Authors: Christopher Hebert
She got bored sitting and waiting. She’d read all the magazines and shot all the squirrels a thousand times. Besides, she reminded herself, she had the whole neighborhood to patrol. She couldn’t go spending all her time in just one place.
So she moved on, and for a few days she managed to forget all about the house on Bernadine Street.
But then one afternoon later that week, she was passing through the lot on her way home from school, and someone new was standing on the porch, the new door and the shiny deadbolt open behind him. But there was no truck at the curb, nothing but him. He was tall, and coils of red hair flopped around his head like ribbons. He was dressed in worn corduroys and a heavy coat that fit him like a tin can on a beanpole. He was so pale he almost disappeared in the glare of afternoon sunlight. He was looking right past Clementine, as if she wasn’t even there.
She knew four different ways to get into the house on Bernadine Street. Not to mention that she’d seen the short man with the flame
tattoos hide the key in the drainpipe. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t see anything through the papered windows, but eventually she figured out that during the day the guy who looked like a sickly clown left the back door open, probably for light. From the empty lot behind the house, she could sometimes catch a glimpse of him moving around inside. No matter how hot it was, he was always wearing the same heavy coat buttoned up to his chin.
After that first time on the porch, she never saw him outside. But somehow he managed to get furniture: a table, a chair, a mattress. She didn’t know what else. At just the right angle, she could see him moving the stuff around, trying different spots. As if it mattered, as if the place wasn’t a complete dump. He ended up leaving it all in the living room. She would’ve put the furniture up in the tower. If he was the kind of hoodlum with guns, the tower would’ve given him the clearest shot. For any kind of hoodlum, that was the smart place to be.
That weekend Clementine was supposed to be helping May-May in the garden. Clementine usually didn’t mind helping, but Car was there too, and she was being the word Clementine wasn’t allowed to say but everyone knew Car was. The two of them were shoveling compost, and anytime a speck touched her shoes, Car would shriek and stomp her foot until it fell off.
“What will the other skanks think,” Clementine said, watching the routine for what felt like the thousandth time, “when they hear you’ve been standing in horse poop?”
“What will your friends think?” Car said, flexing her blood-red talons. “Oh wait—you don’t have any friends.”
“All right,” May-May said, “all right.” And she came over and lifted the wheelbarrow by the handles. “You’re both excused.”
“She’s acting like a baby,” Clementine said.
May-May had already turned away. “I’d rather do this alone.”
Car gave Clementine a nasty look, her face even more hideous than usual.
“Go text somebody,” Clementine said as her sister walked back toward the house.
“Go play with yourself!” Car shouted over her shoulder.
As she watched her great-grandmother weave the wheelbarrow among the raised beds, Clementine thought about how furious Pay would be. It had been his idea that they help. He thought May-May was too old to be out here all alone.
“I’m sorry, May-May,” Clementine said, picking up her shovel again. “I want to help.”
May-May wouldn’t even look at her. “You’re all done for today.”
Pay would be waiting for her at home, and Car would already have blamed Clementine for everything. So she went in the opposite direction, passing through the garden and into the empty lot. She was halfway across when she lifted her eyes and saw something strange on the porch of the house on Bernadine Street: the tall, gangly, clown-looking guy, slumped against the house, as if he’d been shot. But even from the top porch step, Clementine didn’t see any blood. Unless his coat was hiding it.
“Are you dead?” she said.
His eyes opened slowly, and it seemed to take them a moment to focus in on her.
“What’s your name?” she said.
He righted himself, pushing his palms against the peeling porch floor. “Dobbs.”
She came another step closer and stood there looking down on him.
“What’s yours?” he said.
“Clementine.”
He leaned his head against the dirty siding. His eyes looked as though they might close again. “Really?”
“You got a problem with it?”
He pressed a thumb into each of his temples. “It’s just unusual.”
“There’s a song,” she said. “There’s a fruit. It’s more usual than yours.”
