Something Rising (Light and Swift) (14 page)

“What do you make of the bunnies, Emmy?” Puck asked.

“I think they're making me higher,” she answered, pressed against the side of the van. “Also everything sounds flat inside this helmet.”

“I like them,” Puck said. “Oh, look, I caught one. It's heavy and, my goodness, very warm. Imagine if we could gather them all up into a blanket. A rabbit blanket.”

“Imagine,” Emmy said, “lying under the rabbit blanket with morphine and candy.”

The driver used his turn signal on the empty road, then turned right on to the stretch of utter darkness that would lead them to the darker blackness of the old hospital. Cassie considered his use of the turn signal. It could be ironic. He could be saying, I am a law-abiding citizen, with the glint in his eye that marked the
onset of a heinous crime. It could be unconscious, the reflex of a careful driver. Now that she knew they were there, Cassie could smell the rabbits strongly, but above or below them, little else. Gasoline, as if in a closed container. Something like a hot transistor. Puck and Emmy. But no alcohol on the driver or the passenger; no jittery junkie smell; nothing like the sharp chemical leak that came from the skin of a meth addict.

The lane they were on was rough, mined with holes, unattended by any bureaucracy. The van sank a few inches, came back up. Emmy bumped her metallic helmet against the side of the van four or five times in a row. The springs sang; rabbits skittered and hid behind the mystery boxes.

“Man oh man,” the driver said, flipping from his high beams to his low, trying to determine the best course of action. “What do you want back here? Why would you come back here?”

“Thank you for asking,” Puck said, coming to attention. “We are searching for someone, a friend called Dante.”

“I know Dante,” the passenger said, and his voice was surprising, breathy and boyish.

“You
do?
”

“We went to school together before.”

“My heavens,” Puck said. “A surprise to meet you. I'm Puck, by the way, and who would you be?” The van hit a hole, and Puck lost control of his rabbit.

“Jeff,” the passenger said, turning around in his seat and shaking Puck's hand.

“And this is Cassie, this one with the flashlight, and over there is Emmy, she's a college gal, and oops, she's, maybe she's asleep.”

“Nice to meet you. This here's Wally, he used to be my stepdad.”

“Hello,Wally who used to be my stepdad.”

“Howdy,” Wally said without taking his eyes from the road.

Howdy was always ironic, except when it became a habit. And then it was the speaker's entire life that descended into irony, and later into self-parody. Cassie studied Wally's face in profile but couldn't tell where he stood.

They passed the first of the institutional buildings, built in the late 1940s and situated under a row of hundred-year-old maple trees. It had served as the office of the director and the counselors and was the part of the sprawling camp most often shown in the newspaper and in television reports. All the buildings were variations on a theme: the large lake cottage, covered in cedar-shake shingles painted green, with screened porches. There was a humane vision, Cassie thought, in the construction and in the location. The land was beautiful, lonesome, on a knoll overlooking a strip of forest a mile long and hundreds of acres wide. In the summer the inmates would have found themselves above a green canopy; in the fall they would have seen the drama of hardwoods in the weakening midwestern sun. The county had closed the place a few years before, after an intrepid newspaper reporter went undercover as an orderly and audiotaped an old man being beaten for wetting his bed. The reporter had gone on to disclose the names of dozens of people who had died by accidental drowning since the 1950s, most of them mentally retarded and suffering from seizures. And many more dead from unknown causes.

They drove past the medical facility, a squat block rectangle that could serve in any historical atrocity. Wally turned right again, following the gravel lane along the edge of the knoll.

“There's light back here,” he said, “behind that last house.”

Cassie leaned forward between Wally and Jeff as the van slowly made its way deeper into the compound. They passed the residence of the former director; a swing set, mostly dismantled, sat mute at the edge of the yard. Then a building on the left, larger, longer than the other cottages. Something flashed white in a window, but Cassie couldn't have said what it was.

“Looks like a fire back there,” Wally said. He parked in the drive next to the last building, and he and Jeff got out quietly.

Cassie sat back and touched Emmy on the shoulder. “Em, we're here.” She shone the flashlight above her friend's sleeping face.

