Thirst (9 page)

“Right,” Eddie said.

Laura stood beside him. “And you’re collecting these for who, exactly?”

“We’ve got elderly people all over this neighborhood. A lot of them don’t have family nearby, not that they could even get here anyway. Some of us who’ve lived here a long time just want to make sure they’re okay.”

“And people are giving you things to drink?” Laura said.

“If they have it.”

“And what are
they
drinking?”

“If you’re young and you’ve got your health, you’re lucky. You’ll be okay until they get this stuff worked out. I’m not saying to give me everything you have.”

The man behind him spoke up. Eddie had thought he’d stooped to hold the wheelbarrow, but now he saw he’d let it go—that his back was hunched. He wore suspenders. Whatever Paul projected, this second man balanced out. His cheeks were
loose and stubbly. “Shouldn’t be more than a few hours till everything’s back and running,” he said. “Until then, we just want to make sure our neighbors are okay.”

“How about
I
take it to them?” Laura said to him. “I mean, what I have to give.”

“Sure,” Paul said. “You can just follow us there.”

“Why don’t I just take it to them directly? The Cartwrights? I think I know where they are.”

Eddie put his hand on her arm, as if to keep her from making good on the idea right then. “It doesn’t make sense for you to go,” he said. “They have the barrow.”

To Paul, he said, “We’d help if we could. I guess we didn’t plan very well.”

“No one planned for this,” Paul said, still smiling.

“It’s okay,” Laura said. She went back to the kitchen and brought back four of the juices. Eddie met her a few feet in front of the door and tried to hedge her back. “We don’t have any to give,” he said.

“We do,” she said. She held up the juices by their lids, two in each hand. “These.”

She walked past him, down the walk, and put them in the wheelbarrow. The hunched man reorganized his feet and grunted.

“We’ll let you know if you can be of more assistance,” Paul said. The other man hoisted the wheelbarrow and the two of them walked next door to the Davises’ house.

“No way Mike Sr. gives them anything,” Eddie said.

“Eddie, it’s for our neighbors. They’re old. What’s the big deal?”

“Have the Cartwrights ever said hello to you on the street? Would they recognize you if you knocked on their door?”

“It’s our responsibility to help
them
, not the other way around.”

“You sound like such a saint.”

“It’s done, okay? Just drop it.”

The house was heating up, and his headache hadn’t gone away. When he went into the bathroom, he pissed an amber color.

The last beer in the fridge was almost cool. He poured it into two whiskey glasses. Laura was lying on the couch, reading the
Field & Stream
, and Eddie put one of the glasses down on the table in front of her.

“That doesn’t seem like a good idea,” she said.

“It’s cool, at least.”

They drank their half a beer. Eddie sat across from her in a reclining chair. He closed his eyes, but his thinking wasn’t clear. He balanced there between wakefulness and sleep. It was difficult—as difficult as real balancing—and it only tired him further. When he slept, he was at the edge of the embankment, beside the highway. The snow was so thick between the trees that he had to hold them to keep from sinking. There were voices behind him, in the woods. “Don’t tell,” they said. “There’s a reward.” Eddie took deep steps through the snow. He tried not to sweat. If he started to sweat, he knew he would freeze.

“Come on,” said the man in the flannel shirts. He had no face, no hair. Just a mouth, though Eddie couldn’t really see what kind of mouth it was. “
Wemmick
,” Eddie said to him. Wemmick held out his hand and Eddie took it.

“I thought you were dead,” Wemmick said.

When he opened his eyes, he saw that Laura had fallen
asleep, too. She was spread out on the couch with the magazine on her chest.

“Maybe I should check on the cars,” he said.

“No,” she said without opening her eyes. “What good would that do?”

“Maybe mine’s cleared out.”

“Maybe.”

“I should go.”

“Do you have the energy for that?”

“It’s my
car
, Laur.”

She rocked her head back and looked up, as if she were exasperated with the ceiling. “I understand that. But getting home was hell. I can’t imagine doing it two more times. There and back if it’s still stuck.”

“I thought you said you didn’t see anything. What do you mean it was hell?”

“The only thing bad I saw was you throwing someone down the steps. That’s all I saw.”

“What are you talking about? I didn’t throw him down the steps. I was trying to get him out of our house. If you force someone down the steps, it looks like throwing.”

“Fine,” Laura said. “What would you take with you on this journey to get your car? We’d need to bring supplies.”

