Streams of Babel (21 page)

I felt split in half—as a grieving person who didn't want my house to empty out, and as a paramedic who didn't want people to get suspicious. If I confessed that Owen was sick, my mom's brother would panic. A guy with his clout could start a community panic, which could actually end up costing lives by jamming the emergency room with imaginations they weren't prepared for.

He put a hand on my leg, reading my mind, I guess. "Where's Owen?"

I thought fast. "Down at Cora Holman's house with Rain. They're consoling one another."

The truth made sense, under the circumstances. "That's probably good for him. Why don't you get something to eat? There's lots of new people downstairs waiting to hug your neck."

I followed him and after chatting it up, I headed into the kitchen for a couple of aspirins. I couldn't tell if my head hurt from tension, paranoia, or something slightly worse. While trying to be careful, I'd been touching sick people all day. A hand reached for mine as I pulled the glass out from under the spigot and plopped aspirin in my mouth. It belonged to Mr. Stetson from the Utilities Department.

He pointed to a piece of yellow paper tacked onto the refrigerator. "I wouldn't expect you to read notices from the city today, Scott, but for the record, there it is."

IMPORTANT NOTICE TO THE RESIDENTS OF TRINITY FANS ON THE FOLLOWING STREETS.
Mine was one of them. It basically said they were fixing a broken water line at the end of the block and to please not drink the water until further notice, which should come in the next few days. I spit the aspirin into my hand, looked at the glass, and turned it over in the sink with annoyance. Mr. Stetson pointed out the kitchen window. I could see past the woods to a couple of huge trucks, like dump trucks, down at the swamp end of our street with a bunch of night lights on.

"They're the culprits. Struck a vein by accident a couple of hours ago, working overtime to finally get Dr. Chad Mather's new house hooked up. They'll get it patched up quick, I hope."

Paranoid thoughts might have gotten me right away, except Leo was a local. And I would not have expected him to lie.
Dumb-asses.
I wondered if I would have to shower with brown water in the morning and if I ought to run down to Cora's to keep sick kids from drinking squirrel poop juice. I turned the faucet on again, though as I wiggled my fingers under the drip, the water was still clear. It would probably start running brown just as I turned on the shower.

"Did you take this notice to the Holmans'?" I asked.

"I did your street myself, yes. I saved your house for last so I could visit with you boys and your uncles some." And he pointed out two crates of Evian water on the counter that someone must have brought over.

"Whom do I thank?" I asked.

"I think Alan Steckerman walked it across the street maybe an hour ago."

I went to the window and stared at his house, with all its shades drawn and all those airport cars parked outside.

I stood there for a long time, and arm after arm went around my shoulder, but no one said, "A penny for your thoughts" Dangerous question under the circumstances. Finally, one arm belonged to Dobbins.

"Learn anything over there?"

I sighed. "I think I learned more over here." I showed him the notice, which I'd been holding between two fingers.

He read it, then stared at the Steckermans'. "You think they sent this notice and they're covering up the truth?"

My jaw bobbed. "I feel like an idiot thinking that. But I'd feel like a worse idiot
not
thinking that. Last summer, I'd have more easily suspected an alien invasion from the planet Zirmakon. But. We're less than three hours from New York, where every fathomable creature roams. It seems like a world away, but..."

"But if you looked on a map of the world, you'd think we would have felt the vibrations when the Trade Center fell." Dobbins saw my side. "Maybe it's like the cockroach principle. My mom says whoever lives closest to the tenement district is most likely to end up with cockroaches. Doesn't matter if your house is big or small."

That made sense, though not much else did. "Just answer me this, Dobbins. If you can get past the concept that a terrorist group would poison the water here ... how the hell would terrorists poison only
part
of the water?"

"Damned if I know."

"Isn't that sort of like eating just the flour in your cake, and leaving the eggs and milk and sugar?"

"I'd say it's more like those summer rainstorms we get sometimes—when it's raining over your house, but not over mine ten blocks away." He stopped short and gripped my arm while not moving his eyes from the Steckermans'. "I just thought of my uncle Ron—the wheat farmer out in Hammonton."

"What about him?"

