Floodmarkers

by Nic Brown

  “I’m not going to lie to you, man,” Matthew said.

  “I hear you,” Nigel said, but he didn’t want to hear any more. He didn’t have much advice to give. He had dated only one girl during his time in Atlanta: Kylie Crooke, a thin Kansan who had broken up with him after being diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. “It isn’t you,” she’d said, “it’s the bones.” But Nigel felt pretty sure it had been him.

  “Tell me what the perfume squad cornered you about. I saw you checking labels,” Matthew said, resuming his fireworks transfer.

  “Mrs. Vanstory just told the story about me kissing Lily, you know? When she drove into the tree?”

  “About you kissing Lily?” Matthew said. “That was me.”

  “What?”

  “I told you that story a million times. I kissed her and then her mom drove into a tree. In 1979. Why are we even talking about this?”

  “Because that was me!”

  “Look, I have a Polaroid. It’s from that day. Me and her. Not you,” Matthew said.

  Nigel raised the flashlight beam to Matthew’s face. For a moment, before Matthew raised his hands to block the beam, Nigel could see that he was smiling, almost ready to laugh.

  Nigel walked out of the garage and into the kitchen, where Matthew’s wife, Elena, was smoking at a table with Mrs. Hampton, Matthew’s mother. Two gas lamps lit the room, making Elena’s jewelry sparkle softly in the lamplight. It seemed she wore gold everywhere, on her neck and ears, in her hair. Elena was from Salamanca, Spain, and as far as Nigel knew, she was the only person living in Lystra who had been born on another continent. After knowing her for years, though, he still felt the need to be formal around her.

  “Deviled egg?” Mrs. Hampton said, lifting one off an oval platter.

  “No. Thanks,” Nigel said. “Elena, do you . . . I’m sorry. Hi, how are you?”

  “Fine, Nigel. How are you?” Elena said. Her accent was very heavy.

  “Good. You look great.” Her clothes were exotic, label makers unknown. “Do you know where Matthew’s old photos are?”

  As Elena told him, a plume of smoke tumbled out of her mouth and Nigel noticed that even the brown cigarette she was smoking had bands of gold foil sparkling on its filter.

  The guest room had a bookshelf filled almost exclusively with photo albums. Nigel scanned their spines by the light of a candle. Twenty, thirty, they took up three shelves. Only one of the albums belonged to Matthew, though. It was an old plastic binder that he had kept since Nigel could remember. The rest were Elena’s. Her family, her childhood in Spain.

  Nigel paged through Matthew’s album. He found himself in almost every photo. There was one of them dressed as women for a sixth-grade play, a shot of them at the awards ceremony for the middle school tennis tournament, where they had been the only entrants and Matthew had won. Birthday parties. Skateboarding at the spillway. And then, in the back, next to a photo of Matthew and Nigel at Myrtle Beach, he found the Polaroid. The flat, washed-out colors made both the grass and the sky different shades of the same grey. Lily was wearing exactly what he remembered her wearing, the Umbros over her swimsuit, the Wild Dunes T-shirt. They were in the same position he remembered, and she was laughing just like she had. And Nigel wasn’t in the photo. It was Matthew.

  Near the porch, two teenagers dressed in black jeans and tuxedo shirts mixed drinks on a card table. Nigel didn’t know how Matthew had pulled this all together. His stepsister was supposed to have been married at the band shell in Mankin Park that afternoon, but after the storm had rendered any outdoor event impossible, they had moved all wedding events inside Matthew’s house. They’d arranged everything in a matter of hours, even with the phone lines down. Now that the rain had stopped, people were outside and in, tracking mud everywhere.

  Nigel was waiting for a drink from one of the bartenders when he heard someone say, “Hello.”

  “Hello?” Nigel said to the bartender.

  The teenager raised his acne-scarred face from a bottle of whiskey and said, “Huh?”

  “Hello,” he heard again. It was Elena’s voice, accented and soft from behind him.

  He turned around. She was smoking another brown-and-gold cigarette and held a trident-shaped metal spear with a green plastic handle.

  “What’s with that?”

