The Inner City (6 page)

He included Joey when he read off the names of the dead. But Joey was capable of bad jokes, of bad taste, of not knowing when to respect other people’s feelings. Joey was capable of fudging this somehow.

However: “accounted for and identified.” Could Joey really pull that off?

He stood in line for the grief counsellors. “I don’t think Joey’s really dead,” he said.

The counsellor smiled sadly, then consulted a list. “He really is,” she said. “What you’re feeling is very natural, it’s called denial. The first thing you do is insist that the facts are wrong. Because you can’t, at first, accept it. It’s a terrible thing, it really is, but it happened.”

Jonah sat there, miserable and polite. Joey was dead.

There was a half-day at school. He went home and sat in the kitchen. So, apparently his parents hadn’t heard or they would be there, waiting for him. Wouldn’t they?

He sat at the kitchen table, his head feeling very heavy, and he thought about it. He could find no way to put all this together. He wondered, shamefully, if Joey had left him anything. He was always going on about how Jonah should turn his stuff over because of the Rapture.

I bet he didn’t see this coming, Jonah thought. I bet he was really surprised. It was supposed to be me.

When his mother got home, Jonah said, “Joey ascended.”

“No,” she said. “I understand what you’re feeling. It’s a shock. We were all prepared for ourselves, and it’s a disappointment, but one thing has nothing to do with the other thing.”

“It happened at sunset.”

“Coincidence.”

“You always say there is no coincidence with the Lord.”

“I think you should pray harder. As soon as your father comes home, we’ll pray. You’ll feel better. We’ll pray for Joey’s soul.” She looked away a little at that.

“You think he’s burning in Hell!” Jonah said, suddenly understanding that look.

His mother sighed. “Of course he is,” she said gently. “You know that too.”

His father was depressed. “The numbers all added up to this,” he said. “And we invited the Lord into our hearts and lived for Him. Does it make sense to you that He would abandon us like that?”

His father had been born with the name Robert, but he took the name Paul when he converted, because he was struck suddenly, mid-life, mid-path, by the Lord. He’d been on a walk in the park and stumbled on a church picnic, and there, standing as if waiting for him, in a ray of sunlight, was Ann Mary. “Come along now,” she’d said gently, turning, “he’s about to speak.” And this was how he entered the Church of Rising Saints, and how he was persuaded that the Rapture’s date was revealed in the Bible, if you read carefully and did your math. From that point on, his life had felt luminous and populated. The Rapture had been far enough in the future not to seem frightening then, and over the years he had learned to accept it hungrily—all of them, together, glorious.

Ann Mary worked for the Church for a very low wage, doing clerical matters and filing various forms. Paul, however, worked in the world, delivering packages for a shipping company. He was friendly to his coworkers and had, once only, and a long time ago, tried to give out pamphlets from his Church. Now he tried to smile, be gentle, never foul-mouthed, be polite—he tried to live as an emblem of his religion and not mix. Not be polluted. Over the years, he had invited a co-worker or two to his home, but it had always been disappointing. They had come in eagerly, and left even more eagerly. They did not want to discuss God; no one in that world wanted to discuss God.

And God was the background sound in Paul’s life: the resonance, the resource, the high-pitched whine.

Each day he went out to
their
world, each night he came back to his own. In love with God, with Church, with Ann Mary. His wife believed her children went fortified out to the heathens, flowing in the safety of their belief. She had been out there—knew that it was possible to love the endearments of the damned; it was hard not to wish they could be saved, but she had learned that for all their humour and ease, they could line up against you.

So Jonah kept a sort of cautious silence about his life, and was solitary at school, until Joey sought him out. Joey looked poor and unkempt; he had a nervous energy and a compulsion to pursue his own curiosity. He heard, once, that Jonah belonged to a cult, and he attached himself to Jonah like a dog.

“We are not a cult,” Jonah’s father said stiffly. “Cults do not praise the Lord, they praise the leader of the cult. They’re heresies.” He paused, took a breath, and said, “Everywhere you go, people believe in someone or something—God. Everyone has a version of God. But they’re not all true. They represent how much people can or will understand. In a way, it’s like music. Some people like classical, some folk, some rock. Music speaks to people, yet there are higher and lower forms of music. So why do some people love the low forms of music? Because it’s all they can understand. It’s how far they’ve gone with their abilities—with their souls.”

