When we pulled up, cats flew from the holes and disappeared. In the middle of the street about four houses up stood a coyote frozen in mid-lope with its ears perked. It watched us get out of the car. I stood behind the open door and stared at it. It stared back at me like I was a dead man walking, then completed its unhurried crossing into a yard where I lost sight of it.
Exhausted. There’s no hero in me.
From the street, I hear it. This flapping. We walk to the porch and I see paper under a stone sitting atop my trombone case in the entryway.
It’s a foot-long receipt from the Dollar Tree dated September 24. It’s folded in half. On one side is written a note[18] I’ve seen before:
512-455-4688 call me to discuss all things pseudo-intellectual
Kodie had left this note for me in my cubby in the storeroom on that day. I’d asked for her number several times. She’d been coy. But then on that day she gave it to me and I had called her and that night we went out to dinner. We got looped on free margaritas, the bartender dude giving me the stink eye the whole time because I think he was one of her wanna-bes but never-wases. Then we’d gone up to Ginny’s Little Longhorn, this tiny, bar painted UT burnt orange with a Baptist church steeple on top. They wouldn’t let us in so we hung out with the regulars in lawn chairs in the parking lot, the door open. We listened to a country band covering Beatles songs. She sat on my lap and we kissed and the regulars all said awwww.
I’d kept it folded in my desk drawer, thinking someday I’d show it to her when we were older and have a laugh. I turned it over.
In the same handwriting, but different ink, the text uneven and slanted, it read
Kevin, Come down
We can start over
Adam and Eve just like you said
The euphoria I felt knowing she was alive was dampened by the weirdness. It doesn’t sound like her. More like Nate’s somnambulistic oratory, but with a pen.
I never told her about how I thought we could be like Adam and Eve. I’d only thought about it. I’ve only told you, dear reader.
Maybe innately is farfetched, but to describe how I knew where she was, that’s the best word I can come up with. Although she could’ve given a specific location (lacking in specificity), she doesn’t, or the kids don’t want her to. My quest. Up to me.
I figured I didn’t have much of a choice.
When she says “come down,” in my mind’s eye I’m looking south from atop Mount Bonnell on the morning of. That wave rolling. So calm in its progress. I know that’s the direction I’m to go.
I remember thumbing Jespers’s copy of Heart of Darkness in the stack under Lord of the Flies, Kurtz declaring, “My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my—”
The river. Kodie waits for me where the Colorado River unburdens itself into the Matagorda Bay. On a beach there, she will be waiting.
One look at that note and I knew this innately.
That and the beach at night, their bright fires.
Maggie and I walk through the house of holes and the rain pours through and cold drops strike my scalp. From under some rocks I manage to pull out Martin’s big canvas bag he used on his outdoor buddy excursions—still smelling of funk and fish—dragged it to my bedroom, stuff it. So tired, I just want to curl up.
Curl up and die, my brain banged at me. Not my mind. This came from my reptilian midbrain. Curl up now, Kev, and you will die.
Then that brain of mine shoots me up with adrenaline. My pupils dilate with a snap. My hands shake.
I hesitated before the fridge. They’d smashed the shelves and everything had dropped and congealed at the bottom, the stench nipping my sinuses. I closed the door, and that’s when I looked through the place where the kitchen window used to be.
There, on the cement, placed, no, presented in front of the bashed portable generators was my twelve-foot periwinkle blue tandem kayak, the oars lying neatly within the rear paddler’s well. A floor display at REI.
The kayak had been stored in the standalone garage, suspended by ropes and pulleys attached to the crossbeams, a condo for wintering mice. They’d bashed everything else, yet here sat this cleaned-up kayak.
Take me.
“No no,” I said chuckling. “No way. Not happening.” I looked at Maggie.
“We’ll be taking the K9 unit.”
Night was coming yet I knew I had to leave. I saw movement in the trees, scurrying silhouettes against the sky’s violet crown.
I had water, food, my bag and my dog. I sat behind the wheel of an Austin Police car with a full tank of gas. A loaded policeman’s shotgun stood near the gearshift and my glock was strapped snug at my side. I opened a crisp map of Texas, plotted my general course under the dome light, and pulled out. Highway 71 south. All the way to Matagorda Bay.
Full dark by the time I reached the letter avenues intersecting Forty-Fifth. I haven’t driven alone in the dark since chasing the train. That had felt different. I still had friends waiting at home.
No streetlights, no ambient light from storefronts. Pitch dark. Not even a moon shone for the rain. I had my brights on. No oncoming traffic to blind. Deer and cats darted across. “Slow and steady, steady and slow, that’s the way we always go,” I said to Maggie over my shoulder in Goofy the Disney dog’s voice. Her tail thumped and she put her snout on my shoulder. I smelled bad egg sulfur and Nate’s blood.
The blood smell reminded me of feral kids. This was no river. When would the windshield turn into stars from thrown stones?
Forty-fifth Street crosses train tracks before the airport which takes you out southwest to Highway 71.
We rolled slowly like we’re patrolling.
Maggie growled in my ear.
There.
They suddenly appeared in the headlights along the train tracks as if arising from the earth itself. They stood in rank after tight rank like a phalanx of Trojans. I stopped the car, flipped on the search light. I dragged the beam slowly along them, examined each face in the front row. Mannequins in the cold rain. Not a pair of eyeglasses rested on a nose. They blinked in dolorous synchronicity. They didn’t utter a sound, didn’t move. Though winter approached, they wore no coats. Some wore the pajamas they woke up in the morning of, some the filthy clothes of that morning, what they would’ve worn to kindergarten and elementary school. They quaked and stood stone-faced.
Despite my ire toward them, in that moment I found myself suddenly overwhelmed with the need to connect to them. I felt such pity for them. I craved the ability to expand my reach so that I could surround them with my arms and hold them tight and tell them we are all going to be okay like I had Johnny and Nate.
I know they did what they did mindlessly, without conscience. When an animal does something vile yet in its nature, you find it abhorrent, but you understand. You can forgive it. Although what Maggie and the Utopia dogs did was beyond abhorrent—the thought of him running from them in his panic with that basket of eggs, their baying and snarling and running him down and when he screamed they tore into him even more. But, ultimately, I could forgive them.
But these are human children. They’ve woken up to this new world and they haven’t a clue what’s happening. I can forgive them.
I put my lips to the loudspeaker handset. I pressed the button. “I forgive you.” It came out loud and authoritative.