Nobody Floats It This Time of Year - Part Two: 2026 (1)

The old man in the last room on the medical floor at Lowder Memorial had not moved since the deputies came up.

He lay on his back under three heated blankets with the side rails raised, a clear line running from the back of his hand to a bag on a pole beside the bed. His hair was white and long and had dried the way the creek had left it, pushed back off his forehead in one direction. The skin of his face had gone fine and loose, like paper that has been wet and dried again, and it was spotted brown at the temples. His mouth had fallen open a little. Under the window the radiator knocked twice, stopped, and knocked again. Past the glass there was only the black of the trees going down the slope toward the water.

The two deputies stood in the doorway with the night nurse between them and the hall light behind, so that their shadows lay across the foot of the bed.

"Nothing we can do with it," the older one said. He had his hat off and turned it slowly by the brim. "Sarge says no crime, no evidence. It's not against the law to be old and wet."

"Not against the law to be on the creek, either," the younger one said.

"I didn't say it was."

The nurse stood with her arms folded over a cardigan she wore on top of her scrubs. She was in her fifties, broad through the shoulders, with reading glasses hanging from a beaded chain and a pen clipped at her collar. She was looking past them at the chair under the window.

The bag sat there where someone from the ER had set it. It was an old leather bag of the kind doctors used to carry, with a hinged mouth and two straps and a black cane buckled along its side under them, the leather gone black with water and dried in places to a pale crust. A ring of damp had spread from under it into the vinyl of the seat.

"So that stays," she said.

"Stays with him. We looked. You're welcome to look." The older deputy turned his hat. "Some kind of costume in there."

"What kind of costume?"

"Clown or something." He thought about it. "It's got stripes."

"Smells like a pond," the younger one said.

"Everything he come in wearing smelled like a pond."

"Fella running trotlines found him at the county landing yesterday morning," the older deputy said. "Raft hung up on the ramp. Logs and old boards wired together. You seen it?"

"I've been in the building since seven."

"It's down in your ambulance bay. Nobody knew where else to put it." He looked at the man in the bed. "Still wet underneath. You'd think it would've dried by now."

The younger deputy had his thumbs hooked in his belt. "We ran him against missing persons," he said. "There's nobody that old in it." He looked at the bed. "Only one anybody ever lost off this creek was that boy from Ohio. Put in at the landing store eight years back and never come out. He'd be in his thirties now."

"Look at him," the older deputy said. "Let it alone."

For a moment nobody said anything. Down the hall a call light chimed once and quit.

"And that?" The nurse nodded at the nightstand.

The phone lay there in a clear plastic case gone cloudy with age, a cord wound around it many times and knotted. Through the plastic showed a foam grip stuck to the back of the phone, the kind sold to keep one afloat, faded to a pale orange and cracked across the middle.

"Out of his pants pocket," the older deputy said. "Sarge wants paper on it before anybody goes in it. Find out who he belongs to. Somebody'll be back for it tomorrow, or the day after."

"It's dead anyhow," the younger one said.

They put their hats on in the hall. "Night, Joanne," the older one said, and she listened to them go down the corridor with their belts creaking, and the elevator open and close on them, and then the floor was quiet except for the radiators.

She walked up to the nurses' station. Half the long tubes in the ceiling were dark to save on the light bill, and one of the ones left burning buzzed and stuttered over the medication cart, so that the hall ahead of her came and went. The brightest thing on the floor was the drink machine against the wall, humming, its front lit white and red. In the cabinet under the counter was a copier-paper box with LOST + FOUND on the side in marker. She set it on the counter and went through it: a pair of reading glasses with one arm, a single earring, a paperback with its cover torn off, and a knot of charging cords. She worked the knot apart with her fingernails, holding each end up to the light of the drink machine to see it. The third one fit.

Back in the room she picked at the knot in the old cord until it gave, unwound it from the phone the way she would have unwound a bandage, and pried the case open along its seam. It was dry inside. The phone was an ordinary phone, some years out of date, its glass unbroken, the cracked grip still on its back. She knelt with one hand on the nightstand for balance, found the outlet behind it, plugged the phone in, and laid it face up beside the water pitcher.

Nothing happened. She waited on one knee. After a while a thin red mark showed on the black screen, held there, and faded out.

"There," she said to the man in the bed. "Somebody's going to want to call you."

She got up by pulling on the bed rail. The bed alarm was clipped to the rail beside his hip, a gray box the size of a deck of cards. She pressed the button on it and the light didn't come on. She pressed it again. Then she took the pen from her collar, wrote ALARM 21 on the back of her hand, tucked the top blanket in under his feet, and went out, leaving the door open a hand's width the way they always did.

The radiator knocked.

The old man opened his eyes.

He lay looking straight up at the ceiling tiles. Then the shaking took him. It started in his hands on top of the blanket and went up his arms into his shoulders and his jaw, a fine hard shudder that rattled the side rail against its catch. He turned his head on the pillow and saw the IV pole standing beside the bed against the dim of the doorway, tall and thin, with the bag hung near the top of it and the light from the hall showing through, and he jerked away from it so hard the line pulled taut at the back of his hand.

