by Joe McKinney
“I want Daddy to do it,” she said.
“Connie, honey, Daddy's cleaning the kitchen.”
She raised her voice, each word a stab in my heart. “I want Daddy to do it!”
“Connie,” I said, an edge creeping into my voice.
But she wasn't listening. She turned her face to the wall and at that moment I ceased to exist.
The living room was lit by candlelight.
I'd got my yoga mat out. The copy of Vogue that Chunk was making fun of earlier and an issue of In Shape magazine were both open on the floor in front of me. Every night I did a mix of the yoga routines in those two magazines to clear my head, but after the mess I made of putting Connie to bed, I could tell it wasn't going to work for me that night.
I tried anyway. I spread my legs and bent forward at the waist, putting my hands on the floor as far out in front of me as I could. Then I slowly moved my hands towards my feet in a sweeping arc motion.
Between my legs as I stretched down, I could see Billy in the kitchen, scrounging for something to eat. I noticed he was getting a little pudgy. It was from the MREs (Meals Ready to Eat), I figured, that he always bought at the food distribution center. Those things have got 3000 calories per package, and he'd eat two, sometimes three a day. His favorite was the chicken alfredo. He said it tasted good hot or cold, but I couldn't eat it. Too salty for my tastes.
He came out to the living room, eating a granola bar.
“Looking good from here,” he said.
“Thanks,” I said, but without enthusiasm.
I got down on my back, right knee bent, left leg pointed out straight, about 6 in off the carpet. I raised and lowered my left leg for 25 reps, then switched to my right leg.
The magazine said it would make my thighs and abs look the girl in the picture.
When I was finished, breathing hard, Billy asked, “Have you given any more thought to her party?”
He meant Connie's party. Her sixth birthday was coming up in five days, and it was scaring the ever loving crap out of me.
Little girls should have birthday parties. It's only fair. I wanted Connie to have one. I really did. But everyday I went back to that damn mud pit, the Scar, and when I saw the bodies tumbling in on top of each other, and the horrible smell hovering over the grave pits like some beast out of the Book of Revelations, I felt like I had to tell her no.
“I'm scared, Billy. I'm so damned scared of what could happen.”
He smiled. “I know you are, babe. I know. But I honestly think it'll be okay. We can do this.”
“Are you sure? Billy, are you really? I need you to tell me you believe that.”
“I do,” he said. His eyes were filled with light. “I do.”
“Okay,” I said. “Okay.”
Then a thought shamed me. We didn't have any gifts to give her. Even though we were doing better than most, we had very little. Just enough to buy staple groceries and run the air conditioner during the 105 degree days. I was spending so much time away from home during those days that I didn't even know what my daughter was into anymore. She used to be all about birds, every kind of bird, and even though she still wore the pajamas, I didn't know if birds were still cool.
“Is it still birds?” I asked.
Billy smiled and nodded.
“I wish we could get her something bird-related. I don't know. A book maybe?”
“I've got something to show you,” Billy said, and crossed the room to the bookshelf, where he took down a few books and carefully removed what looked like a cigar box he'd hidden back there.
“What is it?” I whispered.
“Something I've been working on,” he said, “out in the shed, while Connie's in here reading.”
He pulled out a bird and handed it to me. It was hand carved from oak wood, polished smooth, painted with exacting and loving detail. It was a blue jay, a perfect likeness, right down to the wrinkles on its claws.
I took it in my hands delicately, like it was made of glass.
I could feel a tear threatening to break loose.
“Her favorite right now is the gray barn owl. I've already got one of those made too, but it's too big to put in the box. I have it out in the shed. I'm gonna start on a nest for it tomorrow.”
I looked up at him, and the tear fell.
“Hey,” he said, kneeling next to me, taking my face in his hands. “Hey, it's all right. We're all right.”
I closed my eyes and lost myself in his hands. Such wonderful hands.
“I love you so much, Billy. God, so much.”
“I love you too, Lily. Always.”
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Chapter 8
I kept a journal of the flu. It wasn't anything as organized as a diary, more a collection of random thoughts and feelings, and sometimes news clippings. But peppered throughout the entries were little flashes of inspiration, things I thought were as powerful as a wildfire, and just as temporary. I felt I had to put them down on paper, else they'd become ashes, flavorless and without meaning, only the echo of something that had once burned hot within me.
In looking over it now, I saw a lot of those flashes, all of them written in an urgent, slashing hand, like I was trying to carve them into the paper. Yet it pained me to realize that nothing of the desperate need that prompted me to write them down survived.
One passage read:
This morning, through the fog and the clean, brisk smell of the Vespers Creek, two deer. A mother and her baby. Must tell Connie about this, when she's older. Nature can be kind and beautiful, too. Death is not all there is.
I could only guess at the emotions that prompted me to write that, for I no longer had them readily on tap. Like the memory of the scene, the words were no longer vivid and vibrant in my mind. Only gray survived.
H2N2.
My journal was filled with my thoughts and observations about this killer version of the influenza virus. I realized, as I read the journal over again, that I've studied it, taken in details of its killing spree, in the same way that a condemned man might read about the mechanical operation of the gallows. It is both good and horrible to talk with Death when you know he's sitting at your table.
