“Hambone?” she said. “I gotta hear this.”
“I got here about seven years ago,” I said, taking a pull from the canteen. “I’d been wandering around for a while, but for some reason, I thought I’d stay here for a while. Hambone was already here—near as anyone can tell, he’s been here since the War. He managed to keep himself alive, just barely.
“I’d been here for a couple of weeks, and I’d spent most of that time building my house. I spent a lot of time hanging around out front of my place, blowing my horn, thinking. I didn’t have any friends around here: I didn’t want any. I just wanted to blow and watch the flies.” I paused while a plane howled by.
“Then, one morning, I was blowing ‘Reveille’ and watching the sun come up, and I heard this crazy beat behind me. I looked around, and it was Hambone, sitting on top of the hill out back of my place, keeping time. I didn’t know about him, then, so I figured he was just one of the locals. I waved at him, but he just kept on pounding, so I picked up my horn and we jammed and jammed.
“It became a regular morning gig. Once I ran out of steam, he’d get up and wander away. After a while, he was playing right on my doorstep, and I noticed how skinny he was. I tried to talk to him, and that’s when I figured out he was special. So after we finished, I gave him a couple cans of Spam.” A plane flew past.
“After a month of this, I decided I’d follow him when he left. He didn’t seem to mind. We came to a ladder that led down into a big, bombed out basement, all full of books. And this big asshole was playing a piano, just pounding on it.”
I nodded at Timson, who picked up the tale. “It’d been tough to get the piano down there, but when I found it, I knew I needed to have it. I’d been going nuts, looking for a chance to play. Hambone had been coming by regular to jam around, and I tried to make sure he got fed. I figured he was shell-shocked and needed a hand. Then, one day, he shows up with this guy and his horn. Next thing you know, we’re all playing our asses off. It was the most fun I’d ever had.” He waited for a plane to pass, and built up the fire.
“The rest, as they say, is history,” he continued. “Steve heard us jamming and invited himself along. He kept after us to play publicly.”
Jenna looked over at Steve, who was lying on his back with Lucy twined around him. “Well, he can sing, anyway,” she said, and grinned wickedly.
We all nodded.
“So,” she said, stretching casually. “What are you guys gonna do when you run out of cans?”
I groaned. She’d been picking at the subject all day.
Timson poked at the fire, and Lyman sauntered over. “Our supply will hold out a while yet,” he said, “if we keep interlopers out.” He loomed threateningly over her. Timson stood up and loomed back. Lyman retreated a little.
“How about gardens?” she said. “A decent garden could really stretch out your food supply.”
“Who,” I said, lazily, “is going to work on a garden when there’s all this food just lying around?”
“I will, for one. Think about it: fresh vegetables! Fruit! When was the last time you had a tomato, a big fat red one?”
My mouth watered. Lyman said, “When we run out of cans, we’ll just move along. Gardens’ll only tie us down here.” His boys all nodded, the way they did when he made a pronouncement.
Jenna glared at him. “That’s pretty goddamn short-sighted. How long can you live off the past? When are you going to start living for the future?”
Lyman’s rebuttal was cut off by another plane.
Timson slapped her on the back. “‘When are you going to start living for the future?’ You’ve practiced that, right?”
She pretended she didn’t hear him. “How come the planes don’t run out of fuel?” she said.
I said, “They’ve got an automated maintenance station somewhere around here. They land there for scheduled repairs and refueling. It’s supposed to restock their ammo, too, but it looks like they’ve run out. Lucky for us.”
Jenna’s ears pricked up. “You know where this station is? They’d have power? Radios? Maybe we could call for help.”
Everyone looked at her like she was nuts. “Where, exactly, are you going to call?” Timson asked.
“New Zealand. They didn’t get into the War at all. They’re probably sitting pretty. Maybe they could help us out.”
“On the Beach, Nevil Shute,” Timson said. “You’ve been reading too much science fiction, girl.”
She slapped his shoulder. “It was The Chrysalids actually. John Wyndham. Kiwis and Aussies always come out okay.”
