A Catch in Time Page 13

  Ripples of laughter came from the audience, along with a collective “Amen.”

  Reverend Perry nodded to the audience, then leaned into the table and stared at Father Bullard. “You are right to speak of a receptacle,” he said, “only it’s not a receptacle of thoughts, it’s a cauldron of evil. That evil is real, that evil is the souls of sinners Satan eats every day. And four weeks ago last Tuesday, Satan upended that cauldron and poured his filth on mankind. And there are those among us who weren’t prepared.

  “Satan has unleashed demons and we need to join the war, fight so we can join God’s kingdom. Hallelujah!” He turned to the audience. “Time has come for the Lord to walk among us again, to bring His peace to the world, and we cannot abandon Him.” His voice thundered, “Stand by the Lord and banish Satan, and we will dwell in His house forever!”

  The audience erupted. TV cameras panned the crowd, showing arms raised, faces in surrender, people shouting, writhing, humanity ready to be enveloped, as it had for millennia, in the promise of safety.

  A commercial interrupted. A cartoon figure scurried among real cars, jamming a length of garden hose from one gas tank into another, its cheeks bulging in useless efforts to siphon. A voice-over chided the frenzied cartoon, telling it about Syphoze, the new product guaranteed to penetrate the anti-siphoning devices found in most cars.

  Eli pushed the remote’s mute button and, in the sudden silence, said, “If ever there was a time for people to believe bullshit, this is it.”

  “Aw, hell,” said Kate uneasily. “Brimstone-breathers have been around forever.”

  Catherine, brow furrowed, said, one syllable at a time, “I believe we should leave this town as soon as possible.”

  “If we let every jerk like that preacher chase us off,” Kate protested, “we’ll be running forever, Catherine. This place’s got everything we need—electricity, running water, gas, food, things to do …”

  “I don’t know, Kate,” Eli began.

  “Well, I do,” Kate interrupted. She glowered at them. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  CHAPTER 22

  JOHN THOMAS WALKED ALONG THE EDGE OF THE SID ewalk where the snow lay in thick drifts. He stomped hard, making deep impressions, then looked over his shoulder at his trail. Someday, he’d make footprints as big as Josiah’s. John Thomas giggled as he continued tromping. He couldn’t imagine himself grown up, only as he was now but with Josiah’s big feet.

  “What’s funny, John Thomas?” Lucas asked. He walked on the sidewalk’s mashed path, holding Laura’s hand and hanging back against her steady pull.

  “Big feet,” John Thomas said, abandoning the game. They were almost home.

  Lucas laughed loudly but wondered why big feet were funny. He filed it among other things he’d been told were funny but didn’t know why. He had small feet, so nobody would laugh at him. Lucas hated to be laughed at.

  Tromping through the cold, Laura felt only Lucas’s small, mittened hand in her own. She’d tried to behave normally around him, but her apprehension had grown. She’d questioned John Thomas, careful not to reveal her uncertainty, but learned nothing. It was as if John Thomas didn’t remember Lucas in his life before. He took a long time to frame answers and never mentioned Lucas in them.

  It was always the same. He’d hesitate, and then he’d talk about all sorts of things but never about Lucas.

  It was cold. Josiah hunched into his jacket and burrowed his fists in the pockets. A block ahead of him, three people were receding into the gray-white. He watched as John Thomas stomped through drifts of snow and Lucas dragged against Laura’s arm, then turned from the sight and crossed the street in the opposite direction, toward downtown.

  Cars passed, tire chains crunching snow with a slapping rhythm. A man emerged from a doorway down the block and walked toward him. Josiah averted his eyes until the instant they passed each other. In that moment, he glanced up and looked steadily at the man, who gave a brief nod and flicked his eyes forward.

  Josiah looked at the eyes of every person he encountered on his frequent, solitary walks, searching for the presence Laura had described. Had it been hidden in the furtive glance of the woman he’d passed the other day, or the man who’d refused to meet his gaze? Maybe he’d never see it, because Laura had just experienced a meanness only she’d never encountered before. Not something new to the world, just new to her.

