World of Trouble (16 page)

When they got to Rotary, Tick told Atlee to wait, said it shouldn’t be more than fifteen or twenty minutes, and Atlee said that sounded okay, although he wasn’t terribly pleased about standing around. He had other things he needed to be doing, there are always other things to do. But he waited, stood with crossed arms just inside the door of the police station, trying to stay out of the rain, and out of the way of a group of young men and women moving boxes and bags from the lawn down a flight of metal stairs into a basement.

Besides Tick, Atlee communicated directly with only one of them, a man who appeared to be the leader: a short stocky man, older than the others, with bushy hair and dark brown eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses.

“Did you get this man’s name?”

“Astronaut.”

“His name was Astronaut?”

“I might guess it wasn’t. But that’s what they called him.”

I write it down.
Astronaut
. Two circles around it and a question mark.

This man Astronaut was quietly but unquestionably in charge,
Atlee says, giving the orders and keeping the group on task as they rolled up sleeping bags and zipped up duffels, stacked boxes of food and jugs of water and tromped up and down the staircase. There were boxes, too, big square shipping crates that looked heavy, that had to be carried by two people moving slowly as they descended the steps.

The contents of the boxes, Atlee doesn’t know. My mind flies out in all directions. A machine saw—guns, ammunition—fuel—computer equipment—building materials—

I have arrived at the penultimate page of my slim blue notebook. I steady my hands. I am picturing these people: nervous, strange-looking Tick, Astronaut with the eyeglasses and the bushy hair. The kids, college-age kids like Nico, marching up and down the metal stairs like ants, hauling their food and their water and whatever was in those crates.

Atlee guesses there were fourteen people in this group: eight women and six men. I ask him what they looked like and he shrugs and says “they looked like people,” and it occurs to me that it may be the same for Amish people looking at us as us at them: do we in our nonblack clothes and our ungodly accessories and haircuts, do we all look the same? I press him, though, get what details he recalls. There was a kid with bright blue sneakers, he remembers that, a tall kid, heavyset. One woman he remembers particularly, African American, unusually thin. I describe the sleeping girl, Lily, and he doesn’t remember seeing any Asian women, but he can’t say for sure. I describe Jordan, Nico’s pal from UNH. Just describing him brings up a boiling of anger in my gut; I picture him, sneering, a shape-shifter, hiding layers of secrets beneath sunglasses and a smirk.

But Atlee doesn’t recognize the description; no one he recalls as particularly short, no one in sunglasses.

But one person—one person he remembers distinctly. I still have the picture out—the ratty black T-shirt, stubborn expression, the studiedly unhip glasses—and I ask him to look again and he does, he looks again, nods again.

“Yes.”

“You’re absolutely sure?”

“Yes.”

“This woman, she was in the group?”

“I saw her,” says Atlee, “and I heard her speak.”

After he had waited for over an hour for the group to be done with their packing and moving, Atlee was becoming increasingly impatient to do his job and be done with it. On the way there, he had noted a barn on Police Station Road, between the station and the town, and he was intending to stop there on his way home and sift it for what might be useful—animal feed, maybe, or tools, or propane. But now it was approaching four o’clock and his slowpoke clients were still moving their things up and down the stairs, and he was running out of daylight.

So Atlee goes to ask Astronaut how much longer and finds him, in a hallway outside the garage, talking to a girl.

“It was her,” he tells me, pointing to the picture. “Your girl.”

They were speaking, Nico and Astronaut, in hushed voices, at the end of the long hallway that cuts through the police station. Both of them were smoking cigarettes and they were arguing.

“Wait,” I manage. “Arguing about what?”

“I do not know.”

“How do you know it was an argument?”

Atlee smiles slightly. “We are a gentle people. But I do know what an argument sounds like.”

“What were they arguing about?” I can barely hear my own words, my heart is beating so loud; blood is rushing into my head like cold water in a cavern. I feel like I am there—coming upon them, huddled together in conversation in that narrow corridor. Was it already stained with blood, with two overlapping trails leading into and out of the kitchenette?

“I cannot say what their subject was, but I could tell that the girl was the angrier of the two. Shaking her head. Poking the man in the chest, like this, with one finger. The man Astronaut, he says that the situation is what the situation is. The girl says, I disagree.”

I let out a gasp of laughter. Atlee looks at me, perplexed. Of
course
she said that. That’s my sister, that’s Nico, stubbornly rejecting the most uncontroversial statement of plain truth
—The situation is what the situation is. I disagree
.—that’s Nico, up and down and all around the town. I can
see
her saying that. I can hear her. I’m so close to her right now. I feel so close.

“And—okay. Okay, what else did they say?”

Nothing, says Atlee, and shakes his head. “I cleared my throat so they would see me standing there. I had been told half an hour, and now had been waiting three times as long. The man apologized. He was very polite. Very soft in his manner. He asked if I could come back at five thirty. He assured me that by that time they would have completed their move down below, and the concrete piece would be
waiting for me to shift into place.”

“And that’s what happened?”

“Yes. I went and searched that barn as I had intended, and returned at the appointed time.”

“At half past five.”

“Yes.”

“And they were all gone and the concrete floor piece was waiting?”

“Yes. Along with the food I had been promised. What you called them.”

“MREs,” I say absently, and chew for a moment on my lip.

“You didn’t pour the concrete?”

“No,” he says. “It was built when I got there.”

I don’t write any of this down, I have run out of paper, but I think I will remember. The timelines, the details. I’ll remember. “And so by five thirty all of them were gone?”

“Yes.”

“They had gone under?”

“Well. I don’t know. But they were gone.”

