“I don’t think it’s the meter reader or the FedEx guy the dogs are barking at.”
After another half minute of louder barking came close, throaty whispers, the last we’d hear, lips touching the mike, the breath stressing its metal diaphragm: “Methinks it’s trick-or-treaters.”
Chris didn’t pick up again and navy evening turned to black night. Bass folded his hand and said hold on, he was going to go out to switch off the generators to test the grid. The lights and sound disappeared.
Me and Kodie giggled in the dark. I grabbed her hand and held it tight. Her wheeze sung its see-saw song. Her head was silhouetted against the picture window. I smiled to myself at her beauty, the shape of her head, her blinking lashes.
We heard Bass curse outside, but it was the humorous curse borne of frustration or clumsiness. We chuckled again, trying to allay the fear of sitting in the dark at the world’s end on Halloween night having lost contact with Chris in Utopia.
Then, for the first time in two days while home, we heard a dog barking. We squeezed hands. Our neighbors didn’t have dogs. This one sounded like it was around the block. It barked and barked.
There’d been no barking in the neighborhood when we filled the tubs. There was nobody for dogs to be barking at because there was nobody walking dogs, no invading servicemen. The dogs had been silent until now. Silent and very hungry.
Just as I had decided to get up to grab a flashlight, the lights flickered and the static pulsed once, twice. I froze, then all was back on. We heard Bass coming back in, laughing and snorting. He stopped as he rounded the bar to the living room.
“What’s the cussing about?” I asked.
“Nothing,” said Bass.
“What about this master electrician work you’re doing, taking us off the grid, putting us back on? I wouldn’t have a clue how to do that.”
“Did I fail to mention that?” There was a hint of smarm in his voice.
“What’s so funny?” I asked, a little perturbed.
“Nothing, nothing,” Bass said with mock dismissiveness. “Really.” He tried to make a serious face, but it held for only three seconds, then he snorted laughter through his nose. Then I smelled it.
“Ah. Terrapin Station. Didn’t know you still had some,” I said to Bass.
“A wee bit I found in the pocket of me coat. A little smoke for the hallowed eve,” he said in a not-half-bad Irish accent. It lit up the room and we smiled at him. Life returned in these little moments and I could see how it would be possible to get it back someday. Humor and levity may be the most powerful forces on earth.
“Screw it,” said Bass, clapping his hands once hard. “I’m going to carve a jack-o’-lantern. Okay with you?” he asked, looking at me. “Can I grab your pumpkin outside?” I said sure, buoyed by his bothering to ask me. After all, moms and dads brought home the pumpkins in October and sat them on the porches. My mom did. She always did, and it was Martin who carved. I’d usually help.
My throat got tight and I nodded after saying sure and Kodie gave my hand a sympathetic squeeze.
Bass sprang into action. Bass strode out the front door to get the pumpkin. He sat it on the floor by the ham and then called out a barrage of seek-yous. I felt useless so I got up to make myself available. Bass lifted his head and said, “You hang close to her. I’ll do the Martha Stewart thing, and mind the ham.” Bass had a talent for communicating in a way that was clear and forceful but never strident.
I helped Kodie up off the floor and we took to the couch. “Right about now I’d be watching a horror movie,” Kodie sighed, staring at the flat-screen set within the hutch in the corner of the room behind Bass’s set-up. “Watching Michael Myers rise up behind a blubbering Jamie Lee Curtis who you simply cannot believe is still standing there with her back to him. I mean, you stuck him in the eye with a hanger. Now, run, bitch!”
We chortled. She wheeze-laughed. Insane serial killers had become nostalgic. Bass was scooping pumpkin with his hands and slapping the wet seeds and stringy goop on a spread newspaper—slap. slap.
Kodie said, “I’m really wondering if we’re not Jamie Lee, just sitting here. Maybe we should heed Chris in Utopia.” She looked the window. “I think we should definitely go out there.”
“I’m leaning that way. We need numbers. But, it’s too late tonight. Let’s go in the morning. Bass?”
Bass stopped carving, looked at all he’d set up, sighed, and nodded. “Yeah. We need to make a run for it and link up with those guys.” He punched an eye hole through the pumpkin with the knife handle. “First light, let’s start packing.”
It was settled.
I took comfort in that and, for tonight, the existence of the arsenal in this room. I felt fortified, ready. I wanted to lighten things so I brought back the old world with Halloween. “I’d probably be taking Johnny around trick-or-treating. Last year, Bass and I were just getting to know each other and we hit the cemetery for the first time. Remember that, Bass? I took Johnny out for a while and then you and I jumped the fence and did our cemetery dance.”
He bobbed his head, but was uninterested in reminiscing. Facing away from us, he hunkered and listened intently, called out into the present, “CQ CQ Chris you there? Anybody?”
slap. slap.
wheeze. wheeze.
(bark bark)
“Hello? Chris. Hello.”
The lights low in the house. We’d closed the blinds and curtains as if this were a normal Halloween night and we wanted to give the customary signal that we wouldn’t suffer trick-or-treaters, we don’t have any damned candy for you, go away.
Bass had set the jack-o’-lantern on the kitchen bar. I’m sure he meant it to be festive and comforting, but to me it was a reminder of what jack-o’-lanterns were all about which was to ward off the spirits of the damned come rap-rap-rapping on your door. Though the face wasn’t scary per se—it was childlike with its rounded eyes and nose and convex eyebrows—it was mawkish and seemed to be laughing at us, in on a joke we weren’t privy to, a joke that had real-life peril as a punch line, a byzantine joke that lost you in its labyrinth until it mattered, at the end, when you learned you were the brunt of it all along, its victim. Its ochre glow radiated, rendering incomplete shadows on the walls and ceilings.
“Cool, eh?” Bass had said when he first set it up. Kodie gave tepid applause through a stifled yawn. Kodie and I had started to doze, my eyes flying open when she coughed or when Bass spoke out into the abyss. My watch said eleven. Now Bass sat reading in a chair, I couldn’t tell what, but it was obvious to me he hadn’t been really reading but listening; to the night wind, to the gathered darkness, that dog barking. He went back to the ham. Bass had been at it for hours.
“I feel like if I don’t keep trying, that’s when I’ll miss someone.” I’d been asleep but his sonorous voice jerked me awake. I was still blinking my eyes and trying to figure out where I was, my life’s context—couch, Kodie on me, her smell in my nose and lungs, family gone, world gone, night. “What if this is it? Chris in Utopia? I’ve heard nothing from anyone on this thing for hours.”
Bass had placed the book he read facedown on an armrest. Lord of the Flies, my copy from my room where I kept it on a high shelf above my desk slotted in among many others, a decades-old forest-green cloth hardback. I could smell the decay in the yellowing pages from here.
When did he go in there? I’m confused in my sleepiness. I propped myself up on an elbow and looked at him. Bass said in a way-too-serene and measured voice, “Like Utopia Chris said. There are probably a bunch of people our age getting it together and doing just what I’m doing. It’s just a matter of time.”