THE LAST TIME a stranger had set foot in Dust was fifteen years earlier, at the turn of the millennium.
Betty Lovell, of nearby Crum, West Virginia, had accepted the 2000 Census Bureau job after the Crum Post Office was forced to close, leaving both her and her husband unemployed. It would be easy cash, or so she thought. She tucked the census documents into her husband’s pleather briefcase, hopped in their rust-riddled ’83 Ford Escort, and made the five-mile journey up to Dust.
The first residence she came upon was a ramshackle single-wide propped up on cinderblocks in the center of a weedy lot with a few engineless old trucks, two claw-foot bathtubs and one disemboweled toilet.
Some might think twice about approaching such a dwelling, but Betty was born and bred in West Virginia; heck, she and her husband Bob Lovell lived in a single-wide too.
She adjusted her freshly permed hair and brassy makeup in the rearview mirror, before grabbing her briefcase and exiting the vehicle.
Just three short steps from the car, a crazed bloodhound came bounding around the side of the trailer, heading straight for her. The dog’s neck violently snapped back just six inches shy of her pounding carotid artery as she stood there, helplessly frozen with fear. She whispered a quick “thank you” to her savior -- the heavy steel chain lassoed around the bloodhound’s neck -- and hurriedly retraced those three doomed steps back to her car.
As her fingertips grazed the door handle, Caleb Crimm threw open the trailer’s front door. Wearing nothing but a pair of filthy briefs and a bedraggled beard, he pointed a 12-gauge shotgun in the air and fired off a warning shot.
“Hold up der.” Caleb’s lack of teeth further muddled his already incomprehensible hillbilly accent. “You guv’mint?”
“’Scuse me sir?” Betty responded, seriously beginning to regret her decision to take the job.
“I said, you from guv’mint?” Caleb repeated, as he scratched at his nether regions with the tip of the 12-gauge.
Sporting her sunniest bureaucratic smile, Betty replied, “Oh, yes sir, I’m a federal government employee here to take the 2000 cen--.”
A booming gunshot rang out and that was the end of Betty Lovell. The West Virginia State Police never found a body or her car. Rumor had it, Betty had been planning on leaving her husband for years and had finally found the gumption to pick up and move down to the Florida Everglades where her secret penpal lover awaited her. Poor Bob went to his early grave, three years later, swearing up and down that it was the Crimms of Dust who had “done her in.”
Needless to say, the 2010 Census taker erred on the side of caution and skipped over Dust all together, which brings us back to the road sign. “Dust, City Limit, Population 23” should have read more accurately, “Dust, City Limit, Population 1.” That’s right, two days before, every Crimm brother, sister, son, daughter, uncle, aunt, niece, nephew, grandpa, grandma, mother and father disappeared into thin air... except for one, young Caden Crimm, who was slowly making his way down the dusty road.
•••
“I’m gonna be frank with you, Gordon. I’m up shit’s creek without a paddle and you’re the last guy to call on my ‘Save the World’ Rolodex.”
“Rolodex?” Gordon smiled. In his high tech world, finding a Rolodex atop a desk was akin to spotting a dodo in the wild.
“I’ve outlived fifteen different computers, but I can assure you that I will not outlive my Rolodex.” Wilkinson’s firm tone and rigid gaze suggested that the debate had ended and the winner had been decided. “So, I’ve had every government expert and scientist from here to East Poughkeepsie looking at this thing and all we’re getting are shoulder shrugs and head scratches. Not to mention, the UFO nut jobs are all over it since a couple of kids uploaded a damn cell phone video of the blue light in the sky...which just about every news outlet has picked up. We’ve got the area quarantined under the guise of a possible anthrax outbreak, but that’s not gonna hold much longer.” Wilkinson took a final swig of coffee. He set down the empty “World’s Greatest Physics Teacher” mug on the corner of the desk. Gordon discreetly slid a cork drink coaster under it. The kid was thorough.
Gordon began to rock back and forth in his chair. Motion was his mantra and he found comfort in it.
“Gordon?”
“Sorry.” Gordon stilled as he focused on the Lieutenant General’s pleading stare. “I’m not really sure what to say. It just seems so...well, crazy. I know I’m young, but I’ve worked super hard to get to this point and from what it sounds like, you’re not just asking for a weekend commitment. I’ve got some major work in the pipeline -- theories, seminars, books--“
“I get it, wunderkind, believe me, but this is different. There’s a lot at stake. Your country -- hell -- maybe even the world. Anything you request is yours, and that’s coming straight from the top. The president would have come himself, but I thought a familiar face might help seal the deal.”
“I hope you know I’m thrilled to see you and flattered that you thought of me, but you really should have sent the president,” Gordon stated flatly.
An awkward pause extended between the two men, before the Wilkinson’s widening smile broke the tension.
“Ha, got ya,” Gordon continued. “It’s just that, well...I don’t know what to make of all this. Can I have some time to think about it?”