And that’s it, end of story, end of the day of September 26. Atlee and I stand together in thoughtful silence, leaning on a fence in the darkness at the far edge of Joy Farms.

After a last moment of standing side by side, Atlee turns away from the fence and wordlessly hands me the one thing that was missing from my pockets, my department-issue pistol. He has no more information to give me, but there is one thing I still need. I describe my request and he readily accedes—tells me where I have
to go and whom to talk to. He takes my notebook and writes on the back of it. I bend my head gratefully. I feel genuine sadness for this old man, the mantle he has laid on himself, the Herculean task of making believe that the world is still more or less what it has been. He has acted like a Secret Service agent leaping in slow motion, hurling himself in the path of the information.

As I step at last off the fence and begin to say goodbye, Atlee Miller cuts me off, holds up his pitchfork at shoulder level.

“You said, I think, that this girl is your sister.”

“Yes.”

He looks me over again, seeming to decide something. “The man, Astronaut. Mild, as I said. Polite. But on his belt, a workingman’s belt, he wore a long-barrel pistol, and a sawtooth buck knife, and a claw hammer.”

Atlee’s expression is set and somber. A chill drifts down over me like snow.

“He never took off the belt, never used it. But there it was. This is what I noticed about him, this man, the leader of this group,” he says. “A quiet man, but with one hand always on this belt.”

*  *  *

I see Houdini on my way out, still in that muddy spot he picked out behind the shed. Wallowing, practically inert, head tilted, asleep. A couple of the Amish kids are nearby, playing jacks on a patch of hard dirt. Houdini will like that, when he wakes up, he’ll like to hear them laughing. It happens the same way Atlee described it, in the crack of
a moment—I don’t call to the dog. I don’t even get close enough to wake him. I move quietly past with my head down, looking back once and then moving on.

It isn’t easy, because he’s a good dog and he has been good to me and I love him, but I leave him behind in this big green place that smells like animals and grass, among these people who will take care of him into a good old age, at least as far as either party knows.

*  *  *

“Wait, please.”

A girl’s voice, just loud enough to be heard. I stop and turn around and there’s Ruthie, the one I caught cheating on the blessing, with the big blue eyes and the plaited strawberry blonde hair. One of the oldest of the giggling Amish girls, but she’s not giggling now. Grave-faced, cheeks flushed from running, her plain black dress dusty at the hem. She has caught me at the crook in the path, where the farm turns into the road. Staring at me, intent, her anxious fingers reaching for my sleeve.

“Please. I have to ask you.” She glances once nervously back at the house. I almost say “Ask me what?” but it would just be buying time. I know exactly what she means as soon as she says it.

The radio, up there in the barn. An innocent child alone in the moontime darkness of the loft, listening to forbidden music and enjoying a rare breath of independence, a respite from chores and sibling responsibilities, when she hears the baffling news, and at first she is confused, and then it slowly sinks in, what it means, what all
of it means.

Pretending since then. Putting it on. Poor young Ruthie knows about Maia, just like her grandfather she knows, but she has not told him. Not wanting him to know that she knows, not wanting him to know that she knows that he knows. Hide-and-seek at the end of the world.

But here she is. Standing and waiting for me. Her fingers clutching at me. “How much longer?”

“Ruth,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

She tightens her grip on my sleeve. “How much
longer
?”

I could give her a reprieve: there’s a plan in motion, actually. Department of Defense Space Command, they figured something out. A standoff burst, a nuclear detonation at one object radius from the asteroid, releasing sufficient high-energy X-rays to vaporize some portion of its surface … everything is going to be
fine
.

But I can’t do that, so I just say it as quickly as I can, tearing off the Band-Aid, “Three days,” and she breathes sharply and nods bravely but stumbles forward into my arms. I catch her and hold her small body to my chest and kiss her gently on the top of the head.

The voice of Cortez, singsong in my ear.
Everything reminds you of your sister
.

“I’m so sorry,” I tell her. “I’m really, really sorry.”

It’s just words, though. Just a bunch of tiny little words.

Everything is exactly as it was.

The headquarters of the Rotary Police Department is like a small gray ship docked in the gloom. The driveway a rough horseshoe of gravel. Two flagpoles, two beleaguered flags. I approach in sunrise silence, work shoes crunching on the gravel, like a mountain man returned to civilization after a long wilderness exile, only civilization is gone. It’s just the one dull municipal building, planted like a ruin in the center of an overgrown lawn. It’s raining again. It rained on and off all night.

I slept again for five hours in the middle of the night on the side of the road, at my same
YOU ARE HERE
rest stop, my coat jacket folded neatly for a pillow, my police-department pistol in the crook of my arm.

Now it’s morning and as I step off the road onto the grass I can sense them, feel them—I can practically hear them down there
under my feet, nosing around in their underground lair, the basement warren they dug down into and took over, the maze they’ve occupied. My mind has built mythologies around them all, cloaked their names in malevolent auras. Tick, long-faced and bizarre. The very thin black girl, moody and cruel. Astronaut with his bushy black hair and his belt of weapons. All of them are listed now in black pen in my blue notebook. Suspects. Witnesses, though to what I am not yet sure. They’re all down there, scuttling around like spiders, and they’ve got my sister.

It’s Monday now. Monday morning; 9:17, according to the Casio. Two days to go. I’m almost to the door of the station when there’s a sudden sharp scrape from just above me. The roof. I jump back from the door, draw the gun, and shout “Police!”

Old habit. Can’t help it. My heart beats. Silence—ten seconds—twenty—me stepping slowly backward, one big step at a time, trying to get to a place where I can see what’s up there.

Then the noise again, a scrape and then a rustle, and then new silence.