by Nic Brown
“Uncle Pete came to my window,” Grier said.
“You shouldn’t be out in this,” Mike said.
“It’s Uncle Pete shouldn’t be out in this,” Fletcher said.
“We’ll find him.”
She kept looking around, squinting into the darkness, before finally just looking at Grier.
“What are you guys doing?”
“We’re looking for Uncle Pete,” Grier said.
“He can’t be out in this,” Fletcher said. “He really just . . . he can’t . . .”
She then moved slowly back into the darkness, almost sleep-walking. Moments later, a thin sliver of light appeared in her front doorway across the lawn, profiling her body as it slid back inside.
“Motherfucker,” Mike said.
“I have to go talk to her,” Grier said.
“No you don’t.”
“Yes I do,” Grier said, and rushed across the road, through the soggy lawn to Fletcher’s back door. She stepped into the kitchen, where the refrigerator held a magnetically arranged display of get-well cards. Every second grader at Preston Elementary had made one for Fletcher after the student body president at their high school organized the effort. It was a surprise and he delivered the box of cards one afternoon accompanied by a few of the children. Grier had been with her when they arrived, and Fletcher had been mortified. Beside that refrigerator was the table where Grier had first role-played with Mike. Fletcher’s house was filled with memories like this. There was the stereo that, a few summers earlier, Grier and Fletcher had used to continually play a cassette of the rap group Whodini. They had memorized the lyrics and choreographed dances, and then, in September of that year, when Grier’s parents had divorced and her father had left, Fletcher had sat Grier down at that table, pressed play on the box, and rapped along to the Whodini song “Friends.” Afterwards, she said, “See. That’s what we are. Friends.”
She walked down the hallway, past the guest room where Mike had held her, past the bathroom where Fletcher’s pubic hair had spilled out upon the floor, and stopped in the doorway of Fletcher’s bedroom.
Fletcher lay on her mattress. Her scalp was smooth and soft, as if a thin layer of uncooked dough had been spread across it.
“Hey,” Grier said.
“Did you find him?”
“Not yet,” Grier said. Fletcher rolled over and looked silently at the ceiling. “Fletcher?”
“I just don’t feel very good.” Grier stepped closer. Fletcher looked tired, old, and shrunken. She shut her eyes and said, “Can you get Mike?”
Grier found Mike in the kitchen. By the time they returned to her bedroom, Grier was positive Fletcher was dead. It makes perfect sense, she thought. This is what cancer does.
But then Mike said, “When she’s out like this, she doesn’t get up for, like, ever. It’s because of the drugs and stuff. She takes all these drugs.”
He spoke at full volume and Fletcher didn’t stir. Then he took Grier’s hand again and led her to his bedroom. Only as a girl had she been in Mike’s room before, marveling at his mess, looking at his official boy items—his skateboard, his soccer ball when he had been younger, his sneakers, his tapes. He put his arms around her and she nestled her face into his neck, smelling the cherry Jell-O in his hair. Every morning he heated a small bowl of it in the microwave, then rubbed the liquefied gelatin into his hair to keep the mohawk standing. Grier thought it smelled great. Mike pushed her head back and started to kiss her. She kissed back and they fell onto the bed.
“It’s OK,” he said. “She’s not going to wake up.”
Grier sat on top of him, straddling him, and he grinned up at her through the darkness. She felt suddenly rash and safe, and wiped a hand down Mike’s face, from forehead to chin, then did the same to herself. They were clean, ready for escape.
“It’s nice to meet you, Walter Teague,” she said.
“Who are you?”
“Local woman.”
“What do you do?”
“I’m a doctor.”
“What kind?”
“A heart doctor.”
“How is it?”
Grier put her head against his damp chest. “It’s beating.”
“Do I sound healthy?”
“I don’t know.”
It seemed contact was some necessary medicine. They grabbed at each other desperately, licking each other’s mouths and faces. Her wet robe fell to the floor with a splat. He took his clothes off in only a few rapid motions. They touched each other everywhere. Grier lay with one leg swung over Mike’s, listening to his slow, deep breathing. It was the longest she had ever spent touching a boy’s body. The wind buzzing through the low pine branches outside was loud enough that she did not hear Fletcher step into the doorway, only saw her head when it appeared, alien and thin against the dim hall light.
