“Which hand, horsey? Which hand?” asked Teddy, his face nearly split in two with a grin.
“Jesus H. Christ, Teddy,” said Derek. “Are you getting stupider on me?” He raised a hand to cuff his brother, but John tugged at his sleeve.
“No wait,” he said. “Watch.”
Derek watched. Afha stared at Teddy’s meaty fists, the milky cataract of his superfluous eye roiling. Then the donkey reached out and nuzzled Teddy’s right hand.
“Hee hee hee,” shrieked Teddy. He opened his right hand. The pebble was on his palm.
“Come on,” scoffed Derek. “It’s just luck.”
“I don’t know,” said Leggy, stroking his beard. “Your brother’s done it ten times already, and the donkey’s got it right every time.”
“Oh bullshit,” said Derek. “Did you all just get radiation poisoning?”
“See for y’self,” said Leggy.
Teddy played several more times, and each time Afha chose the hand that held the pebble.
Then Teddy said, “Okay horsey, last time now. Okay? Last time.” He put both hands behind his back, and fixed his face with a look of exaggerated seriousness.
Derek instantly recognized the look—it was Teddy’s “I’m trying to fool you” face. Derek sighed. Teddy never understood that if he really wanted to trick someone, he should keep up that shit-eating grin.
With his hands still behind his back, Teddy leaned over to his brother and stage-whispered in his ear.
“I put the stone in my pants, Der,” he said, the veneer of his serious face nearly cracking. He composed himself and brought both fists out from behind his back.
Afha stood and stared at Teddy, blowing through his nostrils. Then he backed away two paces, shook his head, and whinnied.
“Pick, horsey. Pick a hand,” sang Teddy. He waggled each fist enticingly, but the donkey would not pick a hand.
Finally Teddy opened his hands. They were both empty. Afha brayed, and Teddy clapped.
“He knew! He knew I played sneaky,” shouted Teddy. “Smart horsey!”
“I’ll be damned,” said Leggy.
“The Lord be praised,” said John.
“Get straight,” said Derek. “The Bedouins probably taught it how to play games. Or maybe the stone smells funny.”
“It does now,” said Leggy, watching Teddy fish in his drawers for the pebble.
Then Leggy looked up. The sky above was gradually being hidden by a thick gauze of gray haze, and the sun was going down fast.
“We better see about a fire. Looks like it’s going to be a dark night.”
Leggy was right. The darkness fell fast, and a haze above them hid the stars and moon. They were terribly glad when orange flames began to eat greedily at the deadwood they’d gathered.
The scraggly remains of dead, twisted trees provided copious firewood, and they stacked a supply that would keep the fire hot and bright all night long if they wanted it to.
Nights had grown steadily colder as they ascended the foothills, and they huddled close around the fire, glad for the boulders that threw back the warmth of the flames. The darkness was utterly complete outside the small ring of light—no moon, no stars, only an invisible landscape hidden behind a black curtain.
“I gotta piss,” said John, “but I’m afraid if I go too far, I’ll never find you all again.”
“Sidle on up to the edge of the firelight and aim yourself away from us,” said Leggy. “You’ll be all right. Just don’t piss on the mules.”
***
As John urinated, he stared into the darkness, straining to see anything at all in the void. He seemed to pee for hours, and he didn’t like the way his urine just vanished into the night. He felt as if he were standing at the very edge of a chasm, that if he stepped forward he’d tumble from a high precipice and fall headfirst into the darkness and never stop.
“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,” he whispered, trying to calm himself. But the words died on his lips as he detected movement in the distance, fluttery and uneven. He rubbed his eyes, thinking perhaps he was imagining it. But then he heard a sound, a soft chuffing sound, and it was getting closer. His bladder clenched closed with fear.
“Something’s coming,” he whispered breathlessly. He hurriedly buttoned himself into his pants again and scooted toward the fire. “Something’s coming outta that darkness.”
“Huh?” said Derek.
“What’d you see?” asked Leggy.
“Not sure I saw anything,” said John. “But I heard something. Sounds like, like wind.”
“Get this fire out,” said Leggy, his voice urgent.
“Are you crazy?” said Derek. “We’ll be blind out here.”
“Yeah, but so will whatever’s comin’ for us,” said Leggy. He removed his heavy serape to beat out the fire, but then stopped.
Suddenly they heard the noise. It sounded like wind. Or like sheets hung to dry on a line, snapping and cracking in a gust.
Leggy lifted his serape, but at that instant wings exploded out of the darkness all around them, beating and flapping madly over the fire. Musty, cobwebby tendrils brushed against their necks and faces.
Teddy howled in fear, throwing his hands up over his head. Minna and Ahfa joined in, braying with terror. John watched in gape-eyed horror and wonder as a dozen or more of the creatures swooped and dove around them.
The creatures were nearly man-sized, with large, papery wings marked in swirling patterns of black and gray. Their faces were oval, with almond-shaped eyes and small mouths. Their cylindrical bodies looked like elongated infants wrapped in swaddling blankets. Six slender, jointed legs sprouted from wrinkled abdomens and writhed manically. Their wings beat the air as they swooped, turned and hovered over the fire.