“But why wouldn’t God give everyone the higher soul?”

“He does; they choose what to do with it.”

“Why can’t they all be saved?” Jonah cried.

“They don’t want it.”

Jonah stopped. He knew there was no use in arguing, that everything he said would float out alone to be swatted by his father’s voice. He could never feel his own conviction; he seemed too new at it. But his parents’ faith seemed so sure. He regretted it, that he would leave Joey behind, but it had also, in a strange way, seemed obvious. Joey wasn’t like them. He wasn’t like Joey.

“What if the date was right?” Jonah whispered. He could see his father’s mouth twist. “And we weren’t the ones who were called?”

Jonah went to Joey’s house to see if Joey really did have a dog. He felt responsible for it, because of the way Joey had talked about the left-behind dogs.

Mrs. Pattimpot answered the door, red-eyed, exhausted. “You can’t have his dog. What did you say your name was? Oh, yes, he talked about you.” She looked away above the trees, then her glance came down again. “I don’t know about a pact. I don’t know.” She didn’t seem to be deciding anything. “I don’t know. For a while, okay. Just leave me your address and phone number.”

She stepped back, opening the door. Behind him, its tail tucked, its ears flat, was a little gray dog. Kind of curly-haired; mournful, shivery.

He bent down and picked it up.

“Wait!” Mrs. Pattimpot said, and went deep inside the house. She came back with a plastic shopping bag. “Buster’s dog food,” she said, handing it to Jonah.

She closed the door as soon as he stepped outside. Jonah looked in the bag and found a leash. He clipped it onto Buster’s collar, and talked to the dog in a soothing tone. “It’s perfectly all right. Joey is the one who told me all about you, so nothing bad will happen. You won’t be alone,” he said firmly. “We’re going to rescue all of them.” He stopped and took a sheet of paper from his pocket. His lips moved as he read the next address. There was an old Labrador in the yard there who looked at him hopefully. “Shane,” he said, “come along, Shane.” He went to Matt’s house and collected Sophie, then to Sandy’s and got the two Chichuahuas, Lefty and Righty.

The dogs sniffed each other, wagged their tails, showed their teeth, but none of them fought. The males took their turns lifting their legs on a post or a tree, and they would have done it endlessly, one after the other, if Jonah hadn’t grown tired of it.

He took the dogs home, locked them in his room, and went out for the rest. When his parents came home, they paused outside their door, listening to the yapping. There was a note on the door:
Don’t come in yet. Dogs loose—Jonah
.

They knocked, and Jonah opened a window and leaned out. The wild yapping was louder. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But you’ll have to go somewhere else for a while, just till I figure it out. The house is filled with dogs. There’s no more room.”

“Jonah—” his father said sternly.

“The problem is, they’re excited. I think they’d bite if anyone else came in. They’re sorting themselves out—you know, hierarchy. They’re finding their hierarchy. Could you give me a few hours?”

His parents stood there, listening. Ann Mary squeezed Paul’s hand. “Jonah, are you safe in there?”

“Oh, I’m safe, sure. They like me. I just think they need to settle down a little.” He bent down and disappeared for a moment. When he popped up again, he had Buster in his arms. “This is Joey’s dog.” He flushed a little. “I said I’d take care of him. The other dogs belonged to the rest of the kids who died.”

His parents were silent for a while. “All right,” his father finally sighed. “But you have to get them in order. Put them in the yard or downstairs or something. They can’t be everywhere. And you have to give them back eventually, you know. They’re not yours.”

The Reverend’s house was in an uproar. Church members came and went, grouped on the porch or in the living room, in the back yard. Half the congregation thought the Rapture had taken place without them; half thought their math was wrong, or they had used the wrong calendar. Quite possibly calendars themselves were artificial counting tools.

“It’s the nature of inspiration,” one member was heatedly saying, “to have
specific
meanings, not universal meanings, so the predictions might apply to some, not all.”

“Of course, no one argues with that, but
we’re
the
some
. We’re the ones.”

