Abby’s smooth skin slid along his side. Her hand slipped into his as he took a deep breath and blew the candles out.
6
For ten days, Gordon’s life followed a new pattern. As if to catch up on six months’ road weariness, he slept late each morning and awoke to find Abby gone, like the night’s dreams.
Yet her warmth and scent lingered on the sheets when he stretched and opened his eyes. The sunshine streaming through his eastward-facing window was like something new, a springtime in his heart, and not really early autumn at all.
He rarely saw her during the day as he washed and helped with chores until noon—chopping and stacking wood for the community supply and digging a deep pit for a new outhouse. When most of the village gathered for the main meal of the day, Abby returned from tending the flocks. But she spent lunchtime with the younger children, relieving old one-legged Mr. Lothes, their work supervisor. The little ones laughed as she kidded them, plucking the wool that coated their clothes from a morning spent carding skeins for the winter spinning, helping them keep the gray strands out of their food.
She barely glanced at Gordon, but that brief smile was enough. He knew he had no rights beyond these few days, and yet a shared look in the daylight made him feel that it was all real, and not just a dream.
Afternoons he conferred with Mrs. Thompson and the other village leaders, helping them inventory books and other long-neglected salvage. At intervals, he gave reading and archery lessons.
One day he and Mrs. Thompson traded methods in the art of field medicine while treating a man clawed by a “tiger,” what the locals called that new strain of mountain lion which had bred with leopards escaped from zoos in the postwar chaos. The trapper had surprised the beast with its kill, but fortunately, it had only batted him into the brush and let him run away. Gordon and the village matriarch felt sure the wound would heal.
In the evenings all of Pine View gathered in the big garage and Gordon recited stories by Twain and Sayles and Keillor. He led them in singing old folk songs and lovingly remembered commercial jingles, and in playing “Remember When.” Then it was time for drama.
Dressed in scrap and foil, he was John Paul Jones, shouting defiance from the deck of the Bonne Homme Richard. He was Anton Perceveral, exploring the dangers of a faraway world and the depths of his own potential with a mad robot companion. And he was Doctor Hudson, wading through the horror of the Kenyan Conflict to treat the victims of biological war.
At first Gordon always felt uneasy, putting on a flimsy costume and stomping across the makeshift stage waving his arms, shouting lines only vaguely recalled or made up on the spot. He had never really admired play-acting as a profession, even before the great war.
But it had got him halfway across a continent, and he was good at it. He felt the rapt gaze of the audience, their hunger for wonder and something of the world beyond their narrow valley, and their eagerness warmed him to the task. Pox-scarred and wounded—bent from year after year of back-breaking labor merely to survive—they looked up, the need greatest in eyes clouded with age, a yearning for help doing what they could no longer accomplish alone—remembering.
Wrapped in his roles, he gave them bits and pieces of lost romance. And by the time the last lines of his soliloquy faded, he too was able to forget the present, at least for a while.
Each night, after he retired, she came to him. For a while she would sit on the edge of his bed and talk of her life; about the flocks, and the village children, and Michael. She brought him books to ask their meanings and questioned him about his youth—about the life of a student in the wonderful days before the Doomwar.
Then, after a time, Abby would smile, put away the dusty volumes, and slide under the covers next to him while he leaned over and took care of the candle.
* * *
On the tenth morning, she did not slip away with the predawn light, but instead wakened Gordon with a kiss.
“Hmmmn, good morning,” he commented, and reached for her, but Abby pulled away. She picked up her clothes, brushing her breasts across the soft hairs of his flat stomach.
“I should let you sleep,” she told him. “But I wanted to ask you something.” She held her dress in a ball.
“Mmm? What is it?” Gordon stuffed the pillow behind his head for support.
“You’re going to be leaving today, aren’t you?” she asked.
“Yes.” He nodded seriously. “It’s probably best. I’d like to stay longer, but since I can’t, I’d better be heading west again.”
