Lark and Termite (21 page)

Downstairs the sound of the rain is calmer, steady, like the flood has come in and hushed the storm. It’s quiet and strange. Water stands evenly in every room, a foot deep up the legs of chairs, opaque and still as a mirror. I open the door to the deep closet where we keep the wheelchairs, both of them now. A piece of the vacuum cleaner floats out around my ankles. Then a hat and some gloves. I leave the heavy old chair where it is and pull the new one out by the handles. It’s folded up and the flood is only midway up the wheels. It pulls through the water like a ship or a toy, and I push it up the attic steps on its big thin wheels. It glints like a creature and
tick ticks
across the attic floor in the thin space left—an aisle that leads to the window. I move it over near Termite’s chair and set it just opposite, angled toward the window like his. Then I open it, lock the seat in place with the levers on the wheels. “I’ll sit here,” I tell him. “We’ll have supper and watch the rain.”

He doesn’t say anything and I wonder if he’s scared. The beam of the flashlight pours past us to the space above the steps. I leave it lie and lean over Termite, press my face to the attic window. It’s not day or night. The water moves like a shallow river between the houses, level with the sills of first-floor windows. I see an old wooden doghouse float by, bobbing its peaked board roof, dragging a length of thick rope with a collar still attached. Something about the boxy shape and floating rope reminds me of Termite’s wagon. I should have thought, should have got it up the stairs, had Solly help me. I know we’re leaving here, I can feel it. Maybe we’ll stay with Elise in her little house until we know where to go, but he’s got to have his chair, and the wagon, big and heavy as it is. They’re all he knows about where he is.

“I guess you’d like to have your wagon up here, wouldn’t you, Termite. I think I’ll go and get it.”

Think I’ll go, think I’ll go,
he says, quiet, like he’s not convinced.

“You take your moon man,” I tell him, “and give me the flashlight.”

I move his hands, each finger, until he closes his palms around the little moon-faced pitcher, and I stand at the top of the attic steps, play the beam of the flashlight down across the water. The flood has made the third step and looks black in the light, scary, like oil or paint. I switch the flashlight off, and move closer. There’s nothing to do but step in. Water fills my boots and rises midthigh. The flood has come in all at once, cool now, the color of coffee with milk. I’m standing in Termite’s room. His bed, a metal cot with fold-up legs, turns just slightly, floating like a raft. The thick plastic mattress is still dry and the water bears it along like a special platform. I move through to the living room, where I left the wagon. The door to the basement stands open, moving with the flood. I think about the basement underwater: the empty space where the boxes sat, the workbench, Termite’s newsprint drawings disintegrating on the clothesline. I tell myself the house has a granite foundation: it will hold, even if it fills. Nothing else matters: the water will decide. The marooned piano in the living room has shifted to the left, water stirring almost to the keyboard, and the piano bench is upside down. Sheet music circles on the water, silent, open pages, weighted and wet. I train the beam of the flashlight over the words. “Meet Me in St. Louis” drifts by, and “My Funny Valentine.”

Termite’s wagon is partway onto the back of the couch. The metal handle sticks up like a long neck with a skinny head, gleaming its wedge-shaped face. The wagon is tilted out of the water, but it will fill if I try to pull it away, and I’ll never get it up the steps. My boots are like weights, but I get in position to balance the wagon and give the couch a shove. It moves, like a sodden, heavy boat, and nearly lurches backward, but I hold it steady and push. There are no doors in my path. I can float the couch through the archway into my room, through Termite’s room to the attic stairs, then angle it and pull the wagon off, up the last five or six steps. Nick Tucci made the arches wide. I think about him plastering those arches when Termite was two or three: Nick made space for the flood, for the brown muck of a river he said he doesn’t like. I know Nick was in high school with my mother. He’s the only one who ever mentions her to me, like she’s a secret we share, but we don’t. You remember her mother, Nonie told him, when she thought I couldn’t hear.

