Water

by Dan O'Brien

  The screen had seen better days.

  Though not yet broken, the display wore the scars of battle. Pressing buttons with authority, James sighed in frustration as the machine whirred frantically. Heavy sounds groaned within as wheels and plastic pieces fought desperately to dance one last time.

  Bills sputtered with a labored shuffle.

  Grabbing the money, he pushed it into his pocket with determination and wheeled around. Much to his surprise, his face was plastered against the warm fabric of Mouse’s pullover. He saw the gun before the words could spill from his mouth.

  “What the….”

  The man did not look stable.

  Dark hair looked as if it had been tied into a series of ridges and valleys. Pale features were made more so by a patchy beard and gray eyes that had not seen sleep in some time. His clothes appeared as if they were trying to escape from each other. A partially un-tucked shirt was pulled and stretched to one side of his neck.

  “Give me the cash,” he spoke.

  His voice wavered and cracked.

  Mouse took a step back and the man waved his gun wildly. Not pointing it, but shaking it for effect. “Don’t move, man. I’ll…I’ll fucking shoot you.”

  Mouse raised his hands higher and backed up against the wall, revealing James. Foster could feel the steel press against him. He knew that he could not realistically grab it before the man shot him.

  The heat on his neck was overwhelming.

  Sweat coursed over his body, making his skin itch.

  “Let’s talk about this. You don’t want…”

  The disheveled man took a step forward, pressing the gun against James’ face. The coolness of the barrel surprised Foster. He felt like he was blinking too much. His hands were calm at his sides. Much of this life had been spent wondering how he would react in these kinds of situations.

  He licked his lips.

  The man’s hand shook.

  Turning his body as he brought his hand alongside the gun, James moved quickly. Had it been a movie, it would have been in slow motion. To Foster, it felt as though he had not even breathed. A thunderous shot filled the air. James was beside him, his hand still near the weapon. Hooking his hand over the top of it, he stepped beside the man.

  The motion pulled the gun against the man’s stomach.

  Slipping his hand so that it grasped the man’s wrist, James had control of the gun in one smooth movement. He raised it shakily, uncertain if he had what it took to be merciless. The barrel wavered and James exhaled sharply, as if he had been holding his breath.

  The roles were reversed.

  The would-be thief knelt, raising his hands over his head.

  He pleaded. “Please…I….”

  Foster felt his hands sweat.

  Mouse’s voice startled him.

  “We don’t need this. Let’s just go. Let’s get out of here.”

  The heat was forgotten.

  Dread replaced the madness of the day.

  Foster’s throat felt tight, dry.

  As he spoke, the words seemed distant, removed. “We should get going. Have to get back and leave, can’t keep them waiting. I promised that I would come back soon. I have to go back soon.”

  Mouse touched his shoulder and James nearly jumped.

  The gun shook in his hands.

  Meeting his friend’s eyes, James exhaled again.

  This time his chest heaved and his shoulders sagged. Turning back, the kneeling man had disappeared into the heat like vapor. Letting the gun fall to the ground, James left that world behind.

  Friday

  T

  he Jeep had not been large enough for the five of them. Instead, the purple-and-yellow hippie bus that Mouse had inherited from his parents had become their caravan to the north. The winding road out of Miranda was just as congested as they had anticipated. Posted speed limits were not only respected, but grossly adhered to. The sun was high overhead and beat down upon them. This brought an irritated grunt from Robert Foster.

  A shotgun rested on his knees.

  Mouse drove.

  One spindly arm out the window, the other negotiated the loose steering wheel with a practiced, albeit distracted, ease. His beanie was pulled down such that his eyes barely peeked out. “So, Papa Foster, you think the shotgun on the legs is necessary?” he asked without taking his eyes from the road.

  Robert pointed to the road with the shotgun. “You concentrate on the road and I will concentrate on the gun.”

  “Fair enough.”

  The back of the bus was filled to the brim with overflowing duffel bags, and where those failed, dark black trash bags. Most of it had been packed early by James’ father, though some of it was clearly from the other members of their little journey. Julie’s backpack hung around her slender shoulders and the hat hid her features. Violet watched her daughter anxiously, her body tense.

  James sat just in front of them on the ground, as there was no back seat of any kind. Just two bucket seats in the front and then shag walls and a fluffy, white carpet that itched. Julie hummed quietly to herself, the tune obscured.

  “Do you have what you need?” James asked after a time.

  Violet looked at him vacantly.

  She shook her head as she spoke.

  “Not even close. We have to leave behind so much.”

  James could understand the sub-text, the words unspoken: her husband. “It seems like life has changed dramatically, so quickly. A disaster, a catastrophe boiling the world down to its bare ingredients,” began James, but the squeal of the brakes and a bemused harrumph from his father drew his attention.

