“I don’t want that to be my last memory of them.”
Silence.
Reality drilling down, striking rabbit terror which now bubbled up.
I prattled on like a soap opera matriarch glossing over profound familial injury. “Yeah. And that plane? You hear that? Crashed right behind our house. I watched it float right over.”
“Man…”
“You see any media at all? I missed everything. Everything went down before… well, I did see this one guy on Univision. But that ended quickly.”
“So… you don’t know.” Kodie said, not asked. She looked away in thought.
“Know? I know nothing. What is this?”
“Well, I don’t know that, but for a little while on cable news they were showing camera phone footage. All over the world, Europe and Africa. Eastern seaboard, then Texas. Kevin, people were—”
“Yeah. My neighbor told me.” I paused, inhaled. “I’ve seen that myself.” Exhaled.
“You mean you saw people…?” Kodie lowered her voice and finished her question. “You mean you saw people… killing themselves?”
I nodded in eyes-closed solemnity.
“Where?” she whispered, loud and breathy.
I tossed my head in the direction. “Hancock Bridge over MoPac. You know, with the pedestrian sidewalk, that fence?” I put my palms together and made a discrete diving motion.
Kodie put her hand to her mouth and her eyes welled. “Into traff—” she stopped herself. Down to a clipped whisper now. “Traffic?”
This had to be a dream. Sure it was. I’d awaken and this would all seem a bizarro dream. I’m dreaming the world is ending because I’ve been kicked off the band squad and I’m stressing about the SAT and I’m stirring all that together with an increase in pot smoking and insomnia. Of course. I’d laugh and I’d tell Bass, “Dude, there were these fubar whalesounds at dawn, people foaming at the mouth and dying in their yards, people killing themselves with grins on their faces…”
Kodie paced back and forth in a five-step rhythm. When she pivoted away on the second pass, I noticed it. There, behind her on the parking lot cement, set so haphazardly that it said to me that this was no longer a parking lot but simply a surface on the earth.
They had been building out the strip mall to include a five-story apartment-condo. Lots of stone and brick and wood stacked around at the staging area there at the back of the lot. What I saw was made of some of the broken bricks and rocks, this little rounded pile, about two, three feet high, seven feet long. I hadn’t seen it when I first pulled up I was so focused on Kodie.
My stomach went out on me, and my bowel did this shimmy-shift. Seeing it, I immediately looked over my shoulder at the CVS across the intersection, at the parking lot, where that dead guy was.
A neat pile of stones there now.
Wouldn’t we have heard the stones clacking in all this quiet? That pile made me think about all the bodies.
All the bodies.
Kodie yanked me from my reverie. “You okay?”
“Yeah. I’m fine.” Kodie saw my face and mouthed, What?
She already knows. Or intuits.
I asked her, “You? How do you feel?”
“I’m okay I think. It’s all happened so fast. Seems like it would’ve hit me by now, you know? If it’s infectious, or a gas, it’s everywhere. I’m not feeling any different, physically that is.”
Over her shoulder I saw Mi Victoria, the Mexican bakery where Johnny and I always got breakfast tacos. Mi Victoria likely had a cook in the kitchen dead on the floor from either choking on whatever-it-is or sticking his head in the deep fat fryer like he’s bobbing for apples, that smile seared into his face. Mi Victoria wasn’t cranking out egg and chorizos for the construction crews gentrifying the Burnet Corridor.
My head hurt right then. As it hurt in the summerdreams.
My face must have gone ashen because Kodie asked me in a panic if I was okay again, stepping to me and grabbing my wrist.
What disease chokes you on glistening webby crystals? Quickly chokes you, like volcanic lava overflowing, too late to stop it once the seal brakes, and, oh, God, what disease makes you gladly commit violent sudden suicide? “I’m fine, I’m fine,” I said, straining to keep the reticent shake out of my voice. Reticent shake being another way of saying terror.
“You see that?” I lifted my arm and extended it slowly, my index finger rising to meet its target. Kodie turned around.
She froze, put a flat hand across her brow, a salute to block the sun.
“What is that?”
“Don’t know.”
“Was it there before?” Kodie asked.
“Don’t think so.”
What had she seen before she got here? Why was the door to the store locked when I pulled up? And why was she holding a baseball bat? Dollar Tree only sold Whiffle sets.
We heard a low boom far away which took our glances from each other and up to the middle sky. The sound seemed to have come from as far away as Camp Mabry off of MoPac a couple of miles west.
It sounded like a shotgun blast, or even something bigger. After September 11, 2001, Camp Mabry wasn’t as open to the public anymore. I have no clue what weapons they have there. A mortar round? We didn’t even ask each other if we heard it. It made our time in the parking lot feel like it needed to end, that lingering anywhere wouldn’t do.
Kodie looked at me in agreement with what she saw on my face—the sense that we were exposed.
“How’d that…? How did we not…?” mused Kodie, her fright blooming. It felt claustrophobic even in this open, bright parking lot under that blue sky.
“Look.” I pointed at the CVS.
She saw the pile now. “Kevin?”
“You didn’t see it?” I asked.
“No. I’ve been at the back of the store.”
“There was a man’s body over there in that parking lot when I drove by. Now, as you can see, there’s a pile of rocks.”
Kodie crossed her arms, shot her hip, and furrowed her brow. She’d have looked cute as hell if I wasn’t feeling ill with dread. Woo takes a distant back seat when the world’s ending and you’ve got a gun strapped to your ribs.
We only did it the once. Rain slipping down her window, pattering the roof. Her folks were home but she lives in one of those garage apartments like you see all over Hyde Park. She closed her eyes and her lids fluttered. For me, much in life doesn’t match the hype but that did and now I just think about Kodie all the time.
Kodie looked over at the nearest pile and kept her attention there. I stepped over to her and put my arm around her. “What are you thinking?”
She didn’t answer. Kodie took a few steps toward the pile, hesitated, retreated back the same number of steps, keeping her eyes trained on it.
Kodie, detached, questioning her own sanity, “What’s this covering bodies with rocks?”
She turned to the big jack-o’-lantern’s grim rictus in the Dollar Tree’s window, its brows screwed down in a scowl. Some things you can’t continue to question, even when you want to. Some things just… are the way they are.
A memory of Johnny during one of his sleepwalks into my room interjected. “They’re going to be waiting at the shore.” He had flipped on the lights. He wore burnt orange Texas Longhorn PJs. I squinted. He didn’t. “You think I want this? I don’t,” he’d said, more awake then. He burst out a single sob, swallowed it back and said, “It’s not a task I want, Kevin, you have to know.”
We stood stock-still. My throat and ears full and hot. I sniffed hard and spat far, shuffled my feet to keep from getting woozy. Kodie squinted in the sun glinting off the store’s metallic sign. With one eye closed against the glare, she said, with maximum cool, “We need to get out of here.”