A Righteous Wind Read online

  At her office Christmas party last year, the first for Shelton since he’d been out of work, Elaine’s co-workers and spouses, usually friendly with Shelton, tried to avoid him. He couldn’t open his mouth without saying something sarcastic, even while trying not to. His face had become frozen in a smirk. He flopped on couches and in chairs with his boots up on tables and finally, angry at everybody for ignoring him, he pulled his black western hat down over his eyes.

  And what was Elaine’s reaction to his behavior?

  She walked over to where he was sitting and kicked him under one knee with a pointy-toed stiletto. Then she grabbed his hat from over his eyes and sailed it like a Frisbee across the room.

  She had been dressed in shimmery black and fake diamonds that didn’t look fake on her.

  Everybody quit talking and laughing except Elaine, standing before him with a half-full glass of champagne.

  “Now get over yourself,” she said with a mocking toast and a hideous laugh that marked the beginning of the end to his self-pity.

  Chapter 9

  Morning brings no change, not even emotionally. Shelton thinks, as he walks back across town, that time alone—this is the fourth day if he is recalling correctly—should have helped to ease the shock.

  The weather is the same, warm and dull without full sun; the dead car jams are the same. Helicopters hover and clatter in the smoky sky. People are still hiding inside their houses and the occasional police or sheriff cars prowl like listless dogs.

  Shelton has left Kim asleep in the bed she shared with Dan. He had slept on a narrow cot in the baby’s room, stifling with baby smell. Before leaving, he had written a note to Kim and placed it on the kitchen table, telling her he would call to check on her as soon as he could recharge his cell when the power came on.

  Last night he had tried to carry on a conversation with Kim, to entertain and distract himself, as well as pick up on some missed clues to what’s going on. Maybe another neighbor had spoken to her, besides the one who had warned her not to go out. But in her slow, lazy way, she had yawned and said yes and no and I don’t know, until he’d given up and let her leave the kitchen and go to bed.

  Finally, he had dropped down to hell in a dream that was pretty-much what he is living now.

  Just past the post office, he is crossing a strangely empty side street, facing the north side of a many-winged gray stone church with a heavy wooden door set in the middle of the wall, when he spies a white police car taking a left off one of the main streets through town. Shelton sprints for the door, expecting it to be locked. It bumps open to a dimly lit vestibule, silent as a vault. He eases into a shadowy corner, tucking himself into it and out of the light, waiting for the police officer in the white car to burst through the door with his pistol drawn.

  Cool and growing more confident with every undisturbed minute, he breathes in the dank air spiced with burned wax and book mold. He hears a vague voice and then somebody coughing from behind another door leading to the west wing.

  Elaborate chairs upholstered in wine velvet face each other along both walls with mahogany tables set between pairs of chairs.

  Shelton decides not to wait for the cop but to move on, maybe find another door where he wouldn’t be expected to exit. He steps quietly along the hall, between the tables and chairs and gently turns the knob on the door—just a crack—where the voice is coming from, peeping into what he now sees is the main sanctuary.

  Maybe ten, fifteen, mostly older people are scattered about on dark wood pews, staring ahead, listening to a speaker hidden from Shelton’s view by a wall framing off the pulpit.

  “Come unto me all who are heavy laden and I will give you rest.”

  He wonders how people are communicating. Maybe like Kim—word passing from neighbor to neighbor.

  He closes the door quietly and walks back toward the door to the street, changing his mind about finding another door for a different exit. He feels like the worst kind of intruder, and too he just wants to get out—outside and back to the reconfigured world of wreckage and smoke where he belongs.

  As he steps through the heavy wood door, facing the empty street, he sees a red sign posted on the door, reading Condemned under penalty of law do not enter.

  ***On the south end of town, sidling along store fronts and backs and ducking between burned and parked cars, he thinks about the security systems in newer cars. The computerized system, from what he has heard, is like GPS in that it knows where the automobiles it services are at all times. Such systems can unlock a door if the driver locks himself out and leaves the key in the car. It can also seize up the engine of a stolen car, leaving the thief locked in till the police arrive.