“Angels,” whispered John in awe. “Are they angels?”
“No, you dumb shit,” shouted Derek. “They’re bugs!”
“Moths,” shouted Leggy. “Put out the goddamn fire! They’re attracted to the light.” He tried again to flip his serape over the campfire, but one of the swooping creatures knocked it aside.
Derek snatched a blazing branch from the fire, leapt to his feet, and smashed one of the creatures to the ground. It shrieked in agony as its papery wings ignited in flame. Derek beat down another with wild swings.
The creature fell at John’s feet, and he watched in horror as the thing writhed in the dirt, its almond eyes wide with pain, its wrinkled torso flaring like a match. It locked its eyes on John, its mouth moving pathetically. John could feel the pain and confusion in the creature’s death gaze, but he did nothing, merely watched as fire engulfed its face and head, reducing its body quickly to black ash.
Derek killed three more before the creatures, still swooping and diving toward the camp fire, lifted themselves out of reach.
Leggy tumbled out of his chair, recovered his serape and finally smothered the blaze. Derek scattered the hot coals and ash with several savage kicks. Darkness engulfed them, broken only by the orange glow of scattered bits of smoldering wood, which winked out one by one as they cooled. They could hear the creatures still troubling the air above them, but soon the noise of beating wings died away as the things moved off.
“Everybody all right?” asked Leggy in the stillness.
“I’m okay,” said Derek.
“Me too,” said Teddy, his fear gone now that the bugs had departed.
“I…I’m here,” said John, his voice hoarse.
The half-charred corpse of the moth was lost to the darkness, but he could still see it in his mind. No creature deserved to die as horribly as these had. It just wasn’t right. And what if they were more than just bugs? Their resemblance to angels—at least what John imagined angels to look like—disturbed him. Surely their poor treatm
ent of these creatures would come back to them somehow. Not just to Derek, but all of them.
“I expect the mules bolted,” said Leggy. “I didn’t hobble them very securely.”
“No,” said Teddy. “Horsies are still here. They don’t run away.”
From the darkness, Ahfa snorted as if in affirmation.
“Well that’s one good bit of news,” Leggy said. “Fellas, we’re gonna have to do without a fire for the rest of the night. I hope you all ain’t afraid of the dark.”
“I’m not,” said Teddy, but they could all hear the lie in his voice.
“The dark doesn’t worry me, but what about the cold?” asked John. “I can already feel a chill creeping into my bones.”
“That we can do somethin’ about,” said Leggy. “Let’s all gather up close, fellas. Just follow the sound of my voice.”
Leggy hummed a creaky old tune as Teddy, John, and Derek clambered blindly toward him. There were a few moments of stumbling about. Teddy stepped on John’s foot hard enough to bring tears to his eyes, and Derek tripped over Leggy’s wheelchair with a curse, but soon they were close enough to hold hands, even if they couldn’t see each other.
“Okay now,” said Leggy, “we just lie down back to front and use each other’s body heat to stay warm. I done it a few times before when I was runnin’ freight and got into a spot where we couldn’t light any fires. I’d rather be bunkin’ down with a nice full-figured gal than you smelly lot, but it beats freezin’.”
And so they bundled themselves together on the hard ground, with Derek and John bookended by Teddy and Leggy.
“Who’s teeth are chatterin’?” asked Leggy.
“Me,” said Derek. “I don’t think this is workin’.”
“Just give it a minute,” said Leggy. “You’ll warm up, and you’ll probably fall asleep before you know it.”
“Shit,” said Derek. “It’s so goddamn dark I could probably sleep with my eyes open.”
Teddy and Leggy laughed, but John was silent. The episode with the moths troubled him, and he too thought he’d never get warm. But within a few minutes he realized that Leggy was right about body heat. Teddy was practically a blast furnace, and soon John felt drowsy. He desperately wanted to fall asleep and not wake up until daylight, so that he could forget this strange, dark night.
But sleep eluded him, and he lay in a restless despair while his companions snored around him. His long vigil was finally broken as the sky lightened, and the first fingers of dawn reached slowly over the Sierras.
***
They marched farther into the foothills that day, watching the landscape around them slowly transform. Gone were the brown sagebrush and the desiccated tumbleweeds that rolled like bony fingers across the cracked earth. The desert plain gradually transformed to rocky soil, from which grew sparse clumps of grass and low shrubs that Leggy called gorseberry. Rocks and boulders poked up from the earth, their hard faces crusted with pale white and blue lichen. Now and then they passed through stands of scraggly pine. The trees stood no higher than ten or twelve feet, but they were a wonder to the boys, for whom a tree meant the gnarled and stunted Joshuas.
They spotted numerous creatures in the brush and stones all around them—scampering brown lizards, brown-furred rodents, and flights of small birds. Teddy spotted a hawk high overhead, gracefully hovering on an updraft.