“Seriously,” she continued, “what else are you doing around here? Aren’t you getting bored of slipping back into savagery?”
“We’ve got plenty to do,” Lyman called from across the fire. “We’ve got to drill the militia!”
“Band’s gotta practice,” Steve called, from under Lucy.
“Sure you do!” Jenna retorted. “If you’re gonna play the Sydney Opera House, you’re gonna need a whole shitload of practice!”
Steve glared at her, and Timson pounded her on the back. I produced my Mickey of tequila and magnanimously shared it all around, even letting Lyman and his thugs have a swig.
She dropped in the next morning while I was blowing ‘Reveille.’ I hadn’t had the energy the night before to take Hambone back to his cave, so he’d crashed on the floor of my shack. It’s a pretty good shack: three of the walls are concrete, there from before the War. I’d put together a roof of tin and cardboard and whatever else I could find, and added another wall the same way. Be it ever so humble.
“You gonna help me dig a garden?” she asked.
I squinted at her. She’d gotten some water somewhere to clean up. Timson had a big reservoir in his basement, a flooded subbasement. I had thought I’d seen them go off together.
Pink and scrubbed, with her hair tied back tight, she was, well, pneumatic. Sweat beaded on her forehead, and on her pink eyebrows. She was wearing a tee-shirt and cutoffs, and the prospect of passing a day beside her while she bent over a garden was very tempting. But if she and Timson had something going on, I’d best put myself out of temptation’s way. Besides, I was sure that the hill I’d been working on still had some good stuff in it.
“Got a full dance card today, sorry,” I said.
“Well, don’t get caught under any rockslides,” she said, giving me a slightly pissed-off look.
I spent the day undermining the mountain, but I couldn’t get it to come down. Finally, exhausted, I staggered to the hill where we played and warmed up on the horn.
Jenna and Timson arrived together, eating olives and stewed tomatoes with their fingers. Timson set up an architecture book on his stand and tapped at the piano. Hambone ambled up. Steve showed up with Lucy clinging to him like a limpet, and then we played our asses off.
Jenna danced and so did lots of other people, and then Steve waded out into the crowd and danced with them, and I joined him, and then the crowd and the band were all mixed up, and it was fine.
It turned out I was wrong about Jenna and Timson. She used his water but that was it. He was feeding her, though. Now, he can do whatever he wants with his food, it’s his, but the two of us had always fed Hambone, and Timson couldn’t afford to feed both of them, so I ended up running my larder down to dangerous levels over the next couple months.
I started to get a little grumpy about it, but that all ended when Jenna and Timson showed up at Hambone’s cave one night while I was feeding him. They had three big sacks, filled right to the top with fresh vegetables: tomatoes, string beans, squash, rutabaga, cabbage and onions. There was even lemon grass, parsley and basil. And strawberries! My eyes nearly fell out of my head.
“Holy crap!” I said.
Timson pounded me on the back, then popped a cherry tomato into my gaping mouth. I bit down involuntarily and gasped. “That is the best thing I’ve ever tasted,” I said.
“Tell me something I don’t know,” Jenna said. “We’ve notice
d you sulking around the last couple months. I figured that I could bribe you and you’d quit pissing around.”
“Did you grow these?” I said.
“No, I pulled them out of my ass,” Jenna said, and ate a big, fat strawberry.
Timson fed Hambone a few strawberries, and that signaled the beginning of a chowdown that went on and on until we could hardly move. My hands stank of a wondrous cocktail of strawberries and herbs and onions. It had been a long time since I’d put fresh vegetables inside my body. I felt like I was sweating green.
“Sun’s going down,” Timson said. “Showtime. I’ll catch up.”
Jenna and Hambone and I climbed slowly up the hill, luxuriating in satiety. Hambone’s smile was a new one, pure joy.
Timson met up, lugging more sacks. He shelled them out before we started playing, and I never saw more snaggletoothed grins. Even Steve had some. He made a crack about the wisdom of handing out fruit to an audience before a show, but no one was going to waste any of that beautiful food by throwing it.
