The Extinction Event

by David Black

  “Wiper fluid used to be ninety-nine cents a gallon,” the driver said. “Now, it’s five times that. Why not save a little, using Windex, until winter?”

  As they passed Big Pig Bar-B-Q, smoke from the outside pit billowed across the highway into the car.

  It smelled to Jack like Robert’s burning body.

  3

  Jack climbed out of the car a few blocks away from Bix’s one-story cottage. The fifty-year-old rust-colored asphalt shingles were stripped away from under the front window, revealing the tar paper beneath.

  Bix’s truck wasn’t parked in the driveway. Two clunkers were on the lawn.

  The wind dropped. The electric wires, which had been singing in the breeze, went silent.

  Jack hobbled up the walk to the house, his cut pant leg flapping.

  Jack opened the door. Bix never locked the house.

  Bix wasn’t home.

  The house smelled of old bacon grease.

  Jack stumbled into the living room and eased himself onto the couch.

  He figured he’d just remove Caroline from his life. Bit by bit. Like shrapnel.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  1

  At dawn, Jack sat bolt upright on the couch in Bix’s cottage. Wide awake.

  His pant leg—the previous night, he’d flopped down to sleep without getting undressed—was crusted with new blood. The couch cushion was also crusted, so thick, it flaked when Jack moved.

  From outside, Jack heard a Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings song. That must have been what woke him up.

  Aching, light-headed from loss of blood, Jack eased himself up from the couch and took a few loping steps to the door of the cottage, which he opened.

  Rays of green shot from the horizon into the dawn sky, like an opening fan.

  In front of the shack, Jack’s brother, Bix, was smashing the windshield of one of the clunkers—a battered Chevy.

  The music had changed to “The Night Hank Williams Came to Town.”

  “County fair’s next week, little brother,” Bix said. “Got to get ready for the demolition derby.”

  “I’m too old,” Jack said.

  “You wasn’t too old last year,” Bix said, eying Jack’s bloody pant leg and newly battered face.

  “You got to get yourself a new hobby,” Bix said, nodding at Jack’s injuries.

  “This year,” Jack said about the demolition derby, “you ride solo.”

  “We ain’t never missed a year since you was nineteen,” Bix said.

  Bix swung the crowbar backhanded and left a spiderweb crack in a side window.

  “I got another crowbar,” Bix said.

  “I need a gun,” Jack said.

  “You got a gun,” Bix said.

  “Two guns,” Jack said.

  “Crowbar’s better,” Bix said, “for this work.”

  “Both untraceable,” Jack said.

  “You ask Mama?” Bix asked.

  “I don’t want to put Mama Lucky on the spot,” Jack said.

  “But I’m family, huh?” Bix said.

  “Not the kind of spot I mean,” Jack said. “I go to Mama, you find out, you go bawl her out.”

  “Then,” Bix said, “I whop you upside the head for not coming to me.”

  Bix was smiling, but Jack knew how serious he was.

  “You know I can get you what you want,” Bix said. “Why go outside the family? You got something you want to tell me?”

  “Where’s the crowbar?” Jack asked.

  Bix reached into his battered white Chevy truck and handed it to Jack.

  Jack swung the crowbar, shattering first one then the other taillight. Despite the stab of pain in his side.

  “Your condition,” Bix said, “you sure you should be doing that?”

  “Fuck, yes,” Jack said.

  2

  By the time Caroline arrived, Jack and Bix had stripped most of the glass and chrome, anything that might shatter during the demolition derby, from the clunker.

  “You weren’t home,” Caroline said. “You didn’t answer your cell. I thought you might be here.”

  Jack was prying off trim.

  “No one’s going to bother you,” Jack said. “Not with your uncle, your family around.”

  “That wasn’t why I was upset you left,” Caroline said.

  Bix was welding the junker’s doors shut. In his plastic goggles he looked like a BEM—bug-eyed monster—from a 1950s sci-fi movie, an effect heightened by the acetylene torch that seemed to shoot fire from his alien hand.

  “I think we should call the cops,” Caroline said.

  “You trust them?” Jack said.