  “Matthew says it is for frogs. Could I have a chardonnay, please?” The teen poured wine to the brim of a glass. “He promised that he’d take me.”

  “Where?” Nigel said.

  She held up the spear.

  “Now?”

  Matthew was tossing someone’s baby into the air on the other side of the lawn. The young mother laughed and pointed. Pocahontas stood at his side, clapping her hands in joy.

  “You know how?” Elena said.

  Nigel had never gigged frogs in his life, but he said, “Yeah. I’ll show you.”

  They entered the woods at the edge of the lawn, near where Nigel knew a creek ran. He had the faint idea that you were supposed to use a spotlight to find the frogs, or to attract them. He’d also never heard of gigging frogs in a creek. They could hear the croaking, though, and just kept walking towards the shifting sounds along the creek bed. Nigel had a mini-flashlight on his keychain that he shone weakly on the water. The creek had risen out of its banks and ran messy and wide through the scrub pines. As they walked, ice tinkled in Nigel’s glass. From time to time he glimpsed a tiki lamp shining through the branches.

  Elena squealed a lot and kept grabbing Nigel’s elbow. As they made their way deeper into the woods, she poked him in the leg with the gig twice. After lunging for only one frog after several minutes, she stopped Nigel and took a large sip of his whiskey. Something splashed into the creek and Elena gasped, then grabbed Nigel around the waist. She pressed her face into his neck and laughed.

  Nigel stopped walking and held her. He hadn’t done this since Kylie had left him for her bones.

  “Ay yay yay,” she said. “Where are the frogs?”

  “I don’t think we’re going to catch a frog.”

  Nigel could tell she was looking at him from the angle of her neck, but he kept his eyes averted, watching the side of her gold necklace glitter in the faint light.

  “Matthew can be such an asshole,” she said.

  Nigel just kept watching her necklace.

  “I know what he’s doing,” Elena said. “He’s fucking those sluts.”

  Nigel had never had a discussion like this with Elena.

  “I live here, with him,” she said. “You know? I give up all that. I miss my family. I miss . . . I miss Matthew. I miss him when he is fucking these sluts.”

  Nigel finally let his eyes meet hers. They were full of tears and the only thing that seemed right was to kiss her. Her mouth tasted horrible, like burnt garlic and cigarettes, but he let the kiss linger and so did she. Slowly, he brought his hand up to her left breast. She leaned into him. They stood there for a while, no longer kissing, just upright with Nigel’s hand on her left breast.

  Then he said, “Is this really happening?”

  “Ay Dios.”

  “I just need you to tell me if this is real.”

  “This is real,” she said, then started to cry again.

  Nigel took his hand off her breast and just held her until she was done.

  As they walked back, Nigel became increasingly panicked that people might have noticed their absence. Voices grew louder as they neared Matthew’s lawn, and much more light shone through the branches than before. Electric light. Floodlights from the garage and strings of white bulbs hung over the patio. While they’d been gone, the electricity had returned.

  At the edge of the woods, where Matthew’s lawn met the first pines, a frog croaked and Elena jabbed the gig at the base of a tree. Nigel heard the spear strike wood. Then she held the little trident up, backlit against the lights from the house, and Nigel saw the outline of two dangling frog legs, kicking.

  Elena carried her frog around the cr
owd, holding it aloft like a torch. Sporadically Nigel would hear an excited yelp or moan as she moved from group to group.

  Matthew’s stepsister and her new husband were preparing to leave. Nigel found Matthew at the edge of the driveway, setting down the buckets of roman candles. In the electric light, he looked pale, sweaty, and tired.

  The bride was hugging a whole line of people. Her white dress had a six-inch cuff of mud around the bottom, but she didn’t seem to mind. Her husband kept giving high fives and whooping with people calling him Stu-driver.

  “Come on,” Matthew said. “It’s time to blow this stuff up.”

  And then Matthew was all business, distributing roman candles, winking at people, giving orders, and handing out extra-long matches. He turned off the floodlights, and as the bride and groom drove away, a bevy of roman candles lit up the sky, leaving undulating blue orbs floating across Nigel’s vision.

