The World Itself Departed

by J. B. Beatty

  Not wanting to be rude, I wave back. He looks like he wouldn’t mind us stopping for a chat. I almost start to slow, but Justin says, “Not now. We need to buy a new car.” I accelerate again. I check my rearview and he’s still moving along the road. I can almost imagine him whistling.

  It appears we weren’t the only ones who had the Chevy idea, as all of the monster trucks are gone from the lot. There still are plenty of smaller cars that aren’t going to do us much good. We drive a loop of the parking lot, saying “Nope… nope… nope…” like that. I even say, “Well maybe we just drive a neighborhood and take something from a driveway.”

  “That’s stealing,” says Justin.

  “Oh yeah. And this, we’re signing a lease or are we putting money down?”

  “It’s just easier.”

  Around the back, things look a bit better. We find an express cargo van in the lot for the service department. On the side is painted “Two Guys Plumbing” with a phone number. Inside the service area, we find the keys, and a receipt showing that it was just in for a tune-up and oil change and is ready to go.

  I start the white van up, because Justin wants to be in the same vehicle as Maggie, and we’re not moving her until we need to. She moans her assent. I check the back, which is empty except for a few boxes of what look to be plumbing parts. “It’ll be hard to keep clean, especially if we’re driving a lot of dirt roads.”

  “First world problems,” says Justin, who has pulled up alongside. I start to argue that that is no longer fair terminology to use on the complainers of the world, in that the United States of America can probably no longer claim first world status, given the zombie flu and the virtual extermination of nearly every citizen between puberty and great-grandparenthood.

  “Yeah, you keep stringing words together.” He shrugs and shakes his head. “Just lead.”

  Before we roll out, we load up on gas as well, filling up a few empty containers that we have, and load them in the back of the van.

  On the way back to Camp Attignawantan, I see the Aerosmith guy approaching in the distance. I slow to a stop and call Justin. “I say we check him out.”

  “Why? We’ve got to get going.”

  “Just one reason. If he’s sane and a good person, and he wants to join up, we could use the help. And if he’s not afraid to walk down these roads all alone, I’m guessing he knows how to defend himself.”

  “Yeah but just be careful. He could be crazy. And dangerous. Do you not see that he is an old white guy?”

  “Wow,” I say. “Just wow. The race card?”

  “I call it the ‘stay alive’ card.”

  Yet when we pull up to him, he seems to be absolutely unthreatening. He puts both his hands atop his walking stick and rests his chin on them. “Hey there,” he says. He wears tiny professor-type spectacles and his gray hair hasn’t seen a barber in a while. He has one of those faces that would work equally well on a bartender or a certified public accountant.

  “Where ya’ headed?” I ask.

  He looks around. “I’ve been there,” he points down the road, “so I guess I still need to check things out there,” he points the other direction.

  “You’re not staying any place in particular?”

  “Plenty of mostly empty houses, plenty of mostly uninspiring food. I think this is my new retirement plan.”

  Justin climbs out of the SUV and approaches. He watches the guy silently for a minute and finally says, “How come you’re not afraid of us? We could be the bad guys. We could be gunning for you.”

  The old guy smiles, “I really can’t imagine I have anything you want. The only thing I’m afraid of is crazy. And I can see crazy coming a mile away. If you guys happened to be the crazy ones who just want to shoot everything in sight, you never would have seen me. I can feel it coming. And I’ve hid from it plenty of times in the last few weeks.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “RIP,” he says.

  Justin and I both look at him oddly, waiting for him to finish the thought.

  He shrugs and continues: “Robert Ingelbrecht Pennway. Yeah, I know, sounds rich. It’s a blue-blood name that would be more at home in a country club. My parents had great ambitions for me. Instead I owned a liquor store. Ruined half the livers in Mecosta County. Now they’re dead and I’m unemployed.”

  “Can you shoot?” asks Justin.

  “With confidence.”

