Another guy sat slumped over, his head on the meat of his outstretched arm, his back against the industrial shelving. The halo of splatter on the boxes next to him spoke plainly, as did the Browning .22 on the floor a few feet from him.
You drew one or the other. One was the pitiless choking. The other, overjoyed suicide—the lipsticked nurse on the pedestrian bridge, the bald guy in his yard with his waving. No stones covered the bodies in here.
Then I got it: in here. The bodies weren’t covered indoors. Why only cover the ones outdoors? I had to get out of there; the tang of blood in the air. I took long fast steps past Kodie and Johnny and made straight for the door.
Kodie called after me. I put my hand up in the air. I just need a minute.
I shoved open the glass door and the electronic chime bonged. I sidestepped the cairn in front of it, noticing for the first time the blue leather purse next to it.
Whatever this was, maybe it was stalking me now, I’d thought. It’s taken me longer than the rest, but maybe that’s because of my late blooming. Just a delay. Now it’s here, come for me.
My heart thudded at my temples and in my throat so hard that I thought for a moment I might pass out. I thought of the suicides I’d witnessed. Just before they did it, they were ecstatic to be doing it. The rapturous look to them.
What calmed me down: I didn’t have that.
Impulsively, I went over to the pile covering a suicide and I tossed off a couple of the rocks. An act of taboo desecration. They were watching from the thickets that ran along Shoal Creek. A multitude of eyes blinking at me behind the wall of green.
I yelled out toward the green, “We should be piling them in truck beds, burning them in pits! Not covering them up like cat turds in a litter box!” I stood up. “Come out!” I waited. “Come out, come out, wherever you are! Olly-olly oxen free goddammit!” I collapsed to my knees next to the cairn and peered down into the space in it I’d created. Through the stones I could see skin, the crew neck collar of a T-shirt. Couldn’t see the face, and that was probably for the best, given the large kidney-shaped puddle of blood hardening as it continued to swell over the macadam, screening the sky’s racing clouds.
That moment seemed to freeze for an elastic amount of time. My head buzzed.
I go back in and we load up with grim resolve like out of an eighties revenge movie montage: crossbows, shotguns, pistols, civilian-grade assault rifles.
I forced the trunk closed and we all got back into the car now stuffed with a small war’s worth of groceries and gear.
“Gotta figure out how to use this thing,” I said, holding up a small black graphite crossbow.
“Who you plan on shooting?” Kodie sat in the back, Rebecca’s head returned to her lap.
“Well, like you said, packs are dangerous.” We drove.
Kodie said, “God, imagine… imagine the rebound of fish in the oceans and rivers, the pollution in the air and water receding, the earth basically healing itself.”
“Ah, cataclysm as environmental correction.”
“Just saying.”
“We’ve definitely peed in our own soup. The whole planet, though? It was here long before we arrived and will go on even after the sun burns out, a cold, indifferent rock, her scarred ocean beds smiling like Buddha.”
“That’s uplifting.”
“Doesn’t seem like a day for optimism.”
All the windows down, the hair on all of our heads, Rebecca’s too, lifting and flowing. Johnny rested an arm on the door, sunning his elbow. He leaned his forehead out to let the wind rush his face, eyes closed. Bliss in that face.
Not the bliss of the ignorant. No.
“And what, oh wise one, do you think about all this?” She waved her hand out the window as if she were a real estate agent displaying the available world to me. I felt a missing-Martin pang. “What does an organism do when it becomes infected with, oh, let’s say a bacteria that just grows and grows?”
I wasn’t taking the bait. I shrugged, looked out my window at the blurring green as we headed back north to the house.
“It defends itself,” she answered herself. “Sometime during the industrial revolution, the earth realized that it had been infected.”
Not wanting to get into it, I said, “It doesn’t matter does it? Besides, okay, to your point, the earth doesn’t have standards. It doesn’t feel. The earth is an ever-morphing system. It adapts to the new thing.” I looked at the rearview. Kodie cupped Rebecca’s face with her hand. “I’m sorry.”
“Nothing to apologize for,” she said under her breath, shaking her head with small swivels.
“It’s going to be okay, Kodie.” I kept trying to get her to glance up at the mirror with my overt head jerks. But she didn’t.
“You don’t believe that, do you?” she asked, still not looking up. “That it’s going to be okay.”
Johnny emerged from his reverie and looked at me, restating her question with his face.
Too much time went by. I demurred, “The world always looks bad when you’re hungry and tired.”
“No disrespect, Kev, but the world looks pretty bad. I don’t think some sandwiches and a nap are going to change that.”
“Thank you, Johnny. Thank you for your perspective.”
“You’re quite welcome.”
We held it in for a few seconds, but, thank God, that made us all bust out laughing.
I was amazed that there weren’t fires burning out of control in the city, that nobody dropped a cigarette as they got the feeling, left a gas pump open and flowing. The skyline revealed no smoke save for an upward trickle coming from what I knew had to be the plane crash. Early afternoon now and the wave has hit and gone and now it’s just quiet as hell. That’s it. The world set to stun.
Somehow the charge in the air told me things were beginning, not ending.
Johnny asked, “Shouldn’t we…? Maybe there’s people downtown—”
I slammed on the brakes. “Oh, man! Bass!” Then I floored it.
“Bass?” Kodie asked.
Bass and I tried to grow a small patch of weed together just to see if we could, behind the equipment shed at the elementary school. If some maintenance guy whacks it down, so what, it’s a weed.
Bastian’s a varsity football benchwarming linebacker doing his time. Bastian puts on the pads, hits people at practice, but he’s never started a game. He’s on the team out of familial expectation, he tells me, and because it’s good for college applications. Holds water with some colleges and with Daddy’s sphere of influence when it’s time for internships. It’s a club badge, Bastian would say, as he did just last week as we sat in his beater Bronco and smoked from our first homemade bag listening to his Heartless Bastards on repeat. The smoke tasted like burnt lawn clippings and stung more than usual and it didn’t get us but slightly lit which was okay with me. I don’t like getting stoned stoned. An awful feeling.
How, you may ask, do a jock and a band geek become friends? Isn’t this against the rules? True, cross-pollinations like ours are rare. I guess it’s more Bastian being Bastian than me making some great leap across the social divide in a moment of altruism.
Social strata and rules between jocks and band, cheerleaders and punk rock girls? Man, all that’s just… gone.
Bastian’s a big guy, more lank than thick. He says that he’s strong of haunch. This is Texas football, remember. Big public school. Even the benchers are monsters. He could break me over his knee on a cold day.