The Shelter Cycle

by Peter Rock

  “Are you asleep?” Wells said.

  “No,” she said. “Not yet.”

  “While you were gone—” He glanced back in the rearview mirror, his sweet, worried eyes, then through the windshield again. “Why did you go like that?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I just did it.”

  “You should have told me.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It felt,” he said. “It felt like you were trying to get away.”

  “That’s not it,” she said. “That’s not right.”

  “I would’ve understood,” he said. “Or tried to. I think I understand better, now.”

  Outside, the snow came down thicker, faster. He switched on the wipers, switched them off.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have,” he said. “Maybe you’ll be angry, but I read about it—everything you wrote, about when you were growing up.”

  Draft horses stood out in a field, snow on their broad backs. Tall fences against the elk surrounded haystacks. Farther away, a small herd of antelope shifted at the sound of the car, then leapt fluidly over a wheeled irrigation line that had been left out for the winter.

  “Are you warm enough, back there?”

  “Yes.”

  “It really made me miss you,” he said. “Reading it did. Are you mad?”

  “I didn’t write it for you.”

  “You were gone. I didn’t know—”

  “It’s fine,” she said. “Maybe it’s better, I think it is—I’m glad you read it. But I wrote it for myself.” Shifting in her seat, she looked at the sleeping baby’s smooth face, adjusted the blankets. “I wrote it for her, too. So she could understand.”

  Francine watched as Wells reached out, turned up the heat, the defrost. Black stripes, tire tracks marked the white highway, left by vehicles she couldn’t see, fading to white as the snow fell.

  “Did you find it?” he said.

  “Find what?”

  “The reason you went there,” he said. “Are you glad you did it?”

  “I should have told you,” she said.

  “But you had to go.”

  “Yes,” she said. “And I feel better, I feel better to be talking about it, for us to be talking.”

  “It all sounded so happy, back then,” he said.

  “It was.”

  “I was thinking,” he said, “before, when you were asleep, how this driving was kind of like your family, when you were a girl, how maybe we—our family—were driving over the same roads, all these years later.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Only you had two girls,” he said. “And that picture on the dashboard, that angel.”

  “Archangel Michael,” she said. “Yes. It was only a piece of paper, but it looked like stained glass. And we decreed as we went.”

  “How did that sound?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It does,” he said. “I want to hear it.”

  Leaning forward, she gathered all her hair together in one hand, pulled it back from her face, tucked it behind her shoulder. Then she closed her eyes and began:

  “Lord Michael before, Lord Michael behind,

  Lord Michael to the right, Lord Michael to the left,

  Lord Michael above, Lord Michael below,

  Lord Michael, Lord Michael, wherever I go!

  I AM his Love protecting here!

  I AM his Love protecting here!

  I AM his Love protecting here!”

  Silence. The snow slanted down; the wind blew it loose from the green trees along the highway. The baby’s eyes jerked open; Francine felt the vibrations of her voice, the words settling around them.

  “Thank you,” Wells said.

  “Feel safer, now?” she said.

  “In a way, I think I do.”

  “It woke up this little girl, in any case.”

  The baby began to cry; her face turned impossibly red, her little hands suddenly loose and flailing.

  “Can you pull over, so she can nurse?”

  Wells found a turnout, eased over the frozen crust of tire tracks; the car slid a little, then stopped, settled. Francine unbuckled her seat belt, unzipped her coat, unbuttoned her blouse. The baby began to quiet as soon as she was lifted; she weighed so little, her gums showing, her mouth sucking at the air and then latching on, her arms pushing, her hands trying to hold.

  It was silent again. Snow drifted down, settling on the hood of the car, slowly piling up on the windshield wipers. Francine watched the baby’s jaw flex, and the pale blue veins that forked along her skull, disappearing under her knit cap. She’d come from far away and grown inside her and now here she was, outside. The blanket around her tiny body rose and fell, her breathing.

  “You’re crying,” Wells said, turning in his seat, watching.

  “It’s just that I’m so happy,” she said. “It’s so hard to believe that we get to keep her, we get to have this little person.”

  “Have you thought of any names?”

  “Not yet,” she said. “We’re still getting to know her. Soon.”

  It was a little sad to look back at our trailer, unlit and abandoned, knowing we might never live there again. I slipped on the ice, held my mom’s hand. No one was yelling yet, or hurrying. There was a kind of purpose, a quiet purpose guiding us along. We didn’t talk. Somewhere a dog was barking, somewhere I couldn’t see.

  People joined us, above and below, people forked away to other shelters. Flashlights and camping lanterns shone against the darkness. There was hardly any sound at all. Far below on the highway an endless line of cars crept south, some turning off at Glastonbury, most keeping on toward Corwin Springs. Even miles away, through the snow, I could see all the things piled atop the vehicles, all the last-minute supplies and belongings that couldn’t be left behind.