  He circled the clunker. His leg throbbed.

  “Someone should give your sister a good spanking,” Jack said.

  “Wouldn’t she just love that!” Caroline said.

  Jack gave the side trim a crack with the crowbar.

  “Having fun?” Caroline asked.

  Jack handed her the crowbar, which she swung with all her might at the side of the car.

  “Everyone should keep a car like this in their yard,” Caroline said. “There’d be fewer wars.”

  “Pry off the trim,” Jack said.

  Caroline did, working her way along the side of the car.

  “Does Nicole know what happened to Robert?” Jack asked.

  Caroline nodded.

  “Big news in the local papers,” she said. “Even over the border here in New York.”

  “I always said Robert was a real ball of fire,” Jack said.

  Caroline scowled. Not amused.

  “The funeral’s this afternoon,” Caroline said.

  The trim clattered to the stony ground.

  “By the way,” Caroline said, as she handed the crowbar back to Jack, “I saw someone standing outside our house last night.”

  Jack froze.

  “Across the street,” Caroline said. “I couldn’t sleep. I was on my way to get a glass of water and happened to glance out the window. I’m sure he was watching the house.”

  Jack held the crowbar so tightly his knuckles went white.

  “And all these years I’ve been afraid of aliens and vampires,” she said.

  3

  “I’m not going to discuss it,” Caroline said, as she and Jack crossed the grass toward Robert’s funeral.

  “A guy’s watching your house—”

  “Maybe.”

  “—and you think you don’t need a gun?”

  A dozen-and-a-half people were gathered around the grave.

  “I can’t kill anyone, Jack,” Caroline said.

  “A guy’s squeezing your neck,” Jack said, “you can’t breathe, you know you’re dying, and you tell me you wouldn’t pull the trigger.”

  Caroline walked faster. Away from Jack.

  Bix had promised to get Jack two guns. And a third for himself.

  “When I’m not around,” Jack had asked Bix, “keep an eye on her. When you can.”

  The tombstones lined up in neat rows looked like pieces on a giant Stratego board, as if someone were playing a cosmic game against—who? What?

  God? Nature? Fate?

  In the old cemetery to the right, all the tombstones were leaning or knocked over, as if whoever was losing had tried to end the game—against God, nature, fate—by upsetting the board.

  Weatherworn skulls grinned lopsidedly from the old stones. A dancing skeleton, wearing victor’s laurels, held in one boney hand the moon and in the other a smiling, spiky sun. A poker-faced Adam and Eve stood on either side of the Tree of Knowledge—or Life—staring down any passerby who might notice their effaced nudity.

  Demons holding arrows of death.

  Fierce angels blowing Trumpets of Doom.

  Thunderbolts from stone clouds striking a stone earth.

  God’s wrath.

  God’s vengeance.

  Human suffering.

  Human evanescence.

  Jack passed a grave decorated with a small, ta
ttered American flag—a military flag with fringe—and a black-and-white flag in honor of missing Vietnam POWs. Along with a young man’s birth and death, the tombstone was engraved with: Hold Your Mud.

  A man in a seersucker suit and black-and-white spectator shoes caught up to Jack and asked, “Do you know where the pet cemetery is?”

  Jack shook his head no.

  The man shrugged and handed Jack a business card: Pet bereavement: three sessions. Pet genealogies our specialty.

  “For a thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past,” the minister droned, “and as a watch in the night…”

  Jack took his place next to Caroline.

  Under the bandages, his leg itched.

  When he breathed, his ribs ached.

  Across Robert’s grave, Jack saw Keating. His chin seemed longer, the pouches under his eyes grayer, his cheekbones sharper. His face was crosshatched with fine lines, as if it were covered with a web of burlap.

  But he stood erect, almost military in his posture, in a dark hat, dark suit, white shirt, dark bowtie, and black shoes so polished they reflected—Jack thought—the scudding clouds.

  A trick of light?

  Keating moved, not his head, but his eyes, and fixed his gaze on Jack’s face.

  “He knows,” Caroline whispered, “we were with Robert when he died.”

