The Shelter Cycle (10 page)

Snow flurries drifted down at the top of the pass; as Francine descended the other side, they disappeared, and the sky opened up. A surprising blue, a blue that she remembered. Darker than it seemed a sky should be.

 

 

 

That day in the classroom, after the Messenger told me and Colville that our paths were intertwined, that we had to help each other, she began to leave. She told us to remember our Archangel Michaels, especially in these times. She told us to have fun on the path, and that our duty was to prove Light. The door closed silently behind her. I don't think she even touched the doorknob and it moved.

It was silent. We glanced up at the windows, hoping to catch sight of the Messenger's feet. We did not. It was as if she didn't have to walk past the window, as if she'd floated away.

We didn't turn the videotape on again; we didn't watch the end, to see what would become of the world. We all tried to work on mathematics. Hardly a pencil scratched a number. Our minds wouldn't sit still. And then the signal went off. Right away we were all lined up, ready.

The sky was so clear and blue, bright outside. The wind had disappeared; it was hard to know which way to lean. All across the hillsides, people were moving. Lines of children from all the schools, cars and trucks piled with mattresses and everything. Cars sped by, down below on the highway, driven by people who didn't know what was coming, who hadn't been warned or hadn't believed. I looked up into the blue sky, wondering if you could see a missile coming, how fast it would be, whether something next to you might just explode and you wouldn't know that something was coming at all, if the sound would be delayed and so would the sight. Only if we survived could we explain what had happened; or maybe we could explain it, just not from the earth.

Mom led us along the route we'd practiced before, the hard dirt road of Glastonbury. Two kids from our class peeled away from the line, up a path toward Liberty Lighthouse, their shelter. A truck rattled past, a duffel bag falling off and left behind. We kept walking. We each had a buddy, to keep track of and to keep track of us. In a moment like that, rushing, worrying, any kind of Entity might lead you away.

My buddy was Colville, and he walked right in front of me, kicking his feet along, hardly lifting them. He had this way of wearing his jacket where it hung over his shoulders and the arms were empty, his own arms out in front, through the zipper. So he looked like some kind of octopus, or half-octopus. Both of us were thinking about what the Messenger had said, how we were all intertwined, but we didn't say a word.

We passed the Kehoe shelter, the Kletter shelter, white pipes hooking up from underground so the hidden people would be able to breathe. My mom was shouting not to lag behind. It was so hard to go fast, wearing a skirt, and we were always wearing skirts and dresses, loose so our curves wouldn't show or so it wouldn't show if we were developing. I wasn't. Maya was, and I could see her ahead, coming down a slanted path to join us. She walked with her friend Courtney Stiller, laughing, and Courtney was wearing jeans, which we weren't supposed to wear. All the lines of our shelter, Lifesavers, were coming together near the opening, where the earth had been heaped up to cover everything.

We didn't slow as we passed my family's trailer; we went farther, down toward the mounds of fresh dirt. We passed a dump truck, a bulldozer. We climbed up to the top and looked down, fifty feet underground, to where the men were working.

In school I'd built a diorama of the workers on the Egyptian pyramids, and this was the same. If I held up my hand, it blocked a man out. That's how far down they were. The shelter then was open; the concrete was about to be poured, and then all the dirt would be pushed back over it. This day the bent redwood ribs showed like arches, and the rebar over them, the whole thing circular, like a huge doughnut that seventy people would live inside. I don't think I've ever been so proud of anything.

Through the ribs I could see the men, so busy, racing along. My dad was in charge, building all day every day, deciding what people should be doing. Then I saw him, waving up at me, shouting. His arms and face were all black with dirt except around his eyes, where he'd been wearing welding goggles. That's when I knew it was only another drill, that it was not the day, even though the Messenger had visited us. My father was smiling, down there, laughing like it was all the same to him whether the world ended or didn't end. He knew that everything was temporary.

W
ELLS AWAKENED ON
the couch, white pages strewn around him. A few still rested on his chest; he held one out now, squinting: Francine, trying to sleep so far underground, surrounded by her family and yet separated from her friend by miles of dirt and stone.

When he sat up, pages slid to the floor. Kilo, sleeping there, lifted his head with a startled sound.

The dog followed Wells out of the living room, down the hallway. The door to the baby's room was open, the room empty, as was their bedroom. The bed still made, the blankets pulled tight. Wells picked up Francine's phone from her dresser, turned, and headed toward the kitchen.

It was almost ten o'clock; she should be home by now. He dialed the hospital, waited to be connected to her department. The woman who answered was not someone he knew.

“Francine's not working now. She's not here.”

“When did she finish?”

“Pardon me?”

“She worked last night,” he said.

“I don't think so. I believe she's gone on maternity leave. I can check the paperwork if you like.”

“That's all right,” he said, hanging up the phone. He knew that the woman was mistaken; if Francine wasn't at the hospital, she had to be here soon, on her way home.

Kilo was scratching to be let out. Wells took hold of his collar and opened the door; barefoot, he led the dog down the steps to the driveway, unlatched the wooden gate to the back yard, and let him loose.