  Twenty or so people gathered near the tunnel that led to the shelter, the ground there all scraped free of snow. More lanterns were set up and two of the workmen were telling people how much they could carry in. To one side, duffel bags and suitcases and trash bags were piled up. People dug through them, sorting, deciding. Other people who didn’t have a space in the shelter were crying, pleading, trying to talk their way in. They had no place to go, and now the time had come. March 15, 1990.

  The men knew us; they waved us through the door and we hurried down the steep wooden stairs with the warmer air rising around us, the darkness giving way to lights as we reached the bottom, where we kicked off our boots into a pile of boots and shoes. Everyone had to wear slippers inside, to keep out the dirt and dust. We had to keep everything as clean as we could, to keep the ventilators from working too hard.

  The second door was also metal, and would close the shelter off from the entryway. We went through it, into the hallway, which was crowded with people I knew and people I didn’t know. Everyone just buzzed; it was all finally happening.

  We forced our way past, out for a moment into a wider space of the eating area and the kitchen, people busy sorting pots and pans, counting chairs. They were talking about pancakes in the morning, and I started to wonder how we would know what time of day it was if we couldn’t see the sky, if all the clocks and watches ran down. I decided it might not matter.

  Maya had slipped ahead, people between us. She was already moving farther down the curved hallway, beyond our door. My mother called after her, then told me to wait in our room.

  I walked down the hallway and opened the door. Number 7. I stepped inside and closed the door. Everything was quieter, everything in its place. I climbed up into my bunk, which I’d climbed into so many times before this one night that mattered. Here was the quilt that smelled like my mom, since she had made it, and the sweet chemical smell of the new foam rubber mattress, and the smell of the wood that had been bent to cover all the walls. I rolled over, onto my back. Two knots in the wood just above me stared down like eyes. I looked at them and knew they’d become so familiar to me in the days and nights to come.

&
nbsp; I listened for my mom and Maya, for their voices in the shouting, and couldn’t be certain. Down below, our room was so neatly packed, all finished now. All the clothes and shoes of my future body, all the books and encyclopedias and dictionaries, all the first aid and wilderness guides. So many things packed up in plastic trash cans with their locking lids, the big Tupperware containers that fit beneath the bed, in the spaces under the floorboards; it all reminded me of playing with Colville in the shed outside our trailer, where our parents were gathering all their canning and everything. We’d rearrange the boxes full of food so it was a kind of fort, a shelter that would protect us and that we could eat.

  Colville wasn’t so far away, just down the highway; still, he could be on the other side of the world, considering how far apart we were at that moment, how impossible to reach him. We might not see each other until we were teenagers. Would we still be friends? What would we talk about? I imagined how it would be if he burrowed a tunnel to me, between the shelters. I’d hear a scratching through the wall and then he would come through, dirt in his hair, his body older, a man’s body, and still my friend. Was Colville asleep right now? Was he thinking of me?

  I couldn’t sleep. I counted the containers, waiting. All this my parents had done for us, and they knew what they were doing, and I was not afraid because I knew they would be with me, underground in the shelter, no matter how long it took. I found this reassuring, and also it made me think of my grandparents, my parents’ parents, who were far away and on the outside. I hadn’t seen them very often, and now we might never see them again. There was a photograph of my mom’s parents, on a bookshelf. They stood in front of a red car and my grandpa had a small mustache, his arm around my grandma’s shoulder.

  The door beneath my bed suddenly swung open and I turned over and saw the top of Maya’s head, her crooked part, then my mom’s. Maya took two steps up a ladder and fell face-down onto her cot. She lay still. My mom turned to check, to see where I was; she didn’t smile.

  Maya snuffled, turned her face sideways where I could see it, red and teary. Her friend Courtney had run away; she’d gone with people who weren’t in the Activity, people she knew somehow. Maya told me that, then stopped talking. She sobbed every now and then, shifted her body, and I heard her whispering Reverse the Tides decrees, and then she slowed down and finally fell asleep. I watched her the whole time, thinking how sad it was that she had planned to have her friend along with her, underground, and now would not. Then I realized that Maya was not crying because of that, or not only because of that; it was more that Courtney didn’t believe and so she would be exposed, out in the open most likely when the blast came. That meant she would really be gone.

  I rolled onto my back again and stared at the knothole eyes. I felt bad for Maya, losing her friend and not knowing what had happened. At the same time, it meant that she would have more time for me, and that made me happy, since I didn’t have many friends in the shelter. I’d expected that Colville would be there, three doors away, and he wasn’t; instead he was down at the ranch, in the big shelter. I imagined how happy he had to be, underground, to finally have the waiting over, to find out what was going to happen.

  We hadn’t heard about Mrs. Young’s baby, so maybe it hadn’t been born yet and would be born underground and wouldn’t even see the sky until he wasn’t even a baby anymore. He would be a boy, a special boy like the Messenger had said. Would his eyes work, out in the daylight? Would his pale skin burn too easily? Would he always want to live underground? Would he wear sunglasses, even inside?