  Shelton figures that it is possible for the home bases of such systems to have a glitch in their computers and seize up all automobiles it services at once. Now that would explain things, he thinks. Older automobiles without the service would be caught up in the wreckage too. Like Elaine’s jeep.

  He walks faster, feeling better now that he has come up with a plausible reason for the jammed traffic.

  He doesn’t pass through the minority housing settlement to get home. Instead he walks through the woods west of there. One thing, he has to get home to the dog and the goats, but also he cannot think of a single encouraging word to say to the people there, and he for sure doesn’t want to stir up another outburst from the woman they call Sis’ Shirley. Besides, the On Call theory, as he has now settled on naming it, would be too hard to explain, and he doesn’t want to be swayed into even considering the Rapture as explanation and blame.

  Just hearing that crazy woman ranting had bumped the idea to the bottom of his list.

  But say such a thing could happen, say it had happened. Well, he wouldn’t be here, walking through the woods by himself. He would be with Elaine now, rather than out looking for her. Hadn’t he gone to church regularly with her? But really he doesn’t believe all that bunk about a magic Jesus descending from heaven to carry his people, dead and alive, home with him.

  Shelton never believed in the Rapture because he never believed in God. He’d only pretended to believe. His mother on her deathbed a few years ago refused to die till all her family had gathered around her hospital bed. Nobody understood how she managed to hang on with her esophagus eaten up by cancer. Shelton had been away in Costa Rica at the time, looking at a site for his company to build a condo.

  When he reached the hospital in Atlanta, standing next to the bed where his mother, pale as the bed sheets, lay smiling up at him and trying to speak, Shelton had to lean close to hear what she was saying and still he couldn’t be sure. Then she closed her eyes and her head rolled to one side, that smile on her bloodless lips remaining.

  His father and brother were standing on the other side of the bed.

  “She’s dead, Daddy,” Shelton said, looking up at the age-shortened man, who once owned one of the biggest service stations in Atlanta. He still wore his dependable chrome tire tester like a pen in his white shirt pocket. He was always checking air in everybody’s tires and advising them on how many pounds to put in them to save on gas.

  “No,” he said. “She’s sleeping, Shelton.” His tiny blue eyes locked with the brown eyes, his wife’s eyes, of his younger son’s. “What did she say to you?”

  “I couldn’t make it out,” he said.

  What she’d said was “What have you got to be so puffed up about, son?”

  Shelton had been working then and he had been proud of his job. Maybe puffed up even. He got to travel all over the world, sometimes taking Elaine with him, and he was raking in the dough. He had been to Spain, Africa, Italy, Germany and the list goes on and on. He was proud of his degrees from Emory University, in Atlanta. At eighteen, just out of high school, he had applied to the University of Georgia and been turned down because of low SAT scores.

  Shelton had been living at home, the small farm his daddy and mother had bought in Cartersville, north of Atlanta, to get
out of the city and test their independence away from so-called civilization. Both had been raised on farms with vegetable gardens and cows and chickens and they wanted to go back to simple living, which turned out not to be so simple after all. Organic sounds good, Shelton had learned, but try growing vegetables with manure from only one milk cow and waiting for rain to fall in wrecked weather. Try plucking horn-worms and bugs from plants in lieu of spraying with chemicals. It’s harder to go back than to go forward, he had found.

  A week or so after Shelton had been turned down at UGA, he’d come in from milking the cow and sat at the kitchen table and announced to his mother and daddy that he’d decided to apply at Emory. His mother had laughed, really laughed. “How do you think you can get in a private university like Emory if you couldn’t get in at UGA?” His daddy though had offered to pay his application fees, saying, “Well, you sure won’t get into Emory if you don’t apply.” A month passed and there it was in the mail—news that he’d been accepted. Bye bye, farm.

  He thinks now about his mother asking what he had to be so puffed up about and understands that she had meant his lack of humility in a religious sense.

