by Frank Owen
‘Some vacation, huh? You two must be kaput. So, I was thinking, there’s one of those shelter points about an hour from here – old hotel. That sound good? They’ll fix you up and then you can get back home, take your own sweet time.’
Buddy was no idiot, thought Vida. He could smell the trouble on his passengers, and he wanted to get rid of them, saint or no saint. She clutched the bag tighter, feeling first for the plastic sewing kit, then for the scissors inside.
Panic bloomed in her throat. The blades were gone.
She turned, and in the glow of the dash lights she saw the silver blades glinting in Dyce’s hand, half hidden by his sleeve.
‘Hey, Buddy. Could you turn this up? I haven’t heard this song in forever,’ said Dyce. He leant in close.
6
Norma was asking whether Felix needed to phone someone, her pink face scrunched up in concern. Instead of saying, No, everyone I know is floating face-down in the North Platte, he took the coin she gave him and sloshed over to the payphone in the alcove between the men’s and the ladies’. The plastic pod smelt like turds and burnt wiring, but he wasn’t there to picnic.
He turned the coin over in his hand, like treasure. It was an old twenty-five-cent piece with a picture of the Lincoln Memorial on the back. The year and the slogan had worn off with all the handling over the years, but Felix knew what it would have said: IN GOD WE TRUST. That hadn’t worked out too well, now, had it? It was strange to see what had endured, with or without the help of the Lord. They were using these coins before the War started, and that was a good forty years back.
He picked up the receiver, not expecting a dial tone. But there it was, like magic. He dropped the coin into the slot and then dialed the only number he could remember. He’d dialed the damn thing about a thousand times from his parents’ phone in those tense few days before the War.
It rang. He half expected his old landlady, Mrs Bishop, to pick up and he’d finally get to ask the questions he’d wanted to ask all along. How’s my shop, Mrs B? The stock still there? And Dallas? You seen my baby cat?
He shook his head. It was like he still had water in his ears. All that was a lifetime ago. Mrs Bishop, the cat, the shop with the big-ass, eighty-pound TV sets – they were all gone to dust.
The phone rang and then clicked off. Coin didn’t come back, neither. Wasn’t that always the way?
‘No answer,’ said Felix when he got back to the table.
Norma held her head on one side, and her chins bunched together. She came to a decision.
‘Now, I don’t normally do this sort of thing. But you look like you could use some help, mister. Isn’t that what the Good Book tells us? Help your neighbor?’
It was love your neighbor, Felix was pretty sure, but he didn’t want to interrupt Norma in full flow.
‘Well, I reckon you could use a little neighborly help.’
He waited, trying to look unthreatening.
‘I don’t usually invite strange gentlemen back to my place, but you can have a shower and get yourself cleaned up, and then we can decide what we’re going to do with you.’
‘Ma’am, I could do with both of those things.’
‘Well, saddle up, cowboy. I can sweep this place out later. It’s not like the customers are exactly beating down the door.’ She pulled a face at him.
Norma’s car was parked around the back of the diner, between two dumpsters and under a sign that said STAFF ONLY. It was a rust-colored Muntz, though the badge had long since fallen off, another pre-War relic, patched and maintained meticulously, but not new. But Jesus Christ! A real car! It was the old stuff that kept on working if you treated it right, Felix thought.
The giraffe was still there, standing on a front lawn, undisturbed, chewing the high leaves of a cottonwood. The creature paused as if it felt his stare, and turned its bumpy spotted head toward the road, jaws masticating all the while, slow and unblinking. Fuck me, thought Felix. Damn thing looks like it belongs here!
‘You never seen a giraffe before? Don’t they have them in New York?’
‘Not when I was a boy, though I can’t say what-all is going on up there now,’ said Felix. ‘Too cold for them there, I always thought.’
Norma sighed. ‘Oh, my husband used to love this thing – called it Gemma. Used to leave fruit on the roof for her, can you believe it? She’s partial to oranges.’
‘What changed his mind?’
‘Oh, nothing.’ Her mouth jerked at the corners. ‘He passed over.’
