by Brian Hart
Sang-Chul went back to Sacramento that day but April stayed until the funeral and came back with Roy and Karen and the girls afterward. She didn’t want to go home. Gem and the puppy stayed with her. The Malinois was a beautiful dog, and days and then weeks passed with April sitting on the porch wrapped in a blanket, Gem sleeping at her feet, instructing Wiley and Roy on how to care for him and train him to keep him in fighting trim. He was special, a one-in-a-million dog.
Near the end of the month, just as they were sitting down to dinner, Sang called April’s phone and told her that the shooter had been arrested leaving a Walmart in Van Nuys with a box of ammunition. He was a kid, seventeen. He’d shot his own mother and three other cops besides Aaron. He’d worn a GoPro.
April was packed to leave the next day. Roy gassed up the truck so Karen could drive her home. She was leaving the puppy for Sarah and Wiley.
“He’ll keep you safe,” April told the girls, through her tears. “I want you all to keep each other safe.” Gem looked at them from the open passenger window. She and the puppy had never been apart, and although Roy didn’t have to restrain the younger dog, it was obvious that he wanted to follow his old pal, wherever she was going.
[35]
M<55
OR 9XXXX
The gate is still closed and appears to be locked. Printz’s vehicles haven’t moved. Nothing has changed. He and the dog wait for a few minutes to make sure no one is around, watch their backtrack. The dog breathes heavily on his neck. Bloody muzzle, dry now. Lucky you weren’t shot. Both of us.
He breaks the passenger window of one of the troop carriers with a rock, finds the tire repair kit under the rear seat. He uses the small octagonal key to unlock the hubs and with a tire iron removes the lug nuts from the tires of both vehicles and throws them by the handful in three different directions into the forest. He keeps the key. Whatever weapons are still there are locked in the gangbox in the bed. He doesn’t waste time trying to get in.
He waters the dog first, then refills all of his bladders and bottles from a polytank in the lead vehicle, leaves the tap open. He watches the road behind the gate, listens to the silent woods. He retrieves his bike and trailer and shoves the redwood box and all of his water, whatever else will fit, into his panniers. He’s leaving the trailer behind. Thinks to go through the vehicles for hidden weapons but doesn’t want to waste the time. One gun won’t save him. Ten guns won’t. Rolling away, he brakes hard and dismounts, takes time to stab some dead pine needles into the keyhole of the padlock. As an afterthought, pisses on it.
His brake pads melt on the descent and by the time he hits the lower gate he’s dragging his feet to stop. The dog has the squinty look he gets when he’s fatigued. The man closes the gate and locks it, the pine needle trick is repeated. Before they leave he gives the dog more water, has a few swallows himself but he throws it up, managing to land some on the padlock.
Back on the pavement, he puts his head down and pedals without stopping, breathes deep, paces himself. There’s nothing left in his stomach to throw up. He pedals through his dry heaves. The dog is hanging in beside him with his tongue out.
The dog is out in front. He stops and stands broadside at the top of a low hill and tests the wind. The man dismounts and pushes his bike to join him. Below them, on the road ahead, a shredded Winnebago is blocking both lanes, broken glass like spilled water. The man slides into the ditch and with his binoculars sees the bodies on the road. The fields are empty, no other vehicles. He and the dog approach slowly and from the side.
The corpses of what looks to be two separate families are scattered on the blacktop and in the ditch. Two teenage boys with bottle flies blanketing their eyes and red-black blood, exposed flesh, are tangled together as if one had been trying to carry the other. Both sets of parents have been shot with high-caliber weapons and are missing large pieces of meat and bone. The swarming flies are thick enough to offer shade. Empty shell casings on the road tell him that they’d fired back or fired first.
It’s the dog that discovers the boy cowering speechless in a culvert under the road. He’s docile and allows the man to pick him up. He’s small, maybe six or seven years old. There are bicycles on a rack on the back of the RV.
“Can you ride?” the man asks.
The boy stares at him. He carries the boy to the shady side of the RV, away from the bodies, and sets him down.