I was a child and Nick would throw me over his shoulder like he did his sons, hold me in his lap, teach me fingerplays and silly songs. I’d beg him to take me to work with him, night shift at the plant, and sometimes he did—Nonie must have needed a babysitter. He’d find me a soft chair to sit in by the wall, put earplugs in my ears, and tell me not to move. I could feel the wrapper slamming bales so hard the big room jumped, and it was like Nick made the sound. The pounding lulled me to sleep. He broke walls with a sledgehammer the summer he made a room for Termite. We kids cheered while Nonie took Termite into the yard, not to breathe the dust. Solly and I smeared each other with chalky powder, ran in and out of the gaping holes Nick smoothed and shaped. Nick used to call me his girl but I got older and he stopped. You remind me of someone, he started saying. Lark is nothing like her, Nonie told him, and I tried hard not to be. I could pour myself into Termite and it was never enough, he needed me all the time. But I was like my mother with Solly, all along. We were children, doing those things, and I remember thinking about Nick. Like those nights at the plant, sitting in the near dark with my ears stopped up. I could feel the wham of the wrapper pounding through the floor into my feet, through the seat of the chair into my hips. I thought about Nick, pressed hard against a wall with a woman whose face I couldn’t see, like I knew what had happened to him with someone else.

The rain has lessened. The sound now is like the flowing of a stream, light and high and constant. Parts of Winfield flood worse than here—Nick will be with the men, taking people out of houses and off the tops of cars. He’ll be asking Solly where the hell I am, and where’s Junior? Solly will say we’re fine, and we are. I’m moving the couch, edging it along the wall in the mud-colored water, but I keep slipping in the wobbly boots. Carefully, I step out of them, reach down, find them in the murk, and empty them into the flood. I feel the floor under my feet, throw the boots on the couch, balance the fat length of it along the wall, through the arch into my room. My bed is underwater. The tall headboard stands above the dark reflection of the flood, and I see something move past it. The water ripples, ripples again in a long streak, and I look away. That cat, I think, that feral alley cat that’s dirty orange and sits and watches Termite, that slinks away at the rail yard. I don’t want it in the attic with us. I’ll pull the steps up, as soon as I manage the wagon. The steps seal tight, to hold the heat in winter. They’re fitted with a plywood rectangle on the back, layered over with the same pale blue bead board as Termite’s ceiling. They fit so tight you wouldn’t notice them from below, except for the wooden handgrip that’s broad as the steps, and the cord that dangles from it. The steps are not much wider than the wagon. I feel the couch nudge them, blind and blunt. It’s getting dark. I’ve got the flashlight in one hand.

“I’m coming up, Termite.” I move around the couch, feel my way onto the submerged lower steps. I can just reach the handle of the wagon. It pulls easily over the back of the couch, but I’m pulling dead weight at a steep angle when I move farther up the narrow opening of the attic steps. I put the flashlight on the top step and hold the wagon in place, arched up on its front wheels like some awkward reptile emerging from a pool. I pull it up one step, and two, then the couch spins away and dips into the water. The weight of the wagon lurches back and pulls me forward so fast that I’m in the water before I can brace myself. I hear the wagon thud to a lower step as I fall, but the wheels lodge tight. The flood is higher, nearly to my chest, deep enough to swim through. I keep my head out of the water and remember those sandwiches in Termite’s lap. If something happens, he’ll have enough to eat until someone comes for him. He wouldn’t, though; he wouldn’t eat. I feel for the steps and pull myself all the way up, careful and quiet, not a sound or move to jostle the wagon, and the wheels stay locked.

I’m wet through and I smell of the flood, a smell of ruined fruit and dank motor oil. I angle the beam of the heavy flashlight so I can see the wagon just below me, then I sit on the attic floor, grip the ladder steps with my ankles, legs spread, and pull the wagon toward me. I’m pulling it up, locking the wheels higher step by step, and I see the water ripple below me in long glides. They’re rats. I see their eyes glisten in the light, and one of them leaps onto the back of the wagon, feeling its way fast along the wooden edge toward me. I scream, feel the flashlight in my hand, and throw it hard. The rat plops back into the water, then I’m scrambling in a panic, pulling the wagon up fast in the dark. I get it just behind me and realize they’ll be up the steps. I see motion in the water, grab for the rope handles of the attic ladder, pull hard to angle the steps out of the flood, midway to the ceiling. The shape hangs in the dark, too high, too high for rats to jump. I look for any movement, slam the wood hard with my fists. The wobbling scuttle rats make is so different from the streak of a mouse. I wish for that alley cat, that filthy vicious cat that eats what it catches, and I wish for a hammer or a gun. The steps will latch tight. I pull off my dress that smells of slime and rot and drop it into the water, then I look down before I close us in, count the long glides across the flooded space. There are three of them, or four. Smooth torpedo lines that shine and search, dark little bullet heads. The rats from the river and the Polish Town dump are swimming out of the flood.

