by David Brin
He sat forward, not believing his ears. “What did you say?” He had formed hopes of staying in Pine View for at least the cold season, maybe a year or more. Who could tell? Perhaps the wanderlust would leave him, and he could finally find a home.
His sated stupor dissipated. Gordon fought to hold back his anger. To have the chance revoked on the basis of the crowd’s childish fantasies!
Abby noticed his agitation and hurried on. “That wasn’t the only reason, of course. There was the problem of there being no woman for you. And then …” Her voice lowered perceptibly. “And then Mrs. Howlett thought you’d be perfect for helping me and Michael finally have a baby.…”
Gordon blinked. “Um,” he said, expressing the sudden and complete contents of his mind.
“We’ve been trying for five years,” she explained. “We really want children. But Mr. Horton thinks Michael can’t ’cause he had the mumps really bad when he was twelve. You remember the real bad mumps, don’t you?”
Gordon nodded, recalling friends who had died. The resultant sterility had made for unusual social arrangements everywhere he had traveled.
Still …
Abby went on quickly. “Well, it would cause problems if we asked any of the other men here to … to be the body father. I mean, when you live close to people, like this, you have to look on the men who aren’t your husband as not being really ‘men’ … at least not that way. I—I don’t think I’d like it, and it might cause trouble.”
She blushed. “Besides, I’ll tell you something if you promise to keep a secret. I don’t think any of the other men would be able to give Michael the kind of son he deserves. He’s really very smart, you know. He’s the only one of us youngers who can really read.…”
The flow of strange logic was coming on too fast for Gordon to follow completely. Part of him dispassionately noted that this was all really an intricate and subtle tribal adaptation to a difficult social problem. That part of him though—the last Twentieth-Century intellectual—was still a bit drunk, and meanwhile the rest was starting to realize what Abby was driving at.
“You’re different.” She smiled at him. “I mean, even Michael saw that right from the start. He’s not too happy, but he figures you’ll only be through once a year or so, and he could stand that. He’d rather that than never have any kids.”
Gordon cleared his throat. “You’re sure he feels this way?”
“Oh, yes. Why do you think Mrs. Howlett introduced us in that funny way? It was to make it clear without really saying it out loud. Mrs. Thompson doesn’t like it much, but I think that’s because she wanted you to stay.”
Gordon’s mouth felt dry. “How do you feel about all this?”
Her expression was enough of an answer. She looked at him as if he were some sort of visiting prophet, or at least a hero out of a story book. “I’d be honored if you’d say yes,” she said, quietly, and lowered her eyes.
“And you’d be able to think of me as a man, ‘that way’?”
Abby grinned. She answered by crawling up on top of him and planting her mouth intensely upon his.
• • •
There was a momentary pause as she shimmied out of her clothes and Gordon turned to snuff out the candles on the bed stand. Beside them lay the letterman’s gray uniform cap, its brass badge casting multiple reflections of the dancing flames. The figure of a rider, hunched forward on horseback before bulging saddle bags, seemed to move at a flickering gallop.
This is another one I owe you, Mr. Postman.
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 wrinkled 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 mom
ent 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.