Shadows Over Main Street, Volume 2

by Gary A Braunbeck

  The water suddenly seemed a whole lot colder. I probed the lump more carefully. It was hard, all right, maybe the size of a broken shooter marble, and it hadn’t been there before.

  “God dammit,” I whispered.

  Mom had found a lump just like this one when she was 60. Same breast in nearly the same spot. Her doctors took her breast and gave her radiation treatments, but the malignant cells had lain in wait and sprouted in her brain and spinal cord ten years later. Long enough for her to be a statistical breast cancer survivor but not an actual one.

  I took a deep breath to try to calm myself. Turned off the water. No sense in borrowing trouble when there was so much already at hand, was there? It could just be a cyst. I’d ask the doctor to take a look after he’d checked on Mom. I toweled off, combed my damp hair into a ponytail, got dressed, and went into the kitchen to mix up some lemonade.

  Soon I heard footsteps on the wooden stairs outside, and shortly thereafter came a rattling knock on the screen door.

  “Land shark!” Dr. Olmstead called. “I mean, uh, Candygram!”

  I laughed. “Come on in. Want some lemonade?”

  “Just water, please, with a pinch of salt in it.”

  Dr. Olmstead stepped inside with his leather physician’s satchel, carefully pulled the screen door closed behind him, took off his windbreaker and hung it on the white antique hook rack. He left his knitted multicolored scarf on; it was a handmade Doctor Who replica, though at most a third as long as the one the Doctor wore.

  I got his salted water from the kitchen and smiled at him, remembering the first time I’d seen him wearing that delightfully nerdy neckwear… and in that moment I realized that he looked terrible. His clothes were neat as always —well, nearly neat as always—but his body had changed for the worse. When I first met him a year ago he was very fit, with nicely muscular shoulders and a full head of dark curly hair. But now, his dark polo shirt hung loosely on his bony shoulders. His bare scalp gleamed. He’d been buzzing his hair short since the city burned, and I’d always thought it was just for the sake of hygiene, but looking at him now I wasn’t sure that his hair hadn’t fallen out.

  And his face… had his face always been that narrow? Had his eyes always bulged out like that? When had he gotten so damned pale?

  “Are you feeling okay?” I asked.

  He shrugged, took a long drink from his water glass, and gave me a tight-lipped smile. “Right as could be expected, considering. How’s our lovely lady?”

  I shook my head. “She had a bad night. Nightmares, hallucinations… I can’t tell.”

  “Probably a little bit of both.” He tugged at the scarf around his neck as if it itched, but he didn’t try to unwind it. “Let’s go take a look.”

  My mother was so groggy from the sleeping pill that she was barely able to sit up and open her eyes when the doctor asked her to. He spent time peering into her eyes with a penlight and gravely listening to the sounds of her body with a stethoscope. When he was finished, he tucked his instruments back into his bag and gestured for me to follow him back into the living room. Mom was asleep again before he’d gotten up from the chair beside the bed.

  “How is she?” I asked.

  “Not good. Her heart is failing. The sleeping medicine is hard on her body, but insomnia will kill her just as quickly and be a whole lot less pleasant. And her breathing doesn’t sound right; I suspect she might have a mass pressing on her lungs, or the beginnings of pneumonia.”

  “Jesus.” I rubbed my eyes. I didn’t want to cry in front of him. “How much time does she have?”

  “Days. Maybe hours. It’s hard to know.”

  “Can you stay?” I blurted it out before I could stop myself. “I… I don’t know what to do after she dies.”

  He gently touched my shoulder. “I have to check on the others, but I will come back and stay, yes. And I’ll help you bury her someplace nice, okay?”

  “Before you go… can I get you to look at something?”

  I explained what I’d found. Dr. Olmstead had me lie down on the sofa and he performed a breast exam. His hands were cold and clammy, but gentle. When he found the shard-like lump, his expression turned grim.

  “That feels like a problem, but even with your family history, I can’t make a definite diagnosis one way or the other.” He offered me a hand to help me sit up. “Normally I’d refer you for a mammogram and biopsy, but…”

  He trailed off, gesturing helplessly toward the city.

