he flew like some kinda indigenous angel.
'cept maybe his wings was made outta tv dinner trays.
- Smoke Signals
'cept maybe his wings was made outta tv dinner trays.
- Smoke Signals
It started at first with a little rain. Plop, plop, plop—and then the drops added up to a whole. The lake swelled up like a bad knee and potted plants turned into wells. Lawns plugged up with water that plucked grass blades from their roots, one by one. It filled up the storm drains and made lakes in sidewalk cracks and thundered down storm drains like cannonballs, like bowling balls.
There was the water, and there was Isaac. Isaac in his wheelchair with his limp legs and strong arms, fingers always picking at scabs. There was Isaac, and then there was Oonchee*, old and forgetful and always rubbing cream into her creaky bones. It never worked—her skin was too thick for the herbs to soak through. Part of the problem was the cold. They lived together in an old house that they hadn’t paid for—it was just empty when they came upon it, homeless and wandering with Oonchee’s quilts in paper sacks. There were bats in the attic and rats in the walls, and sometimes Isaac worried that he and Oonchee were like Goldilocks, and any minute three bears would tumble in, outraged at the intrusion.
“If it ain’t nobody’s,” Oonchee insisted, whenever he would ask. “It might as well be somebody’s.”
Instead of healing, they sat together on an old floral couch that puffed dust into the air and watched soaps and waited for frybread to cool. That was, at least, until the storms took the electricity away.
“You know,” said Oonchee to Isaac when the rain was pouring down, “When there’s a thunderstorm, it means God’s up there”—she pointed to the ceiling—“bowling.”
Isaac could never tell if she meant the sky or the attic. But when he wheeled himself outside down their rickety front ramp, he could still hear God bowling. He bowled all day and all night, and the earth was like a sponge—except now, it was soaked. Isaac propelled himself down the sidewalk, cutting twin tracks through heavy skeins of rainwater.
He was going to Nigel’s house.
Both Isaac and Nigel lived on the edge of town, properties hugging the boundary line like snaggleteeth. Nigel was a little Mexican boy who lived with a family of little Mexicans in a little trailer by the side of a little creek. He had four brothers and sisters: Miguel, Marcos, Manuela, and Maritza. He was the youngest. A little Mexican with a little white boy’s name. No one knew why; they just figured his parents were inspired. There was something else wrong about Nigel, but it was hard to tell exactly what. That was what made Nigel and Isaac such good friends. No one knew precisely what was wrong with Nigel, but everyone knew exactly what was wrong with Isaac, the cripple. But when they were together, no one asked questions.
“Isaac, you’ll never guess what I just discovered,” said Nigel, splashing through standing water to get to the wheelchair. Isaac gripped his hands round muddy wheels to slow them. Nigel held out his hands—a frog; fat, dirty, and heaving. “It’s a plains leopard frog. Rana blairi. You never find them this far north. Something, isn’t it something?”
“Hm,” said Isaac. The frog’s chin inflated like a muddy balloon. Its eyes whirled in circles and came to rest splayed and crossed.
Nigel set the frog in Isaac’s lap and walked around his friend to the back of the wheelchair. He took the handles and pushed his friend back onto the sidewalk. Isaac and the frog eyed each other warily. He never asked where they were going; it was dangerous to ask much of Nigel at all.
The rain was coming down harder now, and icy. It had been raining for six days now, and nobody noticed being wet anymore. Mud was dripping off the frog’s body and onto Isaac’s jeans. Oonchee was going to be angry. He wasn’t one to complain—he let Nigel push him onto First Avenue without protest. The buildings were all lit by candlelight, and the shopowners sat next to the front drapes, nervously waiting for the cloth to light.
First Avenue was a slapdash main drag with cartoonish storefronts and painted signs. Nettles, Nebraska always looked to Isaac like it was designed by a toddler with a crayon—a church with a big cross, a gas station with big trucks, a post office with a big postman. But the smiling Sandhill sun squiggled in the top right-hand corner of the blue, blue sky had faded, replaced by rainclouds and lightning strikes. The road was filled with standing water, and his toes were skimming rain.
“Where are we going?”
For once in his life, Nigel didn’t answer. Instead, he pushed harder, propelling Isaac down the middle of the swamped street. The frog tipped over on its side, helpless. Isaac was reluctant to touch it.
They flew past the grocery store and the ice cream parlor; past the gas station and Nigel’s cousin’s house, until they reached a low brick wall.
The old schoolyard.
Rusty swings screamed back and forth in the wind and the merri-go-round spun itself. The school building itself and its collapsed roof seemed to rock from side to side. In the background, the Sheridan County Reservoir lay glistening, slowly licking its way toward the forgotten building.
Nigel pushed Isaac’s wheelchair through a break in the wall and along a rim of solid ground. The frog began croaking nervously and Isaac, in his uncertainty, raised his voice once more.
“Nigel, where are we going?”
The ripples of the reservoir were sharper, now, and it was easy to see that its usually drought-sucked body was now swollen, straining at the sides of its man-made walls. Water lapped over the edges in all directions.
“Nigel?”
“I made a new discovery,” Nigel said, peering through the rain and mist. “Just watch. Watch the water.”
They both stared.
And then, it happened.
Thunder growled in the distance, and all of a sudden, a giant slap of water broke the sound. It wasn’t loud—wasn’t fireworks loud, wasn’t earache loud—but loud enough to startle; to watch as an arm of water, twisted like a cyclone, reached its way up out of the reservoir and slam against the outside of its walls. It lingered a moment, and then shriveled, retreating to its primal depths.
“We have been visited by The Creep.”
* 'Oonchee' is Lakota for 'grandmother'.
...