spots. Glancing up at her, I saw her head suddenly duck low, ears forward.
Then I saw the shadow crossing the yard.
I was out the door before I'd thought about it, taking care not to let the screen door bang. A bright moon hung above the trees. My eyes fell to their base, seeking movement, changes in texture, further shadows. Birds and frogs had stopped calling.
Never thought they'd show up this soon.
I eased across the porch and onto the top step, looking, listening. Stood like that for what seemed endless minutes before the floorboards creaked behind me. I turned and he was there, one sinewy arm held up to engage my own.
'Nathan!'
His grip on my wrist loosened.
'Someone been up in them woods,' he said, 'going on the better part of a month now.'
'You know who?'
He shook his head. 'But early on this evening, one of them came in a little too close to the cabin, then made the mistake of running. Dog took out after him, naturally, came back looking pleased with hisself. So I tracked him down this way. Blood made it some easy.'
We found him minutes later by the lake, lying facedown. Early twenties, wearing cheap jeans and a short denim jacket over a black T-shirt, plastic western boots. Blood drained rather than pumped from his thigh when I turned him over.
Nathan shook his head.
Dogs hereabouts aren't pets, they're functional, workers, brought up to help provide food and protect territory. Nathan's had gone at the young man straight on, taking out an apple-sized chunk of upper thigh and, to all appearances, a divot from the femoral artery.
'Damn young fool,' Nathan said. 'Reckon we ought to call someone.'
'No reason to hurry.' I took my fingers away from the young man's carotid. When I did, something on his forearm caught light. I pushed back his sleeve. 'What's that look like to you?'
Nathan bent over me.
'Numbers.'
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I remembered them from childhood. I was six years old. They were everywhere. Covering the trees, climbing the outside walls of the house and barbecue pit, swarming up telephone and electric poles, making their way along the chicken wire around dog runs. There they erupted from the back of their shells and unfurled wings. Hadn't been there at all the night before. Then suddenly thousands of them: black bodies the size of shrimp and maybe an inch long, transparent wings, red eyes. The males commenced to beat out tunes on their undersides, thrumming on hollow, drumlike bellies. As the sun warmed, they played louder and harder. Dogs, the wild cat that lived under the garage, chickens, mockingbirds, and bluejays ate their fill. People did too, some places, Dad told me.
People thereabouts still called them locusts. My friend Billy and I collected their husks off trees and the house and lined them up in neat rows on the walls of our bedrooms. Later I'd learn their real name: cicadas. I'd learn that they emerge in thirteen- or seventeen-year cycles, coming out in May, all dead by June. The male dies not long after coupling, whereupon the female takes to a tree, cuts as many as fifty slits in one of the branches, and deposits 400 to 600 eggs. Once her egg supply is gone, she dies too. Six to eight weeks later the nymphs hatch and fall to the ground, burrowing in a foot or so and living off sap sucked from tree roots until it's their turn to emerge, climb, shed skins, unfurl wings.
Most of this I learned forty-odd years later.
Not a title – my name, Bishop Holden told me at our first meeting. He and I were of an age. When, after my childhood experience of them, the cicadas came again, I was in a jungle half a world away and Bishop was in line at the local draft where, told to turn his head and cough, he instead grabbed the doctor's head in both hands and planted a hard, wet kiss on his lips. He was carried away, discoursing incoherently of conspiracies and government- funded coups, and remanded by courts to the local psychiatric hospital. He'd been in and out of one or another of them most of his life. At the last, during convulsions caused by a bad drug reaction, he'd bitten off the finger of an orderly trying to help him and developed something of a taste for flesh. He'd bagged another finger, half an ear, and a big toe before (as he said) putting himself on a strict diet.
He had skin like a scrubbed red potato, pouchlike, leathery cheeks. In khakis, cardigan, and canvas shoes, he reminded me of Mr. Rogers.
'Ready for them?' he asked. Our chairs stood at a right angle, a small shellacked table pushed close in to the apex. I turned my head to him. His turned to the window.
Ready for what exactly, I asked.
'The cicadas. It's time. I've called them.'
Called them up from the depths of the earth itself, he said; and while I was never to learn much about Bishop Holden, over the next hour and in later sessions (until one bright morning he bit through the chain of a charm bracelet on the wrist of a teenage girl passing his breakfast sandwich through a carryout window) I learned quite a lot about cicadas.
Now, so many years later and a bit further south, it was time for them again.
Two abandoned shells, spurs hooked into mesh, hung on the screen of the window above the sink when I got up the next morning. It sounded as though a fleet of miniature farm machinery, tiny tractors and combines and threshers, had invaded the yard.
Thanks to Bishop, I knew that three distinct species always surface at the same time, and that each has not only its own specific sound but a favored time of day as well. Someone once said that the three sounded in turn like the word pharaoh, a sizzling skillet, and a rotary lawn sprinkler. The morning cicadas, the sizzlers, were hard at their work.
'What the hell is that racket?' J. T. asked from the doorway. I told her.
She came up close behind me and stood watching as they swarmed.
'Jesus. This happen often?'
'Every seventeen years, like clockwork. No one understands why. Or how, for that matter.'
I filled her in on cicadas as I pulled eggs and cheese from the icebox and poured coffee for a reasonable facsimile of Val that wandered in-what a writer might be tempted to call a working draft. I dropped a tablespoon of bacon grease from the canister on the stove into a skillet, laid out bread in the toaster oven I really needed to remember to clean. Dump the crumbs, at least.
'Did I hear cars?' Val asked as I poured her second cup. The rewrite was coming along nicely.
'Doc Bly and his boy.'
'Not a delivery, I assume.' Doc ran the mortuary. He was also coroner.
Putting breakfast on the table, I told them about the young man who'd died out by the lake.
'He'd been living in the woods?'
'According to Nathan. More than one of them.'
'Have any idea what's with the numbers?'
'Not really.'
'They were permanent?'
'Looked to be.'
'Not just inked in, like kids used to do back in school?'
'Not that crude. Not professional, either, but carefully done.
In prison there were guys who'd do tattoos for cigarette money. They used the end of a guitar string and indelible ink, took their time. Some of them got damned good at it. That's what this reminded me of, that level of skill.'
'Nathan have any idea what these people are doing up there?'
'None.'
