“Keep Dixie here and watch Adam for me, will you?” she says to Lucy, who has moved over to Sis’ Shirley’s cot, watching Kim. “If he wakes up, bundle him up and bring him to me.” No please or thank you or sorry to ask you to do this.
She picks up the long black flashlight from its spot next to the kerosene lamp and goes out the door to the freezing wind, back to its job of misery-making. The batteries are so weak that she is following only a small spot of light, as she heads out through the dead trees, trunks making a creaking sound where they rub together.
The wind whips at her blanket and carries the loud voices from the other cabin. Every other word, “Laura, no.” “No Laura.”
Kim is about halfway there, halfway to the framed yellow lights of kerosene lamps, as seen through the windows, when she spies something white flash from the back door and fly past the cabin behind it, with a trailing scream.
Everybody inside the cabin is shouting at once, “Laura, no. Laura come back.” Huey’s voice hooting above the rest.
Kim can see all three of them gathered on the porch, peering out into the dark. Then she sees the flash of white pass behind the next cabin. And then the next, circling back, not twenty-five yards from where she is standing with her dot of a light-beam.
The bear is no more of a threat to Kim now than the wind and the cold and the demoniac girl.
She means to block Laura from crossing the imaginary line she’s drawn between Laura and her own cabin. To keep her from waking and terrifying Adam again. So, she stands, flicking off her flashlight to be invisible, and also to better see Laura dashing about in her white gown or blanket or whatever.
Finally, she slows, still screaming and crying now too, bending, standing, squatting and moving on. Slowly this time, but her screaming still sounds like it is trailing.
If she would steal Adam’s milk, she might harm him. And what about the ham she stole from her own mother and all of them starving? She might try to steal the car to leave as she had tried to with the girls she sent to steal their food and get her clothes. Following that bit of mischief, Shelton and Huey had started keeping their keys in their pockets.
The three faint figures on the porch head inside and in a few minutes come out with one flashlight, calling, “Laura. Hey Laura.” That’s Shelton. “You get yourself on back in here. Don’t, you gonna hurt that baby.” Sis’ Shirley. “Laura, behave.” Huey, the blocky one in the group now about halfway between Kim and Laura.
Their blankets flap in the wind like wings of bats, like Halloween spooks.
“Kiss off!” Laura moves faster, closer to Kim. She steps behind a thick pine tree creaking so that she thinks it might fall. Cold couldn’t be any colder or black blacker.
As she crosses Kim’s imaginary line, getting nearer the cabin where Adam is sleeping and Lucy is probably listening, torn between going out to her sister or staying where Kim has told her to stay, Kim steps toward her, switching on her flashlight. Dead, no light.
Almost eyeing each other in the blind dark, Kim rushes her, grabbing her around the waist, front-on, and wrestling her to the ground. She is all teeth and nails and bony elbows and knees, except for her round, hard, knotting belly.
The others surround them, pulling Kim away and laying hands on Laura, dragging her toward her cabin. All talking at once and making no sense. Laura breaks free, moving again, flashing white as she circles the cabins on the other side of Kim’s imaginary line. She doesn’t realize that Shelton is holding her back, struggling with her, till he says, “Kim, what? What are you doing? We’ve got to get her back inside.”
All four wander around, calling, “Laura,” losing sight of the flashing white, then finding it again. But she’s always moving in the opposite direction, screaming, stumbling, falling. Amazingly sprite for a cold and starving woman in labor.
At last, maybe an hour later, maybe two, in the glowing brown of twilight, when she falls, she doesn’t get up.
“Slow now,” Shelton says low. “Don’t spook her. Let’s just move in close and pick her up and carry her inside.”
But when they get to where she is lying on her back with her long thin legs folded beneath her lower body, she is unconscious, either fainted or in a coma.
Leaving Laura in the care of Shelton, Huey and Sis’ Shirley, Kim goes back to her cabin to check on Lucy and Adam. Both are sleeping in cots on opposite sides of the dim, freezing room. Adam in the same place and position as Kim had left him. Dixie is oddly fast asleep, same spot on the floor, in a tight curl. It comes to Kim that the dog must be getting quite old by now; she has a beard of white hairs running the length of her chin. She’s been through so much with them and is always last to get fed and watered. It shouldn’t be that way; she thinks about how pampered pets used to be before the world as they knew it blew up.