  The brooding, gray day matched his mood. He struggled against wishing for the world that no longer existed. A fresh peach. A new movie. A predictable tomorrow.

  He wanted things with Laura, without baggage.

  She wasn’t crazy, so what difference did it make what she believed? Why was he trying so hard to prove her right? Somehow, she’d pushed him off center, off that sweet spot he’d found the secret to maintaining: acceptance.

  He’d accepted the blackout, the changed world, just as he accepted his own life; things happened. You accepted change, because change became life.

  Realizing that had allowed him to stay centered throughout his childhood, those long periods of being locked in the bedroom of their squalid apartment while his mother whored for drugs, endless hours waiting in line with her for a welfare check or a dose of methadone. Always waiting. For a pimp. For a john. For a dealer.

  He wasn’t sent to school. He wasn’t allowed outside the apartment without her.

  His world was filled with damaged adults, people who used drugs, people who used people, people whose dreams were limited by their cravings. He learned to set himself aside, a small, sad chameleon, to blend into the background by being whatever was expected. Those expectations changed moment by moment as drugs destroyed the people who regulated his life.

  His gentleness, having found no form of expression, burrowed deep within him and became spiked with defensive cynicism. He spent as much time as he could alone, in his shabby room with his small old black-and-white TV. Rabbit ears received only one station, which played old movies and sit-com reruns.

  One night, when he was about seven, he was watching The Three Stooges with the volume turned up as loud as it would go. It still didn’t drown out the crashing and shouts beyond the rickety door.

  The screaming, slapping, and punching that night ended with his mother in the emergency room with a broken jaw and dislocated shoulder. As he sat next to her in the crowded waiting room, he clutched the little TV on his lap. His thin arms ached with the effort of holding it, but he’d feared having it stolen. Their front door had been demolished.

  His mother went from the emergency room into the arms of Jesus, and the next two years were filled with threats of hellfire, crushing expressions of love, and demands of duty. His mother made him listen while she “read” the Bible aloud. Functionally illiterate, she’d move her finger along the page as she repeated the stories she’d heard at the ghetto mission. Josiah would frown with concentration as he tried to match the black squiggles on the page to the sound, trying to understand which symbols matched which words.

  Just when Josiah would think that “Behold!” was linked to a specific group of marks, “Behold!” became an entirely different group of symbols beneath his mother’s nail-bitten fingertip.

  “Show me how to read, CeeCee,” he once demanded, caught up in enthusiasm. A stinging slap was followed by, “Don’t you order your mother around, boy!” Her fierceness prevented him from repeating the request again. Two years later, he discovered Sesame Street on his fuzzy black-and-white, and with it, the revelation that groups of squiggles could be broken down into individual marks, each with its own sound. To Josiah, this was more a miracle than any his mother had read from the Book.

  When Josiah was nine, his mother fell from grace, back into addiction. Within a month, she was dead, in an alley, from an overdose of bad heroin.

  “Anyone know her?” asked the policeman, but no one in the gathering of ragged spectators answered, so the gaunt filthy body was unceremoniously tagged and bagged. Josiah, squeezed behind trash and garbage c
ans, watched the departure of his mother, as red and blue flashes of the police cars bounced from pitiful walls. Silently, he answered the policeman’s question: She’s CeeCee. CeeCee Jackson. Never Cecilia, never Mama, Mother, or Mom. Just CeeCee.

  That night, he returned to the cold, dark apartment, stretched out on the lumpy couch, and lay wide-eyed until dawn broke through the bare, dirty windows. He brought his television into the living room and tuned through the numbers, fiddling with the rabbit ears until he found a picture. It was PBS, a station he’d never before received.

  At nine o’clock, Josiah watched Sesame Street, featuring the letter C.

  He didn’t know the symbol, but the sound was as familiar to him as his own name. Cee. CeeCee. A miracle had happened.

  During the following months, in a condemned building with pirated electricity, Sesame Street became his school, the characters his classmates, its music the lullabies he’d never heard.

