Kids These Days (31 page)

I didn't recognize the house from the back. We came up on it suddenly, climbing out of the swamp and into a clearing featuring a long strip of grass and weeds that looked almost built for landing something, even if it did need mowing. There was nobody there—no car by the house, no buggy on the runway, no swath of fabric. No second cart, either. No Hank. No
POW
chute. I'd expected him even if I hadn't expected anybody else, I realized. He'd pointed at me. So here I was. Carolyn put it in park, closed her eyes, said a prayer to some god—and then she got out of the truck, left the door open, and walked away. The warning chime played until Alice leaned over to pull the door back closed.

Carolyn stood in the high grass and looked at the house, looked up at the sky, then back at the house again. After a while, she sat down. The grass was so tall that we could really only see her head. Delton said, “What's she doing?”

“She's melting down,” Alice said.

“Maybe she's just taking a minute,” I said.

“Maybe it's both,” said Alice.

“I'm going out there,” Delton said. “I want to talk to her.”

“Me, too,” said Sophie-Jane.

“No one's going out there,” Alice said. “That was the deal.”

Delton said, “I wish Nic was here. He's good with stuff like this.”

“Like this?” I said. “Really?”

She said, “He'd have ideas.”

Maggie woke up. “I have to go potty,” she said.

“Can you wait, sweetheart?” said Alice.

She said, “I have to go now.”

“I have a key,” Delton said. “I could take her in.”

Alice said, “We're not doing that.”

“She can't pee in here,” I said.

“I can't pee in here,” Maggie said, already edging up on tears.

Alice blew a couple of breaths through her fingers. “Here's what we'll do,” she said. “Delton and I will take Maggie in to pee, and Uncle Walter will stay out here and keep track of everything else.”

“Cool,” the twins said.

“Not cool,” Alice said. “Just plain and simple. Everybody else stays in the car.”

“OK,” they said.

“OK?” she said to me.

“OK,” I said.

“Nothing happens,” she said.

“He's not even here.”

She said, “And isn't that the problem?”

Alice got down out of the truck, holding the small of her back with one hand, something I'd seen her do several times in the past few weeks, but somehow hadn't fully processed—and in that moment, I'd never been more aware of her being pregnant. Of her being so apart from me, but so bound to me at the same time. The fact of it tightened the skin across the backs of my hands. The way she walked had changed, I saw, and the way she moved and stood. Her hair was getting longer. Her jawline looked different. Her eyes. And it wasn't the pregnancy itself, all those cells choosing up sides. It was Alice. It was this new Alice. I had missed it. It had been happening without me. But it was right there. And I wanted, suddenly, to tell her there was more I could do. I wanted to tell her I would not flee the scene. I wanted to get out of the truck and get my feet planted in what ground there might be and wrap both my arms around her and push my face into the back of her neck and just see how long that could hold us—see if that would be enough to start.

But she reached back in for Maggie, and all my halfassed gallantry receded into the busy simple need to get the child out, find her a bathroom. The twins unbuckled her and passed her up, and Delton and Alice lifted her to the ground. Maggie took hold of each of their hands. Alice shut the back door, and that fast I was sealed off from her again, had to watch them through the windshield as they passed Carolyn, who glanced up, but maybe didn't really see them. She was too far inside a world of her own. Maggie looked tiny between Delton and Alice. They swung her up the front steps, making a game out of it. Delton shuffled through her purse, produced a key, jimmied the bolt on the front door and got it open—and they were inside the house, and when the door swung shut again there was only Carolyn, still sitting on the ground, and only Sophie and Jane and me in the truck. And then there was the Crown Vic pulling up beside us, a shimmering mirage, out of nowhere. Friendly and Helpful. It was not quite fear I was having. It was certainty. “Stay here,” I told the twins.

“Who's that?” they said.

“They're helping look for your dad.”

“It's the cops,” they said.

I said, “In a manner of speaking.” With just the three of us in it the truck seemed gigantic, insane. I got out. “Stay here,” I told them again.

“She told you to stay here, too,” they said.

