by Nic Brown
“OK, guys,” Isaac said. “OK. Look. Scoville. Let’s pretend we’re playing dress-up. That’s all it is. OK?”
“I don’t mind,” Scoville said.
“We playing dress-up?” Tisha said.
“No. I’m just saying that it’s like Scoville’s wearing a costume. Think of it like that. A dry costume.”
“You said we were playing dress-up,” Tisha said.
“We’re not gonna play?” Scoville said.
“I didn’t say that. We’ll play something, if you want.”
Isaac desperately tried to think of a game to play with the children. He wondered if they were too old for hide-and-seek.
“Bag-heads?” Tisha said.
“Bag-heads!” Scoville said.
“OK,” Isaac said. He didn’t know what they were talking about.
Tisha rushed into the kitchen and Scoville followed, dragging the yellow skirt across the floor behind him. From between the refrigerator and the counter, Tisha retrieved three Kroger paper bags and laid them on the floor.
“We make them like this in class,” she said, drawing a green crayon mouth onto a bag. Then she rapidly drew five eyes, all with very long black eyelashes, and punched small holes through two. She put it over her head.
“Wow,” Isaac said.
Scoville drew what amounted to a pumpkin face on his bag—two triangle eyes above a toothy grin. He put it on and looked back and forth between Tisha and Isaac.
Isaac wasn’t sure if he should play this game or just supervise. The kids were now looking closely at him. Or he assumed they were. He couldn’t see either of their faces, but both bag-heads were pointed in his direction. He drew a woman’s face onto his bag, adding large red lips and long curling lashes. When he put it over his head, the children burst into laughter.
“You like this, huh?” he said.
The laughter increased.
“Do I look like your mother?” he said, now speaking in a high falsetto.
“No!” Tisha screamed, laughing.
“Are we sisters?”
“No!” Scoville said.
“I think we look like sisters.”
The children squealed from behind their paper masks. Isaac thought he must remember to play bag-heads with his own child when the time came. Knowing about something like this, he thought, this is what makes the difference. These are the things that parents do. He felt suddenly empowered, and then began to sing.
“Um diddle diddle diddle um diddle ay! Um diddle diddle diddle um diddle ay! Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!”
As a boy, Isaac had listened to his mother’s Mary Poppins record endlessly, and those songs were some of the first he had ever learned. She had sung them to him during afternoons in the yard, or hiding together under tablecloth tents. When Isaac was seven, though, his mother had died from spinal meningitis. Isaac had not been raised in the denomination, but his mother’s family were the only Russian Orthodox in Lystra and the funeral had included a traditional open casket. The body looked almost exactly like his mother alive, asleep. The coloring was perfect, and the distance Isaac kept from it allowed the illusion to live. Isaac now felt that it was important to see the body at a funeral, to allow the mourners to experience the physical closure of a coffin snapping shut, but at that time, when the priest let the lid fall, it had been violently painful to Isaac, like a hand smothering his face. What helped him past it, though, in that initial moment, was the fact that he was expected to sing. In retrospect, it seemed a job perhaps too great for a seven-year-old, but something about the responsibility of a public task forced Isaac to cast off that unbearable burden. He stood at the altar and sang the hymn “The Day Thou Gavest, Lord, Is Ended,” and it gave him a moment of peace. He still believed greatly in that power, the escapist power of music.
“The biggest word I ever heard, and this is how it goes—oh! Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!”
Before the next line, Isaac heard the door open. He turned in its direction, but could not locate it through the eye holes.
“What the hell?” a woman said.
Isaac ripped off the bag-head.
A thin black woman in a nurse’s uniform stood inside the door. She looked to be about the same age as Isaac.
“Baby!” the woman said.
“I know this looks crazy,” Isaac said.
“You get the hell away from her,” the woman said, rushing to Tisha.
“I’m her bus driver.”
The woman began backing Tisha into a corner.
“No you aren’t.”
“No, I am. School is closed. I’m her bus driver.”
