Thirst (13 page)

“Then you tell me.”

“An aquifer thing.”

“We’re not on an aquifer.”

“A different one,” he said. “They go dry and create a suction. It’s the physics of it. You don’t know.”

“Trust me,” the first one said. “It’s pipes.” He took a hand from his pocket to wipe beneath his nose. Then he rocked on his heels some more.

“
All
of our pipes?” the other man scoffed.

Mike Sr.’s forehead strained from clenching his teeth. He shook his head in a very small way.

At the other end of the room, a man who might have been the owner of the house stood facing them. He had thick gray hair that curled down his sideburns into a beard, and he wore the bulbous glasses of an earlier epoch. A general whispering had begun. The man in front was talking intently to the women closest to him, and he raised his voice as if something had been decided between them.

“If people can leave for the city, they should,” he announced, continuing his thought. “And it would be best to go in groups of at least three.” He spoke like an inveterate coordinator of volunteers. “We’ll draft some sign-up sheets,” he said.

“Why the city?” someone in the back called over Eddie’s head. He turned to see a woman in a flowered dress with enormous stains beneath the armpits. “Won’t the city be more dangerous if that’s where people are running to? There was crime in the city before all this. Now it’ll be worse.”

“Mrs. Ramos told us,” said the man up front, “that they have stations set up there. Cooling stations and water stations.
The benefit of going in groups is that we can pool our resources for the walk, and we can look out for one another. We all know each other here, and that’s to our advantage. Not everyone down there will have the advantage of a group.”

“Where did she hear that?” Mike Sr. asked, his voice rising. People turned to look, and Eddie felt himself flush. Mike Sr. was scowling. “About the cooling stations and all?”

“You’ll have to ask Mrs. Ramos that.”

“Where is she? She’s not here?”

“It doesn’t matter where she is,” the man said. “This is the time for evacuation.”

Mike Sr. looked over his shoulder at Eddie.

“More like ejaculation,” he mumbled.

“That’s where all the resources are right now? In the city?” someone called out.

“It’s a rumor,” Mike Sr. said. All the bodies in the room had made it hotter still, and his face was glowing red. “One lady says it’s true. So what? Where did she hear it? Did she see these cooling stations? Does her
TV
work right now? Because I’ll go over there and watch the news with her.”

“What are the alternatives?” said someone else.

“If you could all give me your names,” said the man up front.

The woman with the pit stains strained forward on her toes to make her voice carry. “There will be emergency workers down there, at least. Paramedics. Police.”

Eddie had turned to look at her, but instead noticed the woman beside her. She was wearing a blue top with little white flowers across the front, and her gray hair was back in a bun. Her eyes were closed, and she was doing something strange
with her lips—moving them quickly. “Isaiah fifty,” she whispered, opening her eyes.

“What, dear?” her friend with the pit stains asked. She stroked the woman’s shoulder. “We’ll be okay now. Strength in numbers.”

“ ‘By My rebuke I dry up the sea,’ ” the woman recited, her eyes widening, “ ‘and turn rivers into deserts. The fish rot and die of thirst.’ ”

She began to shake her shoulders up and down as if she were holding back sobs, but her eyes were clear. She turned to her friend. “Pray with me,” she said. She clasped her hands together in front of her waist.

“Pray,” she said again, this time loud enough so that other people turned. “We need to pray together!”

“Now, Doris,” the man up front said, “we’re being practical about this.”

“It’s
hell
,” the woman said. “This is hell
right here.
We’re in it already. Don’t you see that?” She began to shout. “Pray! Pray to God with me!”

“
Sid
,” the man in front said sternly, “can you get—Can you and John escort her out of here, please?”

The two men behind Eddie stepped on either side of her and held her arms where they were. “Settle down,” said the barrel-chested one.

The woman with the stained dress tried to pry them off, but it was like trying to pry cement. She had a frenzied look. “What are you doing?” she cried. “You can’t take her.”

“Just outside,” the other one said. “We’re just taking her right outside.”

The woman between them closed her eyes and let her mouth
hang open. Her legs went limp and she fell halfway down before the two men caught her by the shoulders and lifted her so that her feet dragged on the floor.

