The Mist (3 page)

Billy was on the rock breakwater, examining the dock that had washed up on the stones. It was painted in jaunty blue and yellow stripes. He looked back over his shoulder at us and yelled gleefully, “It's the Marlinses', isn't it?”

“Yeah, it is,” I said. “Wade in and fish the flag out, would you, Big Bill?”

“Sure!”

To the right of the breakwater was a small sandy beach. In 1941, before Pearl Harbor paid off the Great Depression in blood, my dad hired a man to truck in that fine beach sand—six dumptrucks full—and to spread it out to a depth that is about nipple-high on me, say five feet. The workman charged eighty bucks for the job, and the sand has never moved. Just as well, you know, you can't put a sandy beach in on your land now. Now that the sewerage runoff from the booming cottage-building industry has killed most of the fish and made the rest of them unsafe to eat, the EPA has forbidden installing sand beaches. They might upset the ecology of the lake, you see, and it is presently against the law for anyone except land developers to do that.

Billy went for the flag—then stopped. At the same moment I felt Steff go rigid against me, and I saw it myself. The Harrison side of the lake was gone. It had been buried under a line of bright white mist, like a fair-weather cloud fallen to earth.

My dream of the night before recurred, and when Steff asked me what it was, the word that nearly jumped first from my mouth was
God.

“David?”

You couldn't see even a hint of the shoreline over there, but years of looking at Long Lake made me believe that the shoreline wasn't hidden by much; only yards, maybe. The edge of the mist was nearly ruler-straight.

“What is it, Dad?” Billy yelled. He was in the water up to his knees, groping for the soggy flag.

“Fogbank,” I said.

“On the
lake?
” Steff asked doubtfully, and I could see Mrs. Carmody's influence in her eyes. Damn the woman. My own moment of unease was passing. Dreams, after all, are insubstantial things, like mist itself.

“Sure. You've seen fog on the lake before.”

“Never like that. That looks more like a cloud.”

“It's the brightness of the sun,” I said. “It's the same way clouds look from an airplane when you fly over them.”

“What would do it? We only get fog in damp weather.”

“No, we've got it right now,” I said. “Harrison does, anyway. It's a little leftover from the storm, that's all. Two fronts meeting. Something along that line.”

“David, are you sure?”

I laughed and hauled my arm around her neck. “No, actually, I'm bullshitting like crazy. If I was sure, I'd be doing the weather on the six-o'clock news. Go on and make your shopping list.”

She gave me one more doubtful glance, looked at the fogbank for a moment or two with the flat of her hand held up to shade her eyes, and then shook her head. “Weird,” she said, and walked away.

For Billy, the mist had lost its novelty. He had fished the flag and a tangle of lanyard out of the water. We spread it on the lawn to dry.

“I heard it was wrong to ever let the flag touch the ground, Daddy,” he said in a businesslike, let's get-this-out-of-the-way tone.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Victor McAllister says they lectercute people for it.”

“Well, you tell Vic he's full of what makes the grass grow green.”

“Horseshit, right?” Billy is a bright boy, but oddly humorless. To the champ, everything is serious business. I'm hoping that he'll live long enough to learn that in this world that is a very dangerous attitude.

“Yeah, right, but don't tell your mother I said so. When the flag's dry, we'll put it away. We'll even fold it into a cocked hat, so we'll be on safe ground there.”

“Daddy, will we fix the boathouse roof and get a new flagpole?” For the first time he looked anxious. He'd maybe had enough destruction for a while.

I clapped him on the shoulder. “You're damn tooting.”

“Can I go over to the Bibbers' and see what happened there?”

“Just for a couple of minutes. They'll be cleaning up, too, and sometimes that makes people feel a little ugly.” The way I presently felt about Norton.

“Okay. Bye!” He was off.

“Stay out of their way, champ. And, Billy?”

He glanced back.

“Remember about the live wires. If you see more, steer clear of them.”

“Sure, Dad.”

I stood there for a moment, first surveying the damage, then glancing out at the mist again. It seemed closer, but it was very hard to tell for sure. If it was closer, it was defying all the laws of nature, because the wind—a very gentle breeze—was against it. That, of course, was patently impossible. It was very, very white. The only thing I can compare it to would be fresh-fallen snow lying in dazzling contrast to the deep blue brilliance of the winter sky. But snow reflects hundreds and hundreds of diamond points in the sun, and this peculiar fogbank, although bright and clean-looking, did not sparkle. In spite of what Steff had said, mist isn't uncommon on clear days, but when there's a lot of it, the suspended moisture almost always causes a rainbow. But there was no rainbow here.

The unease was back, tugging at me, but before it could deepen, I heard a low mechanical sound—
whut-whut-whut!
—followed by a barely audible “Shit!” The mechanical sound was repeated, but this time there was no oath. The third time the chuffing sound was followed by “Mother-fuck!” in that same low I'm-all-by-myself-but-boy-am-I-pissed tone.

Whut-whut-whut-whut—

—Silence—

—then: “You cunt.”

I began to grin. Sound carries well out here, and all the buzzing chainsaws were fairly distant. Distant enough for me to recognize the not-so-dulcet tones of my next-door neighbor, the renowned lawyer and lakefront-property-owner, Brenton Norton.

I moved down a little closer to the water, pretending to stroll toward the dock beached on our breakwater. Now I could see Norton. He was in the clearing beside his screened-in porch, standing on a carpet of old pine needles and dressed in paint-spotted jeans and a white strappy T-shirt. His forty-dollar haircut was in disarray and sweat poured down his face. He was down on one knee, laboring over his own chainsaw. It was much bigger and fancier than my little $79.95 Value House job. It seemed to have everything, in fact, but a starter button. He was yanking a cord, producing the listless
whut-whut-whut
sounds and nothing more. I was gladdened in my heart to see that a yellow birch had fallen across his picnic table and smashed it in two.