  The crowd thinned rapidly. At least one man had already thrown up on the front lawn. The grass was worn into muddy circles around the tiki lamps and the drink tables. Matthew’s mother walked past Nigel on her way out and said, “Why don’t you move home and leave the labels in Atlanta?”

  Nigel considered what it would be like to live in Lystra again. He could see the whole town at that moment. He knew that Duke Power employees were on cherry-pickers mending power lines, and he knew how the children were disappointed that the power had returned. Dogs on walks at that very moment were finding themselves overwhelmed by objects to sniff, branches to carry, new puddles to drink from. He knew everything in Lystra. Everything. He didn’t need to see it.

  “Someday,” Nigel said.

  He went inside to avoid the rest of the departures. The kitchen was empty and he took the last deviled egg upstairs. The photo album was in the same place. The Polaroid was still there. He still wasn’t in it.

  He flipped back through the album. There were so many photos of him. He had played saxophone in marching band. He had gone to Michael Lipsitz’s Bar Mitzvah and worn a yarmulke. He had done a handstand on someone’s yellow couch. He did exist.

  Nigel walked downstairs after he was sure everyone had gone. Matthew and Elena had their arms around each other on the couch. The lights were off and the room was lit by low burning candle stubs. Elena’s head was nestled between Matthew’s shoulder and ear.

  “Baby, we’re gonna go smoke,” Matthew said.

  Matthew kissed the top of her head, and Elena motioned softly with her hand as if to say fine. The gesture struck Nigel as uintessentially European.

  Nigel had taken off his shoes and when he stepped onto the porch, the brick felt clammy and slick on his bare feet. There were cigarette butts strewn down the steps. Plastic champagne flutes lay scattered across the lawn, in the middle of which sat two wooden chairs from the dining room.

  “Hey,” Nigel said. “About earlier, I think you’re right.”

  “About what?” Matthew said, spitting a piece of tobacco off his tongue as he lit a miniature cigar.

  “Lily Vanstory.”

  “We really still talking about this?”

  “I saw the photo and I’m just saying you were right.”

  Nigel stepped into the lawn. It had been years since he’d felt wet grass on his feet.

  “What you need is a girl,” Matthew said. “No. Listen to me. I know how your luck’s been. Why don’t you move home? We could have a good time. What! I’m serious. I miss you, man.”

  “What would I do?” Nigel said.

  “You can do whatever you want. You got your shit together more than anybody I know.”

  Underneath one of the chairs lay the frog gig, the frog still speared on the end.

  “Hey,” Matthew said, picking it up. “You see this?” He bounced the frog slightly, the barbed tips extending through its side.

  “That’s a big frog,” Nigel said.

  “No shit! Elena caught it.”

  “Really.”

  “Yeah. These things get confused when the water rises,” Matthew said. “They go all over the place. You ever done it?”

  “Done what?”

  “Frog gigging.”

  “No,” Nigel said.

  “Well, we’ll go next time you’re in town,” Matthew said. “When you move back.”

  Nigel looked at the frog, its body held fast on the barbs as it bounced, the skin tight and muscular. He knew that he’d seen those frog legs alive, backlit and kicking. He knew that he’d been there, that he’d heard the spear hit wood, that he’d seen her kill it.

  “Shhh,” Matthew said. “Listen.”

  The air conditioner was running again, so they weren’t as clear as they had been earlier, but a few intermittent croaks sounded loud and consistent from the woods.

  “Come poke me with a spear,” Matthew said. “That’s what they’re saying. Come get me, Nigel. Come home.”

  spirits

  George stepped into Kenny Craven’s yard and everyone quit talking. He was sweating through his mesh T-shirt, drops sliding down his expansive pocked face and glistening on his giant arms. Every neighbor there was silently looking at him, their faces lit from underneath by the undulating light of the charcoal grills. Smoke curled around the indistinct forms and their collected thawing perishables.

