Mark Falkin - The Late Bloomer

“Cavalry?” Bass whispered. “Huh… what now about horses?” He said this absentmindedly, his eyes glued to the lenses, his knuckles white around the binoculars. He’s having a hard time grasping what it is he is seeing. Their movements you want to say are wrong, profane. You want to look away. Your brain demands that it stop moving like that, yet… you can’t stop staring. It sickened me. Kinda like being seasick.

Never asking for the binocs, Kodie seemed to know not to look directly at it for very long, like one knows not to look at the afternoon sun. Medusa. Your parents having sex.

I use levity to take the edge off now.

I tried to explain. “Calvary’s where Jesus was—”

“—one day and they’re already meting out justice,” Kodie said. “Incredible.”

“That boy in the middle, Simon, he talked to us. They didn’t like that.”

“Yeah, no shi—” Bass said. “Hey. I just thought of something.” But he stopped talking, totally aghast.

I prodded, “Go on.”

“Simon said something about a beast? I mean, is this punishment or doesn’t this look like they’re being offered up for sacrifice? They’re tied up like Naomi Watts for Kong.” Bass continued, scanning the crowd now. “A bunch of piles around. I mean, wow, a bunch.”

“Stones?” I asked, hurting like hell for my little brother. He was out there, I’m sure. I almost yelled out for him right then.

“Yeah. Some of the little ones are picking them up and dropping them. Playing with them. Tossing them back and forth and smiling. Oh, wait, now. The crowd is…”

Moving. The whole mass of them moving in agitated waves I cannot even describe. But I guess the writer must try, right? So here: it surged forward and then back, over and again. It’s the best metaphor I’ve got—it’s waves. The whole thing is just fluid, not the movements flesh and bone on dry land are supposed to make.“They’re not moving their feet. They’re, like, bending at the waist. Their eyes are closed. Goddammit, Kevin, what the hell is this?”

“Are we dreaming?” Kodie’s eyes looked straight at it, wild-eyed and entranced.

Humming, as from a hive, rose up from Butler Park, became a single thing, moving the air in currents. I grabbed the binoculars back. All of them, even the toddlers, the infants, eyes closed and humming the low vibraphonic bottom-register hum, Ohm —

Electricity in the air. Pure harmonics.

Kodie whispered, “It’s like plainsong, but it’s not even singing. It’s…” She went walleyed and swiveled her head no in tiny arcs.

My mom used to get bad carsick sometimes. I never understood that. Now I did. The motion, the hum. I had to look away else I knew I’d puke. My head hurt too. Stabbing pain above my right eye. I bent over and put my hand over it. I stared down at the track with my left eye.

To the left in my periphery, I thought I saw movement up the track. Johnny? My heart rattled my ribs, making me even woozier. I looked down the track but didn’t see anything.

The sound they made swirled and augmented so oddly that it compressed your head. Maybe I won’t survive this after all, I thought. Maybe it just takes us late bloomers longer to die. My head pounded with my heart. I looked up at an awestruck Kodie, the rims of her nostrils ringed with dried blood. From earlier, I guessed. I could hear her wheeze over the hum.

Just when the children’s noise reached an almost unbearable intensity, it leveled off to a mellifluous buzz. A wave moving over and away.

Through the binoculars I watched their movements. “They’re all looking down now, searching for something. Why are they… are they uncovering bodies?” Like a flock, like a swarm, like a school.

“Hush. They’ll hear us,” Kodie said, but she said it as if she were aloft. An angel with belabored breath. “Ssshhh.”

Fixed in her eyes existed this meditative focus so serene it frightened me. She looked at inward galaxies and time and into the mind of God.

I’m essentially having an aneurysm above my eye, Bass is wigging, and Kodie has slipped away from us and so what came to mind was an old song Martin used to play real loud when we’d drive out to his real estate buddy’s hunting lease, the dawn gray and cold but he’s amped from his stainless tumbler of coffee (a song I really liked, Martin’s liking it notwithstanding): There’s something happening here, And what it is ain’t exactly clear . [14] “For What It’s Worth” by Buffalo Springfield (1967).

Danger. The feeling of danger flooded me when my mind played that song. The need to puke disappeared, the head pain melted and my heart found its rhythm, warm and bright in my chest with a job to do.

The song’s lyric continued in my head— stop children, what’s that sound, everybody look what’s going down , and with it I felt their eyes on me.

“Oh, crap, there’s a couple little girls who see us. They’re pointing,” I said.

And then a hundred thousand little faces turned to us. Their heads snapped and locked in on us like radar dishes. Cold, inanimate.

We ice over. We don’t breathe. I still held the binoculars to my face, elbows out, but I’m Tin Man stiff, knowing that the glare off the lenses, if moved, will not help our chances.

I’m thinking about the footrace to the Bronco. I’m thinking there’s a few of the boy-soldiers of the group already peeling away from the back of the pack and heading in that direction. When I say a few, I guess I mean a hundred.

“We need to go,” Bass whispered. The children looked at us in the huge mesmeric quiet. Kodie said, “If they wanted to do us harm, they would’ve attacked us already. They had their chances yesterday.”

“Today’s a new day,” said Bass. Which was oh-so-true.

“They could’ve invaded like locust last night. I think they just want us to go. Not to—”

“See,” I said. “They don’t want us to see.”

“Yeah,” said Kodie with distance and wonder in her voice. The question floated through our collective heads: See what ?

As I sit here, or I should say, float here, talking into this thing, I don’t know what it is we saw that morning at Butler Park. I haven’t seen them amass quite like that since. I’m sure they have, I just haven’t seen it. Saw them at the pit, but that’s different. Later.

I’m pretty sure when I get to where I’m going, I will see them amassed again. Maybe then I’ll know why. I think I fear that most, seeing them like this again.

What did it do to Simon and the other two? What were they waiting on?

I think about that winged watching thing, its shadow moving over the house that morning. How it blocked out the sun for a second. I’ll get to that later, too.

“Let’s give these kids some privacy,” said Bass in comic relief. “Get ready to run. As soon as we move they may come tearing after us.” Think: the athletically gifted zombies trope, them tear-assing around the corner coming for us.

But I knew they wouldn’t. Kodie didn’t comment, confirming to me that she didn’t think they would either. They just wanted us gone.

“Ready?” Bass said. “Okay, let’s go. Go now.” I lowered the binoculars and turned to him. He had taken a few steps down the ties. “Let’s go,” he whispered through gritted teeth, his tall frame hunched. “What’re you doing?”

Kodie and I lifted our chins and gave the staring masses a last look.

We were making our way down the embankment to Barton Springs Road when we heard the roar come from the park that prickled the skin as it curdled the blood. We ran to the Bronco.

It came again and again as we ran, this hideous cresting surf-roar. Deep in the roar lived an inhuman screech. It hit the higher registers of our aural perception, pinged and tweaked them to the point that we flinched and clasped our hands to our ears, cowering as we sprinted across Barton Springs toward the big green elf.