Where (6 page)

Drumbeat. As if to scare us into submission, the amplifiers blare. “Signs of violence.”

To keep our attention, the banner running along underneath the feed expands to fill the screen— block letters, so there's no mistaking it:
SIGNS OF VIOLENCE
. It does the job.

Then everything rolls in on us all at once. The sun is a white hole in the white sky. The breeze has died and there are no shadows left. Stay here and we'll fry like marbles in a punch bowl, while above us, everything we've lost flashes by in a hasty reprise: our sweet waterfront, our abandoned houses, our empty rooms, our most intimate places laid open and magnified like specimens in a high school science class. All our abandoned toothbrushes, empty shoes and rumpled beds taunt us, everything we've lost and everything we care about …

That, I could have handled, but the agency behind our— what?—
removal
— wants more out of us. We are packed in tight, belly to butt, flank to flank, scared and flatulent and rank with morning breath, all Kraven island jammed in the plaza with no logic to it, local knowns and unknowns in uniform white scrubs, nobody any better or different from anybody else. We're all here except the one soul I thought I knew by heart.
I used to think I knew.
I whirl, yelling to fix what's broken, calling out again and again, and loud enough for my old life to hear and come back: “Up here Dave Ribault, I'm here!”

Then Ray Powell plants both hands on my shoulders to bring me down. “Merrill, shut up,” he says, not unkindly. With the white hair and that big square jaw, he looks like a Roman centurion marching out. Immaculate Ray. When he speaks, you listen, but the day has changed him; I'm not sure how. He turns me to face the screen. As I turn with him, I see what Ray can't: Father, free for now, shoving people aside, hitting when he has to, anything to clear his way to open space.

I nudge Ray. “Father alert.”

But Ray's fixed on the moving images above. “Shut up and watch. Help me figure this out.”

If you think you want to know what happened to us, slouched in front of your TV or watching our story play out in your favorite bar or listening as your smartphone directs you through the streets of a strange city, I'll tell you who wants to know.

We do!

Sucked into the moving history, I lift my arms and jump high enough for Davy to see me in the crowd.
I thought I knew you.
I don't even know if they are watching on their screens back home, and it is bitter.
I don't know you at all. Dave Ribault, I
 …

I'll never know what the
I
was because Ray snags my arm. “Don't!” I point to the cameras posted at all four corners of the plaza. “Please!”

“Right.” We're on camera and too fried to wonder whether it's surveillcam or we're on TV. Ray boosts me higher, while Father bulldozes his way to the front. I should warn Ray, but I wave for the cameras with both hands, reaching. Praying, I think.

Ray puts me down. “Enough! Nothing we do will make any difference.”

Looking into his bleak face, I see. I open my mouth and grief comes out in a groan. Around me, a hundred others let go too, and all our pain and confusion spills out in the plaza all at once. The sound is huge. Whatever we had been— blindsided by the experience, stunned, scared or mystified— turns into rage.

Electrified, Father climbs Delroy Root like preacher climbing into a pulpit and shakes his fist at the elements. His voice gets so big that it drowns us out. “Explain!”

He'll be blamed, but he's only the first. Like Father, Ray raises his fist. He turns to the camera, and shouts in a voice so commanding there's no mistaking who's the real leader here: “Explain.”

In seconds it's a communal roar, a hundred Kraven islanders shaking their fists at The Power … if there are Powers, shouting: “Explain.”

“Answers.” Father goes on, at top volume. “We want answers!”

Well, he gets one. The TV feed stops.

And— like
that
— all telecommunications cease. In that second, we have made ourselves heard.

At that moment, we understood. Every television, cell phone, PDA and netbook in the compound is dead. We are mute, essentially deaf, blind and ignorant, cut off from life as we knew it, the struggling, imperfect, noisy real world. I flash on Neddy with his eyes rolled back in a blank face, replaying that stupid game inside his head, and for that half-second, I think:
Good.