“It’s too late,” she began to whisper. “Too late.”

The woman’s friend followed them outside.

There was a muttering among the group, but no one moved to stop them. It was as if the woman was a regular fainter at meetings.

Eddie looked at Paul again, who was staring out the window at whatever was happening outside. The man beside him cleared the phlegm from his throat and bowed his head as if to heed the woman’s admonition.

Mike Sr., though, was unfazed by the removal of the limp-legged woman. “We don’t need to go to the city,” he said. “We’ll get crews up here, too. They just haven’t come around yet.”

“They would have been here by now,” the man up front insisted.

“How about for people who can’t go?” Mike Sr. asked. “You want us to just leave them here? I’ve got a kid. You want me to abandon my kid?”

“It’s only nine miles,” the man up front said. “A child can walk nine miles.”

“Maybe your child,” Mike Sr. said.

“My boys are grown,” he said.

“Come on, Ed,” Mike Sr. said, loud enough to address the group as a whole. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

Eddie followed him out into the startling sunlight, back across the street. There was no sign of the group with the praying woman. “What do you make of it?” he asked.

“All that talk? Right. Mrs. Ramos heard they’re handing out icy pops in the city. Sure thing. Let’s all go to the city for icy pops.”

“It’ll be a mess down there,” Eddie said. “I don’t trust emergency workers in this kind of emergency.”

“You’re right,” Mike Sr. said. “You’re absolutely right. Power goes to their heads. You remember Katrina.”

“You need to stay here for Mike Jr., anyway.”

“He’ll be okay. Little man’s tough like his mom.”

“Yeah,” Eddie said.

They stood in front of the Davises’ house, and Eddie watched Mike Sr. cross his yard and go up the steps of his deck, past the patio furniture that had seemed, just the evening before, to pulse with his presence.

Eddie felt foolish—foolish for having been scared by anything on this block, scared by anyone in this whole neighborhood. They were a bunch of terrified old-timers. He was strong and young, and if anything, he should be helping. Bill Peters was gone. He needed to forget about Bill Peters.

He walked across the street to the Mathiases’ door. The curtains were drawn, and after he’d knocked, Mr. Mathias answered, shirtless, his belly moist with sweat. He had small buttons of black hair on his chest.

“Please,” he said to Eddie. “Just leave us alone.” He didn’t seem to recognize him. The interior of the house was almost black, and Eddie could see beyond him that they’d affixed blankets over the curtains.

“I’m your neighbor,” Eddie said. “Ed Gardner. From right over there. I just want to see how you are. I’m checking on you.”

“Oh,” he said. “Yes. You.”

“There’s going to be an evacuation,” Eddie said.

“Who?”

“People are leaving in groups. I thought I’d tell you.”

“You’re going?”

“No, I think we’ll stay. It’ll all come back on soon. We’re okay.”

“Right,” he said.

“You’re okay, then?”

“All right as we can be,” he said, and then added, “Too hot to leave this door open,” and he closed it.

Eddie went back and stood on the Davises’ porch. He looked into a window. If they saw him looking, he would wave them out. They weren’t in the kitchen or the den, as far as he could tell. They were probably somewhere dealing with Mike Jr.

From up there on their porch, he could see into his own yard—the tarp along the back fence had the half-pitched quality of a complicated tent. Something welled behind his heart and rose into his throat. He turned and retched over the railing into the flower bed. It was hardly anything, thin and yellow, but he had to put his hands on his knees and gasp for breath.

In the late afternoon, Eddie and Laura stood in their doorway and watched a group of their neighbors set off from across the street. They were outfitted as if for an expedition, with packs and visors and hiking shoes. An hour later, another group gathered, but this one was smaller, only three. Eddie thought he recognized the man with the beard who’d organized the evacuation.

“How many signed up?” he called from the doorway. Two of the evacuees were bent over, pressing clothes into unzipped packs; the organizer was doing some final stretches. He whipped his head around, trying to place the origin of Eddie’s voice. He held his hand up to shade his eyes.

“Are you coming?” he called. “Is that what you’re asking me?”