“I know,” I said, and shut the door. I walked to the Crown Vic and waited for them to roll down the window. Which did not happen. Instead, Friendly got out and stood next to me. Neither of us looked at each other. We both looked at Carolyn, who was still watching the sky.

“You're not supposed to be here,” Friendly said. He was tan. Everybody was tan. “You know something we don't?”

“I doubt it,” I said.

“He's supposed to be here. Not you.”

“Which is why you're here?”

“Which is why we're here.”

“I haven't understood one piece of this the whole time,” I said.

“That's what Mid keeps telling us. Hopefully that'll be true.”

“It is true.”

Friendly looked around. “This place is big. What the hell is it?”

“Fishing cabin?” I said.

“It'd be a lot of fishing.”

“Then I don't know,” I said, and I felt the hum set up along my spine.

Helpful got out, too, and pointed back behind us at the trees. “Adding a few to the dance card,” he said.

“What?” Friendly said.

Helpful held up a radio, but he didn't need to. Two green-and-white squad cars—maybe the same cars from that morning—came down the road and parked at the edge of the clearing. Green-shirted officers got out. With rifles. Friendly stared them down, said, “Motherfuck.” He took his sunglasses off and wiped a line of sweat from his forehead. “Who's in the car with you?” he said.

“Me?” I said.

“You.”

“Everybody. Some of them are in the house. Maggie had to pee. The youngest.”

“What is this, a field trip?”

“Something like that,” I said.

“You gotta get them all out of here,” he said. “Everybody.”

I said, “What's going on?”

“How did those guys end up here?” Friendly asked his partner. Helpful shook his head. “Who needs the goddamn infantry?” Friendly said.

“You need me to get them out of the house?” I asked him.

Friendly said, “Just get everybody the fuck out of the way. Please.” To Helpful, he said, “Any chance of raising their people on the dial, see if we can slow this down some?”

“Already tried,” Helpful said. “Nobody's talking.”

“I thought he'd at least be ours to bring in,” Friendly said.

Helpful said, “Guess not.”

“Call somebody,” said Friendly. “Call anybody.”

We heard him before we saw him. The breeze slacked off and the birds went quiet, and then there was that telltale buzz and whine, and Mid came right over the top of us, low, just above the treetops. He dipped a little at the field before he saw everybody, and then he pulled back up. He was by himself. No Hank. Carolyn stood up. Friendly and Helpful were both already on their phones. Two of the local cops got back in one car, wheeled it around behind the SUV, bumpered us in to where we couldn't go anywhere. They left the lights turning. I went over to explain to them about how Friendly and Helpful actually wanted me to move, but they weren't paying a lot of attention to me. They were both back out of the car, looking up. They were impossibly young. Mid flew over again, this time yelling something down nobody could hear over the top of the engine. He was gesturing, pointing, waving us off, and every time he did the whole rig swung around with the effort of it. His face was red. Cords stood out in his neck. Whatever he was yelling was long and complicated. Instructions, maybe. Accusations and amendments. Alice and Delton came back outside. Alice had Maggie on one hip, and she was trying to keep Delton pinned to the porch railing with her other arm. They were staring. Everybody was. Carolyn tried flagging him, waving him down, and she was screaming at him, telling him to land, calling him a bastard, telling him she loved him. He disappeared again, but we could still hear him. We knew he was coming back. The engine thinned, then swelled, and he flew over a third time. As he passed across the front edge of the clearing, he started shooting. One shot. Another. The cops on the ground scattered, took cover behind the open doors of the squad cars. My whole head emptied out. Something hit the roof of the Crown Vic. They would kill him. They would kill him in front of all of us.

Except something already didn't balance: His gun was funny, for one. It was like he was shooting firecrackers—though they were bigger than that. One hit the ground and did nothing, a black sphere the size of a golf ball. Another landed in front of the squad car that had us parked in, bounced underneath it, rolled out the other side and burst into pink flame. They were flares. He was shooting safety flares. Alice pushed Delton onto the porch floor, got down there with her, held onto Maggie. I opened the door of the SUV that was furthest from all of it, dragged the twins out, ran them up to Alice. “What are you doing?” she wanted to know. I pushed the twins closer to her. It was the only thing I knew to do. I would have pushed them inside her if I could.

