He feels angry at her now for having witnessed that, and also for her having snapped at him with those eyes when he’d tried to joke around with her. “I detest sarcasm,” she once said. Girl couldn’t take a joke, that was her problem.
But when she calls on Wednesday morning, he cannot temper the pleasure in his voice.
She wants to come see him.
“Is it safe?” he asks, as if they are slipping around, cheating on Elaine and Dan.
She says she’s figured out a back road she can take to keep from driving through town. “Besides,” she added,” from what I’m hearing, they’ve started clearing the streets of the wreckage. There’s a curfew from six pm to six am but it’s okay to go out between those hours.”
Shelton wonders if he’s still at risk of being arrested.
Only after she hangs up does it occur to him that Kim never mentioned Elaine nor Dan and Buck. Does this mean she too believes that “the Rapture” could have occurred?
***He is so glad to see Kim drive up into Elaine’s usual parking place that, at first, he doesn’t even notice that she is driving Dan’s old green Land Rover with the baby’s blue safety seat still buckled on the passenger side.
He meets her out on the front porch to keep her from seeing the piled lumber of the fallen porch roof and floor boards in the back yard, though she has heard about it often from Elaine. The story, and the updates, never amused Kim, not even a hint of a smile from of those tight lips.
“They towed it home,” she says, looking at the Land Rover with Shelton at the edge of the porch. “No trace of Dan and Little Buck.”
This time Shelton is the one who only nods. He wonders if a tow will be bringing Elaine’s jeep, and if not, why not.
While Kim makes lunch for them—canned tomatoes and rice and fried Spam—Shelton sits at the square table, one side butted up to a wall, and tries to make casual conversation about anything except their missing families, while keeping that edge of sarcasm out of his voice. It’s like performing circumcision on himself.
Kim opens the refrigerator then slams it shut but not before its rotted breath swamps the room. She turns, staring him down, then a slight smile parts her lips. No lipstick, no makeup.
“I was just getting around to that when you called this morning,” he says.
She turns back to the stove with a spatula. “I’ll help after lunch. Give me something to do.”
Her rounded shoulders are shaking and he knows she is crying. He doesn’t know what to do. With Elaine all it took was a hug and some petting, but Kim strikes him as the kind of woman who would be embarrassed to be found out. A pride thing?
They eat quietly at the small table, facing each other. Though he cannot say whether Kim is a good cook, given such a sorry menu, he eats fast and lots. He’s never eaten Spam—mostly softened gristle, salt and fat—and never thought he would, but he is so hungry. It’s delicious. The mixed canned tomatoes and rice are tangy and filling. Elaine always overcooked rice, but Kim’s is perfect—separated grains, soft but not too soft.
After lunch, they wash and dry the sink full and stove full of dirty dishes, pots and pans, which Shelton was supposed to have done while Elaine was at work on Friday. All dried and put away, they start on the refrigerator, laughing when they can’t identify some of the furry molded food. Shelton hates clichés of any kind and this food-game is one, but he laughs along anyway. He wonders if she’s dumb; he wonders if she’s wondering if he’s dumb. He goes quiet over a plastic container of left-over caked rice and hopes Kim doesn’t recognize what it is and make some comment. Of course, she doesn’t.
While Shelton hauls the spoiled food out to the woods behind the house in a washtub, Kim wipes down the inside of the refrigerator with a wash of baking soda. Shelton had opened all the windows in the house and a cool breeze plays at Elaine’s white curtains. All curtains have to be white, Elaine had insisted.
The dog lies on the mat by the door after Shelton comes back inside. “The buzzards will have a feast out there.”
“I don’t know if even buzzards will eat that,” says Kim, setting a rack in the refrigerator.
Shelton recalls something from a preacher at church, something about birds, he thinks, from the book of Revelations. Yes, birds feasting on the flesh of millions during an attempted invasion of Israel “from the north,” halfway through something called the seven-year tribulation period. Or maybe the bird banquet came later—War of Armageddon. Or maybe there were two feasts, or maybe none. He cannot trust himself on such matters.
