He cracked a smile and I tousled his hair. We turned around.
Maggie had been right there with us, usually leading the way and checking back. “C’mon Maggie,” I called out, my claps for her echoing off the limestone cliff walls. “Going back,” I cried through cupped hands, opening and deepening my voice. We both did a three-sixty turn. No Maggie.
With as much buoyancy mixed with calm as I could muster, I said, “Huh. Well, she’s off chasing something. She’ll catch up.” I think I even shrugged my shoulders like some fifties sitcom kid.
We began walking back. Our shoes crunched the trail which was mostly caliche, but in some places plates of limestone. Neither of us admitted that we didn’t hear her run off, heard no paws scratching on the trail. Neither of us wanted to admit that we didn’t see her dashing away. That neither of us wanted to discuss it made us walk faster.
Two vultures assuming their V-shapes made spiral sweeps down past the tree line horizon between us and the house. We had progressed a few hundred yards from the house this time, the farthest we’d been by a lot, and now the safety of a dwelling seemed far away and we felt exposed. The quiet, the distance from the house, and our nervous crunching feet got to me to the point where I wanted to draw the gun from my holster and walk with it, flick the safety off while pirouetting to see if we were being watched or followed.
Immense quiet does this to you. Even to you, dear reader, you there, sitting in a quiet place reading this. You feel it too. The quiet makes you uncomfortable. It makes you squirm. You have to look up to answer the questions all beings ask themselves all the time, consciously or not: Am I being watched, tracked, hunted? Even you, reading this, will now wonder and look about.
My watchful lieutenant of a dog had vanished. We were a good distance from anywhere. While we started this walk in the afternoon, I have to admit that I didn’t check the time nor the sun’s position in the sky and maybe we did depart from the house a bit later than before.
I didn’t want to scare Nate by drawing the glock, so I didn’t. I considered reaching in to pull loose the Velcro fastener, but I didn’t do that either.
What I did was pick up the pace and start whistling. I whistled a variation of one of the many themes that had come into my head those days. In my head I heard my trombone.
Nate had to trot some to keep up. “Kevin. Wait for me.”
I slowed just enough so he didn’t have to trot. “You know this one?” I asked. I started whistling the tune from Bridge Over the River Kwai. On the second pass, he tried to pick up on it and he got it on the third. We whistled like that for a hundred yards, walking fast enough so that the whistling became a challenge of breath.
Nate put his hand on me, stopped whistling, and asked, “Are you scared?”
I stopped whistling. “Huh-uh,” I lied, “just want to let Maggie know where we are.”
“Well, I’m scared.”
“Don’t be.”
“You’ve got a gun, right?”
“I do.”
“You know how to use it?”
“Yeah.” I started whistling again. Our pace had not slackened.
Winded, Nate asked, “You shot anything with it?”
“No, but I’ve been quail hunting with my stepdad. We used rifles.”
Nate got real quiet. He put his palms over his ears and then rubbed his temples with his fingers. “My mom carried one in her purse.” He blinked and jerked and stutter-stepped, as if he just heard it go off.
God, this is how his mom went. He was witness to it. “Hey. It’s all right. Listen, don’t try to remember right now, okay? Not right now.” Our feet scuffed the path. Some bird of prey overflew.
He burst out in a throaty cry, wiped at his eyes, and held his head.
Nate’s memories flooded him now. His face showed more panic than pain, his eyes wide and toggling back and forth at onrushing memory. I wanted to stop and hold him but we needed to keep walking. I called out loudly for Maggie, ripping the holster Velcro as I did. Then I whistled the theme to The Andy Griffith Show, my arm around Nate’s shoulders.
So there we were at the end of the world, seeking out hope and a future, striding fast, me whistling, eyeing the birds, watching the open spaces, gun drawn and held down to my side, my other arm around a boy who’s sobbing at the recall of his mother pulling a pistol from her purse and firing its bullet into her head—no doubt with a horrible crazy rictus on her face—and all along I’m deathly worried about Maggie, I’m deathly worried about what tomorrow brings. I’m deathly worried.
All our ersatz normalcy and rhythm dashed, once again we lived in the fearful moment. I knew this is how it would always be.
My whistles came back to us from the walls of the valley louder than they left.
Roaring fire inside, small flames on the grill outside and I’m cooking eggs in an iron skillet. The sun plummets and it’s cold enough that I’m seeing my breath. Nate looks down at me from the tall rectangular window of his loft.
I feel him up there. Watching me. I pretend to focus on the skillet, but in my peripheral vision, I see his forehead and palms are pressed to the glass. His stillness is palpable.
He’d gone mute since we’d returned. His eyes had retrograded on me, looking like they did when I first met him in the office holding that Polaroid in my hand.
After a few minutes of me pretending to not know he’s up there staring down at me, the eggs I’ve stirred together popping into a scramble I’m sure will bring in the dogs (hoping to Christ it does), I attempt to nonchalantly look up over my shoulder and feign surprise to see him perched up there.
He’s staring, his oceanic eyes wide. I force a smile. Because it’s false, his face doesn’t change. His gaze bores through me. I wave my spatula at him. He blinks the sea-stare from his eyes and tepidly waves back.
Then he suddenly pushes off from the window.
“I’m ready to talk now.” I’d just looked back at my eggs and then Nate’s voice was right there. Standing in the garage doorway, he’d materialized so suddenly that I jumped and spun around brandishing the egg-dripping spatula as a weapon.
This should be funny. We should both break down laughing to release the tension.
I don’t like how he came down, so quiet and fast. As I recall this now, I think of him moving in a sickening new-world blur from his window and down the stairs.
I don’t like the look in his eyes or on his face either. While he doesn’t beam malevolence, I know within him a battle rages. The urges belonging to a scared kid of the old world named Nate versus implanted directives of the new.
“Talk about wh—?”
He cut me off. “When we first sat down the other day and you made me a peanut butter sandwich, you wanted me to tell you what I know.” I could swear I heard a smidgen of that flange in his voice.
“You don’t need to explain anything to me. I doubt there’s anything you can tell me that would be worth your pain.”
“But I want to.”
“Do you think it’s important?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is it hard for you?”
He paused and said, “Yes.”
“Then I don’t need to hear it right now.”
“But—”
“I trust you, Nate.” Oh—how his face fell when I used that word trust. He lowered his eyes to the cement. I continued. “I think you’d have told me already if there was something I needed to know. I know you wouldn’t keep things from me that would hurt me.”
His pause before responding signaled calculation. His eyes drifted back to mine. “No, I wouldn’t do that.”
“We have tons of time. Okay?”
“Okay.” He slumped, plodded forward like any kid. “I thought you’d be mad at me.”