"I'm just thinking of something I helped him do last summer. He wanted to keep some sort of spider mites out of his wheat crop with this one insecticide. But if it had gotten into the vegetables, it would have made them unfit to sell because they would have absorbed the stuff, whereas the wheat wouldn't."

He traced his finger through the air, like he was trying to remember something. "We dug up his irrigation pipe, the one that only watered the wheat. We didn't even have to shut off the water. My uncle had some special metal drill, and he drilled a small hole into the pipe on some weird angle so that the running water wouldn't gush out of it. He hooked this little red box up to the pipe with this tiny hose."

I was kind of lost. "The red box, what? Had the insecticide in it?"

"Yeah. It was time released. He wouldn't have to refill the box all summer. We covered it up again with soil."

My gut kind of bowed, like I'd drunk a vat of insecticide. "Interesting concept," I managed to say. "But there's a hell of a difference between drilling a little sprinkler line and drilling into a public water line. And that's just for starters."

I was back to thinking about aliens from the planet Zirmakon. But I couldn't stop staring at the Steckermans'.

"There's so much USIC in that house right now, you could choke on it, Dobbins. I gave them the sheets of paper—the ones from the shoe store. Now I wish I hadn't. I thought we might play give - and - take."

"And they weren't giving?"

"Not a fart on a breeze," I said. "I feel helpless."

"Don't. You got Rain, Cora, and your brother to look after."

He offered to drive up and down the five streets mentioned on the posting from the Utilities Department and see if there were any unmarked cars or cops, or out-of-towners digging up any water lines or acting otherwise suspicious. I reminded him that there were strange lights on already in the woods, between our house and Dr. Mather's new construction, and that Mr. Stetson had pointed to that place as the spot in question.

Dobbins was out the door as fast as he could go without drawing attention to himself. It could be that he would only find workers from the Utilities Department back there, cussing a blue streak over a broken line. But he might also see some USIC guys—strangers in ties and suits. That would be a dead giveaway.

I needed to think about my brother and Rain and Cora. I went for one of the cases of bottled water in the kitchen and took it out the back door.

CORA HOLMAN
MONDAY, MARCH 4, 2002
7:05
P.M.

RAIN AND JON Dempsey were roughhousing beside me. The noise was happy, at least compared with the noises Aleese used to make, but it was the type of thing I used to stare at from across the cafeteria or down the corridor. It was like movie actors had jumped out of the screen into my house.

Rain tried to push Jon Dempsey away, who was attempting to help her up. "The dress thing ... it just doesn't work out for you, Rain," he was saying. "I just saw your underwear."

"In your dreams." She pushed his face.

"Ew, get your typhoid off of me. Typhoid Mary."

"Weirdo."

I forced myself to my feet, also. I'd turned the television off shortly after they'd come in but kept the remote in my hand as I pretended nothing was wrong with a scene like this inside my house. Standing up put me firmly back in their world.

I moved toward the table, toward Jon Dempsey, Adrian Moran, and Tannis Halib, and they turned dead quiet. They kind of stepped back and stared down at me as I walked through the middle of them. What was I supposed to say? I knew that "May I take your coats?" was wrong, but I didn't know what was right. So I busied myself with an aluminum cover on one of the pans that had come from the Ebermans' and ended up in the kitchen by myself.

The blackness out the back door looked so inviting. I wanted to fold into it so I could get my thoughts together in privacy and silence. My headache was gone, but not the chills, and my thoughts were cloudy to the point where I wondered if I had dreamed the VHS I'd been watching. Aleese had fought for something outstanding—protecting more Kurdish people and trying to get them into America. I wondered what else I would see of her life prior to coming here, but it was pointless to guess at that now. I just wanted to say "the Kurds" over and over to myself, and try to link them to me through an act of heroics.

I spotted a yellow paper on the floor and reached for it, figuring it was a pizza delivery menu. A shadow materialized behind it. Scott Eberman toed the door open with his foot, with what looked like a case of bottled water or soda in his hands. Bob Dobbins followed closely behind him. Scott looked past me, muttering to himself.

