“Not good. Let’s move on. Slow. Don’t want to attract attention.” It comes to Shelton that he wants the world to believe that he’s vanished with the others. He wonders if Kim feels the same.
“Go up to the next street and take a right and head home the back way, what you say.”
“Okay.”
Driving east, passing through the mostly poor-black section of town, men and women, old and young, are sitting out on the porches of their old dilapidated houses or wandering the streets and yards. Loud music, lots of laughing.
A man on a bicycle cuts across in front of the Land Rover and Kim has to stomp the brakes to keep from hitting him.
“Damn bastard!” Shelton has to hold to the dash to keep from hitting the windshield. “Get your ass off the street,” he yells.
The man stops the bicycle, both black high-top athletic shoes anchored on the pavement. “Who you cussing at, turkey?”
“You, nigger!”
“Shelton, no.” Kim reaches out to stop him from opening the car door. “Somebody might call the police.”
She is right. Shelton sits up straight. “Hit it!”
In the rear view mirror Shelton can see the crowd watching from the street. He can feel the brittleness of hate for a man whose name he doesn’t even know.
Back on the highway, heading home, Shelton says, “Well, some things never change, do they?”
“True.”
Sitting back in the seat, relieved to be on the way home, Shelton says, “So, what did you gather from the trip into town?”
Kim stares at him with her serious gray eyes. “We didn’t see any children.”
Shelton thinks about the government minority settlement where he’d gone on his way to Kim’s house. She is right—no children.
“Hey, you want to see children, I’ll show you children. It’s about time for everybody to be getting to church. You can’t walk for children under your feet.”
Just past the dirt road to Shelton’s house, Kim turns right down another dirt road. Curves and overhanging branches and open sun casting long shadows of pines. The road is white clay, hard as concrete in places and dead sand patches in other places. “I don’t want to stop,” Kim says.
“We won’t. I just want to show you that you’re wrong about no children.”
It is about five o’clock and the sun is in their eyes when they reach the little white frame church they used to go to with Elaine and Dan. Then, after church, before Kim and Dan’s baby was born, they would go to Shoney’s at Lake Park for desert—rich, dark chocolate cake with hot fudge icing. After their first outing with the baby, Shelton would make up any excuse to keep from going and watching that baby smear goo in his hair while everybody laughed at him.
The church house is dark-looking inside with the sun streaking around it. No cars and trucks in the shady front yard. No children out playing among the huge live oaks. No groups of men and women out talking while waiting for the service to start.
There’s a red sign on one of the double doors like the condemned sign Shelton saw on the door of the church in Valdosta.
Elaine drives on, and just south of the church a black sheriff’s car is parked in the cemetery aimed at the road.
Shelton sits back as far as he can, not moving his head. “Let’s go, let’s go! Don’t speed but keep moving.”
In the rearview mirror he sees the car still sitting there, windows glazed over with sun.
“What in the world is going on?” he shouts, pounding his knee with his fist.
Kim keeps driving, both hands on the wheel, as calm as he is agitated.
“Well, say something,” he shouts. “What do you think is going on? People don’t just vanish, do they?”
She opens her mouth to speak. He interrupts her with, “Don’t you dare say ‘I don’t know.’ You must have an opinion. And don’t give me that crap about the Rapture. I know you don’t buy that anymore than I do.”
At the highway, she takes a left.
Shelton keeps shouting. “Okay maybe you do believe that and that’s why you’re hiding out at my place and not charging your phone. Because you don’t want anybody to know you didn’t make it to Disney-World Heaven with the rest of your family.”
She turns on the blinker to take a right. “Shut up, Shelton. No wonder you didn’t get airlifted with Elaine.”
“What about you? You’re still here. You with your open-minded take on one God for all religions.”
“At least I don’t hate people just because their skin is darker.”
She swerves in an exaggerated manner to keep from bumping into the back of his parked truck. “Know why you’ve left that truck there for three months? Pity. Self-pity. Same as the porch.”
