The Narrows(2)

“It’s okay,” Matthew said evenly.

The bat swung around until it nested in a potted plant atop a large metal filing cabinet at the back of the room. Its movements caused the students out in the hall to shriek shrilly and—almost humorously—caused Miss Sleet to hustle more quickly from the classroom.

“Those things got rabies,” Dwight informed Matthew, still slouched down at his desk.

“Not all of them,” Matthew said…though he was a bit discomfited by the bat’s having appeared now in the middle of the day. Bats were nocturnal. Of course, it was entirely possible that the thing had gotten trapped in the school during the night and had simply been sleeping here, undisturbed, until chubby, little Cynthia Paterson had noticed it. It could have been here for weeks, in fact.

Wild and fuming, Mr. Pulaski staggered into the classroom, his janitorial jumpsuit a palette of stains, his wiry, gray hair a frizzy mat on his head. With the eyes of a hawk, he quickly spotted the bat nesting in the potted plant on the filing cabinet. Mr. Pulaski was chewing hungrily on his lower lip and holding a wrench out before him like a fencing sword. Many of the students in Stillwater Elementary were afraid of Mr. Pulaski, and there was no shortage of stories—each one more frightening and implausible than the next—circulating about the creepy old janitor. Once, Matthew had seen the old fellow dump sawdust on a puddle of pinkish vomit in the cafeteria. When Mr. Pulaski had sensed Matthew’s eyes on him, the old janitor had met his gaze—those steel-colored eyes like the burned-out headlights in a Buick—and had held him in it, trancelike. “Might taste a bit different,” Mr. Pulaski had said, his voice like the twisting of old leather, “but it still looks the same.” Then he had winked, sending Matthew scurrying off down the hallway, his skin gone cold.

Now, Mr. Pulaski struck Matthew as oddly comical. Wielding an oversized wrench and peering across the room at the bat with excessive disdain, he suddenly reminded Matthew of Don Quixote, from the book he’d read over summer break: the confused and improbable hero who battled windmills.

“You boys get out of here,” Mr. Pulaski said, referring to Matthew, Dwight, and the smattering of other boys who still lingered in the room, pressed against the tops of their desks.

“Don’t hurt it,” Matthew said.

If Mr. Pulaski had heard him, he made no acknowledgment. Holding the wrench now in both hands, he crept slowly down one aisle of desks toward the filing cabinet, his eyes trained on the small brown husk of vibrating fur clinging to the leaves of the potted plant. Out in the hallway, someone moaned. Matthew thought it was probably Miss Sleet.

A cool breeze whistled through the open window, blowing papers off desks and rustling the Halloween decorations. Tornados of dead leaves whirred to life out on the lawn. On top of the filing cabinet, the bat burst from the plant and carved a clumsy arc across the classroom toward the open window. Mr. Pulaski made a pathetic gah sound as he took a swing at the bat with the wrench, and some of the girls out in the hallway cried out in a combination of nervous laughter and abject fear.

“Holy shit,” Dwight squeaked then rolled out of his desk chair onto the floor, covering the back of his head with his hands. The bat swerved toward him, executing a fairly commendable loop-the-loop, then pitched out the open window. A second later, it was gone.

Mr. Pulaski, who was still in the process of gaining his balance by leaning on one of the desks, stared blankly at the window then over at Matthew. Again, Matthew thought of the creepy wink the old janitor had given him that day he saw him cleaning up puke in the cafeteria. Might taste a bit different but it still looks the same. For whatever reason, eleven-year-old Matthew Crawly was stricken at that moment by an unfounded sense of guilt.

Then the bell rang, signaling the end of the school day, and everyone cried out in surprise.



2



It was mid-October, and the western Maryland town of Stillwater was still drying out from a rainy season that had arrived with the swift and unmitigated vengeance of a Greek god, flooding the Narrows and temporarily darkening the town square. Wills Creek—a slate-colored, serpentine ribbon that forged a valley between two tired mountains and ran along Stillwater’s northern border in a semicircular concrete basin, more familiarly known to the locals as the Narrows—had swelled like a cauldron coming to a boil, washing the Highland Street Bridge into the Potomac and casting torrents of black water down the length of the B&O tracks. The town’s roads had served as conduits, flushing gallons of water through the neighborhoods and out to the farm roads, while at the center of town, shop owners had watched with mounting horror as the level of the water had risen incrementally against the brick fa?ades and plate-glass windows of their buildings. Some livestock drowned and automobiles that hadn’t been repositioned to higher ground flooded. If one were to stand on the circular walkway that circumnavigated the top of the abandoned grain silo on Gracie Street, the destruction would have appeared to be of biblical proportions. It took a full week for the water to retreat completely, leaving behind clumps of reeking, muddy sludge clogged with tree limbs and garbage in the streets. Many houses remained dark for several days more, the power having been snuffed out like a candle in a strong wind. The air stank of diesel exhaust from the litany of gas-powered generators that hummed in open yards. Shop owners were left to contend with flooded storefronts and stockrooms, freezers and refrigerators that were nothing more than coffin-shaped boxes in which goods thawed and rotted. The basement of the elementary school that Matthew Crawly attended had filled with several feet of water that had turned black and oily after mixing with the soot and muck from the elementary school’s ancient furnace. Generators were hooked up and a pumping machine was submerged into the swampy mess, trailing a long plastic sleeve up through one of the storm windows, across the playground and the muddied, ruinous baseball diamond, and over the chain-link fence where it vomited fecal-colored water into the woods.