The Great Big One Read online

  It felt like certain remote forests. Sacred groves left untouched.

  “Old growth,” Leo whispered to Griff.

  Yes. The whole place had that subtle mix of magic, where you might just as easily see a towering redwood as a pair of pixies with fluttering wings.

  “Can’t believe this town keeps a secret this good,” Charity said.

  She touched a shop door with chipped red paint. Thomas cupped his hands to dark glass and peered inside. They talked in low voices, as if afraid they’d wake something, and finally found themselves at the end of the winding road, standing by the moonstruck steel floodgates.

  Shut. Flat, unadorned, pocked with rust.

  “End of the road,” Thomas said.

  “Not for us,” Leo said. “What we want is that way.”

  “We’re not going home?” Charity asked.

  “We’re just getting started,” Leo said.

  The ocean beat its soft drum. Leo snugged the straps of the black backpack and walked.

  They followed Leo back out of town. Buildings broke off to dune grass, parkland, and a generous parking lot.

  “Right there,” Leo said.

  A hulking shape, in the darkness.

  “Giant crab,” Charity said.

  “The half shell,” Griff said. He’d seen it in a photo at Shoreline Gifts. A big band on stage. An audience of white and smiling faces.

  “Let’s get closer,” Leo said.

  “Across that?” Griffin asked.

  Between them and the amphitheater, a moat of industrial wreckage. Broken piles of brick and tile, rusted heaps of rebar. Slick-bellied logs. Plywood split and rotten and fanged with nails.

  “Into the Sea of Tetanus, everyone!” Thomas cried.

  They took careful steps, checking the grip of their shoes. They followed Leo over the sea of debris to what was now recognizable as a stage, and Charity whispered—

  “Wow.”

  “Hello!” Thomas shouted. His voice hung in the air as if suspended. “Check those acoustics!”

  The stage itself was a stew of minnowy cigarette butts, beer can disks, the kind of thick, molten trash that must be cultivated for years.

  “Bro. Just look at this venue,” Leo said.

  Leo’s greatest gift. Where Griff saw trash, Leo saw stacked amps and trussed lighting. The adulation of multitudes, crowds stacked back to the low-water mark. This close, the lighthouse beam felt heavy. Shaped by mist, it wheeled through the sky and struck with a palpable force—

  WHOOMP!

  “We could fix this!” Charity said. Leo’s spark had lit a fire in her eyes. “This whole place. Thomas, you’ve got mad skills. You all do. Imagine if you used your gifts to do something interesting rather than bracing for death?”

  Griff and Leo laughed.

  Thomas started a song. Laid down a beat. They gathered around. Charity hummed with the sound that rose up from deep in her body and began without words and Griff could hear the musical openings for his own voice. Missed bars slipped past like the open cars of a train he couldn’t quite gather the courage to jump. Leo jumped. He sang with a voice Griff had forgotten his brother had.

  “Out here on the water,” Leo began.

  Charity kept her eyes shut, Thomas kept the beat in his throat. Leo sang:

  Out here on the water, I sing the ocean song—

  Out here on the water, we know we won’t be long—

  It struck Griff, the truth that his brother was a better musician. No bitterness. The lilt of a pleasant surprise to hear him sing this way. Soft and sweet, like a chorus just short of its final words. They listened, and he stopped.

  “Go on,” Charity said.

  Leo’s mouth worked around the next few words. Griff could almost hear them.

  “Just messing around,” he said.

  “C’mon and mess around,” Charity said.

  “So,” Leo asked, voice shifting. “Can we all do a show here? Promise? A great big one?”

  “Will you sing the ocean song?” Griff said.

  Leo glared. The comment landed wrong, but Griff meant it. He wasn’t making fun of Leo. No way to make it right now. Leo would swallow the comment deep down and pretend he didn’t care.

  “Yes,” Griff said. “I promise.”

  “Hands,” Leo said.

  “A show,” Thomas said. “Right here. Bright lights.”

  “The best ever,” Charity said.

  They put their hands in a circle. They all said yes.

  “Now,” Leo said. “To the beach.”

  It suddenly made sense.

