The Messenger of Magnolia Street (18 page)

She has lots of plans, and those plans include being in the right place to meet the right husband because she will someday have a big house and throw elegant parties. During the winter they will be inside in the great room with the fireplace, and during the summer they will be out by the pool. For the summertime parties, she will hostess in her not-too-much-but-just-enough tan, wearing pastel colors made out of drapey fabrics. Because she doesn't know what she will wear in the wintertime, the summer parties are her favorites. She knows that she will serve large platters with cocktail shrimp, but that's as far as she has gotten with the food. Right now her husband doesn't have a face or a shape, but sometimes she picks out outfits for him to wear. Things that will coordinate with her dresses.

Trudy has a lot of well-thought-over and dreamed-about plans. But in the evening light of Shibboleth, in its closing hours, when the phone rings on her desk, she answers “Hello” instead of “Shibboleth City Hall.” This is the most glamorous part of her job, the part that usually gives her the best practice for the time to come. But this afternoon there is no one nearby to notice how out of character this is for Trudy, and the person on the other end of the line simply says, “Wrong number” and hangs up. Trudy is left, phone still in hand, looking out the window, forgetting all about the paper-doll promises that she was hoping for, not even caring if they come to pass.
An exodus of sorts is beginning around the edges of Shibboleth. Carloads of Skippers, truckloads of Gettys, even walkers, out on the highways and byways. They don't know where they're going. They just know they are leaving. They aren't packing anything because they aren't moving away. It's as if the wind itself is picking them up and tossing them off toward the horizon. Off into the unknown corners of the world.

Those not wandering away are sitting unmoving on couches or chairs or porch steps. They don't know why they are sitting, but they can't think of any reason to get up. They can't think at all. They've lost their reference points. They're missing their landmarks, the ones in their souls that take them back to where they came from and point them toward tomorrow and the next hour. But now the next hour is lost on the people of Shibboleth. The next hour rests in the plan of three people retracing their steps, finding their way.

Obie has walked off and left her shop, back door standing wide open, and gotten in her car and started to drive. She is about to get lost trying to find her way home. She has forgotten where home is, and she will drive around and around the emptying town trying to find her way to anything that reminds her where to stop. Finally, she pulls back up to her own shop and, leaving her car running, gets out and walks through the back door without closing it behind her.

A country mile away, two big feet in two big, flat, ugly boots are walking steadily down Magnolia. One plodding step at a time. At the corner of Magnolia and Main, the boots stop, and Magnus looks to the right and to the left, spits between her fingers. She stands still, frozen solid in her tracks, then she turns all the way around and looks back down Magnolia. She begins walking forward, back down the road toward her house. Five steps later, she stops, turns around, spits again, and heads forward toward Main Street.

The stray dogs in Shibboleth have taken cover. They are hiding alone, or grouped together, under porches. Against back doors. Some dogs are scratching to get in, even the ones that know the answer will be no. The cats have hidden. The birds have roosted early but are deathly quiet. The sky has gone from the brown shade of dirt to an evening red. But it's not a sunset red. It's an unnatural red that pulses with a power that is unrelenting. And unholy.

Blister looks up at the sky. He is trying to
think
, trying to remember if he has seen this red before. It is knocking around vaguely somewhere inside him.
Seen this before,
he thinks.
But where?
Blister has managed to make himself move, to get himself in his truck. It takes a long time before he remembers that the key is in the ignition, that he was going someplace.
I am going to see someone
, he thinks. But he has forgotten who the someone is. “Maybe if I just keep driving, I will find them. Whoever they are,” he says aloud. And then he slowly pulls away from his trailer.

Monday, 4:35 P.M
.

Butch is watching Kate. Kate is watching Butch. They are at a standstill. She stands behind the cash register, pulls the phone from the cradle, and dials Dwayne's number. She has it memorized.
If she can't get the deputy,
she thinks,
if he's not already out this way, there will be no point in trying
.
Maybe I can call Zadok, he's close by
.
And to think, all the knives are in the kitchen and this gorilla is between me and the knives.
Kate is looking around for something else to use as a weapon when she spies the ballpoint pen and thinks,
If he gets close enough I'll put hiseyes out.