Good for Ned, sure, but without electronics, with no way to send for help or plead our case, we're stranded here, wherever
here
is. We can't search. Worse. We can't get a message out. Shaken, we turn on Father:
Look what you did,
we rage, terrified and livid
. In the name of God
,
shut up,
but as if nothing just happened he goes on shouting, “Explain!”

At which point all the scared, infuriated people Father mistook for followers converge on him, throwing whatever they happened to be holding when unseen forces yanked our lives out from under us— shoes, books, useless smartphones. Friends and neighbors close in on him, lawyers, probation officers and perps Father had put away while he was still a judge, women who hit on him after Mother left,
ordinary people we thought we knew
run at him in a rage, ready to bring him down.

Father is too enflamed to notice. Demagogue, on a tear. I know that fierce, contorted grin:
my people are angry
— his people!— the arrogant fuck. He spreads his palm on Delroy Root's face and hoists himself even higher, shouting,
“Tell them, people. Louder. Make them hear it. Crack the skies.
Explain!
”
Father rails on, shouting orders at the wind as the Dawson boys lunge and his voice cracks: “Order, order!”

He doesn't get it, but Delroy does. He sets Father down and backs away. The old man's mouth is still moving in the seconds before whatever civility we'd maintained so far shatters. Islanders fall on him, shouting, pounding, and I watch with OK, forgive me, a rush of vindictive joy.
Whatever they do, it serves you right.

Then Ray smashes the empty bin against the flagpole, CRACK! The clang silences the mob and they fall back. Without speaking, he cuts through the crowd to help my father the yowling idiot who just made things worse. Ray picks him up by the armpits, sets him on his feet and steadies him with both hands. Knowing Father, I flinch, waiting for him to lash out. He shakes off his rescuer and stands straight, bunched to fight. Then he blinks. It's Ray. An extraordinary thing happens.

I see my father break in two.

He reels, shaken. His ugly mouth blooms in a beginning wail.

As it does, the giant speakers at four corners of the square come back to life, ending it.

ANNOUNCEMENT, ANNOUNCEMENT, ANNOUNCEMENT

We're so eager for news that everyone in the plaza falls still. We are standing at attention, but Ray has Delroy, Marlon Weisbuch and the Dawson brothers form a protective cadre around Father, just in case.

A hundred of us silenced. Docile for once, we fall back and wait to be told.

The next voice we hear is CG: an unseen animatronic group leader calls the shots. Chapter. Verse, a list of Things to Do by the numbers: One. Two. Three. We listen gratefully and line up to locate our quarters, designated on a map incised in the blank side of the main building.

First, we're to find our houses and move in. In that instant, the air in the plaza cools. As though something in the system changed it— sedative being pumped in? Too soon to tell. It could be the rush of relief that comes when you have places to go and something to do. Subdued, obedient for once, we study the map incised in the blank side of the main building. Anything to get away from the others, out of this square! Funny, how relieved we are to have certainties: marching orders in this mysterious, suffocating place. Scared and, OK, glad, to get out of that enclosure, we turn to go.

Ray stops us with a shout. “Wait!”

Even on Kraven, where we're relaxed and aggressively down-home, Ray gets what he wants. His people were in Kraventown long before the Civil War; the Powell plantation took up half the island before his great-greats got enlightened and sold off everything but Azalea House and the grounds leading down to Powell's dock. He creates silence with a single word. “Friends!”

Heads turn. They always do. That's Ray.

“I won't keep you, but we need to talk.” He puts his hand on Father's shoulder, making clear what we have to talk about. “Figure out how to make things right.”

People catch the tune and echo like Baptists at a revival, agreeing, “We need to talk,” “We need to talk,” “We need to make things right!”

“Back here for a meeting, everybody. After we check out our new quarters and settle in. I'll get the word out when it's time.” He points to the building behind us, the big block letters mysteriously incised in its formerly blank face:

MEETING HALL

“Over there.”