“You just gave our supplies away.”

She flipped her legs around and sat up on the couch. “It’ll be easier once they fix the power.”

They ate uncooked hot dogs with mustard for lunch. Laura didn’t think you could eat them raw, but Eddie said you could. They each drank a juice. Through the kitchen window, they could see Mike Jr. with the golf club. He was hacking at the
grass in the manner of someone splitting wood. Eddie knocked on the glass.

“Now you’ve done it,” Laura said.

Mike Jr. spun around, looking for the source of the knocking.

Eddie opened the window. “Over here, bonehead,” he said.

Mike Jr. squinted at them. “Eddie!” he said. In a moment, they could hear him coming up the steps, and Eddie opened the back door.

“What do
you
want?” Eddie said.

“Ah,” said Mike Jr., catching on to the ribbing. He was smiling with his mouth wide-open. There was brown sauce on his face.

“I bet I can guess what you had for lunch,” Laura said.

“Barbecue,” Mike Jr. said.

“Why are you beating up the ground with that golf club?” Eddie said.

“I dunno.”

“C’mere. Let me show you how.”

He led him back outside and picked the club up off the grass. “First, you’ve got to hold it right,” he said. He took Mike Jr.’s hand and put it around the club with his index finger pointing down the shaft. He put his other hand so that it gripped the finger.

“Now, you’ve gotta swing through,” Eddie instructed, standing beside him and making the gesture. “Wait!” he said, anticipating Mike Jr.’s backswing. “Let me get out of the way.”

He stepped back and a fatigue enveloped him. Something cinched down hard on his lungs. He couldn’t breathe. He had to bend and put his hands on his knees.

Mike Jr. swung and hit the ground. The club shivered out of his hands, end over end.

Eddie looked up. The air was coming in again.

Mike Jr. ran to retrieve the club.

“Good,” Eddie said, standing up straight, regaining himself. “Let’s do it again.” He helped him with the grip. He was breathing fine. The air was close, but he was okay. He found the Wiffle ball lying at the base of some ornamental grasses. “Now try it with this.” The grasses were brown, but maybe they were supposed to be. Eddie couldn’t remember what they’d looked like before. He set up the ball and backed off beneath a mulberry tree at the edge of the yard. The branches drooped low, and Eddie grabbed one between his fingers. The leaves were as loose as dead skin. The light green undersides had curled up and around, making them look inside out. The same thing was happening to the leaves on the oak. Mike Jr. swung and clicked the Wiffle ball in a miraculous arc that landed in the street. He put a hand to his forehead, gazing into the distance the way Mike Sr. must have taught him.

“Yeah, yeah,” Eddie said. “Beginner’s luck.”

Across the street, a group of teenagers was walking through the front yards of his neighbors as if the sidewalk went straight through their lawns. They stepped on flower beds and broke through bushes. They held on to one another. Two girls laughed and doubled over in the way Eddie had seen girls laugh and double over when leaving bars in college. Something flashed in the sun. One of the boys held a knife—a long silver triangle.

“Get over here,” Eddie said. He walked Mike Jr. up the
Davises’ front porch and knocked on the door. Patty answered and cradled Mike Jr. to her side by palming his head. “He making trouble?”

“No. Just playing golf.”

“Hotter than hell out here,” she said.

“Everything’s wilting,” Eddie said.

She looked down at Mike Jr. “You gotta stay inside where it’s cool, little man.”

“Is it cool in there?”

“Cooler than out here. Not really, though. I’m sweating like a hog.”

“Did you give those guys anything when they came with the wheelbarrow?”

“We’ve got Mike Jr. to think about,” she said, and when he heard his name, Mike Jr. maneuvered his head from under her hand and smiled up at his mother. “They’ll be okay. Can’t be much longer now. The power company must have gotten a thousand complaints.”

Eddie went back inside his house and took the knife block off the kitchen counter, placing it on the floor beside the bookcase. It was inconspicuous there. Laura was in the bedroom.

“Let’s go to the stream,” she said. She stood with one arm up the doorjamb and canted her hips in a saucy way.

“Why?” Eddie said.

“We’ll take a dip. It’s roasting.”

“You know how dirty that water is?”

“How?”

“That trail follows sewage pipes. Whenever they leak, guess where it goes. Not to mention the runoff from all of this.” He
twirled a finger at the ceiling to indicate the network of suburban streets.