“Mike,” Fletcher said. “I’m sick.”
Mike flinched and turned on the bedside lamp. Grier clenched her eyes against the sudden light, but when she opened them again, it seemed Fletcher hadn’t even noticed that she was there. She was simply leaning against the doorframe, covering her face with her hands. A thin strand of saliva dangled from between her wrists.
Mike turned the light off as he rushed into the bathroom. Grier lay silently in the darkness.
“Can you just get me a glass of water?” Fletcher finally said, so faintly that there was no way Mike could have heard.
Grier said nothing.
“I’m just so thirsty,” Fletcher whispered. “Please, Grier.”
“Oh! OK, yeah.”
She pulled on Mike’s T-shirt and rushed to the kitchen, passing Fletcher on the way, rubbing against her in the doorway. When she returned, Fletcher was sitting on the floor, her back against the doorjamb. Pepto-Bismol was spilled across her T-shirt. It was such a bright pink. It seemed the color of sickness.
“If I die, you guys will have each other,” Fletcher said.
“What are you talking about?” Mike said.
“I’m talking about this.”
“Stop saying that.”
Then she burped up the rest of her Pepto-Bismol and it ran pink down her chin and onto her ankles. Mike helped her down the hall to her room.
Grier sat on the edge of Mike’s bed, waiting, looking at his posters. The Violent Femmes. Christian Hosoi. The Connells. Lance Mountain. She stepped into the hallway and listened but heard nothing. She didn’t know if she should stay or go. After several minutes, she put on her wet robe and walked outside.
It was just barely daylight and the area of yard between the two houses was littered with small branches. The rain was even stronger, more steady, and the wind was beginning to gust. There were no insects, usually a chorus at this hour. It was all just continual rain, thudding into the grass and washing through the leaves. In the park the water had risen over the first floodmarker on the bridge and now lapped the concrete just below ’82.
The lights in Fletcher’s bedroom cast a pale parallelogram onto the grass outside, and Grier could see Mike standing in the room near the glass. She thought that he was waving and she waved back, but then realized he was only unfolding a large towel, and for a moment she let her hand dangle in midair, as if something delicate, like a brittle marionette, were hanging from her fingertips.
This was when the lights shut off in Fletcher’s bedroom. Grier looked around. The streetlamp was out, the light over her back door was dark. The whirring of the air-conditioning unit ground to a halt. It wasn’t uncommon for the electricity to fail in Lystra, the result of too many old trees and thunderstorms, but it startled her and she rushed back to her own house.
Inside, she took off her cold robe and showered in the dark bathroom in an attempt to warm herself up. The shower seemed almost exotic in the darkness and she tried to relax. She inhaled deep lungfuls of steam. Afterwards, as she dressed, she looked outside as a trash can rolled onto the lawn and what seemed to be a candle floated through the darkness in Mike’s k
itchen.
In the back hallway, the door was banging in the wind. Its top hinge was broken. At one point Grier’s father had fixed it with a broken nail, but now it had broken completely and often kept the door from closing all the way. She started towards it, then heard Uncle Pete meow. She found him at her feet, soaked, looking half his size. She bent down and he strained his neck towards her, trying to reach her face. It was clear what he wanted: the kitty kiss. She picked him up instead, his claws digging into her flesh. He cried and tried to pull away, but she held him tightly and rushed into the rain.
The trash can rolled away from her on a new gust of wind, a plastic bag lifting out of it on the draft, floating in a spiral into the low branch of a dogwood. The water in the park had obliterated any suggestion of the actual creek from which it came and now spread thin across the grass, lapping at iron bench legs and tree trunks and inching even closer to WHIRLIES on the bridge.
She approached Mike’s back door and through the small window saw the candle now burning on the kitchen table. When she swung the door open, though, she found Fletcher, not Mike. A mug of something steaming sat on the table before her and she looked like a zombie, her eyes sunken in, the skin puffy and dark around them.
