Thirst (12 page)

Eddie ran a hand through his hair. She was right. He touched the collar of his shirt. His neck was dry, too.

“I feel it,” he said.

“What?”

“I’m out of breath.”

“Stay still,” she told him.

“The water’s got to come back soon,” he said. He got up and stood beside the bed. “Don’t they plan for this? Isn’t this why we pay taxes? Why we elect people?”

“There’s a cop right up the road,” she said.

“No,” he said, the word escaping him before he had a chance to pen it back.

“The cop we passed with Mike.”

“So what?”

“So, we’re safe. There are people around, is all I’m saying.”

“Yeah,” he said.

When she was asleep, he went very quietly out the front door again. Around back, he took the tarp off Bill Peters’s body, tugging on his arms until his legs dropped from the pile.

With small backward steps, he pulled him across the grass.
The body was heavy, and it strained his back and knee. On the sidewalk, he stopped, even though it was open and clear for anyone to see. His eyes burned, and maybe he was crying. He checked with his fingers, but his fingers were numb. If he left the body right there on the sidewalk, it would be found by the time the sun was up. He would be questioned, but there was nothing he couldn’t deny. Why would he leave a body in front of his own house? He’d been in bed with his wife. Laura would say that that was true.

The knife handle stuck out from Bill Peters’s chest, and Eddie used the corner of his shirt to wipe it down.

What else had he touched? Bill Peters’s skin? He didn’t know if fingerprints could be left on skin.

A couple of houses down, there was an abandoned house. It looked just like Eddie’s, except there were county papers taped to the door and the lawn was in poor repair. It had been empty since they’d moved there, five years ago.

He dragged the body down the sidewalk and around the back of the abandoned house. There was a hedge that divided the yard from the neighbor’s. It was six feet tall and full of long waxy leaves. Eddie pushed Bill Peters’s body beneath it, and then he lifted each leg, rolling it over so that the body flipped onto its stomach and then onto its back again deeper into the hedge. He was in there pretty good. No one ever came around this side of the house.

On his way back, there was motion on the sidewalk. It was two people, a man and a woman. They had backpacks on and a little girl between them. She had a pack on of her own.

As they approached, Eddie stopped. They hadn’t noticed him yet and he looked down at his body to see if he was visible.

“Where are you going?” he said, as calmly as if had he been saying hello.

As they passed, the father pulled his daughter close in against his hip. They didn’t look at Eddie. They used each step to put themselves between the world and the little girl.

“Stay with us,” Eddie heard the father say sharply.

Eddie awoke when the sun was high and hot in the bedroom window. Laura was already up. She was in the kitchen, squinting into the light, but it wasn’t from being groggy.

“My head hurts more now,” she said. “Maybe we can find that guy with the wheelbarrow. Maybe he has extra.”

“Drink the juice from the peppers first.”

“That’s not for drinking.”

“Here.” He took the second pepper jar and held his fingers over the opening so that only the juice drained into a glass. It made about half a cup.

“Pinch your nose,” he said.

“We can go down to the stream and get water. We can boil it first.”

“Forget about the stream.”

“Why?”

Eddie hesitated. Laura knowing about the dry streambed
seemed worse than the dry streambed itself. “There’s barely any water in it,” he said.

“What are you talking about? Some is enough.”

“Listen to me. I don’t want to do it. There’s nothing down there for us.”

“Then
I’m
going this time,” she said.

He caught her wrist and squeezed.

“Ow,” she said. “Okay.”

“It’s dangerous,” Eddie said. “Even when there’s not an outage. There are homeless people down there. They’ll be desperate.”

“I’m not an idiot, Eddie. People walk their dogs there.”

“You’re not an idiot.”

“If you say so.” She rubbed her wrist as if it were cold. “I’m going to have a mark here. So thanks for that.”

She went around by the stove where he couldn’t see her.

“My parents are going to wonder why we didn’t try to come,” she said.

“No they won’t,” he said. “That’s absurd.”

He heard her clinking dishes.

“You’re putting those away?” he called, not moving.

“Well, they’re
dry
.”

