Rome

by Matthew Thayer

  I expected the woman to fetch her kids for one last goodbye. That’s not happening. She and Maria have lifted the naked boy, each holding an arm and a leg, and are carrying him into the water. Watching them work together it would be easy to think they were sisters or friends that had known each other forever. Trust.

  Now the boy floats between them as the mom cups water in her hands to give him one last washing. Scanning the surface for shark fins, I notice they have timed the outgoing tide pretty good.

  After one last shake of a finger and final pearl of wisdom, the mother has given the body a gentle shove toward deeper water. This is some sad shit. Why am I the only one with tears in his eyes?

  After floating on the tide for a minute or two, it looks like the body has been caught by the current and taken under. Maria has put an arm around the woman’s shoulders and turned her toward shore.

  Time to log out.

  TRANSMISSION:

  Kaikane: “How’d you know what to do?”

  Duarte: “I didn’t.”

  Kaikane: “What?”

  Duarte: “Babe, I was winging it.”

  From the log of Maria Duarte

  Chief Botanist

  Boj-Koj and her kids have joined Paul in the clam beds at the far end of the beach. Borne on the light afternoon winds, snippets of the children’s chatter and the mother’s gentle prodding reach my ears as they help Paul procure tonight’s supper by digging in the wet sand with sticks.

  Two days have passed since the funeral. Our patients are nearly recovered. Mild scurvy, malnutrition, a few infected cuts and splinters, thankfully their problems were easily treated. The mother thinks the sudden turnaround was magic or a feat of medicine, but there’s nothing like rich food, clean water and rest. I’ll not take credit for remedies that date back to the dawn of mankind. She’s fortunate the sea kelp native to these waters is not only sweet and tasty, but also rich in vitamin C. Paul delivers kelp by the armful and her kids gobble it like candy.

  The trio has also managed to put serious dents in our gathering bags. They’re not shy about rooting through our belongings. Funny how our big hurry to stock the canoe and sail east has been unexpectedly paused. We are actually going backwards in terms of preparation. And I could not care less. The old Maria Duarte would be pacing the beach, fretting the clock, worrying about things over which she had little control–and missing out on what a beautiful day it is.

  What difference does a few days or a week matter in the grand scheme of things? The boys probably think we’re out on the island working our butts off. We only planned to gather for a few hours before paddling back home to do the smoking and curing. Everything we cure here gets eaten, which is great. It warms my heart to see the little ones eat.

  It has also been refreshing to make a new girlfriend. Though Boj-Koj and I may not be able to share long conversations, we have nonetheless formed a bond during our short time together. She thanks me for helping with her dying son’s funeral and for nursing her little ones back to health. I roll my eyes and shrug my shoulders to let her know it was no inconvenience, that she would have done the same thing for me.

  My relationship with Paul puzzles her. That he spears fish and turtles, nets crabs and lobsters, brings home a bloody piglet rich in fat is all very normal. But when his hunting turns to gathering, when he lowers himself to prepare food and clean the campsite or, heaven forbid, eat at the same time and place as the women and children, her concept of social structure is turned upside down.

  “What is he doing here?” She asks. “Why won’t he leave us alone? Is he one of those men who wish to be a woman?”

  Paul’s behavior inspires many questions. As best I can, I explain that in our clan men and women often work together. Sharing duties is not uncommon. “Our men like to hunt and fight and rut,” I said, “but there is no shame in gathering nuts and mushrooms, or cooking a meal every once in a while.” I could tell by the lines on her forehead the images were difficult to process. She’s a quick study though. Boj-Koj barely batted an eye the next day when she took Paul up on his offer to babysit.

  She and I spent hours roaming the beach, sifting through millions of shells to collect tiny blue ones for necklaces. At her insistence, we limited our search exclusively to one particular type of bivalve shell, sky blue like her son’s eyes and about the size of one of his little fingernails. Half of the blue shells littering the beach were intact, and half had a hole bored into their middle by a predator intent on eating the flesh inside. These holes are common. Everyone knows they make shells easy to string, but Paul and I have never worked with the blue shells. They’re so small and thin we made the mistake of overlooking them.

  After we collected 2,000 or more, Boj-Koj took my hand and led me toward the shade of a carob tree where we would be out of sight of Paul and the kids. Unwrapping her woven fiber tunic, spreading the garment on the ground, she anchored its four corners with stones before pouring her haul of shells in the middle. With a playful push she motioned for me to add mine to the pile.

  Taking my hand again, she pulled me into the sunlight and up the face of the sand dune to where tufts of sedge grew in the lee of the wind. Leaned by rough times, her muscles were ropy, well defined. Her small breasts may sag from nursing three children, but her tight butt is something girls in the 2200s will pay good money for. All day, she seemed to do a lot of touching and feeling, running her fingers through my hair. As we walked hand-in-hand to the top of the dune, I was beginning to wonder if she was trying to put the moves on me. Thankfully, once we found the sea grass she was looking for, she got down to business.

  “See this grass?” she asked. “Worthless. No good. Bad. Necklace break after only one moon.”