  ***When he gets to the dirt road and home it is about three in the afternoon and he decides his emotions have changed after all because he doesn’t expect Elaine to be there and he feels a little bit happy just to be back.

  He lopes across the road, seeing his old truck with the smoky sun shining through the back and front windshields.

  First off, he heads for the plank bridge to the back door to let the dog out. When he opens the door Dixie dog hops out to the ground, not even bothering with the bridge.

  “Sorry, Dix. Couldn’t be helped.” As he turns around in the kitchen he hears the hum of the refrigerator and the ratcheting roll-over sound of the icemaker.

  Quickly he steps into the living room and switches on the TV with the remote on the table before the couch. He is sitting when the screen comes up presenting the big-eared little head of Selah. Shelton turns up the volume till it vibrates the windows.

  Selah is pausing, speaking serenely to a sea of people in New Rome, according to the ticker tape on bottom of the screen. “There’s a reason for everything and there is a reason for this global disaster.”

  The audience roars.

  Selah holds up both hands for silence, moving his head slowly side to side. “Bad weather everywhere—earthquakes, tornados, avalanches, floods, you name it—has hampered our investigations. But trust me, we will get to the bottom of this.”

  More roaring.

  Selah ’s voice reaches a crescendo, an almost shout.

  “I would like to admonish you to not spread superstitious, religious or apocryphal rumors as some are doing. They only create confusion, panic and despair.” He pauses again, a slow smile spreading across the bottom half of his face, as is his way when a clever line is about to be delivered. “Keep in mind, we have a righteous wind at our back.”

  The sea of people rise and in one voice chants, “Se-lah! Se-lah! Se-lah! Se-lah!”

  Shelton, perched on the edge of the couch, wipes a hand down his pale face, as if to wipe away superstitions churning in his head.

 

  Chapter 10

  While his cell phone charges, Shelton takes a bottle of water and goes out and sits with the dog on the plank across the porch floor framing. He feels numb, has to hold the bottle with both hands to bring it to his lips. Then he feels mellow and satisfied for no reason, except that he now knows the devastation is world-wide, which in no way accounts for his resignation. Yes, resignation.

  It’s okay that over half the porch is dismantled and has been for so long he can’t remember, lying sprawled in the yard. It’s okay that he has no way to go and the world is in turmoil. But it’s not okay that Elaine is gone as if she’d never been and won’t be coming back.

  He is once again considering the Rapture theory. But sorting the reasons why, he doesn’t feel serious. He’s like a ten year old saying he believes in Santa Claus to ensure that his parents will get that bike he’s been wanting for Christmas.

  He had in mind to call his daddy in Atlanta and his brother in Arkansas, when his cell got charged, to see if they are okay. But he’s afraid to now, because if this thing about the Rapture is even a remote possibility, and they’ve been truly born again, saved, as they claimed, they wouldn’t be there. And if his brother’s wife Libby is left behind, like Shelton, as he believes she probably would be, he doesn’t want her to know she’s been right all along about him being heathen.

  In fact, now that he has the charged cell phone, he can think of nobody to call who wouldn’t have been raptured to Heaven, if such a thing is possible, or either left behind, who he wants to know that he’d been playing the Christian for the sake of his wife and his mother, daddy and brother. He can’t call Elaine’s family in South Carolina for the same reason.

  It’s a pride thing.

  The dog rests her chin on Shelton’s leg, as if enjoying the setting moon-like sun through the smoky woods. The goats are satisfied too, full and back to their routine of wandering till they get empty again.

  If it was the Rapture, and Shelton’s not sure he believes that, even as a consideration, over the On Call theory, which he’s grown rather fond of, he thinks there’s something to be said about not having to worry about sinning every time he opens or closes his eyes.

  Then why does he feel so dead inside?

  He flips open his silvery cell, happy to hear the familiar bomb-targeting sound and see the red dot flare into a vee and the little battery image fill up with green bars. He picks out Dan’s number—it doesn’t say Kim—he’s never called her—and listens to it ring.