In the late afternoon, Leggy suggested they set up camp early, to try and bag some of the wildlife scurrying about. Derek set out traps while the others gathered brushwood and hunted up water. Then they rested. Leggy put his pipe in his mouth but didn’t light it. He felt content to sit in his chair and just be. A soothing bliss had fallen over him, better than anything he’d ever poured out of a bottle, and he wanted to fill himself up with it, to brim with it, because he knew what lay on the other side of the mountains.
A blasted waste, a nightmare territory.
Thoughts of what was to come crowded his mind, but with an effort he shoved them aside. That was for another time. Now, he would simply sit and watch the light change, and feel cool, moist air kissing his cheeks.
Derek checked his traps at dusk, but they were empty. “May not get anything till morning,” he said. “May not get anything at all.”
“No matter,” said Leggy. “We still got rations.”
They made supper over a hot, bright fire, then sat back to watch the flames.
The night was clear, and a brilliant moon held court over a thousand bright stars strewn across the sky. The group drifted off to sleep without bothering to set a watch.
***
Near midnight, Leggy roused his companions from sleep.
“Look,” he said, pointing up toward the moon.
They could see, on the horizon, a strange fluttering cloud, which slowly resolved itself. It was the moths, dozens of them, an indeterminate distance away. The creatures were high up in the sky, and seemed to be straining to reach the moon itself, their papery wings beating inexhaustibly in the thin air.
John watched the creatures. From a distance they looked even more like angels. It looked like they were trying to fly back to Heaven. Something stirred in him, a mixture of sadness and joy.
Back home, the Elders had spoken longingly of Heaven. They said Heaven should be the goal of every man, woman, and child. In Heaven there would be no more pain, no more hurt, no more desperation. Only milk and honey in plenty, and white light, and cool days that went on forever. And these angels were trying to reach it.
“What are they doing?” asked Derek.
“Don’t know,” said Leggy. “But it looks like they’re attracted to the light of the moon. Like they’re trying to fly to it.”
“Dumb bugs,” said Derek. “Even if they could, they’d die as soon as they got there.”
“Why, Der-Der?” asked Teddy.
“Cause there’s no air on the moon. They’d choke to death.”
“Oh,” said Teddy.
“How do you know?” asked John, his voice sullen. He didn’t like Derek’s dismissive tone.
“What’d you mean, how do I know?” asked Derek.
“You ever been to the moon?”
“Course not.”
“Then how do you know?”
“My father told me.”
“You mean your father went to the moon, then he came back and told you about it?”
“What the Hell’s wrong with you, John?” asked Derek, turning on him. “It was something he read about from the Before Times. One of the damn things he was always tellin’ me about.”
“But Leggy said there were men on the moon,” said John. “If there’s no air, how’d the men stay alive?”
Everyone turned to Leggy.
He coughed. “Well, I’m not too keen on the details, but I believe they had special suits. Special suits that helped them breathe.”
John shook his head. “You don’t know any better, either.” He rolled over and went to sleep.
***
The next day, Leggy had to abandon his wheelchair. The going had been getting steadily rougher. The land was sloping upward, and the ground was growing more tangled with brush and roots that snagged the wheels. In addition to gorse bush and stands of pine, the hills were alive with a profusion of greenery that was beyond even Leggy’s ability to indentify.
Thus far, Teddy had been able to manhandle Leggy over every obstacle, but even his great strength was waning, and the group’s progress was slowing.
Before mid-day, Derek called a halt. Teddy and Leggy were several hundred yards behind—again. Teddy was wrestling the chair through a particularly malicious tangle of trailing vine. The metal wheels of Leggy’s chair looked like a strange bouquet of green leaves and stems.
Derek strode back to meet them. “Time to pack
up the chair, old man.”
Leggy looked up from the ground, where he’d been trying to search out a clearer path. Teddy stood behind him, panting and blowing.
“You’re slowin’ us up,” said Derek.
Leggy knew there was no argument.
“Ah, shit,” said the old man. He found himself reluctant to give up his chair, a feeling that surprised him. He’d never particularly cared for his wheelchair. It had always been cumbersome and uncomfortable, and in the last year or so strange bits of metal had begun to poke him in odd places, a sign that its frame was coming unaligned.
But now that the time had come to pack it up, he didn’t want to get out. And he certainly wasn’t looking forward to its replacement, the hard spine of a braying donkey.
“Time’s a wastin’,” said Derek.
“All right, all right,” said Leggy crossly. “Get them mules back here and let’s saddle up.”
Leggy watched from his wheelchair as the boys transferred Afha’s baggage to Minna, and then inexpertly applied the saddle to Afha.
“Tighten it up good,” said Leggy. “I don’t want to slip off on some steep mountain pass.”
Derek kneed Afha in the belly. The donkey brayed and exhaled, and Derek cinched the saddle an extra notch.
“Okay cowboy,” said Derek with a mocking grin, “mount up.”
Leggy motioned to Teddy, who lifted the man from the wheelchair and placed him gingerly on Afha’s back. The donkey took Leggy’s weight easily and didn’t seem to mind the rider.
Teddy handed Leggy his serape and a tattered old satchel that had hung behind the wheelchair to hold Leggy’s possessions, his whisky flask, pipe and tobacco, matches, and a pocketknife.
Wasteland Blues Page 10