  Looking out the windshield of their decadent and beaten raft to safety, the world had indeed been distilled to a fundamental desire––a base reason. The road ahead was not only congested, but instead had become the parking lot of the apocalypse. Cars sat overheated, steam rising into the empty sky overhead, devoid of joy or winking clouds. There was the steady hum of voices arguing about things that could not be fixed, lives unjustified and unrequited.

  Mouse pressed on the horn.

  Robert frowned.

  Violet drew her daughter close.

  Wrenching on the side door of the bus, the world flooded in like waves on a shore in the throes of a violent storm. People argued bitterly as some had abandoned their cars for shouting matches. A man carried his child on his back as he ambled off the road.

  “James, close the door,” spoke Robert.

  Yet he lingered, watching as the world inundated him.

  The horizon up ahead was stale air and hazy black clouds that threatened something unbecoming and possibly frightening. James felt Violet’s hand on his shoulder and he was drawn back.

  She smiled at him weakly.

  Julie looked at him with large, unblinking eyes.

  Mouse’s concave chest rose and fell as he sighed. “Looks like we aren’t going anywhere, anytime soon,” he grumbled as he leaned forward again, rolling down his window for a better look. Horns filled the air like a dilapidated symphony of dirty brass and broken strings.

  Robert gestured with the shotgun, bumping it up against the window as he did so. “All kinds of trails and old roads that lead north through Nevada, might take our chances. No telling what’s going to come of this.”

  The blue sedan with faded bumper stickers just in front of the bus puttered forward, spewing hateful smoke and the sounds of shaking parts. There was a sudden burst and then a crash.

  Voices were renewed.

  A man crawled through the window of the sedan, as the driver’s side door had found a home in the passenger side door of an egregiously chosen escape vehicle––a SUV burdened with oversized tires and a desire for height.

  As he emerged, born of heated steel and a smoking engine, he carried a duct-taped crowbar. Blackened at the edges, he dragged it along the side of the SUV, damaging the luster and shine of the thrice-polished veneer. Raising it high above his head, as if summoning thunder from the mounta
ins, he slammed it against the tinted windows.

  Glass rained out from the impact.

  The world became infused with sweaty apes bound by dirty clothing and angry, hooting calls that filled the yellow-marked lanes. Grabbing the wheel of the bus, Robert pulled hard. Mouse, being the reactionary that he was, slammed his foot down on the gas in response. Barreling forward like a roller coaster, his eyes went wide as he maneuvered in and out of traffic. Like a bumper car gone awry, each jagged turn of the wheel drug them to and fro against the maze of steel and steam.

  With a heavy foot, Mouse ended their haphazard journey.

  A tire on the loose rocks of the side of the road––as well as the front of the steel monstrosity pointing clearly in the wrong direction––announced a sigh of relief exhaled as one by the wayward travelers.

  This was short-lived.

  “Wow,” mumbled Mouse.

  “Wow?” echoed Robert with a scowl.

  Mouse looked at him, chagrined.

  “I think this warrants a wow.”

  “Are you an idiot? What in the holiest of hells compelled you take us on some kind of California driving test?” spoke Robert clearly, though laced with contempt and the slightest bit of exhausted humor.

  It was not a secret that the curmudgeon believed that all drivers in the sunny state of California were deviants who could not maintain the requisite attention to stay on the road for any amount of time in a cool and collected manner.

  “Damn near got us into a fender bender, Mighty Mouse.”

  “Just Mouse, you grumpy old man,” retorted Mouse as he wiped one of his long, pale hands across his forehead. “Shit is getting real out here.”

  Robert frowned at him and his inability to accurately express himself in a grammatically appropriate way. “Shit, as you so cleverly put it, has always been quite real. We’re seeing what happens when people panic.”

  James touched Violet’s arm and she looked up to him with her large eyes. She was okay––shaken, but unhurt. Julie remained staring at the ground, as if she could see the blacktop and broken glass beneath.

  Leaning forward between the two verbal gladiators, James spoke. “That was damn close, Mouse. Any damage to the bus?”

  Mouse looked at the stout hood of the bus and shrugged.

  Tapping the faded and dusty hardened plastic over the various dials and gauges that announced the inner workings of the engine with colored triangles and crudely drawn representations, he doubled down on his uncertain gesture.

  Robert shook his head once more and cranked on the dull silver handle of his door. Opening it with a groan, he turned back and placed the shotgun down on the seat. James watched as his father walked out in front of the bus and struck the hood, glaring at Mouse as the spindly fool looked on with a thousand-yard stare.

  “Pop the hood,” he commanded.

  A few seconds of hazy recollection hung in the air before Mouse reached down and released the hood latch. James’ father disappeared for a moment as he lifted the hood and suspended it there before rooting around inside the engine. There was a slight shake of the bus and then some throat-clearing. With a swift movement, the hood closed once more and Robert rejoined them in the bus.

  James looked at his father expectantly.

  “Seems alright,” he responded.

  Mouse looked out his window at the consequences of his ill-timed carnage. “I think that might be a gross overestimation, gramps. The road before us is burdened with hot steel and the path that is behind remains a monstrous cluster-fuck of epic proportions.”