  Twenty feet away she found a tuft of grass that looked almost exactly the same but held amazingly different properties. Pulling a pair of stems free, she rolled them together in her palm to make a simple twine. Handing me the string, she challenged me to break it. I pulled until my hands nearly bled without success.

  “This good for necklace. Good for tools and clothes. Hard to find.”

  She showed me the difference between the two plants that are always found together and are always ready to trick the fool who makes a net or traveling bag with the wrong one. The strong-fibered grass has alternating dashes of green up the sides of its stalks, while the softer plant, which evidently has medicinal properties, features uniform green stripes. You never know whom you’ll get a botany lesson from.

  Paul and the kids had wandered down the beach looking for us when we finally returned to the shade of the ironwood.

  “I didn’t know what happened to you guys,” Paul said. “I was getting worried.”

  “Just collecting sennit for our necklaces. Here, try to break this.”

  “Wow, strong.”

  “We’ll get some more later. It might come in handy.”

  “Roger that.”

  Boj-Koj and I spent the rest of the afternoon sitting in the ironwood needles stringing shells. She was happy to share fiber with her kids, but they had to collect their own shells. She wouldn’t part with a single blue beauty.

  After you string 100 or so of the blue shells, you begin to see what makes them so special. You notice how the edges are lighter in color than the middles, and how they line up to shimmer like opal snakes in the sunlight. It was slow, painstaking work, with nearly every delicate shell needing to have its hole gently reamed to make room for the string, but the time seemed to fly by.

  Paul and the kids grew bored and wandered off to throw stones into the surf and dig holes in the sand. Paul would make a great dad. He’s so patient and good-natured. Let’s face it, he’s a big kid himself.

  The sun was close to setting and we could smell the tuna Paul was baking far down the beach as we strung our final shells. Tied off, my necklace was a bit longer, while hers was more uniform and beautiful. Comparing the two, I could see where I had strung a few shells facing the wrong way. It was still pretty, but
not as pretty.

  Feeling a hand on my waist, I turned toward Boj-Koj. Slipping her necklace from my hand, reaching up, she placed the perfect blue oval around my neck and held my gaze. It only took me a couple seconds to realize I was supposed to do the same. Never taking my eyes off her, I lowered my necklace over her head and arranged it so it rested symmetrically.

  Pointing to my chest and then her own, Boj-Koj said words I did not recognize, but there was no mistaking their meaning.

  “Sister. You are my sister. I am your sister. We are sisters.”

  I couldn’t help but cry. What are we going to do with these people?

  TRANSMISSION:

  Duarte: “She reminds me of my cousin Rucella.”

  Kaikane: “I don’t think you’ve ever mentioned her.”

  Duarte: “We weren’t close. Rucella and her parents didn’t emigrate. They stayed in Portugal. Though we communicated throughout our childhoods, I only met her in person one time. My father and mother took me back to the old country when I was 11. Rather than crisscrossing the land visiting everyone, they hosted a reunion at a seaside resort where we stayed for two weeks.

  Kaikane: “Sounds expensive.”

  Duarte: “Insanely. There must have been 250 family guests for the final weekend. My papa could be such a stubborn, prideful man.”

  Kaikane: “I thought he was a cheapskate.”

  Duarte: “Oh, he was! He hated to spend money.”

  Kaikane: “What’s he doing renting out a hotel for half of Portugal?”

  Duarte: “It was his solution to a family drama. Papa inherited, by name, a family property outside Lisbon. It wasn’t much, just a few acres of dry land atop a hill at the end of a winding road. All that was left of the failed olive farm was the ruins of a burned-out barn and an old wooden farmhouse without power or water.”

  Kaikane: “Sounds like my kind of place.”

  Duarte: “After we emigrated, Father was having a hard time renting it out so he started allowing family members to use it for vacations and parties. After a while they came to consider it their own. Papa tried to start charging rent to cover the taxes and that turned into a fiasco.”

  Kaikane: “Families.”

  Duarte: “As a little kid you’re out of the loop. I didn’t know how much turmoil was going on. I mean, I felt the tension between my aunts and uncles, but I didn’t understand why there was so much backbiting, so many arguments in Portuguese.”

  Kaikane: “He sold the farm out from underneath them?”

  Duarte: “Yep. Care to guess what he did with the money?”

  Kaikane: “Sounds like he had a party.”

  Duarte: “A big one, at the beach.”

  Kaikane: “He spend it all?”

  Duarte: “Every last Norte Americano.”

  Kaikane: “So you and your cousin Rucella, you two have a good time?”

  Duarte: “We had a great time. Remember how easy it was to make friends when you were little? You know each other for a half hour and already you’re best buds. She loved the outdoors as much as I did. We hiked and went beachcombing. There were no shells to find, of course, but we looked for colorful rocks and interesting pieces of plastic and driftwood. We even found some slivers of sea glass.”

  Kaikane: “Is that what reminds you of Rucella, hunting shells with Boj-Koj.”

  Duarte: “That, yeah, and also how quickly we hit it off. She’s an interesting person, a survivor. I wish we could communicate better, I’m sure she has some stories to tell.”

  Kaikane: “What happened to her husband?”

