Thirst (7 page)

“Did you see a little boy?” Eddie asked. “All burned up? I mean like all … ashy?” He rubbed his thumbs across his fingers as if the ash was on them. “He was down by the stream, I think.”

“What was he, fishing? There must be a real fish fry down there,” he said, smiling again. “I don’t like mine blackened, though.” Then, more soberly, he said, “No, I didn’t see any boy.”

He went up the walk and into his house and left Eddie to the silence of the street again. Eddie picked the golf club back up.

When he returned home, Mike Jr. had gone inside. Eddie leaned the club against the chain-link fence.

He heard voices coming from the back.

Mike Sr. was talking to Laura there.

Eddie liked Mike Sr. He owned a landscaping business and sometimes brought ornamental plants home for Eddie and Laura to plant in their yard. They had a miniature Japanese maple next to the walk that had already doubled in size. He saw it there now. It looked the same as it had the day before. The man with the Buck knife hadn’t witnessed
anything. People would believe anything when they were scared.

“You got him home?” Laura asked as Eddie came around. She was talking about the boy, but Eddie looked at Mike Sr. instead of answering her.

“Welcome back!” Eddie said.

“Yeah, yeah, I made it,” Mike Sr. said. “I had to leave my truck in Virginia, though.”

Laura stepped closer to Eddie.

“You got him home?” she whispered.

He nodded.

“Really?”

“Yeah.” Eddie squeezed her hand because of the way she was staring.

To Mike Sr., he said, “It’s blocked all the way down in Virginia? That’s why it’s taking them so long. What a mess.”

“Or because they’re incompetent shits,” he said. “We were out for six days in two thousand eight. They just aren’t prepared, is what it is.”

“Do you have supplies?” Laura said. “We just got some things.”

“Oh, you were out there looting with the rest of them?” Mike Sr. laughed.

Eddie could feel the heat of Laura’s blush. “There’s no one working,” she said. “I’m making a list of what we took.”

“I’m kidding. Ed, can you give me a quick hand with something? I might be able to solve some of our problems.”

He followed Mike Sr. into his basement stairwell. Inside, it was dark and full of junk, but there was fresh lumber framing the walls, and the junk was stacked up in an orderly way.

Eddie said, “I just met one of these survivalist types. He lives right up the street.”

“What, he’s got a year’s worth of canned peas? I’d rather die.”

“Maybe it’s smart.”

“Living in a hole in the ground? No. This is smart. Get over here.” Sometimes he spoke to Eddie as though Eddie were a child. There was a workbench at the other end of the basement, and he bent down beneath it and took out a black case the size of a lunch box.

“If stuff gets crazy, you two are welcome to stay with us.” He thumbed the numbers on the lock and popped the clasps open. There was a silver handgun in a foam cutout. “Just a burglar alarm,” he said. “One that really goes boom.”

“What’d you see out there?” Eddie said.

“It’s bad. I’m not going to let on in front of your wife or mine, but I can be straight with you. It’ll settle down, but it’s bad right now.”

“I saw some stuff, too,” Eddie said.

“Let’s just say I’m glad it was
me
who got stuck that far away. I don’t know what I woulda done if Patty and Mike Jr. had been along.”

“Laura had to walk home on the Beltway. I was really worried.”

“Here,” Mike Sr. said. “Let’s take this up.” He pinched a tarp off a pile in the corner. There was a generator underneath. Eddie took the black bar on one side, and Mike Sr. picked up the other, and together, they humped it up the steps. When they had it next to the house, Laura was still standing there. She’d reached across her chest to grab her elbow. It wasn’t like her to stand around. Mike Sr. unscrewed the gas cap and said,
“Yep.” Then he ripped the cord a few times. It whined, but only weakly. He ripped it again. Then a few times more. “Shit on it,” he said. “I
thought
maybe it was busted.”

“We’re about to cook some pizza on our grill,” Laura said. “You’re all invited.”

Eddie went back around the fence and poured in the briquettes. He had some lighter fluid in a dented can, and sprayed it on before throwing in a match. In the rush of flame, the pleasantness of summer returned to him, and when the coals were hot and low, he put the pizzas on the grate. Mike Jr. came outside with a Wiffle ball and a plastic bat. Seeing him there with his smudged face, he could forget that the other boy had come by.