Mid was circling now, holding the gun in his left hand and firing cowboy-style, letting his whole arm bounce with each shot. He wasn't even aiming. It was a show. He was laughing. Or singing. The white sail over his head looked like a rip in the sky. The grass was smoldering where the flares burned. He was going to take down the whole forest, the house, everybody. He'd make the news after all. A hundred acres burned to ash. Story at eleven.

And I did not see what happened next so much as imagine later what it must have been, paint it out by numbers once things had sufficiently slowed: He'd stopped shooting—I knew that much—and as he flew away from us, toward the far end of the field, one of the sheriff's deputies near us stood back up, put his rifle to his shoulder, aimed, and fired. It was a smooth, simple motion. The noise of it. The sheer noise. Nothing happened. Mid flew on. He did not evaporate in a fireball, did not turn, did not try to land. The deputy shouldered the rifle again, and I took off running from the front porch, started counting steps—ten, eleven, twelve—and I focused on his ear, stared at his ear as I got closer and closer, the folds, the pinches of skin, and I was in the air and through him before it ever occurred to me to worry about what would happen after we landed.

We hit so hard that at first I could not tell the difference between ground and sky. I huddled on my side trying to figure out what it might take to breathe again, trying to make note of what I could still feel and what I couldn't. I had grass in my mouth. Blood. I held my arms up at my ears, waiting for them to start beating me, kicking me. I listened for Alice. I saw the rifle lying well away. The cop I'd tackled was still on his back. We'd hit our heads together. I wasn't sure if he was conscious. I saw the deputy who was still standing drawing his pistol, aiming the gun at my chest, yelling at me to freeze, to put my hands in the air, two competing ideas I didn't think it was right to leave me to choose between. I saw he was shaking. It wasn't Mid they were going to kill. It was me.

Over the deputy's shoulder I watched Mid continue on his line down the field, only lower now—lower, I could see, than the tops of the trees—and he did nothing other than sail directly into them. It was hard to call what happened a crash. He did not swerve or bank. He just flew into the trees. The cart hit first, bounced off and fell a few feet, and then the parachute caught him, snagged up in the branches so that the whole rig hung in the air. The engine ran a full beat, maybe two, before it cut off. The only sound left was Carolyn screaming to him, and him not answering. The deputy kept his gun on me. Nothing moved in the cart. Friendly and Helpful had their guns drawn, too, but they were aiming at the deputy. He didn't even look like he'd need to shave every day. The other cops were coming at us on the run, yelling at everyone to wait, to holster their weapons. Carolyn made it to the end of the field, was standing directly under him, and now she was yelling back to us, screaming, “Somebody help!” Begging us. “Somebody do something!
Somebody somebody somebody!
”

Friendly grabbed the deputy who had his pistol out, spun him around, and punched him in the face. It was an uncomplicated thing. The arc of his fist. The sound of it against the kid's head. The kid went down. Then Friendly got in the Crown Vic and drove to Carolyn, to Mid, or almost to them, because he hit something down there, something metal in the grass, hit it hard enough to spin the car sideways, put it up on two wheels for a moment before it came back down again. He ran the rest of the way and started trying to climb the tree. Helpful called whoever it was he had on the other end of his fancy phone, said he wanted a helicopter. The deputy I'd tackled was sitting up now. He was cut along the bridge of his nose. I felt like I might have knocked one of my shoulders loose from the socket. Nobody put me in handcuffs. Nobody shot me. Up on the porch, Alice had pulled all four kids back through the front door of the cabin, and she had her body between them and everything else. She was staring at me, not blinking, not moving. My head hurt. My shoulder hurt. I got up and went to her, asked her if she was alright, if the kids were. “I'm sorry,” I told her, wanting that to stand in for everything. “I love you. I'm sorry. I am.”