‘Oh,’ said Felix. Part of him wanted to say he was sorry, but he wasn’t – not about the death of a Northerner, one death among the hundreds of thousands.
‘They don’t usually come into town like this, but Gemma’s half tame, plus everyone’s been evacuated.’
‘What about you? You also free-range?’
‘I’m stubborn. And I’m two hundred and fifty pounds. They couldn’t make me leave if they tried. Get in.’
He did, trying not to look as if it was unusual, but inside he felt like a kid at a funfair. A car!
She eased the vehicle back and then began a practiced slalom out of the parking lot to avoid the largest bits of the storm debris. The tires crunched over glass and sticks and Perspex. The heater began warming up as the revs climbed, and the hot blast of spicy potpourri and diesel tickled Felix’s nose and made his skin ache. He located the source – a sticky little bottle she had dangling from the rear-view mirror like a fetish.
He wasn’t prepared for when she wound down her window and let a gust of storm-clean air into the car. It circulated high up, and for a moment he sat motionless, fighting the urge to hold his breath, or to tell her to close the goddam window.
Fresh air!
He would have to reprogram himself after the years of hiding from the wind and the sicknesses it brought. He closed his eyes and took in the air in tiny sips, picturing the mushroom spores in his system doing their hopeful work. The antivirals were working so far: if the pneumonia hadn’t taken him in the night, then something was on his side. Maybe old dogs learnt new tricks if they had enough to lose.
Or if they had a mission – and a limited time to do it.
As the houses began to flash past, Felix relaxed against the upholstery. He felt as though nothing had changed, that the War hadn’t happened at all. He imagined Norma as his ageing trophy wife, fattened up on the money from his TV empire; they were off to a grandkid’s birthday party where he could find a corner to drink Wild Turkey until the screaming got too much and he could blame incontinence and escape. And it would all be normal. That was all normal here.
The engine thrummed under the backs of his thighs. They passed house after house, still standing but marked by the storm. Felix expected homeowners to be out and about, moving around, taking off the storm shutters, or standing with their hands on their hips, surveying the destruction. The town was empty – not even a man bent over the remains of a garden shed dispersed like matchsticks.
Norma said, ‘It wasn’t as bad as we were expecting. They were calling it the Hundred-Year Storm. Thousand-Year, more like. Lucky, huh?’
Felix nodded. ‘No looters,’ he said, and the disappointment swelled in his chest. The carnage had been a chance to get rid of everything – the whole stinking mess that they called the First World, the ragged South but also the glorious North, the world and his wife. Start over like the Garden of Eden, without the snake Renard.
And now that chance was lost. The man upstairs had missed a trick there, Felix told himself.
‘Not a lot of people left to do the looting. We may be poor, but we have learnt to work together, mister. Crime is down in Saratoga, would you believe it. And that’s down from hardly any at all since the War ended. You got to look on the bright side.’
Felix sniffed and Norma shot him a sideways look. His nose was streaming at the chemical smell of the expired freshener, but he was too embarrassed to wipe it. Don’t look like a hobo, he told himself. He concentrated instead on t
he houses that hadn’t fared well. An old honey locust had lost its biggest branches when it came down on the roof of one house across the street. The yellow leaves were fluttering like tape at a crime scene, and the wooden attic struts poked at the sky. Norma slowed, and he saw the pale tiles scattered like teeth on the swampy grass. She sucked the air in through her own dentition.
‘Didn’t see that on the way in. Hope the Schermbruckers got out safe.’
‘Where is everyone living? Are there collection points? Refugee camps, I guess?’
‘Sure. Churches, schools, the town hall. Further north, outta harm’s way. How come you don’t know this stuff?’
Felix shrugged and stared out of his window. ‘I been busy. And you can’t always trust the news.’
Stop asking so many questions, you old fart! You’ll give yourself away.
