He blinked and put his hand down to Maggie for her to lick.
I found the dog food in aluminum trash cans up on a foot-high riser at the back of the carport. I filled several big pans for them. Making several trips like a harried waiter, I placed them down and each time the dogs waited until I had walked off before eating. When they did, they did so orderly and quietly, all standing around the bowls, heads down, no fussing or fighting.
When I came back in, I noticed how dark the room was now that the sun had gone down. It had descended faster than I expected here in the hills. The windows were purple and the trees and hills framed within them black silhouettes. I’m in a place I don’t know. As small and simple as it is, once it’s dark, it will become a cave of unknowns.
“Nate?” I called out.
I heard Maggie whine once, close in the room. “I’ll get you yours in a minute, okay?” I said, more to make myself feel better in hearing the sound of my own voice, like whistling past a graveyard.
I called out to her. “Maggie?”
Lingering light allowed me to find Maggie sitting next to Nate who lay asleep on the couch in a part of the room where there was a flat screen and some magazines spread on a coffee table.
“There you are.” Maggie stayed seated. “Nate,” I whispered the first time. “Nate,” I then said aloud. I shook his leg. “Nate,” I said even louder, my voice banking off the vaulted ceiling and tiled floor. He didn’t move. “Maggie, stay.”
Pleased with myself with how quickly I found candles and lighter the owners had laid into the first kitchen drawer by the door, I sang a bit (that graveyard whistling instinct). “Come on baby light my fire. Try and set the night on… fire…”
The candlelight lent a gothic cast to my wandering. I needed a flashlight. Badly, particularly when lightning lit up the rooms, throwing unfamiliar objects into relief, gave each a shadow.
Standing in this hall holding this candle, the lightning flash afterburn leaving matters even darker, I was maybe the most scared I’d been yet, even with Nate asleep nearby.
I had to make noise to stave off the fear, so I made busy, opened cabinets and closets looking for a flashlight. Nothing in those cabinets except dead scorpions stuck to glue board traps.
In the walk-in pantry, spaghetti crisscrossed the floor like pick-up sticks among all manner of cereal the dogs failed to eat. Top shelf, there the several flashlights were with packs of batteries stacked next to them. I put four flashlights on the kitchen counter. I tested them, replaced batteries. I lit three more candles and placed them on the bar, on the dining table and one over near Maggie and Nate. Place looked like goddamned Dracula’s castle now, less the cobwebs draping over staircases and the conspicuous lack of mirrors. It was indeed a dark and stormy night, dear reader. Candlelight, lightning flashes, hardened shadows, and, underneath, pulsing quiet.
And it would stay dark because, after all, were the strong, capable people at the power company working on it somewhere out there in the night, with gritted teeth and know-how? Nope.
Maggie sidled up to me and leaned against my leg when I sat down on the couch next to Nate. I tried to imagine his child terror but it wouldn’t form in my heart because whenever empathy kindled, my mind heard their roars and his flange enmeshed within it.
He hadn’t told me anything yet. He slept. I still didn’t know where he came from or even how old he was.
Maggie jumped up onto the couch and curled up next to me. Watching Nate’s diaphragm rise and fall, feeling the rocking of Maggie’s panting next to me, I drifted to sleep.
Thunder rolled down from the hills into my dream. I dreamed of Johnny and me playing soccer together under a low gray sky bringing rain, just knocking the ball back and forth. I wore new cleats. They felt good on my feet, all soft and formfitting. Johnny wore a red Man U jersey. When he turned with the ball, faking out a nonexistent opponent, I saw the name on the back of the jersey curl over his shoulders: Rooney. Johnny kicked the ball high and directly above him, as high as one of the trees lining the field’s chain-link. He did this show-offy twirl, and when his back was to me again, I saw the name wasn’t Rooney, but March, blazing white against that Old Trafford red. He trapped the ball to his feet like it was an egg, just taking it out of its sixty-foot drop and laying it gently at his feet. Johnny was a good player in the old world, but in the dream world, which felt part of the new world, he could do things with the ball that he never could have done in reality.
He passed it to me with crisp and assured pace. I swatted it back to him but not as well. He had to stretch to bring it in, and once he did, he dismissed me and started juggling. The ball a magnet to his feet, thighs and head, he moved it around his body and there was no chance it’d touch the ground. I watched rapt and proud.
In the sixty-foot trees behind me I heard Kevin! Kevin, help me!
I turned around quickly like someone had tapped me on the shoulder, my eyes scanning the trees. Johnny’s ball-work staccatoed its leather-on-leather thumps behind me. A shape in the trees. I knew it to be a kid nest. This one had the look and shape of a brown felt bag. The bag bulged and rolled like a third trimester belly and from it the cries came more muffled now. Ke-uhnn… Elllp eee.
“Heads up,” he said, and as I spun around I heard a thump unlike the others. I didn’t see the ball but rather felt my head snap back and then my feet flying out from under me.
Johnny’s shadow fell over me. I couldn’t move yet, still stunned. I rubbed my right occipital bone. In my periphery, I saw the ball in the grass.
“Sorry about that,” he said, stifling a laugh. “You okay, Kev?”
In my periphery, the ball was gone. I turned to look for it. Where it had been, a riven fist-sized stone.
He stood over me now, blocking much of the sky. He did Rooney’s Christ pose. “Helluva shot, eh? One for the books,” he said.
He puts his hands on his hips, looks down at me. “I’m your brother so I’m not scared of you, but the rest are. Scared of you yet needing you. When we’re near you, we feel more our old selves. You’ll be able to help us bridge the old world and the new. But right now is a time of change. We’re not ready. And something…” Johnny’s eyes hollow out, his face falls into a terror mask, but then snaps back bright like a struck match. He sighs one of those oh-well, what’re you gonna do? sighs. “I can’t talk about it.”
I sat up on my elbows and squinted at him. My mouth felt stuffed with cotton.
Johnny looks at the sky and seems to draw from it. Then, the blue of the sky having transferred into his otherwise brown eyes, he lowers his head and stares into me. “You’re it, my brother. You have been for a long time.” He chuckles to himself, pops his cheek. “Don’t know why it’s a dork like you, but.”
The muffled cries grow louder. Johnny looks in the direction from which they come, narrows his eyes to slits. “Don’t listen to that, Kevin. They don’t understand.”
Maggie growls. Nate’s talking. My eyes fly open. Nate is sitting up, staring ahead unblinking, mumbling in his sleep. He doesn’t react to the flashlight when I point it at his face, but his pupils contract to pinpricks and his speech clears. “You have to go, Kevin… you can only go one way.… you already know. You must go alone.” Then in a faraway disembodied flange voice he says, “It’s only me, brother. No other.”