Laura came into the doorway, and Eddie saw both men keep themselves from looking. She was showing a lot of skin in that bikini top. “I witnessed it,” she said. “He was threatening my husband. All Eddie did was ask him to leave.”
“You’re a liar!” called Bill Peters.
Paul bobbed his head judiciously. “Well, that confuses things,” he said.
“It’s pretty straightforward, actually,” Laura said. “Now you can get off our lawn. I don’t know you.”
“Ma’am, I—” Paul said.
“I’ll citizen’s arrest you,” Laura said.
She closed the door, and they looked out the living room window as Paul and Bill Peters confabulated on the sidewalk. Bill Peters pointed to his head. When they walked away, he lifted his middle finger up behind him again.
Laura gasped.
“No, screw you,” she shouted out the window.
They’d finished the last of the juice. Eddie’s knee was swollen and purplish below the kneecap, but he could bend it and walk without much pain. Laura had convinced him not to go for the car, but Eddie couldn’t see another way around it. The Davises had been out in Patty’s minivan, and Mike Sr. thought that maybe things were clearing out on 29, though he couldn’t say for sure. “You can ride up and down University, but the Beltway’s the same,” Patty told him. They’d brought Eddie and Laura back a twenty-ounce soda. “That’s what we could find. Twenty bucks. It’s just guys who set up in front of that convenience store on Carroll. They’ve got a couple of coolers.”
Laura gave her a twenty, the last of their cash.
Eddie said to her, “I’ll ask Mike Sr. to take me up.”
“Then we’ll both go,” she said.
When they asked, he said something about gas, but then agreed, and they got into the minivan.
“My car has gas,” Eddie said, but it was after the fact.
They were alone on the road, and as they passed the empty spillway, Eddie tapped on the window opposite it to keep her from turning her head.
“What?” Laura asked, looking where Eddie pointed.
The spillway was on the southbound side, sheltered by the ravine, and the heat blurred the daylight so that the black trees at its edges seemed to disappear into the woods. A little farther on, they saw a cop car parked in a driveway. Eddie didn’t remember seeing it before. He leaned forward into the front, hovering near her headrest.
“Look!” Laura said, pointing at the cop car.
“He probably lives there,” Mike Sr. said.
“Still,” Eddie said.
As they came to the bridge, Mike Sr. stopped the minivan, and held his foot down on the brake. Debris was spread across the road.
“I’ll get a flat tire.”
Eddie got out and used the inside of his foot to scrape as much of the broken glass and plastic as he could to the center of the road. It pinched his knee, and he switched to the other foot. By the time he was done, he was limping again.
“There,” he said.
With the way the cars were positioned, there was a little channel they could navigate through. It looked like they’d been moved. Mike Sr. went slowly, almost scraping against the safety wall.
When they’d gotten through, he stopped the van again. “Hold on,” he said. “We should check the cars.”
“I think we should just keep going,” Laura said.
“There’s nobody in them,” Eddie said.
“I’m talking about checking the cup holders and stuff,” Mike Sr. said.
He parked right where he was and the three of them walked back down to the wrecks. Some of the doors were so bashed in they couldn’t get them open, and some of the doors were open already. On one of the dashboards was a spill that looked like syrup.
“Gross,” Laura said.
In another car, they found a blue sports drink, two-thirds full. It was as hot as broth, but they took turns sipping. Heat rose from the asphalt.
“I drink worse than this on the job sometimes,” Mike Sr. said, “when my workers leave the thermos out.”
Eddie turned and looked down the highway, the way they’d come. Though he couldn’t see it, there was a pull-off just down the road, a little gravel lot with a grassy patch and a picnic table, and he remembered stopping there the summer before, coming back from visiting his college roommate Jason’s family. Laura had looked ill at ease, jutting forward in her seat like she had a stomachache. He’d thought it would do her good getting out right then, and they’d sat at the little table in the fresh air and listened to the cicadas in the woods. There’d been shade and the trickle of a creek below.
He remembered it so clearly—the way she’d stared down into the grain of the picnic table. Eddie was godfather to Jason’s little girl, Ellie, and they’d spent the afternoon in the yard of their town house. They’d eaten corn on the cob and grilled burgers, and he’d gotten Ellie to eat some spinach by joking with her. “You’ll be the strongest girl in school!” he’d trumpeted, and she’d smiled greenly, fragments of the leaves stuck between her tiny teeth. Yet Laura had been so glum.
He wondered what that pull-off looked like now, scorched and barren.
She stood with Mike Sr., the two of them leaning out over the safety wall. Mike Sr.’s voice was slow and full of reverence. “What. The. Fuck?” he said.
Laura gripped the wall with both her palms.
“Look at this,” he said.
Down below, the riverbed was empty, just sand. A scar through the middle was pocked and rust colored, just as it had been below the Beltway. Often, when Eddie drove across this bridge on his way home from work, he’d watch the sun glisten above the water as it set—the view spanning five seconds of drive time that engulfed him as if, rather than being suspended above it, he’d driven into the water’s depths. He would look out and feel it all around him, the river coming up to the base of the trees, curving back into what looked like wilderness. It had been like that just two days before.