Emmy opened her eyes and stretched out an arm; her eyes were swollen and bloodshot, and she seemed disoriented. “Yikes. Sleeping in a helmet isn't half bad.” She sat up and adjusted her jacket. “I'm dying of thirst, I'm dying, seriously.”

Puck was feeling around on the floor for his rabbit, but it had gone missing. “Here, alien girl. Don't drink it all.” He handed her a plastic bottle of Mountain Dew from his jacket pocket.

By the light of the fire Cassie could see Wally and Jeff peering behind the empty house, then conferring. She got out of the van and walked toward them, cold again, surprised by the air.

“There's nobody here,” Wally said, looking around him, “but that fire is pretty big.”

“They're here,” Cassie said.

Puck stepped out of the van and thrust his stomach forward, causing his helmet straps to swing to and fro, then marched toward the fire. “What is this?” he shouted. His voice rang out across the silent valley below. “A fire with no one tending it? Have our educational institutions been entirely remiss in teaching fire safety?”

Shapes began to emerge, one at a time, and approach the fire. A girl—maybe it was a girl, a person in a skirt, anyway—crept out from under a black tarp at the edge of the cottage, a boy from behind a tree. A screen door on the cottage creaked open, and three more people came out.

“Puck!”

“Hey, dude!”

“Where you been, man? We've missed you!”

Puck threw his arms around each of them in turn. They squatted by the fire.

“These friends of yours?” Wally asked Cassie, tipping his head toward the scene.

“Not so much.”

“But you know them.”

“Some.”

“But this … Puck? He's your friend?”

Cassie nodded. “We go way back.”

Wally was wearing faded blue jeans and an old sheep-lined leather jacket. Standing this close to him, Cassie could smell the leather and hear it creak when he moved. She relaxed. Jimmy had worn a flight jacket; she remembered hiding in the closet and breathing it in when he was gone.

“You looking for a boyfriend?” Wally asked, raising his eyebrows not quite lasciviously.

“Nope.”

“Already got one?”

“Nope.”

“You gay?”

“You tryin' to piss me off?”

Wally shook his head and reached inside his jacket, pulling out
a pack of filterless Camels. A book of matches was tucked inside the cellophane. “Smoke?”

“No thanks.” Cassie took Emmy's bottle of Southern Comfort from her back pocket. “Drink?”

They stood that way awhile,Wally and Jeff passing the bottle back and forth, Cassie watching the fire. Jeff didn't smoke, didn't speak, wasn't wearing a coat, just a thick hooded sweatshirt with a school logo on the front, something Cassie couldn't quite make out. A Trojan, a Viking.

Emmy wandered up, and the firelight reflected off her silver helmet in flashes. “Somebody stop me next time,” she said, rubbing her eyes.

Cassie watched Puck with his ragtag army. She wondered what they thought of his living in the immaculate ranch house in the deathly subdivision off the highway. His middle-aged and overweight mother was generous in her grief; she had been waylaid by widowhood, and now Puck had, in addition to his midnight-blue Camaro, a snowmobile, an expensive stereo system, a wardrobe that changed constantly to accommodate his ever expanding girth. He had gadgets: handheld video games and walkie-talkies, TVs and VCRs, a motorbike he was too fat to ride. His mom had finished the basement in his honor and filled it with shiny electronics and a wide, sturdy bed. He had his own bathroom down there, his own phone line. But these children, as he liked to say, were his chosen people.

He was talking with the girl who called herself Anastasia, and the boy, Romeo. Both of them were slight and dirty, dressed in layers of vintage black clothing and combat boots laced tight against thin legs. It was the new look—for Indiana, anyway—the bat cave death look. Peter Murphy was worshiped here (if you
loved Bauhaus, you were too old), and the Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Nick Cave; all the thin and wasted boys and girls who might have been junkies but at least had mastered the fashion. These were children who believed—at fifteen, sixteen, seventeen—that they were falling from a great height, and that what would save them was love and drama. They saw the planet they hurtled toward as having a breakaway skin, like the warm swimming pool of a rock star. Cassie and Puck had talked about it many times since Emmy left for college, Cassie shaking her head against their doom, Puck gleeful.

