He raised his eyes. A dark cloud of gulls burst over the storefronts down the street and poured past inland and he stood amazed. Seabirds many hundred strong. Flying fast and silent and sinister in their silence over the streetlights and trees and old buildings.
They passed from sight. The sky felt all at once larger, darker.
Then a second flock hurtled up and over the buildings as if following the first. The old man shivered and lowered his gaze. The black child in the café window was watching him and raised one light-skinned palm to the glass in what might have been a gesture of greeting or farewell.
The old man hurried across.
The boy watched the old man long and thin in his greatcoat striding along the far side of the street and thought:
I did not want to go
anyway and even if I did want to go I would not go now.
Thought:
They
will find out it was Tobey and then they will be sorry.
He had one sharp elbow pressed into the math textbook open before him and he was chewing small ribs into a pencil as he brooded when the old man stopped suddenly and lifted his drained grey face and all at once a darkness poured like dampness down the building behind him.
The boy shivered. There was a warpling in the upper windows along the street as if the very glass itself were bending and the boy blinked and adjusted his eyeglasses on his small nose. He rubbed one elbow on the café window though his mother did not like him to do this. Then he lifted up his eyes.
He lifted up his eyes and saw them. The seabirds. Rivering past in a thick black torrent.
And he could not help himself and whispered, very deliberately: Holy
shit
.
Then glanced quickly back at the counter. His mother had not heard. He pressed one palm to the cold window his fingers splayed as if to blot the shadowed street out but the rope of birds was already thinning, already the last stragglers like scraps of cloth were being blown past. When he lowered his eyes the old man was coming towards the square.
He flushed suddenly, as if he had been caught out. And thought again:
No I would not want to go even if they wanted me to
even if I was allowed.
Thinking of the museum with its moth-eaten tusked mammoth, its creaking old explorer's ship, the dark streets of its mining town on the second floor. The smell of tar and the clatter of horses and the recorded cries of miners in their tunnels. Then thinking of his classmates in the school bus and the plastic seats with the stuffing frothing up out of the seams and his teacher in his stiff angry manner glaring back at them. Thinking of that and then not thinking of that.
The boy set his chewed pencil with a click sullenly down. Pulled the textbook into his lap and curled two hands over the top corners. The espresso machine roared, steamed off.
The door banged open in a gust of cold air and the old man stamped in. He scraped his shoes twice on the mat. The boy saw his own watery reflection swing into view in the door, his tight black hair cut short to the skull, his nose and lips small in his wide face. His mother often told him he had his grandfather's face but he was not so sure. He was ten years old and short for his age but his narrow shoulders and compact arms were strongly built and he was not finished growing.
The old man met the boy's eye and the boy looked away.
What can I get for you? his mother asked.
The old man stood six and a half feet if anything. His skin was grey, leeched, and in his old greatcoat he loomed over the boy's mother like some terrible figure from nightmare. His voice dry as old leaves.
Coffee, he said. Just a small coffee.
Then reached deep into his left pocket and withdrew a lean brown billfold. His knuckles were red with the cold. The boy could see very distinctly the old man's silver wristwatch and the hour hand where it pointed to twelve o'clock. The big brass clock on the wall read ten past nine.
The woman hauled a rack of steaming mugs from the dishwasher and set it clattering to cool. She looked at her son, thought of him that morning and of his quarrel with his sister. She could not recall why they had fought. His sister was sixteen. She supposed that was reason enough.
Then the door banged open, an old man ducked in. With his white hair and grey skin and pale clothing he might have been covered in dried clay, so grey and ghostly and strange was his pallor. He was very tall and made taller by his reserve. Only his eyes were dark.
Just a small coffee, he said gruffly.
And reached down, took his change, nodded to her. His fingers were callused and cold. When he was gone she stood a moment with one dark wrist pressed to her brow watching the space where he had been and then she grimaced and smoothed her skirt over her thighs. Her torso was ribbed and sexless like a dancer's and she was proud of her thinness after two children.
I'll be checking that, she called across to her son. Don't think I won't be.
The boy glanced at her then again down at his math book. He was sitting at the table beside the electric fire. It was a narrow coffee shop she owned but the windows were tall and blue in the early blue light. The red leather couch behind him gleamed.
I don't see you writing anything down, she said. You better have one heck of a memory.
He blew out his cheeks, picked up his chewed pencil. He picked it up very slowly.
It was then that the woman realized the old man had left his billfold standing open on the counter. Shit, she muttered. And glanced quickly at her son to be sure he had not heard. Mason, she called to him. I'll be right back honey.
He looked up.
Someone forgot their wallet. I won't be a minute.
I can watch the counter.
She snorted. You just tell anyone who comes in I'll be right back.
In the square outside she found the old man with his thorny hands clasped in the small of his back and the coffee held there by its lid and his greatcoat bunched up under the elbows. He was stooped, peering down at a window display where a mobile of a clown in a circus tent turned lifelessly. The leaves of the big oak tree rustled in the square behind them. In the street the traffic was slow and the stoplights swayed though there was no wind.
Someone in the crosswalk was shouting. The brake lights of a truck flared.
You forgot this, she said. Feeling the cold through her shirtsleeves. Sir? She touched his sleeve softly and he turned, startled, peered down at her.
She held out the billfold. You left this on the counter.
He took it. His fingers touched hers.
And just then something, a tremor, shuddered up from under her feet. Something in her stomach pitched and rolled and the old man caught her elbow with his left hand.
Are you alright? He was holding her elbow and his grip was gentle.
I'm fine, she said. She was not certain that she was. She shook her head. He was looking at her, waiting, and suddenly she blushed. You didn't feel that? Just then?
What?