  Watching Keating’s raptor’s eyes, Jack figured she was right.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  1

  Jack caught up with Shapiro at his home on Amity Street. Shapiro had dodged calls at his office. He spotted Jack entering Judie’s, where Jack had been told Shapiro was having lunch, and slipped out unseen.

  Jack had to ring the front doorbell six times before Shapiro reluctantly answered.

  “I’m busy,” Shapiro said.

  “Why did Keating Flowers get you fired?” Jack asked.

  Without answering, Shapiro turned and headed along a hallway, decorated with old movie posters: Paul Muni in I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend: Bug Vaudeville, Come Blow Your Horn.…

  On the wall next to the door at the end of the hall was a faded New Yorker cartoon of two modern bearded prophets, one holding a sign Love thine enemies and the other holding a sign Love thy neighbor.

  The caption—one prophet saying to the other: I’m telling you for the last time—keep the hell off this corner.

  In his cluttered study at the end of the hall, Shapiro sat at the old walnut kneehole desk. He hit play on his computer video.

  Music came on. A song in German.

  On the screen, over Shapiro’s shoulder, Jack saw happy teenagers playing soccer, couples strolling in a park, kids romping in a kindergarten.…

  “Theresienstadt,” Shapiro said. “The Nazi’s model concentration camp,” Shapiro said. “Where they sent the intellectuals. The artists. Like Kurt Gerron.”

  Shapiro explained: In the Thirties, Kurt Gerron was one of Germany’s most accomplished and successful actors and directors.

  Gerron played Police Chief Brown in the original stage and film versions of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Die Dreigroschenoper. He was one of the stars of Josef von Sternberg’s Der blaue Engel—The Blue Angel.

  “He acted in or directed around seventy films,” Shapiro said.

  Unable to work in Germany after April 1, 1933, when, due to the boycott of Jewish businesses, Gerron was replaced by an Aryan director in the middle of a day’s shooting, Gerron moved around Europe, each move a step down the economic and theatrical ladder. In 1942 he ended up in Amsterdam performing cabaret with one of his former leading ladies, Camilla Spira, at the Jewish Theater and, finally, as part of the Entjudung—the Jew-cleansing process of the Netherlands—at the transit camp Westerbork, where the camp commandant, SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer Lieutenant Colonel Albert Konrad Gemmeker, instituted a Monday-night cabaret on a stage made from a demolished synagogue to entertain the deportees who were to leave eleven o’clock Tuesday morning for the death camps in the east.

  “Gemmeker opened the cabaret in honor of the forty thousandth inmate to be deported to the death camps,” Shapiro said.

  In all, over 104,000 Jews—along with Gypsies and Communists—were shipped out of Westerbork.

  “On February 25, 1944, Gerron was shipped out in a cattle car along with Spira and her six-year-old daughter,” Shapiro said. “In the cattle car, Gerron held his coat to shield the daughter when she had to use the bathroom, a single bucket in the corner.”

  At Theresienstadt, Gerron resumed the cabarets. As the Allies landed at Normandy and fought their way east, the Nazis had Gerron direct a propaganda film The Fuhrer Gives the Jews a City.

  Jack nodded at a stack of printouts, CDs, art catalogs, books.…

  Music in Terezin, 1941–1945, Theresienstadt: The Town the Nazis Gave to the Jews, I Never Saw Another Butterfly … Children’s Drawings and Poems from Terezin Concentration Camp …

  Books on concentration-camp memoirs, concentration-camp culture, concentration-camp humor. Laughter in Hell.

  “Something you’re working on?” Jack asked.

  Shapiro gave Jack a wry sidelong look.

  “You might say that,” he said.

  “A little out of your field,” Jack said.

  Silently, they watched the images from Theresienstadt.

  “Sixty or so years ago,” Shapiro said. “Not so long ago.”

  On-screen, the documentary explained that on July 23, 1944, Red Cross observers visited the camp.

  The observer was so impressed by the inmates’ chorus, he made the camp commandant Karl Rahm promise never to separate them—a promise Rahm kept: After the Red Cross left, Rahm sent everyone in the chorus to the gas chambers at Auschwitz together.

