life, and the music . . . the wall of sound . . . I nearly faint.
People file in all around, including a woman with a thick southern drawl in the back who keeps yelling, “I want to see my stories!” until they switch the channel to Days of Our Lives. Passion and sex flow from the screen in reds and violets, and before the first commercial break, I am convinced I am no longer a virgin.
I begin to forget. First I can no longer remember exactly what state we’re in. The rivers begin to evaporate and the Tamzene flows upstream, and all the hemp goes back down into the hold. Seabrook and Kang disappear, and even Arthur and Esmerelda fade away, and soon it’s just me and the hourglass from Days of Our Lives.
Twenty-four minutes tick by like thirty seconds, and then the screen goes black. I feel hollow. More people shuffle in.
“Springer!” someone yells. “Dad gum, y’all got to watch them soap operas last time. I want to watch Jerry!”
The TV comes on like an atomic bomb. For twenty-four minutes I feel white-hot rage. The screams of the guests, particularly a transsexual prostitute who has duped a dwarf lesbian into marrying her, are like souls screaming in hell. The angry crowd shouts back like a Greek chorus. And what they shout is more poetic than any Shakespeare play we ever had to read in school.
Twenty-four minutes later the TV goes black, and Roy says, “Move on to Conference Room B down the hall.”
Somebody has ripped out my insides. Everything is dark. The hollowness hurts.
I fall.
Then someone is carrying me. Someone shirtless, painted with brown war paint.
It’s Kang. People file into the room all around him.
A man is leaning against the wall, dozing. He opens his red eyes. That’s the mayor, I remember. Mayor . . . something.
The mayor’s eyes snap open. They’re red and look ready to bleed down his face. “Well?” he says. “Can y’all fix it?”
We Are All Crew Page 21