Norma was pulling into the muddied driveway of a peeling house, which had been sky blue when it was new. Below the dermis was the dirty white undercoat – and below that Felix could see the red bricks like open flesh, pockmarked by storm shrapnel. But the bones of the house itself looked okay. It would take more than a natural disaster to wipe out places like Saratoga. Towns were made up of their buildings, thought Felix, but there were other things that kept settlements functioning, things both older and newer – the land on which the buildings stood, and the people who lived in them.
The front door before them had also swollen from the pooling rain and Norma had to lean her shoulder against it to force it open. It was dark inside, mildewed with the history of the family who had lived there. Felix thought of spores, of the breeding they could do in these perfect conditions. Maybe the flood could do some good work for him after all.
Norma showed him to a bathroom, outfitted in tiles they used to call avocado. She gave him a towel and then set out some of her dead husband’s clothes on the lid of the green toilet – boxers, chinos, a Brooks Brothers shirt, a sweater.
‘He wouldn’t mind,’ she said, and winked. The clothes looked like a decent fit: Mister Norma must have been Jack Sprat. ‘And now I got to go and sweep that diner out. If you’re still here when I get back, I can make you some dinner. Make yourself at home.’
‘This is mighty kind of you, Norma,’ said Felix, and he found tears prickling at the corners of his tired eyes. ‘Mighty kind.’
He watched her leave the house. He was alone again, but this time it felt good.
When he turned on the shower, the water sputtered through the nozzle, and for a moment he expected it to be a dribble, or else the color of blood, like a haunted house in a horror movie. But then it came down in a hot blast, and he stripped and stood under it and cried. He’d spent his life cursing the North for taking all the big things away – family, purpose, dignity, health – but as he stood in the warm, deliberate water, with the sugary oil of the donuts still coating his blistered mouth, all the million small comforts he’d missed over the years began to leak back, pattering down on him.
‘Fuckers!’ he shouted, and thumped at the shower glass with his palm. His own voice startled him, wet and hoarse and croaking with age, and it made him come back to himself. When he assessed the damage, he saw that his violence had barely left a mark in the streaks of soap scales.
Ashamed, he got out of the shower and dried off. He found a pink razor and shaved. Then he looked in the mirrored cabinet for a first-aid kit and patched up the grazes on his neck and hip.
‘You bony fuck,’ he told his yellowed reflection. He took two painkillers, bright red capsules that were hard to swallow, but he had forced down worse things in his time.
He held the clothes up against his body: they looked like they’d fit okay – better than his own, anyway – and they were, by Jesus, dry. He tucked them under his arm and stepped out of the bathroom.
At first he didn’t see the man who had been standing in the passage, dark and tall.
Felix looked up. He fell backward, by instinct, catching his sore hip on the bathroom door handle.
‘You Felix Callahan?’ the man asked. ‘I’m asking for a friend.’
7
Dyce aimed the scissors and did the calculation. He’d need to be quick – one stab at the base of the brain. Stab hard. Then the really dangerous bit, which would be getting hold of the steering wheel before Buddy pulled the whole speeding wagon off the road. He braced himself for the act, willing himself to be more like Garrett. Buddy kept talking, telling him about blues and country, and how they were both the same thing, two sides of a sad coin.
He couldn’t do it. He slumped back, his heart beating fast. Vida shifted across the seat of the truck and rested her head on his shoulder, her hand holding his – for comfort and for restraint, to keep it from finishing what he’d almost done. If he’d really wanted to murder Buddy, there would have been no way she could stop him. She was hurt, and he was too strong for her.
But he’d stopped, hadn’t he? And that was Vida’s doing. They both waited, the knowledge silting down inside them.
What if there was a better plan?
Dyce took a deep breath. It was Garrett’s voice he sometimes heard in his head. He closed his eyes and there was his brother, smiling like a dick, Bethie’s ghost there too, leaning up against him with her arm twisted around his waist, three fingers tucked into the top of his jeans. What if there’s a better way, little brother? Was there a way to turn Renard’s viruses against his own people? Give him a taste of his own medicine? Dyce forced the image of Garrett and Bethie away and pictured himself, legs dangling from a hillside water tower, looking down on a nameless city as the people below coughed and faltered and stank of the death that hung over the place.
