He found himself running through coarse yellow grass. Butterflies scattered before him in a bright panic. The raggedy parachute above wasn’t done with him yet. It yanked him back up, dropped him, pulled him into the air again, yo-yoing him across the field. It made booming sounds each time it caught another scoop of ground wind and filled tight. Not only was Aubrey running—he couldn’t stop. If he quit, the parachute would drag him. Aubrey began to unclip carabiners, wrestling with hard, cable-tight ropes.
He saw the road ahead, and a fence, rotten wood posts with three widely spaced lines of rusting barbed wire strung through them. The parachute inflated yet again, hauling him into the air. He lifted his knees almost to his chest and was carried right over the lines.
Aubrey put his feet down in a ditch on the other side, stumbled, and was remorselessly dragged out into the highway. He reached around behind him, grasping wildly for the carabiners on the back of his harness. He unclasped one, a second. The road burned his knees through his jumpsuit. He leapt up, did a hopping jig, found a third clip, snapped it free. He twisted from the waist, feeling for the last. It sprang loose all of a sudden, and Aubrey was thrown onto his chest, across the dotted yellow line.
He lifted his head and watched as the gay ruin of his parachute was sucked into the crown of an enormous oak across the street. Immediately it collapsed, draping itself upon the branches.
Aubrey turned over. He ached in the small of his back, in his knees. His throat was sandpaper dry. He gazed into the bright, hard blue, searching for his cloud. And there it was—a great white hubcap, barely indistinguishable from the other fat, puffy scraps of cloud up there. It still looked like a mother ship, just as Harriet had said. Harriet had said it was a UFO, and she’d been right.
He felt an inexplicable throb of affection for it—for the home his Sky Harriet had tried to make for him there. He felt in some ways that he was still gently floating to earth. He might be floating like this for days.
He was yet on his back in the road when a guy in a black Cadillac rolled down the highway from the north, slowing as he approached, then steering a wide berth around Aubrey. The Caddy stopped right next to him.
The driver—an old man with angry blue eyes under a thicket of storm-cloud-colored eyebrows—powered down his window. “Fuck you doin’ in the road? Someone could go right over you, asshole!”
Aubrey, unoffended, sat up on his elbows. “Hey, mister. Where is this? Am I in Pennsylvania?”
The driver glared, his lean face darkening, as if Aubrey were the one who had called him an asshole. “What kinda drugs you on? I oughta call the cops!”
“So not Pennsylvania?”
“Try New Hampshire!”
“Huh. No kidding.” Aubrey wasn’t sure he could get out of the road just yet. It was awfully nice here, warm blacktop beneath his back, sun glowing on his face. He was in no rush to get to whatever was next.
“Jesus!” the old bird said, spittle flying from his lips. “Get your head out of the clouds!”
“Just did,” Aubrey said.
The old guy powered his window back up and got out of there. Aubrey turned his head to watch him go.
When he had the highway to himself, he got to his feet, dusted off his rear, and began to walk. From above he had seen a farmhouse not too far away. If anyone was home, he thought he’d ask to use their phone. He figured his mother might like to know he was alive.
RAIN
WHEN THE RAIN FELL, most everyone was caught outside in it.
You wonder, maybe, why so many people died in that initial downpour. People who weren’t there say, Don’t folks in Boulder know to come in out of the rain? Well, let me tell you. This was the last Friday in August, you remember, and it was H-O-T, hot. At eleven in the morning? There wasn’t a cloud to be seen. The sky was so blue it hurt to look at it for too long, and a body just couldn’t stand to be inside. It was about as glorious as the first day in Eden.
Seemed like everyone found something to do out of doors. Mr. Waldman, who was the first to die, was up on his roof, banging a hammer on new shingles. He had his shirt off, and his skinny old-man’s back was baked as red as a boiled crab, but he didn’t seem to mind. Martina, the Russian stripper who lived in the apartment below mine, was out in our dusty scrap of yard, sunning herself in a black bikini so tiny it felt like you ought to have to feed a machine quarters to keep looking at her. The windows were all open in the big, decaying Colonial next door, where the comet cult people lived: Elder Bent and his “family” of broken wackadoodles. Three of their women were outside in the silver gowns they all wore, ceremonial hubcaps on their heads. One of them, an obese gal with a sad, vacant grapefruit of a face, was turning sausages on the grill, and the blue smoke carried down the street, making folks hungry. The other two were at the wooden lawn table working on a fruit salad, one of them chopping pineapple and the other picking red seeds out of pomegranates.
Me, I was killing time with Little Dracula and waiting on the person I loved most in the world. Yolanda was driving up from Denver with her mother. Yolanda was moving in with me.
“Little Dracula” was a boy named Templeton Blake, who lived across the street from me, next door to Mr. Waldman. Yolanda and I both looked after the kid sometimes for his mother, Ursula, who was on her own after her husband had died the year before. Ursula tried to pay us sometimes, but usually we could convince her to settle up with some other form of compensation: a few slices of pizza or fresh vegetables from her garden. I felt sorry for them. Ursula was a slender, small, gracious dame who suffered from mild haphephobia. She couldn’t bear to be touched, which made you wonder how she’d ever had a kid. Her nine-year-old had the vocabulary of a forty-year-old sociologist and almost never left the house; he was always sick with one thing or another, on a raft of antibiotics or antihistamines. The day the first rain fell, he was being treated for recurring strep and couldn’t go outside because his medicine had made him hypersensitive to sunlight. A lot of healthy, vigorous children died in Boulder that day—parents all over town booted their kids outside to whoop it up on one of the last, most brilliant days of summer—whereas Templeton survived because he was too ill to have fun. Think about that.
Because he had been told he’d fry if the sun so much as touched him, he was going through a vampire phase, walking around in a black silk cape and a pair of plastic fangs. His mom was home, but I was keeping him occupied in the dark shadows of their garage out of sheer fidgety nerves—the good kind. Yolanda was on the way. She had called just as she and her mother had set out to make the one-hour drive from Denver.