Grier didn’t say anything, just set Uncle Pete on the kitchen table. As Uncle Pete rushed across it, Fletcher pursed her lips and closed her eyes. When he reached her, they began the kitty kiss. Uncle Pete stood frozen except for his tail, which continued to whip back and forth. Grier watched, unbelieving, as it passed in and out of the small candle flame. It seemed too impossible, too ridiculous to be true as the very tip suddenly blossomed into flame. Fletcher’s eyes were still closed, though, and Uncle Pete seemed oblivious, his purring audible even from a few feet away. The flame burnt brightly for an instant but then, upon encountering the dense wet fur a bit farther up, faded and died. The whole event lasted no more than three seconds.
In the dim candlelight, hives were already appearing on Fletcher’s scalp like mysterious continents revealing themselves on a map. A small bulb of mucus emerged from a nostril and began to creep down her upper lip. But still she continued to exhale. When Fletcher finally took in a new breath, Grier knew she was going to smell the thick, foul stench of burnt cat hair. But for now, Fletcher looked elated, high, and not even Uncle Pete had noticed himself on fire, too intent on getting some good love from whoever would give it.
quickening
Isaac turned the school bus left at Church’s Chicken, past the abandoned strip mall on the right with the two dead cars parked in it. Kudzu twisted up the antenna of one.
“Nimbostratocumulus?” he said.
“Nope,” Scoville said. Scoville was eight years old, black, had a bumpy shaved head, and talked big. “There ain’t no nimbostrato. It’s just nimbo. Or strato.”
“Well, which one is it?”
In the rearview mirror, Isaac watched Scoville consult his study sheet.
“This one’s strato.”
“Strato, nimbo,” Isaac said, now barreling through a wide expanse of standing water. Past the parking lot, he spotted the Mylar balloon that had been tangled in the power lines for days, all of its helium almost gone now as it whipped back and forth in the wind. This was the route he drove daily, from 6:00 to 8:00 AM and 2:00 to 4:00 PM. He was driving an early return trip now, though, because the hurricane had cancelled school and he hadn’t even heard until it was too late. Neither had Tisha and Scoville, the two third graders now on the bus—two of the only four students who’d shown up that morning. He should have put it together. It wasn’t until he had driven them all the way to school that they found out it was closed and Isaac’s father, the bus dispatcher, had sent them back. Now Isaac was driving Scoville and Tisha home.
“What’s the nimbo?” he said.
“Nimbo are the cotton ball-looking ones.”
“They all look like cotton balls.”
He came to a halt at their bus stop—a postal box on a corner without curbs or a sidewalk, only a drainage ditch now overflowing.
“OK, Strato,” Isaac said. “Which house is yours?”
“It’s further down,” Scoville said.
“That one’s mine,” Tisha said.
Tisha was also in Scoville’s class but she already towered above him, lanky and rail thin and awkward in her movements, like a newly born horse. Her jeans all had elastic waists and her eyes bugged out over a long crooked nose. She was pointing through the steamy windows at a large, dilapidated house with intricate, rotting trim. Antennas sprouted from dormers and a nest of mailboxes hung clustered by the door. This part of town was filled with once grand houses like this, now run-down and segmented. The black part of Lystra. Brown Town, Isaac’s friends called it. The Place Where People Are Shot.
Isaac liked driving this route, though. He felt he was keeping things real, getting closer to the source, because in reality, he wasn’t just a school bus driver. He was a singer. He specialized in obscure spirituals that he learned from archival recordings at the public library. He was not a believer, but the authenticity of these songs appealed to him. Songs with names like “Hang Man Johnny” and “Wrestling Jacob,” “Lilies Walk Out of the Valley” and “Oh Oh Oh Jesus!” By his senior year in high school, Isaac had already begun booking shows in the area. He sang in public libraries and rock clubs, selling tapes of himself out of a suitcase after shows. A few times he had even sung in some of the area’s black churches, bringing the lost spirituals back to the source.