  To survive the streets without the protection of CeeCee and her network of whores and addicts, he joined a gang and submitted to the ritual kicking-in initiation, pushing the pain to the farthest reaches of his mind.

  He lived alone, raising himself in the same rundown tenement in which his mother had given birth to him, and paid for food with money from the gang’s burglaries and drug deals. He became expert at separating his thoughts from his actions.

  Bob helped him survive those years. Bob, the Big Bird doll who sat on the couch in the smelly apartment, his goofy happy face staring at him. Always at him.

  Three weeks after his mother had died and had been replaced by the equally unapproachable, but friendlier, Sesame Street, he’d found Bob in a thrift store. He’d even paid for the small fuzzy yellow doll, instead of stealing him. He hid Bob in his ripped jacket until he was home.

  Josiah was a tough guy with a doll, but he resolved the contradiction by naming him Bob. Dolls were girls and Bob was a guy.

  Bob was the first word he’d ever created with his new understanding of letters. He found it amazingly simple. Big Bird’s initials separated by a vowel. Within moments of being named, Bob ceased being a doll and became his confidante and partner.

  When he was twelve, the tenement he called home burned down. By then, he’d stopped watching Sesame Street, but Bob was still a big part of his private life. He’d known that the stuffed doll was inanimate, silent, but in his lonely heart and imagination, Bob had been a source of comfort and conversation. The morning the fire started, Josiah had been gone. By the time he returned home, the entire building was engulfed in flames and the firemen were trying to save the buildings on either side of it.

  Oblivious to the noise and chaos on the street, Josiah stared upward in disbelief. In his mind’s eye, he could see the flames lapping Bob’s yellow fuzz, his silly friendly face disbelieving the fire licking at his beak.

  He cried as he watched the building burn, aching with a crushing grief he’d never felt before. He didn’t have a single tarnished memory of Bob in the three years they’d shared, not one moment that had been bruised, as had all the moments with other people in his life.

  He’d watched the flames, knowing Bob was dying. It had been unbearable.

  Trudging down a snow-covered Reno sidewalk, amidst an increasing flow of pedestrians, Josiah passed pawnshops and souvenir stores, most shut down long ago.

  On one plywood-boarded storefront splashed with graffiti, large red letters were sprayed over previous graffiti: JOIN THE BROTHERHOOD. It was a slogan he’d been seeing more and more often on his daily walks. He realized he didn’t want to be here.

  Turning to retrace his steps, he confronted a crowd surging around the corner toward him. He ducked into a doorway and watched.

  Many of the people held signs and chanted a slogan. The crowd spilled into the street as more and more people flowed around the corner. Cars slowed, horns blared, and vehicles tried to inch through the mob but came to a halt as traffic backed up behind them. The mob coursed around and between the cars.

  Most of the signs read: “BROTHERHOOD NOW,” “JOIN TOGETHER,” and “WALK WITH JESUS.” He saw one sign that caused him to step back farther into the shadows of the doorway. Badly hand-lettered in red on a black background, its first words were written in large letters, with each subsequent word getting smaller to accommodate the entire message: “KILL THE SHAITAN, SATAN IS LOOSE. ALL EVIL MUST Die. KILL THE EVIL!”

  Josiah peered around the doorway. Yet more people were pouring onto the street. Now they were coming from the other cross street as well, with more signs declaring war on Shaitan, on evil. Josiah breathed deeply. There was going to be trouble.

  A white sedan directly across from him was blocked by traffic and the mob. Josiah looked at the couple inside. The driver appeared angry, the woman beside him scared.

  A man leaped onto the hood of their car. The driver’s face contorted, ready for confrontation. The man on the hood leaped to the roof of the car and brought a bullhorn up to his mouth. A river of people parted around the car. The red-faced driver leaped out, his passenger’s hand clutching his arm, trying to restrain him. She lay across the seat, straining to pull him back in.

  Her movements were frantic, her pleas drowned out by the crowd and the shouts of the man on the car’s roof.