“We can go down and see what’s there, at least.”

“If you can’t swim in it, you don’t want to drink it. I think that’s a rule.”

“Just for the walk, then.”

“You can go. I was just out there. It’s a million degrees.”

“Fine,” she said. “I can’t sit around here all day.”

She went into the bedroom, and when she came back she was wearing shorts and a brown bikini top. Eddie thought of the burnt streak in the sand at the bottom of the stream and how the ash had piled in the spillway.

“Don’t,” he said. He held her and could feel the delicate bones interlocking in her shoulder. Her skin was smooth and warm. “Please. It feels like we should just sit tight.”

“What makes it feel like that?”

“There were kids outside. Just now.”

“So what?”

“High school kids or something. I think they were drunk. They go down to the stream to drink. I’ve seen their empties there. One of them had a knife.”

“You think they’re going to mess with me? Don’t worry, Eddie. I’ll defend the family honor.”

“Why look for trouble?”

“Eddie, this is ridiculous.”

“It’s ridiculous? Really? You want to go take a dip in our local cesspool.”

“People fish in it.”

“They don’t eat what they catch.”

There was a scuff of footsteps on the front walk, and Eddie
waited for a knock to follow. The air in the room seemed to suspend them where they were. When the knock came, Eddie let his breath go out.

Paul was standing on their doorstep. His face was dour and he’d clasped his hands behind his back. The second man with the wheelbarrow wasn’t with him. Bill Peters was with him. He stood down on the sidewalk, looking up at Eddie. He wore a head bandage like a Civil War casualty—gauze wrapped around his ears.

Paul said, “Did you assault this man?” His eye contact was severe.

Eddie let a short laugh escape him. “No,” he said. “I didn’t assault him.”

“He says you did.”

“Paul,” Eddie said. “What are you doing here?”

“Did you
assault
this man?” he said again, more slowly.

“I just gave you juice to give to old ladies. I’m your neighbor. I was playing with the little kid next door. What are you accusing me of?”

Down on the sidewalk, Bill Peters shook his bandaged head. “He did it,” he called.

“Do you know who he is?” Eddie asked Paul.

“He’s a man trying to take care of his family. He says he’s got an unhealthy child.”

“He was in my yard last night.” Eddie shifted his gaze and met Bill Peters’s. “I know you were here,” he said.

Bill Peters shook his head again.

“Look,” said Paul. “I don’t want to make this difficult. But for now I’m going to make a citizen’s arrest.”

“A citizen’s arrest.”

“The cops aren’t here yet. But they will be.”

“Paul, do you know what a citizen’s arrest is?”

“Just come sit on my porch. As long as I know where you are, it won’t be a problem.”

“A citizen’s arrest.”

“You assaulted this man.”

“Go home, Paul.”

Bill Peters called up from the sidewalk. “They’ll lock you up when this is over. I’m pressing charges to the full extent of the law.”

Paul turned to Bill Peters for the first time, and lifted up his hand for quiet. “Bill,” he said. “Please.”

Laura came into the doorway, and Eddie saw both men keep themselves from looking. She was showing a lot of skin in that bikini top. “I witnessed it,” she said. “He was threatening my husband. All Eddie did was ask him to leave.”

“You’re a liar!” called Bill Peters.

Paul bobbed his head judiciously. “Well, that confuses things,” he said.

“It’s pretty straightforward, actually,” Laura said. “Now you can get off our lawn. I don’t know you.”

“Ma’am, I—” Paul said.

“I’ll citizen’s arrest
you
,” Laura said.

She closed the door, and they looked out the living room window as Paul and Bill Peters confabulated on the sidewalk. Bill Peters pointed to his head. When they walked away, he lifted his middle finger up behind him again.

Laura gasped.

“No, screw
you
,” she shouted out the window.

They’d finished the last of the juice. Eddie’s knee was swollen and purplish below the kneecap, but he could bend it and walk without much pain. Laura had convinced him not to go for the car, but Eddie couldn’t see another way around it. The Davises had been out in Patty’s minivan, and Mike Sr. thought that maybe things were clearing out on 29, though he couldn’t say for sure. “You can ride up and down University, but the Beltway’s the same,” Patty told him. They’d brought Eddie and Laura back a twenty-ounce soda. “That’s what we could find. Twenty bucks. It’s just guys who set up in front of that convenience store on Carroll. They’ve got a couple of coolers.”