“I was hoping maybe you’d tell me.”
“How can I?”
“I think you know things. Things you want to tell me.”
He looked at his lap, ashamed. “I don’t.”
“But you just nodded that you did, just now.”
“I don’t understand what’s happening. I’m scared, Kev.”
In my head I’m yelling at him, Why don’t you tell me the truth?
“My head hurts,” Johnny mumbled.
Why’d you let them push me out of that room?
I asked, “Do you know Simon?”
He shook his head and grimaced.
“You don’t know a redheaded kid named Simon? Not at school, not from the neighborhood?”
He shook his head the same way while on his face was a mask of solemn duty which said: deny deny deny.
Kodie used her teacher’s voice. “Do you remember this morning?”
“Sort of, yeah.” Johnny swigged his soda and placed it on the table with a tinny bang.[10]
We just looked at him.
“Not really.” Johnny was still too young to lie well.
She continued. “Do you know what’s with the piles of rocks—”
“—Stones,” corrected Johnny.
“Excuse me?”
“Say it.” Johnny’s face fell into a baleful smirk.
“Say what, Johnny?” Kodie asked.
“Stones. Say it.”
“Why is that so important to you?”
“It’s just more… correct.”
“It’s more correct? Why does that matter, Johnny? See what I’m getting at?” asked Kodie.
“No, I don’t.”
“Now you’re being rude, J. Stop it,” I said. Johnny looked up me, snapped out of his malevolence. “She’s just trying to help.”
He dropped his chin a bit. He looked back at Kodie but without the nasty look. “Sorry, Kodie. I… I don’t know why. I don’t. It doesn’t matter. You’re right.”
“But… you felt compelled to say it, didn’t you? I guess that’s what I’m asking. Do you know why that is?”
He shook his head, drank, set the can down quietly this time.
I piled on. “Sleepwalking this summer, you said to me, and I do not paraphrase, ‘it’s not a task I want, Kevin, you have to know.’ You remember that?”
He started to get upset. “Can we please stop? My head really hurts.” He rubbed his temples.
Kodie sat back up straight, sighed deeply. “Sure, it’s okay. I just want you to know that you can tell us anything. You don’t have to be afraid to tell us anything you want.”
“We need your help,” I said.
Bass looked at Johnny and worked his jaw around his food.
Johnny slumped in his chair and nodded but evaded our eyes by looking out the window. We’d all scooted our chairs away and were starting to clean up. I’d gone into the laundry room off the kitchen to tap the pony keg when Johnny muttered from his chair, “There’s more smoke.” We all gathered behind Johnny and looked up at the twilit sky above the backyard oaks.
Kodie was reluctant about leaving Rebecca sleeping in Johnny’s room with her shoes off and tucked under a blanket, her diaphragm sine-waving. I locked the doors and set the house alarm. If it went off, we’d hear it, even down in the creek.
The smoke our beacon, we walked to see the wreck. This stretch of neighborhood looked as it would on any other night. Most porch lights were still on, as well as many interior lamps, enough to maintain the appearance of a normal evening in central Austin in October. Sodium-arc streetlamps kicked on as if heralding our progress. Everywhere in evidence was that ancient harvest time screw-you to winter’s deathly approach: Styrofoam graveyards, some with boney arms piercing the earth’s surface, cottony spider webs spanning entire front porches, pumpkins waiting on steps to be carved and lit. Johnny pointed out, “Look, the Millers’ pumpkins. They always do great carvings.” We didn’t comment on his upbeat observation which so looked forward to the night when the neighborhood took on a Saturday Evening Post cast with the trick-or-treater traffic, some spaz-dad’s machined fog caught in the live oaks, billowing costumes in the dark, flickering ochre of the jack-o’-lanterns, the squeals of delight and laughter.
No cars, nobody took their evening walks under the canopy of trees. You could feel the death settling in. Other than Mrs. Fleming across the street from us, there weren’t any piles. The roaring quietude. The big fear residing inside it. Not with a bang but a whuh!
We ran over to a house with a front room filled with spectral flicker and looked through the front window, hoping that maybe we’ve been wrong in our assumptions, that maybe someone alive sat inside watching a news broadcast from a surviving corner of the planet.
Bass rang the doorbell repeatedly and we cupped our hands around our eyes to see in the front window. Looping in its DVD start menu was The Wizard of Oz.
As we heard Judy Garland singing that heartbreaking why oh why can’t I? I noticed the woman in the chair. I couldn’t gauge her age. Maybe fifty. We jostled each other to see her better. Bass continued jamming down on the doorbell. The violin interlude of Rainbow went on and then Kodie pulled away from the window and gulped and pulled Johnny by the elbow back with her.
I felt like I peered into a scene in an unvisited corner of Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum. The large kitchen knife buried to the handle just under the woman’s sternum and the hardened black that had poured forth to collect in a pool on her lap. Only the TV light on her. If she had been smiling at Dorothy’s Technicolor world, the smile no longer graced her face. Her eyes were open but the lids drooped like a zenned-out Buddha and her hands still had a loose grip on the armrests like she’d just come to a stop after riding a roller coaster.
We didn’t want to go exploring old-world buildings anymore if we didn’t have to. We knew what we’d find.
Though the fuel had burned off by now, it did seem to be smoking more. The trees all around looked like they had burned but the fire hadn’t spread. The rain earlier in the week defanged the roaring tinderbox established in August. One of the wings looked to have decapitated a house backing up to the creek. Only a rill of water ran under the plane through the creek bed. The fuselage acted as a slanted bridge of sorts. The windows were all burned out. The thing was so big as we neared that we feared getting much closer. You could smell fuel. You could smell cooked flesh and smoke. With small switches in the breeze, on top of everything, you could smell that port-o-potty sanitizing smell that had leaked from the flying toilets.
Our curiosity forced us down the embankment and into the creek. We’d jumped across a yard-wide run of water and stood on a limestone island strewn with faded aluminum cans. We could see coyotes on the other side of the plane standing in the creek looking at us, their eyes flashing yellow in firelight.
Bass roared and thrust his hands into the air. The coyotes didn’t bolt. The alpha considered Bass and then calmly turned and walked away back up the creek. The others followed him into the tunnel of gathering dark, disappearing behind the fireglow.
We drew closer. The plane looked like a giant black alighted insect. Only in a few places did the silver of the fuselage show through the black matte carbon patina.
“The pilot tried to avoid as many houses as possible,” Bass said
“Looks like he did a pretty good job, all things considered,” Kodie said.
“But where are the bodies?” asked Johnny.
“Burnt up,” I said. “Look.” I pointed at the fuselage. Evening light hung in there though we spun toward night with increasing speed. You could just make out the charred humanoid figures sitting in their seats. I thought of the choking pilot trying to call out May Day to the tower but nothing coming out of his mouth but whistling. His eyes wide. His neck veins standing up. I thought of the air traffic controllers fallen out of their chairs. I thought of the world coming to an end while I toked up above it all because I was all sad about my little life. Idiot.