“You’re gonna hit the ball with me?” Mike Jr. said.

He stood on the sidewalk with the bat cocked over his shoulder, and Eddie walked down and threw the ball to him. When he made contact, it went knuckling into the street. He
was
a good little athlete.

“You get it now,” Mike Jr. said.

“
I
get it? You’re the one who hit it.”

“Yeah, but.
You.
”

Mike Sr. cracked a beer. He was sitting on his porch stairs watching them. “You better go on and get that ball,” he said to his son, and Mike Jr. scampered into the street.

When the pizzas were ready, Eddie brought out the cutting board and sliced them into wedges. He took five of the barrel-shaped juices from his backpack. Mike Sr. and Patty had some patio furniture, and they sat outside and ate. The evening cooled a little, and a couple of the stroller-moms passed by on the sidewalk.

“I might take a walk up the street later and check on some of the neighbors,” Mike Sr. said. “If you want to join me.”

“Okay,” Eddie said.

When they were finished with the pizza, Patty brought out ice cream and poured it into bowls. They slurped it up like soup.

Eddie and Laura sat on their sofa as the sun faded outside. He thought of Mrs. Kasolos—that jug of water she had in the basement.

She was a tough old bird, he thought. He wouldn’t be able to live alone at her age. Just getting the pots from the stove to the sink. It took a certain kind of person to last that long.

She certainly didn’t need another five-gallon jug of water just sitting in her basement. Eddie would go to her if the water didn’t come back on soon.

Laura was reading a copy of
Field & Stream
that had been sent to their house as a promotion.

“Why are you reading that?” he said.

She didn’t move her eyes from the pages. “There’s an article about gophers.”

If Eddie held on to the jug for Mrs. Kasolos, it would be safer, and he could move it around, for one thing. No way she was lifting forty pounds up those stairs. She wasn’t
that
tough.

“Mrs. Kasolos has more than enough to drink over there,” he said. “I think I’ll find a jar or something and have her fill it.”

“We should be the ones helping
her
,” she said. “Please don’t take anything from that old woman.”

“Okay,” he said. “But she has extra she doesn’t need.”

Laura went back to reading, but the image of the jug floated in Eddie’s mind. The more he pushed it down, the more it bobbed back up to the surface.

If he wasn’t the one to get it, it would be somebody else. In his mind, that person had no form. But then he saw it was a man. It was Bill Peters. Eddie could see him doing it. He could see him pushing his way in, babbling on about his son.

“I’m going to take that walk with Mike Sr.,” Eddie said.

“Okay.”

“It’ll be good to know what’s going on.”

She moved on the sofa in a way that suggested she was coming with him, but Eddie put his hand on her shoulder to keep her there.

“I think he wants it to be just me and him. You know how Mike Sr. can be.”

“That’s silly,” she said, but slid back to a comfortable spot.

“I don’t want you to worry. You’ve got Patty right there if you need anything.”

“I’m not worried,” she said.

He went to the basement and took the flashlight off the workbench. Then he went to the shelf and held Laura’s silver pom-pom to his face. He breathed it in again, as if he could find traces of her there. Still, there was nothing. Then he squeezed
it in both of his fists and pulled until some of the strands strained and disconnected. It was a strange feeling. He held the severed strands between his thumb and forefinger, examining them as though they were a memento of her having once been young. He put them in his pocket.

“I’ll be back soon,” he said at the door. “Don’t worry about me.”

No one was out next door and he walked past the Davises’ with his breath held in.

At Mrs. Kasolos’s there was no response, and he went around knocking on the windows. When he got to the backyard, he heard her voice through the wall. “What in the hell?” she said.

“I’ll go to the front!” he hollered.

She was wearing a thin nightgown, the kind that Eddie’s own mother had worn, and she spoke very loudly—as though she’d never seen him before: “I don’t know what to tell you! I don’t have anything for you!”

“It’s Laura Gardner’s husband,” Eddie said. He made his voice as loud as hers. “I’m Eddie Gardner. Remember? I checked on you before?”

“I’m waiting for my daughter,” she said.

“Did you eat?”

