What Dies in Summer (6 page)

But it wasn’t the Lord I saw keeping watch at my bedside again that night. It was the girl who was death.

Doo-be-doo-be-doo
, she sang softly from her cold blue mouth.

THE LAST TIME
I ever rode my bicycle was the day I learned something important about what the word
home
really means. Or maybe what it
doesn’t mean.

I had been thinking more and more about L.A., trying to make sense of her being here and figure out what had happened to make her leave home. Gram must have wondered too, but I guess we both had
our reasons for not asking. With me it was not wanting to piss L.A. off, along with the absolute certainty that she’d never tell me anything she didn’t want me to know anyway. And even
though I told myself L.A.’s arrival had nothing to do with it, my night visitor had shown up right after L.A. had, and the feeling of connection wouldn’t go away. I finally decided that
if I was ever going to have any peace I needed to know.

But that’s where I hit the wall. I didn’t think Aunt Rachel or Uncle Cam would tell me anything, at least not anything I could be sure was true. Which didn’t leave many
possibilities. The only source I could think of who might know something and be willing to tell me was Mom, but that didn’t simplify things much because of all the pitfalls talking to her
could involve.

What finally decided it for me was a miracle. Maybe that isn’t the right word for it, but then I can’t think of a better one. You can judge for yourself.

The day it happened started with rain, which began coming down in earnest while L.A. and I were having breakfast with Gram at the kitchen table. It was a cornflakes morning, and along with her
cereal, which she was mainly ignoring, L.A. was taking occasional sips of the coffee Gram had fixed for her—half a cup of fresh-brewed Folgers filled the rest of the way up with milk and
sweetened with a spoonful of brown sugar. Like always at this time of day, her eyes were wide and blank and her hair had what Gram called that freshly dynamited look. Jazzy was curled up asleep by
her feet.

Since the municipal pool was open this morning and it was an Adult Day—which meant they only allowed swimmers old enough for you to have a reasonable hope they wouldn’t pee in the
water—this was supposed to be a swimming day for us. But when I heard the rain and wind and noticed how dark it was getting outside, I was forced to start thinking in terms of fallback plans.
With a frog-strangler like this in the morning, a lot of times it’s just the beginning of a whole day of start-and-stop rain, which would mean the pool would be closed on account of the
possibility of lightning.

Gram looked out the window for a minute and said, “Now, where was all this last month when we needed it?” She set her coffee cup down in front of her.

L.A. didn’t speak, just stirred her cereal around, rubbed her nose with the heel of her hand and yawned. She was never in a hurry to eat anything, especially in the morning. On the other
hand, I was into my second bowl of flakes with no loss of momentum as I listened to the rain roar and rattle outside. By now it was almost dark as night out there. I didn’t know why, but I
enjoyed the sound of the rain. Regardless of how bad they could sometimes screw up your plans, I liked rainy days almost as much as rainy nights.

Then, while I was gazing absentmindedly at something on the back of Gram’s newspaper about a teen reported missing, and just as L.A. was finally getting around to taking a bite of
cornflakes, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that her hair was sticking almost straight out from her head. Even the fuzz on the backs of her arms had begun to stand up. Feeling a tickle on my
own skin, I looked at my arms and at Gram and saw the same thing happening to us. Jazzy’s head came up.

“Well, my land,” Gram said, trying to smooth down her hair. I noticed a smell in the air that reminded me of a hot radio, and then the entire world seemed to explode with something
completely beyond sound—like a gigantic fist somehow slamming into me from all directions at once. The accompanying flash half blinded me. The lights went out and the dishes went on rattling
for a couple of seconds.

“Good heavens!” said Gram. “I think it must have struck the old sycamore.”

I guess Jazzy had jumped into L.A.’s lap, because now she was peeking up at me over the edge of the table between L.A.’s arms, trembling and making small cooing noises, like maybe
the explosion was my doing and she was begging for mercy. You could see the whites of her eyes. I shook my head and put my hands over my ears. I had a problem with loud noises anyway, and this one
had started millions of little bells ringing in my head.

