Where Page 3

  Roadblock, here at the bottleneck, and it’s … He checks his watch. It’s well past noon.

  This is really bad.

  MPs with handhelds and clipboards stand next to the military Humvees, grilling drivers of outgoing cars, checking licenses and registrations, car by car. They work in pairs, peering into backseats, popping every trunk. Other MPs are stationed around the circle, flagging cars onto this exit or that. They’re diverting most drivers onto the dirt road through the Bartlett woods. It takes you back to downtown Charlton, but not anytime soon, and the rest? From the looks of it, only a few cars make it onto the causeway home. Certified islanders, Davy thinks, and he’s not sure how this will play out. Although he was born in Charlton, he didn’t move out to Kraven until Merrill loved him well enough. Now they live together in the little clapboard house on Poulnot Street. Look, Officer, it’s been five years. He’s done some of his best work on Kraven island so, is he a certified islander or not?

  “Dave Ribault, from Kraven island. What’s going on?”

  “License and registration, sir. Please.”

  “The— whatever happened.” He hands them over. “Is it on Poynter or on Kraven?”

  “Only documented residents…”

  “Dave Ribault, it’s right there on the license. My people were…”

  “I don’t care what your people were.”

  “What’s going on?”

  MP Number One hands them back. “We’re not authorized…”

  “I have a…” He starts to say girlfriend, but it comes out, “I have a wife out there!” As he does so, two TV8 trucks rumble past and he thinks, This is really bad.

  Number Two notes something on his clipboard.

  Overhead, helicopters rattle the sky. It’s even worse than I thought. Crazy, listening to his voice zigzagging. “Just tell me. What the hell is going on!”

  The first MP hands back his paperwork. “Proceed.”

  As he flags Davy toward the channel bridge, Number Two’s voice breaks just enough to let the truth leak out. “Nobody knows.”

  Naturally the drawbridge is up. He tries the phone again; he’s stopped caring what they say to each other, he needs to know she’s OK. There’s crap reception out here even on a good day, which this is not. He dies a dozen times, squirming until the drawbridge closes and he and the few cars backed up behind him go across to Poynter’s island.

  The main drag in Poyntertown is packed solid with cars and pissed-off drivers trying to get somewhere. Given the lay of the land, it’s expected. As a kid, he came out here to Earl’s house so often that he knows the island by heart. Anybody who’s been crabbing in the swash knows there’s another way to the Kraventown causeway. Never mind that it’s longer, and there are wet patches that you have to ford and places you can bog down, depending on the tides. It beats stasis, which is what this is.

  He peels off and heads for the beach road. The crushed oyster shells will rip the hell out of his tires and that’s the least of it, but he doesn’t care. He’ll be at the Kraven island ON ramp and on the causeway before those poor suckers jammed up in Poyntertown figure out that in terms of forward motion, they’re screwed.

  Making his way around the island, he plans. Merrill left for work hours ago, so he’d better think up a terrific explanation for him leaving without stopping to kiss her goodbye and make up for whatever that was that fell between them last night. Think, asshole, it had better be damn good. He needs to pick up something at Weisbuch’s— wait. A late lunch won’t make up for what they said to each other. No way. He needs to drop into Fowler’s Gems on Bay Street and find her something terrific, grin like he drove all the way in to Charlton before dawn looking for this essential pretty Thing, wasted the morning shopping in town and got hung up in the monster traffic jam. He’ll play up the trouble he went to, trashing his undercarriage on the oyster shells, throwing palm fronds into the road to keep from sinking into the sludge, and guess what, all that time wasted and your present was right here, in the front window of Fowler’s jewelry store.

  Who cares what it costs, he owes her. Tennis bracelet, he thinks, linked baby diamonds, because until they make up for things they said to each other. Wait. Given the last thing she said to him. Well, a diamond ring might be cheaper, but it would be all wrong. Wrong, he thinks, rounding the last bend, uneasy and distracted. Wrong, he tells himself, trying out and discarding a dozen possible right things to say.

