by Joshua Gayou
A few people around the circle looked surprised to hear him say this; I know I certainly was. Edgar was typically the kind of guy that saw to his own comfort before worrying about others, or at least, that was the aura he usually projected. Listening to him express concern over his ability to help adequately made me second guess my initial impressions of him.
“Besides,” he continued, “I’m not exactly great with kids. I didn’t have any of my own for a reason. I liked my Porsche a lot more.”
On second thought…
“Man,” groaned Ben. “I was really happy without math.”
“Sorry, bro, but you need math. You can’t build anything better than a shack without it,” Oscar said.
“That’s Oscar,” said George. “He and Fred take on all of the building projects.”
“And even if you don’t have a really useful skill you can always pick one up,” Barbara offered. “I never really did anything but putt around in my garden; my husband Lyle worked while I stayed home to…to run the house.” She seemed to have stumbled at the end of her statement. She shook her head, coughed nervously, and pressed on. “Well, now Jake has me working with him to put together a crop schedule for next year when spring hits. I guess I’ll be the resident farmer.”
“A lot of us are kind of in a wait-and-see place right now, too,” Monica said. “I was a prison guard myself, back in the day, which you may or may not be surprised to learn has jack to do with surviving in the wilderness.” There was some laughter at this; Monica had a no-nonsense attitude that a lot of us enjoyed. “So right now, I help out by going out with the scavenging teams and finding as much food for the group as I can. We think, or at least hope, that we’ll be living off the land by this time next year and my thoughts are that I have that much time to fall into a new role by then.”
“There hasn’t been a lot of time to really plan any of this out,” Edgar admitted. “Mostly it’s just been a lot of scrambling to put away enough food to last us through the winter.”
“Well, I can definitely help with that,” Otis said. “Scavenging, I mean. I have several months’ worth of practice built up by now.”
“What did you do for a living before the fall?” asked George. His question surprised me; I realized I didn’t know the answer and yet felt as though I should have. Otis seemed to me like this old friend that I’d had for years and I knew virtually nothing about the guy.
He seemed to swell up a bit as he said, “I owned a barbeque joint. Best damned Southern barbeque in New Mexico; I was even featured on some TV shows in my time. Called it The Smoke Pit.”
“Only Southern barbeque in New Mexico, you mean,” Ben muttered.
“Now, that ain’t true, boy, we had competition,” Otis laughed. “Maybe the only authentic Southern barbeque; I’ll let you get away with that.”
“I had no idea, Otis,” I said smiling.
“It’s a long story,” he said. “We had a joint back in Atlanta that was family-owned; I kinda broke away to go do my own thing. I used to butt heads with my dad a lot.” Ben snorted, nodding to himself as he drew in the dirt with a stick. Otis smiled at his son and struck him lightly on the shoulder.
“Could you butcher an animal, Otis?” asked George thoughtfully.
Otis’s expression was mildly surprised. “Well, I s’pose I could try. I’ve never done the job before, though. The meat always came to the restaurant all carved up and ready to go. I mean, I know where the cuts come from and all; that was my whole business, but my guess is I’d probably be an embarrassment to a real butcher. Probably take me three times as long and screw it up a bit, besides.”
“Okay, that’s fair,” said George. “What about preserving the meat? Long term storage, and such. Do you know about that?”
“Oh, sure. Shoot, I learned a lot of that just from my mamma. Main thing is: we’ll need a lot of salt and a smokehouse for that. Vinegar, too, if we want to pickle anything.”
“You don’t know how to hunt, do you?” asked Wang, mild excitement showing in his eyes.
“’Fraid I can’t help you there. Bought my meat, like I said.”
“Crap,” said Wang, deflating. “Well, it’s a start, at least.”
“I can’t imagine it’ll be that hard to hunt down some game,” Tom began but was interrupted by Rebecca when she pointed out to the valley entrance and said, “Hey, they’re back, you guys.”
