Benton was only a short drive from the pond, and soon Dani was turning through the last lazy bend leading up to what passed for Benton’s downtown. As the road straightened out and the bridge came into view, she saw a row of maybe ten cars stopped at the foot of the bridge. On the other side of the river cars in the oncoming lane were backed up to Bob’s Drive-In. And on the bridge itself, flanked by two state police cruisers, their blues flashing, was a single black sedan, parked squarely alongside the pedestrian walkway, its driver’s-side door hanging open.
Dani pulled to a stop and got out to join the other onlookers, approaching the bridge with slow steps, eyeing a black-clad figure, presumably the owner of the black sedan, who stood on the narrow ledge on the wrong side of the railing. Two staties in their big hats stood behind him, their hands raised in cautious entreaty. They were speaking to the man’s back. The toes of the man’s black shoes hung out over the riverbed; only his heels were in contact with the ledge. His arms, in their black sleeves, were stretched out behind him. His hands grasped the top of the railing so tightly that Dani could see the knuckles straining against the skin, even at this distance.
And she moved closer, faster now, her feet carrying her past the others, who gawked and pointed and gradually stopped at what they perceived as a safe distance. Dani kept moving forward. And saw that the man on the wrong side of the railing was in fact a priest; he turned his head briefly toward the staties, and Dani could see the white flash of collar at his throat. She saw, also, that he was old. His hair was full but stark white, and the skin just above his collar was loose and grizzled, pinched into a cluster of pendulous wrinkles by the tight fabric of his faith.
And Dani kept walking, past the steel joints where the road met the bridge. Here the bravest of the onlookers had stopped, their hands to their mouths, as if some invisible barrier kept them from proceeding any further. She moved through this barrier and took one step onto the bridge, then another. She could hear the staties now, the fear in their voices. “Father, please,” they said, their hands open and helpless. The priest paid them no attention, but gazed down at the river below, which in the summer heat had dried to a trickle, laying bare the hard cracked bed, the rocks glazed green with lichen, a few dead fish rotting in the sun.
On the other side of the bridge, at Bob’s Drive-In, Dani saw her friends, girls and boys alike standing on the hoods of their cars, shading their eyes with cupped hands. One boy turned to another and said something. When he turned back, he was smiling.
They are children, Dani thought. This is entertainment.
The staties: one very tall, the other of average height, both projecting strength and control in their pressed uniforms and bulky black gun belts. But their eyes gave the lie to this illusion—they had no strength, and no control. They were afraid. They were only feet from the priest’s back but did not move to touch him. “Father, please…”
Dani moved closer still, around the police cruiser, her legs carrying her forward of their own accord. She looked at the staties. Do something, she wanted to say, but she said nothing. She was afraid the sound of her voice might sever the delicate tendrils of reality which were, it seemed, the only thing that kept the old priest from plummeting off the side of the bridge. Because this, what was about to happen, couldn’t be real. Could not. And so if she stayed silent, did not disturb the scene, maybe reality would reassert itself. Do something, for Christ’s sake.
Dani stopped. The priest lifted his eyes from the riverbed. For the first time that day, the sun passed behind a cloud, a phantom cloud out of nowhere, and the Earth dimmed, and Dani glanced over to the hills and saw the sky was empty, and she looked back and saw, on the pavement near the tall statie’s polished boots, something that would follow her to Carolina and beyond: laid out neatly, side by side, were the old priest’s hat and wire-rimmed glasses.
For years, long after the world ended and remade itself, Dani would dream of reaching out to the priest, and wake with the starched feel of his black cotton shirtsleeve between her fingers.
Dani looked up, following the priest’s gaze. She saw nothing but blue. When she looked back the priest was gone. For a long, long moment, everything was frozen just like that. And then the sun came out from behind the phantom cloud, and the Earth brightened, and things started moving again, but slowly.
Indian Summer
Howl, ye shepherds, and cry; and wallow yourselves in the ashes, ye principal of the flock: for the days of your slaughter and of your dispersions are accomplished; and ye shall fall like a pleasant vessel.
