Mark Falkin - The Late Bloomer

Johnny held up binoculars he’d grabbed from our cache of gear on the living room floor. “Here, Kevin, you look.” He said this like he couldn’t bear to see it confirmed.

The fire did eat away at luggage and it was clear that it had been gathered then set afire. The flames were too far away from the plane to make sense, too new and blazing. This is the added smoke we saw from the window.

The binoculars still to my eyes, I whispered, “Why?”

Johnny sighed and said, “To make us come check.”

“To draw us out here,” Kodie said.

Bass pointed along the top of the embankment.

All along both sides of the embankment, set against the dusky sky, were the silhouettes. They stood equidistant from each other, still and soundless as statues.

Johnny stood up on his toes, leaned into me and whispered, “They want me to go with them.”

“You’re not going anywhere,” I said. I put my hand into my shirt, scratched out a single beat of ripping Velcro, and unsheathed Martin’s Glock 9.

“That’s loaded?” Bass asked out of the side of his mouth.

“Oh, yeah.” I pulled back on the slide. The sound ricocheted nicely throughout the creek bed.

“Okay, good. I thought I was the only one.” Bass pulled a handgun from his waistband and held it down to his side.

Kodie unsheathed a bowie knife I didn’t know she had. Flames danced on its blade.

“Okay, listen up,” I spoke loudly up the embankment, my voice echoing and carrying to the other side.

Kodie interjected. “We’d like to help you boys and girls. We are not going to hurt you and we know you’re not going to hurt us. We can all help each other, okay? But right now we need to get back home and you all need to clear out and go back to your homes or someplace safe.”

“You can come with us if you want to. Tomorrow’s a new day. Okay?”

Dark invaded everything now, in just those last seconds, as my last okay echoed and washed out. The fire up ahead blinded us to everything beyond it. There could’ve been five hundred coyotes and an army of kids behind that fire. “We are all scared, all right? We know. But let’s help each other,” Kodie demanded. I looked up at one side of the embankment, then the other, staring into the voids of their faces.

All stood in silent standoff for maybe ten seconds. Then I muttered under my breath, “Okay, fine,” and popped off three shots into the air and they scattered. You barely heard their scuffling.

I got the sickening feeling they possessed feral patience that belied their momentary fear of gunfire. Time is something they had. You felt they owned time. This was only the first night on the day of. They’d be less skittish soon, like those coyotes.

We made our way back up the switchbacked embankment, a switchback created by generations of neighborhood kids.

Though I didn’t say so to anyone else, I still felt uneasy. It felt too easy, their sudden scatter. Less a reaction to the violent noise than a signal.

I had my gun drawn moving up that embankment in the lead like some sort of half-assed hero. A pot-smoking high school trombone player. Then, halfway out of the creek, we heard the home alarm blare high and urgent in repeated bursts.

We ran. Dark now. They’d busted the sodium-arc lamps. The glass sparkled on the street. Only the porch lights and whiteout TVs pressed back the dark enough. The alarm grew louder as we drew closer. At the house I jumbled the keys from my pocket with one hand, the other holding the gun, and keyed the door. I ran to the back of the hall and entered in the code.

The abrupt quiet was as starling as the alarm’s onset. The others had gone into Johnny’s room and when I skidded into the doorway, there Rebecca was, sitting in bed, crying as Kodie held her. The sliding windows were large and tall along the bedside. One was broken. Glass arrayed in a puzzle on the bed and floor. At my feet, a stone.

Through her sobs, Rebecca managed to say, “…tried to get in.”

“We know. We’re sorry we left you alone,” said Kodie.

“It tried to get in!”

Johnny spoke up. “What do you mean ‘it’?”

Rebecca shoved her face into Kodie’s shoulder. Her voice muffled and wet, she said, “You know what it is, Johnny March. Don’t act like you don’t.”

“Screw it,” said Bass. I was with him on that, joining him in the laundry room. He sat on top of the washer, me on the dryer and below us the keg in a full red ice chest. We drank Warsteiner from Martin’s best frozen beer mugs and after a minute of downing and burping, I uttered my profound retort.

“Yeah, screw it.” I hopped down, the shift in me causing the release of a massive belch landing on the burp scale somewhere between old gaseous lion and horny walrus. It echoed in the room’s tight confines.

“Nice.”

I took the gun out and put it on the kitchen counter and leaned against the door jam. We both wanted to stay in this tiny room, a respite from all that space and quiet. “Man… so tired. Aren’t you?” He nodded with the mug at his lips.

“This will help,” I said as I bent down and refilled. I got back on the dryer and stared forward just as he did, jaw jutted out, eyes lidded. We looked like a couple of defeated caged monkeys wary of too many sugared children. But it had been a day of defeat, the longest day of all. I didn’t want to think anymore, and put the mug to my lips, closed my eyes, tipped it up, and began to chug.

“Can you believe this?” Bass asked, beer-wet lips shining.

I chugged. His question felt rhetorical. When I finished, I wiped my mouth with my arm and belch-said, “No. The very definition of surreal.”

Bass nodded.

“ Sur is French for ‘on.’”

“So, on real,” Bass said.

“On real.”

“We in danger? Tonight, I mean,” Bass asked, bent over at the tap.

“Don’t think so. Just kids and they’re scared too. Nighttime. They’re not—”

“They came here and broke that window.”

“True. We weren’t here. I don’t think they’re coming back.”

“There’s an arsenal in the living room,” Bass said.

Two mugs down and now I was feeling it in my legs and throat, a flushness behind the ears. “C’mon. Let’s do what we said we would. Drink this here beer, try and relax for a bit.”

“Until you guys drove up… I was gone, really losing it.”

Quiet. Stifled belches.

“Kevin,” Bass said. “Why won’t they come to us?”

I shook my head. “I don’t—”

He jumped off the washer. “Why are they against us? You’d think they’d need us—”

“I wish I kn—”

“—come running to us crying and tugging on us.” Bass exhaled an exasperated pshhh . “I do not get this. It scares the hell out of me, Kev.”

I held up my mug to the flyspecked light and looked through the blond bubbles with one eye and redirected the conversation to the more hail-fellow. “You know, beer’s a good thing. A good good thing. I am so glad that I insisted on grabbing this bad boy from the store,” I said, kicking the cooler with my toe. “Did you know that in medieval times, Renaissance, when potable water was hard to come by, they drank beer for breakfast? Those beautiful churches all over Europe? Monks built those. Trappists, they made beer, man. They were drinking beer and building churches. Think about that.”

Bass chugged a bit, bent at the knees, giving it a little body English. “Yeah. And the Rastafarians. They prayed using weed. God gave it to them so they could know him.” Burp .

“I mean, wine’s the blood of Christ for chrissake. Turning all that water into wine.” I hopped down.

We both nodded at the concepts we’d just unveiled upon human discourse for the first time and in the fog of a beer buzz coming on, we stood there quiet for a moment and thought of the monks and the Rastas and God, the water and the wine and the weed and the expanses of stained glass set into all those churches’ frames.