Mark Falkin - The Late Bloomer

Problem was, we didn’t think to commit the closing time to memory so there we were parked in his old Bronco at the back of the cemetery on the gravel shoulder under a huge oak tree and smoke’s building up in the cab like Cheech and frigging Chong and up behind us rolls the sexton’s black pickup. It’s custom, all matte black, full-tint windows, hubcaps, everything. I notice it in the mirror as Bass is pulling on his quartz-cut pipe he got down at some booth on First Thursday on South Congress next to the drum circle and the Keep Austin Weird T-shirt vendor. I’m basically frozen looking in the rearview mirror like Death itself has crept up on us, scythe gripped in his boney hands.

Bass was about to roll down a window to blow out but I said no, don’t do that, the dude’s behind us and he says what dude and I said the cemetery dude the black Mad Max behind us and Bass coughed out his smoke while simultaneously uttering shit, sounding like sh- cough it- cough .

I snapped off the music. All to be heard was the fulsome chug of the sexton’s black nightmare. The truck flared his brights once. We’re expecting the guy to narc on us but instead all we saw were his hands hovering outside his window, one hand pointing to his watch. We were out of there idiot-giggling and the guy didn’t follow us out or anything.

He had to have known. Probably deals with weird stuff like that all the time. Like, I’m always seeing this same guy walking through there, some dad-looking dude who’s either reading a book while walking or listening to the radio and talking to himself. He’s harmless, but I’ve also noticed a homeless guy smoking a pipe pulling his things behind him like he’s rolling through Heathrow.

I swear, I’m not one of these goth kids. I dunno. It’s more of a peaceful place than most parks full of nannies and moms and squealing kids and put-out dads with their hands on their hips, like, can we go home now, dear, the game’s on , some huge Hispanic family having a picnic and cumbia’s slave shuffle blasting. It’s quiet, green, and nobody here expects anything of you.

As we were turning off Hancock to the entrance, I stopped and craned my head around and saw a cairn in the Montessori parking lot right next to that Volvo I’d seen with the arm hanging out the window. The Volvo’s door was open.

Mad Max’s window was down. In the driver-side mirror I could just see the sexton’s ear and jawline.

We drew alongside the truck. The guy’s eyes were open, white crystal effluvium protruding from his mouth looking like a crude spearhead.

Kodie uttered something under her breath and looked away. Johnny and I looked at the guy, his hatchet-faced gaze. He looked shocked to be sitting there with this stuff choking out of him, his wide eyes having the look of marble.

I accelerated forward. Kodie asked, “Why here?”

“You mean why’d we pick this place, me and Bass?”

“Yeah,” answered Johnny. Kodie nodded in the rearview.

“I ride my bike through here a lot and—”

“Wait wait wait. You ride your bike through this graveyard?” Most girls would probably put on a face of disgust, but not Kodie Lagenkamp. She let uncork a knowing smile when she heard this and then said, “That’s fubar, Kevin.” Our eyes met in the rearview. I’d found a girl who not only wasn’t repulsed by the fact that I often rode my bike through a cemetery but who found it understandable and endearing.

“I do. Well, I did before I got these here sweet wheels.” I didn’t want to lose that fascinated look on her face so I added, “But I still do. Once a week at least.” I spoke the truth. Kodie shook her head looking down with that blushy smile still on her face. “Why, what? What’s so funny?” We were in high flirt now.

As the world fell apart around us and we entered a cemetery to check on a friend I had no way of knowing was still here while a little girl we don’t know lies on Kodie’s lap in a coma, we were in high flirt. I mean, if this doesn’t tell you how powerful the need for the species to continue is, I’m not sure what will.

I’m thinking about the species’s survival now as I sit here in my kayak, the current taking me. Life will go on. It will survive despite this.

“It’s not funny .”

“Well, what?”

She kept shaking her head and stroke-combing the towhead in her lap. I toggled my eyes between the narrow cemetery road and her face in the mirror. “I do the same thing. I did the same thing. Did. Do.”

“Ride your bike through here? I’ve never seen you.”

“No. I go for long walks and lately I’ll turn into this little place over in Hyde Park, behind the church. There’s maybe twenty or thirty gravestones back there, old ones. Very secluded. More gothic than this. I’ll sit and eat a sack lunch there sometimes, feeling morbid at first but then somehow I feel okay among them. The sun will break through the branches and come around the church wall and warm my face and I feel okay. It’s comforting, not scary.”

My eye caught on a grave decorated for Halloween with a softball-sized pumpkin and Dia de los Muertos sugar skull swarmed by flies. She continued. “What are the odds that two people, you and me, would both do something so rare like that and end up in such close proximity to each other?”

I found myself slowing down as she spoke and then I was at a stop, looking at her in the mirror. “Long odds, I’d say,” and in my mind’s eye, Grandma Lucille closed her eyes and nodded.

“Yeah,” she said all forlorn. We had made this connection, but now there was a cast of melancholy to her, her yeah distant and fraught. “Long odds.”

Rolling under the canopy of oaks and ash, cedar elms and pecans, the lack of that whisper-roar that always came off MoPac, which bordered the west side of the cemetery, struck me hard. I’d rather hear sirens, bomb concussions, even distant screams rather than this harrowing silence.

Right now in my ears sounds the hurry and rumble of this swollen river. But I know just beyond it: silence, stillness.

Up on MoPac you could see cars pulled over to the side. I wanted to see more chaos, more wreckage, something that told me we put up a fight. The end of the world can’t be this orderly, this benign. Not this whimper, everything just winding down to a nullity.

Quiet welled such that it threatened to breach my sanity’s threshold, so I had to keep talking. “We’d been here before in Bass’s car. And then late one night, the Fourth of July actually, we jumped the fence, smoked some, and planted what was left. The plants have grown since.”

I thought I knew where Bass wanted to meet. But that’s not where he was. The small wood lining the back northeast corner of the cemetery is Terrapin Station. However, as I crested a small hill, turning right, and passing Michener’s grave, up ahead, under the tree where we usually parked his Bronco, sat Bass wearing our blue-on-white Paladins football helmet.

He had to have seen us coming the whole time because the view down the hill to the road is clear almost all the way to the front of the park. Yet he wasn’t standing up and waving. He just sat there and I thought the worst.

“Is that him?” Johnny asked, concerned.

“That’s him.” I honked the horn. The sound brought good cheer to the scene. He looked up and waved but stayed sitting. Closer now and I saw where his other hand was and the smoke rolling out from behind the face mask. I was dismayed at first but then I thought of those guys in Vietnam getting stoned before going on patrols. How to cope.

Bass stood as we pulled up, holding the pipe down to his leg, smoke filaments stretching up from the bowl. First thing he says with that radio-DJ deep voice of his: “Hey, want a binger?” like we’d just shown up at a house party and he’s bored in the back room with his weed and remote control. The guy’s a young Howard Stern with less hair and wearing a helmet.