Before he tossed the boots under the bench, Marl stared at the gray flesh of his father’s feet, at the long, curving toenails, jutting like black hooks.
The siren stayed silent, and the tires left a damp whisper. Staring out the window, Athena remained mute and unseeing. At the sides of the road, pines bristled and sagged, flowing past.
“Honey, I just feel so bad that I took so long getting here. The roads. I mean, I’m just so sorry,” said Doris, her voice raw with cigarettes. “I tried to call Larry. I even tried Siggy but couldn’t get hold of anybody. Half the phone lines are still down from the storm. I’m just so sorry.” Spray flaring up behind them, they swerved to avoid a downed tree in a sheet of water. All the roads were flooded, many impassable, forcing them onto winding detours that seemed to take them always farther from the highway. “I’m just afraid of getting stuck out here,” she muttered between her teeth as she wrestled the wheel. “We’d never get a tow.”
Athena shut her eyes. No matter how she tried to unfocus her thoughts, she couldn’t blunt her awareness of the sheeted form behind them. “Oh, don’t get stuck.”
Doris shot her a look. When she’d first picked her up, Athena’s words had tumbled out, hysterical and fantastic, but since then she’d retreated into silence. “Will you look at this!” The rig splashed around a turn. “What in hell’s going on up there?”
In the half-submerged road, several vehicles had parked haphazardly, and people milled around a bogged car. A uniformed trooper stood in the middle of the road, shaking his head. He looked very young.
“I’m sorry, honey.” Swaying, the rig slowed. “I just have to see what this is.”
Athena nodded, already jumping down. Though the water rose above her ankles—part of a sudden lake that stretched to cover the floor of the woods—the sands felt solid underfoot. With a dazed expression, she looked around. Pines stuck out from the wash as though caught by an incoming tide.
“’Thena? What are you guys doing here?”
Searching for a dry place to stand, she looked up to find Steve sloshing toward her.
“We tried to call you,” he said. “I didn’t think you’d be able to get through.”
She saw the confusion on his face as she moved away from him and walked toward the knot of people at the found ered car. Wind in the wet branches made a low whistling moan.
The car windows were crystal webs. It had sunk up to the axles, and through a forest of uniformed legs, she saw the crimson film on the soaked floor. She drew closer. She stared a long time, nodding, as though this were only to be expected. There was very little blood really, but she imagined that most of it must have been washed away. The body had been so badly savaged that it barely looked human anymore. The throat had been mauled out to the neckbone, and whitish segments showed through straggling veins. There was no face left.
“I tried to talk her out of coming along, but you know how stubborn she is.”
She recognized Doris’s voice. And soon she realized that other people around her were speaking as well, had been all along, but their words sounded as distant and meaningless as the drip of rain from the trees. She couldn’t seem to make sense of anything, so she stopped trying. “Doesn’t matter,” she whispered to herself. “The wind knows.” Her shoes began to sink into the watery soil. “The pines know.”
“Shit, it’s like his stomach was bit out.”
Feeling a dim sympathy, she glanced at the young trooper beside her. Vaguely, she became aware of Barry’s voice, somewhere off to the side, on the edges of the crowd. Swirling, all the voices drifted away from her again, and there yawned a cathedral quietness, swelling with the rush of wind, punctuated only by damply muffled footsteps and splashings. Sand shifted and yielded underfoot, the earth soft as seaweed, soft as ruptured entrails, and the deep whirl pool of silence broke only upon the sharp, liquid twittering of the birds. She realized that Steve was beside her again, that he was asking her something. “It looked like Wallace,” she told him, knowing he wouldn’t understand. “Lying there in the mud. I thought it was Wallace again.” Dizzy, she leaned on a police car, wondering how she hadn’t heard the birds before. “And the crickets on him, moving, like Wallace was still moving when I found him. Only I didn’t know what to do. Not then. I would now.” Her voice trailed off, and she wondered if he’d heard her, if she’d even been speaking aloud.
She tried to walk away, conscious that the sand made no brisk noise underfoot, just this rotten, mushy sound. The pines whispered. She looked for the birds but couldn’t see them any more than she could the toads. She wanted to call out to someone. To Barry, yes, Barry. Always so forceful, he would help her. People milled all around, but her throat felt dry, and the small sounds she made and the sounds made by the other people seemed muffled to the point of muteness. Yet the wind held many voices, gently hissing ghosts among the trees. They pleaded with her, surrounded her with their desperate longings.
Barry appeared to be questioning a bald, muscular man with a red face. A trooper kept interrupting, while another muttered something.
“We was gonna come back with a tow.” Only Athena really listened, heard the words and understood. “It got so dark,” the man kept saying. “We couldn’t, the rain, it come down so hard we couldn’t see.” The young trooper she’d first noticed stood by one of the blue-and-whites, trying to radio for instructions, and before long, she’d heard enough to piece together some of the facts: car pool of construction workers; late shift; short cut. “It just, the road, it washed out from under us. We got stuck.” It was widely believed that the area was riddled with car thieves who used these back roads, so they’d left one man behind with the car while the others had hiked to a farm house. The bald man looked as though he’d been sick. “We just wanted a tow. We tried to come back. We did.”
“Are you all right?” Steve stood beside her. “Doris just told me what’s, I mean, who’s in the rig.” He stared at her. Too closely. “Athena, what can I say? Can I do anything? I’m so shocked, so sorry. Doris said something about dogs. Lord, that’s awful.”
“Hey, ’Thena!” Putting his notebook away, Barry approached. “How’d you get here?”
“Leave her alone,” Steve said.
“What’s your problem?”
Doris and the trooper wheeled up the litter, and the sound of the invisible surf boomed louder than it ever had in Athena’s ears. The night tide. Only it was morning. Mourning. The tips of the pines vibrated, describing circles that grew ever smaller. Athena shut her eyes and knew the sea swirled all around her, knew the breeze that whipped through wet branches carried a faint tang of salt spray.
In erratic bursts, the radio warned that power lines, downed by the storm, remained potentially deadly, and a phone number kept repeating through the static. “Fat lot of good that number’s going to do,” Doris muttered, switching it off. “Damn phones are down too, lot of places.” She kept turning to look at Athena. Through the rearview mirror, Athena watched the police car that followed them; she imagined she could make out the faces behind the windshield, imagined she could hear their voices.
“I handle all emergencies well, don’t I? And I don’t cry. Did you know this? I never cry. Not even as a child.” When finally she began to talk, her words rambled uncontrollably. “And my aunt used to tell me my mother wouldn’t nurse me, that she said it hurt too much.”
“What, honey?”