“Oh, God, there you go again. You’ve always got a disaster up your sleeve.”
“I see what’s out there. You see it too. You just deny it.”
“Remember when you thought starving hordes were going to come crawling over our walls and we would have to run away to the mountains and eat grass?”
Did I remember? I turned to face her, first angry-furious—
then to my own surprise, sad. “I’ll miss you,” I said.
She must have read my feelings. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
We hugged each other. I didn’t ask her what she was sorry for, and she didn’t say any more.
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 2026
Dad didn’t come home today. He was due this morning.
I don’t know what that means. I don’t know what to think. I’m scared to death.
Cory called the college, his friends, fellow ministers, co-workers, the cops, the hospitals… .
Nothing. He isn’t under arrest or sick or injured or dead— at least not as far as anyone knows. None of his friends or colleagues had seen him since he left work early this morning. His bike was working all right. He was all right.
He had ridden off toward home with three co-workers who lived in other neighborhoods in our area. Each of these said the same thing: That they had left him as usual at River Street where it intersects Durant Road. That’s only five blocks from here. We’re at the tip-end of Durant Road.
So where is he?
Today a group of us, all armed, rode bicycles from home to River Street and down River Street to the college. Five miles in all. We checked side streets, alleys, vacant buildings, every place we could think of. I went. I took Marcus with me because if I hadn’t, he would have gone out alone. I had the Smith &
Wesson. Marcus had only his knife. He’s quick and agile with it, and strong for his age, but he’s never used it on anything alive. If anything had happened to him, I don’t think I would have dared to go home.
Cory is already out of her mind with worry. All this on top of losing Keith… . I don’t know. Everyone helped. Jay Garfield will be leaving soon, but that didn’t stop him from leading the search. He’s a good man. He did everything he could think of to find Dad.
Tomorrow we’re going into the hills and canyons.
We have to. No one wants to, but what else can we do?
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 18,
2026
I’ve never seen more squalor, more human remains, more feral dogs than I saw today. I have to write. I have to dump this onto paper. I can’t keep it inside of me. Seeing the dead has never bothered me before, but this… .
We were looking for Dad’s body, of course, though no one said so. I couldn’t deny that reality or avoid thinking about it. Cory checked with the police again, with the hospitals, with everyone we could think of who knew Dad.
Nothing.
So we had to go to the hills. When we go for target practice, we don’t look around, except to insure safety. We don’t look for what we’d rather not find.
Today in groups of three or four, we combed through the area nearest to the top of River Street. I kept Marcus with me— which was not easy. What is it in young boys that makes them want to wander off alone and get killed? They get two chin hairs and they’re trying to prove they’re men.
“You watch my back and I’ll watch yours,” I said. “I’m not going to let you get hurt. Don’t you let me down.”
He gave me the kind of near-smile that said he knew exactly what I was trying to do, and that he was going to do as he pleased. I got mad and grabbed him by the shoulders.
“Damnit, Marcus, how many sisters have you got?
How many fathers have you got!” I never used even mild profanity with him unless things were very serious. Now, it got his attention.
“Don’t worry,” he muttered. “I’ll help.”
Then we found the arm. Marcus was the one who spotted it— something dark lying just off the trail we were following. It was hung up in the low branches of a scrub oak.
The arm was fresh and whole— a hand, a lower, and an upper arm. A black man’s arm, just the color of my father’s where color could be seen. It was slashed and cut all over, yet still powerful looking-long-boned, long-fingered, yet muscular and massive… . Familiar?
Smooth, white bone stuck out at the shoulder end.
The arm had been cut off with a sharp knife. The bone wasn’t broken. And, yes. It could have been his.
Marcus threw up when he saw it. I made myself examine it, search it for something familiar, for certainty. Jay Garfield tried to stop me, and I shoved him away and told him to go to hell. I’m sorry for that, and I told him so later. But I had to know. And yet, I still don’t know. The arm was too slashed and covered in dried blood. I couldn’t tell. Jay Garfield took fingerprints in his pocket notebook, but we left the arm itself. How could we take that back to Cory?
And we kept searching. What else could we do?
George Hsu found a rattlesnake. It didn’t bite anyone and we didn’t kill it. I don’t think anyone was in a mood to kill things.
We saw dogs, but they kept away from us. I even saw a cat watching us from under a bush. Cats either run like hell or crouch and freeze. They’re interesting to watch, somehow. Or, at any other time, they’d be interesting.
Then someone began to scream. I’ve never heard screams like that before— on and on. A man, screaming, begging, praying: “No! No more! Oh, God, no more, please. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, please!”
Then there were wordless, grating cries and high, horrible mewling.
It was a man’s voice, not like my father’s but not that different from his. We couldn’t locate the source. The echoes bounced around the canyon, confusing us, sending us first in one direction, then in another. The canyon was full of loose rock and spiny, vicious plants that kept us on the pathways where there were pathways.
The screaming stopped, then began again as a kind of horrible, bubbling noise.
I had let myself fall back to the end of the line of us by then. I wasn’t in trouble. Sound doesn’t trigger my sharing. I have to see another person in pain before I do any sharing. And this was one I’d do anything to avoid seeing.
Marcus dropped back beside me and whispered, “You okay?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I just don’t want to know anything about what’s happening to that man.
“Keith,” he said.
“I know,” I agreed.
We walked our bikes behind the others, watching the back trail. Kayla Talcott dropped back to see if we were all right. She hadn’t wanted us to come, but since we had come, she had come, she had kept an eye on us. She’s like that.
“It doesn’t sound like your daddy,” she said. “Doesn’t sound like him at all.” Kayla is from Texas like my biological mother. Sometimes she sounded as though she’d never left, and sometimes she sounded as though she’d never been near any part of the south. She seemed to be able to turn the accent on and off. She tended to turn it on for comforting people, and for threatening to kill them.
Sometimes when I’m with Curtis, I see her in his face and wonder what kind of relative— what kind of motherin-law— she would make. Today I think both Marcus and I were glad she was there. We needed to be close to someone with her kind of mothering strength.
The horrible noise ended. Maybe the poor man was dead and out of his misery. I hope so.
We never found him. We found human bones and animal bones. We found the rotting corpses of five people scattered among the boulders. We found the cold remains of a fire with a human femur and two human skulls lying among the ashes.
At last, we came home and wrapped our community wall around us and huddled in our illusions of security.
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 2026
No one has found my father. Almost every adult in the neighborhood has spent some time looking.