radio coughed and sputtered. “… administration dismisses EPA scientists … Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 gutted …” Doc reached up and turned the channel. “There’s an old flame, burning in your eyes … that tears can’t drown, and makeup can’t disguise …” Alabama and a chorus of cicadas filled the front yard with song. Doc turned, confused. He climbed out of his bed, big toe searching for his house shoes.
He stood up. The wave of sound droned around him, the rhythm filling his head and clouding his eyes. The food Rachel had prepared him was resting on a plate on his nightstand. The window he swore he had closed was wide open, gaping like a dark mouth.
The hair on his arms rippled, and he caught himself from crying out. He hadn’t been afraid for so long, he had forgotten how fear might feel. Rachel kept one of those drugstore cell phones for him, but he rarely used it because there was no one left to call. He thought about picking it up and calling Rachel, but he wasn’t so sure what he would say once she answered. Hey, daughter, a haint chasing me all through my sleep. Hey, daughter, I got mud on my clothes and mud all cross the bottom of my feet. Rachel wouldn’t understand none of that. And she had already started to watching him out of the corner of her eyes, when she thought he didn’t notice. He knew what his most loyal child had been searching for, and he was determined to hold back the fatigue that kept calling him to linger longer in his sleep. Whatever was chasing him would have to come harder than that.
When Doc put on his knock-around boots and stepped out into the yard to greet the day, he liked to fell down when he saw the ruckus in his yard. A big-ass crack, zigzagging long like Moses in the mountain high, had separated what was left of his family’s property. “Sweet geegee, great day in the morning,” he said, and stumbled down the porch steps so fast, he nearly flipped over.
He had never, in all the long minutes and hours of his days, seen a sight like this.
The yard was all torn apart, as if a great hand from above had reached down and unzipped the dark earth. He walked over to the crack nearest him and eased over, his knee and his whole leg tense. Doc craned his head to see how far the hole went, and realized there was no bottom to see, just darkness leading down and thick, twisted roots and stones and things he wasn’t sure he actually did see.
What he did recognize was the same source of all his and the town’s troubles, that red-stained poison that the Viscerol plant had cursed them with. At one point, everyone and their mama had worked at Viscerol, and the money was good, too. But one by one, family by family, a sickness had come down on each of them, until finally, the only healthy families left had packed up their things and got on down the road. Only a few stubborn, hard scrabblers stayed on, Rachel included. That bloody water ran through each dark vein across the town, until only a few families remained. Rachel was all of Doc’s own, the others, he knew, long gone, perhaps to sweeter grounds. Silver citadels of columns and pipes, smokestacks and tanks rose along the town’s skyline like rusted spikes. “Relocate Fair Property Buy-Out” signs dotted abandoned lawns, jagged yellow teeth. Houses, once full of light and life, sat on their haunches, full of furniture, roofs lolling like broken baby dolls, doors flung open, bloated, wooden tongues.
Scavengers came to take what the families had not deemed worthy to carry on. Whole families had disappeared, it seemed, overnight, leaving all that they once owned behind to decay in the town’s deadly dust. And now Doc stood, staring down into what he thought had to be the dark face of God’s judgment. The Good Lord took man and put him in the garden to work and keep it, but from what Doc could tell, man had done a piss poor job.
And what had that hard, scrabble-back preacher said, before he, too, showed his backside to Viscerol and the town, with its labyrinth prison-like plant that spewed poisons, and the giant water tower emblazoned with its red V? They had transgressed the laws, violated the statutes. They had broken the everlasting covenants, turned an ancient blessing into a new curse. Old Rev. Bowen had preached a word that day, as he took the church Bible and its baptismal altar with him. That they never should have let Viscerol build on their fertile land. That they should have turned those jobs down, and the money, too. Now newborns of townsfolk, who had been there for generations, were being born so sick, they had to carry the future away from there.
Doc didn’t know what that was, rumbling deep inside the open door of earth, but he knew he didn’t want to be standing around when whatever it was came busting through. He bolted up the steps as fast as his legs would carry him and knew exactly what he must do. He planned to be long gone, before the skies rolled up like a scroll and the heavens vanished like smoke.
“Doc! Oh, Doc! What is all this you got piled up in the truck?” Rachel stomped up the steps, the screen door banging shut behind her. Her bike lay on the ground, the rusted kickstand jutted out like a swollen tongue. The house was dark and the whole sky, too, but she could still see that Doc had emptied half the house and had it sitting up in the back of Big Daddy.
A groan met her before she walked in his room.
“What did you say, Doc?”
She put her helmet down and found him lying on his side in his bed, staring out the window. Rachel missed the times when he was a handful, when she used to get off work and find him, stumbling, mumbling in the dark, cranky as ever. Then he would cuss like a thief with an empty wallet, tell her story after story about some slight from the past, a friend who stole away from the broken, poisoned town without even saying goodbye, the neighbor who still had his good clippers and never bothered to acknowledge the debt. The other one, whose grass he cut as if it was his own, when the poison had made the man’s skin peel off under the tainted bloodstained tap water. Thirteen years, he and his friends had suffered, undergoing varying stages of collapse and decay, until only Doc remained, steadfast and stubborn on his family’s land. But it wasn’t the land that worried her. It was his mind. Now it didn’t even look like he was going to be able to hold on to that.
“Where have all the fireflies gone?”
Doc pointed a finger at the darkness outside. “There used to be clouds of them, all up through here. When y’all was little, you used to run out and try to catch them …”
“In jelly jars, yes,” she said, “I remember, Daddy. Why are you worried about fireflies? We ain’t seen them in years, now. And why have you tired yourself out, packing up this old house by yourself? I told you, when you were ready to move, I’d be ready to move with you.”
“‘Cuz they gone like everything else.”
“I ain’t gone. I’m still here.”
He turned to look at her. “Yes, you are. You and that old maple in the yard, the only things softening the heat. What you gon’ do when my eyes close?”
“Oh, Daddy,” Rachel said and brushed some lint out of her eye. “Why you always got to say that?”
Doc didn’t answer for a while. He raised up on his elbow and craned his head, as if listening to a sound far off in the darkness. The wind whistled and the little strip of curtain fluttered like a moth’s wing. Finally, he turned to her, his beard jutted out like a question mark. “Because I don’t want you to be the last one left here.”
Rachel rubbed her palms together, the sound like sandpaper. “What I tell you? When you leave, I leave.” The moon rose from behind a cloud, the light spilling over the windowsill into the room of darkness, a sign and a symbol. “We got to leave soon. The ground ain’t good.”
Doc
