FSF, October 2007 Read online

  A young guy wearing a T-shirt that said Thanks Katrina, That Was a Hell of a Blow Job told about meeting two girls who'd come to town to save abandoned animals; he offered to share his house with them and wound up living in a Noah's Ark of dogs, cats, horses, and chickens. ("But no nooky,” he added in an aside to Jim. “Just my luck, those ol’ gals only like animals and each other.") An eighty-year-old Dutchman so gnarled as to resemble a driftwood statue told gutturally how he'd stayed home through the whole damn thing, the storm and the aftermath, drinking bottled water and eating MREs cadged from the army. “Vot I care about floods for, anyvay?” he demanded.

  Jim talked to a young woman named Molly. Attired in shorts, bra, and flip-flops, she'd wrestled a defunct refrigerator to the curb, then come out for food. Her freckled face shone with grease, her body with a fine sheen of perspiration. She told him he'd have trouble entering Lakeside. The water was all gone, pumped back into the lake, but the power was still out and the army had blocked all the usual entry routes. The only people living half normally in the area were in the big houses along the lakeside ridge, where behind the green levees the ample L.A.-style dwellings of the rich and tasteless had passed through the storm almost unscathed.

  Then Molly had an idea. “Look,” she said, “most of these guys in the Hummers are from out of town. When they stop you, show them your driver's license and say—what street did you say you lived on?"

  "Lark."

  "Tell them your house is right off Lakeshore Drive and the power's on there. They won't know the difference. Say you've already been there and you left to get ice, is all."

  In the end Jim's problem, like so many, solved itself. He drove down Elysian Fields between rolling prairies of wreckage that would have done honor to a major war. When he passed Hummers, young guys in cammies waved languidly at him or simply sat, cradling their rifles and chewing gum. Nobody stopped him until the wreckage itself did. At the border of Lakeside he had to get out and walk the last mile under the dazing sun, clambering over toppled poles and trees, watched by starving dogs uncertain whether to beg him for help or eat him.

  And so he came back to No. 488, Lark Street.

  * * * *

  He unlocked and forced the front door open, stared and gasped. Then scuffed inside over stinking mud that lay caked and gray on what had been honey-colored heart-pine floors.

  The silver-framed pictures had vanished, maybe into the hands of looters. The furniture had floated here and there in the oddest way—a new Sony TV was standing on its head, while the dining room table had ascended the stairs about halfway before becoming stranded. Protected by its layers of varnish, his mother's portrait in oil looked down on the ruin, astonished but unharmed.

  The bathtub ring was roughly at four feet. Yet the flood had initially been much higher. The tsunami had rushed down Lark Street, knocked in windows, filled the houses, then subsided to the lower level—where it sat, and sat, and sat for weeks on end. As a result, black mold made the pale walls look like monochrome Jackson Pollocks. Thirteen inches of rain had come through the roof and contributed to the ruin. In the kitchen, the ceiling had fallen on the stove, insects buzzed and unseen frogs brayed as they had in the pools of the vanished cyprière. Tiny flies hovered around the fridge amid whiffs of graveyard odor. Jim knew the creatures well; common fruit flies, Drosophila melanogaster— he used to breed them in his lab.

  Getting to the second floor was tough. The table had lodged at a precarious angle, blocking his way, and he had to wrestle it loose and tip it over the banister, back into the ruin of the dining area. But at last he stood panting and streaming sweat in the upstairs hall. He touched the doorknob of the bedroom where he and Dot had slept for twenty years. Then thought: No, I don't want to see it, and thank God she can't. He climbed the last flight of steps, the ones he'd built himself when he was preparing to floor and insulate the attic, and pulled open the door at the top.

  Above him the suspended ceiling and the pink battens of insulation were mostly gone and stripes of hard blue sky slotted the brown rafters. The wind must have roared through here, emptying his desk, taking south all but one page of prophetically named Vanished Worlds. The pocket billiard table balanced like an acrobat on the legs of an overturned captain's chair. One of the retired armchairs had been flung against the far wall and smashed. Yet a guitar he'd trucked around the country back in the Sixties—his sole adventure before Dot came along—still hung from a nail in a sheltered corner, a fragile survivor of the wind's manic attack. The jukebox stood unmoved, seemingly ready to light up in orange and purple glory. A green anole lizard basking in a dapple of sunlight on the selection keys turned its head and watched Jim with an eye like a tiny bead of black glass.