  Duarte: “Nothing happened to him, the shithead.”

  Kaikane: “What do you mean nothing? Where is he?”

  Duarte: “North. He left with the clan.”

  Kaikane: “That’s cold-blooded.”

  Duarte: “Tell me about it.”

  Kaikane: “Your aunts and uncles enjoy the party?”

  Duarte: “Father waited until Sunday afternoon after they had run up their bar bills and trashed their rooms, to tell them this was his way of sharing his inheritance. They thought he was going to give a toast when he stood up and explained they would find a locked gate and new owners the next time they tried to visit the olive farm. When they complained, he shouted that instead of saving the profit for his own daughter’s education, and therefore being forced to listen to them piss and moan for the rest of his life, he spent it on the party. “Poof, it’s gone,” he said, snapping his fingers. “I hope you enjoyed it.”

  Kaikane: “Did they?”

  Duarte: “We had to leave early. There was a riot.”

  Kaikane: “Sounds like one of my family’s parties.”

  From the log of Paul Kaikane

  Recreation Specialist

  As river crossings go, today’s was one of the easiest and most fun. I don’t know if it was because the kids enjoyed it so much, or all the excitement at the end, but it was a good one.

  Maria and I got up a couple hours before dawn to sneak off and shuttle a kayak to the northern side of the Tiber. While we were at it, we did a little recon of potential landing places and found one of the main camps where the Mammoth Killers have been bunking lately. It had good fires going, including a line of little ones dotting a path across the mudflats to the river. Man’s territory. As long as we timed the crossing to land there, we wouldn’t have to fight any wolves, cats or water buffalo to get ashore.

  I paddled downriver and along the coast with Maria balanced on the bow of my kayak–lying on her belly with her butt in the air. I love that view. We didn’t talk much, just sort of watched the day take hold. The sun wasn’t up yet and it was already hot as hell. Winds were calm, the tide was on its way out and there were some pretty little waves peeling off the point when we got back.

  “Don’t you dare,” Maria said as I dug for the second wave of a set. “Just hold on, babe.”

  I caught the roller way outside, in a perfect spot. It must have carried us a good 300 yards, even gave us a couple tubes to shoot through. The wave had great shape, the best I’ve seen on this coast. It just kept breaking, pushing us across its glassy face. The beach was coming up fast when Maria started to freak out. She didn’t say anything, I could just tell.

  The shorebreak was kinda gnarly, but no real worries. Maybe I was showing off a little as I waited for the last tube to finish before turning the boat hard and angling it up the face and over the peak. Letting it pass underneath, we rode the back of the wave onto the beach, way up onto the sand, only a few feet from the clump of bushes where I’ve been hiding the boats. As I expected, Maria got a kick out of the ride.

  “That was awesome,” she said as we slid up onto the sand. “I see why you like surfing so much. It feels good!”

  “That’s the negative ions.”

  “What about them?”

  “They make you feel positive.”

  “Huh?”

  “You’ll have to look it up, I’ll probably get it all wrong. It’s been a long time since I wrote a report about it in high school. It’s something about free radicals. Remember that band, the Free Radicals? They have something to do with it.”

  “The band?”

  I thought we talked about this before, but Maria doesn’t forget stuff so I explained what I remembered about how breaking waves release negative ions, which are really good for you, way better than positive ions.

  “Well, we got a nice dose then,” she said, moving close and wrapping me in a hug. “That was the longest ride I’ve ever had. Thank you.”

  “Thank you?”

  “Yeah, thanks for not putting us face-first into the rocks or snapping the kayak in half on the sand. You may make it look easy, but my heart was in my throat the whole time. That wave was 10 feet high!”

  “Six feet, tops.”

  “It felt like 10.”

  She started messing with my loincloth and, as the characters in those romance books in my computer say, “one thing led to another.” I guess you could call
it a “quickie,” but our roll in the sea grass was so intense and felt so good, the tingle in my groin stayed with me for the rest of the day. How cool is that?

  The mother was already up when we rounded the point holding hands. She had the fire banked for cooking and a row of puffin eggs lined up just the right distance from the embers. Taking a good look at us as we settled back into camp, she laughed. Pointing at me, she cracked some jokes I didn’t understand completely, but were probably along the lines of “It’s about time!” or “I didn’t think you could do it!”

  Just because we keep our intimate moments private doesn’t make me any less of a man. Does it? What’s she want me to do? Knock my wife to the ground and screw her in the sand while the kids watch? We’ve seen worse.

  The eggs were eaten and we were still hungry, so the kids and I put the shells into one of my traps and used them to catch a fat eel. We were going for crab so the eel was a real bonus. We drizzled the last of our honey down the length of the four-footer as it barbequed over the coals. Man that was good. Nobody said a word, not even the kids. All you could hear was moaning as we stuffed the sweet, oily meat into our mouths. So tender!

  The chore of squaring away a campsite for the next guy has not caught on in the Paleolithic, especially for a camp as makeshift as this one. Generally, Cro-Mags hunker down for a few days or a week, then just move on to the next place. If the next jerk wants to claim your lean-to and sleep in your crap that’s his problem.