She stepped back and scraped the toe of one shoe over the cobblestones as if to get her bearings. The cars in the street poured past without slowing. She felt light-headed, strange.
God, she murmured. I haven't felt a tremor in years, not since I was a girl. Then peering up at the old man looming pale and spectral in that light she added, My dad and I used to feel them all the time. Earthquakes, I mean. He said they were good luck if they came in the morning.
She did not know why she had mentioned her father. Perhaps it was the old man's voice, low, crackling, like a tire driven slowly over crushed rock. She heard her father in it.
He was from Trinidad, she added. I guess they reminded him of home.
But the old man just cleared his throat and frowned and cleared his throat again.
Well, he said. And after a moment, as if he did not know what else to say, he said, Well. Thank you for the wallet.
And he nodded to her with one hand held to his heart, a gesture from another time, and he turned away.
When the old man entered the tobacconist's he did not at first see her and he called a greeting into the gloom. She was in her shirtsleeves, sweeping out back. She pulled on a brown cardigan and walked slowly to the counter and propped her broom behind it. The old man's head was not clear and he shook it slowly thinking still of the fainting woman in the square outside. He set his coffee on the counter to cool. The tobacconist was peering up at him through her bifocals as if he were an inventory to be checked.
You alright Arthur?
He swallowed and nodded. I guess so, he said. I guess it's just one of those mornings.
I know how that is, she said.
I brought you something.
He reached into his greatcoat pocket and withdrew a small photograph and handed it across without looking at it.
What is it?
He nodded at it. Have a look.
She took up the photograph and held it out in front of her as if at something she dreaded to see. Then very slowly she smiled. Is that me with Callie? Where did you find this? She glanced up at him but he said nothing and she stared again at the picture. We must've been down at the breakwater. Look how young we were. What were we doing down there? She set the photograph upright in a slat between the keys of her cash register. He had said nothing and she glanced at him now. You always thought there were more secrets than there were, she said.
Well.
It drove her crazy.
She turned then and took down a jar printed Carib Special Blend and measured out and bagged and weighed and wrapped in paper the loose black tobacco. She had been a model for his wife's sculptures and later a friend and when he saw her now he saw a door that was closing but was not yet closed. She was ill and rarely left her chair behind the counter and the old man knew that one morning the shop would not be open, and what that would mean.
Anything else? Her eyes flicked down to a stack of papers beside the register. She waited with a finger curled above the register and the old man shook his head no.
I think I already read that one, he said.
I suppose at our age not many surprises are left, she said.
I wish I was old like you're old. I'd be running marathons yet.
Go on.
The old man smiled a little, the wrapped tobacco caged in his open fingers. He turned his face and studied the street outside but made no move to leave and the tobacconist took up a cloth and wiped at the counter.
He said instead: Aza? Did you feel something a minute ago? Just before I came in?
Like what?
I don't know. Like an engine starting up underground.
She looked at him a long moment. You mean like an earthquake.
No. Yes. I guess I do.
She shook her head. It's got so I don't even hardly notice them anymore, she shrugged. My mother lived here eighty-nine years and she swore she never felt one. That's just fine with me, I say.
I hear they're good luck in the mornings.
Tell that to the broken dishes.
The old man smiled again.
In the yard behind the shop a dog was barking and barking but it fell suddenly silent.
The sunlight thickened.
A slow spackled dust was drifting in the shafts of light above the door and the mobile was turning faster in the display window. The old man closed his eyes. Opened his eyes. His legs were trembling. The tobacconist was still speaking and there was no sound and he watched her mouth and then all at once there was a great roaring in his ears. Car alarms along the street began to screech. The glass jars were rattling. Then his knees buckled and he grabbed at the pitching countertop, he looked out in time to see a car leap in the street beyond and the asphalt crest like a wave and then like that it was upon them.
He felt it in the small of his back, a sort of shiver. As if the cold teeth of a zipper were swiftly undone down his spine.
His fingers began to ache.
It came on.
It came on and pulsed shuddering up through the woman's feet and knees and up through her hips and ribs and the woman where she stood leaned pitching in it like a figure in a storm. The café countertop rippling in her grip like so much ribbon in a wind.
The cups and cutlery were rattling in the shelves. And it came over the boy in a roar and he reeled where he sat and the heavy table bucked and the walls began to sway.
Mom, he shouted.
Through the glass he could see the oak thrashing the cobblestones.
A crack sundered the drywall and dust sifted down and glass jars were shattering around the tobacconist where she had fallen to her hands.
The café ceiling flexed and sagged and flexed and sagged.
And her son staring at her terrified and the light fixtures blooming and dimming and then the storage room door behind the counter was banging shut and banging shut again.
Stay here, the old man was shouting. Don't move.
Mason, Mason, the woman shouted.
The old man crawling past the overturned shelves cut his hands on a shattered frame and his fingers fumbled at the door to the basement. The floor billowed under him and he leaned into it with a hand on the trim, the pipes in the walls groaning. The door opened onto blackness, a dry dust smoking up out of it.
The café air thickening with drywall dust.
Mason, his mother was shouting.
Then the old man stood in that door frame with his hands held to either side as if to hold that building upright through his strength alone. He could see the tobacconist screaming at him. The blood from his upraised hands was dripping warm into his shirt cuffs.
Then the floor buckled and the boy could hear the hardwood ripping apart around him and he breathed deeply in the dust and sawing heat. Watching from the great distance of his heart the window glass clouding over as if rimed in ice then pushing out into the street.
And all of this silent, slow.
Glass. Exploding into the sunlight.
The woman grabbed her son, pulled him to the storage room doorway. She held him there. She covered his head with her arms and she held him.