When they reach the house, she wheels into her parking place and slams the brakes and opens the door and strikes out around the corner of the house.
Shelton gets out and walks to the new back porch and sits on the edge, gazing out at the goat pen.
When she comes out with her black canvass backpack, the dog is on her heels.
“Call the dog, Shelton.”
“Dixie. Come.”
The dog trots over and sits beside him, whining as they listen to Kim open and shut the car door, start the engine, back out and drive away.
***
Dark seems a long time coming but Shelton waits to go inside till he can barely see. Till the goat pen disappears and the woods are only a block of darker dark; till day sounds turn to night sounds, hum of nothingness. No watching TV, no eating supper. He’s alone, as he deserves to be, and he won’t even allow himself the satisfaction of editing all he’s said to Kim this evening. No thinking of Elaine, no feeling sorry for himself. He is numb.
Leaving the light on over the sink in the kitchen, he goes into his and Elaine’s bedroom and undresses and slips between the sheets smelling of Kim—warm, soft, soap-scented. It’s as if the smoothness of her skin has spun the cotton into silk.
Dixie doesn’t follow him into the bedroom and he doesn’t blame her.
Tomorrow, he will... Nope. No plans, no trying to figure things out or even go through the motions of hoping to make it another day. Tunneling down into sleep, he lets go.
What do you have to be so puffed up about?
When he comes up, opening his eyes, he sees Kim’s rounded silhouette framed in the doorway with the kitchen light at her back. She moves forward, to the foot of the bed, as if trying to see who is sleeping there, then slowly walks around the other side of the bed, sits on the edge then lies down, pulling the cover up to her chin. Then he hears her crying softly. He rolls onto his left side and places his right arm across her body and pulls her to him. Rubbing her arm up to her shoulder he lets her cry, while breathing in the scent of her clean hair and neck. The tension in his body, with him for so long, at last lets go.
“Okay,” he says. “It’s okay.”
“Do you think we’ll get any stars by our names for at least believing in the Rapture?”
A RIGHTEOUS WIND
Part Two
Chapter 14
You would not mistake the kidnapping in progress of being serious, no evil event, even if you were not told that Sis’ Shirley is friend and not enemy: you can tell by the way she is high-stepping it across the dirt road to the dead woods with those huge decorated glasses and a sly grin showing a gold front tooth, her square shoulders not one bit strained from the burden of the little blond, curly-headed boy in her arms, him screaming and pitching to get down, cross about being scooped from his bed before good sunup.
The dog, onto this game from long habit, races across the road, barking, and stretches out over the wide, trenched fire brake and overtakes them.
And then comes Kim, lumbering out of the yard in cuffed blue jeans and bare feet, following Sis’ Shirley and the child, shouting and shaking a fist. She scampers down into the ditch and up again, falling to one knee.
“At least you could ask for once,” she shout
s, obviously inconvenienced and annoyed, but not angry.
She and Shelton had hired Sis’ Shirley with a goat to deliver their son Adam, almost three years ago, to keep him from being listed, labeled and numbered by the World Government system. He doesn’t exist. Kim and Shelton no longer exist since they excised the microchip IDs from the tops of their right hands.
Anyway, Sis’ Shirley had taken one look at the pink-cheeked boy’s blond curls and swore she’d never laid eyes on a prettier child and in place of the goat for pay she would take rights of visitation. Something like that. Really, she is lonely, Kim believes, and prefers Kim and Shelton’s company to that of her neighbors. Maybe she misses her church. She became an outcast in the minority settlement across the woods after her community learned that, for all her holding herself up as a Christian, turned out she was a hypocrite. She got left behind, along with the sinners all about her, that black Friday, three and a half years ago.
Still, Sis’ Shirley is in charge, so used to being in charge is she that she doesn’t know any other way. But she’s not fooling Kim: the main reason she snatches Adam up on occasion is to show off and bait the other women who lost their own children during the Rapture. Kim and Shelton don’t mind her coming over and playing with Adam. He doesn’t mind. He will sit on her lap on their back porch and listen to her silly songs and play patty-cake with her till she gets ready to go home.