“I know.” She nodded seriously. “We’ll all hate to see you go. But… well, I’m going to meet Michael out at the trapline, this evening. I miss him terribly.” She touched the side of his face. “That doesn’t bother you, does it? I mean, it’s been wonderful here with you, but he’s my husband and…”
He smiled and covered her hand. To his amazement, he had little difficulty with his feelings. He was more envious than jealous of Michael. The desperate logic of their desire for children, and their obvious love for one another, made the situation, in retrospect, as obvious as the need for a clean break at the end. He only hoped he had done them the favor they sought. For despite their fantasies, it was unlikely he would ever come this way again.
“I have something for you,” Abby said. She reached under the bed and pulled out a small silvery object on a chain, and a paper package.
“It’s a whistle. Mrs. Howlett says you should have one.” She slipped it over his neck and adjusted it until satisfied with the effect.
“Also, she helped me write this letter.” Abby picked up the little package. “I found some stamps in a drawer in the gas station, but they wouldn’t stick on. So I got some money, instead. This is fourteen dollars. Will it be enough?”
She held out a cluster of faded bills.
Gordon couldn’t help smiling. Yesterday five or six of the others had privately approached him. He had accepted their little envelopes and similar payments for postage with as straight a face as possible. He might have used the opportunity to charge them something he needed, but the community had already given him a month’s stock of jerky, dried apples, and twenty straight arrows for his bow. There was no need, nor had he the desire to extort anything else.
Some of the older citizens had had relatives in Eugene, or Portland, or towns in the Willamette Valley. It was the direction he was heading, so he took the letters. A few were addressed to people who had lived in Oakridge and Blue River. Those he filed deep in the safest part of his sack. The rest, he might as well throw into Crater Lake, for all the good they would ever do, but he pretended anyway.
He soberly counted out a few paper bills, then handed back the rest of the worthless currency. “And who are you writing to?” Gordon asked Abby as he took the letter. He felt as if he were playing Santa Claus, and found himself enjoying it.
“I’m writing to the university. You know, at Eugene? I asked a bunch of questions like, are they taking new students again yet? And do they take married students?” Abby blushed. “I know I’d have to work real hard on my reading to get good enough. And maybe they aren’t recovered enough to take many new students. But Michael’s already so smart… and by the time we hear from them maybe things will be better.”
“By the time you hear…” Gordon shook his head.
Abby nodded. “I’ll for sure be reading a lot better by then. Mrs. Thompson promises she’ll help me. And her husband has agreed to start a school, this winter. I’m going to help with the little kids.
“I hope maybe I can learn to be a teacher. Do you think that’s silly?”
Gordon shook his head. He had thought himself beyond surprise, but this touched him. In spite of Abby’s totally disproportioned view of the state of the world, her hope warmed him, and he found himself dreaming along with her. There was no harm in wishing, was there?
“Actually,” Abby went on, confidentially, twisting her dress in her hands. “One of the big reasons I’m writing is to get a
… a pen pal. That’s the word, isn’t it? I’m hoping maybe someone in Eugene will write to me. That way we’ll get letters, here. I’d love to get a letter.
“Also”—her gaze fell—“that will give you another reason to come back, in a year or so… besides maybe wanting to see the baby.”
She looked up and dimpled. “I got the idea from your Sherlock Holmes play. That’s an ‘ulterior motive,’ isn’t it?”
She was so delighted with her own cleverness, and so eager for his approval, Gordon felt a great, almost painful rush of tenderness. Tears welled as he reached out and pulled her into an embrace. He held her tightly and rocked slowly, his eyes shut against reality, and he breathed in with her sweet smell a light and optimism he had thought gone from the world.
7
“Well, this is where I turn back.” Mrs. Thompson shook hands with Gordon. “Down this road things should be pretty tame until you get to Davis Lake. The last of the old loner survivalists that way wiped each other out some years back, though I’d still be careful if I were you.”
There was a chill in the air, for autumn had arrived in full. Gordon zipped up the old letter carrier’s jacket and adjusted the leather bag as the straight-backed old woman handed him an old roadmap.