The bird flu is not something that just happened one day in rural China. Every version of the influenza virus, and there are literally millions, regardless of its particular arrangement of hemagglutin and neuraminidase, finds its natural home in the intestinal track of wild aquatic birds. Very rarely does a mutated strain make the jump to the human respiratory system.
Several years back, it was the H5N1 version of the flu that the news told us to fear. We were told rural China, with its millions of chickens interacting with wild migratory birds in abominable conditions, would be ground zero for the worst influenza plague the world had ever seen. Bigger even than the pandemic that wrote the year 1918 on fifty million tombstones the world over.
Few thought of H2N2, for it had already had its time on the world stage back in 1957, and had been eradicated, or so, to our folly, we believed, by the 1968 influenza bug.
Few thought that H2N2, with only the smallest change in its genetic material, could open the door to hell.
We were wrong. My God, we were so very wrong.
A man from the Center for Disease Control had the unfortunate task of addressing my unit at roll call, and anybody who has ever had the misfortune to address a room full of cops on any topic knows what a miserable time of it that poor man had. The containment walls had already been put up around the city, and many of us had lost friends and family to H2N2. It was that poor man's unenviable job to explain to us why, and how, it all happened.
He told us that, like many things that seem to happen overnight, the epidemic decimating our lives was actually a long time in the making.
H2N2 never completely went away when the 1968 version of influenza took over. It survived for nearly seventy years in the colons of a common San Antonio pest, the Mexican grackle
. Every November, millions of the birds descend on San Antonio, blanketing the city in bird shit so white and plentiful that you might've actually believed it was snow—that is, if it weren't still 90 degrees outside.
This bird snow was loaded with a virus bomb, brought to us the November before the plague actually hit.
A few people got sick that winter. There were, maybe, 500 cases. All of them minor. None of them even a blip on the radar of those who track coming plagues.
And then, six months later, ground zero exploded. A woman named Reina Villarreal owned a large, weather-beaten home near the Produce Terminal on San Antonio's shallow west side. Ms. Villarreal rented out her spare rooms to ten illegal immigrants from Coahuila, Mexico. These men worked hard, and made little. They spent their days in the Produce Terminal, where almost all of the commercial farms in South Texas sent their harvest for national distribution. They spent their nights at Cattleman's Square, the Tejano music capitol of the world.
These men also ate freely of the chickens Ms. Villarreal kept in her backyard. These chickens ate their feed off the ground, the same ground that the winter before had been blanketed with grackle snow.
Beginning in May, things started happening quickly. On May 3, Southwest Baptist Hospital reported 23 cases of SARS-like symptoms, including scorched lungs, rampant secondary pneumonia, and even the horrible blue footprints of cyanosis.
On May 4, there were five hundred and thirty-three cases reported to the CDC.
On May 7, a state of emergency was declared in San Antonio and the surrounding regions.
On May 13, every one of San Antonio's forty-three hospitals had exceeded their maximum capacity and started turning people away at the door.
On the night of May 17, the military put up the containment walls around the city.
Death was everywhere, and we were locked in with it.
All schools, public and private, were closed by order of the Metropolitan Health District, as were most businesses. FEMA promised to keep the flow of supplies coming into San Antonio, even though most everyone was out of work by that point and couldn't afford to buy anything.
The closing of the schools wasn't a bad thing for Connie. For weeks before the start of her first year, Billy and I had been trying to ease her fears of the big change.
“It'll be just like going to daycare,” I told her, though that didn't convince her. She grabbed me around the waist and told me she wouldn't go.
Then, three weeks after that messy scene, I told her she wouldn't be going to school after all. “Mommy and Daddy will be teaching you,” I told her. “How do you feel about that?”
“That's fine,” she said, and shrugged, like it was no big deal and why was I making such a fuss about it anyway.
But as she walked away, I saw her reflection in the glass door of the oven, and she was smiling.
The little devil.
It was Thursday, May 18, around eleven o'clock at night, less than a day after the military had begun installing walls around the city, effectively locking us into a prison.
Officers of every rank, from every unit on the Department, had been mobilized to help maintain order. I had been teamed up with two Traffic officers. The three of us were working a road block on Highway 90 West, turning back cars that were packed with scared and angry people.
Military helicopters, like giant angry hornets, sprinted up and down the length of the wall, still under construction in some places.
A man's voice, recorded, for the same words were repeated over and over again in the same threatening monotone, warned the scattered crowds not to approach the holes in the wall. The voice warned that deadly force would be used. The message played in both English and Spanish.
The two Traffic officers argued back and forth with each other as to whether or not the military would actually do such a thing. One of them was in the Reserves and he said no way. You'd never get a U.S. soldier to fire on Americans. It would never happen.
In the bluish glow of the floodlights mounted on top of the wall, I could see four young men, teenagers really, being ignorantly defiant the way teenagers feel they have to be, sprinting across an open field to my right. They ducked behind cactus and stands of cedar, but they were constantly making their way toward a gap in the wall.