And now the water was gone. It must have been gone when he ran through the wrecks on the bridge to get home, but he’d been too furious with horn noise to notice.
“The trees!” Laura exclaimed as if she were pointing out a rainbow.
“Must have been a fire,” Mike Sr. said. “A big one. They must have drained it since.”
“Can they drain a river?” she asked.
“This is a reservoir,” he said. “You were wondering where our water went? Here’s your answer. It’s been diverted. That means some other place in the city has it.” He thought on that a moment.
“Goddamn,” he said.
Eddie watched Laura’s face for signs of panic. “You’re not an expert,” he said to Mike Sr., but his voice was weak, almost a whisper, and Mike Sr. didn’t hear.
“Look how far it goes.” Mike Sr. waved his hand into the distance where the band of charred trees stretched along the path of the river.
“What could cause that?” Laura asked. There was a strange excitement in her voice. Eddie backed away from the wall.
“Must be chemicals,” Mike Sr. said. “I’ve never seen anything like it. A chemical leak or something. Something flammable that could travel on water.”
“Fuel?” Eddie suggested. “I think that happened once in Cleveland.”
“Fuel, maybe. Yeah. If it’s gone that far, it could have messed with the power grid.”
Laura said, “You think it could have traveled to the Bay?”
“Doubt it.”
“That’s where her parents live,” Eddie explained.
Mike Sr. was leaning dangerously far over the safety wall. His hands were pressed on the outside of it. When he stepped back, his palms were black.
“Look at this!” he said, holding them up. “The flames came up this high.”
Laura looked at Mike Sr.’s blackened palms. Then she looked at Eddie. “Where’s your car?”
“It’s up a ways. There was a wreck here. It backed everything up.”
“Yo
ur car wasn’t near the wreck?”
Eddie shook his head. “Uh-uh,” he said.
“So which way did you run?”
“This way,” he said.
“Through all of this?”
“Yeah.”
“Were people hurt?”
“What?”
“Were people hurt when you got here?”
“No,” he said.
“How do you know that?”
“There was no one doing anything—I looked. No one was hurt. There weren’t even any emergency workers.”
“That doesn’t mean no one was hurt.”
She began walking through the cars, opening the doors to peer inside. The sound of each door she closed echoed across the bridge.
“So, you just left,” she called back to him.
“I was worried about you,” he said.
“Why?” she asked. “I wasn’t anywhere near here.”
He watched her poking her head inside, one car after another. Mike Sr. looked at him with a blank expression.
“There were already people helping,” Eddie said. “Lots of them. They didn’t need me getting in the way.”
Mike Sr. looked down at the broken plastic in front of his shoes. When he looked up at Eddie, he said, “Wives,” and smiled benignly.
She could be impossible sometimes. On that drive coming home from Jason’s, he’d pulled over to lighten her mood, to cheer her up with the last of a summer day. He’d slid down the slope to the creek below and tried to get her interested in skipping rocks. He’d wanted to be joyous, even childish with her. It was okay to be playful sometimes. Just to breathe in the fragrant air. Just to run.
Now he went over to a little Honda. It was against the safety wall, right at the halfway point of the bridge. On the leather console between the seats was a brown film. Eddie saw that it was skin. There was still hair at the edges. His stomach rose up and he knelt onto the pavement, putting his head down until it touched the hard surface.
“Look!” Mike Sr. called. He was holding a hatchet. “Found it in one of the trunks.”
“What are you going to do with it?” Laura asked.
Mike Sr. eyed the space beyond the bridge. “See how far it can fly.”
Eddie stood and moved quickly from the car. He bit down on his voice to keep it from coming out.
“Should we report any of this?” he said softly.
“Report it to who?” Mike Sr. said.
“What about that cop car we saw? You think he’s really there?”
Mike Sr. held the hatchet with both hands above his head. He took a step and chucked it, end over end, off the bridge.
“Geroni-mo,” he yelled.
As Laura walked toward him, Eddie positioned himself between her and the Honda, boxing her toward the minivan.
“What did you find?” he asked her.
“Nothing.”
They got back in and drove a little ways up until they couldn’t get through. The cars were too thick where they’d been abandoned. Eddie got out and found his car where he’d left it. The key was still in the ignition, but when he turned it, the car was dead.
“Let’s go,” he said. “I’m still penned in. I can’t get out.”
“Where’s the fire department?” Laura said. “Shouldn’t they have been here cleaning this up?”
“Yeah,” Mike Sr. said. “Where are they? That’s the million-dollar question.”
He made a five-point turn with his palm resting on the bottom of the steering wheel. His face was serene. He said, “Let’s not tell Patty about all this. No need for her to worry about something we don’t know anything about. She’s got to deal with Mike Jr.”
“Okay,” Laura said.
“This could be something simple,” he said. “They’ve got the water company around here working for us. A lot goes on that we don’t see.”
“But you’ve never seen anything like this.”
“I’m in landscaping, sweetie. I’m no engineer.”
“They can shut off Niagara Falls,” Eddie said. “Did you know that?”