“He is, Mom,” Tisha said.
“Ma’am,” Isaac said. “I am telling you the God honest truth. I am her school bus driver and was just playing with your daughter here until you came home. I didn’t get the news that school had closed.”
“Baby,” Tisha’s mother said, petting Tisha’s hair back from where the bag had made it stand up on the side. “Baby.” Then she looked at Scoville, who still wore his bag-head and was looking at them through its triangle eyes. “Who’s she?”
Scoville took the bag off and Tisha’s mother said, “Jesus.”
“Hey, Miss Reynolds,” Scoville said.
“What’s that dress for, baby?”
“My clothes’re wet.”
“Oh Lord,” she said, then looked at Isaac and squinted. “How I know you?”
“I drive her bus.”
“No. I know you. You sang at Mount Hope Church.”
Isaac had sung at an Easter celebration there in April.
“Yeah, OK,” Isaac said.
“What’d you sing?” Tisha said.
“He sang some songs, some different songs,” her mother said.
“Where was I?” Tisha said.
“Different?” Isaac said.
“You were with your daddy.”
“What’d you sing?” Tisha said.
“Some old songs,” Isaac said. “Real old.”
“Those were old songs?” her mother said.
“That’s right.”
“Alright. And you drive buses, too?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, you can see why I thought you were trouble.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“So. You gonna need me to watch him?” she said, nodding towards Scoville.
“I can’t leave him with anyone other than his parents,” Isaac said.
“What you going to do with him?”
“Take him with me. Scoville?”
Scoville shrugged and folded his bag-head in half.
The rain had picked up, the streets were filling with branches, and the traffic lights were out, so Isaac drove slowly as Scoville inspected his folded yellow sheet of notebook paper. He had taken off the yellow dress and changed back into his wet clothes.
“Gimme one,” Isaac said.
“Cirrostratus.”
“OK. Those are the high ones? The ones that are mostly just ice?”
“Yeah. Tisha’s mom almost just whup you, didn’t she?”
Isaac just continued to drive. After a few moments, a siren sounded in the distance, growing louder.
“Doppler effect,” Scoville said. “How they use that to tell weather?”
They had studied this phenomenon in part of their forecasting segment, how sound waves change shape when coming from a source that is either approaching or departing. For days the children had been talking about it after the local weatherman, Walter Teague, had visited the school. Isaac had no idea how they used it to forecast weather, though.
“They must bounce sound waves off clouds or something,” he said. “Track it like radar.”
“Oh yeah. That’s right,” Scoville said. “That’s exactly what it is.”
The siren faded, its pitch dropping as they rumbled through huge puddles. The bus seemed louder without a full load of passengers, loose windows and bolts announcing themselves in a constant rattling clamor.<
br />
“What’s wrong with your girlfriend?” Scoville said.
“Nothing.”
“Why’s she going to the doctor?”
“She already went.”
“Why?”
“She’s pregnant.”
“How many kids you have?”
“None yet.”
“You old, though.”
At Preston Elementary, the rolling door to the garage was pushed up, and in the overhang of the opening Isaac’s father sat in a lawn chair beside Emily. Even from the bus, Isaac could see her abdomen rising in her lap. The other morning, she had told Isaac of a dream she had had that she was full term, nearing labor, but that her stomach had not grown at all. Instead, the baby was just clearly outlined under her taut flesh, as if it had been shrink-wrapped in skin.
He parked the car and rushed Scoville through the rain.
“I am so sorry,” he said, wiping rain off his face under the shelter of the overhanging garage door. “Their parents weren’t home so I waited I didn’t know what to do I just—One of their moms came home but his parents weren’t home yet so I figured we’d just wait here. I left a note. What’d they say?”
“They didn’t say anything,” Emily said.
“They just said it was normal?”
“They did an ultrasound and she was fine.”
“You saw her?”
Emily smiled.
“She look like?”
Emily shrugged. “It’s hard to describe. Nothing, sort of. She was moving, but not like what she’d been doing.”