  “Okay, look,” I say, scanning the road ahead. “This might seem a little forward because we’ve just met, but do you have any interest in making a trip with us? We’re heading north. We’re taking our friend, who’s in need of some medical help. And we’re looking to relocate to someplace that will be safer for the winter.”

  “Why me?”

  “An extra hand, an extra gun, would help,” says Justin.

  “Plus,” I add, “we’ve not gotten the slightest response to our ad on Craigslist.”

  RIP looks down and smiles. “Well, in the world of business, I’d say you’ve got to sell me on dicey proposition like this. What’s in it for me?’

  “Company,” Justin says. “There’s safety in numbers.”

  “Can you fight? How much danger am I going to end up in?”

  “We do all right,” Justin says. “Our best fighter is the one who’s feeling beat up right now. She was in a truck that got flipped by an RPG. Some guys in Humvees.”

  RIP nods, says. “I’ve seen that outfit...” He looks back down the road, in the direction where he had been heading. Wipes his nose on his sleeve. Slowly, he turns back to us and says, “What’s your end game?”

  “Meaning?” asks Justin.

  “Your happily ever after. Your pot-of-gold at the end of the rainbow. Or as the proud knights would say, what is your quest?”

  “Right now,” I say, “we just want to get Maggie someplace safe. And hunker down for the winter. In the spring, start looking at timeshares on Lake Michigan… or steal a bunch of frequent flier miles from dead people and finally take that European vacation we’ve been talking about forever.”

  “Now that sounds like a plan I can get behind,” he says. “Though there’s plenty of foolish stupidity involved. North is bad. I started there and there’s a reason I’m meandering south. Why are you set on north?”

  Justin crosses his arms. “We’ve identified what seems to be a good place to find the medical supplies we need to help Maggie. We could find what we need probably in any big city, but we’d also find a ton of flu victims also.”

  RIP shakes his head, repeating, “Flu victims,” as if it’s a punchline.

  “We think it’s safer to find those supplies and facilities in a small town.”

  RIP nods, looking like he’s mulling it over.

  “Plus,” I add, “all the planes are flying north. Something must be going on up there.”

  “Oh, something’s going on up there, I bet. I’m just not sure how smart it is to find out what.” He shakes his head again and pounds his walking stick against the ground. “I’m in, I guess. Giot nothing else to do. And I don’t have anything definite planned for another 17 years.”

  “What happens then?”

  He closes his eyes and practically sings, “I’ll be dying in my sleep on a summer night. In a hammock. With an empty bottle of good bourbon on the ground underneath. And lipstick and hickies all over me.” Opening his eyes, he looks at us and shrugs. “We’re all going to take the Big Nap. I plan on taking it in style.”

  RIP climbs into the big van with me, and we head straight back to Camp Attignawantan. He asks why I’m driving so fast. I explain that we want to bug out today, that we are spooked by the Humvee guys, that we’re thinking of sticking to dirt roads on the way up.

  “Not a bad call,” he says. “Those Humvee guys, as you call them, there’s a lot of them. I’ve seen them blasting down the highway a few times. Mostly supply convoys. Once, it looked like they were transporting a family.”

  “How are there familie
s anymore?” I ask.

  “I know what you’re saying, but that’s what I saw. Mommy, daddy, a few kids. And soldier types armed to the teeth on every side of them.”

  “Are they military?”

  “If not now, they were once.”

  “Where are they going?”

  “Dunno. Everything’s headed north. All the trucks going south look to be empty. And yeah… you want to stick to dirt roads. They own the highway, and they’re shooting everything that gets in their way.”

  27→THE SEA-LOVING DANISH KINGS

  We race, but packing up the vehicles takes longer than we had hoped. With the days getting shorter, and not knowing what we’re going to run into on the way up, it looks like a possibility that we won’t get there before dark. If we go too fast, we could all too easily drive right into a trap, I remind Justin. Been there. Not as fun as it sounds.

  We could wait another night, then set out first thing in the morning. Or hurry and take our chances. The decision is difficult to come by. When we look to RIP for input, he just says, “I’m a hired gun. You guys are the capos.”