The man takes the keys from the RV and unlocks the bike rack. He takes the smallest one to the boy but he shakes his head no. The next-smallest bike is pink with a flower basket. The man returns with a medium-sized bike with gears and the boy stands and takes it by the bars and climbs on.
“Is there anyone else here?” the man asks.
The boy ignores him and rides away. The man follows.
The sign has been altered: Klamath Falls to Klamath Fell. He turns from the highway as soon as he can and plots a new course on his map. The child stops beside him but won’t speak. The man offers him what packaged food he has left—some saltines and peanut butter, water. He doesn’t offer any of the bear jerky because he suspects that’s what’s been making him sick.
When they make camp the man gives the boy his sleeping bag. The dog curls onto the bottom of the bag and the boy works his feet underneath to warm up. The man pulls on his extra clothes and stays up with his cramping stomach and body aches and watches the boy and the dog and can’t help but think of his own childhood. The logic of his life strikes him as impossible.
For breakfast he boils a few pieces of bear jerky thick as yellow pine bark and mixes in a pack of Lipton’s onion soup mix to cut the taste. The boy eats first and finishes the last of the crackers. Shivering in the trees, trying to piss before they go, the man throws up the little bit of broth he supped. When he returns, the dog, or maybe the boy, has finished the soup and licked the pot clean. The boy is pitching pebbles into the pot and the sound vibrates in the man’s head.
The man joins in the game and as they plink stones into the pot he tells the boy his name and that he has two girls of his own, and mentions as offhandedly as he can that if he decides to come along, he can meet them. He gives the dog’s name again, earns a look from the boy for repeating himself, and speaks for the animal in saying he hopes the boy will join them. Unconvinced or still in shock or both, the boy blinks but doesn’t speak. The man tells him his daughter’s names and about the farm they used to have, all the animals they raised and the vegetables they grew in their garden. He doesn’t tell him about his wife or the end. He doesn’t tell him that he’s worried he has trichinosis. The boy tires of the game and tips the pebbles from the GSI cookpot and rolls up the sleeping bag and puts both in the pannier where they came from, nods toward the waiting road.
[36]
R>45
CA 96118
Roy woke the girls in the dark and herded them to the kitchen and cooked them a breakfast of fried eggs and toast, venison sausage. Sarah asked for honey but they didn’t have any, hadn’t for a long time. They had six Warres in the field but the bees had split for greener pastures.
“Blackberry jam,” Roy said. “Take it or leave it.”
Wiley slid the jam jar toward her little sister. The dot-to-dot India ink tattoo, supposed to be a rose, on the back of her hand had already begun to fade, but it still got Roy’s hackles up every time he noticed it. Not as bad as Karen. She wanted amputation or a belt sander. But with the Preservation drawdown and the drought, the militia families mostly gone and the school having closed its doors for the last time, the crowd Wiley had been running with evaporated. It was as if she’d been in the current while her family was in the slack water and they’d just plucked her out before she disappeared. Wiley obviously felt differently. She’d liked the current. She wanted a life outside of survival.
Sarah pushed the jam jar back toward her sister.
“She left it,” Wiley said.
“I didn’t.” Sarah reached for it and knocked it over but it didn’t spill and
when it rolled toward the edge of the table Roy caught it and set it up right.
“Want me to do it or you?” Roy said.
“You,” Sarah said. Roy ladled on the jam but didn’t spread it, knowing that if he did, Sarah would yell at him.
Roy fed the dog and sent it outside, then did the dishes while the girls got dressed and used the bathroom and brushed their teeth. When they came back they pulled on their Bogs and went outside in the dark to do their chores. Before he followed them, he stood at the door and listened for Karen but she was still sleeping. The girls tracked down an escape-artist goat while Roy took the eggs inside as an excuse to get more coffee.
Karen was up, reading the news on her tablet.
“Anything good?” Roy said.
“Farmer’s Almanac says weather’s coming,” Karen said.
“I’ll believe it when I see it.”
“I made lunches for you, don’t forget.”
“OK.”
“Are you staying all day?” she said.