Monday, 4:55 P.M
.

Magnus is counting her steps down Main Street.
One brown boot. Next brown boot. One brown boot. Next brown boot.
She has determined to focus her attention toward town. And the image of the Heritage Oak is in her mind. She is concentrating on the trunk, on the branches, on the leaves. The patterns coursing up through the wood. The green pulse of life behind the pattern. She fixes herself on this image so solidly that it draws her forward like the beam of a lighthouse drawing a shipwreck survivor through an empty darkness.
There's one hell of an undertow today,
she thinks. And takes another step forward.

Monday, 4:58 P.M
.

Cassie Getty has watched her sister drive by on the road without even a nod or a wave.
Sister might be a clone by now
, she thinks.
That's just what a clone would do. Drive right on by like they don't even know their own sister.
She pulls out a suitcase left over from her trip to California in the fifties. All the way to the Pacific and back again. She had once thought about writing a book and naming it just that.
To the Pacific and Back Again.
But she didn't. She couldn't think of another line besides the title and that had slowed her down some. And she couldn't think of anything great to say about the experience except she had gone there and had come back. It looked like the end of the world to her, but nobody wanted to hear about that. She had been trying all of her life to warn people about the world ending one way or another, and it hadn't gotten her any
thing but ridicule.
Well,
she thinks,
any fool can look outside and tell this is the end. They don't need me for that today. Should've listened to me while they still had time. But a fool and his minutes will be parted right down the middle. Cut sideways and crossways. Minced moments till nothing is left. I tried to tell them,
she thinks,
but now it's too late.
Cassie Getty sits down in her rocker and waits for time to stop completely. She wonders what will be her last thought, or if there will even be one. If there will just be the sound of her rocker on the wood floor, the sound of back and forth, back and forth, finally replaced by the sound of nothing. Nothing at all.

Monday, 5:16 P.M
.

Magnus has made her way to the square. She pauses long enough to spit through her fingers. She looks absently around the square and crosses the road to the oak tree. Once she reaches it, she lays one hand up against the trunk and says, “I'm here,” as if she had struggled a million miles. “I finally made it.” It is the oak tree she is addressing. Then she sits down on the bench, sticks her worn boots out in front of her, and waits.

Across the square behind the oak tree, Kate is looking out the window. She had been concentrating on Butch, who hasn't moved an inch in a very long time, but when she catches sight of Magnus walking through the square and plopping down at the oak tree, that sparks her thoughts in another direction.
I've got to tell her,
she says to herself. And without another word, she places the phone back in its cradle and walks out from behind the cash register and, still wearing her apron, out the front door.

Butch releases a deep breath he's been holding in and pulls out his cell phone. He presses one to speed-dial the senator's direct line, but instead of the sure and steady voice of the senator, a recording begins to say, “Due to circumstances beyond our control,” and Butch hangs up. “Out of control all right.” He walks over to the phone behind the counter and picks it up, but when he puts the phone to his ear, there is no dial tone. He taps the receiver button. No change. He hangs up the receiver, waits, and lifts the receiver and tries again. No change. He looks out the window at the blackening red and thinks,
The senator's not going to like this.
Then he looks out the window to make certain that Kate is not on the return and turns toward the kitchen, where he hopes to find another piece of chicken. And another piece of pie. Maybe two. And then he forgets the reason he came to Shibboleth in the first place.

Monday, 5:20 P.M
.

If you could look at Shibboleth today from a hawk's eye, you might see some of the leftover patterns. But they have already begun to disappear. Gardens are unattended. Nothing has been watered. Nothing raked. Nothing broken, fixed, and put together again. Little by little, people have been drying up at the root. Death and dry rot running up the stems of their souls. They are not waving when they pass anymore. Babies are not being coddled but dismissed. Or overlooked altogether, as though no one really saw them. Stories are not being told. Laughter is not being heard. Wishes are not being made. The music of the life of the people of
Shibboleth has been sucked away. Most of them are as empty as locust shells now. Vaguely familiar shapes holding no substance.

Monday, 5:33 P.M
.

