I searched all morning but never found him.
“How could you?” I asked Maggie as she recovered and reset herself in the seat.
The day shone bright but there was no hope in it as the Texas Hill Country scrolled past, its small burgs with no working stoplights blurred in the landscape. No distant smoke spires. They were done with that.
We drove fast down the middle of the roads and highways, the SUV straddling the dividing lines. Leaves, trash, and debris created a wake that swirled up behind us as we crashed through. The roads were no longer neat strips of access and egress. They rolled out before me cluttered and treacherous. The new world would cover them with organic matter until they were vague, ancient paths crossing the expanse.
But today I plowed through at high speed, my jaw set, my eyes level and hooded. Maggie sat in the passenger seat of the black Tahoe with the encircled SA sticker on the back bumper and panted, switching her eyes to me every time I spoke. Furious with her, every once in a while on the drive back to Austin, I tapped the brakes so she’d crash into the dash. Each time I did it, I yelled at her, my voice cracking, “How could you?”
I had dumped all the dog food out onto the garage floor cement, saying nothing to the dogs as they leapt around me like I was their piper. They didn’t understand. While I was upset with them, I didn’t berate them. What good would it do? They were only doing what came natural.
But I held on to my anger toward Maggie.
I didn’t bother to wipe the scuzz from her snout. She licked at it enough so that by the time we hit Route 290, the red egg slime was gone, save for a smear of it on the dash where she’d face-planted. Her chest fur remained dyed red like she wore a scarlet letter of guilt. I wouldn’t help with that. Let her smell it, let its reek remind her.
Goddammed dog.
“How could you, Maggie? You of all? That sweet scared little boy? Didn’t you see he was different? How could you?” I tapped on the brakes and swerved. She tossed and plowed into the walls of the car.
But I knew how she could. Of course I did. As Kodie had said, packs of anything are dangerous. The pack, the hive, colony, marauding horde—they lose their individual minds, surrender it to the collective madness of the congregation and the riot.
Though I don’t want to, I suppose it’s nature’s way. We humans tried to ignore that such was our nature, always hubristically seeing ourselves beyond nature’s reproach.
The road makes you think. When you’re done being pissed at your dog, you think the things that need resolving and somewhere between points A and B, resolutions are made.
I stared at the horizon. The wind busted on the windows. Tuning the radio wasn’t worth it, its scanning roundelays yielding nothing but static. As much as I loathed the world’s silence, I couldn’t bring myself to rid it with music played with such verve before all this happened. I had tried to play CDs, what they had in the car. I couldn’t take more than a few bars of LCD Soundsystem’s dance punk, the chugging opening riff to that Toadies hit, the singer’s vocal a vampiric dare—make up your mind, decide to walk with me…
I listened to the wind and road sounds and Maggie’s nervous panting. She felt my wrath. Moreover, she sensed my fear.
“I’m sorry,” I eventually said to her. She lifted her eyebrows my direction, then back to the road, doing her own resolving, her own remembering.
Home was full of holes but it’s where my trombone’s buried. Austin’s where my mother lay down and died. If that isn’t forever your home, then I don’t know what is. Maybe home becomes the place where you have and raise your own children. I’d never know that kind of home, so, the soil of the city upon which my mother collapsed and died was home. It’s where my friends died.
And, to be honest, it’s where I knew they’d let me go. I had a feeling that if I veered off and went in any other direction, I’d be thwarted.
The pumps didn’t work at a station I pulled into. I had to siphon gas out of a parked car using plastic tubing I’d found in the dark garage smelling of oil. No bodies, but when I opened the refrigerated units in the back I got a rush of warm rot in the face. I coughed and grabbed Gatorade and Cokes, some chips, and a whole display of beef jerky and ran out.
Maybe in Austin I could still find Johnny. That’s really the only hope I had left. Maybe I could wrest Johnny from them and bring him back as I did Nate.
But if I did that, wouldn’t the scavenging dogs—literally, figuratively—come to pull him apart too? Can I be so callous as to think otherwise? Maybe it wouldn’t happen days later, a month, but they’d come for him—the vulnerable one separated from the rest.
When Nate crept past me, did he know he went out to collect his death with that basket? Or was he trying to show me, and himself, that he had changed, that he wasn’t afraid to go alone? Did he think going out to collect eggs on his own at dawn was the threshold he had to breach to be old-world Nate again? Would his head not hurt when he tried to remember? Did he hope to convince the kids that they could do it, too?
Was it expiation? Self-sacrifice, throwing himself to the dogs to satiate the beast they feared?
Did the kids get into his head, force him into that vicious dawn? Never mind the dogs, go outside with the egg basket.
Maybe some are trying to break away, enduring the headache, looking for themselves again. Maybe Nate caught that wave. Maybe Johnny can.
It’s the ones looking for their old selves again. They’re the ones who need me. They’re the ones who sing and guide me downriver now.
Johnny was my objective. I gripped the steering wheel and smiled at Maggie.
Here we came onto the iconic green road sign: Austin City Limits. The headlights were on by default due to the gray day. When the light filled the sign in a flash of white, that’s when Nate’s flanged screams filled my ears, his panicked eyes beseeching the dawn sky for solace through gnashing teeth and flying fur filled my eyes.
I spied a police car on the shoulder of MoPac near the Windsor Road exit. Keys in the ignition. I wanted speed. I wanted search lights. Maggie hopped in. “K9 unit?” She wagged her tail. We were good again.
I flicked on the loud siren, ran it for a few cycles. Echoing, echoing. Maggie ducked at the noise. I kept the lights on as I cruised at cop speed, Barney Fife sniffing, wrist-driving. Emergency. Clear the area, everyone.
On the Congress Avenue bridge. A wintry front’s wind spread and chased ripples across Lady Bird Lake.
Lamar’s yellow lines blurred. In my fog and blear on this last stretch of road home, I realized they’d been trying to tell me since June that this moment came. Johnny, standing in my room, his eyes fixed in sleepwalk, mumbling—coming… coming… close… close… close… shifting his weight back and forth on his feet. Simon, his pale face in the green bordering Memorial Park Cemetery, had said the kids feared a beast.
From writing my essay I’d learned that “lord of the flies” translates in Hebrew to Ba’alzevuv.
In Greek… Beelzebub.
My house looked like a shipwreck from the age of the Barbary pirates, cannon-shot and listing. The other houses looked as they always did. Now that the cold had come, the yards weren’t weedy. It was possible to believe the neighborhood was simply experiencing a sleepy Sunday.