—Jeremiah 25:34
There were ten of us, eight if you didn’t count the two in the middle of the living room holding pistols to each other’s heads. Of the ten I figured I couldn’t have been the only one who wondered if this was really happening. We’d been drinking, of course, and Rick’s parents’ house and its contents had taken on the strange incandescence which infuses everything after you’ve had most of a bottle of Yukon Jack. Plus this was after they’d announced officially that God was dead, but before the CAPA was formed, and things in general, drunk or not, were more than a little weird and unreal-seeming. It could have easily been a dream. I could have been in a coma, asleep under the tentacles of sighing machines while my mother sat at the bedside and held my cold hand in hers and my brain projected a movie onto the insides of my eyelids about how the world had cracked and I and my friends, bereaved and despairing, were about to commit mass suicide. So I’m sure I wasn’t the only one thinking this might not be real, right up to the moment when Rick counted one, two, THREE, and on THREE Ben and Manny blew each other’s brains out.
I even giggled a bit, just before the room exploded with blood and smoke. I mean, we were supposed to be heading back to college, except that there were no colleges to return to. It was all very difficult to wrap your head around.
For a minute after the rounds went off, I could barely see anything, the smoke was so thick. It smelled like the cap guns kids use to play cowboys and Indians, and under that the heavy stench of singed hair and skin. The smoke rose slowly to the ceiling, folding in on itself and shifting like low clouds, and Ben and Manny’s corpses came into view on the floor. If I hadn’t known who they were I wouldn’t have recognized them.
We all stood there, beers in hand, smoke curling off us in little wisps. Everyone appeared shell-shocked, except for Rick, whose expression of grim calm emerged from the cloud rigid and unchanged. Chad, who’d been standing behind and to the right of Manny, looked like Jackson Pollock had used his Shipyard Brewing Company T-shirt to make a splatter painting. I’d taken Explorations in Contemporary Art the previous semester, and we’d spent a lot of time on abstract expressionism, so I could imagine the description in our textbook for this particular piece: Pollock, Jackson. Suicide. Brain on cotton, 2005.
There was so much blood. Blood on the walls, the bookshelves, the framed 8-by-10 of Rick and his folks, taken when we were still in high school. Blood running in languid red lines down the face of the high-definition TV, which had sat silent and useless since the power went out. Blood in little dots on Rick’s mother’s collection of ceramic figurines. And blood on the floor, pooled an inch deep, already coagulating at the edges like pudding left uncovered.
Rick waded into the mess and picked up the pistols. “Get a mop,” he told me.
We’d all lost something, of course. My mother was gone, dead in her sleep after the refills for her insulin pump stopped arriving in the mail. Manny’s father had a stroke around the time the real trouble began, and no ambulances were running by then, so he died kicking on the bathroom floor of their split-level ranch; after that Manny’s mom left with his younger sister for Florida, where she’d heard things weren’t so bad. Chad, Allen, and Ben all lost their families to the car accidents which became common after traffic signals went down and the roads began to pile up with wrecks. Wesley’s father and stepmother had flown to Tucson on a golfing trip and never come back. Leo’s parents were killed
in an explosion at the Shell station while foraging for canned soup and Twinkies. The fire burned for a week, spreading through the middle-class residences of Cherry Hill and killing Cole’s family and Jack’s mother and twin sisters. And Rick had seen his parents shot to death by a neighbor intent on siphoning the gasoline from their Audi. Rick killed the man, an economics professor who used to come by for vodka martinis on Sunday afternoons during football season, with a garden rake to the back of the head.
One by one, following our personal tragedies, we ended up at Rick’s house. Manny and I moved in while Rick’s parents were still alive; we were in the garage, looking for something to cover a broken window on the second floor, when the neighbor killed them over a quarter tank of premium unleaded.
I often wonder how things might have turned out if we’d been in the driveway and seen the guy coming. If maybe Manny had clipped him in the knees like the star outside linebacker he’d been. If I’d busted his shooting hand with the official Reggie Jackson Louisville Slugger leaning against the workbench in the garage. Because then Rick’s parents would have lived, and we wouldn’t have been left by ourselves to decide what next. We were just boys, after all.