“I wanted to be there,” Isaac said. “You think I was dead or something?”
“Just figured you were driving.”
Emily was never as worried about anything as he was.
“This is Scoville.”
“Hi, sweetie.”
“Hey, Son,” Isaac’s father said. “Relax.”
Isaac unfolded a lawn chair beside Emily, then slumped into it and sighed as Scoville sat on a bench against the inside wall and continued to study his clouds. Isaac gently squeezed Emily’s shoulder, feeling the bone shallow under the skin.
The three of them were silent for a moment, watching the rain push through the gravel. A thin branch on a scrub pine at the edge of the lot twirled in the wind, hanging by one thin, resilient wooden sinew.
“What’d you do with them?” Emily said.
“With who?”
“The kids.”
Isaac looked at Scoville. He was engrossed in the clouds, mouthing the names silently to himself with his eyes closed.
“Nothing,” Isaac said. “We just waited.”
After a while, Scoville perked up when the forecast came on the battery-powered radio. As they listened, the headlights of a white pickup truck flashed towards them.
“That’s my mom,” Scoville said.
The car stopped close alongside the garage and the window rolled down. A young black woman with a red baseball hat said, “Get.”
Scoville ran to the passenger side and climbed in. The woman then stepped out of the truck. She was round and very dark skinned, wearing a blue plastic raincoat with large yellow daisies printed on it. She stood in the rain, the windshield wipers of the truck flinging water behind her.
“You the bus driver?” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Elizabeth Reynolds said she come home and find you in her place with a bag on your head and my boy in a dress.”
“You’re gonna have to get back in your car, ma’am,” Isaac’s father said.
“Dad,” Isaac said. “Hold it a second. I know it sounds crazy, ma’am, but we were just playing.”
“Am I crazy?” the woman said. “Because if I am, then tell me. But it sounds like something messed up was going on in that girl’s home. My boy in a bag and a dress.” She looked at Emily. “You his wife?”
“I’m his girlfriend.”
“Mmm, mmm, mmm,” she said, shaking her head and looking at Emily’s stomach.
“OK. Right now,” Isaac’s father said, standing up.
“Dad.”
Isaac’s father began walking towards her, slowly emerging from the garage into the rain.
“I’m going to call the police,” he said.
“I’m gonna call the motherfucking police,” Scoville’s mother said.
“My son loves you people and you shit on him. Shit on him.”
“Dad.”
“You people?”
“Dad! Jesus Christ.”
Scoville’s face hovered behind the clouded windshield. Isaac felt like something was about to explode.
“Jim,” Emily said. “Hey, Jim.”
Isaac had never heard Emily use his father’s first name before. He had never heard anybody his age use his father’s first name. His father stopped walking but continued to stand there in the rain, guarding the entrance of that garage like a bear before his den.
Scoville’s mother finally got back into her truck, and it wasn’t until after she left that Isaac noticed Emily holding her belly. Over the phone, the doctor had assured her that the fits didn’t mean anything was wrong, that they were fairly common and might even be a good sign, but right now she looked scared and in pain and betrayed by her own body.
“Is she freaking out?” Isaac said.
“Yeah.”
“OK. She’s freaking out.”
He touched the taut skin across Emily’s abdomen and it felt like a cat caught inside of a bag: little angles—tiny elbows and knees, he guessed, barely human, maybe see-through, he didn’t know—kept pushing out. His father knelt beside him and put his own hands on Emily’s stomach. Emily held herself, too. There were six hands now—the whole family holding her writhing flesh.
“It’s cool,” Isaac said. “It’s cool.”
Emily took a deep breath, but the movements weren’t slowing.
Isaac put his chin on her stomach and started to sing. “There Is a Balm in Gilead” was the first thing that came to mind, and he sung directly into the flesh. After two verses, it didn’t seem to be working. He switched to “We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder,” but it, too, made no difference and he stopped, looking at his knuckles as Emily’s deep breathing and the radio filled the silence. The weatherman still listed windspeeds and rainfall amounts as gusts of spray blew into the garage. The three of them sat in silence for several moments, Isaac unsure of what to say. He was scared of the pain of another, afraid of what this meant about how he would react during actual labor.