She thinks about Laura’s baby, reluctant to be born, or is it the mother refusing to let go? Such misery, torture. Maybe prolonged labor because of a strangled umbilical cord. Kim has heard of that. So much suffering.
So sleepy and tired and cold she feels as if she’s walking on lead legs, she goes out the door to the slap of cold, hearing a loud crash and jolt from the other cabin and Laura screaming, “Get the hell out of here.”
Inside, the men’s feet scuffle and pound on the floor and then Shelton shouts, “No, Huey, no” and then a shot fires, and Laura’s screams stop.
When Kim gets there she finds Laura on her cot with blood spurting from her chest and spreading on the front of her white shirt. Huey is standing over her with the gun pointed down, at rest. There’s an unmistakable smell of gunpowder, overlaid on kerosene and blood that smells like mold. Shelton is standing on the other side of the cot, gazing from Laura to the brief span of floor between the cot and the wall.
Kim’s eyes follow his as she eases into the room and light on Sis’ Shirley sprawled on her back with her arms wide and her head jacked up against the wall. Her bristly gray hair is pushed up on the crown, her eyes rolled up and lightless and her large rhinestone glasses, on the floor next to her, twisted and broken.
“What happened?” Kim goes over and kneels beside her. Then she sees the sharp rising in the center of Sis’ Shirley’s chest. “What happened?”
Shelton speaks, “Laura kicked her; her heart must have stopped. We’re not sure.”
***Stunned and sick when the brown light of morning comes, they bury Laura next to her mother with her baby nestled inside her bony body.
Then they bury Sis’ Shirley on the other side of Jean.
Lucy, with her long lank hair fanning in the wind picking up, stares at the three graves. Her shoulders are slumped and her green and brown blanket fans about her wan body. Kim thinks it’s often the way that when one child is good and the other bad, the good one suffers from lack of attention. How could twins be so different? She wonders whether under such circumstances the good child is good because she’s witnessed the bad behavior of the other and instinctively does the opposite. She knows it’s true that the bad child is the center of the family’s attention when she realizes that Lucy’s mother had never mentioned a thing about Lucy’s past, only Laura’s.
Chapter 30
With so many immediate deaths, Kim becomes obsessed with losing Adam or Shelton. She feels desperate, itchy, especially her breasts, even while trying to rationalize her faith in God.
She doesn’t tell Shelton. This is between her and God.
She questions all the what-ifs on her list right after the Rapture, which is again beginning to sound like bunk to her.
It’s the environment, stupid!
She has times of remembering Laura as lovely in her sin, and even envying her in her drama before her daddy shot her. To put her out of her misery? To silence her?
She thinks about the way Laura would hang a foot behind her, those long slim legs in blue jeans, altered by her mother to make room for her unwanted baby. She thinks about how Laura would dangle a black sandal, her small toes lik
ely freezing off, and smile with dead-on eyes. She had been the total opposite of the others. Something untouchable about her.
Kim imagines her life as a Goth and all the good-feeling drugs and sex and nothingness. Just being, feeling good and who gives a shit, as Laura would say.
She wonders if Shelton wasn’t a little bit in love with Laura, and such wondering leads to anger and more wondering the same till she is back to doubting the Rapture. It’s the environment, stupid.
Well, regardless they are nearing some kind of an end; they can’t possibly survive in the dirty brown air, without food and water, and the cold wind in a heartless world.
She watches Shelton reading his bible while she’s pondering all this. She watches him play with their son, who is now pale from lack of sunlight, though okay in the nutrition area, she’d like to think, since somehow she manages each day to dose him with her milk.
Her breasts itch constantly. She needs more water to make more milk but is afraid of drinking up Shelton and Adam’s share.
***Days later, in the early hours of another brown morning, Lucy and Huey drive over in the white van to say goodbye. Kim wants to beg them to stay. She is so lonesome with the wind and the brown and the black snaggled woods apt to burst into flames.