“What are you doing out here?” Kate is standing over Magnus with her hands on her hips.

Magnus spits between the
V
of her fingers. “Danged if I know, Kate.” She looks up at Kate and shades her eyes with her hand as if the sun were in her eyes. But there is no sun now. “What are you doing out here?”

Kate sits down next to her on the bench. “Danged if I know, Magnus.”

And the two of them just sit. As if this were their ritual. As if they had sat on this bench through all the girlhood days and glory days and days gone by. And once upon a time, they did.

“It sure is quiet,” Magnus says.

Kate offers her, “Yeah, looks like some kind of storm is coming.”

“Have you seen this kind of storm before?” Magnus paws the dirt with one heel of her boot, then answers without waiting for Kate Ann to reply. “I have. I've seen it. It took me a while to remember where. Took me a lot of steps to remember when, but when I got here, when I laid my hands on that tree,” she shoots her thumb over her shoulder at the oak, “it all came back to me. But it was funny, like looking through one of those glass-bottom boats I saw one time in Florida. You can't touch what you're seeing. And a part of you just wants to get out of the boat and not to drown.” She spits again. “It's unnatural, that ride.”

“What are you saying, Magnus?” Kate is shaking her head back and forth, trying to wake up. She is hearing Magnus's words from a long way off. The truth is, Kate isn't really certain if she is awake or dreaming that she and Magnus are whispering under the covers of a dream. Kate looks down at her hands, still flecked and sticky with flour dough.
Must not be a dream,
she thinks,
if my hands are this sticky
. “Go on.”

“It was the night that Blister got burned.” She turns and looks at Kate, reaches out and takes her sticky hands. “That night, I had a dream, and in the dream was this,” she waves her hand at the dried-up town, the stores, and the fear breathing down on them from the air, “and I woke up afraid, Kate. Everybody was leaving town, and whether they go'ed or whether they stayed made no difference, they were all leaving for good.”

Kate lets go with one hand and reaches out and pushes Magnus's gray hair back.
She's too young for all this gray hair,
she thinks.
Isn't she? Lord, how old are we now? When did this happen?

“And this is what I knew,” she has started to whisper. “If Blister died that night, we all died. And that makes no sense at all. What's an old drunk got to do with the end of the world, anyway?” And one tear slides down Magnus's worry-lined face.

“Blister's all right.” And Kate looks around the square at the stores with no one in them. The open signs gleaming like lies from the windows. The old PURE station sign as dead as Randy Johnson since he passed away. Now everyone had to drive five whole miles out of town to the convenience store to get gas, and Kate didn't think there was anything convenient about it. “Can't even get gas downtown anymore.” Kate has forgotten about Blister, barely remembers that Magnus is holding onto her hands.

“See here, Kate, Trice
saw
what was happening at the minute in
her
dream, but she was still living with you so I didn't know we
were
both
dreaming.
Both
seeing. I was
seeing
what was happening today.” She looks around like Kate at the neon in the windows, the open signs and open doors. And empty buildings. “This is what I saw. The empty streets and stores. The people all sucked away. It was just as horrible then as it is now. Only…Blister was in my dream and he was all twisted up. Inside and out. And I kept saying, ‘Get up, John,' and I called him John 'cause that's his name, of course. ‘Get up!' Over and over I kept saying it, but the funny thing was that he wasn't down. He was standing empty-handed in front of me. Just standing there, and he kept saying, ‘What do you want me to do, Magnus?' Then he'd shove those empty hands in front of my face and say, ‘This is all I got.' And I would say to him again, ‘Get up!' and that's all I ever said.” She takes Kate's other hand, squeezes both of them hard. “That's the first time I ever told anybody about that dream. It has haunted me bad all these years. So bad sometimes I have a dream about the dream. And all I know is Blister was supposed to do something but dang me Kate if I know what it was. But I know this. It's the doggone reason he's still alive and if Blister doesn't figure it out…” Magnus lets her voice trail off and her mouth fall open as Blister's red Chevy appears in the distance, approaching them like a torpedo from the past. And the clock slows down so much you can audibly hear it ticking. It is keeping time with their heartbeats.