“What the hell do you care?”

“I’m going to help you move that water upstairs. You said you had water in the basement? From the watercooler people?”

“I need it for my daughter.”

“I’m going to bring it up the steps for you in case you need it,” he said. “Can I come in?”

“Come in, don’t come in. I don’t care.”

It was hard to see inside; the walls and furniture were the same brown color.

“Down here?” he said, tapping on the door at the other side of the living room.

“That’s my basement down there.”

She shuffled past him into the kitchen, and Eddie opened the basement door. He clicked on his flashlight. The stairs creaked beneath his weight with a wooden springiness that threatened to launch him forward into the dim space below. He wondered when she’d been down there last. If she were to try it now, she’d fall to her death. The uneasiness he’d felt at being in her home had settled into resolve. It was important to help old people, however set they were in their ways.

When his eyes adjusted, he saw the pale blue jug sitting by itself on the cement floor. He hefted it to his chest and made his way back up the stairs again, setting it down against the wall beside the watercooler.

“Mrs. Kasolos?” he said. He walked through the kitchen and stood in front of the bathroom door. He heard the clink of something hard on porcelain. “You okay in there?”

She was moving around. He could hear that much.

In the living room, he examined the jug already installed in the cooler, no more depleted than it had been earlier in the day.

“Mrs. Kasolos?” he called.

Even if her daughter came, they wouldn’t need ten gallons of water. A woman her age—she probably didn’t need more than a couple cups a day.

He lifted the jug from the floor and shouldered it, walking outside and down the steps. By then it was dark and the
shadows were as thick as curtains beneath the trees, but he kept the flashlight in his pocket. He sat the jug by the side of the house among the bushes. Then he walked around in both directions to make sure he was alone. He was sweating and thirsty, and thought of going back inside and taking a coffee mug right out of the kitchen cabinet and filling it at the cooler … but what was in the cooler was hers, he thought—there was enough in there to keep her safe, and he would leave what was left alone.

He stood there in Mrs. Kasolos’s dark yard. Laura would expect him back soon, but she wouldn’t start worrying if he was gone a little longer. She wouldn’t allow the jug in their house, no matter how much he explained. That much he knew. She’d make him give it back.

He hoisted it back onto his shoulder and walked, following the sidewalks until he saw that they revealed themselves too brightly in the moonlight. He walked on the dead grass of the lawns instead. The bubble in the jug slid back and forth in the corner of his vision as it leveled and unleveled with his progress.

He’d go into the woods and hide it in the park. It would be safe there, and when the water came back on it wouldn’t matter. No one would know he’d even taken it. The park was less than a quarter mile away, but his shoulder ached beneath the jug, and when he reached the aluminum rails that marked the entrance, he was relieved to set it on the ground. It didn’t feel as though he were down the street from his house. It felt as if he’d been on a journey—as if he’d left Laura behind long ago. He stuck a hand into his pocket and squeezed the plastic strands of her pom-pom. All he had to do was hide
the jug. Then he could walk back up the hill and he’d be home again.

He set the jug back on his shoulder and clicked the flashlight on, walking slowly to keep from tripping over the roots and stones along the path. Still, his ankles gave way and pinched, and he teetered and had to grab hold of trees with his free hand. He tried to concentrate to keep from slipping, but his head buzzed. Only when he reached the bank of the stream, where the trees were charred and the ash was getting into his shoes, was he thinking clearly again.

This was the stream that flowed over the spillway, and he crossed the sand of the bed and climbed the bank on the opposite shore. From his pocket, he pulled three of the silver strands, affixing them in the crust of a burnt tree trunk. He swung the flashlight quickly in front of him. At the edge of the flashlight’s arc, the strands glinted silver and white where they’d crimped. He would be able to find them again if he walked along the bank and shone his light. The woods were big and deep here and already he had to remind himself of the way he’d come.

He climbed up the slope and walked back among boulders larger than himself, finding three trees so close together they made a kind of fence. Behind it was a hollow place full of ash and sand, and he placed the jug down and tore at the ground with his fingers until he’d unearthed a deep enough trench. He laid the jug in and buried it, and then crossed the streambed and tucked three more silver strands beneath a low rock there.