I turned to see the Dodge coming toward us at a comfortable pace, either Jake or Gibs extending a hand out the driver’s side window to wave and let us know all was well. From the corner of my eye, I saw Wang light a match and drop it into the oil drum. The contents began to smolder not long after.
22 – The Oregon Trail
Gibs
I knew things were gonna be different when Jake and I returned. A new and unfamiliar SUV parked out in the middle of your front yard in the exact spot you’d expect to see nothing at all tends to clue you in on shit like that.
I didn’t come out of the truck switched on and ready to snarl, of course. Everyone was sitting all Kumbaya-style around the camp barrel getting ready to roast marshmallows and whatnot, so I was able to utilize my considerable powers of deduction and reason out that the situation was probably not dire. A quick headcount also told me we were having some guests for dinner. I began to say as much to Jake but before I could even open my mouth, he was already stepping out of the passenger side of the truck while the damned thing was still rolling.
Startled, I called out, “Hey, shit, Jake, come on…” but he’d already slammed the door and was running back around the bed of the truck. I took it out of gear, set the brake, killed the engine, and hopped out while grumbling to myself the whole time. I was met with enthusiastic laughter from one of the newcomers; a black man about my age or a little older, hair grown out a little bushy and graying at the temples with a beard and mustache that was threatening to graduate to Hobo Status any time. He had Jake’s hand grasped between both of his and was pumping the damned thing like he was trying to get water to spray out of the other man’s ass. They were both yammering at each other but I missed most of what was said; I had my eyes on who I assumed to be his son, who stood close by, as well as a young girl either in her late teens or early twenties. I started calculating for mouths and calories, thinking glumly about the food I’d just left in the middle of nowhere; it would have easily kept these new people fed for a day. Things were feeling a lot like one step forward and two back these days, and we were running out of time. It was starting to piss me off.
Jake was calling over to me, startling me out of my black thoughts. I walked over to meet the new mouths.
“Gibs, I want to introduce you to Otis, his son Ben, and Samantha. These are good friends of ours met on the road earlier in the year, before Amanda and I had ever set foot in Wyoming.”
I nodded and shook first Otis’s and then Ben’s hand; Samantha kept hers jammed in her pockets so I passed her a relaxed salute and a smile. She blushed and waved, which served to remind me of my intense powers of animal magnetism, of course. Actually, she made me feel like a dick. I’d just been grousing about the need to feed three new people only seconds ago; her shyness and uncertainty reminded me that I was dealing with more than just mouths. These were people and they had seen real shit just like the rest of us. I owed them all better. Taking this on board, I straightened up and said, “It’s a pleasure to meet all of you. Welcome.”
“I guess they’ve all had some time to chat while we were out,” Jake said. “We ought to have a sit down and get up to speed.” He gestured to a collection of chairs at one side of the fire. Some of the others had already coalesced around this point; folks like George, Barbara, Wang, Oscar, and so on. Around the other side of the fire, I saw Jeff surrounded by the kids – Maria, Lizzy, Rose, the new kid Ben walked over to join them, even Greg and Alan, though they tried to hold themselves apart to look cool. Jeff appeared to be telling the children a ghost story that wasn’t much for thrills and chill
s; the kids were all laughing their asses off at him, which he seemed to encourage and went to lengths to amplify. Rebecca and Monica sat by to watch, laughing along with the kids and clapping, while the new girl Samantha was drawn in like a meteor falling into a planet. I realized that he’d succeeded in segregating the adults off into a private bubble and was impressed.
“He’s so good with those kids,” Barbara said quietly from beside me. “I think we may have found what he was meant to do.”
“Maybe so,” I agreed, and looked over to the adult section. Jake sat in the center next to Otis, who was on his left. Amanda was to his right, and the others fanned out from there. There was an empty chair next to Otis, between him and George. Amanda nodded at me and pointed at the seat.
“Christ,” I grumbled under my breath, and moved to sit down. I noticed that I was almost directly across from Jeff, who fingered constantly at his wrist whenever he wasn’t gesturing around with his hands. He wore one of those old ID bracelets; it flashed and shimmered in the firelight, looking more like a darting fish under water than a silver chain. He constantly rotated it with his free hand, creating that fishy illusion.