Norton gave a tremendous yank on the starter cord.

Whut-whut-whutwhutwhut-WHAT!WHAT!WHAT!…WHAT!…Whut.

Almost had it there for a minute, fella.

Another Herculean tug.

Whut-whut-whut.

“Cocksucker,” Norton whispered fiercely, and bared his teeth at his fancy chainsaw.

I went back around the house, feeling really good for the first time since I got up. My own saw started on the first tug, and I went to work.

Around ten o'clock there was a tap on my shoulder. It was Billy with a can of beer in one hand and Steff's list in the other. I stuffed the list in the back pocket of my jeans and took the beer, which was not exactly frosty-cold but at least cool. I chugged almost half of it at once—rarely does a beer taste that good—and tipped the can in salute at Billy. “Thanks, champ.”

“Can I have some?”

I let him have a swallow. He grimaced and handed the can back. I offed the rest and just caught myself as I started to crunch it up in the middle. The deposit law on bottles and cans has been in effect for over three years, but old ways die hard.

“She wrote something across the bottom of the list, but I can't read her writing,” Billy said.

I took out the list again. “I can't get WOXO on the radio,” Steff's note read. “Do you think the storm knocked them off the air?”

WOXO is the local automated FM rock outlet. It broadcast from Norway, about twenty miles north, and was all that our old and feeble FM receiver would haul in.

“Tell her probably,” I said, after reading the question over to him. “Ask her if she can get Portland on the AM band.”

“Okay, Daddy, can I come when you go to town?”

“Sure. You and Mommy both, if you want.”

“Okay.” He ran back to the house with the empty can.

I had worked my way up to the big tree. I made my first cut, sawed through, then turned the saw off for a few moments to let it cool down—the tree was really too big for it, but I thought it would be all right if I didn't rush it. I wondered if the dirt road leading up to Kansas Road was clear of falls, and just as I was wondering, an orange CMP truck lumbered past, probably on its way to the far end of our little road. So that was all right. The road was clear and the power guys would be here by noon to take care of the live lines.

I cut a big chunk off the tree, dragged it to the side of the driveway, and tumbled it over the edge. It rolled down the slope and into the underbrush that had crept back since the long-ago day when my dad and his brothers—all of them artists; we have always been an artistic family, the Draytons—had cleared it away.

I wiped sweat off my face with my arm and wished for another beer; one really only sets your mouth. I picked up the chainsaw and thought about WOXO being off the air. That was the direction that funny fogbank had come from. And it was the direction Shaymore (pronounced
Shammore
by the locals) lay in. Shaymore was where the Arrowhead Project was.

That was old Bill Giosti's theory about the so-called Black Spring: the Arrowhead Project. In the western part of Shaymore, not far from where the town borders on Stoneham, there was a small government preserve surrounded with wire. There were sentries and closed-circuit television cameras and God knew what else. Or so I had heard; I'd never actually seen it, although the Old Shaymore Road runs along the eastern side of the government land for a mile or so.

No one knew for sure where the name Arrowhead Project came from and no one could tell you for one hundred percent sure that that really was the name of the project—if there was a project. Bill Giosti said there was, but when you asked him how and where he came by his information, he got vague. His niece, he said, worked for the Continental Phone Company, and she had heard things. It got like that.

“Atomic things,” Bill said that day, leaning in the Scout's window and blowing a healthy draft of Pabst into my face. “That's what they're fooling around with up there. Shooting atoms into the air and all that.”

“Mr. Giosti, the air's full of atoms,” Billy had said. “That's what Mrs. Neary says. Mrs. Neary says everything's full of atoms.”

Bill Giosti gave my son Bill a long, bloodshot glance that finally deflated him. “These are
different
atoms, son.”

“Oh, yeah,” Billy muttered, giving in.

Dick Muehler, our insurance agent, said the Arrowhead Project was an agricultural station the government was running, no more or less. “Bigger tomatoes with a longer growing season,” Dick said sagely, and then went back to showing me how I could help my family most efficiently by dying young. Janine Lawless, our postlady, said it was a geological survey having something to do with shale oil. She knew for a fact, because her husband's brother worked for a man who had—

Mrs. Carmody, now…she probably leaned more to Bill Giosti's view of the matter. Not just atoms, but
different
atoms.

I cut two more chunks off the big tree and dropped them over the side before Billy came back with a fresh beer in one hand and a note from Steff in the other. If there's anything Big Bill likes to do more than run messages, I don't know what it could be.

“Thanks,” I said, taking them both.

“Can I have a swallow?”

“Just one. You took two last time. Can't have you running around drunk at ten in the morning.”

“Quarter past,” he said, and smiled shyly over the top of the can. I smiled back—not that it was such a great joke, you know, but Billy makes them so rarely—and then read the note.

“Got JBQ on the radio,” Steffy had written. “Don't get drunk before you go to town. You can have one more, but that's it before lunch. Do you think you can get up our road okay?”

I handed him the note back and took my beer. “Tell her the road's okay because a power truck just went by. They'll be working their way up here.”

“Okay.”

“Champ?”

“What, Dad?”

“Tell her everything's okay.”

He smiled again, maybe telling himself first. “Okay.”

He ran back and I watched him go, legs pumping, soles of his zori showing. I love him. It's his face and sometimes the way his eyes turn up to mine that make me feel as if things are really okay. It's a lie, of course—things are not okay and never have been—but my kid makes me believe the lie.