  “Is there anywhere else I could go?” I refastened my bra and buttoned up my blouse.

  “You could go inland, but from what I hear on the shortwave radio, what happened here happened along every coast. There are so many refugees that the hospitals and clinics are completely overwhelmed. I’m not sure you could get care in time for it to make a difference if it is an aggressive cancer.”

  I shook my head, wondering if I was going to start weeping, but instead I started laughing. “When it rains around here, it really pours, doesn’t it? Mom always said I was an early bloomer.”

  “For what it’s worth, I’m really sorry. If you start getting sick, I can give you something to make it easier.” He tugged at his scarf.

  “What’s going on with your neck, Doc?”

  “It’s nothing.” He looked away, embarrassed.

  “Liar. C’mon, you just saw me naked. There’s no reason to hide whatever it is if the wool is making you itch.”

  He sighed, gave another tight-lipped smile, and started to unwind the scarf. “You’re not the only one with unfortunate family genetics. I, however, seem to be a late bloomer in that regard.”

  He pulled the scarf free, and I saw a series of purple slashes running horizontally along both sides of his neck. At first I thought they might be scars from a suicide attempt. But no, if he’d done that he’d have been terribly injured. I couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing.

  “What… what are those?” I asked dumbly.

  “Gills. Not open yet. Probably they’ll open in a few days and I’ll have to go in the water after that. I think the flood’s coming before then, though.”

  He flashed me another smile, this one with teeth. Too many teeth. I’d seen the same grin on a piranha once.

  “Flood?” I stammered.

  He looked at me, sad and earnest. “Haven’t you had the dream?”

  I shuddered. I didn’t know if it was the same one he’d had, but for the past five nights running I’d dreamed that I was standing on the rooftop deck watching an enormous tsunami roll green and cold and massive toward the beach. Five times taller than the burning Allstate skyscraper and utterly unstoppable. Here I’d been thinking it was all a metaphor for what my mother’s death would do to me, but a look at the doctor’s expression told me he was sure it was literal prophecy.

  “But… but what could possibly cause a wave like that?” I shivered.

  “Great Cthulhu rises, and Father Dagon, too.” Dr. Olmstead gazed reverently toward the sea. “Mother Hydra. They all rise, and the world will be theirs. Until then, they still sleep, and live in our dreams.”

  The watery nightmares I’d tried to forget came back to me, vividly, and I realized everything he was saying was true. I should have been terrified. I should have been so frightened I was falling to the floor, babbling in madness. But I wasn’t terrified. I was furious.

  “Fuck that, and fuck them.” I balled my fists in my lap to keep myself from hurling the reading lamp across the room. Mom loved that stupid lamp; it was a lopsided, wobbly orange thing I’d made in ceramics class when I was 15 and she’d prized it like a Tiffany original.

  “The only thing I’ve wanted for the last goddamn year was for my mother to enjoy her final days as much as she possibly could.” I was yelling, and the doctor was flinching away from me, looking worried. I wanted to feel bad about that, but I didn’t. “She wanted to live on the beach in the little town where she spent her summers as a child, so I found this place and bought it for her. Q
uit my job and helped her move because goddamn it she’s my mom and I could do it so goddamn it I should. And here I find out some fucking… fucking fish gods are depriving her of the sleep she needs to have anything resembling a good quality of life? Fuck cancer, and fuck them!”

  We just stared at each other for a moment.

  “But… she won’t have to see the worst of it,” the doctor finally said. “She won’t be here for the rising. That’s a silver lining, right?”

  “Right. It is. Clearly.” I took a deep breath, trying to calm down. Me raging around the house wouldn’t do anything but scare Mom.

  “What do I do now?” I asked quietly.

  “Do what you’ve been doing. Make things pleasant for her. If she wants potato chip casserole, make her a casserole. If she wants ice cream and bourbon, ditto. No restrictions. Doctor’s orders.”

  —

  Mom woke up later that afternoon and tottered into the living room with her walker, her eyes bright and some rosy pink back on her hollowed cheeks. I couldn’t help but remember the fancy tropical fish we had when I was a kid; their colors seemed to grow so much brighter a few hours before they died.