  The missing piece. Griff connected his brother to the clattering in the backpack to the cassette player to the Ruins and the buoyancy in his heart was caving, because Leo had just beaten him to the summit, and Griff knew exactly which secret of the universe he was about to tell.

  TWELVE

  “WE’RE FISHING?” CHARITY ASKED.

  Wind whipped up on the beach.

  “Yes,” Leo said. “We’re going to catch a song.”

  “You okay?” Thomas asked Griff.

  Griff was not okay. He was tender, shaky, listening to Leo give it all away. Griff had a multiweek strategy for the radio conversation he had started with Charity in study hall. Slowly, he’d introduce her to each fascinating aspect of the Skip. Frequencies, and a quick study of the ionosphere. Next, he’d cover the Radio Spectrum Allocation, breadcrumbing knowledge slowly, he’d use the access he’d painstakingly gained at K-NOW to harness the full electric power of the strongest receiver on the coast to do the most romantic thing in the world—musical treasure hunting! Exploring the dark edge of the world together.

  Leo was spilling it all, right now.

  Like serving a seventeen-course meal all at once by dumping it on the beach.

  “Do you ever notice how crazy radio stations get at night?”

  Charity nodded.

  She pulled out the small red radio. Leo handed Griff and Thomas inferior radios with earbuds. Not even headphones. Charity leaned forward, intent.

  “It’s because AM radio signals behave differently when the sun goes down. The sun electrifies certain layers in the atmosphere that keep signals close to their source. At night—”

  “—astronomical twilight,” Thomas said.

  “Yes. Radio signals can roam all over the world. Everywhere it’s dark. You can hear songs in Russia. Texas. Ecuador. Patagonia. It’s a minor miracle.”

  “Wow,” Charity said. “How do I not know this?”

  “I was explaining,” Griff said. “In study hall.”

  The words study hall landed like a block of wood. Leo plowed ahead.

  “It’s called surfing the Skip,” Leo said. “People do it everywhere. And this is one of the best places in the world. Because of the sea. And the shape of the cliffs.”

  Leo knew for the same reason Griff knew. Their father, walking them down this stretch of beach. Taking them on low-tide hikes to the lighthouse, explaining the curvature of the treacherous cove at God’s Mouth, the ionizing effect of salt in the air, but before Griff could offer information about waves and salt, Thomas was tearing off toward the ocean. Charity ran after him.

  Out past dune grass and sand, low-tide mud flats stretched like the malodorous skin of a reptile’s back. Wet craters, teeming with life: mollusks seamless as stones, open-throated anemones. Proboscises and pinchers. Thomas crouched near a sand-bound boulder. He popped the stone with a low, sucking sound. Beneath it, a confetti of white-shelled crabs. The simmering reflection like a china-plate moon boiled over, racing off sideways—

  “The gift of freedom!” Thomas said. “Run, my crustacean brothers! Do not squander what I have given you!”

  Charity was laughing, they were all laughing, and Leo said:

  “Please listen.”

  Everyone had bandwidth assignments. Leo would take 550 to 900. Charity 900 to 1100, Thomas 1100 to 1400, and Griff had the top of the dial, up to 1600 AM.

  “What’s t
he goal?” Charity asked. “What are we looking for?”

  Leo smiled. “The best song in the world.”

  Charity took off her shoes. Rolled up her pant legs and cuffed them.

  “Put your shoes back a ways,” Leo said. “Tide’s coming in.”

  Griff and Charity walked back together. Set their shoes down.

  It was a rare night, growing warmer as the evening thickened. Winds laid down calm. Salty breeze just balmy enough to seduce you into the bone-shaking cold of the water. They held still. Griff followed her eyes to the tide line. A blazing white rim at the edge of the world.

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  “It’s the coolest thing I’ve done since I moved here,” she said.

  She removed her jacket, revealing her arms, the miracle of flesh between shoulder and wrist. Barefoot, she ran across the flats. Her feet made small, rippling splashes, like skipped stones.

  “Charity!” Leo called after her. “We’re trying to keep the bandwidths together!”

  She banked to the right. Griff followed her.

