[jerry]
The heat blistered the ground until the dirt dried up and you could crumble in between your fingers, red and chalky. Trees stood by the way, miserable and bent-backed, peel-skinned as desperados and the air chugged and slurred. People stayed inside. They stayed inside and sat on their couches and fanned themselves with old magazines. Insects died. Slim-bellied cockroaches with retracted, jointed legs. So many fly bodies on the kitchen floor and in the sink and along the window sill. Old, clicking locusts clipped along the dead roads, stuttering telegraphic Morse with their wings. Coghill County was listless and dry-lipped as it was regarded by the sun, ticking and overheated, like a cooling engine.
Jerry and his sister Annie walked the road barefoot. Jerry didn't have his shirt on. His chest was skinny and young, his nipples were bee-stings. His jaw was slung open slightly because it was so hot and so his tongue was tacky as candy. Annie trudged beside her big brother with hard, grim eyes, her lips small and red and beautiful. A little gauze of sweat bandaged their faces. And the heat did its best to dry them out, to smelt them down. But they kept walking. Thrust-jawed and clench-fisted.
Annie looked sideways at Jerry. “How much farther?”
Jerry chewed on the words for a little bit. “Half-mile maybe. But we're gonna cut through the trees right up there and it'll be a little cooler in there.”
“Okay.”
They walked up until they came to a speed limit sign fallen over the back of a barbed fence that penned all the trees in. The two kids walked off the road and Jerry helped his sister over the fence, and then stepped carefully over himself. The trees hid their greenery like a sin. They kept it out of reach and choked. A quiet whisper played through the fingers of the trees – an insubstantial suggestion of wind above the tree tops – but otherwise the woods they walked through were silent. The mean dry deadness of the day settled over everything, sitting in the crooked limbs of the trees. Their feet broke twigs and old leaves, the only noise.
“Are they gonna come looking for us, Jerry?”
“Nah,” he said. “Weather like this makes all the grown-ups fat. They just sit around and talk. Probably won't even notice we're gone.”
“We could've finished our chores at least.”
“Not a chance. Can't even barely breathe. Never been this hot before. No one will blame no one for taking a little break.”
“What if the water's all dried up?”
“Be a godawful shame.”
“Don't cuss, Jerry.”
“Shoot, kid, we're not in sunday school right now. I can do what I want.”
Annie shrugs. Her little flowerprint dress is sucked up against the skin with all her sweat, and you can see her bony, hipless shape. Her tongue slithering out of her mouth to lick her lips, like a timid cuckoo emerging from the geared guts of a clock. “How much longer?”
“Have some patience.”
They walked a little further, picking through the dead skeletal tallgrass and the wiry blackberry vines that grabbed at them like barren mothers hungry for a child. The sound of running water trickled through the heat and the trees, lyrical and giggling. They picked up their pace. A little while longer, rooting down the slumped back of a bank, where knobby tree-roots stood out of the ground, and they came to a little river. Muddy and sick. Bloated and fat with the heat, too. Silty. Warm. But the children still whooped and stripped off their clothes and waded in, splashing water all over, laughing and slipping on the scummy turtlebacks of stones and clutter. Their little white toes, turning pink and wrinkly. Hair stringy and pressed against their faces, breathless mouths. Gulping and tasting. Holding out against the current which pulled vaguely at their ankles. Jerry dove underwater. Annie waded towards the other bank, looking for frogs. She stepped carefully, the soles of her feet tender and unmapped.
Jerry popped out of the water a little ways down stream. “Hey, Annie! C'mere! I'll show you how to swim a little!”
She didn't answer.
He looked for her, water dribbling down his forehead and into his eyes, and couldn't see her.
A little drill of worry wheedled into his chest and he stood upright in the water and came splashing towards where he had last seen his sister. “Annie!”
Again, no answer.
The water played with his feet demurely, like a lazy whore.
He came around the shallow bend of the river and saw her, standing in the reeds of the other bank, her back towards him. He breathed out. “Godssakes, kid! Why didn't you answer me?”
Annie didn't move.
She stood still in the heat, waxy-backed and a shawl of water droplets on her skin.
“Annie.”
He sloshed towards her.
Cicadas murmured.
“Annie. Kid. What's the matter?”
She was breathing thinly. A tinny wheeze. Her eyes shrunken and stained iodine. Shivering ever so slightly. He could feel the vibrations. She lifted her hand. She pointed deep in the reeds.
Jerry looked.
His throat tightened.
A man. Face up. Soggy with water and decomposing. His mouth open and drained, all of his teeth missing so that his lips curled around the trench of his mirthless smile. His eyes slitted and wrinkly, like little, starchy apples that you feed to a pasture horse. His cheesecloth skin limp and gray. A subtle, dead animal smell. Flies. Heaving and flitting on his skin, so that it looked as if he was still alive and his corpsy flesh was twitching and writhing in silent agony. Jerry looked away. The stench was stronger now. He grabbed Annie's arm.
Let's go.
Let's go.
Splayed out there. His shoes were missing. Bony, black toes – like berries to be picked. Water nudging up against him. False movement. Eerie ghost lights in his rotting eyes. Flabby, wormy cheeks.
Let's go, godssakes!
He yanked on Annie's arm and lost his balance, falling face first into the water. He came up choking and gulping and retching. Swearing at Annie. Annie moving out of the water dazed. Quiet. Empty-faced. He scrambled up on the bank, cussing, pulling up his trousers. Toes squelching sickly in the hot mud. C'mon! C'mon! Let's get out of here! Godssakes, we need to tell somebody!
The heat spoiled.