  On-screen, hundreds of marching Nazis made up a choreographed swastika.

  “Busby Berkeley, right?” Shapiro said. “It’s all show biz.”

  The marching swastika turned like the gear of a great machine.

  “I’m beginning to understand why you were fired,” Jack said.

  2

  An ancient woman shimmered into the doorway. Shapiro’s grandmother.

  She still has sex appeal, Jack thought. Star power.

  “I wants to be an actor lady…,” Shapiro’s grandmother sang in a surprisingly robust, husky alto, “be in a play up on Broadway…”

  She wore a wrapper with big orange flowers. When she swayed her hips, the cloth flowed.…

  “Ms. Lucas!” Shapiro called his grandmother’s nurse.

  “I heard that song when I was five years old,” Shapiro’s grandmother was saying. “On the Boardwalk.”

  “Ms. Lucas,” Shapiro called, “could you come and get Bubbe?”

  “At Atlantic City,” Shapiro’s grandmother was saying.

  Jack expected a large, imposing nurse to appear in the hallway behind Shapiro’s grandmother. But Ms. Lucas turned out to be a sexy young woman in her early twenties, with flame-red hair and catlike eyes.

  “Come on, Sadie,” Ms. Lucas said to Shapiro’s grandmother.

  “You should have seen me when I was young,” Sadie said. “I was the girl on the Carolina Cigar band.”

  “I saw a picture,” Jack said. “In your grandson’s office.”

  “My tits were beginning to sag,” Sadie said, “but I still had the best ass in the business!”

  “Dr. Shapiro has work to do,” Ms. Lucas said.

  “You got a pretty good caboose, yourself,” Sadie said to Ms. Lucas.

  “Who,” Ms. Lucas said, “would’ve ever thought I’d consider bringing sexual harassment charges against a hundred-year-old woman?”

  “Tara-ra-ra-boom-de-a!” Sadie sang, giving a grind and bump.

  “We’ll watch a movie,” Ms. Lucas said.

  Ms. Lucas started to lead Sadie out, but Sadie stopped. Turned coyly back to Jack and said in a very uncoy voice, “Watch your back, mister. They think getting old means getting simple.”

&n
bsp; “The world’s a concentration camp,” Shapiro said. “We try to mock up a civilization. Like Gerron’s movie. For show.”

  3

  “When I was fired,” Shapiro said, “I tried to explain to everyone it was because I was going to testify about electrical pollution.”

  “A conspiracy, huh?” Jack said.

  “Everyone said I was crazy. Said conspiracies don’t exist. But sometimes conspiracies exist. Sometimes they’re big. Sometimes they have awful consequences.”

  “You’re just trying to make what happened to you bearable by making it part of something bigger?” Jack said.

  “The world is filled with conspiracies,” Shapiro said. “Don’t tell so-and-so we’re having a party after work, just the three of us are getting together, no one else—but conspiracy is just another tool. A compass. Let’s you tell where you are in the wilderness.”

  Jack looked out his window at the corduroy sky.

  “You think I’m paranoid?” Shapiro asked. “You think I’ve got a persecution complex?”

  “Things just don’t happen that way,” Jack said.

  “Then why did Flowers get me fired when I got involved in the lawsuit about electrical pollution?” Shapiro said.

  “Why would Flowers care?” Jack asked.

  An hour later, Caroline arrived and told Jack, “Keating is on the board of Mohawk Electric.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  1

  “There are no coincidences,” Jack once had told Caroline.

  “Try this,” Jack said.

  Jack was talking to Caroline from across the top of the clunker Bix had moved to Jack’s shack—Jack’s demolition derby car, which Jack was painting.

  “Frank finds out Jean’s suffering from electrical pollution. Thinks there may be money in this.”

  “A class-action suit against Mohawk,” Caroline said.

  “He finds out about Shapiro’s research,” Caroline said. “About why Shapiro attacked Keating. He had the docket number.”

  Abruptly, Jack fell silent.

  “Which would explain why Frank visited Keating,” Caroline said.

  Jack dipped his brush into green paint and started painting lightning bolts on the car’s right fender.