  Swirling lights of crimson and azure disrupted the pall on the road, reflecting and cascading across broken glass littered in the road and windshields bewildered with dust. Robert looked over his shoulder and then out the sun-stained window to his side and grimaced, prickled flesh from adrenaline spent. “I think we need to make ourselves scarce in the quickest possible way. When they flash the lights like that, it isn’t meant as an invitation for dinner.”

  “I think you might be on to something there, old man. A momentary glimpse of agreement, a bridge across the chasm of generations…” began Mouse grandiosely.

  And then turning to see the glare born of irritation and several decades of putting up with adolescent nonsense, Mickey had the statistically improbable presence of mind to stop talking and press down on the accelerator.

  Bald tires gripped desperately in the heat of the day.

  The front end dipped and the weight of the engine was credited with the assist as the magenta monstrosity motored forward off the blacktop and onto the uneven terrain of desert soil. The lights continued to swim in the air, but it was clear that each chug forward of the relic was a definitive distance from an unpleasant encounter with a more-than-likely irrational civil servant.

  Dusty roads populated by ill-formed gardens of cacti were laid out before them. As the van bounced and resettled, the madness of a highway populated by denizens of despair became an increasing distant memory. Apprehension dissolved from them as miles were put between them and Miranda; the minor valleys of sand became a habitable road that soon announced shacks and barns just off in the distance.

  Robert was the first to talk after a while, though it was only a whisper of a thought. “It won’t last long.”

  “This madness? The water shortage?” queried Mouse.

  The old man looked out the window at the passing landscape, his glassy eyes watching something that only he could see. “Any of it.”

  *

  When Randy awoke, he was not quite certain where he was at first. He remembered pieces of things. There had been a gun and someone hitting him in the face; the creeping morning was followed by the scorch of the sun. As he pushed himself to a sitting position, he was aware that it was not blacktop beneath his fingers, but instead the scratchy fabric that he knew too well.

  A sheet-less cot in the drunk tank.

  It was not his first visit.

  Were there a rewards card for being a drunken, two-time felony loser who saw more of the pot-bellied sheriff than this his own daughter, then Randy Ashland would be the charter member.

  Despite the heat of the day, there was a foreboding chill inside the old-style cell. When other towns had upgraded their holding tanks, the drunk tank of Miranda had remained nothing more than a concrete enclosure with rusted, iron bars. Standing with a groan and a painful grimace, he gripped the cylinders of his imprisonment.

  “Hey, anybody out there?”

  Silence whispered urgently.

  “Sheriff?”

  Again, the transparency of nothingness answered him.

  He attempted to recreate the hours of his life. More to the point, the hours of his life that led up to this particular stint in a cement motel.

  “Must be some damned break or something….” he mumbled as he retreated back to the rear of the cell to the one window that was just out of reach. Looking around the confines of his entrapment, he singled out the toilet as a possible ladder to greener––or perhaps browner––views.

  With a grunt, and an unsettling shift of the contents of his stomach and small intestines, he heaved his hung-over weight up onto the much-maligned porcelain goddess with a precarious step. The laces of his shoes dragged in the murky water of his stepstool of sorts, and then lifted free once more as he put his weight on the lid of the tank and pulled himself by his fingertips so he could see outside the cell.

  The sheriff’s office sat on the far side of the town, near where the road slithered out into the desert and canyons filled with all manner of creature. Craning his neck and squinting his eyes, Randy was struck by the emptiness of the town, the desolation that filtered through the air.

  “Where in the hell is everybody? It’s damn near….”

  Looking down at his watch, he noticed that the hands were not moving as they should. As he lifted his other hand to tap the stained exterior of the timepiece, he immediately realized his error and felt the consequences of such an ill-timed exchange o
f balance. The cot was not close enough, and the floor far too hard to cushion the fall.

  To make matters worse, his boot caught the bowl of the toilet and ripped the seal from the floor. With a flurry of curse words and a fluttering of hands and feet, Randy had pulled himself into a ball and was looking sourly at the slowly spreading pool of water that emerged from the upturned latrine.

  “Doesn’t that just make my fucking day.”

  The urgency of his clumsy fall and the desolation just beyond his prison of both mind and body caused him to perhaps be a bit more sensitive than many folks in a similar situation––though such a situation seems difficult to imagine. This hypersensitivity led to the perking of his ears and the subtle turning of his head when the whisper of a footstep sounded just beyond the gray door that served as the median between cells and office.

  “Someone out there?”

  A shuffle of boots and a wet cough replied.

  He took a few heavy steps forward and gripped the bars of the enclosure. He pressed his face against the bars and tried to hear more clearly the shuffling footfalls that might announce an explanatory orator of his present circumstances.

  An outer door creaked and the silence of the dim interior of the buildings seemed haunting to Randy for the first time. A scraping sound joined the aqueous cough that echoed in the emptiness…

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