  We load everything up except for our sleeping bags, our guns, and a couple meals. Maggie, when she’s tuned in, mostly watches RIP carefully. When we’re alone she tells me quietly, “He looks okay. But if he gets crazy, kill him.” I reassure her that I’ll do exactly that. My stomach turns, because I’m not sure I can do exactly that.

  Tonight it’s beans. And yams. And jerky. “This diet’s going to kill me,” says RIP. We mumble acknowledgment while chewing, but he adds, “I mean it. High salt. Not so good for a cardiac condition. Plus, I haven’t had my meds in a while.”

  Justin looks up. “What are you on?”

  “The usuals, Lipitor, Brilinta, Lisinopril. And aspirin, but I’ve got aspirin.”

  Justin goes out to the van, find the right boxes, and returns with three pill bottles for RIP. “Don’t die on our account,” he says.

  That night RIP tells us about his dad, the guy that insisted on giving him the middle name “Ingelbrecht.”

  “It’s a Norwegian thing,” he says. “My dad’s people were Norwegians. Way, way back. It’s not like they still had any trace of the culture or the language. When I was a young man, I remember when ‘The Vikings’ came out, I would think of him because he was always saying we were descended from Vikings. You know ‘The Vikings’? Kirk Douglas? It was a classic. The ending always stayed with me, the Viking chief—his dead body—sailed away on a burning boat as all his people cried. That’s how they took care of their dead back then. ‘You’re a Viking, you know, Robert,’ he would say. ‘You’re descended from fine Viking blood.’ Of course, I guess half of western Europe is, the Vikings did so much raping. That’s where they say all the Irish redheads came from, children of Viking rape.”

  I raise my eyebrows. Learn new things every day.

  “My father was always on to me about being proud of my family. It truly was an important value to him. And I never really got it, because he never talked about his own father, my grandfather, a man I had never met. My grandmother raised my dad, and grandfather was never spoken of. His first name was Ingelbrecht, so I guess I was named after him. But if no one ever spoke of him, how proud could they be of him? Yet I was told time and again to be proud of my family. I think they thought that was the cure, but to what I didn’t realize until many years later.

  “Every time I asked about my grandfather, the subject changed quickly. I was told he died in the war, World War II. You’d think that would be something to be proud of: the Greatest Generation. The young men who defeated fascism. Hah! Only to roll over in their graves when they saw their grandchildren roll out the red carpet for it. That’s how this all started, you know.”

  RIP is angry at the thought, and takes a few minutes to shake it off before continuing.

  “Once I had to do a school report on the war. Some of the other kids were writing about their grandfathers. One wrote about his grandmother, who was a Rosie the Riveter type. Those women were damned important but never got the credit they deserved. So, I started asking about grandfather and what battle he died in and all that. But the subject kept changing. I rode my bike to the war memorial in the park but I couldn’t find his name on it. Not that that meant anything. I realized later that my grandfather had lived in Detroit. My grandmother moved us out to the burbs afterwards. He wouldn’t have been on that war memorial anyway.

  “My father died pretty young too. Not as young as grandfather. But he had some kind of early onset dementia. A lot like your Alzheimer’s but I’m not sure it was the same thing technically. I remember watching “The Vikings” with him. In between that confusion that was always around him like a fog, there were moments I could see his eyes shine with pride. When they shoved Kirk Douglas off in the burning boat, he pointed at the screen. I think he wanted to go that way. When he finally passed away, I wished I could have done that with him. But the funeral director just looked at me like I was crazy. He said, ‘You don’t live far enough up north for that.’

  “After he died I had to go through all the things he had in storage. He didn’t keep as much as some people—he wasn’t a hoarder. But it was a lot, and you could tell it all meant something to him. It was hard figuring out what to do with it all. I kept the wedding photos, that sort of stuff. But I figured my life was complicated enough as it is—I’ve been divorced twice—I didn’t need to make myself a museum for my dad. I ended up burning most of it. And I tried to honor him, show him I was proud of my supposed Viking heritage, by loading up an old wooden rowboat with the stuff, the photo albums and yearbooks and old baseball mitts and whatnot, dousing it all real heavy with gasoline, and setting it on fire in the lake. My buddies and I held up our beers and saw him off in Viking fashion.