“Where are you going?” Shelton asks Huey.
“South. Just south. No destination.” His hands are in the pockets of his black nylon coat, lined in fur. His neck is scrunched, invisible under the collar and his thick dark hair. His large face looks thicker too, his large nose like a speckled toad.
“In that case you’ll be needing more gas.” Shelton turns toward the Land Rover, on the other side of the cabin, with Huey following, protesting.
They come back lugging a red five-gallon can each and place them in back of the van.
Kim thinks that must mean that she and Shelton and Adam will be staying in the swamp till whatever, whenever.
Back to where Kim and Lucy are standing, the men square off with each other. “Thank you, buddy.” Huey sticks out his hand to shake and Shelton takes it, pumping it for what seems like a long time.
“What about supplies?” Kim asks. “Do y’all have plenty?”
He smiles at Kim. “Enough.”
Dixie is lying on the front porch by the door, old for sure, but seeming only lazy and content. Last week Kim opened the can of evaporated milk and has been rationing it to her to make her stronger. She rests her head on her front paws, peeping out, dozing. Her donkey ears twitch, a plea for silence to allow sleep.
In the dead dirt of Shelton and Kim’s front yard, they hug their neighbors goodbye and bow their heads to pray. Then each of them go to their own automobiles and bring back something to give to the others—woman to woman and man to man, and Lucy, by virtue of suffering, is a woman now.
Kim brings back their last can of peaches and hands it to Lucy, with her hands held behind, shy-looking in her paleness and quietness, uncomfortable as center of attention with her sister gone.
Taking the peaches in one hand, she pulls the other out and presents Kim with a pair of small white shoes, strings tied together, for Adam. “Mama saved these for me after I grew out of them. I found them with the family pictures she’s been dragging pillow to post.” He’d been wearing Kim’s shoes with paper stuffed in the toes after he’d outgrown Buck’s white brogans.
Shelton gives Huey his black plastic box of fishing tackle. “I can’t take that. What if you need it?” Huey tries to give it back, but Shelton shakes his head. “No, man. I won’t be needing it where I’m going.”
Huey takes it, grumbling about it being too much and to prove it takes a cellophane wrapped cigar from his shirt pocket and waves it in front of Shelton’s face before handing it to him. “Thanks, man.” Shelton sniffs it, then sticks it in the pocket of his gray tee-shirt under the black leather coat earlier given to him by Huey.
Adam, in the yard next to Kim, grabs the shoes and stumps over to the doorsteps and begins taking off Kim’s shoes and putting on the ones from Lucy. He is wearing his long gray “sweat coat” with layers of clothing underneath that make him look sturdy, though his skin is too pale and his eyes are too pale. He has the wide-eyed querulous look of third-world starvelings.
Dixie stretches with her paws on the floor and her behind in the air and then ambles over to sit next to Adam. Lucy walks over to help Adam lace up the shoes, and while Shelton and Kim talk with Huey, she tries to teach him to tie a bow.
The wind picks up and Lucy and Huey have to go to the van for their blankets to wrap around their shoulders. Shelton and Kim go inside and bring one out for Adam, who is following Lucy about the yard with Baby Jesus hanging by one arm, and a blanket each for themselves.
Nothing else to say now, so lingering from the yard to the van, they say good-bye again. It’s time for Lucy and Huey to go.
“See you, man.” Shelton in cowboy boots waves to the brown sky as the van backs out of the lane, then he walks up on the porch and stands leaning on a post with one boot crossed over the other.
Kim stands in the yard with Adam, waving till the van turns off the lane to the gravel road and disappears behind the vertical, log-like wall of dead pine trunks. No color anywhere.
Shelton steps down and drops to the top doorstep, fingers latched, watching Kim watch the van disappear. “I’m about ready to head out too,” he says.
“Where?” Kim looks back at him.
He snaps his fingers and taps his boot toes, singing in a Tim McGraw falsetto: “Got a date with a lady at the beach.”
Fernandina Beach, yes! She will find God and purpose again at the beach. An open horizon of aqua sea and sky scroll up in her imagination.