“How old are you?”
She put her hands on her hips and thrust out her chest, her trademarked impersonation of Car. “Too young to be your girlfriend.”
“I figured.”
Her gaze wandered over the surface of the porch. It was all so much more depressing now that someone was actually living here. “Your house is terrible.”
He shrugged. “Where do you live?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?”
He got up slowly, one hand against the wall for support. “Are you like this with everyone you meet?”
“Just suspicious people.”
He moved toward the open door.
He’d dumped the mattress in the middle of the floor. Against the wall were the table and chair. His junk was all over the place, a few pieces of clothing, a flashlight, wrappers, and cans.
She said, “It’s even worse on the inside.”
She lost him for a moment in the glare and the shadows. When she found him again, he was standing at the table, lifting a plastic jug to his lips. The water seemed to miss his mouth completely, pouring down the front of his coat.
“Why are you wearing that?” she said. “It’s not winter anymore. Aren’t you hot?”
His right eye twitched. And then the twitch traveled to his nose and on to his other eye. It was like a tremor spreading across his face, making every stop along the way.
“I think you might be dying,” she said.
He groaned into his chair, which rocked on uneven legs. “Just tired.”
“Weren’t you just sleeping?”
“Was I?”
“You’re weird.”
Clementine turned to look out the open door. From the tower upstairs, she could see past the brush and shrubs to May-May’s garden and, past the garden, to May-May and Pay’s houses. From down here, though, she couldn’t see anything.
“What kind of hoodlum are you?” she said.
His head fell sideways. “How old are you?”
She stepped back out onto the porch. “I have to go.”
On Monday a cat Clementine had never seen before crawled under the pricker bush in the lot beside May-May’s garden. She waited two days before poking it with a stick.
Science! Would the cat shrivel up and turn to dust? Would rats come and pick its bones? Would she get to see what it looked like on the inside?
For the rest of the week, she raced to the pricker bush after school with her notebook.
Day 3
:
It stinks. Looks the same
.
Day 4
:
It stinks even more. Fur is falling off. Flies all over the place.
Day 5
:
Something ate its butt. It smells disgusting. Covered in ants.
On day six, her mother found out about her fractions test, and Clementine was grounded until day nine.
By then the cat had lost almost all its fur and its stomach was puffy, and Clementine was afraid that if she poked the cat again, it would explode, and she’d get covered in guts.
On day ten, she spent the afternoon at home watching cartoons. Car, for a change, was somewhere else.
The next morning Clementine was on her way to school, less than a block away, with exactly two minutes to spare, when Dobbs appeared,
turning the corner at the old fire station, coming straight toward her. Clementine was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, and he was in the same heavy coat as always. There was no one else on the street but the two of them. She waved, and he kept right on going, like she was invisible.
He turned onto Bernadine Street, heading home. She thought about following him, but the bell was going to go off at any second, and she knew what would happen if she got another tardy.
The next morning the same thing happened all over again: Clementine going to school, Dobbs going the other way. Same time, same place.
It occurred to her he must’ve been out all night. And he was only now returning home.
But where in the world could he have been?
§
Her mistake was saying she felt sick before asking what was for dinner. When she sat down at the table that night, there was spaghetti with garlicky bread, and her mother had even made meatballs. Clementine knew if she made a pig of herself now, her mother would see she’d been lying. So instead she picked at her plate while Mama and May and Pay and Car twirled birds’ nests on their forks and crammed them into their mouths. They were so busy stuffing themselves, they didn’t notice Clementine slipping pieces of bread into her pocket.
As Car went back for a second helping, Clementine clenched her stomach and moaned. “May I be excused?”
Pay looked like he was going to give her his usual
you’regonnastayinyourseattileveryone’sdone
, but then he raised a paper napkin to his lips and nodded toward the stairs.
Clementine went up and then straight out the window and over to Bernadine Street.