  So Madame Lott had been wrong. Nobody had died here. He'd come all this way, slogging through the ruins, risking heatstroke, only to gaze on the mutilated face of everything he'd been and done with his time on earth.

  Suddenly he felt faint. He leaned over and vomited; a fist seemed to close on his chest, and for a few seconds he couldn't breathe. Time compressed, then expanded, and he was out on Lark Street again.

  He really didn't know how he'd gotten out of the house, and yet here he was, drifting along like any idler, watching through the swags of power lines as guys in gloves, masks, plastic coveralls, and blue hardhats came around a huge trash pile blocking the corner. Accompanied by a big brown dog, they began making their way slowly toward him across the blasted plain that once had been his part of New Orleans.

  He wondered whether they might take him for a looter, maybe arrest him. But they passed him by, attentive to their jobs, paying him no attention—except for the dog, a rangy mutt with bloodhound in his genes and furrows above his eyes, who sniffed warily in the vicinity of Jim's feet until his trainer pulled the leash and recalled him to duty.

  Systematically the men worked through house after house, kicking in doors where they had to, trusting the dog's educated nose as to whether they should enter or not. Afterward they spray-painted X/OB on the walls, and now he understood its meaning: House checked—no bodies.

  They reached 488, and the dog began to bay. For the first time, somebody went inside. Jim watched with a tingling sense of having missed something all-important. After five minutes the searcher emerged and put in a call on a cell phone. Then the team dawdled until, with an unholy racket, a helicopter dropped out of the sky and landed with all the usual rattle and roar beside the errant garage, the prop creating its own mini-hurricane.

  When two guardsmen in brown and green-spotted fatigues jumped out and carried a stainless steel gurney into his front door, Jim started forward, moving like a man breasting a strong chill current, trying to shout, and angry at the way everybody ignored him.

  Then the gurney reappeared, carrying a burden in a black plastic bag. All he could do was stare. The guardsmen loaded it, jumped aboard again, and the helicopter departed in a tornado of white dust. The guy who'd gone into the house spray-painted X/1B on Jim's front door, and he and his team moved on.

  * * * *

  So now he knew the score. During his life people had often called him boring, but never stupid.

  In a dream he entered his house again, this time with singular ease, delighting in the soft glow of the honey-colored pine floor, the gleam of the silver picture frames on the mantel. The shadow puppets danced sinuously on their bamboo wands, dark eyes watched him through the Venetian masks, and the Goddess of Mercy raised two fingers in serene blessing as he passed.

  Upstairs the jukebox began to play “Unchained Melody,” the 1956 version that he'd heard the first time and danced to (clumsily, of course) with Gwen at a high school hop. Jim ascended the stairs without effort, glancing en passant into the bedroom, noting that it was looking neater than it had in a long while, thinking that Dot must have made the bed and tidied up.

  The attic stairs, the open door. The recreation room was crowded—Dot leafing through a Better Homes and Gardens, Papa relaxing in one of t
he tattered old easy chairs, and the mother he could hardly remember gazing through the casement window at a bygone Lakeside of building sites, scattered new homes, and small thin pines. Madame Lott was there too, dandling two sleeping brown babies on her wide lap, and Jim recalled suddenly hearing her say once that she owned a house in the Ninth Ward.

  He tried to tell her, No, I want this but not yet, Gwen's waiting for me, I haven't finished with life, this is too soon. She looked at him and shook her head, somehow conveying, without anything being said, that Gwen had only been an interlude, that she and he weren't made to stay together for long.

  Then Dot looked up and smiled, and his mother turned to him with astonished gray eyes—he'd been all of three years old when she'd seen him last—and Papa raised his head and smiled one of his rare smiles. Home, really home at last and forever, Jim relaxed and moved with open arms toward the other inhabitants of his personal heaven.

