style="font-size:15px;"> “It’s possible.”
“Was she married? Did she have children?”
“I had a cousin. Rachel. She was two years older than me. They lived in town. I don’t think they’re effs now.”
What was Rachel like? Chad wanted to ask. Did you like her? Did you spend Christmases together? But all those questions seemed too intimate. He blinked. “What about your dad’s side?”
“His parents were divorced. I don’t think I ever met his dad. His mom used to live with us. Meemaw.”
Chad’s mouth went dry. “Your grandmother lived with you? Was she with you when … ?” He couldn’t bring himself to finish.
There had been a fairly concerted effort by the government to promote the Grid transplants to the general U.S. public as heroes (giving up their homes for the common good), but the more vocal transplants tried to grab the microphone with complaints, and after a few years the government’s attitude became benignly forgetful.
“Oh, no,” Sharis said, her eyes still roving the map. “She had another son besides my father, and he got killed in a motorcycle crash, and she had his photo of him beside her bed with a cross next to it, and when my father got all crazy-religious he said his brother’s photo was Meemaw’s idol. He wanted her to burn it. So she left.”
Chad swallowed. “Could your grandmother still be alive?”
“I doubt it. She was already an oldie.” Sharis’s gaze returned to the map. “And I don’t see where she lived. It wasn’t far from us. In Beulah.”
But they couldn’t find a Beulah. “Belle Center?” Chad suggested. “Botkins?”
There were only two and half million transplants, a drop in the American bucket. The Ohio transplants (that was the word that was used, not “refugees”) were settled largely in the Dayton/Cincinnati area (population over six million) or in southeastern Ohio, which was technically part of Appalachia and too hilly and rocky for farming. The Indiana transplants had a new city built for them in the karst country between Indianapolis and the Ohio River. All the transplants got government pensions and housing allowances. “Maria Stein?” Chad, still searching the map, asked Sharis. “Ada?”
Arguing during a meal: there was a weighted moment. Didn’t so-and-so remember fourteen, fifteen years ago before the Grid, when breakfast cereal cost three times what it did now and there was a shortage of corn syrup to make candy? Even Sharis, who was young and healthy, had been too underweight to have periods when they first married. Conceiving Howard had taken some time. But conceiving Leon was effortless. Effortless! It was fun! The way it should be. How could someone disagree with food? Right there on people’s plates was Chad’s argument.
“Bellefontaine,” Chad said. “That sounds like Beulah.” He waited a moment, thinking maybe Sharis hadn’t heard him. “Bellefontaine?” he said again.
She was crying. Chad scooped her up and sat them both down on the bed. He stroked her hair and said that he was sorry. In an odd way, he thought, these were his happiest moments.
“WHAT ARE YOU trying to do, exactly?” Kelso the guard asked, looking at Tuuro wedged upside down in his cell.
Tuuro told him about Dakwon walking on his hands.
“I could stand on my head once,” Kelso said. “When I was about twelve. Come on, I’ll unlock you and you can practice out here.”
They shoved the chairs and table and TV aside in the common room, leaving a bare patch of wall against which Tuuro could lean.
“I’ll hold your ankles,” Kelso said.
Fortunately, Kelso caught Tuuro before he crashed. “Try it again,” Kelso said.
DAYTON’S MARCH 1913 flood was also known as the “Great Flood.” There were earlier floods, but this one changed things. Dayton made the front page of the New York Times. Dayton’s downtown lay just south of the confluence of rivers where the first settlers landed. There was a levee to protect it, but the levee was too low.
The Indians had warned them.
Twenty feet of cold and coursing water. Horses swimming frantically in the current. Houses and railroad cars washed away. People scurrying to their second floors, to their attics, to their roofs. Gas lines breaking; explosions; fires.
Before the water overtopped the levee, before dawn, John Patterson—the corporate paterfamilias/maniac who ran National Cash Register, his jail time postponed by an appeal—walked the south levee of the Miami and saw trouble. He summoned his executives to an emergency meeting at 6:45 a.m. The name of their company, he said, was to be temporarily changed from National Cash Register to Dayton Citizens’ Relief Association. The mission of this new company was to help out people who would soon be driven from their homes. His executives (you can imagine, Chad said) were startled. Glances around the table, bitten lips, a timid Sir, is that really our job? Isn’t the levee still holding? Patterson said, “This meeting was not called to discuss the issue.” He ordered his company to start making bread and soup in the company kitchens, to tap the company wells for drinking water, to send employees out to buy up clothing and staples, to build rowboats big enough to transport six people. “Start turning out the boats within an hour,” John Patterson said. He designated a company building to be the flood relief headquarters, with floors for a hospital, a maternity center, a dormitory, and a laundry.
By 7 a.m., when the water first came over the levee, John Patterson’s meeting was over. Evacuation, food, and shelter: the man had planned it all. And it worked.
“SON,” CHAD SAID. Howard looked back at him over the top of Chad’s car. “Tuck your shirt in.”
Howard scowled and tucked. Fourteen, Chad thought. Three years older than this clown, and I married her.
He didn’t lock his car (he never locked his car), but for a fraction of a second he visualized a clear shield flowing around it—radiant, protective—which Chad always thought of as bondad. Why he thought of a Spanish word instead of “goodwill” he didn’t know, but bondad was what he thought. He had never had a thing he owned stolen, not from his house or his car, and Chad believed this was because of bondad. He wished ill of no one, and in consequence no one hurt him.
A good heart and a plan.
Bondad, his old apartment mate in college had said. Sounds more like bonehead.
There weren’t that many cars at today’s game. There weren’t that many cars in Dayton, period. Consort’s unreliability had made recharging cars a problem. And selling a car to ship to a more stable part of the country was a handy source of cash.
“Maybe I’ll bring Leon to the next game,” Chad said as Howard trudged behind him.
“Yeah, right,” Howard said. They both knew Howard’s brother had no interest.
Chad had been coming to watch the Dragons play baseball all his life, dating back to Fifth-Third Field and a friendly dragon mascot named Heater. His parents had hired Heater for one of Chad’s birthday parties. Chad and his father had been part of the steady fan base that transformed the Dragons from Single A to Triple A baseball. Chad had had Dragon seats he called his own in three different stadiums, all in downtown Dayton.