A nearby helicopter dipped its nose to the ground and raced to the patch of sky above the boys.
A spotlight hit the ground, lighting them up.
The boys kept running.
An amplified voice from the helicopter ordered them to turn around. They didn't.
They were almost to the wall, not stopping, and everyone in the assembled crowds held their breaths.
The helicopter rotated, turning its flank to the boys. The scene was frozen for the thinnest of moments, and then four quick bursts from the helicopter's guns dropped the boys.
The assembled crowds drew in a collective breath. They were quietly horrified. Then, like a wave, a tumultuous roar of protest erupted from their ranks. Angry shouting filled the night. Volleys of rocks were thrown at the helicopter.
I realized then that I was still holding my breath.
A few words about the wall.
If you've ever wondered just how badly the Government can fuck with you if it wants to, look at the wall around San Antonio.
The wall is made up of interlocking plastic blocks, most of which are red, though some are white for no particular reason that I can figure out, and a few, bleached of their color by the ferocious South Texas sun, have faded to a pink the same color as a mountain laurel blossom. In the first few days of the quarantine, the wall was nothing more than hurricane fencing laced with razor wire. In some places, there wasn't even that. But then, and it was done with shocking speed and efficiency, they brought in the interlocking plastic blocks.
Now that it's complete, the wall forms a giant circle around San Antonio. This circle is one 190 miles in circumference. The total area inside the wall is 2830 miles.
Each block is 20 ft high. They are 12 ft wide at the base, 7 ft at the top. Each block weighs 7525 lbs. Each block is 40 ft long.
There are, on average, 132 blocks per mile. The total number of blocks is 25,080.
Reportedly, each block cost $3000.00 to make. The total cost of the wall was therefore $75, 240, 000.00 and change.
Rumor has it that the government started building the pieces to the wall years before the epidemic in San Antonio—not as a means to quarantine a city, but to keep the Mexicans from jumping the border.
“Mommy, what's Mr. Wilkerson doing?”
Connie was on her belly, face pressed against the living room window, looking at the house across the street.
I got down on my belly next to her and nudged her playfully in the ribs. Even in late June, I'd still been able to manage a smile.
Looking through the window, I saw Bob Wilkerson hanging black bunting on his front door. Further down the street, two other doors had bunting on them, but Connie hadn't seen them yet.
I watched Bob Wilkerson. His shoulders were stooped, his walk slow. Even from across the street I could tell his eyes looked swollen and dead.
I wondered if it was his wife Susan or one of his two sons.
“What's he doing, Mommy?”
How could I explain that to her? My God, how?
“Honey, that black ribbon means he's lost somebody he loves very much.”
“Who?”
“I don't know. Maybe Mrs. Wilkerson. Or maybe Bobby or Anthony.”
“How did they get lost?”
I drew in a breath through clenched teeth. “They died, honey. That's what the ribbon means.”
She thought about that. Turned it over in her mind the way bright children do when they discover something strange about the world. I wanted her to be free of that knowledge. I wanted her to be five years old, untouched by the horrors of the world. But at the same time I knew that was both unpractical and unwise.
“He looks sad, Mommy,” she said.
; “He is, honey. Very sad.”
“Does the ribbon make him feel better, Mommy?”
“I don't know, honey.”
Connie watched Mr. Wilkerson. Watched him watching the bunting.
She turned to me suddenly, and in a conspiratorially quiet voice, she said, “Mommy, I don't think it does.”
Somebody sent me a forwarded email a few months after the wall went up. It showed a picture of one of those bumper sticker ribbons, like the ones that say SUPPORT OUR TROOPS, only this one said REMEMBER SAN ANTONIO.
I thought about my job at the Scar, thought about all those bodies crammed into unmarked mass graves, and I thought, Ain't that a great notion. Remember San Antonio. How quaint.
Chunk was raised by his maternal grandmother, a woman about one-third his size, but twice as tough. She took a big black boy who was destined to become yet another east side gangsta thug and whooped his ass daily until he'd finally had enough and joined the police department.
On a brutally hot morning in early June, we were called away from the Scar to the Medina Health Clinic on the east side. Chunk's grandmother was there, dying by slow strangulation. The inside of her lungs had been scorched by acute respiratory distress syndrome, and her body was being eaten alive by its own immune system. Her skin was covered in blisters, and as she moved, feebly, upon the floor of the hallway, for every inch of that small clinic had been packed with the dead and the dying and the grieving, the blisters popped. She made a crackling, popping sound as she rolled over to say goodbye, and the sound reminded me of a child playing with bubble wrap.
That woman, that great, good soul, had become yet another canvas upon which H2N2 had painted death.
Later, we stood on the white brick steps of the clinic, not speaking, for there were no words up to the task.
Chunk couldn't afford a grave site, or even a coffin. He dreaded taking that beautiful woman to a mass grave at the Scar.
Billy made a coffin, his first.
That evening, as a warm breeze blew through the oaks near the back of our property, Billy and Chunk hacked into the ground with picks and shovels.
Chunk's voice faltered during the prayer. Billy finished it for him.
