“I’d like to close my eyes and open them to a blue sky.”
“Go for it, babe.”
She closes her eyes and there it is—a blue sky. She opens them to brown. “Didn’t work.”
Adam has picked up the jingle again. “I’m a milkman. I’m a milkman.”
“What about closing your eyes again and don’t open them till I tell you to.”
After a few minutes and nothing, she has to place her hands over her face to keep from peeping—five minutes, at least.
“Okay, open your eyes, babe.”
The Land Rover speeds up a long hill of sand dunes and blowing sea oats and brakes at the top. Nothing but murky brown water with bulging waves, festering waves that rupture on the filthy shore and brown sky as far as the eye can see.
***It’s too cold and windy to go down to the beach, littered with drowned sea weed and wood-not-of-the-driftwood kind and gray iron rebar wedged into dirty white sand along the in-slush and out-slush of battering waves. But Kim is determined to have her son experience the ocean even though it bears little resemblance to the real ocean, the one she has known and loved. He doesn’t know the difference, she thinks, that it should be blue and clean, rather than brown and murky. It no longer smells of salt or fresh-caught shrimp, but of rotted fish and something chemical. Like the weed-killer her daddy used to spray on unwanted weeds in their yard each spring and summer. Weeds now resemble weeds then, after weed-killer.
Leaving Dixie asleep in the car, she and Shelton wrap Adam in a blanket and Shelton carries him down the slope of dunes to the wet sand where the tide has withdrawn, depositing belly-up jellyfish, fish skeletons and hulls of crabs.
Ahead is a strand of isolated beach and further on what looks like a broken pier, half in the ocean and the other half on shore.
Adam wants down. Shelton stands him on the sand and together they walk him down-beach veering right, away from the rolling surf of the in-coming tide bearing down on them.
His teeth are chattering and theirs are too and they are constantly on guard for one rolling wave that might venture from the fold of the snarling tide. He laughs and races ahead in his long gray sweat-coat and white shoes from Lucy, squatting to check out a bone or a broken shell, the plastic collar of a six-pack of sodas, and a tin can long ago tossed from a boat.
At one point, while Adam races ahead, looking back now and then maybe to be sure that his mommy and daddy don’t get raptured without him, Kim spies a hypodermic syringe tumbling on the waves. She doesn’t mention it; this is down-time from worry.
About a mile down the beach, Kim begins to see human heads intermittently appear behind the dunes, maybe ten or twelve in head-rags and hoods. She tells herself they could consist of only three or four, the same people moving along with them and peeping over to watch them.
When Shelton says, “Let’s move closer to the car,” she knows he has seen them too.
Sticky with salt and smelly with the weed-killer chemical they make their way back to the Land Rover, with the heads behind the dunes popping up like a magician’s trick. The tide is almost in, only several yards from the line of dunes where the Land Rover is parked.
Adam running ahead, and Shelton and Kim walking faster to prevent him from getting too far ahead, Kim asks, “What do you think they’re up to?”
Shelton shakes his head, the wind whipping black tendrils around his pale face. “Just keep walking. We’ll be to the car in a minute and we’ll move on.”
The heads still pop over the ridges of dunes, but now Kim is sure there are only four people: blue-striped scarf with fringe blowing in the wind; black hood; black hood with pompom; green hood with a flatter crown. And then soon all are gone.
Adam has stopped to dig a hole in the sand, using his hands as a shovel. They catch up just in time to keep him from unearthing an open pocket knife. Kim expects him to cry when they make him stand and she begins brushing the smelly sand from his hands, but he doesn’t.
Then looking toward the car Shelton shouts, “Damn, damn! Double-dam!” and begins running with his elbows pumping. “Don’t tell me!”
Kim lifts Adam in her arms and pats his back. “It’s okay, baby, it’s okay.”
“I’m not a baby.” He kicks to get down.