He stayed like that, turned from it, the hand with the line in it drawn up against his chest.

Then he looked at the window, at the black of the trees beyond the glass, and he kept looking. The shaking came over him in waves, and slowly the waves came farther apart. Behind him on the nightstand the phone's screen woke, showed its red mark, went dark, and woke again.

He turned his head toward it.

---

He reached for it with the hand that had the line in it, stopped, and reached with the other.

The cord was short. It held the phone down near the outlet, and he had to roll onto his side and work himself to the edge of the mattress, against the rail, to bring the screen close to his face. He pressed the button on its side. Nothing happened. He pressed it and held it, his thumb shaking on it, and after a long time the screen went white and showed the maker's mark and went black, and then it lit.

It asked him for a number. He put his thumb to the glass and it skated off. He tried again, slower, one figure at a time, and on the second try the screen opened.

He found the videos. There were a great many of them, in rows, small and dark. The first showed a building with a tin roof. He touched it.

The landing store came up in late afternoon light, the roof gone copper-brown, the drink machine under the eave, BAIT ICE TUBES leaning downhill across the block wall. The sound came out of the speaker small and flat: an engine ticking as it cooled, a crow somewhere. He laid his thumb on the line under the picture and drew it along, and the store slid away, and the slope of red mud went by, and the pale peeling trunks of the sycamores, and then the creek.

He let it play.

The creek lay wide and brown-green with leaves turning on it. The picture tipped down toward the water and found a pair of feet in river shoes standing in the shallows, and then it swung up and around, and there was a young man's face against a sky gone pale green, his cheeks pink with the cold, grinning into the lens.

"It is six-oh-four p.m.," the young man said. "It is Halloween."

The voice came out of the little speaker quick and warm and close. The old man's hand jerked, and the phone knocked against the bed rail. He held it there. On the screen the young man went on talking, his breath going out white, and laughed at something he had said, and the old man watched him laugh with his own mouth shut.

He drew his thumb along the line again.

The picture went gray, then darker. A long tunnel of white light opened in it, a headlamp's light, with moths swimming in it and trunks going by on both sides, and then a pale lattice of steel standing across the dark. A pier came up out of the water. Rust ran down the concrete in long stains. Above a narrow ledge, a heart had been sprayed in white paint gone gray. A wet hand came into the frame and bent a glow stick until it cracked, and shook it, and it lit green.

"So you guys can see where we've been," the young voice said.

The green light went up in a little arc and came down on the ledge and rolled against the wall.

"That's the thumbnail right there."

The old man stopped it. The frame held still: the pier, the gray heart, the small green light lying on the ledge. He looked at it for some time. Then he drew the line on.

Gray light now, the phone's own, weaker. Leaves crawling on black water. The pier came up out of the dark again, the stains, the heart, the ledge, and the glow stick lying on the ledge where it had stopped rolling, still burning. The picture shook. Under the hollow roar of the water, close to the microphone, a breath went in and didn't come out.

He drew it on.

The same pier. The same gray heart. The ledge bare. The picture tilted up into the dark under the deck, shaking, and the gray light reached a little way into it and gave out, and above that, at the rail, a small green glow hung in the air with nothing under it. The rail stood behind it. Beyond the rail was empty sky. The glow moved. It came out over the rail, slow, and lower, out over the water, and out of the speaker came a sound from the young man that had no words in it.

The phone was shaking in the old man's hands, and the picture shook inside it.

He drew the line almost to its end.

Black. Trunks close together, gray where the light touched them and gone where it didn't. Leaves near the lens. The picture lurched and climbed, and branches came across it and were shoved aside, and under everything there was breathing, fast and hard, and the scrape of laurel, and once a fall, the screen full of wet leaves, and then up again.

The trees thinned. The picture came to the edge of them and stopped, and held on more trees, black trunks with the gray of the phone's light spread on the leaves in front of them.

"Hey," the young voice said. It came out hoarse, and cleared, and came again, louder, out of the little speaker into the dark room. "Hey. Help. Can you help me?"

Nothing on the recording answered. There was the breathing, and the leaves under his feet, and nothing else at all.

The old man's lips moved. They shaped something small against his teeth and stopped.

On the screen the picture rose, as if the arm holding it had been lifted, and held on trees. It held a while. Then it dropped and swung and settled, pointing down, and showed the ground: packed dirt, a few leaves, a pale circle of light laid on it that jogged a little with each step. The steps went on for a time. Then they stopped, and the circle lay still on the dirt.

It stayed that way a long while. The breathing went on. Then the circle thinned and grayed, and the dirt was gone, and the screen was black, and the clip was over.

He lay with the phone against his chest, the cord pulled tight to the wall. His hand was still shaking. He turned the phone over, laid his thumb on the line, and drew it back, all the way to the beginning.

 

Next Part:
https://www.abctales.com/story/soulfire77/nobody-floats-it-time-year-par...