didn’t know much about directions outside of Elmwood, but he did know that Westhaven Street was over in Bethany. Chuck agreed with his dad that River Town and Bethany were just a lot of ugly old properties that should have been razed for new development. Chuck’s dad sold real estate and Chuck figured he would one day, too. And when he did, he’d have Bethany bulldozed to the ground.
Tara Boyle, slumping under the rain, said, “I thought you said we were in Crandon. Westhaven isn’t in Crandon.”
“It is too,” Cal Woltrip said, but you could detect a note of uncertainty under his words.
“It is not! My dad’s going to put a Burger King in Bethany! He told me so! He said he was putting it on Westhaven Street!”
“Lah-tee-dah,” Kyle said. “Do we have to listen to this?”
“You’re both…jack-offs!” Tara told them. “All you’ve done is get us lost!”
“You could do better?” Cal asked her.
“Anybody could do better,” Chuck told him.
“Okay, smartass. Here’s the flashlight. Go ahead, take it. You lead. You get us out of here.”
Brian and Jacob and Mark just stood around forlornly, rain dripping off them.
Chuck swallowed, took the light. “Good, now we have a chance.”
“You don’t know your own ass from a hole in the ground,” Kyle told him. “Just a fag like your old man.”
Chuck turned on him quick, but Cal got in-between them.
“No, no, no,” Cal said. “Let the big man lead us out. Go ahead, Mr. Big Man. Do your stuff. But if you don’t get us out, then we’re all gonna kick your ass.”
Brian giggled.
Tara sighed. “Oh, spare me the drama.”
Chuck turned away from all of them.
They all stepped back, left him out front, all alone.
Well, it was just a matter of…well, he didn’t honestly know. But he wasn’t about to admit that. Westhaven was right ahead of them. If they followed it back the other way, to what he thought would be east, then they would have to come out in Crandon. Of course, if those dumbass Woltrips hadn’t been in charge, they could have followed the hill up out of Bethany to Broad Street.
Chuck, feeling very tense inside, took a step forward. Then another.
2
By God, it was a wasteland.
Bethany was a drowning wasteland.
Chuck Bittner saw it open up before him and it took his breath away. You simply couldn’t realize the extent of the devastation until you were hip-deep in it. Just like you couldn’t appreciate the cool dankness of the grave until you found yourself in one.
A bit of moonlight came through now and about all it did was make the streets look like a flooded cemetery with all those buildings and houses rising up, some leaning and others narrow and skeletal. The waters had claimed Bethany like some gargantuan oil spill, something black and rising and glistening. Nothing but floating leaves and garbage, pieces of houses and tree branches.
“C’mon,” Chuck said.
He moved down Westhaven in a direction that he was pretty certain would take them away from the river. And that was the important thing now. The water was thick and sludgy, lots of submerged things bumping into them. Occasional ripples brushed through it as if things were moving just under the surface. Everything echoed with a rolling, subterranean sound that was more than a little disconcerting.
Chuck was scared.
Oh, he’d never admit it to the others, but he was bad scared. Scared like he hadn’t been in years maybe. Back when he was little and his mom used to hold him when he had a bad dream. A long time ago. Mom was dead now, of course, and Chuck had trouble feeling anything about that. She’d moved out when he was like five and spent her time drinking and whoring (his father’s words). Chuck saw her quite a bit at first, but as the years passed and she tangled herself up with one man after the other, the visits became very infrequent. When she died, he hadn’t seen her in almost three years. But right then, he wished she was there. Not his dad, but her.
They moved on that way silently for maybe ten or fifteen minutes and then stopped.
“What was that?” Brian said.
“I don’t know,” Kyle told him.
They’d all heard it and it stopped them dead. Nobody was willing to identify what it was. Or maybe they were just afraid to. Chuck panned his light around. It gleamed off the water, sparkled with raindrops. A few stray leaves blew around before settling into the murky soup.
“It was nothing,” Chuck told them.
But, dear God, he did not honestly believe that for a minute. That sound had been clamorous and loud and sharp. He knew what it sounded like, but he wouldn’t dare put a name to it. Not out loud. But in his head, a voice was saying, You know darn well what you heard. It’s weird and freaky and it just doesn’t belong, but you know what it was…a noisemaker.
Sure, one of those silly contraptions you spun around on a stick on New Years Eve. They were kind of funny, kind of annoying maybe. But out here? Out in this flooded blackness? Such a sound was about as disturbing as anything Chuck could imagine. For those things didn’t make noise by themselves, somebody had to spin them, to wind them around on their sticks. And that could only mean that someone was out there, someone who thought this was all some kind of party. And what kind of person would think that?
The sound came again and again.
“That’s…that’s one of them whaddyacallems,” Kyle said.
“Noisemaker,” his brother put in.
“Out here?” Jacob said.
Suddenly they could all hear Tara breathing so hard and so fast it sounded like she might be hyperventilating. “We better get out of here,” she said. “This isn’t right. Nobody would do that. Not out here.”
And maybe they were all waiting for Cal or Kyle to say something truly inappropriate like, well, nobody sane. But they said nothing and it was just like that moment on the bus when they’d all suddenly felt something outside. It was like that…heavy and ominous.
Nothing but silence and falling rain, the moan of the wind.
Mark sniffed the air. “You smell that? Does anybody smell that?”
Chuck felt something tighten inside, wind up tight like a rubber band to the point of bursting. He was smelling things, too, but right away his mind simply refused what it was receiving. He could not be smelling these things.
Not out here.
Tara’s breathing galloped quickly, then slowed. “That’s…oh my God…that’s cotton candy! Can you smell it? That’s cotton candy! Like at the carnival and the fair!”
“No, it’s not,” Chuck said.
“It is,” she maintained.
“Yeah,” Kyle said. “I can smell it…but why out here?”
“I smell other things,” Brian said.
“Hot dogs…that’s hot dogs,” Jacob said, just beside himself.
Mark nodded. “And popcorn.”
But they were wrong, they were all wrong and Chuck knew it. Sure, he had smelled those things, too…at first. Sweet cotton candy and salty buttered popcorn in little boxes, the smell of hot dogs bubbling in grease and wrapped in doughy, deep-fried buns. Maybe ice cream and root beer in waxed cups, too. Like all of the fall carnival in one swooning breath. But he knew he wasn’t really smelling it. It was in his head, just as it was in theirs. And if he let himself go?and he badly wanted to with a childish glee?he might have smelled the smoke of barbecuing