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  The Bird Shaman's Girl by Judith Moffett

  Judith Moffett's first stories of the Hefn invasion were assembled into the novel The Ragged World, which was followed by another novel, Time, Like an Ever-Rolling Stream. Her most recent story in the series was “The Bear's Baby” in our Oct/Nov 2003 issue. These days, Ms. Moffett divides her time between Swarthmore, PA, and a hill farm in Kentucky. She says she has finished up work on a third Hefn novel (of which this story forms a part) and she is now writing and publishing more poetry again. For this story, Ms. Moffett is grateful to Polly Schaafsma, and to Solveig A. Turpin and Jim Zintgraff, whose written and photographic work on Pecos River rock art were of great help.

  1

  Even at the end of May you could find snow in the Wasatch Range of Utah if you went high enough—snow on the ground, snow occasionally falling from the sky. Pam Pruitt stood behind one of the cameramen and watched a group of actors haul their burdened handcarts up a steep slope. Wooden wheels screeched on wooden axles. Neil Reeder, a handsome teen in a tattered coat and britches, with a rag tied over his head and ears, was pushing a cart from behind while a man and woman strained backwards as they pulled on the handle. Snow swirled around them. As he passed the camera Neil looked directly into the lens, face contorted with effort and determination, heavy shoes slipping on the icy stones. The next instant a wheel came off the cart and Neil, with a startled yelp, went sprawling.

  "Cut!” the director yelled. “We'll do one more take, folks. Dave, move that mark two feet downhill, I want Neil to release the wheel a little sooner.” The actors trooped back down the slope while props people reattached the wheel and rolled the carts down. Neil saw Pam standing with Lexi Allred, his costar in the series they were filming, and waved. Pam and Lexi waved back. “Places, everybody. Neil, see the mark? About two feet sooner.” Neil nodded. The director called “Ready? Roll ‘em. And—action!” And the Ephremite pioneers began again to toil up the mountainside, pulling and pushing their handcarts toward the New Jerusalem and the cameras.

  Pam glanced sideways at Lexi, eleven years old and in a peck of trouble. Lexi, radiantly beautiful even in that getup, stood clutching a silvery emergency blanket over her long dress and shawls. Feeling Pam's regard upon her, she looked up and smiled, and Pam smiled back.

  This time the director was satisfied with the broken wheel and the actors regrouped to begin a different scene. “I'm in this one,” Lexi said. She gave the emergency blanket to Pam. Walking to join the others, she lifted her shawls and redraped them so they covered her head as well as her shoulders. Pam shook out and folded up the blanket, and handed it to RoLayne Allred, who had come to stand beside her. “Can you take charge of this? I might get called away before they finish the scene."

  "Fine,” said Lexi's mother. She half-looked at Pam as she tucked the blanket under her arm, a look of mingled resentment and shame.

  Years of being Liaison Officer for Child Oversight in Utah had conditioned Pam to ignore such looks. Lowering her voice, keeping it friendly, she said “How do you feel she's doing?"

  "She seems to be doing all right."

  "Have you talked about it with her much?"

  "That counselor you're making her see is the one she talks to,” Lexi's mother said, and this time the resentment was unmistakable.

  Pam counted to ten before replying, with a kindness that was at least partly genuine, “She feels bad about getting her granddad in trouble, you know—she feels like the abuse was her fault somehow, that's very common. You could help with that, RoLayne. I know it would be a huge relief to her if you could talk about it with her—reassure her that she did the right thing to turn him in."

  The director called for action and they watched Lexi struggle up a different slope (with less trampled snow) at the front of a group of shawled women, heads bowed against the wind and swirling flakes. The able-bodied women were helping haul the carts; these, as Pam and RoLayne could see, in front of them and on the monitor screen, were all too old, young, pregnant, or enfeebled to do more than totter along behind. Where the ascent was less steep, some would ride.

  It wasn't a scene where the onlookers had to keep completely quiet, and Lexi's mother murmured, “Well, I can't very well say what I don't believe."

  Pam murmured back, “That she was right to tell? But surely—"

  "Tell you Gaians. I don't think that was right myself, so you needn't expect me to say it was."