“I had Jimmie Horton mark the places we know of, where homesteaders have set up. I wouldn’t bother any of them unless you have to. Mostly they’re a suspicious type, likely to shoot first. We’ve only been trading with the nearest for a short time.”
Gordon nodded. He folded the map carefully and slipped it into a pouch. He felt rested and ready. He would regret leaving Pine View as much as any haven in recent memory. But now that he was resigned to going, he actually felt a growing eagerness to be traveling, to see what had happened in the rest of Oregon.
In the years since he had left the wreckage of Minnesota, he had found ever wilder signs of the dark age. But now he was in a new watershed. This had once been a pleasant state with dispersed light industry, productive farms, and an elevated level of culture. Perhaps it was merely Abby’s innocence infecting him. But logically, the Willamette Valley would be the place to look for civilization, if it existed anywhere anymore.
He took the old woman’s hand once again. “Mrs. Thompson, I’m not sure I could ever repay what you people have done for me.”
She shook her head. Her face was deeply tanned and so lined Gordon was certain she had to be more than the fifty years she claimed.
“No, Gordon, you paid your keep. I would’ve liked it if you could’ve stayed and helped me get the school going. But now I see maybe it won’t be so hard to do it by ourselves.”
She gazed out over her little valley. “You know, we’ve been living in a kind of a daze, these last years since the crops have started coming in and the hunting’s returned. You can tell how bad things have gotten when a bunch of grown men and women, who once had jobs, who read magazines—and filled out their own taxes, for Heaven’s sake—start treating a poor, battered, wandering play-actor as if he was something like the Easter Bunny.” She looked back at him. “Even Jim Horton gave you a couple of letters to deliver, didn’t he?”
Gordon’s face felt hot. For a moment he was too embarrassed to face her. Then, all at once, he burst out laughing. He wiped his eyes in relief at having the group fantasy lifted from his shoulders.
Mrs. Thompson chuckled as well. “Oh, it was harmless I think. And more than that. You’ve served as a… you know, that old automobile thing… a catalyst I think. You know, the children are already exploring ruins for miles around—between chores and supper—bringing me all the books they find. I won’t have any trouble making school into a privilege.
“Imagine, punishing them by suspending ’em from class! I hope Bobbie and I handle it right.”
“I wish you the best of luck, Mrs. Thompson,” Gordon said sincerely. “God, it would be nice to see a light, somewhere in all this desolation.”
“Right, son. That’d be bliss.”
Mrs. Thompson sighed. “I’d recommend you wait a year, but come on back. You’re kind… you treated my people well. And you’re discreet about some things, like that business with Abby and Michael.”
She frowned momentarily. “I think I understand what went on there, and I guess it’s for the best. Got to adjust, I suppose. Anyway, like I said, you’re always welcome back.”
Mrs. Thompson turned to go, walked two paces, then paused. She half turned to look back at Gordon. For a moment her face betrayed a hint of confusion and wonder. “You aren’t really a postman, are you?” she asked suddenly.
Gordon smiled. He set the cap, with its bright brass emblem, on his head. “If I bring back some letters, you’ll know for sure.”
She nodded, gruffly, then set off up the ruined asphalt road. Gordon watched her until she passed the first bend, then he turned about to the west, and the long downgrade toward the Pacific.
8
The barricades had been long abandoned. The baffle wall on Highway 58, at the east end of Oakridge, had weathered into a tumbled tell of concrete debris and curled, rusting steel. The town itself was silent. This end, at least, was clearly long abandoned.
Gordon looked down the main street, reading its story. Two, possibly three, pitched battles had been fought here. A storefront with a canted sign—emergency services clinic—sat at the center of a major circle of devastation.
Three intact panes reflected morning sunlight from the top floor of a hotel. Elsewhere though, even where store windows had been boarded, the prismatic sparkle of shattered glass glistened on the buckled pavement.