  “Hello?”

  “Kim, hey. It’s Shelton.”

  Nothing.

  “I thought I’d check in and see if you’re okay and if Dan and Buck made it home yet.”

  “No.”

  He wonders if she’s saying no about being okay or about Dan and Buck not being home.

  “Elaine’s not either. But the electricity is back on. Good, huh?”

  Nothing.

  “I guess you saw on TV they’re working to figure it all out and fix it.” He doesn’t mention the global disaster thing because he thinks it may not make her feel better, as it has him.

  “I saw,” she says.

  He can hear the TV in the background, the swell of voices: “Se-lah! Se-lah! Se-lah!

  “I’ll call you back later. Bye.” He snaps the phone shut. “Nice talking to you too,” he says to the phone.

  While in the considering of the Rapture-theory phase, he doesn’t want to turn on the TV only to hear that maybe the Radio-wave or the On Call theories or the Terrorists-attack theory have panned out.

  So, he stays sitting on the plank even after the sky grows dark and smeared with smoky stars and the dog has gone inside to dream of being left behind by both Elaine and Shelton.

  He’d love to be a dog. So simple.

  The air is cool and strangely free of mosquitoes, and he can hear the lazy shuffling of the goats and smell them ripening on the smoky air.

  He wonders if the vandals from last night will come back and finish off his truck. If they do, if he hears them, he is going after them, or maybe joining up with them because it doesn’t matter, nothing matters. Not even going to bed.

  If the cops come after him, he’ll go with them to jail without a tussle. He’s as well off there as at home. At home without Elaine.

  He starts to call Kim again but doesn’t really want to bother dialing the phone.

  What does he need a phone for now?

  He gets up and opens the screen door and tosses it through the door to the kitchen and it skidders across the cheap beige tiles and the dog on the couch lifts her large brown head and then lets it drop again.

  Okay, if Shelton thinks the phone is useless why didn’t he toss it to the dirt beneath his feet or out to the pile of boards that used to be his
porch?

  He knows why. For the same reason he is going inside to go to bed: hope.

  Chapter 11

  It is now believed that over a billion people have mysteriously disappeared, but an accurate accounting is impossible at this time because of the phenomenal, global weather disaster that...

  Shelton, on the couch, jabs the air between him and the TV with the remote, switching channels.

  A sustainable, dependable peace treaty has been arranged with Israel at last. Jews, always a besieged people, can now live in peace without fear of their Arab-Muslim neighbors. They are under the protection of the World Government, formerly known as the European Union.

  In the background is a picture of the World Leader smiling as he signs the treaty. And on bottom of the screen a ticker tape reels off a phone number beginning with the prefix 888 “for psychological counseling centers in your area.”

  No matter how hard Shelton tries, after watching TV news on Tuesday, he cannot rekindle his spirit of resignation. By turns, he feels dull and faint then too alert, like a bright light is shining in his face. By turns, he rejects and accepts the possibility of a hocus-pocus kind of religious phenomena: the Rapture.

  He wonders if Kim has now succumbed to the Rapture theory. If so, how is she taking it? He has no doubt that she too is watching news. What else is there to do?

  He longs to call her—anybody—but feels too overwhelmed to deal with her terrors, especially as passive as she is. He would be caught up in watching her serious eyes and clamped mouth and imagining what is going on in that head.

  After all, they had both gone to church, the same church, Sunday after Sunday, with Elaine and Dan.

  Yes. Kim is the only person, except John at the convenience store, who knows Shelton didn’t make the Rapture, if that’s what it was. And John doesn’t count because he’s probably never heard of it. And Kim doesn’t count because she wouldn’t talk if her toenails were being plucked out. Besides, she missed the Rapture too. If that’s what it was.

  But at least she hadn’t pretended to be One of the Chosen as loudly as Shelton had. He remembered how she used to stare down the pew at him while he was singing with the congregation. Loud.