Back to the Garden

by Clara Hume

  And then of course my dad and I weren't that close, for he became a solitary survivor after his one love in life got taken from him. From that time on, the world became progressively worse year after year, and Dad went inside himself, barely coming out to say hello to me, his only daughter.

  No wonder Fran and I had made a hit. We both found pleasure in our own imaginary worlds, though while mine was in weaving thread and dreams from books, hers was in the visceral reality of land, water, air, plants, and animals. Still, we hit it off and found a center we could imagine. We'd climb into the core of our merry-go-round and watched the world circle around us.

  Now we were nearing our destination, having finished with our stay in Athens, with no more word from anyone there about Maisie's mother. We had a few fresh supplies and a southeast direction to pass and rode along mostly silently. We were hungry and not getting enough to eat, and had to ration our water supply. The bugs were bad too. We'd gone across the desert until reaching the humidity of the southern states, which was drier and hotter than the old days but still hazy. Any rains were quick and dirty with screaming winds and large droplets that would come in sideways, forcing us to pull over in the wagon and causing Kristy to cry.

  These storms acted like that on the mountain, too, non-sustained and short, but heavy. In their aftermath came the insects, like we were traveling through the jungle, and after the big rains, when we'd get going again, came the corpses running off in temporary streams. I once saw a human skull with flesh still clinging to it, and its mouth still stuck in an astonished and frightened look. I broke down. Daniel came over to comfort me, but I couldn't tell him what it was just then, as I'd been staring absent-mindedly out the back of the wagon while feeding Kristy. I didn't want to frighten her, so said, "I don't know. I'm just a little tired."

  Daniel mixed together milk powder and water and poked me in the ribs and said, "It'll be okay, Rosasharn." This was our joke, and he made me smile again. He took Kristy, who was falling asleep, and fed her more from a cup.

  We passed wispy places after Athens. One was Oconee National Forest, which had a few old-standing loblolly pines that had not been ruined by the southern pine beetle. I was so tired once, as we tracked south of Highway 20 near Augusta and then into our destination state, South Carolina, that upon hearing Leo strumming an unrecognizable song one evening, I began drift off into a dark dream.

  In it, we were in the woods back near Vicksburg, where I overheard an imagined conversation between Ishmael and Jimmy.

  Ishmael had an astute face and said, "We are the leavers. They are the takers." He squinted to a dying sunset and added, "We will leave the good Earth for the next generations. They will take it all."

  Jimmy looked at him for a long time and then nodded slowly in agreement. Finally, he said, "Gorblimey," in the most perspicacious tone.

  The two men rolled around the woods laughing, even as old as they were, where you would think they couldn't perform such athletics. Their laughter roared out into the hills and the forests, and in return crickets chirped and there came sound of a woodpecker.

  I awoke an instant later to Buddha coming over to me and tapping my shoulder.

  "Huh?" I said with a jerk.

  "Hey, did I wake you?"

  I had never felt so disoriented. "I think so."

  He handed me an orange.

  "Where the hell did you get that?" I thought for a minute I might still be dreaming.

  "Can't hardly believe it, but a wagon just rolled through here not a minute ago. Was full of oranges falling off the back of it."

  "Hope they aren't full of pesticides."

  "Naw, I tried a bite. They're good."

  I sat up and smiled, thankful for the first fresh orange I'd eaten in years and years.

  "Wonder what that wagon was doing. Is there some kind of orange farm nearby?"

  "Dunno," said Buddha. He plopped down heavily in the grass beside me. "Leo and Joe went running after the wagon in my bike. We'll see what they say."

  I looked down the road and saw nothing but a trail of dust settling.

  I peeled an orange and saw in the distance that Daniel was helping Kristy eat a slice of the fruit.

  "I have, like a favor to ask," he said to me.

  "Sure, Buddha, what's that?"

  "Well, like, I wondered if you could talk to Mei."

  I squinted up at him, curiously. "She doesn't talk, my dear, in case you hadn't noticed."

  "Yeah, but she will listen to you."

  "Oh?" I had never noticed that.

  Buddha began talking fast and disjointedly. "Yeah, dude, you are always talking with her like she's listening, even though...she's not really talking back or sometimes not even looking at you. But I know she is listening, because I see it on her face. She...I think she wants to talk with you, but is just scared to. Anyway, I am pretty sure that Joe really likes her, and I was wondering, if you know, like you could talk to her about that and maybe tell her that if she likes him back, she should start talking and tell him so, because otherwise they are never going to know it. And while they are young, she might as well start talking, and they might as well, you know, like...get together."

  He took a breath and looked proud to have finally got the guts to tell someone this observation. I grinned and said, "She listens to you more than anyone, Buddha. She's always on your bike instead of in the wagon. Besides, how do you know Joe likes her?"

  "Dude," he said, accusingly. Then he said, "I think she rides with me because something bad happened, you know. Like, what if we think is true, that someone, or some ones, raped her before we found her. She is afraid of men, but maybe she wasn't always afraid. Anyway, I think she gets claustrophobic in the wagon. Or something. Or maybe it's because I'm fat and friendly and she doesn't see me as a threat. But she likes Joe too, only it's in that way. I think she does. I see her smiling at him. Anyway, she doesn't like me. She just likes hanging out with me. Friend zone. That's cool with me," he said with a shrug.