She began to sing. She had a low, somber voice, and when she used it with any seriousness, it could make Eddie weak. Her previous life apart from him was still so mysterious—a childhood he could never really know, textures he could only touch the surface of. The singing brought it out of her somehow.

It took him a moment to recognize the song, she was singing. “Idiot Wind.” It was a dig at him, he knew, but he
loved that song. And she knew he loved it. He’d played it for her—had introduced her to the album, in fact—that first year that they’d met. It was the deepness of her voice, though, not the words, that touched him. The words were nothing. He knew this about the way he loved her—that there were times when it was the vessel, not what shifting matter it contained, he needed most.

She stopped as he walked up behind her. She was standing over the counter and the dishes were put away and she was staring down into the drying rack. He laid his palm on the flat of her back.

“I have something we can boil,” he said.

She didn’t turn around. “What?” she said.

“Just hold on.”

He took the two water bottles from the closet downstairs and pressed them to his chest.

“Where did you get those?”

“From the top part of the toilet. It’s clean in that part. It hasn’t been used.”

“It’s okay to drink?”

“I’m going to boil it anyway.”

Outside, the leaves on the trees were as shriveled as prunes. He touched one and it crumbled between his fingers. There was only a third of the bag of charcoal briquettes left, but he got them going hot. He poured the water into a pot and put the pot on the grill. It was over a hundred degrees out there and standing next to the flames was impossible.

So he walked away, toward the corner of the yard. When he saw the tarp on the ground it shocked him as immediately as if had it been moving. The sound of Bill Peters’s death wail
flooded him afresh. He couldn’t breathe. The air was as thick as rubber.

“Hey, neighbor.”

It was Patty. She’d come up to the fence in front of him. Her voice pierced the seal on his breathing and the air came back again.

“Yeah,” he said.

“I hate to ask this, but do you have anything left?”

“Anything to drink?”

“Mike Jr.’s not feeling good.”

“He’s got a headache?”

“Bad, I think. Poor guy. All he wants to do is lie on the floor.”

“I’m just waiting for this to boil.”

“From the toilet?”

“Yeah.”

“We boiled ours yesterday. I learned my lesson: always stay stocked up.”

“You couldn’t have known, though. Nobody did.”

It took a long time for the water to boil. Patty leaned against the fence and didn’t say anything. After a while, she went back inside and brought out her own pot. When the water boiled, she came around to his side of the fence. Eddie held the pot handle with both hands, and they poured the water back and forth between the pots to cool it. On the last round, Eddie poured half of the water into her pot. Maybe more than half.

“Thanks,” she said. “I was actually worried last night. The power’s one thing, but the water’s something else. They can’t let us go without for too much longer. I guess they just have to get the trucks through all those cars on the highway. Mike
Sr. told me they’re all abandoned. If they can’t get the trucks through, they can’t fix the water. They’ll have to start towing and that can take forever.”

“They’ll bring water trucks around, though,” Eddie said.

“I expect they will. They just need to hurry. We’ve got a lot of old people around here. And kids.”

“We took up a collection for the old people,” Eddie said. “I’m not worried about them. You tell Mike Jr. to start feeling better.” He raised his pot in a salute.

Laura was sitting at the table.

“I want you to drink all of this,” he said.

He tipped the water in the pot into a tall glass, filling it.

Laura drank from the glass. “I just want to lie down,” she told him. “Will you come lie down with me?”

“Yes,” he said.

But they didn’t lie down. They sat there at the table.

“If we had water, we could help people in the neighborhood,” she said. “We could bring whole buckets.”

“What are you talking about?”

“If we could get water from somewhere. We could boil it.”

“I just used the last of our charcoal.”

“Anything can burn, Eddie. We could boil it and strain it with a coffee filters. We could bring it all over.”

It sounded like the half-dreamt pillow talk she’d murmur after a long day, and Eddie squeezed her hand to keep her awake.

“It’s Mike Jr. you should worry about,” he said.

“What’s wrong?” she said. Her eyes shifted suddenly, and it was that, more than the fear in her voice, that startled him.

