Mark Falkin - The Late Bloomer

Maggie stopped in front of me, her muzzle dripping of egg and blood viscous and vermillion. Unlike the others, Maggie didn’t wag her tail and didn’t seem to revel.

“Oh, man! Tell me you didn’t get into the coop. Please tell me you didn’t just slaughter the hens and scarf the eggs.” Maggie averted her face from mine.

I strode through dewy grass to the coop, chuffing steam-breath into the air, yelling over my shoulder, the echoes highlighting my solitude, “Goddammit, you guys! This is our lifeline!” Maggie obsequiously loped behind.

When I got to the coop, I found it undisturbed. A couple of chickens came out of their holes and poked around. No blood, no signs of breaking and entering.

I circled the coop twice to make sure, thinking no feathers on the ground, no feathers on their snouts…

Maggie, tail tucked, scooted clear of me as I turned to run.

I didn’t call out. I topped the single flight in three bounds. The mattress on the floor of the loft lay empty, the comforter folded back, the pillow still impressed with his head-shape.

Downstairs, and I see the egg basket is gone.

The dogs weren’t disturbed as I tore out of the house. The storm door slapped the frame. I ran back to the coop. The chickens squawked and dashed back into their places when I barged in.

All the nests were empty.

My heart thudded between my ears and my stomach dropped.

He had wanted to do it himself. He didn’t want to wake me.

For hours I yelled out for him. I ran around the compound breathless and panicked.

Shadows thinned and slanted. I sat numb at the kitchen table and stared at its lacquered knots, black holes through which I tumbled.

I remember sitting there wishing I would cry. I just tumbled, I don’t know for how long, the silence of the world beating at my ears.

The dogs lay in a tight pack in the sun. A cool wind blew over them. Their bellies engorged with new-world blood, they all slept save for Maggie who sat at the front of them with her ears up, waiting for me.

I hadn’t made a fire. The room grew cold by noon. I tumbled.

I took the Bobcat around the property. About a quarter mile away in the other direction from the way we’d been walking—which means he must have been running from them because he wouldn’t have gone that way otherwise, not without me—up near the mouth of the creek which dumped into a small lake on the property, I found his egg basket, bent and slimy, a spray of shells like spent firework paper, his too-big hunters cap in a wet wad, and the grass all around matted with blood gone brown.

I stood there in the cold looking at the scene, wondering where the carcass was, wondering about what he had seen the morning of, wondering how much horror can a little kid see and still live on, wondering what kind of foulness had descended on the world to allow a little boy to witness his smiling mother blowing her head off with the pistol she kept in her purse.

I stood there and the sadness never came to me. The anger came. It came as an entity and swirled inside me under my breastplate, rooted itself and made a home there. My eyes stung with rage, and though I yearned to, I couldn’t scream out into the valley because it wasn’t a valley. It was a void which would only throw my own voice back at me in mockery, the void knowing that’s the most painful trick of all.

I searched all morning but never found him.

“How could you?” I asked Maggie as she recovered and reset herself in the seat.

The day shone bright but there was no hope in it as the Texas Hill Country scrolled past, its small burgs with no working stoplights blurred in the landscape. No distant smoke spires. They were done with that.

We drove fast down the middle of the roads and highways, the SUV straddling the dividing lines. Leaves, trash, and debris created a wake that swirled up behind us as we crashed through. The roads were no longer neat strips of access and egress. They rolled out before me cluttered and treacherous. The new world would cover them with organic matter until they were vague, ancient paths crossing the expanse.

But today I plowed through at high speed, my jaw set, my eyes level and hooded. Maggie sat in the passenger seat of the black Tahoe with the encircled SA sticker on the back bumper and panted, switching her eyes to me every time I spoke. Furious with her, every once in a while on the drive back to Austin, I tapped the brakes so she’d crash into the dash. Each time I did it, I yelled at her, my voice cracking, “How could you?”

I had dumped all the dog food out onto the garage floor cement, saying nothing to the dogs as they leapt around me like I was their piper. They didn’t understand. While I was upset with them, I didn’t berate them. What good would it do? They were only doing what came natural.

But I held on to my anger toward Maggie.

I didn’t bother to wipe the scuzz from her snout. She licked at it enough so that by the time we hit Route 290, the red egg slime was gone, save for a smear of it on the dash where she’d face-planted. Her chest fur remained dyed red like she wore a scarlet letter of guilt. I wouldn’t help with that. Let her smell it, let its reek remind her.

Goddammed dog.

“How could you, Maggie? You of all? That sweet scared little boy? Didn’t you see he was different? How could you?” I tapped on the brakes and swerved. She tossed and plowed into the walls of the car.

But I knew how she could. Of course I did. As Kodie had said, packs of anything are dangerous. The pack, the hive, colony, marauding horde—they lose their individual minds, surrender it to the collective madness of the congregation and the riot.

Though I don’t want to, I suppose it’s nature’s way. We humans tried to ignore that such was our nature, always hubristically seeing ourselves beyond nature’s reproach.

The road makes you think. When you’re done being pissed at your dog, you think the things that need resolving and somewhere between points A and B, resolutions are made.

I stared at the horizon. The wind busted on the windows. Tuning the radio wasn’t worth it, its scanning roundelays yielding nothing but static. As much as I loathed the world’s silence, I couldn’t bring myself to rid it with music played with such verve before all this happened. I had tried to play CDs, what they had in the car. I couldn’t take more than a few bars of LCD Soundsystem’s dance punk, the chugging opening riff to that Toadies hit, the singer’s vocal a vampiric dare— make up your mind, decide to walk with me …

I listened to the wind and road sounds and Maggie’s nervous panting. She felt my wrath. Moreover, she sensed my fear.

“I’m sorry,” I eventually said to her. She lifted her eyebrows my direction, then back to the road, doing her own resolving, her own remembering.

Home was full of holes but it’s where my trombone’s buried. Austin’s where my mother lay down and died. If that isn’t forever your home, then I don’t know what is. Maybe home becomes the place where you have and raise your own children. I’d never know that kind of home, so, the soil of the city upon which my mother collapsed and died was home. It’s where my friends died.

And, to be honest, it’s where I knew they’d let me go. I had a feeling that if I veered off and went in any other direction, I’d be thwarted.

The pumps didn’t work at a station I pulled into. I had to siphon gas out of a parked car using plastic tubing I’d found in the dark garage smelling of oil. No bodies, but when I opened the refrigerated units in the back I got a rush of warm rot in the face. I coughed and grabbed Gatorade and Cokes, some chips, and a whole display of beef jerky and ran out.

Maybe in Austin I could still find Johnny. That’s really the only hope I had left. Maybe I could wrest Johnny from them and bring him back as I did Nate.