“We’re going to the beach, Adam!” She dances around with his small cold hands in hers. “We’re going swimming, Adam!” Dixie circles them, barking.
“Beach?” Adam looks up at Kim.
“You know, water, bud?” Shelton kicks down the steps to the yard, and joins them circling and dancing. “Lots of water.”
Adam plops to the ground. “I’m scared. I wanta go home.”
Chapter 31
Crossing the long arched bridge over dry marshes, leading to the ocean, they watch a skinny old man, weather-beaten and bundled in rags, with a shiny fish, not four inches long, dragged from his rattle-trap of a bicycle by two young men in layered, raggy black clothes.
After they club the old man with baseball bats to an unconscious state—maybe death—the one holding the fish by its tail jogs off, the other pedaling the old man’s bicycle.
Earlier, before Shelton and Kim reached the bridge, they’d been almost car-jacked by a gang hanging around an old, closed-down barbeque shack. Waving tire tools and steel bars, they had stepped out into the road, bent and bouncing toward the front and sides of the car, leering, shouting. Filthy in their pieced-together pants, shirts, coats and hoods, two hopped up on the car hood, jumping down and hawing as Shelton swerved and sped up.
Before that, a black patrol car had tailed them from one red-light town to another, at least ten miles. With Adam screaming, “I wanta go home.” Kim, shushing him, kept trying to buckle him into his car seat. But he’d long outgrown it and Shelton kept shouting for her to stop, to sit down and be still. “I wanta go home. Don’t let her get me.” Adam had worn himself out before the police car suddenly turned off down a side street, motoring on. Kim couldn’t stop shaking.
Dixie in her spot in the back with the dwindling supplies and cans of gasoline, depending on the circumstances, slept and woke and barked.
While Dixie slept and Adam slept Kim started to tell Shelton about the police woman stopping her near Valdosta before they left home, but she was too tired, not ready, and besides her fear had set off something like rebelliousness inside.
For the rest of the trip, till they reached the bridge, she just sat with her head back, eyes closed, clenching her teeth.
***When she opens her eyes, Shelton is watching her with a
lit cigar between his lips.
She rises high in the seat and watches the wind blow the dry marsh grass like waves on water. She can smell the salt air and what she likes to think of as fresh caught shrimp, but there is no denying the brown clouds traveling with them. There is no denying that they are denser, broader, darker, almost covering a white rose blooming in the sky, east over the sea.
Adam has made up a song and is singing, “I’m a milk man. I’m a milk-man.” He sings it a couple more times then says, “What’s a milk man, daddy?”
Shelton fixes him in the rearview, puffing on the cigar. “Uh, I don’t know about that. What you think, Mommy?”
Suddenly Kim feels light and giddy. She laughs out. “Oh, no you don’t,” she says to him. “He asked you.”
“What’s a milk man?”
“Well,” Shelton puffs. “I’d say it’s a woman, like Mommy. She’s the one carrying the milk.”
Kim laughs again. This is getting really funny.
“But I’m not a woman, am I?” Adam asks.
“No. Of course not. Laura just called you that because you’re still nursing Mommy and you’re a big boy.”
“I’m not doing it anymore, Mommy.”
She looks back and his chin is up, the back of his head pressing the tweed seat. He seems to be thinking about what he’s gaining by giving up the breast. “Maybe I’ll do it for awhile, Mommy.”
“Okay.”
“I’m scared.”
“Nah, we’re not afraid, are we?” Shelton looks goofy, slunk low in the driver’s seat, with the lit cigar in his mouth.
Kim waits for Adam to say, “I’m scared,” and when he doesn’t she takes it as a good sign.
She speaks loud to be heard over the cold rushing wind through the windows, partially let down to vent Shelton’s cigar smoke. “You know what I’d like, Shelton.”
“What, babe?” Shelton puffs on the cigar hanging from the corner of his lips. His eyes squinted from the smoke.
“I’d like a tall icy marguerite with a little striped umbrella sticking up.”
He grins. “Me too, babe!”
“You know what else?”
“What’s that, babe?”