Mark Falkin - The Late Bloomer

They were still roaring as we shut the doors and rolled up the windows. The horrid noise muted, we looked at each other wide-eyed in the acknowledgement that it contained the sound of bloodlust.

Kodie had managed to keep her coughing in check on the track, but she began to cough now with the excitement and the running. Bass turned to look at her and I could see that he thought of his mother’s demise yesterday. The struggle in her face.

“You okay?” I asked. The question came out lame. Of course she wasn’t. She was older than me and Bass and now she struggled for air like the world’s adults did.

She put her fist to her mouth and furrowed her brow and nodded she was okay, managing to mutter when she was done with the fit, “Yeah, just the running.” She noticed me looking at her blood-specked fist. She tucked her hand away and looked out the window.

“Kodie,” I whispered, “let me know what you want me to do. Okay?” She smiled and her eyes shone. A tear fell, then she coughed again. She took my hand and held it hard against her chest like a jewel she couldn’t afford to lose.

“I will,” she said, her voice a clipped-off wet whisper.

Bass didn’t peel out. We sat in idle, our heads all turned to a pile of stones sitting right below the takeout window at the McDonald’s next to Peter Pan Mini Golf. No car there.

Drawing your final breath on the oily tarmac of a McDonald’s drive-thru, looking at a huge purple Grimace (A pained facial expression is a monster’s name? And you sell food to kids with it?) and Mayor McCheese, the stench of hot reconstituted fat from the pickup window… This has got to be one of the worst places to exit this life. We stared as we passed. Just galling.

Roaring children, a cairn at a McDonald’s drive-thru. The wincing smile frozen on Grimace’s face as he waves his flipper, a smile which clearly says ‘help me’, Madness.

The roaring stops. It listens.

We’re all listening, turning around in our seats to look to see if they’re coming.

The seconds tick off and the swelling silence becomes unsettling. “Bass, go,” I whisper. That damned muffler blats even in idle.

It’s a reset. A do-over with the children while Grimace and a giant Peter Pan watch. The mass of children who move as an oil slick on troubled water. What had come that morning was not the destroying thing itself but rather the claxon call heralding the foaming white to bubble up. Triggering the fall, forcing smiling people to leap from high places.

I’m certain the children gathered as they did in Butler Park in every city and town the world over. They gathered in fields off the highway, or someplace behind the rows of tannin sorghum and tall fall corn in those places where we envision alienate crop circles. Back there, having their get-togethers like this, the roar not as loud but for the size of the crowd, but coming from the same impetus, and if you look real hard you can see how they move in synch just the same. Not a late bloomer among them.

Bass drove slowly and mused out loud, “I figure we’re just below expiration, though I doubt age-in-years has anything to do with it.”

“Three of us have already found each other within a day. You gotta figure there’s more of us out there.”

“I’ve been thinking. Let me ask you guys. Were you late bloomers? I mean, you know, relatively. Puberty wise,” Kodie asked.

I nodded. So did Bass. We shot glances at each other.

Though I intuited it was, I nonetheless asked, “You think that’s why we’re still here?”

Bass shrugged and nodded. “If so, we’d’ve seen a lot more of us, but there’s been nobody. Gotta be more than three in a city the size of Austin.”

“We haven’t been everywhere. We don’t know yet,” Kodie said.

“Would’ve run into them by now,” deadpanned Bass. He scanned the road with his eyes with both hands on the wheel.

“Not necessarily,” Kodie admonished. “They could be hiding. We haven’t tackled this with any systematic—”

“—Okay. Yes. You may be right,” Bass cut her off.

I continued to play golly-gee. Maybe it’s because I didn’t want them to think I knew something. The responsibility of that.

“It skipped over us somehow,” I said.

Kodie inhaled and exhaled rapidly once. “Maybe it didn’t skip us. Maybe it just takes us longer.” The Bronco got real quiet. The muffler’s blat and tire hum was all. I glanced at Kodie. She looked down at her hands, her face trying to conceal deathly fear. To hear herself voice it drove her eyes wild.

We drove slow now, crossing over Lady Bird Lake, and as we did it occurred to me that I’d never not seen a paddler down on the water until today.

I asked, almost rhetorically, “Why didn’t they surround us, you think? They saw us.”

Kodie curled a hair loop behind her ear. “I think it’s… they’re still just little kids, you know? They’re scared. Our world, our lives have been turned upside down. Theirs has been turned inside out. They’re clinging to each other. They’re very much about safety in numbers. Rugged individualists they aren’t.” She looked out the window at a Lamar without traffic, its places of business and apartments tombs now. Staring, she said, “They fear.”

“They are skittish. They haven’t come near us. Not at the HEB, not at the cemetery. When we went to Rebecca’s house, that was us going to them, surprising them a little I think,” I said. But they knew. Bass turned in his seat a little to face me and Kodie. “You saw them all together just now. Whatever happened… that’s the result. Kids acting as this one thing. No leadership structure. All stimulus-response, like a flock.”

I turned my head as we passed by the bookstore Bookpeople and saw on the marquee that Sarah Bird was to be reading from her new one tonight, an Updikean comedy set at a Westlake dinner party on Halloween. In monotone I said, “Birds. Yeah,” but I thought, oceanic quicksilver .

“A swarm. A hive,” Kodie said, again looking down at her hands which now formed themselves into a rounded, hive-like shape.

Bass nodded his chin her direction. “Hives. Man, that’s it. They’ve all gotten together into these mindless hives.”

I said, “I wouldn’t say mindless. Of one mind.”

Bass equivocated. “But hives have queens. I’m not seeing any leaders.”

I almost asked them right there if they’d seen the dark smiling teeth too.

“I felt kinda safe in the cemetery. Even though I was close to them. I didn’t want to move. They stay in a group, but I’ve seen a few stragglers. Rogues. Not many. Boys, mostly. They don’t venture far. I’ve seen them go off down the street and then come right back running. Eight, nine, ten-year-olds,” said Bass.

“You say rogues, but I bet there’s more to it than that. I bet those are the ones who act as hive police,” I said.

“Bet those are the ones who busted up my car,” Bass said.

And I thought, and dragged off Simon and tied him up to a post atop Doug Sahm Hill.

Nothing more to say for a few beats. In the old world, we couldn’t take it, the building up of quiet like an explosive gas, and somebody would have to rush in to say something to fill the void. The old world abhorred a vacuum. Not anymore.

Bass said at the intersection at Twenty-Fourth, “God, there’s just nothing .” He lightly thumped the steering wheel with the meat of his palm.

I kept thinking I should be despondently sad, and a part of me was, but for some reason the tears just hadn’t come, at least not like the deluge I let go when Grandma Lucille died, like a damn breaking. You’d think I would’ve by then when I thought of Mom, Dad so far away, Martin, Johnny. My classmates, friends, bandmates, Mr. English. I saw their faces, flashes of them at least (amazing how quickly you start to forget even the most important faces in your life when they’re not there to be seen anymore), but that profound mourning had yet to arise in me. Watching the train slide by did it to me, though, and Mr. Fleming’s note. That’s something, I guess.