  “I’m hungry.” She sounded like a little girl.

  “What would you like to eat?”

  “Pie and cookies and ice cream.”

  Jesus. That would send her blood sugar straight into orbit. “We’re out of ice cream, but there’s a key lime pie in the freezer. What kind of cookies do you want?”

  “Chocolate chip.”

  “Okay.” I went into the kitchen and surveyed the contents of the pantry. I had enough chips left for a decent batch. We were out of real dairy butter but Mom never minded cookies made with butter-flavored shortening. “You want anything to eat while the pie thaws?”

  “No, thank you. Can you put on a show for me?”

  The local TV stations had disappeared into static since the city burned, but I’d bought Mom a brand-new Betamax player as a housewarming present, and in the year since we’d gotten a nice little collection of mail-order movies. I briefly pictured the expensive tape cases scattered and covered in barnacles under a hundred feet of seawater, then put in her tape of The Day the Earth Stood Still and started baking.

  —

  Dr. Olmstead returned soon after I pulled the cookies out of the oven. Mom had polished off two slices of pie and was snoozing on the sofa while Bobby and Klaatu searched for Professor Barnhardt onscreen.

  “Wow, it smells great in here,” Dr. Olmstead said.

  “How are your other patients doing?” I asked.

  “They’re hanging in there.” He stepped closer, lowering his voice. “For better or worse. I gave them all opiates to take in case things get bad. I’ve heard drowning can be a painful way to go.”

  I nodded and moved some gooey cookies onto a plate. “Good idea.”

  He helped me mix up some glasses of instant milk and I carried the drinks and cookies in to Mom on a bamboo tray.

  “Oh!” She sat up, her eyes red and her voice slurred. “Can I have one of those?”

  “As many as you like,” I replied.

  The doctor and I settled down on the sofa on either side of her. We all drank well-water milk and ate warm cookies as the tape played on. Mom soon nodded off again, and I became engrossed in the movie, even though I’d seen it a half dozen times.

  “I think she’s stopped breathing,” the doctor said a little while later.

  “Are you sure?” I looked at my mother. Her mouth hung open, and her filmy eyes were half-closed. She didn’t look asleep. She looked gone.

  Dr. Olmstead pressed two fingers to the side of her neck, feeling for a pulse. He met my gaze and shook his head.

  “Oh.”

  I’d though I would cry when she finally died, but it all just seemed so surreal. I mostly felt numb, and didn’t quite know what to do, so I said the Lord’s Prayer.

  “Were there any places she liked to walk?” he asked. “We can find a pretty spot and bury her.”

  I suddenly felt anxious when he said the word bury. I tried not to think of maggots burrowing into my mother’s flesh… and failed. “If it floods, her grave will wash out, won’t it? I mean, we probably can’t get it deep enough in this soil, and the dirt above her will be too loose to hold.”

  He blinked. “Yes, that will probably happen.”

  “And then crabs will eat her. Maybe sharks.” Tears finally started welling in my eyes at that. “I… I don’t want my mom eaten by sharks. Even if she’s dead and can’t care about it.”

  “Well.” The doctor was silent for a moment. “We could make a pyre?”

  —

  We wrapped my mother in a sheet and carried her down to the beach. Dr. Olmstead started gathering driftwood and dry brush while I went back up to the house to search for an accelerant. I found a bottle of bourbon and an unopened bottle of Everclear in the liquor cabinet behind my mother’s stash of chardonnay. I put them both in a picnic basket with a couple of shot glasses and went back down to the pyre.

  We gathered a decent amount of wood and a few baskets of dry autumn leaves, set my mother atop it, soaked it down with the Everclear and lit it at sunset. Dr. Olmstead and I sat on the sand upwind, drinking up the bourbon and watching the flames. When it started to get gruesome, I closed my eyes and tried to listen to the waves instead of the pop of burning fat. Tried to pretend it was any other fall bonfire.

  I was starting to drift off to sleep when there was a sudden roaring whoosh from the ocean.

  The surf had abruptly sucked far out to sea, leaving piles of algae and fish flopping on the wet sand for hundreds of yards, a completely unearthly scene in the dying light.