“No,” Eddie said. He laughed one short, derisive laugh. “I think we’re going to stay right here.”

“There are more groups leaving later. If you want to join
them, of course, you can. They’re prepared to pick up others from the neighborhood. They think it’s best to travel at night. I disagreed, but they insisted. There are pros and cons.”

“Well, break a leg, then,” Eddie said.

“Ha!” he exclaimed. “A dramaturge.”

They looked like a sorry lot, walking down the street turtled beneath their bulbous packs, their naked calves flexing with the weight. The packs were ill-fitting and rattled at each step, making them look like a derelict Boy Scout troop.

When they were gone, the street was silent. The neighborhood looked cleared out and deserted.

In the evening, Eddie took the mattress from where it leaned against the basement wall and laid it on a section of the floor that was bare cement. It was maybe a degree or two cooler there. Lying down, he could almost feel a current of air flow just above the floor.

“You’re okay with this?” he said to Laura.

“With what?”

“Staying.”

“Well, I don’t want to go with them.”

“But you do want to go?”

“What do you think?” she said.

“I don’t want to overreact accidentally.”

“But what’s a reaction and what’s an overreaction? We won’t be able to tell until this is over.”

“At least we know who we can trust here. When this is over, I want to be around people who know our reputation.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I mean,” he explained, “we can all vouch for each other. People here know us.”

“Who?” she said. “Who are you talking about besides the Davises?”

“Whoever,” he said. “All of our neighbors.”

“Our neighbors are the ones who’re leaving.”

“Not all of them,” Eddie said, but he felt it, too. The weight of being left behind.

In the middle of the night, she stirred and sat up cross-legged at the edge of the mattress. She clicked on the flashlight.

“Nothing’s going to make it any different,” she said. “I can say it all day and it doesn’t matter.” Her words came out with almost no space between them—a stream of syllables—and she swung the beam of the flashlight against the walls. “Tell
me
I can’t press charges? Tell
me
? I’ll get the courts here thirty years later.”

“Laura,” Eddie said.

“I’ll get them. He’s going to
jail
.”

He shook her shoulder and the flashlight fell to the floor and rolled against the mattress so that there was only a small disk of light glowing.

She lay back down, but crooked, her legs up where her head had been. Her forehead was sticky and hot and her hair was plastered there.

Eddie went upstairs and fumbled through the cabinet, pulling the handle of the faucet up and down without even looking. When he opened the refrigerator door, the air was as warm as the air in the room. He poured the bottle of lemon juice into a glass and took a gulp that made him shudder.

There was still a can of mushrooms and the can of black beans, and he opened them and held a colander over a glass. The liquid poured through like syrup, and in the darkness, the glass was almost invisible. He stirred it and brought it down to her, kneeling on her side of the mattress.

“Laur,” he said, shaking her shoulder. “Come on, Laura.”

“Oh,” she said.

He put the light down against the mattress so that there would only be the slightest glow.

“Eddie. I feel bad.”

“What hurts?”

“My hands are tingling.”

“Give me,” he said, and he took her hands in his and massaged down her knuckles with his thumb.

“Drink this,” he said, lifting the glass from the floor.

“What is it?”

“Just drink. It’s okay.”

He held her head up and took the glass to her lips.

“
Uhn
,” she said, and wrinkled her face.

“You have to,” Eddie said. “You’ve got to get it down.”

He could feel her heat against his skin, slightly hotter than the heat in the room.

She drank and Eddie watched her feet flex. She got through half of it.

Then he lay still on the mattress, listening to her breathing.
It was steady, but every so often, she rasped. When she coughed, Eddie’s stomach tightened.

Upstairs, her phone was turned off, and when he tried to press it on, nothing happened. The moon lit up the street through the picture window. He heard voices coming from the Mathiases’ and looked across into their yard.

It was kids again. He’d watched Mr. Mathias before—large and stiff-necked—silence the innocuous street chatter of stroller-moms by merely opening his door. Now these kids were in his yard and his door remained closed. Eddie checked the lock. The can on the back door knob was balanced where it was—the sofa beneath it, unmoved.