“If they can shut off Niagara Falls,” Mike Sr. said, “they can do anything.”
She put candles around the living room and they sat in the heat of the flickering darkness.
“What color is your pee?” Eddie asked.
“I don’t know. It’s too dark in there. It just goes down the hole.”
“We should be peeing in jars.”
“How will that help?”
“It’s good to know what color it is.”
“I’ll start tomorrow.”
“What did you drink today?”
“That blue stuff with Mike Sr.”
“Did we finish off the juice today or yesterday?”
“Today. This morning.”
“What else do we have?”
“We have the rest of that soda.”
Eddie went into the kitchen. The soda existed only in four puddles—one in each of the plastic nubs that served as the container’s base. It was a sip’s worth. He brought it to Laura.
“Here,” he said. “Drink.”
“What about you?”
“I had some already.”
“I think we should go to my parents’,” she said. “We could walk.”
“How?”
“We walked back here.”
“Your parents are thirty miles away.”
“We could do it, though, if we had to. We’d just keep walking. We could walk over the Bay Bridge.”
“And what would we drink on the way?” he said. “It must have been a hundred degrees today. We’d die out there.”
“We could bring supplies.”
“If we had supplies to bring, this wouldn’t be an issue.”
“Try the phone again,” she said.
“The phone isn’t working.”
“Just try.”
He picked up the phone. The battery was dead. “Look,” he said.
The candles sent dim golden light to the edge of where she was. He could see her spread out on the sofa, lying on her back.
“We have to stay where we are right now,” he said.
When she didn’t answer, he thought maybe she was thinking about what he’d said.
“Your dad’s the most competent guy I know,” he said. “They’re on well water. He can get down into it if he needs to. And they keep all that bottled stuff in the garage. They never run out of bottled water.”
“That’s why we should go. Going there could save us.”
“Jesus, Laura.” He squeezed the phone and stood over her. “We don’t need to be saved. You heard what they said about oh-eight. They didn’t have power for six days.”
“But they had water.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, what?”
He thought of Mrs. Kasolos’s jug, buried in the woods. There was no reason for them to be arguing like this.
“This is stupid,” he said.
He took the flashlight off the kitchen table.
“Where are you going?”
“Just stay here,” he said. “Please? I’m just going out for a while.”
“You can’t,” she said. “You can’t just go out anymore. Not when everything’s like this.”
But Eddie left anyway. He waited on the sidewalk, thinking that she’d follow, but she didn’t. Through the picture window, he saw her shadow against the candle’s flickering light.
He walked, and at the base of the hill, he could smell wood smoke. His shoes beat against the ground too loudly for him to hear anything else. But when he stopped, the beating carried on. It was his blood pumping in his ears.
Near the aluminum rail, a deserted campfire released a dim gray cloud into the air. There were cans on the ground, a dozen of them, and he bent and picked up each, but they were empty. A white bra was in a pile. He took a stick and raised it by its strap.
In the woods, he tried to be silent. Even in the shadow of the trail, there were darker shadow
s, and he hid himself in them. When he came to the place along the streambed where he thought he should cross, he held his fingers over the front of the flashlight before he clicked it on so that the beam was divided and weak. He swung it back and forth but saw none of the glint from the silver threads, and so he kept on walking. In the dark, it was easy to get confused. He kept the flashlight on, pointed at the ground. The threads would reflect with a quick flash—he could see it in his mind, and his mind projected out onto the ground so that he had to stop several times to swing the beam again and again to prove that what he thought he’d seen wasn’t really there.
Finally, he saw it, but it was small, and he pressed in closer with the light. There was only one silver strand. He crossed the streambed and shone the beam over the sand on the opposite side. He walked ahead and saw another gash of silver in the ground when the light caught it. The cluster had been moved.
Someone had scattered it.
Eddie crouched and ran his fingers through his hair. He made a fist of it and pulled.
Whoever it was must have been watching him as he walked from Mrs. Kasolos’s with the jug on his shoulder. They’d either taken it for themselves or disturbed his landmarks to keep it hidden where it was.
Another pom-pom strand was in the rocks. He followed it up the slope where there were trees close together, but none of them were as close as the trees where he’d buried the jug. The rocks were too low, none of them larger than a soccer ball. He picked his way between them, going back along the opposite bank. Whoever it had been could have taken the strands and strewn them a hundred yards down just to confuse him.
Farther up, the bank sloped higher and was soft beneath the rocks, but there were still no boulders. The ash on the trees was only on the sides that faced the stream.
He looked around to get his bearings, but he’d gone either too far ahead or too far back. He waved the flashlight beam over the ground but found no more silver strands. There was a smooth rock at his feet and he sat there and rested his head in his hands, feeling his fingers dry and soft with ash.
Bill Peters.
It must have been him. He could still see him walking away down the street, Laura opening the window to shout after him. Eddie should have followed. Bill Peters was the kind of cankerous man to fester in a neighborhood. He could have been just around the corner from Mrs. Kasolos’s, hiding in a bush. He must have watched Eddie carry the jug into the park, following at a distance.
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