Not revenge, not really. Justice.
That vision, of the necropolis, was no exaggeration. The first time it had happened, he and Garrett and their mom and dad had watched in terror and disbelief. Then, over time, as the post-War negotiations failed, they’d been forced to hide away for good, like gophers or earthworms or the spores of a terrible blight. Even as kids they had been taught to cover their mouths and noses until it was second nature. There were some days when they only lifted the flap of a breath-moist neckerchief to eat or drink. Or vomit. He felt the road smooth beneath him as the pickup raced along. Had they really lived that way for so long? Constantly washing their hands and boiling their water. Climbing trees, scanning horizons, reading the winds and their hundred ways to die.
Dyce couldn’t say if the memory of the beginning was his own. He had been two years old: he didn’t know how much of it really had happened. It was an inherited familial flashback, a coagulation of all the conversations and condolences, the things about that day that had been said, and the things that no one could say because there weren’t the right words.
The family was staying the weekend with Gracie, who was an old friend of their mother’s. Gracie was a War widow already, getting paler as she got older, the deep blue rings around her eyes making them stones thrown in a well. Garrett and Dyce could not imagine her having any other life before they knew her.
Their mom wanted to see Gracie to make sure she was okay. ‘You don’t know how long anyone’s got, and she’s lonely there,’ she told their dad when he huffed about the gas and the wear on their Dodge Dart. They’d driven down from Leadville – Mom, Dad, Garrett and himself – an hour’s drive, the furthest they’d ever been, through landscapes they didn’t recognize. A mission of mercy, she told their father, but what she meant was that they would have some respite from his moods.
At first they had all been real grateful that Dad had escaped conscription, but then the months turned into years, and he began to understand that he had been excluded from the most important thing that was going to happen in his lifetime. ‘Boys, history is being written,’ he told them, over and over, his breath beery and his grip too hard, ‘and I am watching it from the sidelines.’
Gracie was going to make them meatloaf the night they arrived. It was a celebration, and spirits were high with
the end of the War in sight. The South had been making good progress, pushing the Northern soldiers back. Southerners knew not to celebrate a victory before it was signed and sealed, but they’d fought for so long that even the rumors were good enough. Only an act of God could stop their progress. The bottle of wine Gracie kept high on a shelf was opened, the extra few dollars forked out for ground beef. Real meat! Gracie had paid for it the day before, but without a fridge in her apartment, she’d asked to leave it at the store until they arrived.
When they got there, she slipped out while their mom was bathing Dyce and Garrett and their dad was showering, cleaning themselves up from the drive. Gracie had planned to be back at the apartment and frying an onion by the time they all emerged from the faded guest room, smelling of precious soap.
The onion was chopped – Mom found its pale diamonds sweating on the plate beside the scratched-up frying pan – and Gracie had opened the wine to let it breathe, a red-striped cloth resting over the top to stop the bugs. They sat on Gracie’s sofa, the kids squeaky-clean and grinning, their dad between them, scowling at Gracie’s verses on the walls. THEY WHO SOW THE WIND REAP THE WHIRLWIND, said Hosea 8:7. FEAR NOT, FOR I AM WITH YOU. That was Isaiah 41:10. Mom had sat down too for a while, across from them in Gracie’s slanting wicker chair, but when her friend hadn’t come back after half an hour, she grew anxious and got up to look for little chores in the kitchen. She chopped the onion finer, unsure of what else might be helpful. She wiped down the counters. It was only when she was rinsing the cloth at the sink that she looked up out of the window and saw what was happening to the people outside.
One woman who has dropped her shopping bags in a coughing fit is nothing to write home about, and two is a coincidence – but as she watched, everyone in the scene began spluttering and holding their chests.
She held her elbows and said, ‘Carson.’
‘What?’ He was scratching at his stubble.
She was trying to speak quietly, but the tension in her voice made them all pay extra attention instead, like the time when Dyce had nearly drowned in the bath when he was a baby.