“How hot’s it gonna get?”
“A hundred and four by this afternoon.”
“We’re not staying all day.”
At the bottom of the porch stairs, under a reddening sky, Karen handed them their lunches and gave out kisses. She patted Roy’s waistband to see if he had his pistol.
“It’s in the safe. I don’t need it.”
“OK,” she said. To Sarah, “Don’t eat your lunch early if you get bored or you’ll go hungry.”
“I know, Mama.”
“That goes for you, too,” Karen said to Wiley.
“I didn’t ask for a sandwich, did I?”
“Nope, you didn’t. Have a nice day,” Karen said, and gave Roy a look.
Roy already had his sandwich out and took a big bite and grinned at Karen as he climbed into the truck. The dog was in the crew cab with Sarah. They’d loaded the vegetable crates last night. As he was headed down the driveway, he rolled down his window and yelled to Karen that they had the dog.
Dust and smoke mottled the horizon. If he hadn’t seen it himself, he’d never have believed that this valley had once been sown deep with alfalfa and for much of the summer the air smelled wet and earthy with it. The sprinkler pivots were gone and dust had swallowed the abandoned pipe. The haybarns big enough to be seen from space, stacked to the rafters with four-by-three bales, had either been burned or sold off for the lumber. The hope was that it would get better but that kind of hope wasn’t something Roy could maintain. He hoped for his family’s safety and for water, but he didn’t bother hoping for it to get better—whatever it was anymore—because all of that had long ago slipped out of his hands, everybody’s hands.
He turned and looked at his girls. “What’re we doing for your mom’s birthday? I need ideas.”
“We could bake her a cake and maybe watch a movie,” Sarah said.
“We could set up the projector in the barn,” Roy said. “That’s good. What movie?”
“Out of Africa,” Sarah said.
“Done,” Roy said.
“And what else?” Wiley said.
“What else, what?” Roy said. “Movie, popcorn, a nice dinner.”
“That’s not much of a birthday. I mean, what about an actual present, something she wants?”
Roy suggested a new meat grinder, his one solid idea. “She was just saying how the gears in ours are shot and it’s going to die,” he said, the apology already in his voice.
“No and no?” Wiley said, with her near-constant teenage exasperation. “We’ll get a new meat grinder no matter what, or you’ll rebuild the old one. We need to get her something special, something she’ll cherish.”
“Maybe I’ll get her a tattoo,” Roy said. “A rose, maybe?”
“Don’t start,” Wiley said.
“OK. All right. I don’t know what to get her, though,” Roy said, getting a little annoyed. “That’s why I asked. We only have two weeks.”
“Two and a half,” Wiley said. “We’ll think of something by then.”
“We could make her a painting,” Sarah said. “We could work together and Papa could make a frame for it.”
“I like that idea, sweetheart,” Roy said, glancing at Sarah, giving her a smile. “I don’t know where I’d be without my ladies.”
Wiley shook her head and looked out the window.
Roy passed the first marker announcing the upcoming roadblock. He let off the accelerator and the truck began to slow. The light was red on the barricade and it began to flash as they approached. “Come on, dipshits,” Roy said, leaning forward on the steering wheel. “Where are you? I don’t wanna talk and I don’t wanna stop.” The militiamen appeared with their weapons slung on their shoulders. When they saw who it was they raised the gate and waved them through. Roy gave them a middle-finger wave.
“Are they always going to be here?” Wiley said.
“No,” Roy said.
“Then how long?” Sarah asked.
“I wish I knew.”
A chain was strung across the gate at the farmer’s market and the sign was down. The girls stayed in the truck with the dog while Roy wandered over to the horse trailer with two flat tires that was the market office and talked to Mr. Florence. After shaking hands, they moved from the cool of the trailer to the premature heat of early morning. The girls had gotten out and opened the camper shell and put down the tailgate and sat down, legs swinging. Behind them, small wooden baskets of tomatoes and peppers were lined up and stacked three high, along with their chairs and table and the hand-painted sign that Karen had helped them make. The dog was in the shade by the back tire, intently watching Roy.