  "I'll talk to her," I said, finally, now fully awake and curious about the oranges.

  Buddha jumped up as fast as his weight allowed him to, playfully punched my arm, and said, "Thanks, dude."

  I laughed as he walked away.

  Mei—Chapter 24

  Around Sylvania, with one day left before Beaufort, I saw the stars and heard Buddha snore. I sat with Joe and the others that night. Joe had been fiddling with that old radio most nights. Usually nothing came in, but tonight we heard an authoritative man break through the static.

  Joe had been leaning on the grass and sat up quickly. I scooted closer to him. Joe looked at me and smiled. I returned the gesture. His long, brown fingers adjusted a dial, and his hazel eyes were intent.

  More static.

  Then a few moments later, the man's voice came through clear. "Reporting from New York," he said. "Is there anyone out there at all?" His voice seemed desperate, but we could tell he was trying to hang on to some form of dignity. "If you're out there, know this--" he continued.

  Floppy came over to sit with Fran, and I noticed that the dog was now getting to the point he would touch Fran with one of his paws. It made me want to cry that this little fella who cost Joe his arm had redeemed himself.

  "I advise all travelers to stay away from the city," said the man. His voice sounded like a news reporter. I envisioned him with gray hair and wearing a dirty suit—maybe he had grown crazy in the city. He began to talk like he was on the radio, giving his audience the scoop.

  "Most have died. The government doesn't exist anymore. Underground bunkers were blown up by terrorists. Terrorists from our own soil. They're all around. They are us. The strangers in us. What they called the perfect storm decades ago came true, and New York was hit harder than anywhere. I haven't been able to get out of the city. I see the beaches are strewn with sunken buildings."

  His voice faded and returned. "Dogs everywhere, corpses floating in the sea and littering the city blocks. Stay away from the c
ity!"

  His voice diminished again before he came back with an anguished tone. "Is there anyone out there? Anyone at all?"

  Static. A dimming night. Joe cut the radio off and shook his head.

  I laid back on the dewy grass, and then I was back there, back in Arizona, when I'd come down to Swansea with some friends I'd met after Aunt Ju passed away. They were a rowdy gang, but I was starting to come out of the shell I'd climbed into after Mother, and then Father, had left this world. When Ju had been alive, she and I passed days beneath a deathly sun and began to drink wine because the water would make us sick; there was little fresh water in the desert. Then she was just gone.

  I headed south with my new friends. I was their main hunter, but hardly any game was in the desert. An occasional rat or rabbit. I was their best shot, they said.

  One by one, either people left or died right in front of us. One girl I had befriended, Rachel, left one night and never returned. We buried the ones who died and moved on, looting what few abandoned stores and houses we came across.

  We picked up drifters, and sometimes they'd have water or food. One of the new men, Mike, seemed friendly and wasn't bad-looking either. He kept me under his wing day in and day out, and then found a disheveled cart at the side of the road, which he fixed so that we could push it along and even ride in it.

  One night he said to me, "You are beautiful, Mei." I was sharing with him wine that I'd brought from home.

  I smiled and thanked him, but he became shadowy as he drank more. I wasn't sure if this was seduction or my imagination. I sipped wine, attempting to remain numb from emotions that Mike brought out in me. He was dark-haired with large, gray eyes. He had a sensual mouth and a hard body. Around us, the desert swirled into a sunset ball of paint. As the night wore on and the red wine touched our lips, his looks became hungry and his eyes dark.

  I wore a simple cotton dress, which used to be white but now was gray. My skin had tanned, like Father told me it should. Even so, I was paler than most.

  I fell asleep in Mike's arms one night, but sometime in the night, for he had not slept well, he jerked awake and took another sip of wine. I opened my eyes and saw the flutter of dawn in the east. The pale, gray light roamed the dusty land surrounding us, shaping cacti and sagebrush into silhouettes.

  Later that morning he continued drinking. I woke up with cotton mouth and excused myself to find water in the nearby desert. He kept drinking. He switched from wine to whiskey. I had no more taste for wine this early morning. I tried to get away from him, because he had grown from a sensual man to an angry animal. The whiskey made it ten times worse.

  He would glare at me and stop answering me when I tried to make small talk. He began to boss me around and wouldn't share his food and water with me.

  "Why are you being this way?" I finally asked.

  "Maybe because our world is shit, and there's no reason to keep doing anything."

  "We have to try," I said.

  "Try? What, try to keep walking beneath a sun so hot it's literally killing us?"

  The others in our camp woke up, laughed at him, and said we had to be moving along.

  I kept my eye on him all day. He sat in the cart and made me push him. When I tried to refuse, he slapped me. The others yelled at him, but kept moving along. With my face stinging I went somewhere inside and didn't say another word to him for a long time. He was getting more obnoxiously drunk and trying to sing songs from time to time. He'd stop singing and spit on the side of the road.