  “I read about this,” I said. “This happens before a tsunami, doesn’t it?”

  Dr. Olmstead nodded, looking upset. “It does. It’s happening. I left my bag up at the house… I don’t have time to give you anything. I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s fine. I’m a big girl and I’m not scared to drown. Just…”

  I trailed off.

  “Just what?” he asked quietly.

  “Would you hold my hand?”

  “Of course.”

  He took my hand in his, and I nestled against his cold, gaunt shoulder and watched my mother’s bones glow amongst the driftwood embers.

  A SONG LEFT BEHIND IN THE AZTAKEA HILLS

  James Chambers

  I slid the clipping of his obituary into the same crinkled manila envelope where I kept the handwritten pages he’d pushed through my mail slot the night before he ditched Knicksport and never came back. He had left town in ’64, only five years ago, and I’d always expected to see Jack Kerouac again.

  His death from bleeding and booze filled me with a peculiar blend of relief and sadness over open questions whose answers I’d feared to know and now had died with him. All this only two weeks after Gregory dumped me, and that weird grief of losing someone unseen, unheard, unknown for years entwined with my heartbroken loneliness, two venomous snakes nested inside me.

  Days passed with the distraction of work. On my easel sat a landscape in progress—the Martinson estate’s eroding cliffs prodding into Cow Harbor, commissioned by Saul Norris for the bank lobby—but my brush faltered upon those dark feelings of isolation and rejection. My hands wandered with my mind. Unwanted textures crept onto my canvas, lending unnatural life to sand, waves, sky, clouds, trees, and rocks as if weaves of ropy fibers writhed beneath the surface of everything. Voids in the composition reflected the absence in my apartment. Several times a day I glanced for Gregory’s lanky silhouette as he brought me coffee only to find myself staring at paint stains on sunlit floorboards. The freshly vacated slot in my toothbrush holder gaped like a hole I could fall through forever. I let my beard grow because the idea of shaving with the straight razor we’d shared, left behind in the medicine cabinet, set my hand trembling, and yet I couldn’t bring myself to buy another.

  I could’ve followed Gregory back to the city
if he’d wanted that, but I didn’t know if he did, and I didn’t know what else I could give him if all I had to offer had only left him unfulfilled and restless. I’d left Knicksport at age eighteen and stayed away for two decades, but it was my home. My family built the building I lived in before World War I, and I knew the town’s streets, beaches, and secrets with the intimacy of childhood. By leaving, Gregory had rejected the core of me as if what he saw deep inside there repulsed him.

  More than painting, drinking numbed the pain of losing Gregory and filled the hollowness left by Jack’s passing. I needed little persuasion to set down my brush, turn a blind eye to Saul’s deadline, and take a break across the street at Raker’s.

  Once in a while, devotees of Jack rolled into town, mostly young, naïve, hopeful souls. The poets, the artists, and the songwriters, seeking to walk the same streets the King of the Beats had and breathe the same air as if they might inhale lingering particles of his greatness. Some of those folks knew by word of mouth that if they asked right and tipped well on nights when wind howled down Main Street and the stars wavered oddly in the sky, Spence at Raker’s might talk about the years Jack spent with us. And if Spence sensed a soft touch with a fat, loose wallet, he might even call me down to tell the story of the night Jack, me, and three would-be rock n’ roll stars hiked into the Aztakea hills south of town, which is how I came to meet the mathematician one evening in early November.

  I strolled into Spence’s place, my fingers still gloved in the scent of turpentine and oil paint despite my having scrubbed them raw-pink. Entering Raker’s on a crisp, late autumn night, going from a clear, starry sky and dry air into a fog of tobacco smoke, hazy light, and the miasma of saltwater, sweat, and spilled booze felt like stepping between two worlds. Spence fixed me a gin and tonic with a bright wedge of lime smiling on top and gave me a warm nod. Most folks in town thought I’d lost a roommate when Gregory moved out, or at least they stuck to that idea as a discreet and convenient fiction. But Spence knew Gregory had dumped me hard and had lent me an ear and a shoulder and dragged me home safe when I drank far too much my first night alone.