* * *
It was dark by the time Dobbs finally appeared on the porch, shutting the door behind him. Clementine’s knees were woven with the impressions of grass and twigs. It was getting cold, and she wished she’d brought a sweatshirt.
He was easy to follow. She didn’t even have to be directly behind him. Every once in a while he disappeared in a screen of trees and bushes, but she never lost his trail, even with blocks of empty lots between them. She knew these streets better than anyone.
But after a few minutes, they’d left the neighborhood behind. She couldn’t see Pay’s house anymore. There were empty homes and storefronts, but they weren’t the ones she was used to.
They must have gone twenty blocks. Most of the street signs were missing. She kept track of the turns using landmarks: broken fences, burned-out cars, heaps of junk. Just when it was starting to seem like they were wandering aimlessly, Dobbs turned down a narrow alley. At the end of the alley was a warehouse, two stories tall. Brick and cinderblock, all of it old and crumbly. Around the side there was a garage. Clementine was close enough behind him that when he lifted the overhead door, she saw a big van parked inside.
The door rattled shut behind him.
There were windows, but they were too high for her to see through. On the ground all around were scraps of metal. They were sharp and cold and rusty and boring and they didn’t look like anything. The only sound was the drone of the highway coming from she couldn’t tell where.
She hugged her arms across her chest. She’d given up spaghetti and meatballs for this?
Then it started to rain.
Everyone else was downstairs watching TV when Clementine sneaked back inside. She dove under the covers and took out her
book. Through the floor she could hear the laugh track laughing hysterically to itself.
Her favorite book. Life, she read for probably the thousandth time, had begun on earth with single-cell organisms that lived in the sea. Almost four billion years ago. It took millions of years for those first single cells to attach to other cells. After all that time and hard work, the ice age came, and 440 million years ago most of those early organisms froze themselves to extinction.
When the ice melted, what remained were plants, mosses, and algae. As the Earth warmed, insects appeared. Corals in the oceans built reefs. But the oceans were hit hard again around 374 million years ago, and the reefs suffered the worst of it.
There were five mass extinctions in all. The one that wiped out the insects came 252 million years ago. That was the biggest extinction of all, killing virtually everything on land and sea. It took tens of millions of years for life to recover. During that time, amphibians and reptiles first appeared, but most of them were killed in the fourth mass extinction, which cleared the way for the dinosaurs. But the dinosaurs eventually got theirs, too. Whether it was an asteroid or volcanoes, no one knew, but whatever it was blotted out the sun. First the plants died, then the animals that lived off the plants, and then the animals that lived off them. What survived were the scavengers.
And then we came, appearing recognizably human about two hundred thousand years ago, and even though we came last, we behaved as though we’d been here forever, as if we were the goal everything else had been leading to. But most scientists, including the author of Clementine’s favorite book, believed a sixth mass extinction had already begun.
All a person had to do was go outside and look around.
§
The warehouse door was so solid that when she knocked, she barely made a sound. There were no lights on inside, but she knew Dobbs
was here. She’d set her alarm to go off two hours early, and she’d left May and Pay’s house when the sky was still thick as gravy.
She knocked again. Overhead, between the trees, a pair of bats twirled like a twist tie. She pressed herself up against the door. Last year her class had taken a field trip to a bat sanctuary. She knew these were probably brown bats. Harmless. Living bug zappers. But they were still ten times more disgusting than even a hundred dead cats.
A moment passed, and she noticed a shadow—or maybe a reflection—gliding past one of the windows. She tried to watch it, but without taking her eye off the bats. She banged again on the door, and the shadow advanced the length of the building a window at a time. It stopped on the other side of the overhead door.
“Let me in,” Clementine shouted as the bats swooped low. Their species was dying off from some sort of disease. No one knew why. But who would ever miss them?
The overhead lifted with a jerk. Dobbs stood before her in jeans and a T-shirt. Without his coat on, he looked like a wet dog. His skinny arms were shaking under the weight of the door.