Kim’s eyes stay on Shelton running up the dunes to the car. “Then show me what a big boy you are by holding my hand.” She doesn’t know what to do, whether to linger along the beach, pretending and protecting Adam or to run to Shelton and help him.
“Shelton,” she calls out, wind from the surf scattering the sound.
She can see him through the windows, on the far side of the car, opening the back door and then running around to the rear and lifting the hatch.
Next thing, he is running up the beach, shouting, shaking a fist in the air.
“Shelton!” She walks fast, twitching Adam along. For once he doesn’t fuss and she’s grateful for that. But now she feels desperate and afraid. She doesn’t even try to hide it from Adam, which strangely seems to be the key to his not fussing.
When she gets to the Land Rover she can see all manner of tracks—dog tracks, men’s shoe tracks, and places where the sand had folded in on itself burying the tracks. Both doors on the driver’s side are open, as well as the hatch in back that she’d seen Shelton raise.
“Dixie’s gone,” Adam says, peeping inside while she checks for Shelton up the beach.
She turns, “Gone? Dixie’s gone?”
“Baby Jesus.” He crawls onto the back seat, leaving patches of sand, and picks up the doll and scoots backwards to the dune.
“Oh, no!” she shouts, peering into the car, almost empty except for a few pieces of clothing, a blanket or two in a wad. “They robbed us.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know,” she snaps and begins to cry.
“Don’t cry, Mommy. Don’t cry.” He hugs her legs with his sandy hands.
“It’s okay, baby. I’m sorry.” She places a hand on top of his head. .
“I’m not a baby, Mommy.” He looks up at her pleadingly and brushes her hand from the top of her head.
“No, of course not.” She tries to laugh but it’s mixed in with crying.
“Shelton!” She looks up the beach again, at the tide sweeping in and sweeping out. He must have gone after the thieves, she thinks. But what about Dixie? Dixie was not with him when he ran up the beach, she’s sure of that.
“Will Dixie die like Sis’ Shirley?”
“No. Dixie won’t die.”
He drops the Jesus doll to the dirt and plops down beside it, digging in the sand. “I’m hungry.”
In a terror over Shelton and their lost belongings she still has time to fret over Adam and what’ll he’ll do when she has to either nurse him or let him starve.
***The white patch in the break of brown sky has turned into a sun with radiating streaks but no heat. They are freezing inside the car when she sees somebody trotting toward them, still a long way off. She refuses to let herself panic—it has to be Shelton. But if it is there is no dog behind him. So, maybe it’s not Shelton.
Adam is napping in the back seat with Baby Jesus and both blankets. He had let her nurse him, peering up at her as if to say, “Just this once.”
The car is rank with the smell of stale tobacco smoke and soured milk from where it has leaked from her breasts. The twin spots of milk have dried on her shirt and turned cakey and the starchy material makes her feel miserable, itchy and filthy.
She doesn’t take her eyes off the moving figure in black, not even to look down, just watches with jangled nerves when she’s sure it’s not Shelton, and then perfectly calm, when she’s sure it is.
Closer, she can see Shelton’s black leather jacket. She opens the door easy and closes it easy, and steps out and goes around the front of the car to meet him on the beach. She climbs down the dunes, shaking with cold and hunger. They have no food now.
He doesn’t speak when he gets to her, just bends
over holding his knees and breathing hard. He is pale with a bruised blue outline around his mouth.
She waits till he catches his breath and stands up with his hands on his hips, looking past her to the car and the strand of beach they had walked this evening. “Where’s Adam?”
“Asleep. In the car.”
“I couldn’t catch up with them. They must have had a car waiting somewhere off the beach.”
“Where’s Dixie?”
He bends over again, breathing, then stands. “I followed her tracks in their tracks till they led off into the brush. My guess is she took off after them when they left. Who’d of thought it?”
She wonders if he means about them getting robbed or about feeble Dixie chasing after them.
He places an arm around her shoulder, walking her toward the car, both of them looking up at the strange parting of clouds taking on the shape of a pair of window curtains.