  Pam gritted her teeth. “But surely it's less important whether she told us she was being molested, or told her Canon, or her parents, than that she told somebody.” When Mrs. Allred didn't reply, Pam gestured up the slope and led her companion farther from the microphones. In a normal voice she said, “Kids often feel guilty at the commotion it causes when they report abuse. That's why it's so vital that they be reassured by the people they love and trust the most. Lexi really needs to hear that it's not her fault people are so upset, and she needs to hear it from you."

  "Tell her yourself,” RoLayne said shortly. “I've already given her my opinion, which is that she should've come to the Canon and let him talk to her grandfather. In the Ephremite Church even children have a responsibility to put the good of the Church ahead of their own good.” She flashed Pam a look of pure hostility. “I don't expect you to understand that, but it's true."

  "Well, but—her grandfather and the Canon are old friends,” Pam said, still hanging on to her reasonable tone, which was getting harder to do, “so you couldn't really expect her to go to him about this."

  "What I expect her to do,” said RoLayne, “is her moral duty. I'll tell you one thing I do know. I know whose fault it is that she'll have nothing to do with the Church anymore, since you Gaians got ahold of her."

  "That's a wrap!” the director called. “Good job, everybody. Take ten. Neil, I need you for a sec."

  The group of toiling women broke formation and headed for the hot-drinks trailer, and Lexi, seeing her mother and Pam standing together, ran over to them. RoLayne shook out the silver blanket. As she wrapped it around her daughter, Lexi said, “Mom, could you fix this? I stepped on it and it ripped out.” She held up the hem of her tattered dress with both hands.

  RoLayne examined the hem. “Oh, I think so. Let's go see if we can't find a needle and thread.” She slipped an arm around Lexi's shoulders and propelled her toward the props trailer. Pam she ignored.

  Lexi, however, turned inside her mother's half-hug to look back at Pam. “We'll be done pretty soon. I'm still coming home with you, right?"

  "Right. I can wait, there's no hurry."

  "Is Humphrey still hibernating?"

  "Yep. It'll just be us tonight for dinner, but I got out another cobbler anyway."

  Lexi beamed—she knew blackberry cobbler was the Hefn Humphrey's favorite food on earth—and turned away. RoLayne's stiff back spoke volumes, but there was nothing she could do. Pam felt a twinge of sympathy. Only a twinge, though. If there was one thing she could not abide, it was a parent who protected her belief system and herself at the expe
nse of her child's well-being.

  * * * *

  Apart from RoLayne, Pam enjoyed these visits to Lexi on location. Ephremite history fascinated her. Founded by a visionary and led for decades by a genius-level businessman, the Church of Ephrem the Prophet was a purely American product. Early persecution, climaxing in martyrdom, had united and empowered the Ephremites as a people set apart. They established a kingdom in a desert, and the kingdom thrived. Deprivations? Plagues of locusts? Military occupation? Mass arrests and jailings? They rose above it all; their indomitability kept pace with their suffering. A mulish determination to triumph over adversity seemed hardwired into the collective Ephremite psyche. As a people they were tough as nails, and the toughness had survived into modern times. The more Pam learned about them, the more she admired them for it.

  But child sexual abuse had long been a special problem among the Ephremites; and—as with the Catholic Church—a powerful, patriarchal, self-protective governing authority had allowed the problem to persist and spread. The Ephremite community was deeply family-centered, with many children and lots of activities organized for them. All those Scout troops needed leaders. If you were a good God-fearing Ephremite pedophile, you had no trouble finding victims, in or out of your own family, and nothing much to prevent you, or help you if you wanted to stop. Every Ephremite male was inducted into the Meshak Priesthood when he turned eighteen. For children raised to believe that members of a Priesthood held a God-given authority over them, disobedience was not an easy option. What Lexi had done by exposing her grandfather had taken more nerve than anyone unaware of all this could possibly appreciate.

  The Ephremite Church's way of dealing with the problem was to encourage repentance and forgiveness, to counsel wives that the main thing was to keep the family together and that kids needed their father at home. A perpetrator's local Church authority, his Canon, would explain—and honestly believe—that pedophilia was basically a moral problem, that could be cured with prayer and counsel.