Then Emily said, “You really do that?”
“What?”
“Really play with the kids?”
“Yeah,” Isaac said. “I played with them.”
Emily kept her eyes closed, head thrown back, and a small smile spread across her face. Unseen limbs continued to lift the flesh on her stomach.
Isaac’s father picked up the radio and said, “Try this.”
“For what?”
He pushed it against Emily’s flesh. The forecast was suddenly muted, the weatherman’s voice now distant and low.
“Find some music,” he said.
Isaac began looking for the knob, but before he could change the channel, the weatherman began listing all the counties under flood alert—“Carteret, Pamlico, Craven, Lenoir”—and as he did, less elbows, fewer see-through knees, seemed to strike Isaac’s palm.
“Cumberland, Wake, Chatham, Montgomery . . .”
Isaac hadn’t been positive at first, but the movement was clearly slowing now.
“Pender, Bladen, Cabarrus . . .”
Isaac looked up. Emily’s head was thrown back, the roof of her mouth briefly glistening as she took a deep breath. “Mecklenburg, Guilford . . .” the list just wouldn’t stop. There were so many counties Isaac had never heard of. He wondered if they might study them on the bus one day.
“Yadkin, Catawba, Alleghany . . .”
The music of these counties strung on, intoned through transistor to flesh, and Emily’s abdomen fin
ally became calm. Isaac waited for another kick but there was nothing. Beneath his damp palms, encased in flesh and bone, Emily’s hidden passenger had been mesmerized by the various names of this wide flooding state.
MORNING
8:00 AM
SEPTEMBER 22, 1989
WKLB RALEIGH, CHANNEL 2
FIRST ALERT DOPPLER FORECAST
The storm continues to chug to the northwest at this hour, the eye now becoming less defined as it crosses over Yadkin County to the south of us. So the rain, heavy rain, continuing yet, but the storm path is tracking further westward. For us in the Piedmont? That means we’re going to miss this guy. Not the rain. This is a serious rain event. But the winds are moving south and west of us. For a closer look, let’s go to the map.
steak
The electricity was already out.
The Harris Teeter had power running off of a generator, though. It was a huge grocery store. People called it the Taj Ma Teeter. At timed intervals, sprays of cold mist would waft onto the produce from miniature, hidden nozzles. It was the only place in Lystra to buy the New York Times. It had good olives.
Evelyn Graham was rattling a grocery cart across the floor. She looked like Alexander Hamilton, tall and gaunt with a huge mass of grey hair frozen with Aqua Net. She wore jeans and a raincoat but usually went out in one of her black dresses, the ones that she wore to the funerals. They framed her long, pale neck in high contrast, making her head blossom like some withered cotton ball shooting out of a burnt stem. Evelyn went to almost all the funerals in Lystra, whether she knew the people or not. She lived alone, was still in good health, and she had a lot of free time, so she filled it up with funerals. She wasn’t the only one; there were others who went to see and be seen, to feel like they were still part of the community. To Evelyn and the others, these funerals were social events whose invitations were printed daily in the News & Observer obituaries. There were no funerals today, though, because of the weather.
In central North Carolina, people really only mobbed the grocery if snow was forecast. But even though Hurricane Hugo hadn’t hit Lystra dead on that morning, the electricity was out, so things were busy. Evelyn saw many people she knew. Leanne Vanstory was at the meat counter. Jesse Darren was buying batteries. She saw Welborne Ray rolling an empty shopping cart into the aisle beside her. It was the canned food and condiments aisle. He had on a suit that was not the one he’d worn last Tuesday, at the funeral for Mary Anne Hassel, but it was similar. He was always in a pinstriped suit. It looked like he had come from his law office, she thought. They had probably closed when the power went off.