“What’ll we do now, Shelton? With nothing to eat?”
“I wish I could tell you but I don’t know. I wish I could tell you that we’ll find something tomorrow, but I don’t know.”
“It’s okay. I’m just glad you’re back and didn’t get hurt.”
“They were watching us all that time.”
“Yes.”
“I should have locked the car.”
“No. Then they would have broken out the windows and tonight we would freeze to death.”
***The tide is in, bringing with it nettles of wind-borne mist and clouds of birds, storms of birds. Shrill and wheeling, they are like black blobs on the brown clouds, black blobs on the patch of white. Their wings gusting and swaying the car till dark. Then Shelton and Kim realize that the birds are the dark.
Adam sleeps on and when the birds are gone, hours later, they hear Dixie barking outside to be let in. Shelton unlocks his door and eases it open, making a big fuss over her, before opening the back door. She hops up in the seat next to Adam and lies down, hassling.
Kim twists in the seat to pet her. Her fur is like ice, that wet and that cold. When Shelton is seated again under the steering wheel, he locks his door and gazes ahead.
“Look, Kim,” he says low.
She looks ahead out the windshield and the white patch is brighter, larger, reflecting like the moon on the sea.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know but it’s a relief just to see light in the sky after so long...” He stops there.
Chapter 32
Though they are starving and have been robbed in this very place, they decide not to leave till daybreak. The same thieves won’t come back because they know there’s nothing else to steal. And wherever they go, there’s no guarantee that they won’t be running into trouble by trying to run away from it.
Mercifully they have left three blankets in the wad in back and Kim and Shelton place another one on Adam and the dog, then one on themselves with it pulled up to their chins and both of them breathing under it to generate some warmth.
They doze and wake up to the burning white patch in the dark sky. They doze again and when Adam calls out, half-asleep, Kim gets out on her side and lifts him from the back seat and goes back to her seat to nurse him again. She knows she doesn’t have much milk now but he is too sleepy to fuss after playing on the beach and he falls back into a deep sleep on her lap and she leaves him there to warm them while they warm him. Shelton tilts his face to Kim’s so that both their chins are lightly resting on top of Adam’s head. It smells of his own peculiar baby smell, sour and sweet and theirs.
They stare out at the still patch of light in the sky and the one skipping in the middle of the ocean.
“What if we wake up in the morning and the sky is blue and the ocean is blue?” Kim whispers. “Wouldn’t that be something?”
“Yes ma’am.” Shelton moves his chin and then puts it back. His warm cheek touching hers.
“What if all this misery would be over and we would be back to normal again?”
“I don’t recall life ever being that easy.”
“Well, it was. By comparison with now, it was.”
“What about heaven then?”
She doesn’t answer for a bit, then says, “Shelton, I may not be going.”
He sits up, shocked, then goes still to keep from waking Adam. “Kim, what are you saying?”
“I’m saying I’m not sure.” They are whispering while the tide roars and the sea oats lash at the car. If they speak out now it probably won’t even wake Adam for the mesmerizing sounds outside.
Then in whispers interrupted by the wind and the surf and the rattling of sea oats against the sides of the car, she tells him about her trip into town, she and Adam, before they left home and how she had denied being a Christian and had even signed papers swearing to never speak the name of Jesus again. She told him about doing it to save Adam and how terrified he’d been and how his fear after that, even long afterward in the swamp, had everything to do with his terror of being taken from his mother by the police woman who had stopped them.
It was all broken, and while she talked Shelton wrapped his arms around the steering wheel and stared out at the white parting of the dark sky and then back at her.
“You know what I would have done?” he asked low. “I mean, under the same circumstances. I would have done the same thing, trusting that God would know my heart and that I said and signed what I had to. Understand?”
“You don’t know how impatient I get, Shelton.” She repositions Adam on her lap so that the blood can get to her tingling legs. “That’s not the only time I’ve doubted. I do right now! I do! I mean we’re sitting here with nothing to eat and no where to go and I can’t say that it doesn’t make me mad. I can’t say that. It would be a lie.”