***Even fearing the law passing by and seeing him, or somebody bringing Elaine’s jeep home, Shelton insists that they sit out on the front porch when they get done cleaning the kitchen. He doesn’t want her to see that the fallen porch roof and floor boards are still there.
She sits in the wooden slat swing with her back to Dan’s Land Rover with the baby seat inside. Her ankles are leisurely crossed in child-like white Keds with no socks. She sways in the swing. Her fine brown hair moves about her face—baby skin with peachy cheeks.
The smoke is almost gone except for light drifts in the early mornings and late evenings. Shelton is seated on the top porch step, staring out at the sun streaming down the road—usually, before spring the sun is more southerly, casting over the woods. He looks at the Land Rover, at the sun shining through the tinted windows onto the buckled-up baby seat.
“You can talk to me about it if you want to,” he says low, not looking back at her.
“I don’t.”
“Okay.”
“I just don’t want to be by myself right now.”
“Okay.” She’s so quiet, he thinks, and nice. He wonders how long she will be staying.
The answer comes at dark when she goes out to the Land Rover, as if she is leaving, but then comes back through the front door with a black canvas backpack.
He’s glad she is staying. He sleeps on the couch and she in the bedroom. And when the dog rises from the rug next to the couch and tips into Elaine and Shelton’s room, Kim doesn’t chase her out.
Chapter 12
After a couple of months, hot summertime, it is easier for Shelton to rebuild the porch than to keep trying to distract Kim from commenting on it.
Early on Friday morning, he slips out to the goat shed while Kim is still asleep. He’s used to her now in his and Elaine’s bedroom where she never closes the door at night.
On the next to the top shelf, along the back wall of the brittle wood shed, he finds an old coffee can of new nails and a hammer where Elaine kept her carpenter stuff. She was always nailing up boards to patch the goat pen and the fence with its odds and ends mending looks like a tornado has blown the boards into place.
Going back to the fallen section of the porch, he begins prying boards apart and stacking them according to size.
At around eight o’clock Kim comes out with two mugs of coffee.
He sets the hammer down next to the can of nails and goes over to where she is sitting on the plank bridge, sits down beside her and takes the coffee mug she hands to him.
She sips her coffee. “I’m not saying anything.” She smiles and sips again.
“I wouldn’t if I were you.”
She holds out a free hand, the one with her wedding rings. She has short clean nails. “I guess you’ve noticed that we’re about out of grub.”
“Yes ma’am, I have.”
“You want to go with me to the grocery store in Lake Park?”
“Umm. Let me think about it.” He places a finger on his lips, staring off, then speaks. “Nope. I’ll just get on with this job. I don’t like to procrastinate.”
Home from her shopping trip, Kim parks the Land Rover in what Shelton thinks of as her parking spot now. The fact that Elaine’s jeep hasn’t been brought home, he thinks, must mean that the law or whoever hasn’t made the necessary connections about where the jeep belongs, about who owns it.
Kim, with a grocery sack in one arm, has a red bandana
tied around her forehead and is wearing her usual faded jeans with a cuff and a white polo shirt.
Shelton, still sorting boards from the pile out back, stops and calls out, “I hope you got me a steak for supper.”
Stepping up from the concrete block to the plank, she says, “If you want meat, you might have to butcher one of the goats.”
“Did you see lots of people at Winn Dixie?”
“No.”
He wishes she was more expressive.
“Anybody you know?”
“It wasn’t open. I had to go to that little Mexican vegetable shed off the highway.” She continues speaking to him as she goes through the screen door to the kitchen. “Got all the fixings to go with goat.”
When she gets done putting away the groceries, she surprises him by wandering back through the door with Dixie on the heels of her white canvas shoes and walking the joists to the southeast edge of the porch. “Need help?”