They can count on her to snitch on her neighbors, some of the rougher bunch intent on robbing them. To them she claims to have some kind of in with the World Ruler, Abdul Selah, and they believe her because she’s always writing letters to him and bragging about him writing her back, though nobody has ever seen one of the letters.
“Sis’ Shirley, I mean it.” Kim keeps running along the trail through the dry woods, almost catching up with her and the child and the dog wambling ahead. “He’s not even good awake. His diaper is wet.”
“I’m just taking him to see my Santy Claus.”
“Uhh!” Kim shakes her head.
The trees look rusted from the prolonged drought and pine beetle infestation. One day the pine needles would be green and next day brown till the forest had become like a picture rubbed by a child with a peeled crayon. Even the sapped oaks rustle in the wind, when it blows, and the leaves fall down like rain. Their whole world is layered in dust and smoke, the blue of the sky almost gone.
Shelton’s been saying for weeks that it’s time to go. One spark and the woods are going to blow like a match stuck to confetti. He believes there will be water and safety in the Okefenokee Swamp, some forty-five miles to the east of where they live.
Kim doesn’t want to go. Though bad things have happened to them, she feels relatively safe where they are. They don’t have much longer here anyway.
They’re finding it much easier to trace events of the tribulation period than for the Rapture (there were no events to follow before the Rapture; there are events to follow before the Second Coming). It’s all there in the Bible, and Sis’ Shirley fills them in too. With the Rapture, they had just toed up to the threshold of time and stepped over into a lost world. But with every day that passes now the pressure from those in charge gets greater and people in general grow more evil and hateful.
According to the Sis’ Shirley, there were four major signs, or clues, to the Lord’s return for the Rapture: Israel’s becoming a nation again; everybody, the world over, fighting about oil; Daniel’s prophecy being fulfilled, having to do with Europe’s reestablishment; and the rise of militant radical Islam.
Kim and Shelton should have recognized “the signs and wonders,” as she calls them. Sis’ Shirley had, for all the good it did her. They promised her that they would be more careful to watch for the events to occur before the end of this trial and tribulation period. “Good luck to you,” she’d said and smacked her sullen lips.
Sis’ Shirley knows more Scripture by heart than either Kim or Shelton, and in spite of her dispute with God over missing the Rapture, she’s not one bit shy about sharing what she knows. Loving to shock too, she springs the news she’s gathered from her radio on Shelton and Kim. What’s going on? Just ask Sis’ Shirley:
“Abdul Selah be mad as a hornet because Turkey over there dammed up them two rivers they call the Euphrates and the Tigris. Say the Turks do that so nobody but them can’t float down the rivers on business with Syria and Iraq. Course, with no water the Chinamen’s army of over a million can walk right across them riverbeds and sneak up on Selah in Jerusalem.”
“What’s he doing in Jerusalem?” Shelton wanted to know.
“You don’t know?” Her voice got louder, always louder toward the end. “He in Jerusalem resting up after fighting them ole boys to the north and the south. Wore out, that why he there.”
Mixed up with news from John at the service station, Sis’ Shirley can likewise be depended on for the most titillating news, not without shock value: In London, an exchange student is accused of the sexual battery and murder of her roommate, with the help of her boyfriend; Earthquakes in Indonesia have triggered a massive tsunami; Cyclones in Myanmar; The bird-flu pandemic is sweeping Europe; Meteorite storms over New England; Another volcano in Chile. China and Japan, former enemies, declare peace, friendship and co-operation in their joint venture in refining oil.
***Stepping from the woods to the clearing of houses, Kim smells backed-up sewage and what could be mistaken for bitter frost-burned weeds, though they’ve had no frost for years.
She sees Alfred, Sis’ Shirley’s neighbor to her left, sitting on his doorsteps with his burry gray head in his hands. His mind has been slipping, they say, since so many in the settlement went missing (some claim it’s Sis’ Shirley’s fault for bothering him with all her crazy talk). Now, he’s quit speaking to his neighbors and there’s a rumor going around that he has tongue cancer. Kim wonders whether his own people have turned against him because they feel awkward speaking to him when he either can’t or won’t speak back. Or maybe nobody cares anymore.
