The Floating Cradle

Eighteen

My white tennis shoes slip through the slush and mud. I cannot tell if the air is full of thunder or if it's just my own blood roaring in my ears. The sky is dark, but when I look up every star seems to be falling toward the Earth, and it's impossible to say which one it is but I know one of them is coming for me.

Daddy pounds on the heavy metal doors of the cellar, set into the ground some thirty yards from the back of the house, and Lyle heaves them open from the inside. We scramble down a steep set of stairs into a concrete chamber a little smaller than the living room, lit by a single battery-powered lantern someone has set in the middle of the floor. I look over my shoulder, and the last thing I see before the doors swing shut is our barn on the hill full of dozing cows.

"...existential...remain indoors...not attempt...abandon vehicles...stay where...United States...immediate...communications...electromagnetic..."

The crank radio is patching in and out as Mama twiddles the knobs. Dan reaches out to help but she recoils.

"Maybe it was a false alarm," Felicity posits. Her arm is tight around Pete's shoulders; he grips his sketchbook in his white-knuckled hands.

"Don't sound like a false alarm." Lyle nods toward the radio.

Gil monkeys with his phone in agitation.

"Mierda. Got no reception. No calls going through."

"We'll be fine," I hear the tantum tell Allie, huddled in their own corner. "They wouldn't waste a bomb here. It's the middle of nowhere."

For another few minutes, nobody speaks but the voice on the radio fraught with static, peppering the silence with ominous phrases and the occasional city name—"Jacksonville...Raleigh...Houston"—each one sending a frisson down my spine. I press myself into Daddy's armpit, in need of warmth and reassurance, and wonder if Hollywood Boulevard has become a twisted, molten pit, the stars stricken in their mansions, cast in ash like those bodies they dug up from the ruins of Pompeii. Though I have never visited Times Square, I try to imagine it at the moment of impact, trading chaos for chaos, sound for deafness, tourists subsumed in one final, greatest light show—it is terrible, but still it is not my terror. It is a movie that makes me tear up in a dark theater where no one can see. It is a state-sanctioned memory we observe in the school gymnasium each year through codified phrases and hands on hearts. Distance is the most effective shock absorber.

The cellar is cold and dank. Every year or two we find ourselves down here during a tornado scare, but we've never had to wait longer than a day, listening for the all-clear on the radio, playing Oklahoma rummy, the adults passing around a bottle of whiskey they won't share with me or Pete. Several dusty shelves in the back are lined with Mama's preserves and pickled vegetables, but otherwise it's empty as a tomb, a bare purgatory where you crouch uncomfortably, back to stone, and await the changing—or not—of the world above.

The radio cuts out after ten or so minutes.

"Can't just sit here, knowin' nothin'," Blake grunts.

"You volunteerin' to go back up? Be my guest," Lyle sneers, ignoring Felicity's reproachful glare. He is pacing in front of the shelves as though guarding the food.

"Keep your heads, now," Daddy says. "If in an hour, we ain't heard nothin', I'll make a check myself. In the meantime, you hand me that, and I'll bet your mother'll let you tune up the radio."

He says this last to Dan, who throws himself back on his haunches, kneading his trembling fingers into his thighs. He clutches my saggy old tube sock close to his chest as Daddy gets up and advances on him.

"No. G-give the radio to Al. She can't fix it, no one can."

"Damn thing's got a busted coil." Mama pries apart the housing and tugs at a frazzled copper wire. "Good thing we found it out 'fore tornado season hits. What, y'all think I ain't smart enough to figure nothin' myself?"

"Believe it or not, Mama, not everythin' we do is about you," Allie snipes.

"Christ alive, Al, can't you give it a rest? We could say the same to you!" Lyle snarls, whipping around to face her. "You ain't come back here to bury no hatchet—you just wanted to twist the knife one last time."

"Don't talk to her like that," says the tantum, fixing Lyle with his reflecting pool eyes.

"And who the Hell're you, scabfoot, tellin' me what to do?"

Allie and the tantum are on their feet; in a second we are all shouting, myself included, accusations bouncing off the concrete walls like senseless ricochet. My anger explodes outward in every direction, shrapnel hurtling from my lips toward Mama, toward Allie, toward Dan, irregular and incoherent, intended to inflict crude wounds. Gilberto shakes his head—our soap opera has outlived its amusement, even for him—and climbs the stairs, shouldering open one of the steel doors and letting it crash shut behind him. Pete is gripping his scalp, black tufts of hair oozing out between his fingers.

"People are dying," he says through gritted teeth, but we don't care.

It overcomes us in an instant: an impossible rending of earth reverberating through our very cores, rattling our teeth in their sockets, electrifying our eardrums, drowning us out. I fall to my knees and cling to Daddy, who clings to Mama, who clings to Pete. It transcends sound—it is a presence, a virus, a physical entity infiltrating my skin and bones, my acid-bag stomach, my Cro-Magnon brain. It swells and diminishes; in the split-second lull, my senses regain purchase—I hear my family wailing and wretching around me, smell the fear and heat and preserves leaking from shattered jars—but again the beast of insatiable sound descends, and this time I can feel the world above me meeting its pyroclastic ruin, swept up in a wave of reductionist power, dissected by that scrupulous something as it sows the land with simplicity.