  “There were a couple items I burned separately. I couldn’t let anybody see them. I just did not… I simply couldn’t fathom what they were and how I was supposed to live with them. I couldn’t begin to understand how my father lived with them.

  “One box was my father’s. I mean, it looked like he was the one who saved all the stuff. Well, he must have gotten it from his mother, but he included some of his own things in there—there was a poem he wrote to his father ‘the hero.’ There was also his father’s draft notice: the fall of 1944. Right at the tail end of the war. And there was a letter from the commander of the training base he went to. Place called Camp Millard in Ohio. The letter was a condolence note from the commander, saying that my grandfather had died in a training accident. He didn’t even make it overseas so the Nazis could kill him.

  “There was also a copy of a letter from a lawyer that my grandmother had apparently hired. It was a request that the Army explain the condition of my grandfather’s body. When it arrived at the funeral home, it was clear that he had been beaten severely, probably beaten to death. It was no accident. There was a black-and-white photo with the letter. It looked like he had been pummeled with baseball bats. I can’t imagine what they did to him.”

  RIP stays silent, drinks slowly from a bottle of bourbon.

  “I could imagine why,” he then says. “Because the other thing I had to burn was a leather satchel. It had belonged to Ingelbrecht Pennway, my grandfather. His name was engraved on a little brass plate. Probably a graduation present from his own parents. Inside was an album, a scrapbook of sorts. Kind of moth-eaten and mildewed. Inside were newspaper clippings. 1942, 1943, 1944. Detroit. A schoolgirl disappeared on the way home from school in the winter. Black girl… African-American, I should say. The newspaper called her a ‘negro’ girl. Her parents said she was a good girl, always came straight home. She was 11. Only in winter, it was dark when she got home sometimes. Police said they were looking, but back then in Detroit, blacks were maybe 10% of the population. From what I’ve read, the police force was completely white, and probably didn’t waste a lot of time looking for missing black girls.

  “Another article, a few weeks later, talks about her body be
ing found in a garbage can, burned to a crisp. Her possible body, any ways. Back then there was no DNA testing. Maybe dental records? But maybe that wasn’t something they did for a black family. But it said some of her school supplies were found nearby.

  “There were five more girls. That’s what it said in the clippings. The police were always looking, but never had any suspects. The bodies weren’t always found. Five more. At least. And who knows, maybe there were more. In 1943 there were race riots in Detroit. Not something I remembered anybody telling me about. I found out when I was reading about those years. Kind of a foreshadowing of the 1968 riots that everybody remembers. So, it stands to reason that for a serial killer, all the confusion and distraction that the riots caused might have provided cover for more murdering.

  “There was a bag in the satchel, too. Like an old paper lunch bag. Inside were locks of hair. Each tied up with a string. And, it wasn’t white people’s hair. It was black. Black and kind of—I don’t know how to describe it—hard. There were eight of those locks. Eight little girls. Eight families with their hearts and memories ripped out.”

  RIP pours himself another bourbon. This one to the rim.

  “I never told anybody this. But hey, since the world has ended, who has secrets anymore? I only wonder what my father’s take on it all was. Maybe he told himself that his dad was an amateur sleuth, just someone with an interest in neighborhood crime. Someone had to have an interest in it, and the police certainly didn’t. Maybe he found the satchel many years after he wrote the poem about his father the hero. Maybe his mom had simply told him his father was a good man and that he died in the war. But he never did anything to the satchel. He never brought to the attention of the police. He never uttered a word about it to me. Surely, he must have looked in it at some point. Only once, because that’s all it took. I know. He looked in it, and he spent the rest of his life denying what he had seen.