“Do you even
hear
your lack of humility? Can you wonder why you were left behind?”

“Not left behind—just waiting a little longer—unlike some people who think you either flip the card or don’t flip the card in the universe—”

“Now what that means I don’t even think
you
can explain—”

Paul and Ann Mary and Gina stood in the backyard, listening to the arguments around them. Ann Mary slipped her hand inside her husband’s hand. They had hoped to talk to the Reverend about Jonah and the dogs.

“There was a transposition,” someone argued. “The commonest mistakes. Nine years from now—”

“Or nine years
ago
—or nine days, or nine hours
ago
—if it’s a mistake, who says it’s in favour of the future?”

“Because
we’re still here
,” an exasperated voice cried, and the debate raged on.

“This is no good,” Ann Mary said finally.

Paul looked around and felt very lonely. It was something he hadn’t felt in decades—had thought he’d escaped, and yet here it was, filling his heart like smoke.

They walked home slowly. There were candles placed in front of a tree at one house, with stuffed bears. They stopped, gazing at the display

“I want to give them my sympathy,” Paul said and turned towards it.

“I’m sorry,” Paul said when a man answered the door. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Did you know Sherry?” the man said. “I’m the one who said she could go. I should have told her to come straight home. But how could I know?”

A few blocks later, Ann Mary looked down to the right and saw a bunch of cars parked in the street, and people gathered. They turned that way. A woman carrying a casserole fell into step beside them. “Did you know Clare?”

“No,” said Ann Mary. “But we feel so saddened by all this.” She hesitated. “It could have happened to anyone.”

“It could have been all of us,” the neighbour agreed. “So strange. She was just filling in for the regular bus driver. That’s the kind of thing that will drive Bill crazy, won’t it? The hand of fate, the hand of God, dumb luck, whatever. What if she’d run late. Or run early. Hard to think about.”

“Very hard,” Paul agreed. The woman left, and they continued walking. Finally Paul said, “If it had been
our
bus with
our
people, there would have been no doubt.” He didn’t finish the thought.

“Paul, this wasn’t it,” Ann Mary sighed.

“The church is dividing up,” he answered. “Those who believe it happened without us, and those who believe we got our math wrong. Who’s right? The ones who can’t do math or the ones who think God skipped over us?”

She signed. “Jonah is upset because he lost his friend. Why are you upset?”

Paul was silent for a moment. “Don’t you wonder? That we might have been wrong?”

“It would be unbearable,” she said slowly. “To think what you’re thinking. Pray, Paul. This is not the time to stop talking to God.”

Jonah let them come in. “But be careful about the dogs,” he warned.

“We have to discuss the dogs,” Ann Mary said firmly. “The big ones have to stay outside. At least for a while.”

“No,” Jonah said.

He seemed, suddenly, older. Ann Mary studied him. “At least the ones that are bigger than Gina,” she said finally.

He nodded, and the crowd of dogs followed him to the back door. He grabbed the bigger ones and pushed them through to the outside, where they began to race around.

“Jonah,” Ann Mary said. “What can we do? I’ve lost something too, but we have to hold on to each other. I know that. What can I do to hold on to you?”

Jonah felt a small release in his heart, and he hated it. “I want to see where Joey died,” he answered.

His mother rocked back, noting that he had said “died,” not “ascended.”

“Yes,”’ she said.

They were quiet on the drive out of town. They took the road that led uphill, along the back valley roads. They came to a curve that showed them a smashed spot ahead: flown trees, tires, scraps of metal. There was a wooden barricade with a blinking light closing off one lane. Jonah reminded himself that it had happened a day ago. That seemed too much time; he didn’t want to get so far away from when Joey was alive.

They pulled up to the wooden barricade, a puny thing; what was the point? Part of the guardrail was out, of course; but the wooden sawhorse would keep nothing from going over.

They got out of the car and stood looking at the path of the tornado—bent trees, snapped trees, and a stripped path—clear but brown and aching—straight through.

The weather was changing again; they could feel the wind scraping against their eyes.

Gina had taken Buster with her, Joey’s dog, to see Joey’s last place alive. Jonah noticed the dog dangling from Gina’s embrace, one leg thrown out straight, not able to fit in the crook of her arm.