Lee Goldberg: The Walk

For a brief and satisfying moment, Marty once again felt like he’d conquered the quake with his cool head and superb preparation. The only itsy bitsy problem was the walk home. But in a few hours, that would be behind him and he’d be firmly in charge of the situation.

The important thing now was to learn from his recent mistakes and stick to his plan. Think only of getting home as quickly as possible. Think only about Beth and how much more she needed him than anyone else along the way.

Just ahead, beyond a curve in the boulevard, Marty could see a column of dark smoke. As he approached, he saw a fissure in the asphalt, a geyser of fire shooting out of it, flames lashing the buildings on either side of the street. All that was left of one blazing structure was its quirky, retro sign-a smiling cartoon character in a tuxedo, waving a chastising finger at a cockroach, distracting the insect from the mallet hidden behind his back.

The character seemed so familiar. He was trying to place the image when a dead bird smacked into the street at his feet. Marty looked up and saw two more birds plunging right at him.

He jumped aside, but it was futile. It was raining dead birds. The entire flock that had flown over his head moments ago were falling out of the sky all around him. They hit his body like baseballs, pummeling him to the ground.

And then he knew where he’d seen that cartoon character with the mallet. On the side of an exterminator’s truck.

The birds were dying because they’d flown into a cloud of poison gas, the same one that was over his head right now.

3:50 p.m. Tuesday

Marty scrambled to his feet and fled down the nearest side street, screaming “poison gas” as loud as he could.

But no one was listening to him.

For one thing, his words were muffled by his dust mask. For another, everyone was too busy evading the hailstorm of dead birds. The high-velocity, feathered bombs were pelting people off their feet, thunking into parked cars and collapsing make-shift shelters on impact. Compared to that, a lunatic running down the street yelling something unintelligible was easily ignored.

Marty ran in a panic, stumbling and tumbling over the debris in the street, stealing looks over his shoulder at the brown, roiling cloud of toxic smoke. He ran as if the dark cloud was alive and in pursuit, tendrils of insecticide reaching for him, hungry for his flesh. He ran until he couldn’t anymore, until his stomach cramped up and each breath felt like a sword being shoved down his throat.

He pulled his dust mask down and looked back, relieved to see the noxious cloud was no longer above him but moving eastward, pushed by a gentle breeze. But Marty’s sense of relief was obliterated by a body-buckling cramp and the sudden terror that he might lose control of his bowels.

And that possibility, that Marty might crap all over himself, right there in middle of the street, was more frightening to him than the toxic cloud ever was.

He didn’t worry about whether he’d already been poisoned and this was just the beginning of a gruesome death. He didn’t wonder if the horrible cramps were from the pesticide or his Authentic Kosher Mexican Burrito. The only thing Marty Slack was thinking about was finding a working toilet in the next sixty seconds, because that’s how long his biological stopwatch told him he had until his sphincters burst open.

One of his worst nightmares, far more frightening than the Big One hitting, was the fear of losing control of his bowels without a toilet nearby. This nightmare was topped only by the fear of the big one hitting while he was on the toilet.

Even under normal circumstances, the idea of someone seeing him on a toilet, having a regular bowel movement, made Marty dizzy with terror. Even in his own home he locked the door whenever he used the bathroom-he couldn’t face the possibility of Beth walking in on him.

Marty had already decided, moments after his decision to walk home from downtown, that he wouldn’t take a dump for the next few days. He was determined to be constipated for the duration of the crisis or until he could find a porto-potty with a strong interior latch.

So much for his resolve.

Like every other promise Marty had made himself that day, this one would be broken, and within the next few seconds. His body was rebelling, his intestines twisting into braids. He had to do something.

Marty couldn’t ask somebody if he could use their toilet because even if they said it was okay, he couldn’t risk going into a house that might collapse on him. What he really needed was a hiding place.

He had ten seconds to find one.

Why hide? Drop your pants and get it over with, right here in the street, or on that lawn over there. Who’s going to care? The city is in ruins. There are people bleeding and vomiting and dying all over the place; do you think anyone is going to give a damn about some guy taking a shit?

Marty couldn’t do it. He wouldn’t do it. There had to be someplace to hide.

Then he saw the court-yard apartment building on the corner, and the big, ragged hedge that ran alongside one wall. There was no one near it.

Clutching himself, Marty hobbled quickly to the hedge and dived into it, scratching his face and tearing his clothes on the thorns. But he didn’t care, he wanted to be enveloped by the shrubs, totally hidden from view.

Marty unbuckled his pants, slid them down to his ankles, and squatted in the sharp branches, a mere instant before his sphincters blew. Grimacing, he closed his eyes tight and cowered in the bush, tortured by the cramps, the sounds, the smells, and the overpowering humiliation of his nakedness and vulnerability.

Intellectually, Marty knew there was nothing shameful about this. He was a human being. He was ill. He had no choice. But there was nothing he could say to himself to ease his embarrassment, which was even greater than his considerable physical discomfort. Marty pulled the dust mask over his nose, kept his eyes closed, and prayed that no one would walk by as his body convulsed, cramped, and purged.

A wave of heat washed over him, and he was floating, in a fishing boat on Deer Lake, his grandfather holding the rumbling outboard motor with one hand, his eyes on the trolling pole, waiting for a bite.

It was a hot day made even hotter by the reflection of the sun off the aluminum boat. They were a frying pan drifting back-and-forth across the stagnant water. Nobody built homes on Deer Lake. They parked them and put a picnic table in front of the door and called them fishing cabins.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” Marty whined for the sixth or seventh time, rocking on his bench, sunburned and uncomfortable, his arms wrapped around his stomach.

His Grandfather, Poppa Earl, held out a rusted MJB coffee can to him. It was full of cigar stubs and ashes, fish guts and peanut shells. “Piss in this. The fish are biting.”

“I can’t,” Marty smelled like a coconut, sweating off the gobs of Coppertone his Mother made him put on every time he went on the lake. “It’s number two.”

“Then you can hold it a while longer,” Poppa Earl decided, absently picking dried fish scales off his pants, while keeping his eyes on the line. “We’re on top of a school of silvers. They’ll be hopping in the boat soon.”

They’d have to. The last fish they caught was three hours ago, and it was a thin, sickly one that probably swallowed the hook on purpose to end his miserable life. They hadn’t had a bite since.

“We can go in for a minute and come right back out,” Marty argued. “The fish will still be here.”

Poppa Earl shot him a furious glance. “You can’t catch fish with your line in the boat.”