Between sets, Timson stood up. “Jenna’s been growing this food for the last couple months. I think you’ll agree that it’s pretty goddamn good.” There were hoots of agreement. “So here’s the deal. We’ve got some plots over on the south, ready to be hoed and planted. We’ve got seeds. But we need people to work the plots and gather water. Anyone who’s interested can meet us tomorrow morning.”
Well, that kind of put a damper on the celebration. I felt a little down, realising that this wonderful chow meant stooping in fields, hoeing and planting like some kind of Dark Ages peasant. In the back of my mind, I still thought that I could just keep on prospecting for cans until someone rebuilt civilisation and started making more cans. Rebuilding civilisation was going to take a long, long time. Then I burped up an onion-basil-tomato-tasting burp, and knew that I’d be out the next morning, anyway.
We kept on playing, and people kept dancing, and I may have been the only one who noticed Lyman and his boys shaking their heads and stalking off into the night.
Nearly everyone showed up the next morning and collected a precious handful of Jenna’s seeds. She explained that she’d been hoarding them for years, looking for a place to plant them. The way she said it, you got the feeling that she was trusting you with her children.
We attacked the plots. They were rocky and rubble-strewn, and the poles were poorly suited to hoeing. People improvised: empty bottles became scoops; flattened cans, blades.
We worked, and Jenna came by and kibitzed, pointing out rocks that we’d missed, and generally being a pain in the ass. Eventually, enough grumbling got grumbled, and she went and tended her own garden, so to speak.
The work got hypnotic after that. The roar of the planes, the sounds of digging, it all blended into a deep rhythm. Hambone meandered by and idly tapped out a beat, and I found myself singing “Minnie the Moocher,” and everyone joined in on the call-and-response. It was great, until I realised that I was singing for a crowd and shut my mouth. I didn’t like singing for other people.
Not everyone was cut out to be a farmer. Good thing, too, or we would’ve starved to death waiting for the harvest. Still, there were people down at the gardens from sunup to sundown, clucking over their veggies.
The shit hit the fan one night as we were setting up to play. Lyman was sitting on Timson’s piano, grinning wide enough to show us all his rotten chiclets. Three of his boys hung around close, and another four or five stood at a distance, sniggering.
Timson gave him a long, considering look. It was the kind of look I’d seen him give a humongous hunk of concrete in his plot one day, before he squatted down and hauled it out of the earth, like a 100 kilo spud.
Lyman grinned bigger. “I wanna talk to you,” he said.
Timson nodded slowly. Hambone rapped out a nervous tatter with his fingernails on a beer bottle he’d been carrying around, but I didn’t need his help to know that things were getting bad.
“This gardening thing is getting out of hand,” Lyman said. “People are neglecting their duties.”
“What duties?” Timson asked, in a low tone.
“Drilling with us. We got to be ready to defend our land.”
Timson gave a little shake of his head.
Lyman jumped in with more: “People’re getting too attached to this place. We’ll have to move when the food runs out, and we can’t take no garden with us.”
Timson’s look got more considering. He cocked his head. “Why do they have to defend it and get ready to leave? That seems like a bit of a contradiction to me.”
Lyman’s brow furrowed. If I’m making him sound a little dim, that’s only because he was. “We’ll defend it until the food runs out, then we’ll move on.”
Jenna snickered. One of Lyman’s boys reached out to smack her. Hambone drummed louder; Jenna batted his hand away.
I found myself saying, “What if the food doesn’t run out? What if we grow enough of our own to stay alive?”
Lyman glared at me. “Is that how you want to live?”
I said, “Sooner or later, all the cans will be gone.”
Lyman waved a dismissive hand. “Someone will take care of that. I’m worried about this group. This city.”
“So why not let us make sure we’ve got enough to eat?”
Lyman started forward and I jumped. “I told you! We need to defend the place! And we need to be ready to go if we can’t!”
Timson interceded. “What does this have to do with me?”
Lyman spread his hands out. “I want you to shut down the garden. We were doing just fine without it. I don’t like to see people wasting their time.”
