“Bellefontaine,” Chad said. “That sounds like Beulah.” He waited a moment, thinking maybe Sharis hadn’t heard him. “Bellefontaine?” he said again.
She was crying. Chad scooped her up and sat them both down on the bed. He stroked her hair and said that he was sorry. In an odd way, he thought, these were his happiest moments.
“WHAT ARE YOU trying to do, exactly?” Kelso the guard asked, looking at Tuuro wedged upside down in his cell.
Tuuro told him about Dakwon walking on his hands.
“I could stand on my head once,” Kelso said. “When I was about twelve. Come on, I’ll unlock you and you can practice out here.”
They shoved the chairs and table and TV aside in the common room, leaving a bare patch of wall against which Tuuro could lean.
“I’ll hold your ankles,” Kelso said.
Fortunately, Kelso caught Tuuro before he crashed. “Try it again,” Kelso said.
DAYTON’S MARCH 1913 flood was also known as the “Great Flood.” There were earlier floods, but this one changed things. Dayton made the front page of the New York Times. Dayton’s downtown lay just south of the confluence of rivers where the first settlers landed. There was a levee to protect it, but the levee was too low.
The Indians had warned them.
Twenty feet of cold and coursing water. Horses swimming frantically in the current. Houses and railroad cars washed away. People scurrying to their second floors, to their attics, to their roofs. Gas lines breaking; explosions; fires.
Before the water overtopped the levee, before dawn, John Patterson—the corporate paterfamilias/maniac who ran National Cash Register, his jail time postponed by an appeal—walked the south levee of the Miami and saw trouble. He summoned his executives to an emergency meeting at 6:45 a.m. The name of their company, he said, was to be temporarily changed from National Cash Register to Dayton Citizens’ Relief Association. The mission of this new company was to help out people who would soon be driven from their homes. His executives (you can imagine, Chad said) were startled. Glances around the table, bitten lips, a timid Sir, is that really our job? Isn’t the levee still holding? Patterson said, “This meeting was not called to discuss the issue.” He ordered his company to start making bread and soup in the company kitchens, to tap the company wells for drinking water, to send employees out to buy up clothing and staples, to build rowboats big enough to transport six people. “Start turning out the boats within an hour,” John Patterson said. He designated a company building to be the flood relief headquarters, with floors for a hospital, a maternity center, a dormitory, and a laundry.
By 7 a.m., when the water first came over the levee, John Patterson’s meeting was over. Evacuation, food, and shelter: the man had planned it all. And it worked.
“SON,” CHAD SAID. Howard looked back at him over the top of Chad’s car. “Tuck your shirt in.”
Howard scowled and tucked. Fourteen, Chad thought. Three years older than this clown, and I married her.
He didn’t lock his car (he never locked his car), but for a fraction of a second he visualized a clear shield flowing around it—radiant, protective—which Chad always thought of as bondad. Why he thought of a Spanish word instead of “goodwill” he didn’t know, but bondad was what he thought. He had never had a thing he owned stolen, not from his house or his car, and Chad believed this was because of bondad. He wished ill of no one, and in consequence no one hurt him.
A good heart and a plan.
Bondad, his old apartment mate in college had said. Sounds more like bonehead.
There weren’t that many cars at today’s game. There weren’t that many cars in Dayton, period. Consort’s unreliability had made recharging cars a problem. And selling a car to ship to a more stable part of the country was a handy source of cash.
“Maybe I’ll bring Leon to the next game,” Chad said as Howard trudged behind him.
“Yeah, right,” Howard said. They both knew Howard’s brother had no interest.
Chad had been coming to watch the Dragons play baseball all his life, dating back to Fifth-Third Field and a friendly dragon mascot named Heater. His parents had hired Heater for one of Chad’s birthday parties. Chad and his father had been part of the steady fan base that transformed the Dragons from Single A to Triple A baseball. Chad had had Dragon seats he called his own in three different stadiums, all in downtown Dayton.
It was a hot evening, and there were empty seats around them. Chad scored the game on his perc. “You want to do this?” he suggested. “Picks up your interest in the game.” Howard shrugged. “Here,” Chad urged, passing his perc to his son, but Howard let the thing almost drop from his hand. Chad made an exasperated face and checked Howard’s response: his little eyes (Sharis’s eyes) glared back from under a thatch of hair. Howard’s hair didn’t so much grow from his head as sprout, reaching a critical height and then toppling over. The rest of his face was doughy and unformed, but his eyes gave some hope of intelligence.
Chad didn’t know how he’d ended up with two such different sons. Howard was as lumpy as Leon was spiky. Chad fretted about both of them. He could imagine Howard spending his life oozing from one chair to the next, and Leon having to be grabbed by someone to sit down for a moment.
“Look at the arm on that catcher,” Chad whistled.
Maybe he should talk to Howard about his weight, set up a schedule of exercises for the two of them together.
Howard said, “Can I get a hotdog?”
He was much too big. Little Leon’s body was ropy, while Howard’s body didn’t have a single muscle visible. I wasn’t that big as a child, Chad thought.
“If you’re truly hungry,” Chad said.
The hotdog did make Howard happier. “Leon can’t eat hotdogs,” he said in satisfaction, because Leon’s front two teeth were missing. Howard scored two innings himself, noting that the Dragons’ pitcher always seemed to get behind on the counts. “I’m impressed you noticed that, Howard,” Chad said. “Now, let’s see if you can tell me what he’s throwing.”
Chad was concentrating so hard on the pitches he didn’t notice the faint throbbing from the sky. Shadows were darkening the field before Chad looked up. “What the …” he said, and there they were, maybe twelve helicopters, painted shiny white and nearly silent, a dense formation over the field. Hot air stirred by the rotors, the smell of exhaust. A small American flag on each fender, like a tattooed side of a buttock. Chad glanced at the crowd around him: everyone was staring, mesmerized, into the air.
Chad would think later: the shadow of a dark wing over the field.
The pitcher stopped. He dropped his arms to his sides and craned his neck and looked up like everyone else. The baseball dribbled from his hand onto the mound, and although Chad thought fleetingly that the runners on second and third could legally break for home, no one on the field moved.
Not again, Chad thought, thinking of Sharis’s stories of the Gridding.
“Poison?” Chad had said. Sharis (fourteen-year-old Sharis!) was seated across the picnic table from him, one hand shielding her eyes from the sun, telling him about the Gridding. Chad’s brain had been blank, besotted, and then it was clicking as madly as a Geiger counter. “Your father mixed up poison for you?” Chad repeated, thinking he’d misheard.
“Char!” Howard was whispering. “Oh man, char! This is the charrest thing I’ve ever seen!”
“They’re army helicopters. Hopi Hellions,” Chad said.
“He always said the government was going to come for us,” Sharis told Chad. “That was his guaranteed way out.”
“Where are they going?” said