Tisha’s house was dark, foreboding.
“Anyone home?” Isaac said.
“I don’t know.”
Isaac considered all that could go wrong with a child alone in a storm. Downed power lines started fires. Gas lines broke. Limbs fell though roofs. He couldn’t just leave her.
“We’re all going in.”
Inside, the electricity was out but the dim natural light created a series of geometric shadows across a once elegant flight of wooden stairs, at the top of which Tisha unlocked a green door with the muted topography of countless layers of paint. Weak sunlight shone through the apartment onto brushed-aluminum chairs beside a chrome and glass dining table. The room looked antiseptic and polished. Isaac was surprised at the modern aesthetic.
“Mom?” Tisha called.
There was no answer.
“Where’s your house?” Isaac asked Scoville.
“Down there.”
Through the window, Isaac saw two young black men in enormous sweatshirts sharing a cigarette under the eave of a pink house.
“We’re going to wait here,” he said.
“Why?” Scoville said.
“It’s not safe.”
“That’s just Jorge and Jorge.”
“I mean the weather.”
“Why you keep looking at your watch?” Scoville said.
“I have a doctor’s appointment.”
“You sick?”
“No, it’s my girlfriend.”
“She sick?”
“No. Let’s get you into something dry. There anything here, Tisha, any dry clothes that Scoville might borrow?”
“Maybe.”
Tisha led Scoville through a door near the kitchen and Isaac checked his watch again.
His girlfriend, Emily, was five and a half months pregnant. Recently she had had what the doctor called the quickening—the first time a mother feels the child move in the womb. Since those first subtle quivers, though, the child had become hyperactive, kicking and turning as Emily’s pale stomach rose visibly. The only thing they found that would calm it down was music. Emily had begun placing headphones on her belly and playing Beethoven into the flesh. She said it would raise the child’s IQ. Isaac didn’t know about that, but he did know that if they put those headphones on when the child began one of its episodes, the movement invariably ceased. Isaac found it to be profound. He felt like there needed to be some sort of scientific study done on their baby. Clearly the child was listening.
&nbs
p; Emily had an appointment in eleven minutes. Waiting for Scoville to change, Isaac knew he wasn’t going to make it. He liked to go to all of her doctor’s appointments. They made him feel more in control of his destiny, a confidence rapidly decreasing. He was only twenty. He wasn’t ready for a baby.
Through the windows, Isaac could now see the cumulonimbus clouds low in the sky and knew what was happening above. Spinning nimbostratus, arcs of hovering water, shifting and condensing and now falling onto Lystra. Since Hurricane Hugo had been on the news, the children had been studying the weather for the past week, learning storm patterns and clouds. Cumulus. Altocumulus. Stratocumulus. He was amazed at the number of names for the same natural phenomenon. Clouds. That’s all he had thought of them as before. Isaac often helped the children study on the bus. He found that most of the materials—like the presidents, the state capitals, the Pledge of Allegiance—were things he felt he should know but did not.
“You guys OK?” he said, tapping on the door. There was a rush of movement from within. He wasn’t sure how long this should take. Something seemed strange, though. He swung the door open.
Inside, Scoville stood completely naked near the foot of a bed, his small buttocks a slighter shade of pink against his dark back. Tisha was in her underwear, sitting Indian style on the mattress with clothes piled around her.
“Whoa!” Isaac said.
“Give it to me,” Scoville said, and Tisha held a yellow dress to him.
“What’s going on?”
“She made me show her my privates.”
“They’re my clothes,” Tisha said, stepping into a pair of pink overalls.
“Tisha!” Isaac said. “You do not make other people do that!”
Scoville was pulling the dress over his head.
“Tisha. Jesus,” Isaac said. He had no idea how to handle this. The yellow dress fell over Scoville’s head and pooled around his feet. “Look, is there anything else he could wear?”
“No.”
“He could fit into your jeans.”
“Those all I got,” she said, pointing towards the ones she had just removed, now seeping water into a dark outline on the hardwood floor.