Not that he had really expected anything better, but some of the feelings he had carried with him out of Pine View had led to hopes for more islands of peace, especially now that he was in the fertile watershed of the Willamette Valley. If no living town, at least Oakridge might have shown other signs conducive to optimism. There might have been traces of methodical reclamation, for instance. If an industrial civilization existed here in Oregon, towns such as this one should have been harvested of anything usable.
But just twenty yards from his vantage point Gordon saw the wreckage of a gas station—a big mechanic’s tool cabinet lay on its side, its store of wrenches, pliers, and replacement wiring scattered on the oil-stained floor. A row of never-used tires still hung on a rack high above the service lifts.
From this, Gordon knew Oakridge to be the worst of all possible Oakridges, at least from his point of view. The things needed by a machine culture were available at every hand, untouched and rotting… implying there was no such technological society anywhere near. At the same time, he would have to pick through the wreckage of fifty waves of previous looters in his search for anything useful to a single traveler like himself.
Well, he sighed. I’ve done it before.
Even sifting through the downtown ruins of Boise, the gleaners before him had missed a small treasure trove of canned food in a loft behind a shoe store… some hoarder’s stash, long untouched. There was a pattern to such things, worked out over the years. He had his own methods for conducting a search.
Gordon slipped down on the forest side of the barricade baffle and entered the overgrowth. He zigzagged, on the off chance he had been watched. At a place where he could verify landmarks in three different directions, Gordon dropped his leather shoulder bag and cap under an autumn-bright red cedar. He took off the dark brown letter-carrier’s jacket and laid it on top, then cut brush to cover the cache.
He would go to any lengths to avoid conflict with suspicious locals, but only a fool would leave his weapons behind. There were two types of fighting that could come out of a situation like this. For one, the silence of the bow might be better. For the other, it could be worth expending precious, irreplaceable .38 cartridges. Gordon checked the pistol’s action and reholstered it. His bow he carried, along with arrows and a cloth sack for salvage.
In the first few houses, on the outskirts, the early looters had been more exuberant than th
orough. Often the wreckage in such places discouraged those who came after, leaving useful items within. He had found it true often before.
Still, by the fourth house Gordon had a poor collection to show for this theory. His sack contained a pair of boots almost useless from mildew, a magnifying glass, and two spools of thread. He had poked into all the usual and some unconventional hoarder’s crannies, and found no food of any sort.
His Pine View jerky wasn’t gone, but he had dipped down farther than he liked. His archery was better, and he had bagged a small turkey two days ago. Still, if he didn’t have better luck gleaning, he might have to give up on the Willamette Valley for now and get to work on a winter hunting camp.
What he really wanted was another haven such as Pine View. But fate had been kind enough, lately. Too much good luck made Gordon suspicious.
He moved on to a fifth house.
* * *
The four-poster bed stood in what had once been a prosperous physician’s two-story home. Like the rest of the house, the bedroom had been stripped of nearly everything but the furniture. Nevertheless, as he crouched down over the heavy area rug, Gordon thought he might have found something the earlier looters had missed.
The rug seemed out of place. The bed rested upon it, but only with the right pair of legs. The left pair lay directly on the hardwood floor. Either the owner had been sloppy in placing the big oval carpet, or…
Gordon put down his burdens and grabbed the edge of the rug.
Whew. It’s heavy.
He started rolling it toward the bed.
Yes! There was a thin, square crack in the floor, under the carpet. A bed leg pinned the rug over one of two brass door hinges. A trapdoor.
He pushed hard on the bedpost. The leg hopped and fell again with a boom. Twice more he shoved and loud echoes reverberated.
On his fourth heave the bedpost snapped in two. Gordon barely escaped impalement on the jagged stub as he toppled onto the mattress. The canopy followed and the aged bed collapsed in a crash. Gordon cursed, fighting with the smothering shroud. He sneezed violently in a cloud of floating dust.
Wastelands 2: More Stories of the Apocalypse Page 31