Thirst (24 page)

Laura’s parents would treat him like their son, despite the tragedy he was part of. They would grieve for Laura together. She was all they had. But now they’d have him. They’d lost a
grandchild in the past and this would be too much for them alone.

Next to him was a charred stump. It must have been a stump before all the rest was burned because the top was chainsaw-flat. Lying on the stump was a string of colored beads—butterfly shaped, a sorbet orange, green, and pink. Fishing line held it together. A little girl’s bracelet. Someone else had placed it there, unkinked as it was. A lost and found right there in the woods, as though whoever it was had hoped the owner would be walking by and find it. He held it in his palm and ran his thumb over the indentations stamped into the bits of plastic. Then he laid it back down, a scar of color on the dirty wood.

His arms and legs were sore, but his vision was clearer than before. He got up and ran with his eyes open this time, and another bit of color bloomed in front of him. Thirty feet ahead of him a flower was poking from the ash. He stopped and put his hand on his knees. The flower’s redness was evidence of something.

As he approached, though, the shape of it changed. It wasn’t a flower, after all. It was the frill of a little shirt. A girl was there, her hair clumped up. Her cheek was coated in a film of soot. Eddie touched it, and in the track his finger left, the skin was swollen pink. The rest of her body was covered in dirt and ash. Two men were down ahead of her, but all their color was gone. One looked at the sky, his eyeballs dead and bulging.

Eddie walked around them and kept on going. After a while, the thirst arrived again and started spreading. Laura’s parents were on a well, and if their power was out, then her father had surely rigged a system to get the water to the surface. That was
a man who wouldn’t let his wife go thirsty; Eddie was sure. He admired Laura’s father: whatever his hands could build, he built it for his family.

Through the trees, Eddie watched the sky slide down like a patch of oil. It was amber at the horizon. Black shadows swam through the limbs and gave the impression of people running. Every few minutes, he stopped and stood still, looking around him, but there was no one there.

The ash was thinner, and he could see the trail again where it curved along the bank. The ground was soft and brownish gray. The shadows in the trees looked like children. He saw them running, but didn’t believe he really saw them. It was just the amber light playing through the branches.

Soon, he stopped to take a piss.

“Ha!” he said, shouting at his zipper like a madman.

But nothing came out. He unclenched the muscle in his groin, and a warmth spread between his legs. He thought maybe he’d wet himself, but when he felt there, he was dry. His fingers tingled, but that was okay; his headache was okay, too. His headache protected him from the heat.

Another child streaked across his vision. It was just a shadow in the trees, but Eddie called out. Steve McCarthy had told him to sit and rest—that if he sat and rested the feeling would come back into his legs. But Steve McCarthy was a liar, and Eddie didn’t have time to sit and rest. His window was closing. He needed to get to the bridge. He needed to get to Laura’s parents’ house.

He ran on wobbling legs, trying to ignore the children in the trees. One of them was gray and thronged with streaks of light, which blinded him, and then there was a single child,
running. Eddie left the trail and followed him up into the tree line.

“Come back here!” he called.

The ash was heavy there, up to his shins. But higher on the ridge, the trees were trees again, unburned. They had a rotted, hollow look. The boy looked over his shoulder and zigzagged gleefully, as if Eddie had wandered into a game of tag.

“Stop!” he called. His voice was harsh. The boy turned and stood where he was.

Eddie kept his arms at his sides, as though any sudden movement would spook him. The boy’s left hand was palsied and twitched at his hip in the manner of a gunslinger’s. His hair still stood on end, his shirt the same color as his arms and neck, the cloth so tattered it looked like rotting skin.

Eddie tried to hold him with the sternness of his voice. “Where are your parents?” he called.

The boy clutched his arms at the elbows across his chest.

Eddie didn’t move. “Why aren’t you at home?”

The boy looked at him with muted eyes.

Eddie tried to walk, but his legs wouldn’t follow. He pitched forward, and the boy ran. Eddie watched from where he’d fallen. There were dead leaves in his face so dry his chin made a powder of them against the earth.

“Wait,” he called. The boy grew fainter in the woods, and Eddie squinted hard, hoping to find traces of motion that he could connect together into a path.