“What happened to Robert?” asked Jake, drawing my attention back.
“I guess I’d better start with Oregon,” Otis began.
Otis
We made the side trips that you folks suggested when we parted ways, skippin’ down to Barnes first and then up to the tent city Amanda told us about. We had fairly good luck in both places and from what I could tell, it didn’t look like many people had been through to ransack either of them. You could argue that Barnes is kind of isolated – out in the middle of nowhere as it is, even though it has some big, red letters painted along the front – and maybe you could say that the tent city out by Cedar Fort is a bit off the main drag, but I don’t think these explanations tell the whole story. For the most part, I think Utah is just empty land now. Weren’t that many folks living there to begin with and what was there was mostly killed off when e’rything went to hell. I suspect whoever was left just picked up what they had and lit out. Can’t prove any of that, uh’course. I do know that we didn’t see a soul in the whole state after partin’ ways with Jake’s people.
We made our way up toward Oregon through Idaho, taking things easy; never pushin’ too hard. We kept our eyes open for other survivors but never saw any. Maybe they wasn’t any. Or maybe they was and they just kept they heads down as we passed. You wouldn’t blame them, uh‘course. We seen all the good and the bad, out there, and you never could tell which it was gonna be. After a time, it got to feeling like we was the only people left in the world. I recall Ben mentionin’ that he felt like you folks, Jake and Billy and Amanda, even little Lizzy, had all been some kind of dream. He said the only evidence he had that any of that happened was his missin’ deck of cards. We all thought a lot about you folks during this time. We wondered if it hadn’t just been better if we’d followed along with you instead.
The minivan died in Glenns Ferry; a little splat of a town along the 84 in Idaho, surrounded by a bunch of farmland and such. I couldn’t tell you what it was that killed it. I ain’t no mechanic; I can change oil or change a belt but anything worse than that meant a trip to the shop for me, so we lost ‘bout a day and a half finding somethin’ new, getting’ all our things moved over to it, and getting’ it all gassed up. It was that old Suburban we found and it actually ended up working out for us in the end; we had a hell of a time getting’ that minivan through certain areas. Felt mighty top-heavy and unstable when you took it off the pavement. That Suburban did just fine any time we had to roll off-road. I wanted to kick myself for not getting’ one sooner, once I saw how well it handled that kinda thing.
We took our time gettin’ from A to B, like I said. A drive that woulda taken a day once upon a time took us ‘bout a week, I’d guess. We made frequent stops for gas like you guys advised, which always ate up a good portion of the day. We got where we was going in the end, slow but sure.
My in-laws (Ben’s grandparents) lived in a neighborhood in Portland called Woodstock. I don’t know what I expected or hoped to find when we got there. Mainly, I think I wanted to find someone from my wife’s side of the family for Ben because he’d lost his mom at such an early age. I wanted him to have someone besides me that he could ask questions about her; about who she was as a little girl and such. I think…I think I may have wanted them for myself as well. Miss my wife. I was lookin’ forward to being with her for a long time and even when she got the cancer, I thought we still had some decent years ahead. It just…ripped her away from us so fast; like to take your breath away.
There was no one there when we arrived. Someone had left a note tacked to the front door (I think it was my mother-in-law, Beatrice – looked like her writing, at least) that said, “Left for camps. May God bless and keep us all.” I didn’t really know what to do at that point, so the four of us moved into the little house and I decided to spend some time searching the area. Didn’t have what you’d call a long term plan; we just figured one place was as good as another. Portland was pretty big, had lots of dense populated area; plenty of things to scavenge and such. So that’s what we did for a while.