Timson said, “It’s not mine to shut down.” He nodded at Jenna, who was glaring daggers at the goon who’d tried to smack her.
“Not mine, either,” she said, with barely controlled fury. “It’s everyone’s.”
Lyman said, “Well, you just tell everyone that the garden’s got to be shut down.”
He slid off the piano and took off, goons in tow. One of them contrived to bump into me hard enough to make me drop my horn, and I had to snag it up quick before he stomped it.
Steve showed up, looking pissed, which meant that he was worried. “What was that all about?” he said.
“What was what all about?” Timson said, and propped a book up on his music stand.
* * *
They trashed the gardens two nights later, while we played. I wouldn’t have thought that pack of lazy bastards had it in them to haul enough gravel to cover all the beds, especially not at night, but that’s what they did. They kicked up the plants, and smashed the makeshift tools that the gardeners had left.
They didn’t even have the smarts to steer clear of us the next day. Instead, they waited until a shocked crowd had gathered, and then showed up with big grins. Lyman had a pistol shoved in his waistbelt. I’d seen it before, and I didn’t think it worked, but you never knew.
“Good morning!” Lyman said, stomping across the murdered beds. “How’s everybody doing today?”
Timson hefted his pole and looked significantly at the militia. A number of people in the crowd got the idea. Lyman’s boys looked uneasy.
Lyman said, “We’ve been chasing off rovers to the north every day and more are coming. Things are getting rough. We’ll need volunteers for the militia. You’ve all got spare time now.”
I’d never even harvested a single tomato from my plot. I could see the smashed green buds that I’d been nurturing.
Jenna said, “Who’s got any spare time? It’s going to take us days to clean up this mess.” She stooped and picked up a stone and tossed it away from the beds. “Lucky I got more seeds.”
I bent and picked up a rock of my own and tossed it. I wanted to toss it at Lyman, but Jenna had set an example.
Not everyone followed it. A lot wandered off, to prospect or to go with Lyman. I couldn’t blame them—I felt like giving up.
Over the next week or two, th
e plots started to get back into shape. Occasionally, Lyman would cruise by and glare, and we’d try to ignore him. He and his boys would walk across the plots, talking loudly about running off wanderers. Some of his boys had been planting gardens not long before. It made me boil.
I got it out at nights, when we played. The crowd had diminished. Anyone who had anything to do with Lyman stayed away. Those left behind were more into it than ever. A lot of them sang along, to Steve’s chagrin. Some of them were pretty good.
Lyman hadn’t trashed the beds again. I knew he hadn’t given up. I waited, nervously, for the other shoe to drop.
It didn’t take long. One night, our set ended early because of rain, which always made Hambone nervous. I led him back to his cave and was met on the trail by Lyman, dripping and grinning.
There was no small talk. He put a hand on my chest. “When you going to stop pussying around and help us defend ourselves?”
“I’m a little busy right now. Why don’t you ask me again in a couple of centuries?” Hambone started doing a little shuffle.
Lyman gave him a fist in the ear. His head spun around, and I saw the knot of scar at the base of his skull strain. He turned back around and started shuffling. Lyman drew his arm back.
“Jesus, Lyman, what the hell is your problem?” I said.
He turned and popped me right in the mouth, splitting my lip and loosening one of my teeth. I was so proud of my teeth: I brushed ‘em every morning and every night, and they were in better shape than most. I clutched my mouth. Lyman kicked me down, then walked away, stepping hard on my chest as he walked past me.
I led Hambone back up to his cave, and slept there.
I felt so bad the next morning, I almost didn’t go back to the gardens. My face ached, and I couldn’t blow a single note.
But I dragged myself down anyway. I was feeling stubborn.
Timson had a black eye and a limp, but he grinned like a pirate when he saw me. “How many?” he said.
“Just Lyman,” I said.
He snorted. “They sent six for me. None of ’em are feeling too good this morning, I bet. Couple of them won’t be walking for a while.” He showed me his hands. His knuckles were raw.
Wastelands 2: More Stories of the Apocalypse Page 16