“He’s just thirsty. Just like the rest of us. He’s dehydrated, is all.”

“If we got water from the stream …” she said.

“No,” Eddie said. “You’re staying here. You’re staying right where you are.”

“Eddie, please. If I want to go, I’ll go.”

“We’re trying to conserve our strength. And you’re talking about going for a hike in the woods.”

“I’m talking about walking a few blocks.”

“Let me tell you what you’re talking about. You’re talking about going down to a muddy little stream to bring back water that will make you sick. They’ll be here to fix it soon. Everyone knows it’s out. They’ll helicopter in water bottles if they have to. I heard helicopters out there before. But it’s not going to come to that.”

“There’s no water in the stream, is there?”

“I’m sure there’s water in the stream.”

“Have you been down there, Eddie? Did you see that it was empty? It’s like beneath the bridge, isn’t it?”

“No. I haven’t been down there. There’s water in the stream.”

“Oh, God.”

“There’s water in the stream, Laura.”

“What’s happening?”

“Go lie down. I will, too. We just need to rest. They’ll be here soon. There’s too many people for them not to come.”

Eddie put his hands on her hips and guided her to the bedroom. She was trembling.

“Easy,” he said.

The more she shook, the more steadily he walked with her.

“Tell me,” she said. “You’ve been thinking about it. Even if you’re not sure. Just tell me what you think.”

“It’s nothing. Something at the reservoir. Something with the power.”

“I saw those burned-up trees.”

“Then maybe there was something in the water that was flammable. The other water’s probably fine.”

“My parents.”

“It’s different water. That’s what I’m saying. We’re on reservoir water. That means it’s all connected to one spot. It’s like dominoes, but ours are on a different table from your parents’. Right? The dominoes aren’t going to jump to another table.”

“They’ll fix it, though.”

“Fixing it is their job. The engineers or whoever. The people who can dig a highway underneath a river to get to New York City. Can you even imagine that? It’s all magic to people like us, but they can do it. They fix things like this.”

“You have faith in them.”

“I do.”

“Then I do, too.”

“Just rest now,” he said.

Outside, the sky was white and the sun was buried somewhere in it. Eddie walked down the sidewalk, past the abandoned house, on to the end of the block. Then he walked back past it again.

From the front of the house, the backyard was hidden. He looked up and down the street. At the north end, he could see the tops of the hedges, but that was all. From the south end of the sidewalk, he could see a strip of fence along the property line and, if he craned his neck, the edge of the back porch. He’d never seen anyone stop where he was standing, though. There was no reason to stop there.

When the power came back he would think of something. He was almost certain you couldn’t leave fingerprints on skin. There’d been no struggle, no
DNA
beneath his fingernails. He would simply call it in—say he found a body in the neighborhood.

He’d be questioned, but he’d say he’d been with Laura. She could verify that—and the Davises had seen him.

Eddie turned around and saw Mike Sr. standing behind him in the street.

“What are you doing?” Mike Sr. asked.

“Nothing.”

“Come with me, then. They’re having a meeting across the street.”

“What kind of meeting?”

“Like a council-of-elders-type thing. To decide our fate.” He stared hard at Eddie and then smiled. “I don’t know,” he said. “Just a bunch of these jerk-offs talking.”

They walked together up the street to a house Eddie had never before considered. The door was open, and inside, a group of people stood around a living room. A few of them shook Mike Sr.’s hand.

Paul was there, near the bay window, with the man in the suspenders. He looked at Eddie and then quickly at the carpet in front of him. Eddie looked away, too. Mike Sr. squeezed them into the middle of the room, in front of two large men. One of the men crossed his arms against a chest so barreled it seemed it would take a dolly to move him. The other had his hands balled deep in his pockets. He rolled back and forth on his heels and grunted at Mike Sr.

“How ’bout all this?” he said.

“Yeah,” Mike Sr. agreed. “How ’bout it?”

“I told Sid here what the problem is. Just busted pipes.”

Eddie turned his head to listen. Sid continued to look ahead with his arms folded, the buttons of his shirt straining against his chest. “Pipes,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s more than just pipes.”