The Elephant Mountains

by Scott Ely

  He hoped he would find them sitting at the table on the screened porch. But when they approached the open door, he smelled death.

  Mr. Parker lay just inside the door, a rifle beside him. This time Angela did not cry or scream. She did put the bottom of her T-shirt over her mouth and nose. They found Holly’s naked body on the porch. Someone had slit her throat.

  “They’re better in the water,” Angela said. “Don’t stink so much.”

  Stephen told himself he should not be surprised at her detached reaction. They had both simply grown used to loss and the dead. Perhaps his father would be proved right. Death would replace love. For the first time he realized his father had been speaking of himself. He pitied him. He pitied himself and Angela. Only the dead were free.

  Angela left him and walked back into the house.

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “To cover him up,” she said.

  Whoever had done it had taken food from the freezer and drained all the gas out of the generator tank. There was water in the cistern Mr. Parker had improvised out of sheet metal. Empty plastic jerry cans Mr. Parker had stockpiled were scattered about on the floor. The killers had taken all they could carry. Stephen expected the gasoline from the tank by the garage was all gone, but that would do them no good anyway. They needed diesel. The big farm shop and the diesel tank beside it were underwater.

  When Angela returned, her face was pale and she walked unsteadily.

  “You all right?” he asked.

  “Give me a little while,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”

  “We’ll take the skiff.”

  “It’s tiny. And it leaks.”

  He told her he thought he could repair it.

  “We’ll need another paddle,” he said. “Maybe some oars. I can make some in Mr. Parker’s little shop.”

  “We’ll spend the night here?” she asked.

  “We have to. It’ll be dark by the time I finish.”

  “We could go in the dark.”

  “Not a good idea.”

  He did not blame her. He did not look forward to spending the night among the dead.

  They set to work on the skiff. He rigged some oarlocks. The skiff had been designed to be sculled through the narrow twisting pathways of cypress swamps, but he thought that a set of oars would be useful and more efficient on the rivers and creeks and when they had to cross immense flooded fields. He made the oars using a drawknife and some cypress planks he took off the wall of Mr. Parker’s shop.

  The rest of the afternoon they spent caulking the skiff. They would scull, row and perhaps pole it through the swamps and flooded creeks to high ground. They decided that they would put the skiff on the bridge boat or tow it behind. By using the diesel they had left, they would get as close to high ground as possible. They would approach any checkpoint in the skiff, not the bridge boat. This time the soldiers would take one look at them and know they were refugees, not criminals.

  “It’ll still leak a little,” he said. “But not like before.”

  “These mosquitoes are going to eat us up tonight,” she said.

  “As near as I can tell they’ve been doing that most every night.”

  She glanced up the hill in the direction of the house.

  “I don’t think that porch is a good place to sleep,” he said.

  “We could bury her,” she said.

  “I guess we’ll have to decide which is harder.”

  They sat on the skiff and discussed the best way to deal with Holly’s body. The smell was not so bad on the porch. They could close the doors to the interior of the house and use the porch door.

  “You ever done any grave digging?” he asked.

  “You know I haven’t,” she said.

  “It’s going to be hard work.”

  “We don’t have to exactly bury her,” she said.

  Her plan was to wrap the body in a plastic tarp and drag it well away from the house.

  That seemed like a good idea to him. Who knew how many nights they would have to spend in the skiff? It would be pleasant to have one last mosquito-free night.

  “Those mosquitoes have just about sucked every drop of blood out of my body,” he said.

  “Let’s do it,” she said.

  It turned out not to be as hard as he expected. It was fairly easy for the two of them to tow the slick plastic across the grass. They left her under a fig tree next to the garage. The sink of death mixed with the scent of the ripe figs. Wasps and yellow jackets were doing a good business with the fruit that had fallen to the ground and begun to rot.

  They quickly filled a plastic bin with fresh figs from the tree.

  Before they left, Angela insisted on saying some words over Holly. He felt foolish standing there with his cap full of figs while she prayed to Jesus. When she said “Amen” he said it too, and he could tell she was pleased with that.

  “She’ll rest softly right here under this tree,” she said.

  “Yes, I believe she will,” he said.

  They returned to the porch. The smell was still strong, but as it grew dark a little breeze came up from the river and made it somewhat better.

  “I wish we had some incense,” Angela said.

  “You’d need a pile of incense,” he said.

  By the time they had supper, they had either got used to the stink or the breeze had carried it away (he could not tell which). Once it grew dark he was glad he had listened to Angela. He looked forward to a sleep uninterrupted by mosquitoes.

  “We should stand watches,” he said.

  “If we don’t, I won’t be able to sleep,” she said.

  If someone came by in the night, they would come looking for the keys to the bridge boat.

  “I wonder if Mr. Parker’s wife is in Baton Rouge,” he said.

  “I hope she’s been evacuated,” she said.

  He considered what it was going to be like for her to come back to the house after the water had gone down and order was restored and the dead were buried. The smell of death would be long gone. The rattlesnakes and copperheads would have returned to the woods.