  I couldn’t sleep. A man in the hallway was asking something about the ventilation system. Someone answered him, voices trailing away. Someone else said something about an electrical line and North Glastonbury; a woman shouted about a telephone tree; beneath and beyond the close voices there was the rhythm of decrees, all through the shelter.

  We did have pancakes in the morning, a happy breakfast underground before we surfaced again, into the blue sky, the bright clear day. Some people celebrated because we had turned away the darkness for a time—that’s what the Messenger told us. Prophecy is not written in stone, she said, and already she was drifting away, her soul leaving her body. Some people blamed her, and some kept on as if nothing had changed, even if the nature of this world is change. Some people believed that the world had ended, that the bombs had come, and that we were left to live in a kind of copy that was so close to what had been. Others were confused, and some left the Activity. Some, like Colville’s family, drifted away, splintered off to start other Activities, like the Temple of the Presence, down in Tucson. Some people were angry, or felt tricked. Many had debts from the preparations, the construction, all the years of food and supplies they’d bought. The world remained; the banks and governments had not disappeared. All the problems that had been left aboveground were still there, still here, waiting.

  Lying there that night, in my bunk above the doorway, what I mostly felt was happy. I had chosen the family I was born into, and we were here for a reason. We had been warned, and we had prepared ourselves. We had gathered the Light and we would continue, even in the years underground, even after that. I stared up at the two knothole eyes and imagined the concrete behind the wood, and then all the dirt and earth piled on top of that. If I dug upward forty feet I’d be out in the cold again, where the snow was probably still falling and that dog I’d heard was still barking, lonely, wandering around and through the quiet and lonely houses, searching. Perhaps with his ears he could hear the missiles long before they arrived, as he ate forgotten food from countertops, as he shook snow from his fur and whined quietly to himself. A black dog, racing across the snow. He scratched, he whined and sniffed at the metal doors of one shelter, then ran toward the next, barking and barking, and no one could hear him.

  22

  COLVILLE CHECKED BEHIND HIMSELF; even now, he kept expecting Kilo to be there, or to appear, to draw attention or give him away. And yet the dog was not here. He’d been taken somewhere else by Jeremy. Colville was on his own.

  In the darkness, he leaned against the fence, its splintery wood against his lips, only his eyes peeking over the top, across the back yard, at the darkened house. It was after ten, still before midnight. A foot of snow capped the picnic table.

  He’d left his gloves behind in the pack; with his hands in his pockets, it was difficult to balance on the bucket he’d found. The ground beneath the bucket was all ice, and icicles hung in the sagebrush on the hillside that stretched up behind him, that he had descended not long before.

  Wells, that was the husband’s name, and when a light suddenly shone in a window it was Wells standing there, just staring for a moment, rubbing at one eye. He was in the kitchen—Colville remembered the layout of the house, from the one time he’d been inside it; he’d drawn a diagram of it in his notebook. Close, maybe forty feet away, but with the light on, Wells could only see his own reflection. Now he looked down and turned on a faucet, began to wash dishes.

  Colville’s legs ached from balancing. He waited and watched, the rough fence against his face. This day had started so long ago—the same day that he’d found the girl, that he’d walked out of the mountains and found that he was in Oregon. He’d caught the bus in Baker City and a few hours later got off in Boise. And now here he was, watching Wells, who was squinting through the other window, over the driveway, out the side of the house. Wells switched off the kitchen light, so he could see out, and then Colville could follow his gaze, upward, two houses over, to the lost girl’s house, where an upstairs window was alight in an empty room.

  Were cats fighting, somewhere? There was a crying. A bird? Colville smelled wood smoke on the cold air. Headlights came down the street, visible in the gaps between the houses, then tailed away. Pulling a hand from his pocket, he steadied himself, listened. He heard only distant traffic.

  Wells switched the kitchen light back on and another window went alight at the same moment. The bathroom, the narrow win
dow of thick, textured glass: Colville could see only the silhouette, but he knew the color of Francine’s hair, moving back and forth, her body growing smaller as she turned away. At the sight of her he inhaled the sharp, icy air; he tried to exhale slowly, in pieces, letting just a little steam escape at a time. The bathroom window went dark.

  Colville glanced at the window of the other house. A yellow rectangle, high in the air, light spilling out across the roof of a garage.

  Now, in the kitchen window, Francine appeared, wearing a blue robe, carrying something in her arms. Suddenly Colville felt as if a large, warm hand pressed flat across his chest, a deep vibration over his heart; all of his fingertips and toes felt grasped at once, pulled straight out and let go. His vision clouded white, returned just as the baby’s red face, tiny, showed for a moment between the folds of Francine’s robe. He could hear the squalling, the gasps between the wails.

  Wells turned from the sink, held out his arms, but Francine smiled and shook her head, swayed her body side to side. She held the baby close as it quieted, as it turned its face away from where Colville could see. Climbing down, he picked up the bucket and carried it along the fence line, put it back where he’d found it. It was better to move while Francine and Wells were in a lighted room, where it would be more difficult to see his dark shape scurrying against the white slope.