  “I think she’s already in the deep end, brother,” Griff said, pushing in his earbuds.

  “Griff,” Leo said. “You, over there.”

  He pointed a far and lonesome distance from Charity.

  Nope, Griff thought.

  Leo called after him, then abruptly changed course—chasing something. Griff turned his radio on.

  White noise, like his ear hugging a fan blade.

  WHUMPWHUMPWHUMPWHUMP

  Charity kept going. Did a little leap as a wave knocked into her shins. Adorable. He would just follow her. It was okay to follow her. He walked until the water built to just below his knees. In his ears, a white-noise tumble of voices, notes, a sudden, urgent call—

  “Griff!” Leo was screaming at him. “MOVE! OVER THERE!”

  Griff raised his hand like a visor, like he couldn’t see. Leo was farther off to the left now, too far to stop him. He turned back to Charity. The moon had shed its orange blush and emerged bone white, laying a bright, wobbly carpet across the water. Charity walked the light like a runway and Griff followed—

  In his earbuds, the noise changed:

  WHUMPSSCCCCCRREEEEEEESKREEEEEE

  He fumbled through the noise and into voices—AM talk shows:

  —the problem we’re dealing with here, we know the problem—

  “What have you caught, Griff?” Charity called back to him.

  “Scourge of the airwaves,” Griff said. “White-Bellied Talk Toads.”

  She laughed. “Throw them back! Thomas! Hey! What do you got?”

  “Raaaaaaaaaack Rooooooock!” he hollered from a distance.

  “What?” Charity asked.

  “Rack Rock!” Thomas said. “New Country AM. Racks on women, racks on deers, racks of beers, glad I ain’t queer—RACK ROCK!”

  “Throw them all back!” Charity shouted. Amazing to see her in such joy, leaping the shock of incoming waves, eyes angled on her dial. Determined.

  A sudden, thrilling thought.

  What if Griff caught the song that changed their lives? Long evenings listening in the basement with their father, they’d hooked wild mariachi bands from Texas and symphonies from New York. They’d found all variety of wild crackpots from late-night basement-style broadcasts, hobbyists, truckers, preppers, floods of fifties/sixties pop, torrents of wordless, ear-tweaking static, and never once landed the big fish.

  But tonight!

  Griff planted his feet in freezing water, spread his toes for balance, focusing on the tiny notched dial. Numb to the knees, he teased something from the fuzz. A trumpet! Beautiful horn warbling on AM 1550, and he held on as a woman’s voice joined, soulful words about a mountain town with one road in—

  “Got something,” Griff said.

  The song sizzled and spat like water on a hot pan.

  “What?” Charity asked.

  “I’m right around 1520—” he said. “Wait.”

  Water slapped his knees and his footing shifted, maybe an inch. The song ran. Griff barely touched the dial. Feather strokes.

  “C’mon,” he said.

  White noise thumped, tuneless. Gone. Charity screamed.

  She shrieked. “Oh that’s cold. Ah, I had drums!”

  Tide coming in. Griff’s bare feet hunted for his next step, probing for urchins. In the distance, Leo shouted something. Waved his arms. Griff turned up the hiss and Leo’s voice dropped away to nothing. That easy.

  When he looked back at Charity, she was frozen.

  It happened suddenly. Like she’d been stung. Griff’s training clicked in. He rushed toward her, long lunging steps, shoving through the water.

  “Charity!”

  Water lapped at her thighs.

  In the moonlight, her face was expressionless. Then her mouth parted with a soft sound. He waded closer, tore out his earbuds. Somehow, over the beat of the water, he heard her radio—

  No.

  Her voice.

  Charity was singing.

  The deep, shivery voice she’d summoned in the amphitheater, the one she’d tried out in the Rat’s Nest before Leo scared it away. Full of life and sound and wordless. She sang and saw him watching and blinked, as if woken from a dream.

  “Song on,” she said. “Song on, Griff! Right at 1300—”

  He was very close to her now. A wave rocked them toward the shore, pulled them toward the sea. She grabbed his arm. And jolted.