L.A., who was damn sure wide awake now, said, “Is there gonna be a fire?” She had a death grip on her spoon, her knuckles white.

“I don’t think so, honey,” said Gram. “Not in this much rain.”

We sat in the semidark for what seemed like a long time, the noise of the rain wrapped around us like a weightless blanket. You never seem to notice how much a house is doing until it stops, and
it felt a little strange with nothing running inside. But after a while we began to hear something different out there, not just the rain anymore but something else falling, something solider than
water but not as hard as hail. We all looked at each other.

“I guess we’d better just make sure it didn’t actually hit the house,” said Gram, pushing her cup away. She patted Jazzy’s head and gave L.A. a reassuring smile as
she got up, then went over to the window and bent to look out and up at the tree.

I went and looked too. Outside the window just a few feet away we could see that the big speckled trunk of the sycamore had a steaming rip down its side, with long jagged splinters sticking out
and lying around on the ground. And along with the splinters there were also hundreds of fish, little silver ones, all the same size, quivering and flipping on the grass everywhere I looked.

For once in her life, Gram was speechless.

“Hey, L.A.,” I yelled. “Look at this!”

As I said this the lights and the fan on the counter came back on. The toaster was upside down and thoroughly dead, and the stove clock stayed locked on 8:04 from then on, but otherwise the
workings of the house seemed to take up again exactly where they’d left off.

L.A. got up from her chair and put Jazzy down into her box at the end of the counter. She looked out the window next to Gram and me, then ran to the cabinet under the sink and got an empty
mayonnaise jar. She banged out the front door about half a second later, and I ran out behind her.

The fish were everywhere, all over the street, in flower beds, even on the roofs of the cars and houses. The rain had almost stopped, but a few fish were still plopping down from the trees.

“This is crazy, Biscuit!” said L.A., looking around the yard and up at the sky. “Where’d they come from?”

I couldn’t think of anything to say. I tried to imagine how far the fish could fall and still be undamaged like this. L.A. knelt down and touched one that was still twitching on the grass,
then sniffed the tip of her finger and licked it. “It’s salty,” she said.

She began picking up fish from the lawn and dropping them into the jar. When she had five or six, she went to the spigot and filled the jar with water. The fish seemed perfectly normal to me,
darting around behind the glass like magnified eyes.

Gram was standing on the porch holding a dish towel, her mouth open and her eyes blinking as she looked around at all the fish. “Lord, Lord,” she said.

A blue jay slanted down from a tree overhanging the street, lit on the wet sidewalk and cocked his eye at one of the fish. Then he grabbed it in his beak and flapped back up into the tree. Next
door, Mrs. McReady’s cat Beth stuck her head out from under the porch.

“Pharaoh, let my people go!” Gram said.

Jazzy looked out from behind her ankles on one side, then the other. The sky was getting lighter by the minute, the clouds beginning to thin and break up. Gram walked across the yard with her
arms held out at her sides, laughing and shaking her head. Jazzy followed her closely.

“Minnows from heaven!” Gram said.

Several nuns had gathered in front of St. Mary’s and were whispering to each other and crossing themselves, and all along Harlandale people were coming out of their houses, resting their
hands on their hips, looking up into the trees and turning their faces to the clearing sky. There was a faint smell of iodine in the air.

Gram stopped beside L.A. and reached for the jar with a puzzled expression. “Why, I know what these are,” she said. “I saw fish like these out in Carolina when I was a girl.
They’re alewives. They come from the sea.” She held the jar up for a better look.

By this time you could tell there was something wrong with the fish. They seemed to be swimming desperately but barely getting anywhere in the water. As we watched, one of them rotated slowly
over onto its back and floated to the top of the jar.

“Hey,” said L.A. She peered into the jar and shook it once. Another fish floated up, and in a few minutes they were all belly-up at the surface of the water. She reached into the jar
to poke at the fish with her finger, but they were dead.

“They can’t survive in fresh water,” said Gram.

Jazzy transferred from Gram to L.A., who was taking another turn around the yard. They seemed to be trying to inspect each fish individually.