While Shelton nails the boards to the floor framing, she brings them to him. He doesn’t try to talk to her, just enjoys her being close by and helping him out. It’s something he never could have imagined—her being outside and active. Usually, she stays inside, cleaning and rearranging, though careful not to move things that Elaine may have put in place. She seems to know from instinct.
After noon, the heat thickens and presses down on them, even in the lacy shade of the Chinaberry trees. It’s like standing before an open fire. The goats shuffle and their skunky stink concentrates in the heat. Gnats swarm and buzz around Shelton and Kim’s faces and lodge in their eyes. He blows at them, hammering another floorboard. He notices that Kim keeps wiping her eyes on the smudged sleeves of her white polo and adjusting the red bandana on her forehead. She passes him another board, end out, careful not to hit him with it.
He takes a nail from the can and angles the point on the board, hammering. “Why don’t you go inside and take a break?” he says.
“I’m fine.” She heads back to the stack he’s made for another board of the same size.
They stop for water, for iced tea, and then go back to hammering and hauling, watching the porch floor come together from the west to the east ends.
Their clothes are wet with sweat. Shelton’s arms ache from hammering and he knows Kim’s arms have to hurt from lifting and carrying boards. But neither speaks. The afternoon stretches toward evening. The heat, like time, is elastic.
Shelton isn’t wearing his watch and neither is Kim. No reason why not except that the exact hour and minute aren’t important to know.
Shelton finds that it is hard while hammering to think and worry and feel guilty about waiting till after Elaine is gone to re-create the porch. He should have thought about this before.
He reaches back for another board and Kim hands him her red bandana.
Just before sundown, in the mesmerizing heat and hum of mosquitoes and long shadows, they have a half-porch floor reaching from the west end of the house past the kitchen door.
***Se-lah! Se-lah! Se-lah! Abdul Selah, former president of the United States and then head of the European Union, is on a mission for world peace. His Honor is visiting Israel first and then he will move on to the Arab nations. He will wrap up his tour in Baghdad for the opening of the grandly restored kingdom of Babylon.
Shelton is lying on the couch, watching TV with his head propped on his folded arms. He tries to recall the exact wording of the European Parliament concerning their search for a qualified leader of the Union: “Be he god or devil, we will receive him.”
So, Selah had gone from European leader, to world leader, to global dictator, to a god.
A picture pops up of gold lions, one on each side of a large ornamental gate. A woman with a lilting voice loops round to the story of Saddam Abdul Selah claiming a likeness to King Nebuchadnezzar, king of ancient Babylon.
On another note, earthquakes continue to chip away at the coast of California, north to south, working their way into its interior and spreading fire to densely populated cities.
Shelton closes his eyes, listening to Kim easing open the bedroom door after getting ready for bed. The dog rises from the rug next to the couch and tips through the door and springs up on the bed next to Kim.
“Did you hear that about California?” he calls out.
“Yes.”
He’s grown used to her short answers; he’s grown used to her. And every day that passes he becomes more and more fond of her. More and more attracted. He can feel it from her too, and truth is he’s always attracted girls and women.
He used to compare Kim to Elaine when the two were together, an unfair comparison since Elaine was so beautiful, but, in Shelton’s eyes, she’d become the model by which to measure all women. Kim is now more attractive with Elaine not around.
***Working together, they finish the porch late Saturday evening. Shelton, with Kim’s red bandana wound around his forehead and knotted in back to keep the sweat out of his eyes, drives the last nail on a corner post.
Except for a few split and broken boards the spot on the yard where the tumbled porch roof and floorboards have lain for so long is clean and open to the goat pens and the backdrop of woods.
The fair skin on Kim’s arms is covered with pink welts from mosquito bites and scratches from the splintering boards.
Shelton poses in the yard with his hands on his hips, viewing the repaired porch. “Well, what you think?”
“Nice.”
He wheels, laughing. “You talk too much, woman. Is that all you can say?”
She shrugs, half-smiling, and scratches her arms.
“What you say we get out somewhere tomorrow?”
“Okay.”