W
ooden houses, Nonie always says—about reckless people, risky ideas. I light the kerosene lamps anyway, and the fat, thick candles that won’t fall over. Light to shine through the window, for Solly to see in case he needs to come before daybreak, putt-putting toward us in a Civil Defense motorboat. The flood is all over me, dark soil lifted from Polish Town field and drowned creatures floated from the river, so I twist up my stinking hair and wrap myself in a white bedspread like a girl stepping out of a bath. I pull the wagon over and turn it upside down, with the handle folded inside so it’s level. A table for candles and oil lamps, and I set the food out, baked beans in cans and the cold chicken on wax paper, open the sandwiches on our laps. “Here’s our picnic,” I tell Termite. “See how nice the lights look? And we have a bed for you to sleep in. It’s cooler now. The flood has taken the heat.”

He turns his head toward the window, like we’re discussing it.

Everything tastes better than it really could, like fairy-tale food. We’re sitting in our chairs, him in his upholstered nest, me in Stamble’s wheelchair, knees touching, two ladies at a tea party beside a dark window. I try to rub the dirty glass clear, but all we see is the reflection of two kerosene lamps, wide-lipped forms side by side, and a separate nimbus for each candle flame.

“I don’t hear the rain,” I say out loud.

Stamble’s new wheelchair is thin armed and pulls up right next to the windowsill. I open the window and lean far out. The rain is a mist, a thin cloud pulled apart in patches, and the flood has reached halfway up the houses. Things are moving in the water, dark things, and the surface glimmers, tingles, with the wind pushing along behind. It’s quiet, so quiet, and there are no lights. No glows or lanterns. Just a constant unblurred
shush,
like a loud wet whisper over the running of a broken pipe. The river is in the flood now, racing, rushing along over gardens and tipped-up cars and the surprised tops of trees. They’re strange trees, new ones, and they trail their leaves in one direction, like they all hear the same music. The houses stand up chopped off, showing their roofs and second-story windows. The blank windows look glazed and shiny. It’s a new town in a new world, an empty town for water and wind in the dark.

No one stayed. They’ve all left, run away, and they didn’t get to see.

“It’s just us,” I tell Termite. “It’s all ours. Come here. Listen.”

I pull him carefully onto my lap, into his wheelchair, wrap him close in the bedspread with me to keep him warm. We lean out in the dark, into the air and sound. I can feel, through his skin almost, how much he likes it. Holding him, I can see into the water the way he must hear it, in layers, colors mixing in the black. Tomorrow the flood will be brown as diluted mud, ugly with what it ripped and tore, but now it moves and rolls in one dark sheen, silvered in dim moonlight through the mist. Termite moves in my arms, leans far down, turns his head in small movements as though he’s hearing sounds in the layers of the air.

“That’s enough now,” I tell him. I pull him back against me, feel him nearly vibrating, tense in his limbs like an animal poised to leap. At the school he hated, they hold kids tight when they’re excited or upset, force feeling out of them. I let him be, comb his hair with my fingers, wait for him to rest against me. I talk, quiet, like a story. “You need to sleep. Just sleep, with the lamps lit. I’ll be awake. Solly is bringing a boat he can steer with a motor. We’ll sit still in the boat and ride through the flood, Termite. Maybe in the dark, and maybe when it’s daylight. We’ll find a place to stay until the water goes down. The water will sink back into the river, leave things everywhere. You’ll see.”

I keep talking but I don’t hear what I’m saying. The boxes from the basement are piled behind me and I begin to feel them at my back, solid, radiating heat like stones in the sun. I know there’s a scissors in the first-aid kit, for cutting the roll of gauze bandage sealed in paper. I’ll open every box. They’re mine now, ours, like the flood drowning the alley. The basement is gone, like Nonie’s kitchen and Nonie’s house. Anyone could stand up here now, in this small space under eaves and beams, and claim us, say her name. I say it, part of the story, but Termite is asleep against me, his face in my throat. I carry him to the bed that’s piled with clothes and bedding, a soft nest to sink into, and lay the bedspread over him.