She was singing or she was shouting, and maybe what was making all of her friends laugh is that they weren’t sure which one. In a group of creatures, regardless of the species, there is sometimes one who seems to control the blood of the others.
Fowler tucked deeper into his sausage roll and saw all the men looking at her, not hiding it, their faces made of rubber and their eyes scratched from their heads, like in a picture.
As the girls walked by, the men turned small and strange. No one breathed. They just waited for the girls to get clear and then you could feel them catching up on their breath.
They again gave each other glances. Just a significant exchange of silence, trying not to break into pieces.
“Well, thank god I don’t shit in my own backyard,” one of them finally said, shaking his head.
“Hell, I don’t shit in my own toilet,” someone replied, and they all laughed.
Fowler would see her asleep in a month. You didn’t keep records for things like that, because of course. He would stop in, take a look, gather some items, and truck them up to the hut, where a certain kind of situation was taking shape. A residence, a place, a grave. Today her face seemed filled with air. He squinted so she could be blurry.
A bit more chatter, everybody silently agreeing that they wanted to destroy what they’d seen, that they could remove the small parts of their bodies and make a pile there in the street. For someone to find later. Someone smart, a sort of scientist, who could look at it, throw his hand into it, and have a close enough idea of just what had happened in this place.
Then the men tensed up. “Shut up, shut up,” someone said, “here they all come.”
It was the wives, bombing at them from the other side of the street. They closed in pretty fast and acted like they’d missed all the fun.
“What are you all laughing about?” One of the wives turned to Fowler.
The Shebster wife, the Coramper one. He didn’t remember. Those sounded like fake names to him, like they had all lied about who they really were. He wanted to keep eating. A tough bit of cartilage was lodged in his mouth. He was almost done chewing. He’d do anything not to look at the girl. You had to follow a ration.
This wife was really on him.
“Tell us what these guys said or we will torture you,” she shrieked.
Fowler saw where this woman would be buried and he saw the weather for it, her children crying at her grave. If he really strained he could see the children themselves get old and bloat with fluid until they burst.
She touched him and he stopped eating. “Are you ticklish?” The men all watched.
Fowler was occupied with the larger question of how many ways the girl could look, doing different things, even long after she’d died. As bones, as powder, at night, having all of the different feelings, and if any of those ways would change what he felt should happen—that she and Fowler should combine themselves in a remote location. Even the girl’s father, whom Fowler had seen, and once spoken to, had, buried in his face, something that drew Fowler in.
So it wasn’t the girl in particular, was it? Maybe the father would do, or the mother, or, if it were possible, ancestors going back further, if you could arise out of where you lived and drift into the past, to make selections. Because the attraction—even though that was the wrong word, really—was just the cells, and the blood. A precise arrangement of them, regardless, really, of the carrier, rendering her face and body just so. Maybe the girl herself didn’t matter, even if she seemed to hold a more concentrated level, as if a strong dose of it had funneled down into her for the time being. He couldn’t ignore that. He’d be lying to himself. What would he want from her as an old woman? It was a problem.
The tools didn’t really exist for him to scrape what he needed into a bottle.
“Marjorie,” the woman called over to Fowler’s wife. “Hey, Marjorie, I caught myself a big one!” She’d grabbed Fowler now and he started to sway, eating his sausage again, trying to smile in just the right way for the guys.
The other wives looked down and laughed. The laughing had changed. It didn’t make him feel good to hear someone say his wife’s name. It never had. Early on, when they were first just getting to know each other and he hoped to show her some of the paths in the foothills, before they had embarrassed each other with nudity, he wondered if that meant they should not be married. Her name wasn’t entirely her fault.
Marjorie was nearby, in a circle of people, and she didn’t seem to immediately notice she was being called out. When he saw her he could tell she didn’t want to look up—she had on her do not disturb face. She’d be gone in three months, leaving with no argument, the two of them nearly shaking hands. He wanted to keep these people from bothering her. But she looked over at them anyway.
“What do you say?” the wife asked, pointing her finger right into Fowler’s body. “Is this one ticklish? Your husband! Is he?”
Marjorie shrugged, and it was like they all suddenly felt the same thing, with this woman’s finger pressing into Fowler, as if she knew what she was looking for, when really she had her hand in something she should not be touching. The group quickly fell quiet. Maybe each of them, in their own way, was picturing themselves being launched off the street, as Fowler was, and propelled high up into the air, then rapidly hurtling through space. Their faces spreading in the wind as it rushed by them, and all of them looking down at their whole neighborhood, where everything had turned so small. Killable, dismissible, unreal. There wasn’t really such a good word for how it all looked from up there where he was.
Now Fowler was out in the neighborhood, just where the block party was a year ago, and everyone was gone, evacuated. He could do what he liked. The streets were empty. Yesterday some vehicles had lifted in the muck and floated off. The biggest things, in the right weather, were suddenly weightless, beautiful. Should not people, on occasion, float past one another, weightless and rolling? The problem with the laws of physics was repetition, dullness. There was a kind of deep insult buried in the way the world was designed.
Pretty much everything was hidden by a rumbling flow of mud. Some houses were seeing damage.
Mud, they all knew by now, because you heard it on the news every time the rain started, slid down from Moyer Creek, which nearly ringed the town from above. Nearly. From space the creek might look like a broken circle, a circle with a tear in it, where some beast had maybe broken through. But today you couldn’t really look into the hills and think the mud was coming from just one place anymore. Someone long ago had named the area a basin. Not a scientific term. In the neighborhood they called it a bucket because it did fill right up.
Stupid to put houses in it. Stupid to put people there. True of any place if you took the long view. Pretty much any location anywhere featured its own notable extinction. Sudden death. But people did not exactly get to see a list, for example, of all the people who had died in the place they were thinking of living. Plus how they died, going back a good enough ways to give them the picture they really were entitled to have. Probably it would be unbearable to know. Who died here. And here. And here. How they died. When they died. Probably no one would care to know. But still, freedom of information. If you felt yourself to be strong enough, you should be allowed to know.
There was probably an ocean here long ago. And before that, what, maybe hot plains, they said, too hot even to stand on. Jungle, too. Sharp beds of coal. A meadow of knives, Fowler had read somewhere.
Fowler had to figure that, throughout history, one animal had hunted another in this very spot. What were the larger observations one could make, in terms of who escaped, who was caught, who was eaten? You could think that you walked down the street in your town, but you didn’t. You participated in something else entirely.