There was a sound that may have been branches breaking, but may have been no sound at all. He heard only his breath and then a buzzing.

When he opened his eyes, the buzzing was gone. The woods
were silent, but the sky had changed color. The amber at the edges was darker, and overhead was gray. He rolled onto his side and grabbed his thighs to get his legs beneath him. He leaned into the trunk of a skinny tree, and as he pushed himself up, the trunk broke like wafer candy. It was a tall tree and the upper branches whizzed through the air far away from him. The headache was gone. He could stand. He started slowly, but soon he could walk and then he could run again.

He ran in the direction the boy had disappeared, watching the ground to see where he’d disturbed it. His own feet left deep imprints among the leaves, but it was as if the boy had floated over them.

It was strange the way his energy left him—like a plug had been pulled at the base of his spine, all of it draining out. He imagined the boy in front of him, the way he’d looked over his shoulder devilishly—as if he’d been the one to pull the plug when Eddie wasn’t looking.

First the sky above him went blurry and then he doubled over and couldn’t lift himself up. He stumbled through the woods, his eyes so heavy he almost didn’t see the refrigerator on the ground in front of him. He almost ran right into it. It was on its side, as white as a box of light. Four legs hung over it. Above the legs, two bodies sat.

The boy came out from behind the refrigerator and stood next to the two men’s legs. He grinned at Eddie, as though he’d won by getting there first.

“Keep going where you’re going, pal,” one of the men said. He was shirtless and wore a heavy metal chain around his neck, the kind a bike messenger might use to lock up in the city, except a cross hung from it. The other man reached over the
edge of the fridge and twisted the handle of the samurai sword that leaned against it.

Behind them, tarps were tied to the trees and Eddie could make out bodies lying beneath them on blankets. The tarps were brown and green and red, and strung at different angles like the rooftops of a far-off arid city.

The boy walked back and forth, catlike, between the legs of the two men, running his hand along the metal of the fridge. They didn’t pay him any mind.

When the man with the chain bent over, the chain stayed motionless against his chest. Eddie stepped closer. It was a
tattoo
of a chain and a cross. The other got off the fridge and held the samurai sword. He addressed the tip to Eddie.

“What do you want?” he asked.

Eddie’s throat was too dry to speak. The air hurt going in. He clutched at it with his hands as though he were choking.

The one with the tattoo tapped a knuckle next to where he sat on the metal door of the refrigerator. “This isn’t for you,” he said. “It’s for us and the women.”

Eddie pushed hard with his stomach muscles and made a squeaking sound. The effort forced him to sit, and he looked up at them from the ground.

“We got an arrangement with the moms,” the tattooed one said.

“Nothing left for you,” said the other. “Go back the way you came.”

“Gary …” the tattooed one said.

“What? He’s a dead man. Look at him. It’s too sad.”

He propped the sword against the side of the refrigerator and raised a canteen to his lips, tilting his head back. The
canteen was green and wide, with a cap connected by a bendable plastic strip. Eddie had had one just like it when he was young. He used to play “lost soldier,” hacking at trees with a pocketknife. The memory was strong enough to drop the walls from where he sat—so that he was nine years old again, deep in the woods behind his parents’ house.

The two men stood up and Gary opened the refrigerator door, bending the upper half of his body into it. When he came up he was bear-hugging a watercooler jug against his chest. He leaned it on the side of the refrigerator and took off the cap.

“Give it here,” he said, and the other man held the canteen. “Hold still,” he said. He touched the lip of the jug to the lip of the canteen and poured out two pulses of water.

Eddie clutched his throat again and rasped. He skidded forward on one butt cheek, and then the other. The backs of his legs pounded silently against the earth.

“Get up. Get out of here,” Gary said. “This isn’t for you.”

“You don’t just get precious things for free,” the tattooed one said. “Supply and demand. Get it?”

“If there’s no supply,” Gary said, “you don’t get to demand it.”

“And he works for a bank.”

“
Used
to work.”

“Yeah, used to. What do you do now, then?”

“This.”

“Right. This.”

They seemed to have forgotten Eddie for the moment, talking as they were.

He moved closer, legs out in front of him, trying to use his hands but his hands weren’t responding. They flopped on limp wrists when he pushed them on the ground.