  Everything I said and did last night was wrong. I have to make it better, I have to do this right, I …

  Never thought the trouble that brought half the rolling stock in South Carolina to these islands was at home.

  Holy crap!

  The Kraventown causeway ramp is blocked. Yellow plastic barrels bar the ON ramp. Beyond them, yellow tape protects the police vehicles lined up across the causeway, closing off all four lanes. Uniformed personnel guard the barricades, while others lug in sawhorses stenciled POLICE LINE— DO NOT CROSS to keep back the growing crowd. Angry islanders and frustrated commuters tangle, running up each other’s heels.

  Compared to this, the mess at Bartlett Circle looked like the Azalea Ball. Uniformed personnel stand on the raised causeway between here and the Kraven island bridge.

  The cops and troopers marshaled on the causeway look to be at a loss. The ones on the bridge beyond are at the rail, peering into the dark waters like they expect to see something down there that they don’t know about. Others are bent double, looking under cars that look like they got caught in some storm and froze solid in mid-crossing. Every vehicle he can see is dead empty, and this bothers Davy for reasons he doesn’t want to think about.

  If the drivers bailed for some reason after they left Kraventown, where did they go? More than a dozen dead cars sit up there on the causeway like gulls on a wire strung between here and home.

  Davy noses his Wrangler up the grade to the row of barrels blocking the ON ramp and gets out, thinking to walk around the markers and find somebody to tell him what came down out there, but they’re all busy, frantic with it, whatever it is.

  He shouts, to everybody in general. “What’s going on?”

  An angry voice he can’t source shouts back, “Don’t know. Nobody does.”

  Cleverly, Davy rolls a barrel aside, jiggling it until there’s a gap big enough to slip through. He needs to stand face to face with somebody who does. A state trooper intercepts him. “Back off. Nobody on the causeway past this point.”

  He presses forward. “I live over there!”

  “So do a lot of folks, Mister.” Davy thinks he said, “Or they did.”

  “What happened, what the fuck happened?”

  “Too soon to tell.”

  “But my…” whole life is over there.

  “No civilians allowed.”

  “I have to see my…”

  “You have to go.”

  The trooper doesn’t exactly aim his weapon at Davy, just nudges him back with it, nosing the barrel higher and higher, stampeding Davy toward the crowd crammed behind the police tape. He can either scramble up the bank and join the gawkers or get back in his car, take off the brakes and roll backward down the ramp and go back the way he came, aware as he does so that there are places he will have to ford and places where he may get stuck in the shifting sand.

  Back. No way is he going back.

  Davy fake-leaves the ramp, moon-walking backward until the trooper is satisfied and turns away. At this point, it seems important to study uniforms, find somebody he knows. “Hey, Jack,” he shouts. They’ve known each other since first grade. “Jack Stankey.”

  The Poyntertown cop turns. “Yo.”

  “What the fuck happened?”

  “I’m not authorized to say.” Exact same speech the MPs back at the Bartlett Circle recited. Jack’s face is empty, a surface that was just wiped clean.

  Someone shouts, “He doesn’t fucking know!”

  “Nobody knows!”

  Davy made it through the long morning o
n the belief that whatever happened was happening somewhere else; he’s made it this far on the strength of a lie buzzing like a mantra inside of his head, she’s fine, nothing is wrong, but with the sun high and the causeway deserted and the unknown at work on Kraven island, with no way to find out what’s going on out there and no access, everything is wrong. “What?” he cries. “What!”

  A high, clear voice knifes through the confusion, cutting deep. “They’re all gone.”

  Desperate to source it, Davy whirls. “What?”

  “Gone,” she cries.

  He looks here, there. “What!”

  “They all vanished. Every mortal soul on Kraven is gone!”

  4

  Merrill Poulnot

  The first day

  … This.

  This what? What! In the void Father roars, “This is outrageous,” and for a second I’m seventeen again and living at home, trapped on that runaway express train to despair.

  This nightmare! I grope for Davy, but my hand closes on a foreign body and I snap awake. For a strangled second, Delroy Root grabs hold and we hug, but our bodies know better and we recoil— nothing personal, just, ewww: not-Davy.