  The man with the bullhorn shouted, “He walks! He’s been seen! He is among us, He has come and we are with Him!”

  The crowd roared as it became one ferocious mind. Signs were waved fanatically to confirm the messages they carried.

  Then Josiah saw Alex.

  Capless, his sandy hair blowing in strands across his eyes, his freckles stark on his white face, Alex was part of the crowd near the sedan. He, too, held a sign and shouted, his attention focused on the man with the bullhorn, his expression as avid as those around him.

  Josiah’s gaze moved from Alex to the driver of the car, who was now grabbing the ankle of the man standing on its roof.

  The startled speaker looked down, kicked out viciously, screamed with rage, then swung the bullhorn down toward the head of the driver. The driver ducked but held on. With both hands clamped on the ankle, the driver heaved back, toppling the speaker, who crashed onto the roof of the car. The mob surged and the driver disappeared beneath hunched backs, pummeling fists, and kicking feet.

  Through the shouting, Josiah could hear the woman passenger scream as she struggled out of the car and lurched against the crowd assaulting the man. A hand snagged a fistful of her hair and yanked her head back with terrifying ferocity.

  Other people scrambled onto the car from its other side. Alex was one of them.

  Josiah saw Alex’s face, but it no longer shared the excitement of others. He was screaming, “No. No. No,” while the crowd chanted, “Shaitan. Shaitan. Shaitan.”

  Get out of there, you idiot, Josiah thought, trying to will Alex to see him, to pay heed to his gesture, his get-your-ass-the-hell-over-here wave.

  Alex was intent on the woman who was about to be caught in the bloodlust. Josiah saw Alex’s face fill with fear as he realized what was about to happen. Alex tried to back away, but bodies pressed forward. Shoving and squirming against the madness, he found himself surrounded by the people who’d heard only the cry, “Shaitan!”

  Alex, in trying to escape, suddenly became the Shaitan.

  They attacked him. With rage.

  There was no possibility of aiding Alex. It would be suicide to battle the zealous crowd. A narrow path of escape opened for Josiah, and he wanted nothing more than to get away from the uncontrolled insanity.

  But he had to be certain, for Eli’s sake.

  Unblinking, he watched. With a roar of triumph, the crowd hoisted a limp form above their heads. It was Alex, broken and bloodied, head dangling.

  Josiah tucked his chin into the warmth of his jacket collar, stepped from the doorway, and slid away. A distant siren ululated. Josiah walked faster, beyond the edges of the crowd, down a street of stragglers, until sidewalks were empty.


  The new world was a dangerous place.

  And Josiah knew it would only get worse. Even if someone now answered all questions about the blackout, it was too late. People had taken ownership of their own reasons. And they were terrified of each other, of any challenges to the shadows chinking their own ignorance or innocence. Their fear left no room for anything else.

  Snow crunched beneath his boots. The bleak harshness of the unforgiving world was no longer confined to the streets of his youth. This entire city was in its grip. And he knew of no reason why the rest of the country would be any different. The whole fucking world. What had begun with the blackout had become a terrible darkness that dimmed all reason. The world gone dark with fear.

  Josiah forced himself to breathe deeply. Just as he had refused to become the person his childhood dictated, he now refused to let fear immobilize him. He and Eli would survive this new world. And, he found himself promising, Laura would too.

  It was bitterly cold. The wind picked up, creating eddies of tiny snowflakes. There was a coffee shop on the next corner. Even at ten bucks a cup, it was worth it, Josiah decided. Juan Valdez just wasn’t shipping any more. He opened the door and stepped into a wall of warmth.

  Sitting at the counter with a cup of hot, fragrant coffee, he thought about the unexpected promise he’d just made to himself to protect Laura. Lately, thoughts of Laura had become more insistent. He wanted her. His urges were familiar, but the caution she aroused in him was new. Remembering how they’d met, he felt again the inexplicable energy that had flowed between them. Had it just been the bizarre circumstances? Or was there something special about her?

  It was strange, having people become important to him.

  First Eli, now Laura.