 

7

Davy

Thursday, late afternoon

Davy sprays smashed oyster shell, rushing back the way he came.
Slow, this is too.
Gets bogged down.
Too long.
Again.
Too damn long.
Foraging for dead branches and sprays from travelers' palms to get traction in the bad places, he consoles himself. Everybody else trying to cross Poynter's is either stuck in the five-mile stream of traffic backed up halfway to Charlton, or advancing on foot, swarming to join the mob at the causeway.

At least the shore road is deserted.
Better for me,
he thinks, not sure what he means.

Crazy, but at every bend in the road he stops and gets out of the car, fanning his phone like a mad witch doctor. Usually you can get at least one green bar out here, but things are seriously fucked up. He makes five stops before he can pick up a signal.

Naturally he phones home— rather, Merrill's cell. It rings and rings. He keeps trying, hitting redial the way you do when you're sure she's in the shower, has it on silent, dropped it in the car. Worst-case scenario, he'll leave voicemail. Anything to put them in touch. No Merrill. Worse, no voicemail prompt. No matter how long he lets it ring, no velvety Merrill message: “Whisper your darkest secrets here, and I'll get back to you.” Davy persists the way you do when there's an incurable glitch. Given what he's seen today and what little he knows, he keeps trying in spite of the reality that he's too messed up to admit.

It isn't only that Merrill doesn't pick up. Her cell is offline in some new, alarming way. It's ringing somewhere, somehow, but the threads that connect them are hopelessly snarled. He could hang on from now until the world ends and that's all it will do: ring. He fires off a text, in case. As if Merrill is anyplace he knows. As if she's in a position to text him back.

Where is she?

Her office phone is dead, the town hall switchboard is dead. So are the phones at home. Correction. At her house, is he still welcome there? Is every land line on Kraven island dead? He scrolls through every local number in his phone. He'll talk to anybody, friends, business contacts, cops, the twenty-four-hour clinic, whatever works. Nothing does. Yes he is not in his right mind. If he hangs in here long enough, he tells himself, somebody will pick up.
Unless they're all dead
.

His heart clenches.
Not them, Ribault. Not her, you idiot. The phones.
Again. Again!

It's like yelling into a cosmic void. He loves her, he can't reach her, he can't reach anybody on Kraven island and he needs to know what happened, where Merrill is,
how
she is; Davy is crazy with not knowing. He needs to go back inside himself and think, which he isn't doing very well right now.

Asshole. Get there.

Is he crazy, coming back this way? The crowd at the barricades was multiplying like cancer cells, ignorant gawkers mixed in with anxious homefolks and clueless supernumeraries with homemade armbands and TV crews, and the men in charge? Pit bulls and swamp things, most of them, like half the warm bodies in the county got rounded up this morning and supplied with an armband or a badge. One whiff of power turns them into armed forces bent on keeping the line they just drew. There are homeboys in uniform guarding the shore access ramps and homeboys at the causeway barricade, and the mouth-breathing knuckle-draggers among them are armed and resolute. People he knew and people he didn't know turned on him, breathing through their noses for once, with their jaws tight-shut and their eyeballs jittering like they'd just as soon blow your head off as not. He could turn back and charge the ramp again, he supposes, but for every Jack Stankey out there, there's an armed and dangerous Goethe brother or one of the Fripp cousins, twice removed, vigilante wannabes like Willie Deloach that used to slouch around school bashing kids' heads into locker doors.

Hell, he thinks, rolling across the rattling plank bridge at Pinckney Creek; a couple more miles and he'll be at Earl's.
Why did I not think of this, why the hell did I not think of this?
This is where he should have come in the first place.

He will damn well get home and find Merrill wherever she is, no problem, and he'll do it the best way he knows— by boat.

 

8

Merrill

Deep night

I still feel guilty.

I was so anxious to get shut of Father that I hurried toward the list of assigned quarters. I spotted my place at the far end of the map, at a comfortable distance from the one marked Poulnot, N., Poulnot, H.— just the way it is at home. Odd. On the map, this place looks to be laid out just like Kraventown. Odder yet. We were expected to stay where we were put.