  “Or dead,” he said.

  “No, I like to think of her in Memphis,” she said. “That’s good high ground.”

  She looked out into the darkness beyond the screen.

  “Do you think we covered her up enough?” she asked.

  “We wrapped that tarp pretty tight,” he said.

  He considered what might get at her: possums, feral cats, a coyote. But he had seen none of those animals on the mound. He recalled how Hector’s body was preserved from decay in The Iliad. He wondered if Jesus had ever done something like that. He had never read any of The New Testament. He was reluctant to ask Angela. He did not want to get her started on Jesus.

  “Vultures won’t be able to bother her?” she asked.

  “I don’t think so,” he said.

  It seemed to him that he should be able to say something about the dead that would make them, the living, feel better. But there was nothing to say. There was no possibility of revenge and certainly no possibility of their unknown killers being brought to justice. There was a possibility that in the violent world of the flooded land, the killers themselves had already met a similar fate. He had extracted a certain measure of justice on his father’s killers.

  He wondered how he would now handle the redheaded man’s surrender.

  “I let one of my father’s killers escape,” he said.

  She asked him to explain.

  “I would’ve done the same thing,” she said.

  “Now?”

  “I don’t know about now.”

  She paused for a moment.

  “But maybe I would,” she said. “Maybe I would. And you?”

  “I think that now I would’ve pulled the trigger,” he said.

  “And felt bad about it later.”

  “No, I’d feel nothing at all.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Yes, I t
hink that’s what I’d feel.”

  He recalled his father’s warning. But he was certain that he could love. He loved Angela.

  He hoped she would not start talking about Jesus, and she did not. She simply sighed. Then she asked him to get out the radio.

  They pulled in a few stations and heard about a riot in a refugee camp in Natchez and the usual contradictory reports about the water going up or down. No one mentioned anything about the situation in Baton Rouge, just that the flooded parts of the country were in a state of anarchy and chaos.

  “I can’t imagine Americans doing what they’ve been doing,” the announcer from a Texas station said.

  “Find the mystery station,” Angela said.

  He turned the dial. Several tries gained him only a few scattered words from the Swamp Hog. But then the station came in clearly.

  “The Rocky Mountains are gonna be a jungle,” the voice said. “Two hundred inches of rain a year. Palm trees, banyan trees, elephant grass. Big, big trees festooned with vines. Parrots, monkeys, tigers, peacocks, elephants, cobras.”

  The list of animals and birds went on and on, finally trailing off into static.

  “He’s crazy,” Stephen said.

  “Maybe there’s some truth to it,” she said.

  “All those animals?”

  “No, the Rocky Mountains becoming covered with jungle.”

  He made several more tries to find the station but had no luck. She went to sleep. He spent his watch with the radio, listening to tales of confusion and despair.

  SIXTEEN

  They made a skidway of saplings and used a block and tackle he found in the garage to pull the skiff up onto the bridge boat. Then he told Angela the plan he had made during his last watch. They would cross the river in the bridge boat, go through a levee break on the west bank, and run the bridge boat on a westward course as far as the fuel lasted or until they were in the vicinity of high ground. Then they would abandon it for the skiff.

  “Why the other side of the river?” she asked.

  “I want to go to the Rockies,” he said.

  “You’ve been paying too much attention to the Swamp Hog.”

  “There’re no hurricanes in the Rocky Mountains.”

  “It doesn’t matter to me. I just want to get to high ground. And what about going to Baton Rouge to find your mother?”

  “There’s not enough fuel to do it in the bridge boat.

  We’ll never make it in the skiff.”

  “You can find her later.”

  “I will.”

  He was pleased she had shown good sense about their options.

  They ran the boat across the field and then through a swamp and through a levee break. This one had a strong current, but the bridge boat had no problem overcoming it.

  After they crossed the river, they hugged the slack water next to the bank for several miles, looking for a break in the levee or a place where it had been overtopped. They ended up in a flooded field. It was easy to set a course due west into the afternoon sun. By evening they were making their way through a swamp and running low on diesel. They moored the boat to a tree and spent the night.

  In the morning they abandoned the bridge boat for the skiff. It was going to be much easier maneuvering the skiff through the swamp, and he calculated that they had only a few minutes of fuel left anyway. After the time they had spent on the bridge boat, the skiff seemed impossibly small and fragile. It would never survive passage through a levee break. In the swamps he sculled it through the labyrinth of cypresses. In the flooded fields they took turns with the oars.

  “How far do you think we’ll have to go?” she asked.

  “Ten miles, fifteen miles before we hit high ground,” he said.

  “But you’re just guessing?”

  “I’m guessing.”

  Since they had crossed the river, they had not seen a dead body. They had come upon a few dead animals, both wild and domestic. There had been one place where it looked like the entire population of a chicken house had drowned, the brown water covered with a mass of white-feathered swollen carcasses. The smell was bad.