During the days, Robert and I would head out into the area to go looking for things; water mostly but anything that was useful, like. At night, we did what we could to keep entertained. We played board games, told stories, and read books. It turned out that Robert had a good speakin’ voice and would read out loud for the rest of us often enough if we asked him to. I spent a lot of nights lookin’ through old photo albums with Ben, showin’ him pictures of his mother as she grew up. I think it’s easier for him since he was so young when we lost her. I had a harder time with it; seein’ my Gerty again brought a lot of things back, made my chest feel so constricted with grief I could hardly breathe. Did my best to hide it, though, ‘cause it seemed to make Ben so happy.
We saw the first people after livin’ there…oh…I’d guess it was three weeks or so. We saw them at a distance, Robert and I, and they was skittish, runnin’ off and disappearing, like, when they noticed we was there. Couldn’t get much of a read on them except to say that there was three of them and they weren’t interested in making friends.
Wasn’t long after that when a couple of people broke into our house. All four of us was home, thank God; I don’t know what would have happened if it’d just been Ben and Samantha that was home when they came through the window. I tried to talk to them, thinking they might just be goin’ house to house lookin’ for food and just tryin’ to let them know this one was occupied. They wasn’t interested in talkin’, so Robert and I did for them and then gave ‘em a look-over when it was done. They did happen to have a duffel bag between them loaded with some supplies, a couple of pistols, and one rifle between them. We took all of that and threw it onto our pile. There wasn’t anything else about them that was very special, except that they had red bandanas tied around their arms, just at the elbow. I wasn’t sure what that meant at the time, though I was familiar with gang culture and all that foolishness, and what I saw made me uneasy, knowin’ what all that might mean.
That encounter shook us up a bit and we spent the next few days locked up inside, waitin’ to see if any more would come callin’. No more came, and yet it took us a while longer to get over it. We were in an ugly spot surrounded by bad options, as my mamma would say sometimes. Going out into the city was necessary because that was the only way to get more food but it was also dangerous because there was obviously people out there waitin’ to be found; some friendly and others not so much. So, we didn’t want to go out into that alone. It just felt better having someone you trusted to watch your back. Robert had done a lot of growin’ up between Utah and Oregon and he’d become someone I depended on daily. I knew I could rely on him to protect all of us and havin’ him at my back with a rifle put my mind to ease. To th’other hand, Ben was too young for any of that kind of activity and Samantha was eith
er too fidgety or too scared to fight. The few times I actually got her to pick up a gun, she’d pinch it in her fingers and pull back into herself like she was waitin’ for the whole world to end.
So if we went out lookin’ for food and water, it felt really risky without two people to do it but, when we did that, we was leavin’ our people undefended at home, and we already knew for a fact that people would find the place and try to come in because it had happened before.
It broke my heart but we eventually decided it would be best to leave. The house, as it was in the middle of Woodstock, was too out in the open, too hard to defend, and too hard to fortify. We agreed between the three of us (Ben wouldn’t agree and didn’t want to leave) that we’d pick up and move to a more remote location outside of the city; probably somewhere’s high, where visitors would have to work they way uphill to get to it, and hopefully under cover so it wouldn’t just draw strangers from miles off by simply existin’.
Leaving that home had been harder than I expected. We’d fought so damned hard to get there and the place had become a kind of King’s X for me; I’d travelled towards it for weeks telling myself that all will be better when we get there, everything just gonna be fine and click into place. And now we was leavin’ and it weren’t fine. I wanted to take everything in that house with us. There was things all throughout that I recognized from my life with my Gerty, my gal, that her folks had held onto. Her mamma kept a little curio shelf in the front room and I saw keepsakes that my wife had kept in her room when we was dating, some of ‘em given to her by me. I left ‘em all there, thinkin’ they was more likely to get broke on the road with me.
I took a single photo album with us; one of the ones that had the most pictures of Ben’s mamma from the time she was a girl to when she was a woman, even some of our wedding pictures. There was a framed portrait of her and her family hanging in the hallway. I think she was fifteen or so in that picture. I stopped there and kissed the glass over my dead wife’s lips and then kissed the glass over her mother’s forehead as well, a thank you for givin’ birth to the love of this tired, ol’ man’s life. We lit out.