  Delroy, grieving and baffled: not-Ada. Blinded by the glare, we lock hands and cling.

  Blink.

  Poleaxed, he and I let go. I lunge here, there in the sudden, staggering heat, blinded by sun glinting off the dead white buildings that surround us like slabs of porcelain waiting to be toppled.

  There are at least a hundred of us here. One second we were safe in our houses, submerged in the last sleep before the alarm or just starting the day— steam on the bathroom mirror from the shower, coffee brewing, morning eggs on the stove; we were still in bed, some of us, half-awake and fumbling for early-morning sex. I was stone sleeping while the others nodded over breakfast or got the jump on commuter traffic to the mainland two bridges and one island away from Kraven island.

  Between heartbeats, we were picked up and— what— transported.

  We came as we were, in whatever we slept in or put on to face the day, a hundred thunderstruck citizens of Kraven island, set down in the middle of nothing. We don’t know how it happened or what happened. We were all happily doing whatever we did every morning on Kraven island, hitting the snooze alarm, walking the dog or bringing in the morning paper, texting or skimming the Web, ordinary people sleepwalking through the moment, not thinking about what our lives would be like if all this luxury that we took for granted, ended.

  Then without transition, we were here.

  Missing? Me? Why a minute ago I was …

  Sand gusts into the bleak enclosure where we— fell? Landed in this compound, enclave, porcelain basin set down in a desert, contained in this glossy, bleached out— what?

  What is this place?

  Dropped into a square of gleaming, featureless buildings in a dead desert town where nothing grows, shaken and muttering, most of us, we try to locate ourselves, while at the periphery of the plaza where we landed, Father bellows, bloated with rage. Mother woke me with tears in her eyes the night she fled him. “Look after your baby brother,” she said and I have, until— where is he? Oh God, oh, God!

  “Ned, do you hear me? Neddy! Ned! Edward Lamar Poulnot, you stand up and signify!” It’s so crowded that I can’t make him out. Whirling under the bleached sky, I fix on the flagpole, standing tall in the middle of this mob. There’s no flag at the top to identify this place or tell us what country we’re in or whether it’s a country at all, just a windsock flapping, loose ropes rattling against the shaft.

  “Ned Poulnot, do you hear?” Together, we shuffle and fret under the murderous sun, miserable and confused, struggling to orient ourselves, to comprehend, while Father runs around the margins with his knees going, like pistons on a broken machine, battering the universe with that big, ugly voice.

  “Ned?” If I can only find Ned, then I know I’ll find Davy. I’ll find him and. Then what? “Davy! Dave! Has anybody seen Dave Ribault?”

  But all I hear back is Father, raging like Moses with the tablets raised, ready to smash them on the cement in the plaza of this weird, dead town. Then people I thought I knew fix on the one thing they recognize in the confusion and turn to Father for orders, forgetting the drunken rages and how that usually ends.

  Thank God, Ray Powell cuts him off at the pass. My excellent friend and the real power behind Kraventown; he’s famous for his soft touch. They don’t know it, but Ray keeps even the worst of us in check. Last year he removed Father from the bench so smoothly that the town thought he was retiring to write the history of the Poulnots, three centuries’ worth. While the rest of us were flailing, Ray’s been scouting the plaza— the glistening surfaces of the buildings that dominate on four sides. Four exits: four diagonal roads that lead out of the square, and at its center, the flagpole. Mounting the marble steps to the top of the pedestal, Ray has found the highest point in this place, a square apparently designed to level or subdue anyone who enters here.

  Standing tall, Ray shouts, “Over here,” and everyone in the plaza turns to him, all at once, leaving Father to rail on, forgotten.

  “This way!” Ray lifts us with his voice and turns us around in that easy, commanding way he has. “Fresh clothes!”

  Furious, Father rants while the rest of us, undressed or half-dressed, gather around the bin on the cement at the base of the flagpole where Ray stands. Subdued and gasping, we slip on scrubs to cover ourselves. Flip-flops for the ones transported without shoes and hopping from foot to foot on the hot cement.