By the time Kim gets to Sis’ Shirley’s black-top driveway and kitchen door, she can hear Adam squealing and laughing and the dog barking inside.
Kim steps through the open door and can see him and Sis’ Shirley under her gaudily-decorated Christmas tree—his first ever. Added to Dixie’s bass barking is the high-pitched yipping of a little brown and white windup dog that twitches its ears and tail.
“Sis’ Shirley, where in the world did you get that?” Kim asks.
“My boy Selah send it to me. Send it all the way from New Rome.”
Kim is used to the gifts sent to her by “her boy” Selah. Which means that those things have been stolen from her neighbors. She’s grown worse about lying and stealing over the years Kim has known her, but she never steals from them. She just wants love and acceptance, Kim tells Shelton. She’s just bitter about living all those years for her church, only to be spurned by the One she worked for and sang for and praised, and she honestly believes “it ain’t fair.”
Adam picks up the dog and screams when the twitching ears and tail touch his arm. He drops it. Sis’ Shirley cackles and rewinds it and Dixie keeps barking.
She is tall and slim, fifty-ish, sitting back on her bleached heels, the skirt of her blue chambray skirt covering her long legs. Not a pretty woman but not ugly, except for her sour face and puffed lips. Her eyes behind her stand-out glasses always appear half-shut.
The small frame house is clean and neat but a shamble of cheap cracked plaster walls and peeled white tiles and shattered windows caused by repeated earthquakes. All the other houses in the settlement are in the same condition. Strangely, Shelton and Kim’s house has been spared.
“Y’all don’t need to stay on here,” Kim says. “Fire’s going to come sweeping through.”
“Don’t start on that Okefenoak and all them snakes and gators. I’ll take fire anytime, but Lord knows what I have to put up with here.” She twists to sitting position and places one big-knuckle
d hand on top of Adam’s cherub head.
Kim believes that she will end up going with them, if for no other reason than to get away from these people who recall her contradictory history with the church.
Chapter 15
It is Christmastime but hot as July. Their last real winter had been when Kim was pregnant with Adam. They had been terrified of having a child but not for long.
When Kim comes walking out of the woods to the dirt road with Adam in her arms, and the dog panting behind, she sees Shelton standing in the goat pen behind the house.
“Ready?” she calls.
“Ready.” He waves and smiles.
“Wanta see what Mommy and Daddy made for you?” she says to Adam. “Wanta see?”
Adam climbs down her knees like door steps as she’d taught him to do to keep from further straining her back. Her back is strained from tensing; her teeth ache from gritting them. Sometimes she wonders how far she will go to protect her son, and then she has to stop wondering to protect her faith.
Adam runs across the yard toward the goat pen. Puffs of dust fly with each step. Dixie chases after him, spinning dirt to dust with her claws.
Shelton reaches over the fence and lifts Adam under his arms, high up in the air and then quickly to the ground. He screams in the same tone as when Sis’ Shirley had snatched him earlier this morning while she and Shelton were out back, but this time it’s a scream of thrill. Still, it bothers Kim.
Dixie tries to hop over the fence, but Kim sends her to the back porch.
“Okay, Mommy, we’re waiting,” Shelton says, standing by the fence, in blue jeans and a black t-shirt. “Come on.” His narrow brown eyes crinkle at the corners when he smiles.
Kim steps over the fence. She has to partially straddle and sit and swing the other leg over.
“Shortie,” Shelton teases and pokes one sharp boot toe through the bottom section of wire to spring the fence down.
Her arm brushes his and she feels a warm rush throughout her body. She walks behind Adam to the entrance of the goat shed, with Shelton behind her, pulling her close. Yes, he feels it too. She wonders if he shares her dread of going “out there.” If only she knew what to expect on the road.