The morning was cold. The air smelled like snow. Wells glanced up along the slope and for a moment thought he saw two figures—one taller, one shorter—standing on the distant ridge. Then they were gone and he couldn't find them again. Turning, he went back up the steps into the kitchen.

He started the coffeepot, got dressed. Five minutes passed, ten. Francine should have been home by now, and he didn't like waiting, and anything could have happened to her, somewhere between the hospital and home without her phone to call him with. He snatched his keys from their hook, headed outside, and climbed into his truck.

Down the street, around the corner, he accelerated to make it through a yellow light. This was the way she drove home; he thought it was. He passed under a billboard, the lost girl's huge, pale face staring and smiling down at him, and then a thought came to him, a suspicion. He turned suddenly, away from the path to the hospital. It would take only a moment to check, to be certain.

He pulled into the parking lot of the Econo Lodge, skidded to a stop. There was no one around. Hurrying to the door of room 12, he knocked twice, hard, then waited.

“Colville!” He slapped at the door with the flat of his hand; he pressed his ear close to the brass numbers. There was no sound inside. Nothing.

And then, farther down, he saw movement, a door opening. A man came out of the office. Bald, wearing a Boise State parka, a cigarette in one hand.

“He checked out this morning!” the man shouted, then coughed. “Room's empty!”

Wells began to step toward the man, to ask him if he knew anything more, but just then the phone in his pocket began to ring. He pulled it out—it was Francine's phone, not his. When he flipped it open, he saw that it was Maya calling.

“Hello?” he said.

“I must have the wrong number—”

“Maya,” he said. “It's Wells.”

“Oh,” she said. “Hi. I was supposed to call Francine, so I could meet her. You have her phone? I mean, obviously you do.”

“Is she all right?” he said. “She's there?”

“I thought she called you.”

“Is she all right?”

“She's fine,” Maya said. “She's okay. Just visiting for a day.”

“Is she alone?”

“What? Yes.”

“Where are you meeting her?”

The reception crackled and snarled. Across the parking lot, the motel manager stood next to Wells's truck—its door was still open, and he'd forgotten to shut off the ignition. Steam twisted from its tailpipe.

“She's coming back to Boise tomorrow,” Maya said. “I think that's her plan.”

“So I'm just supposed to wait?”

“Everything's fine,” Maya said. “Really, it's okay. I'll have her call you.”

Wells closed the phone and put it back in his pocket. He drove home more slowly, retracing his path. When he reached the house, he parked in the driveway and sat there for a moment before climbing out.

“Kilo?” he said. “Here, boy.”

But when he opened the gate, the dog did not come leaping out, as he usually did. Wells stepped into the back yard, scanned its perimeter. Empty. He looked up along the slope that led to the ridges, but there was no sign of the dog. Sometimes this happened; when neither Wells nor Francine was home, Kilo would find a way out of the yard, go searching for them. He always came back.

Inside, there was only the smell of burned coffee, last night's dishes in the sink. Wells walked into the living room. The pages were scattered white across the couch, spilled onto the floor. What would Francine say, if she came home to this? He'd like to hear it, for her to see these pages everywhere and to know that he'd read them all.

 

 

 

The fires came in 1988. They burned all through Yellowstone Park and came over the ridge, threatened the Heart. That's where we gathered, raising our voices:
Reverse the tides, Roll them back, Set all free.
The sky was all smoke, the mountains invisible, trees coming and going. I stood next to my mother, watching her face, the heat on my skin. The peanut butter and egg salad sandwiches we'd brought all tasted like smoke.

I chased after Colville when he called my name, broke away from where we all stood. We ran out along the edge of the deep pit being dug for the shelter, past the yellow bulldozers, through the tall, dry grass. We left beaten-down paths behind us.

Between the fire and all the people, animals gathered, herded down the slope by the flames. Elk and moose, raccoons and snakes and mice, all too worried to chase or fight, too afraid to eat each other.

Fires are energy made visible. When the flames came closer, descending the canyons, we wore wet bandannas over our faces. We prayed so hard. The heat bent the air, the heat in my throat. Voices rose up:
Reverse the tides, Roll them back, Set all free.
The voices rose up and the flames skirted the Heart. They didn't burn one tree.

C
OLVILLE AND KILO
broke camp and started hiking before daybreak. In the new snow they were able to follow the elks' path, which came upon and followed the Shooting Star trail south before tapering off. Up and over two ridges, in and out of stands of pine and aspen, along frozen creeks; they passed through charred deadfalls and sections where the ground was still black, new trees growing up through the remains of the fires.

And now they stood here, on the last ridge, overlooking the Heart. Below, the long rectangular indentations of the shelter showed clearly in the snow, the berms like drifts around them. The wide meadow was white, untracked. Had he expected the tents? The people? The energy spun up along the ridges; he felt it thick in his chest, a vibration that almost lifted him off the ground.

The soft snow eased his descent. He tried to slide a little in the snowshoes, to obscure his tracks, make them look less like what they were. Carefully he emerged from the last stand of trees, then circled the shelter, keeping a distance. Here in the icy snow, uncovered by wind, were vehicle tracks, chains on the tires. The watchman or maintenance man, most likely, checking in, sometime in the recent past.