  Parties like these always popped up after hurricanes knocked the power out. Hurricane Hugo had blown inland that morning, and though they’d only gotten the edge of it in Lystra, the power had been out for more than twelve hours now. Coolers of melting ice held everything saved from thawing refrigerators—floating bottles of champagne, eggs, Mountain Dew, beer, yogurt, ranch dressing, white wine. A card table was covered with newspaper, on top of which lay the meat. A gaping rack of ribs, steak, bacon, sweaty ground chuck, and an open baggie of translucent shrimp. Kenny was in the midst of cleaning a pile of quail carcasses, shoving plucked feathers into a plastic bag, but many of the smallest feathers continued to escape and float on the same variant air currents as the smoke, twirling and rising into the darkness. Kenny stopped plucking to look at George, and several small feathers fell back into the light. One gently settled onto his head.

  “George is back,” Kenny said, and everyone turned to look.

  Before the accident, George had been a compulsive weightlifter —272 pounds of muscle. He hadn’t lifted more than a few times since November, though. That was ten months. He had kept the weight, but it was no longer muscle. His stomach bulged under his T-shirt, his neck stood like a ledge under his chin. He was sweating so much that he had seen more than one drop fall from his eyebrows. George lived in Durham now, but had come to town to be with his parents during the storm. This was the first time he had seen anyone in ten months. The first since he had killed Huynh Tang.

  George hadn’t caused the accident. He had simply been driving his Volvo station wagon through the intersection of Beasley and Hoover on Thanksgiving Day when Huynh Tang smashed his head through the passenger-side window, breaking most of the bones in his face, ripping flesh and hair off of his scalp and leaving much of it in the car before sliding out and landing partially under the tires that George was trying to stop. Huynh Tang was a hyperactive twelve-year-old who had been skateboarding as fast as he could downhill before running a stop sign and hitting the side of George’s car. George just happened to be driving by. There were witnesses. Huynh Tang had hit George. Not the other way around. Huynh Tang had caused his own death.

  “Yeah!” Manny yelled, approaching George. “He’s back on the town and ready to Wang Chung!”

  Manny’s blond pompadour gleamed like molded plastic in the firelight, and his extreme features resembled those of an anatomical drawing, all sinew and lips. He was a friend of George’s from high school and lived in another rental house directly across the street from Kenny. All the houses in this neighborhood looked the same—small, with unmowed lawns, gravel driveways, and concrete steps with weeds growing between cracks.

  “Champagne for my real friends,” Manny sai
d, holding out a jar of champagne. “Real pain for my sham friends.”

  George walked away. He didn’t think he could go through with this. But then Manny grabbed his shirt, pulling it so tight that a few rigid tufts of chest hair popped through the thin fabric.

  “Hey, big guy,” Manny said. “Wait.”

  George turned to Manny, but Manny wasn’t looking at him. George followed his gaze. Manny was looking at Huynh Tang.

  He was actually looking at Huynh Tang’s older brother, but in Huynh Tang’s family, everyone had the same name. George didn’t know if that was part of their official naming system or not, but in Lystra, Huynh Tang was both singular and plural, like, “There’s Huynh Tang,” if the whole family was out, or, if you saw just one family member, “Hey, Huynh Tang. How you doing?”

  Huynh Tang were Vietnamese. North Carolina had become the relocation point for a large group of Vietnamese refugees, mountain dwellers known as Montagnards. The Montagnards had served alongside American troops in the Vietnam War but had been left behind after the withdrawal. A local doctor, Sheldon May, had donated enough money for Huynh Tang to come to Lystra and start a landscaping company. With it, Huynh Tang bought a riding mower that they used for a long time as a car, slowly buzzing through neighborhoods from job to job, waving to their clients.

  This Huynh Tang, the one George was looking at now, was the oldest of the two Huynh Tang boys and had been in George’s high school class. They hadn’t been friends, just classmates, but friendly. George hadn’t seen him since before the accident.

  Huynh Tang looked exactly like his younger brother. George couldn’t see that face without envisioning it violated by glass and concrete. The dark eyebrows, matted with blood. The wide nose, flattened and angled onto the cheek. Dark, wiry hair, the same that had spread itself throughout his car, still attached to small clumps of flesh.

  George had heard on the radio that today was the first day of fall. A new season and a storm. It felt like the right time to try to finish things, to start things. This was the reason he had come to Kenny’s house. He knew Huynh Tang lived on the street and spent time with both Kenny and Manny. He knew he would see him here.