  He was like night and day. The rest were getting angry. I had already lost Rachel, and the other girl in our camp was being passed around by the men; she wanted it. I didn't. Mike had become my only friend, and I didn't know who else to rely on when my only "friend" had started acting so cruelly.

  At one point he said we had to stop. We heard a ruckus from an intersecting side road ahead and noticed a band of drifters driving a makeshift wagon. They had guns, and they didn't look like they were the type to mess with.

  "Mike, they have guns," I whispered.

  Mike stood up, grabbed me by the waist, and whispered, "Run!"

  We sprinted away. I jogged quickly while he stumbled and fell before I extended him a hand. The rest of our friends had marched onward. I could feel Mike's drunken footsteps behind me. I had not taken anything from the cart except my small purse, which had my old identification card and the silk handkerchief my father had given me long ago.

  I was an agile runner, but Mike was dead on his feet. We managed to get a good distance before hearing the gunshots. We ran faster, and the wind dried my tears and cracked my lips. We didn't stop for a mile, even though nobody came after us.

  Later we trudged back toward the road, where we found three of our friends lumped into a pile of blood and dead flesh. I wondered what happened to the rest. I bent down to cry, and Mike went through our cart, which had been pushed off the side of the road. The bandits had taken most everything.

  Mike had kept some whiskey and beef jerky. He gave me a small piece of the beef and lifted the bottle of whiskey, forcing it down my throat. It burned, and I cringed and wept.

  We made ourselves a small camp away from the road, where we stayed for a night and the next day. We saved our energy and I tried to ration our water, but Mike kept hogging it. He ate three times as much as me. The night air was sweaty, and in the morning I found enough dew from a Palo Verde tree to give us a tiny bit of water, but we were going to have to dig to get more.

  Mike said, "To hell with that." He plopped down in the sand and drank more whiskey. And more.

  At some point I had drifted off and then later awoken to see him standing over me. He had not slept now for two nights and hadn't stopped drinking. He had stopped sharing his jerky with me. I knew he must be going mad, without sleep or much water. His face was caked with dirt and his eyes angry.

  The sun's rays trickled from the endless sky as he stood over me, first staring, and then forcing himself upon me. I cried out and tried to get away. I hit his arms and back, but I was approximately a quarter of his size: He was a good six feet and was big-boned and muscular.

  All I could see was the vague light of the sun mixed with the blue of the sky. The thundering motion of a tree branch seemed to be moving up and down, but it was me being moved up and down. All I could feel was Mike's throbbing penetration, and his rough pushing and then my bleeding after what seemed eternity. Afterward, he passed out on top of me and didn't wake up again. I pushed and tugged and finally found my way out beneath him. In his pockets I found a knife, the rest of his whiskey, and another bag of beef jerky. I ran and did not look back. I fumbled my way toward a grove of Palo Verde trees I'd seen in a distance. During the next day I drank whiskey and ate jerky. I somehow lost the knife when digging for water and finally passed out from exhaustion and sorrow.

  ***

  Joggling awake, I found I had fallen asleep next to Buddha, who was snoring heavily and slouched toward me. My head had at some point found his shoulder—a good softly padded pillow.

  I was bothered by the dream--or more precisely, the bad memory. I noticed that it wasn't too late in the day. A fire was lit, and there were voices near the wagon camp. I made my way there, suddenly hungry and thirsty, remembering those days with even less than what we had now.

  As I came upon the party at the wagon, I realized there were some new faces. In the distance was an outline of something I couldn't make out, but as I drew forward, I saw it was the fruit wagon that had passed us earlier, which Leo and Joe had run after.

  The crowd was still eating oranges. As soon as I entered into the perimeter of light, I heard Leo say, "This is Mei," as he pointed toward me. And then he said, "She don't talk."

  I nodded and sat down to begin to assess the situation. Fran handed me an orange, and I smiled faintly at her. Biting into the orange invigorated me.

  From the conversation, I gathered that the new people in the crowd, two brothers who appeared to be in their forties,
had been growing oranges in a horticulture operation in Columbia. They were headed down to Savannah with their crop, which they said grew fantastically in this climate, as long as you had irrigation. Their buyer was a preacher.

  "It's the Baptista Mission," one of the men said. He had a tanned face with creased lines and pearly white teeth. His voice was booming, and his grin wide and confident. His name was Clinton P. Graves. The other man called himself Turner. He was quieter, probably because Clinton did so much talking.

  "Sounds like an organized business. Haven't seen those for years," said Caine. "Most folks are just barely making it. A little roadside thing here or there."

  "It ain't all bad," said Clinton. "Bet you folks haven't heard of what happened up there in Washington DC?"

  "Can't say we've heard too much detail," said Joe.

  "Well, after the main resource wars among civilians, the elite went down into some bunkers, where they'd hoarded oil, food, water, you name it, to last them years and years."

  "Dude, we have heard this part at least." I looked up to see Buddha had awakened and come over and started listening in.

  "Oh, I'd say there were hundreds of them that went down to the bunkers, but they had so much in-fighting that one of them formed a coup d'état and stole a bunch of goods, and they made their way out of there but then bombed the whole underground barracks."

  "Funny, we heard a reporter on the radio last night tell that story," Buddha said again, his words drawn out.