  We were expected.

  This was.

  White scrubs. Like costumes, but for what? Shakespeare in the plaza or electroshock in some occult institution? The rectangle of white façades in the plaza looks fake, like the set for an opera that got too ambitious for any stage— which raises the question. If we are in some kind of production, what’s it about? Was it written for us? Why are we here?

  Then Father, my father, mounts the base to the flagpole and throws himself at the ropes, trying to stand higher than Ray. He scrambles on up the pole, hand-over-hand until his strength fails. In the seconds before Ray catches him, he bawls: “Why are you doing this to us?”

  Which begs the real questions. Where are we, anyway? Why?

  As it turns out, those aren’t the real questions either, but we don’t know that. All we know is that we’re the world’s greatest mystery, and we know this— how?

  Color blazes. On the biggest façade in the plaza, a great screen blooms like a tropical flower. We’re on TV! As though the Power, whatever it is, whatever they are— as though some mysterious entity heard my old man howling and flipped a switch.

  We stop what we were saying, doing, thinking, and face the screen like recruits lined up for the orientation film:

  Welcome to Wherever This Is.

  Wedged into the square like illegals waiting to be deported, we watch, waiting for the emcee, director, instructor, captors, the power behind our removal to step out and explain.

  Instead, the show begins. Island Inhabitants Vanish. Long shot of Kraven island. A banner zips across the bottom of the screen on a loop: Weekly World News. My heart lifts. We’re on the news. This means they’ll find us soon.

  But there’s a problem. The travelogue-perfect montage is too detailed to be shot and edited in a day, the interviews so slick that questions stir in my gut, gnawing their way out. No power could have processed all that material in the short time we’ve been gone, but like everybody else watching, I was mesmerized. Changed. For that moment, in the aftermath of our— disruption and removal, I bought it. We all did.

  Even Father goes quiet, fixed on the screen, but I know what he is thinking, standing there with his hands spread and his angry mouth ajar: civic leader, waiting for his cameo, while I speed-read the images; if Davy isn’t here, I’ll find him up there on the screen and find a way to let him know I’m here.

  Cameras pan the route from Charlton to Poynte
r’s island to our island. God, they’ve barricaded the causeway! It’s so weird, all those driverless cars stalled on the road out of Kraventown; I don’t see Davy’s, so, where! Bay Street is so still that even Ray groans. Buildings we go into every day stand empty; shops and guest houses, even the police station, clinic, the banks. All our favorite and our private places are laid open like corpses waiting to be autopsied, doors sagging like empty mouths and all our secret orifices gaping.

  On streets where we used to play, nothing moves but a stray cat slinking across the road with its ass tucked under in shame. Although we have audio there’s no sound on Kraven, really, except for Wade Tanner’s watchdogs snarling as the camera passes his jewelry store. It’s so quiet that even at that great, unspecified distance, I hear marsh beetles crackling in the sawgrass off Ray Powell’s dock. Then a news anchor reaches into one of the abandoned cars on the causeway and honks the horn, and all our dogs begin barking at once.

  In case we thought we were deluded or dreaming, a great late-breaking news banner replaces World News. Racing along below the feed, our situation in précis:

  THE KRAVEN ISLAND MYSTERY

  Authorities Baffled— A Hundred Gone

  Information comes thick and fast: news clips of baffled authorities’ press conferences, interviews with mystified friends and strangers from the mainland and the outer islands, some of them in tears— they’re out there looking. Davy too?

  Then parents and friends and lovers of the missing— us!— plead with kidnappers, in case— wait! is this a ransom situation?— offering millions if whoever has us lets us go. In extreme closeup, the governor of South Carolina reports that the military, state police, local cops, supernumeraries, firefighters from three counties are blanketing the area. With an election coming up, he weeps. “And the sickening thing about this is that we’ve scoured the town and surrounding farmland, walked the perimeter of the island and dredged the channel and no living person is left behind on Kraven island to tell the tale.” Drama queen.