I was through examining the blasted sycamore and was looking at Beth as she crouched on the edge of Mrs. McReady’s driveway, eating the small fish. She took each one by the head with her
teeth, shook it, growled, then chewed and smacked at it until finally the tail disappeared into her mouth, the whole time watching me with her yellow eyes. As if a million years had disappeared and
I was suddenly back in a time where humans didn’t belong.

Taking another look around, I decided to take all this as a sign. I made up my mind to go over to Mom’s house and tell her about the fishfall, which would give me a chance to find out what
she knew about L.A. I went inside and tore off a strip of tinfoil from the box in the cupboard, wrapped two of the fish in it and put them in my pocket.

I didn’t have a regular driver’s license yet, but that wouldn’t have made any difference. Gram would never have let me take the car for what I was planning to do even if I had
had ten licenses.

Which left my bicycle. I went around to the garage to get it, expecting bad news, since in my experience anytime you took your eyes off a bicycle for ten seconds disintegration set
in—tires went flat, spokes came loose, the chain jumped the sprocket or whatever. But it turned out the bike’s tires were hard and everything else about it seemed to be in working
order.

I may even have gotten the demented idea this was my lucky day.

As I pushed the bike out of the garage under the dripping trees, Gram said, “Where to, dear?”

“Mom’s,” I said. The blue jay screamed its thin power-saw call.

L.A. frowned and found a sprig of grass that needed stomping.

Gram smoothed the front of her dress, looked down at the ground for a second and said, “All right. You be careful crossing Lancaster, James.”

Last year some kid riding a bicycle, a kid quite a bit younger than me, had somehow managed to get himself torn completely in half by a watermelon truck over there, and now Gram seemed plagued
with the notion that I was going to be next. It might have been false confidence on my part, but I had no fear of produce trucks. The trolleys that used to run downtown, with all that blue
electricity groaning and snapping from their overhead power arms, seemed more menacing to me.

But the real problem occupying my mind at the moment was the time. It seemed to me that right now I had a better than even chance of finding Mom at home alone, which was the best-case scenario
unless you counted things like Jack going to prison for life or choking on his own tongue, to name just a couple of outcomes that I knew for a fact it did no good to pray for. Mom being there alone
would leave open the prospect of having a Coke with her, showing her the fish and telling her the whole story of what had happened. The next best possibility would include both of them being there
but with Jack sober and cutting the grass or working in the garage, which would allow me to back away before I was seen. Of course, there were plenty of other ways it could play out, but somehow I
managed to steer my thoughts away from those. One more illustration of the difference between being intelligent and being smart.

As I rounded the corner of Elmore a few cold fat drops were still falling from the trees, and you could see from the leaves and branches in the street and the steam rising off the pavement where
the sun struck it that it had rained hard here too, but I didn’t see any more fish. There was almost no traffic and I was making pretty good time, thinking of the fish and dreaming up ways to
describe the episode to Mom, when the dog came at me.

I knew from previous trips through the neighborhood that he was the worst kind, a biter instead of a barker, fairly fast and persistent, staying after you longer than most dogs considered
necessary. Just an all-around shit of a dog. He was reddish and funny-looking, like maybe a dachshund-collie mix or something, with semi-floppy ears that he laid back tight when he chased me. Jack,
who wasn’t a big guy himself, had heard me talking about the dog one day and with a hard grin said, “Collie and dash hound, huh?” A wink at Mom. “Somebody must of put his
daddy up to it.”

I had the advantage of the grade on this block, and, wanting to build as much speed as possible for the chase itself, I got up on the pedals for leverage as the dog was angling across his yard.
He was pumping too, his head driving up and down and his tongue swinging out at the side of his mouth. His hind claws threw up chunks of grass behind him as he ran. When he caught up with me in the
middle of the block I put my near foot up on the handlebar and with my off leg tried to keep up a rhythm on the pedal, really punching on the downstroke and trying not to kill my speed by wobbling.
I could hear the dog’s claws on the pavement and the sound of his breath beside me, but he was fairly stupid for a bad dog and he did what he always did—kept snapping at the pedal, even
though my foot wasn’t there.