The next morning Leo and Cole showed up together, followed by Jack that afternoon, and we all helped dig two holes in the backyard next to Rick’s father’s tomato plants. You don’t know the meaning of the term awkward silence until you’re standing over twin piles of freshly turned dirt with nothing to say. I nearly suggested we offer a prayer, then gave myself a mental kick in the ass for being so stupid. It didn’t matter anyway, because Rick had already gone back in the house.
We dragged the neighbor’s body into the road and left it there.
In many ways, the next few weeks resembled the lives we’d led before. We drank too much, played music and video games, stayed up all night and slept all day. Wesley and I took a truck from the abandoned U-Haul and spent a weekend emptying out Haskell Liquors and transferring the stock to Rick’s garage. Indian summer hit. We threw horseshoes and lazed in patio chairs, trying to drink enough to convince ourselves this was just an extended summer break.
The new reality kept interfering, however. Although the hot weather brought with it high, cloudless skies, a gray haze hung from fires that burned unchecked all over the valley, powdering our skin with soot. One by one the radio and TV stations blinked out of existence. Our stores of food and booze dwindled. Often the night sky flashed a literal electric blue as transformers exploded on telephone poles, and soon the power went out at Rick’s house. We lit candles, listened to the crickets exult in summer’s last gasp, and grew solemn over warm beers.
None more so than Rick. Normally cheerful and fearless (in high school he’d been designated beer buyer, and the only one besides Cole to ever dive from the dreaded sixty-foot cliff at the reservoir in Halowell), since burying his parents he’d stalked through the house, stiff and slow and silent. He drank until his legs gave way and slept wherever he fell—beside the bathtub, on the concrete of the garage floor. He developed an obsession with cleaning, yet seemed afraid to disturb any object in the house; one morning I watched from the hallway as he lifted his father’s can of shaving gel to wipe the backsplash on the bathroom sink, then spent ten minutes replacing the can, moving it to the left an inch, then to the right, rotating it slightly, stepping back to examine the scene from several angles, then adjusting some more.
He went for days without speaking to anyone. Leo, who since we were kids had believed that others could be unhappy only through some fault of his, asked me what he’d done.
“It’s not you, Leo,” I said. “Rick’s just sad. Everyone’s sad, you know?”
But that wasn’t all of it. Beyond mere sadness, we were starting to feel trapped in a perpetual now (as our past receded and any sort of meaningful future became a logical impossibility), a sort of purgatory where you drank and tanned and played Tetris with the same ten guys until the end of time. The walls were closing in, the SpaghettiOs were getting old, and soon Rick wasn’t the only one tottering around like a mute, zombified version of himself.
Then the power went out.
A few days later we woke hungover and thirsty to find the sinks had gone dry. This was the last straw for Rick. He called us into the living room, popped open a Pabst tall boy, took a long swallow, and gazed around.
“I’ve got a proposition,” he said.
We listened. It didn’t seem too crazy, all things considered, and the more we drank, the better it sounded. We chewed it over for hours, until daylight faded. No one bothered to light the hurricane lamp that sat on the piano bench.
“We’re not doing it unless everyone agrees,” Rick said. “All of us together, just like always.”
We sat quietly, alone with our thoughts, for a while after that. I thought about my mother. I thought about my plans to become an architectural engineer (not a dream, strictly speaking, but an aspiration, one that had been fairly important to me). I thought about all the horrifying Mad Max–type scenarios that awaited us when we eventually ran out of food.
Then Rick called each of our names, and one by one we said yes. It was easy in the dark, somehow, shockingly easy, as if we were deciding nothing more weighty than which toppings to get on a pizza. We lit the lamp, sealed our agreement with a dull clink of near-empty beer cans, and went to bed.
It seemed like the best of a host of bad prospects.
