“That’s him.” I honked the horn. The sound brought good cheer to the scene. He looked up and waved but stayed sitting. Closer now and I saw where his other hand was and the smoke rolling out from behind the face mask. I was dismayed at first but then I thought of those guys in Vietnam getting stoned before going on patrols. How to cope.
Bass stood as we pulled up, holding the pipe down to his leg, smoke filaments stretching up from the bowl. First thing he says with that radio-DJ deep voice of his: “Hey, want a binger?” like we’d just shown up at a house party and he’s bored in the back room with his weed and remote control. The guy’s a young Howard Stern with less hair and wearing a helmet.
Kodie laugh-snorted. He stood and again extended his arm out in offer. I threw the car into park and jumped out. “Bass, Jesus. You’ve been here since you texted?”
He shrugged and nodded, the unstrapped helmet jostling his skull. He relaxed his arm. “Mostly.”
“You okay?” I asked. He acted strange. “Why here? Why’d you’d want to meet here?”
He peered at me through the face mask. “Not here. Down there at Terrapin. Where we always meet. I dunno, man. First thing I thought of. Felt safe, I guess? Our secret place. Didn’t think kids would follow me in here.” He turned his head one way, then the other, searching. “I was right.”
“Your folks?” I asked. “You know for sure? I mean, we don’t, me and J. Not… for sure.” I glanced up at Johnny sitting in the car. He stared with a set jaw over at the church playground on the opposite side of the cemetery.
“Yeah,” Bass muttered and sniffed, his voice full and wet. A step closer and I could see he’d been crying. “Yeah, man. They, uh, they…” His skinny frame shook and his shoulders rolled with racked sobs. We took a step to each other then. He dropped the pipe in the gravel and we hugged, my ear meeting his sternum. I let emotion fill my throat for the first time but fought it off, swallowed hard.
I attempted humor as we peeled off each other. “What’s with the helmet?” He picked up the pipe, crushed the carbon on the gravel under his huge Converse toe. “That our stuff you’re smoking?”
He nodded.
“Any good?” The stuff I’d smoked that morning was sour old shake.
“S’okay,” he shrugged. He pointed his chin across the grounds. “Little bastards were throwing shit at me. Sticks and rocks.”
“Where? Who was?”
“Dunno, little kids. That’s why I came here. They were doing it as I was driving around earlier to see what was going on. They came at me from out of nowhere near Butler Park as I cruised down Barton Springs. I hightailed it here and texted you. I sat for a while, then got freaked and impatient so went to check on the plants and there some more were, throwing stuff at me.” Now I saw the back end of his Bronco way back there just inside the tree line bordering that edge of Terrapin Station. “They won’t come in here, though. I was all like come on, come get some, and was backing up waiting for them to rush me. They didn’t. I’ve been seeing them here and there around the parameter.” Bass jutted out his hand holding the pipe and pointed. “There! There’s one of those little turds.”
I followed his gesture and saw a boy in a red shirt and jeans walking by the chain-link fence at the church parking lot about seventy-five yards away. The boy stopped and looked at us looking at him but he didn’t look unnerved in the slightest. He didn’t look at us; he marked us. He kept walking along the fence line and then veered off into the daycare playground, where deeper within the swings were alternating back and forth, two other kids on them kicking their legs out for height and speed. The boy in the red shirt walked over to them. The swingers both dragged their feet to stop and they stood up to look at us. The boy in the red shirt pointed at us. Then they all turned and walked out of sight around the other side of the church.
Did these kids who were all alone now try to reach out to us for help? No.
Did they so much as wave at us, the only older people they’ve seen all morning? No.
Did this fact scare us? Yes. It did me, and I could see in Kodie’s face and Bass’s that it scared them too.
Bass said, “I notice you don’t want to go try and talk to them. No more than I do. You know what’s up. They throw stuff at you?” When I gave no immediate answer, Bass searched my eyes. “You’ve seen something, haven’t you?”
“I’ve, we’ve, seen quite a bit this morning. And not one adult.”
“What’d you see?”
I paused to think of a way to describe my trepidation. “We went to this house to see if we could help this dying man’s daughter. Just over there in my neighborhood. About ten of them, sitting in a back room, chanting. Then they locked Kodie in with them after shoving me out. I had to bust down the door.”
“No way. See, that’s what I’m saying. What’s going on, man? I’m losing it. You seem all calm. If you all hadn’t shown up, I swear… I don’t know. I would’ve stayed here all day. I was too scared to even go back and get the Bronco with them just over the fence running through the woods there.” He put his hand on my shoulder. “Hey, come with me? Let’s get my car.”
I waved to Johnny and Kodie to stay here for a sec and we headed out. Bass kept his helmet on.
“Who’s the chick?” he asked.
“We work together at the DT. You know.”
“Oh yeeaah. Kodie. That makes sense.” He spun as he walked to look at her in my car, turned back. “She’s what, how old?”
“Nineteen.”
“Well. She’s the oldest live person I’ve heard of or seen.”
“You didn’t see your folks…”
He shook his head. “Found them.” He said this in a curt whisper and I remember it making my neck skin gooseflesh. Though I had become fast friends with Bass—you could say he was my best friend—and I didn’t yet know all his mannerisms and ways, this sounded to me like he was lying. I didn’t want to push.
“Sorry.”
“S’okay.” Bass sighed and restarted. “So, you’re almost eighteen, she’s nineteen. I’m seventeen. I’ve seen no teenagers. I mean nobody. And I drove around before coming here, like I said. Nobody. Open car doors and piles of rocks. I’m afraid to even go over to the school.”
“I doubt anyone even made it to school.” I wonder if you did, Mr. E. I know you went in early to work on your book. Are you there now?
“How are we the only ones, then? Two teens close to you are the only ones alive in Austin? What the hell?”
It took Bass’s stoned logic for me to see it. His point was well taken. Me and my two closest friends going into the dawn of this day are the only older people we’ve seen. Isn’t that way too bizarre a coincidence?
I know what Grandma Lucille would’ve said—there are no coincidences. She had told me that only once.
She dropped that on me one night in early June. I had been practicing The Saints, you know—oh when the saints, come marching in. Been practicing it a lot. I could play it real well right from the start. My ’bone’s slide hitting those slots spot on, my lips and cheeks finding their proper pressures. The Saints.
Okay, it’s more than that. I’d heard its faraway echoed strains at the edges of my summerdreams. And Johnny hummed it when he sleepwalked into my room. Sometimes I heard him humming it at the dreams’ peripheries themselves. I’d wake up with a start, feeling his presence in my room but he wasn’t there, the pain in my head above my right eye quickly subsiding.
Grandma Lucille hadn’t been feeling well, so I went over to her house for dinner, trombone in hand, on the promise of her gumbo. The woman could make it, having grown up in way southeast Texas, a tiny Gulf border town north of Port Arthur. Her gumbo? Meal of the gods when coupled with homemade hushpuppies and followed by her pecan pie.