I walk up the driveway toward the truck. The hood is still open, and Jamie doesn’t see me approaching. I say his name and he jumps, banging his head on the top of the hood. He rubs his temple and laughs. “You scared me.”
“Sorry,” I say. I make circles in the gravel with the toe of my boot. “Hey, it’s kind of crazy in there. I don’t think dinner will be ready for a couple of hours.” I shove my hands in my pockets and look out toward the road. “Want to go for a drive?”
He’s quiet for a minute as he pours fluid into a tank under the hood. “We can do that.”
Today Jamie drives south again but soon turns off the Bluff Road. We climb to the top of the bluffs and then turn onto a side road and then down what appears to be a driveway. He brakes and shifts into park.
“Come on,” he says.
I follow him into a small cemetery. The gravestones are mostly old and crumbling, many of them broken in half. The ground is hilly, and angular shadows fall over the graves from the naked tree limbs that hang overhead. Litter is strewn around at the edge of the grounds, beer cans and fast food bags, and I wonder if Jamie’s come here planning to party. I think maybe I shouldn’t have suggested this.
But he turns and looks over his shoulder at me. “Follow me.” We walk past the graves toward a mound of grass. He leads me down the side of the mound, and suddenly the edge of the bluff is before us. We’re at the very top, at the edge, and the bottoms are spread out beneath us, far and wide. A train cuts through the fields parallel to the river. The view is stunning.
“Avery,” Jamie says. “Look at this.”
I turn around. I’m surprised to see a small building, a tomb, built into the front of the mound. It’s old and white and covered with graffiti. Jamie leads me inside.
There are rows of holes where the bodies were meant to be, but they’re empty. Vandals have sprawled graffiti on the walls inside, too, and more litter. “There used to be bodies here,” he says. “But looters broke into the coffins and stole their jewelry, and then a cult pulled the bodies out and burned them on top of the mound.”
“Whoa.”
“Crazy, isn’t it?” He walks back out through the doorway. “I’m glad all that happened before I was around to be blamed for it.” He gestures for me to follow him and walks back up the side of the mound and then out on top of it. I join him, stepping carefully. If I fell off this cliff I’d die for sure.
He nods toward the river. “Can you imagine all this land covered in water?” he asks. I try to envision this. “It happened before. Twenty years ago it was all covered, you know?”
“What about the levees?”
“They can only hold so much water back. They break sometimes, or sometimes the water just spills right over.” He sits down on the soft grass that covers the mound. “Whole towns have gone under water.”
“Wow.” I look out at the wide stretch of bottoms down below. “Isn’t it kind of dumb to live down there, then?”
“That ground is really damn fertile. And most of the time the river stays where it’s supposed to.” Jamie lights a cigarette. “The risk is worth it to the farmers, I guess. It’s the price they pay to use that fertile land. We try to make that land work for us, to take everything it’ll give us. But sometimes it all just gets wiped out.” He takes a drag from the cigarette and blows it up toward the sky.
“You know,” I say, “my dad told me once about these houses that can float. Like, they’re just regular houses, but then in a flood they just start floating.” I squint, trying to make out farmhouses on the land below us. “They should do that here.”
“I don’t know about those houses,” says Jamie. “They’re probably really expensive.” He offers me a drag from his cigarette, but I shake my head. He looks back out over the fields. “I don’t know, I guess it’s nature’s way of keeping things balanced or something. We keep trying to make life easier for ourselves, but if we have it too easy we’ll grow too powerful. Overpopulated—all that. Think about all the disasters that happen. Floods, earthquakes, tsunamis. No matter where we live, something has to keep us on our toes, you know? That’s just what it is to be a human, I think.” He looks over at me. “What do you think?”
I shrug. “Sure. Yeah. Makes sense.” I sit down beside him. “You know, I read once that there are certain things that mostly just exist in certain places, in certain classes. Like serial killers. I don’t know if that’s true, but maybe it makes sense.”
“Yeah, I guess it would make sense.”
“Maybe we make our lives easier, you know, with all these luxuries and technology and everything . . . we have all the things we need like food and shelter, and we don’t have to worry too much about surviving each day. So we make our own problems. Maybe serial killers are another way to keep us on our toes.”
He laughs. “Yeah, you might be right.”
We sit in silence. Another train crawls across the bottoms. The sun creeps up. They’ll be serving dinner soon.
“Jamie,” I say. “So, about my sister. What you said yesterday . . . what were you asking, exactly? What are you trying to figure out?”
He shakes his head. “Nothing. Don’t worry about it.”
I stretch my legs out in front of me. I try to think of something else to talk about, but I can’t let it go. “Tell me, please.”
He takes a piece of gum from his pocket and pops it in his mouth, then offers me one. I take it and fold it onto my tongue. He chews for a minute, softening the gum. “It’s just weird, if you ask me. My mom tells us when your sister goes into the hospital. Your mom calls her, calls everyone. She says the baby’s sick again—seizures, vomiting, diarrhea. She’s not gaining weight, her hair’s falling out. She goes into the hospital and they keep her there for a while until she’s stable and rehydrated and shit. They run tests, try to find out what’s wrong. But they can’t figure it out. She gets better when she’s there. She eats, doesn’t puke, no convulsions. They’re baffled. So they send her home. And then it starts all over again.”