"Jesus Christ ... Why do I try so hard? Hey! Guys!" He hollered over my shoulder, then his eyes found mine. "Sorry, Cora. I should have figured their homing devices would have located Owen and Rain ... I didn't mean to turn this into a party house."

Dobbins moved toward his friends, but Scott dumped the case of water on the counter and took the yellow notice from me, something about not drinking the water. I drank a tall glass when I took the Tylenol, but my stomach wasn't upset. He struggled to stand it up behind the spigot with one hand.

"Would you like a piece of tape?" I asked.

"No. Go sit down. Lie down. Don't touch these guys—Rain! For Christ's sake, will you wash your hands if you're touching all that food?" He left the notice on the counter and stalked into the dining room. He turned her by the shoulders and shoved her toward the bathroom, despite that she was in the middle of a sentence to Bob Dobbins that ended with a laugh and "retard!"

Jon Dempsey was a "weirdo" and Bob Dobbins was a "retard." A longing for Rain's easiness with people hit me so deep that I swayed dizzily, watching Scott play supercommando through the doorframe.

Tannis was clapping Owen on the shoulder and talking to him softly. Scott walked up behind him, pulled him backward by the hood of his jacket, and said, "Don't touch him. Go wash your hands."

Then, he stepped over to my chair, where my dropped tissue was still on the floor, and he picked it up with his pen. He held the thing like a lollipop while Adrian lectured him.

"Scott, chill. Last time I kissed your brother was over a week ago! I ain't hacking, coughing, sneezing, shitting ... whatever the hell else Rain's been doing—"

Tannis snickered as Rain reappeared, holding her hands up to Scott.

"Do I pass inspection?" she asked.

"If you pick your boogers, you gotta go wash again, so
mind your manners. Dempsey, put that down." Scott walked toward me, tossed the tissue off the pen through the doorway, and I caught it. Jon Dempsey was holding my tea mug by the handle. I'd left it on the dining room table hours ago.

"It's in my way," Dempsey griped. "I'm trying to be useful and set the table!"

"You and whose mother? Wash your hands, please" Scott pushed him into the kitchen, and Dempsey locked eyes with me before putting the mug in the sink. I managed to smile at him, but only a flash. He'd asked me out last year. I don't know what had gotten into him, except that he has a reputation for asking lots of girls out. He had a dual role going of halfway-decent jock and class clown, but his attempts at romance worked into the class clown part. Whereas some guys might have gotten a reputation as "having asked out half the class," Jon Dempsey was stuck with "half the class has turned him down." I managed to be very nice until the third time he approached me. I walked away when I saw him coming toward my locker, and the guilt had stayed with me ever since.

Now, he turned from my sink, as if he could barely remember my brush-off. "You don't mind us here, do you?"

My only answer was a smile and "Not at all!" though it came out more easily than I might have expected. Fortunately, he got absorbed in the bottles of water, pulling one out and reading the label.

"Evian? My favorite" He broke open a cap with his teeth.

Scott came back. He stared at the bottoms of his jeans, which were soaked. He stomped each of his feet, and I heard squishy noises.

"I stepped in your enormous puddle when I couldn't see in front of what I was carrying...," he mumbled.

"I'm sorry about the puddle," I stammered. "Mr. Glenn said he would have the Utilities Department come and do whatever work was necessary to—"

"Stop apologizing. Do you have another pair of socks?" he asked.

I rushed to the laundry room and came back with another pair, to find him barefoot, sticking his socks and shoes in a plastic Acme bag. He grabbed a tea towel and dried his feet so meticulously that Jon Dempsey and I exchanged glances. I had a sinking feeling, what with his own mother's funeral coming up tomorrow.
Was he losing his sense of reality?

"Yo. It's just water," Dempsey said. "It's warm as July out there—too warm to catch pneumonia, my man. Don't stress yourself so much."

Scott shot him a sharp, annoyed glance, but no comments followed. He took the socks from me after tossing the tea towel into the bag with his socks and shoes and tying off the top. He shut his eyes as he pulled the socks on, leaving me with the notion that, just for a few moments, he wished to shut out the world. My eyes bounced to that tea towel and stayed there until I could feel him glance at me.