  They spent a night in the skiff and in the morning pressed on. They were running low on water. The weather was extremely hot and humid, but at least it was not raining. The flat, still expanse of brown water lay under a perfectly blue sky. They heard no noises that indicated other humans were about, no motors or gunshots or voices. No planes flew over.

  In the middle of the afternoon, after they emerged from a swamp, he saw a pine-covered ridge ahead. Their hands were now blistered from rowing. He scanned the ridge with the field glasses but saw no sign of anyone.

  “No one will bother us,” he said. “We don’t look dangerous.”

  Then he saw a highway sign. It had the name of a town on it and the mileage. Only a few feet of water was over the road, and they followed it toward the ridge that now rose above them to the west.

  Late in the afternoon the road began to emerge from the water as the land rose. They came upon a car that rested across the road, upside down. There were no bodies in it, no possessions. The interior was filled with mud.

  Now there was barely enough water to float the skiff. It kept grounding out on the asphalt. So they got out of the boat and towed it. It was difficult walking because the road beneath their feet was slick with mud.

  Then the road emerged from the water. They could see where it ascended the side of the ridge perhaps a quarter of a mile away. They left the skiff behind. Angela carried the dry bag with what little water and food they had left. He slung the Saiga over his shoulder. At any moment he expected one or both of them to fall, the victim of some hidden rifleman.

  But when they reached the place on the road where the flood had not risen, it became clear that there had never been an army outpost here. In fact, it looked like no one had ever stopped a car or truck at this point on the highway.

  They walked to the top of the hill. Off to the west was ridge after ridge of pines. Behind them the flooded land stretched off toward the river. The wind soughed in the pines as they stood in a spot of shade, the acrid scent of the trees spilling over them, a welcome change from the stink of mud. Even in the shade it was hot.

  “Are you really thinking about going to the Rockies?” she asked.

  “You heard the Swamp Hog,” he said. “There’re elephants in those mountains now.”

  She laughed. “You’re talking crazy like him,” she said.

  “You’ll see,” he said. “There’ll be elephants in those mountains one day.”

  And perhaps love too. Perhaps she would stay with him there, ignore the difference in their ages. He imagined riding an elephant with her through the streets of a little town, the animal’s ponderous body swaying beneath them, the buildings strung with colored lights and everywhere soft music—guitars and flutes.

  “I’ll locate my mother,” he said. “Let her know where we are.”

  “You can’t locate her,” she said.

  “I know it’s going to be hard.”

  “It’s not that. She’s dead.”

  He stopped and looked at her. This was not something she would joke about.

  “You can’t know that,” he said. “Did Jesus tell you?”

  She began to cry, and he immediately regretted he had spoken so harshly. He put his arms around her and told her he was sorry. She calmed down and wiped her face with her T-shirt.

  “I saw her,” she said. “When I went to look in the other rooms in Mr. Parker’s house. She was lying there with a dead man. He was dressed in camouflage. I guess he was one of her security guards. I recognized her from that picture I saw at your father’s house.”

  He sat down on the side of the road and she beside him.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” he said.

  “You had too much on your mind,” she said. “Too many things you had to do right so we could stay alive.”

  “I could’ve buried her.”

  “Som
ebody will.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Did you say any words over her?”

  He was immediately sorry he had asked her the question. He hoped she would not start talking about Jesus.

  “No.”

  He considered what it would take to make the journey back to the house. It was not a journey he was seriously thinking of making. At least she would not become one of the nameless floating dead. She would be spared that. For some reason he thought of the wasps busy among the rotting fruit.

  He sat there with her beside him, her arm about him, and wept softly. He had the sensation of vertigo as if he had slipped over a precipice and was falling to his death. He laid his head in her lap, and she stroked his hair.

  “I wonder what she was doing there,” he said.

  “Maybe looking for you,” she said.

  He liked the idea of his mother looking for him. He wondered if his father would have believed that was her motive for being there.

  “Anna just can’t pay attention to anyone but herself,” his father had once said.

  That was when she was talking about sending him away to school. But she could have changed, especially after having been separated from him for the summer, perhaps acting on some scrap of information her mercenaries had discovered about his location. He wondered why he did not hold his father’s absence against him. After all, his mother had raised him. What was worse: her indifference or his absence? It was hard for him to decide.

  “What are you thinking?” she asked.

  “About my parents.”

  She paused as if she was having a hard time considering what to say.

  “No telling what’s up ahead,” she said.

  “We can’t go the other way,” he said.

  He sat up and wiped his eyes. He imagined them walking along the road. He did not expect them to come out of that walk alive. To walk over the crest of a hill and see the red-haired man standing there would come almost as a relief. If that happened, he would not hesitate this time, would show no mercy. That they were free of the violent life they had experienced on the flooded land was not something he was ready to accept. But he said nothing of this to Angela.

  Despite the death of his mother and father, despite the deaths of Mr. Parker and Holly and Fred, the prisoners, the towboat crew and all the unknown floating dead, he felt a sense of excitement. They were on high ground. The mountains lay to the west.