“What about me? That fit I pitched on the beach this evening. You think I was waiting on God like I’m supposed to, to take care of things his way?”
“No, but...”
“No no but to it. That was just as much a sign of disbelief as what you did. Maybe more.”
He presses his cheek to hers again, searching out the top of Adam’s head to prop on, to warm on.
Adam’s weight on her lap is comforting, sweet and penetrating warmth. She feels anchored and without him she would be scattered all over the car. Without Shelton’s cheek...well, she doesn’t know what she would do without him, his skin on hers. She wonders if that kind of need is love.
When she feels Shelton’s cheek relax against hers, and his voluntary breathing switch to an involuntary pattern, she closes her eyes against the bright glare of sky and can see it seeping through her eyelids. If this keeps up it will burn the brown away completely. She wonders if people all over the world are seeing this light.
For as the lightening comes from the east and flashes to the west, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be... Immediately after the tribulation of those days the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in heaven, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.
“Shelton, wake up.”
He doesn’t move.
“Wake up, Shelton.” She doesn’t take her eyes off the gradually opening curtains of white. She’s not sure the curtains are moving, so she tries to gauge their movement by the distance from the center marked by a speck on the windshield. Her eyes ache.
“Shelton, wake up,” she says louder and nudges his leg with hers.
Adam doesn’t even make a peep. There’s a reason for that, she thinks, growing excited and light, eyes on the curtains. They look real! No illusion of the light or excited imagination.
“What?” Shelton doesn’t move but holds his breath, his cheek still next to hers. “What did you hear?”
“Look, Shelton, look out at the sky.”
He sits up, leaning into
the steering wheel, gazing out. “Do you think it’s...?”
“Yes, I do.” Her voice is steady and she’s not one bit afraid. “Look at Adam, fast asleep. It’s different.” Used to she would have gone crazy, shaking him and screaming for him to wake up.
Shelton tilts toward her and places a hand on Adam’s chest. “His breathing has slowed; is he okay?”
“Fine. He’s fine.” She bundles him closer, watching with Shelton the slow parting of the curtains.
“What’s next? Do you remember?”
“I think so, but let’s just watch.” She thinks about her first understanding of The Word becoming flesh—literally a word turned into flesh.
“I always wondered how the whole earth would be able to see him.” Shelton draws in his breath. “It’s like a Jumbotron without borders.”
White images like film negatives begin to develop between the curtains, like curtains on a stage or a movie opening from the center of the screen.
Kim gasps. “You see it, don’t you?”
“I can just make out the image of a rider on a white horse, I think.”
The rider’s eyes twinkle like a newly lit firecracker. His long poufy hair grows whiter and stays whiter, while a crown on his head sparkles like His eyes, beginning to burn. His robe develops slowly, red, redder, redder.
“The robe dipped in blood,” Shelton says, fixated on the scene.
Then a sword appears held in His mouth.
“There’s the sword,” Kim says. “Do you see it?”
“Yes. Yes ma’am I do.” Shelton’s voice drops an octave, sucking air. “He will rule them with an iron scepter.”
“Look at the backdrop coming into view, Shelton.”
Multitudes of people on white horses, themselves in white robes, appear, mere images growing, developing.
“Shelton, I’m not hungry, are you?”
He looks at her. “I hadn’t thought about it so I guess I’m not. I’m not!”
Lettering appears across the lead horseman’s robe, close to the hem.
“Can you make out what the writing is?” Shelton asks.
“I think I know, but let’s watch.”
At first the letters are like puzzle-print, the squiggly, lopsided kind used on Internet to verify users’ rights to visit certain sites. Kim used to hate those things.
Suddenly, very sudden, the fur lifts and the letters align and the faint print blooms into bold, like a trumpet shout: KING OF KING AND LORD OF LORDS KING OF KINGS AND LORD OF LORDS