Wilkinson rose from his chair and glanced down at his self-winding 1971 Hamilton Khaki Field watch. “Certainly. You’ve got exactly one hour and thirty-seven minutes to make up your mind. I need to get back to camp A-double-SAP, but there will be a car waiting right outside, should you decide to accept my offer.”
Wilkinson took a few steps toward the door, before abruptly turning back. “Gordon?”
“Yes?”
“I know your father would be very proud,” he said, before making a hasty retreat.
Gordon slumped back in his chair, exhaling deeply. He had always felt the need to please his parents. Even after their deaths, he still weighed their approval in every decision he made. This one was already made for him and Wilkinson knew it.
•••
Gordon packed a few shirts, an extra pair of gray flannel trousers, some freshly laundered cotton boxers, assorted argyle socks and his laptop into his suede carry-on bag.
After a mere moment’s consideration, he opted to leave his Nobel Prize in the care of Caltech. It would be of more use to the university, and would leave the door open for his triumphant return to professorship one day.
He stole one last look around the faculty apartment he’d been living in for the past few years. Bare white walls, minimal furnishings and not a personal touch in sight...well, except for a vanilla scented pillar candle given to him as a housewarming gift by a female colleague; its virgin white wick standing as pristinely as it had the day he removed it from the gift bag. What kind of man can pack up his entire life in five minutes?
Two sharp beeps from a car horn alerted Gordon to the rigid timeline now governing him. He picked up his bag and left his apartment for the last time.
•••
Caden Crimm continued his shambling gait down the dirt road. His vacant stare and dust-coated gaunt frame gave him the appearance of a survivor from some unknown apocalyptic disaster, which perhaps was not so different from growing up a Crimm.
He was tall for his eleven years, despite being malnourished since birth. Caden had made do with so little food that he sometimes chewed old pieces of shoe leather to fight off the hunger pangs. Grandma Boo Crimm often wondered if it was that “ol’ shoe that turned Caden blind.” He had lost his vision less than a year ago, and unbeknownst to him and his family, he was suffering from a plum-sized tumor crowding his optic nerve.
But he had bigger problems at the moment. Two nights ago, every other Crimm in Dust had vanished into thin air.
At first, he thought it was all a big joke orchestrated by Uncle Caleb or Cousin Colton. Uncle Caleb always got the biggest kick out of laying obstacles in Caden’s path and then watching him stumble over them. Rusty bikes, firewood, cinder blocks, old toilets -- you name it and he’d tripped over it.
And Cousin Colton had his own unique game for Caleb that he called “blind and seek.” Basically, Cousin Colton would walk Caden out into the middle of the woods, leave him, and then wait and see how long it would take Caden to find his way home. What Cousin Colton didn’t realize was that when Caden lost his sight, his sense of spatial hearing became far more acute, and finding a Crimm trailer just meant listening for jawin’, shoutin’ and Grandpa C’s fiddle playin’. Caden would sit in the woods for hours absorbing the sounds of nature, before wandering back to the trailer. It was a chance for him to escape the chaos of being a Crimm.
But this night was different. It started with him sitting on the couch listening to his Braille for Beginners cassette on his small portable player and following along in the accompanying book, both gifts from a social worker who never returned after an uncomfortable encounter with Uncle Caleb. He had picked up braille quickly. As Grandma Boo always said, “he be the only Crimm wit’ a lick a sense. The rest of y’all dumber than coal buckets.” He handily mastered the Braille for Beginners cassette and accompanying book and longed for more reading material, which sadly had about as much of a chance of arriving on his doorstep as a scholarship to Harvard. So, he sat on the couch every night and listened to and read the Braille for Beginners book and cassette over and over again.
The night of the disappearance started with a special birthday dinner for fifty-sumthin’-year-old Cousin Cole, featuring Grandma Boo’s famous chitlins. After the meal, the Crimm men migrated to the overgrown backyard where they continued to drink their homemade white dog moonshine well into oblivion. They liked to play a modified version of horseshoes using an old rusty claw-footed tub as the target. Occasionally, a Crimm would end up in the tub trying to catch the horseshoes as they flew in, a game that typically ended in fisticuffs and bloodshed.
With the men out of the trailer and the women busy stacking the dirty dishes on top of the dirty dishes from the previous evening, Caden had the opportunity to escape to the couch. He was right in the middle of his favorite chapter, Five: Whole-Word Contractions Part II, when a sound unlike anything he had ever heard thundered down from the heavens above. When asked to describe it later, he would say, “It done sounded like TV static turned full up, with a licka tornado on top.” The sound persisted for about a minute, and then everything fell silent, dead silent.
He rose tentatively from the couch, imagining that the entire Crimm family was in on the joke. What would they trip him up with this time? One step, nothing; a second step, still nothing. Ah, they were probably all outside waiting to trip him up as he exited the trailer. He walked toward the door, taking comically high knee-steps in order to avoid any obstacles. He opened the front door, distrustfully continuing the high stepping as he descended the two cinderblock steps to the ground below.
“Grandma?” Nothing.