Now, though, as I mopped up the remains of two guys I’d met playing kickball in grade school, I wasn’t so sure anymore. I’d changed the water in the bucket three times yet succeeded only in diluting the mess and spreading it around; the pine boards were streaked with a soapy pink mixture, as if someone had spilled a gallon of strawberry smoothie. Two darker smears extended to the mudroom, where the bodies had been dragged outside. It would have taken hours to clean up properly, and there were still eight of us to go.
I pushed the mop around a little longer, miming an honest effort to clean the floor, while the others leaned against door frames and unsoiled patches of wall, smoking, watching. Finally Rick held a Pabst out to me. “Good enough,” he said. “Pretty soon no one will care anyway.”
His other hand was fisted around a cluster of eight red drinking straws, cut to various lengths. “Gather round,” he said, and we did, slowly. For the first time I noticed how bad we all smelled. It’d been a week since anyone had showered, and the only stick of deodorant in the house, having belonged to Rick’s father, was off-limits.
Leo and Cole drew the short straws. Rick had tucked the pistols into his waistband, and he removed them now. Cole, with a sigh equal parts resignation and relief, took one. He tested the weight of the gun and eyeballed Leo.
Leo looked at Cole, then turned and ran, through the mudroom and out into the night, screaming a shrill apology about how he was just as sad and scared as the rest of us but didn’t have the guts for this no matter how much he drank.
“Wait here,” Rick said. He went after Leo, still holding the pistol.
I was first onto the porch, in time to see Rick’s figure receding in the dark at the end of the street. He turned left and disappeared, going like an Olympic sprinter, his bare feet slapping the blacktop. We waited and listened but couldn’t hear anything over the riot of bullfrogs in the tiny man-made pond two houses down.
Fifteen minutes passed, then half an hour. Wesley went into the garage to grab fresh beers for everyone, and came back bleeding from a gash on his palm.
“Tripped over the snowblower,” he said with a rueful grin. He handed out blood-streaked beers.
“That’s pretty nasty,” Allen said. “You ought to clean that up. Wrap it in a towel or something.”
Wesley looked at him. “What the hell for?” he asked.
Cole, seated in a rattan chair between me and Wesley, drank his beer in three pulls and let loose a roaring belch.
“Well, fuck this,” he said. He eased the pistol past his teeth, drew several quick breaths around th
e barrel, and fired. The bullet ripped a softball-sized hole in the back of his skull and shattered the window behind him. Jagged triangles of glass clung to the window frame, dripping with blood and brain.
“Jesus Christ,” Allen said. His beer, dropped from numb fingers, sat in a puddle of foam on the top step. No one else spoke. Their faces registered only a mild, fleeting surprise, then went blank again as we waited some more for Rick to come back.
“You think he caught him?” Chad asked.
“Probably,” Jack said. “Leo isn’t exactly a star athlete.”
“If he caught him, we would have heard something,” Wesley said. “A gunshot. A scream. Something.”
I took a sip of beer to steel myself. “This could maybe be a mistake, guys,” I said. “I realize we’re probably past the time for debate. But still.”
Wesley looked at me. “You wouldn’t be saying that if Rick were here.”
“Fucking right I wouldn’t,” I said. “Because Rick’s lost his mind. He’s out there hunting Leo. Leo, our friend. The guy who took us all to his dad’s time-share in Florida for graduation. And if Rick catches him, he’ll shoot him down like a dog.”
“We’re still friends,” Jack said. “That’s why we’re doing this. It’s kind of a sacred thing.”
“Leo agreed, just like the rest of us,” Wesley said. “Look, I feel bad for the dude. But he voted yes. Ben and Manny went through with it, and Cole anted up. No one can back out now.”
I eyed the pistol on the floor next to Cole’s chair. Wesley, noticing my gaze, picked up the gun and rested it in his lap.
“I just want to see my folks again,” Allen said. “It’s kind of embarrassing to say it, but I don’t care much. I miss my parents.”
I didn’t have the heart or the energy to point out to him how unlikely it seemed, all things considered, that there was an afterlife of any kind.