Shelton needs to see if Elaine’s jeep is still on the highway; he needs to see order again to clear his mind of the mess when he’d last left the house.
So far, the TV news has failed to report anybody’s notion of what happened. Only that the government is working to get to the bottom of it. All over the world, people have been occupied with surviving deadly weather—floods, tornados, hurricanes, tsunamis, fires in drought stricken areas. It’s as if the planet earth has been sent spinning and tumbled like the porch roof.
Add to that the fact that a massive army made up of Russian and Iranian forces has tried to invade Israel but got caught in the northern mountains by an earthquake, followed by hail and brimstone. Those not buried in the fallen mountains had panicked and killed each other or died of infectious diseases.
Chapter 13
The evening sun is no longer streaming straight down the dirt road but scattered like gold over the green woods to the south.
Shelton’s pickup still sits where it had run out of gas and Kim’s tire tracks are engraved in an arc where she has had to drive around it. She’s offered several times to help him tow the truck home but for some reason he’s not ready.
She swerves around the truck, driving on up toward the highway.
Out of habit, Shelton, on the passenger side of the Land Rover, takes his cell phone from his black t-shirt pocket, flips it open and dials his daddy’s number. He claps it shut before it can ring.
“Where’s your cell, Kim?”
“In my backpack.”
“You ever charge it?”
“No.”
“Why?”
No answer. At the highway, she looks out the green-tinted window on her side, checking for traffic. “Which way?”
Shelton scoots low and braces a knee on the dashboard. “Right. We don’t have to go all the way into Valdosta unless you want to go by your house.”
“No.”
“I just want to see if Elaine’s jeep’s been moved.”
Shelton stares at her. What is she thinking? She’s intelligent, he knows that, so she must have opinions about something, namely about what happened to her husband and son.
Up ahead all is clear—all the wrecked and parked cars are gone. Elaine’s jeep is gone. He can’t decide whether
he is mad or glad that it hasn’t been towed home. Likely there would have been a lot of red tape involved if they’d brought it home.
John’s convenience store is closed up tight as before. Shelton wonders whether he’s still inside or has moved on. He starts to tell Kim about almost getting arrested when he tried to move Elaine’s jeep. But it seems like another mark against him, like the fallen porch roof.
They meet two, three cars, a Wal-mart semi. Kim passes a pickup truck with a gang of Mexican migrant workers, their heavy black hair back-blown around their smiling square faces.
“You ever wonder what they have to be so happy about?” Shelton asks Kim.
“No.”
The sky is gray-blue but cloudless and the sun is back to its business of torture, hot but not nearly as hot as the past two days spent working on the porch. Inside the air-conditioned car it would seem cooler anyway, but the fact that it isn’t as hot out today, Sunday, galls Shelton. The happy Mexicans gall him and Kim not agreeing about them being so happy over nothing galls him. And if Elaine’s alive, it really ticks him off that she hasn’t at least had the courtesy to call.
Kim drives on toward Valdosta. Shelton is already eager to go home. He feels safe there, with only Kim. Now he fears getting in trouble for something he hasn’t done. But at the same time he is glad to be out and seeing automobiles moving normally along the highway.
“Tell me where,” Kim says.
“Umm... Let’s just keep going a bit. Everything’s back to normal, looks like.”
A few people are strolling along the sidewalks of downtown Valdosta. A young couple in blue jeans crosses the street at a stop-light, maybe going to see a play at the old Dosta Theater on the left. Or to eat at the Bistro cafe on the corner. Two old men with canes sit on a bench, on the right side of the street. A middle-aged couple stands staring through the plate-glass window of a furniture store—CLOSING SALE.
But when they reach the courthouse square, a block north of there, men and women, old and young, by the hundreds are lined up from the courthouse door to the street, the line snaking around the square.
“What you reckon that’s all about?” he asks.
“I cannot imagine.”
Police officers in black, carrying clubs, amble along the line, stopping now and then to talk to somebody.