“He not here,” Romeo was saying, “he in love. He leave with that mean spider-looking girl, call herself Maleficent. She harsh on him
night
and
day
, tell him to leave her alone, go get her some jelly beans.”

Puck rubbed his chin thoughtfully, looked up at Cassie, who was listening. “I fear,” he said, “I know not of this Maleficent. Do you know her, Cassandra?”

Cassie shook her head.

“She new,” Romeo said, taking Anastasia's hand. “From California, where she used to write songs on a guitar and own a cat call Tragedy. I haven't seen no cat with her.”

“Well, then,” Puck said, standing up and brushing off his thighs, “I am ready to celebrate Halloween without distraction.”

They gathered around the fire and finished Emmy's bottle, and then someone produced some dark rum and they drank that, too, Cassie watching. When the fire began to wane, someone would duck into a cottage and steal another piece of abandoned furniture and toss it on. Old desk chairs burn a long time, a child's desk a long time, too. Someone had located a spool of copper wire
that they broke off a foot at a time and tossed into the fire to watch the flames burn darker blue.

We found a box of bones
, Cassie heard someone say.
A big box, it was in a locked closet in the hospital building. There were long bones, like from your thigh, and little tiny ones like a hand or a finger. But no heads
.

“Does anybody have any food?” Anastasia asked, swaying. She was so small, Cassie noticed, tucked inside her layers of clothes like a two-word note in an envelope.

A sigh rose up,
food
. She could do it again, Cassie could face it again, maybe, taking Wally's van and driving in to Jonah and loading up.

“I do,” Wally said, heading toward the van.

A cheer: hooray for … what's his name again?

“Wallace,” Puck answered, who sought always to restore dignity.

Cassie's eyes scanned the gathering, landing on first one sleepy face and then another, but no Emmy. Emmy had taken her helmet head and was gone. Cassie turned and looked behind her, moved slowly toward the trees. No one. She was walking to the van, taking careful steps on the uneven ground, when she saw Wally coming back with two rabbits, the black and white and the dark brown, and from his belt hung a skinning knife, sixteen inches long from the look of it. He was holding the rabbits by the scruff of the neck, and they seemed relaxed, not kicking or fighting. She watched him go without a word. Every day was open season on rabbits. They had trained themselves, as a species, to die of heart attacks when necessary, a clever adaptation if every day meant death. Laura called this Evolution Knows Best. Would the people
around the fire watch the killing and eating of the rabbits? They were not brutes themselves; they were gossamer, trapped in their culture, bound by its conventions.

Cassie's flashlight beam illuminated the side of the white van; it squatted at the edge of the grass, cold and silent. It looked like a photograph, admissible evidence. She called Emmy's name softly, in case she was sleeping and didn't want to be disturbed, and heard a soft sound in reply, like someone dreaming, coming from the screened porch of the cottage. Keeping the beam low to the ground, Cassie walked toward it. At the hedge she raised the light and saw Jeff's back, rising and falling, a ship at sea, and then Emmy's hands flat and delicate on him, her voice murmuring like water. Even with the flashlight beam, even with Wally capturing rabbits, they were unaware. They were alone.

Under a tree a little way up the lane, Cassie found Emmy's helmet. She sat down on it, rested her head on her knees. Emmy would at some point remember or realize that Cassie had seen her, she would recall the breeze of light passing over Jeff's back and know who had stood there. Emmy's marriage to Brian had already been ordained: by her secret domesticity, her wish for legitimacy, her wish to stand inside a blameless life and cast a stone against the world. Cassie was the world. She closed her eyes, thought of Diana, with her pointed collars and questions. And Brian, in engineering school at Purdue, his amiable scorn for everything Emmy had left behind.

At some point she realized that all talk around the fire had ceased. She stood and walked back toward Puck, smelling, for the first time, a current of the lives the bat-cave children were living. They might not keep their teeth, they might be spreading disease. In a year there would be a group of babies given interesting
names, and a few months later their parents would part. Little poets in the making, a bumper crop.