“You already paid for your spot, so go on and set up,” Mr. Florence said. “I can give you your money back otherwise. Everybody else took it. I was just waiting here to make sure I squared with everybody.”
“They worked hard for this,” Roy said, motioning to the girls. “I’m not handing them a refund check.” He smiled and Mr. Florence looked at the ground.
“It wouldn’t be a check, I can promise you that.”
“Mr. Florence,” Roy said, making a run at cheering up an old man. “You’re the only person—since I dropped out of high school, when it was actually required of me to do so—that I call mister.”
“You know my first name is Nathan, don’t you?”
Roy grinned. “Sure, I do.” Mr. Florence took his keys out of his pocket and gave them a shake.
Roy cleared his throat. “I don’t even like tomatoes, so we either sell them today or I’m going to have to eat them.”
“You can take them to the food bank,” Mr. Florence said.
“Jefferson or state?”
The old man didn’t seem to notice Roy was joking. “State. The J’s’ll just try to sell ’em again. It’s against their religion to miss capitalizing on a financial opportunity.”
“Some people say greed is good, Mr. Florence.”
“Those people can kiss my ass.”
“Guess it doesn’t matter where we put our table, then,” Roy said.
“I’d say take a piece of shade beside the trailer and chase it until you head home.”
With Roy’s help, Mr. Florence unlocked the chain, took the extension ladder down from the roof of the horse trailer, and flipped the gate sign to open. The girls set up their stand and Roy moved the truck to the far side of the lot under the shade of a dead locust tree.
By the time they took their seats and opened the cash box, Mr. Florence had wandered off, most likely to the porch at the boarded-up feed store where Mr. Florence and the other independents that had never joined the Jeffersonians usually held court. Roy and the girls had two gallons of water and the sandwiches that Karen had packed for them, along with all the tomatoes and peppers they could eat. No cars came. A few people wandered by. The Preservation had made it a boomtown but that was over now. The girls waved and everyone waved back, but nobody bought anything.
After the girls had lunch, R
oy spread a blanket and made a kind of bed for Sarah on the ground and she and the dog took a nap. He kept busy shooing the flies and yellow jackets away.
“You said tomatoes take too much water,” Wiley said. “But I thought people would buy them because they took too much water. I thought we’d get more money and that they’d sell right away.”
“When you started this, you couldn’t have known how it was going to turn out,” Roy said. “You and your sister worked really hard. I’m impressed. So’s your mom.” She didn’t like compliments. They made her angry. She sat there scowling and wouldn’t look at him. He complimented her all the time, win-win.
Roy picked up a bell pepper and twisted off the stem and fished out the seeds and ate it like an apple, talking with his mouth full. “You don’t have to listen to me. You’re old enough now that you can trust yourself.”
Wiley leaned against his shoulder. “I don’t want to stay here forever.”
He didn’t know if she was talking about the farmer’s market or their home. “We won’t,” he said. “But the day isn’t over yet.”
“It’s those stupid food banks feeding everyone for free.”
“Nothing’s free, kiddo, and none of those folks would be there if they had a choice.”
Sarah was awake and crawling into her dad’s lap. “So let’s give them away,” she said. “Let’s give them all away and go home.” She had dents from the blanket on her cheek and a spot of dried drool on her chin. She nuzzled into Roy and he pulled her close and smelled her hair.
“We’ll can them,” Wiley said to her sister.
“I hate canning,” Sarah said. “It’s so hot. And we already have a ton in the cellar.”
They looked to Roy to break the tie. “It’s up to you guys. I don’t have a dog in this fight.” They weren’t familiar with the expression so he had to explain it. They couldn’t believe dog fighting was an actual event that people had watched and bet on.
A woman and her three children wandered through the corner of the park, close enough to see Roy and the girls sitting there, close enough to be embarrassed that she wasn’t buying anything. Roy thought she wouldn’t have come that way if she’d known she was going to have to face somebody, particularly children selling produce. The worst part of farmer’s markets for Roy had always been the desperation of the vendors.