“What is this?” Gary said, his voice going high. “Go die somewhere.”

“Gary …”

“He should have gone with the rest of them.”

“Yeah, but they didn’t come back,” the tattooed one laughed.

Gary spat a loogie that landed near Eddie’s hand. “At least they were trying to help themselves.”

He put the heel of his shoe on Eddie’s shoulder and extended his leg. Eddie fell to his side. He tasted the earth in his mouth. It tasted of fire. He flailed his hands and caught the crook of his elbow around Gary’s shin.

“Get him off! Get him off!” he squealed, as if Eddie were a spider.

The tattooed one retreated behind the fridge and raised the samurai sword.

“Take your hands off him,” he said. “I’ll cut you with this thing.”

Eddie squeezed his arm tighter and pulled himself along the ground using Gary’s leg. He was close enough that Gary doubled over and leaned his hands on Eddie’s back.

“Do it, Matt!” Gary yelled. “Do it, already!”

“I’ll do it!” Matt yelled. “Get off him! I’ll do it!”

Eddie pulled in tighter. He was trying to get close to the refrigerator, but wasn’t having any luck. Gary’s weight was keeping him pinned down.

“I’ll do it!” Matt yelled again.

Gary squirmed around and soon his leg was free. Eddie’s face was in the dirt again. He lay there in front of them.

“What the hell?” Gary said. “Why didn’t you do it?”

Eddie heard the flat edge of the samurai sword click against the fridge.

“I didn’t need to. Why would I do it if I didn’t need to?”

“What do we do with him now?”

It was quiet for a while and Eddie closed his eyes and continued to taste the earth.

“Give me the glass one.”

“The empty?”

“Yeah.”

Eddie felt their steps beat on the ground as they approached him. One of them put a shoe into his ribs. He felt a blow at the back of his head, and the world closed in and was black.

When he woke, he was in another part of the woods. The dark swirled around him like hot oil, scalding his imagination. He would die here, he thought, or he was dead already.

But the longer he was awake, the clearer it became that he was living. The back of his head throbbed and he reached up and felt the stickiness there. The woods were so flat with darkness that he couldn’t move. He tried to sleep, and did, dreaming of Laura’s father—how he would drive across the bridge and down Route 29 when all of this was over, how he would park his car in the lot next to the spillway where the weekend hikers disembarked with their dogs and baby strollers. Eddie dreamt that he was there with Laura’s father. How they would walk up the trail together and find his body where it lay on the ground. Laura’s father would say, “You dummy,” as he often did in his joking way. “You should have listened to that old guy and stayed where you were. You could have made it if you stayed put. Why on earth would you run?”

“My neighbor had a gun. He would have shot us.”

“No, he wouldn’t have. It’s hard to shoot a person.”

Laura’s father had been a soldier once, though he never talked about it with Eddie, and so the way he spoke about shooting someone would carry weight.

Eddie wouldn’t know what to say to that, and maybe silence would be best. For a while—early on in their relationship—he’d called Laura’s father “Sir,” but that hadn’t lasted, thankfully. Now there was respect between them. They could be silent together when considering important things. If Eddie had stayed alive a little longer, Laura’s father probably would have taken him aside one afternoon—when the women were out doing something together—and told him about Laura’s little girl, about how precious she’d been to them and how young Laura had been when it happened. He would have become emotional, and for the first time spoken with Eddie about God and faith, in a way that showed he’d never before given those ideas much serious thought. But Eddie would see that those ideas—of God and faith—were in place for just this kind of thing—that without them, even the strongest people risked falling apart—how they made even the strongest people, in so many ways, seem ordinary. It would be a somber afternoon, certainly, but they would have endured it together, and by the time Laura and her mother got back from whatever they were doing, Eddie would love them all that much more. He would have been that much more a part of their lives.

When Laura’s father left him, and it was just Eddie there, alone in the darkness of the woods, he dreamt about how cruel it was that he would have to live all the way to morning. If he
were dead, at least the night would be over. But his mind ran with a turbulent depth, and time was like a stick gone beneath its current. He opened his eyes many times and the sky was black, but finally when he opened them, it was gray. The next time, it was the dull yellowish color of dawn.