  “What?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”

  She held on to his arm. Pressure of her palm. She clipped the radio onto her belt and she examined her other hand in the moonlight, like she’d just discovered it. She placed her bare hand on Griff’s other arm and lit up, more than just touching, there was some secret—

  “Find it, Griff.”

  He turned the wheel, shredding interference, and blew past something like a thick bump in the sound—a crackle of voices, instruments. He wheeled back slowly, and white noise suddenly stopped. The signal deepened like the bold blue water dropping off the far edge of a reef. The silence was profound. Remarkably clear, then he heard them:

  A band.

  A freezing wave struck his thighs and he was engulfed in strings, bass, percussion—there must’ve been dozens of them playing—a wild, soulful orchestra. Charity sang along. The music on the airwaves assembled around her voice, like they’d carved out a piece in the beat and melody just for her. She held Griff’s arms in a strange embrace, like she might shake some sense into him, or pull him into a ferocious kiss, and she said—

  “Touch me, Griff.”

  “What?”

  “Touch and listen.”

  Griff’s arms felt mechanical, devices he no longer knew how to maneuver, fat fingers fumbled the radio into his back pocket, taking care not to touch the dial. Voices coalesced into a chorus—

  You’ve got to find them—

  You’ve got to find them—

  “C’mon,” she said, eyes hungry.

  Griff reached up his left hand and cupped the curve of Charity’s bare shoulder. Strings surged. Her skin, conductive. Louder. He touched her bare arm. Horns wailed and she whispered—

  “Yes.”

  He did not know he was pulling her closer until she was coming closer and when her thigh touched his and she shivered he lifted his arms and her body fit just perfectly pressed to his chest and both shaking, sharing the shiver and the song swelled, pulled from the airwaves and into their bodies—

  Splashing. Movement—it was Leo.

  “What are you two doing?” Leo asked. He looked frantic.

  Charity guided his thumb to the song. Then she held his arm to make the music surge.

  “Song on,” he said. “Thomas!”

  Leo’s face went slack with wonder.

  “Oh my god,” he whispered.

  Charity touched Griff’s neck. Griff touched his brother’s arm. Linked, the song swelled larger, and then Thomas joined the huddle, armed
draped around the shoulders, swaying with the ocean—SURGE! They laughed and cheered and they were there, at a show together again. Skin to skin and foreheads close. Hard to look in the eyes of someone feeling so much. Sometimes they broke formation, sometimes they looked away, but the music called closer, closer.

  Leo looked at Griff. The raw, open eyes of a younger Leo:

  “It’s the best band I’ve ever heard.”

  They’d built the receiver.

  Down the coast, God’s Mouth said—HOOM!

  The tide-is-coming sound. The get-to-higher-ground sound.

  “Just a little longer,” Leo said.

  A little longer together in the cold water. We can do it. We can hold on.

  THIRTEEN

  THE NEXT MORNING—HOW WAS THAT EXACTLY? THE FEELING. THE way Griff’s feet fluttered in the bottom of the bed when his eyes opened to the sun and how dust motes twinkled as if on fire. Like being eight years old, the whole world was again a puzzle worth solving.

  Questions big enough to nudge him off the comfortable edge of every known map:

  Who was that band?

  Sitting at the lunch table that afternoon, no one had slept much. Thomas not at all.

  “I can’t eat,” Thomas said, staring at a soggy pile of nachos.

  Charity had gotten into a terrible fight with her mother, coming home late and questionably soaking. Leo and Griff had searched for some of the band’s lyrics in vain, then fell into a late-night debate on sound propagation, wavelengths, and electromagnetic voice phenomena that caused them—around 4 AM—to crack into the TOE Box together and make the bleary late-night determination that they might have experienced a mass hallucination.

  Thomas was taking a more deliberate approach.

  “We need to piece together every lyric, every song, every refrain,” he said, “so we have something to search. Then we need a recording.”

  “I’m an idiot,” Leo said.

  “Why?” Charity asked.

  “I didn’t bring a single tape,” he said. “We could’ve recorded the band.”

  “Ugggh,” Charity said, head in hands.

  “With a recording,” Thomas said, “the world opens up. We can do digital fingerprint scans, acoustic profiles—”