What Came After Read Free

That’s all. As simple as that. He said the words fire department as if these people had ever had a fire department. As if these old houses of theirs wouldn’t burn straight to the ground in a heartbeat with nobody prepared to do a single thing about it.
    The boy let the curtain close and went back to bed but didn’t go to sleep. When his father came in later he asked him about what he’d heard. About the man who could fix the car. His father shook his head. “Don’t pay them any attention,” he said. “These people believe all kinds of stuff. Plus they’ll say anything.”
    The boy asked him why.
    “To get a little bit of what we have,” he said. “Something to make them more like us.”
    “You’d pay him though. The mechanic. If he fixed the car.”
    “Of course I would. But I know these people. He can’t fix the car. I don’t want him fixing the car. I don’t even want him touching it.” He put his hand on the boy’s shoulder and told him to go back to sleep. “Don’t listen to them, son. That mechanic of theirs. The miracles they say he can do. It’s just an old wive’s tale. You’ll learn for yourself soon enough. People who are afraid will believe anything.”
     
    *
     
    Carmichael awoke to the sound of a hammer. A high ringing, steady and insistent, metal on metal. The blows had a machine regularity to them except for the way they stopped and started and stopped again. Coming and going through the trees from off in the direction of the highway on a fine light breeze from the south that pushed the window shade back an inch and set it bumping. He sat up and shook himself and groaned. Groaned and stretched and realized. There was only the faintest gray light coming through the window. Hardly anything at all. People out here didn’t begin working until the sun was up. They couldn’t.
    It was that mechanic. Damn him.
    He let Peter sleep and went out, following the sound toward the woods. Hearing people rising inside other houses and smelling the smells of cooking and listening to the sounds of talk. He kept going past where the houses gave out and walked across a cultivated field with his shoes sucking mud and entered the little woods. The hammering got louder but still had that little thoughtful pause now and then, and he went through the woods and came close to the far edge of it and the hammering stopped and he stopped too. Saw the car propped up in the mud on a jack with boards under it. Saw a man drawing himself out from underneath the car, wet mud from the wet ground streaking his back. Weller, the mechanic. In one hand he held the hammer and a bent iron bar with a hole in each end. With the other hand he was slipping something into his pocket. He stood looking at the car. The car and the ground it was sinking into. Rapt and greaseblack and concentrating hard. He slung the hammer into a loop on his coveralls and held the bar out against the horizon. Running his thumb along the top to gauge the bend in it. Cocking his head.
    “Get away from my car,” said Carmichael.
    Weller gave him a slow look, letting his eyes adjust to the distance. He wore a thick pair of horn-rimmed glasses, third or fourth or fifth hand, things that had passed more than once through some Lions’ Club donation box back when there’d been a Lion’s Club. Back when there’d been lions. He gave him a slow look that was adjustment and appraisal at the same time and after a minute he nodded once and stepped backwards. Slow. Like it had been his idea. Nothing to it. He was just leaving anyhow. He had work to do.
     
    *
     
    The boy was gone when Carmichael got back. He wasn’t in the kitchen, and he wasn’t in the bedroom, and he wasn’t anywhere. His father felt the bed and it was warm. He tried the outhouse but the outhouse was empty. The boy was gone and it wouldn’t be long before Black Rose lifted off from New York and how would they know him from anybody else. A little kid like that who could be anybody.