by Nick Cole
“Poppa! Look!” She waves it across his vision and it seems a dragon crossing the desert sky full of flame and smoke.
We must . . .
“We must go,” he mumbles.
All around the Old Man the cries and shrieks of the crowd mixed with some awkward and distorted off-tone music have been playing and growing in his ears. But beneath that, the Old Man hears the guttural growl of a small but vicious animal.
He looks deep into his granddaughter’s eyes.
We are surrounded and there is no way out.
The world begins to tilt. First one way, and then another.
The Fool is growling.
“It’s your turn to drive,” says the Old Man.
“Okay, Poppa!” she explodes.
“You can have mine,” he mumbles to himself as she grabs him by the hand.
She is dragging him back to the tank, pulling him forward in fact.
“Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you, Poppa!”
He feels claws pulling at his other arm and he shakes it stiffly as though controlling it from very far away. The Fool cartwheels in the dirt and an instant later is up in a wide-legged stance. His too-long arms hang down and low, the claws opening and closing.
He is growling.
The Old Man closes his eyes at the foot of the embankment as his granddaughter scrambles up and away toward the tank at the top.
The tank she gets to drive again.
“C’mon, Poppa!” She beckons, leaving him behind.
“What about yer fuel, mister?” Reynolds’s face looms comically into the Old Man’s narrow field of red dirt and rock and sudden blue sky.
The Old Man is grabbed heavily from behind.
The Boy is dragging him, one-armed, up the hill with little effort and much force.
The Fool at the foot of the hill seems no longer friendly. In fact, he seems given completely over to a purple anger none of the other revelers notice. The Fool stares hatefully upward at the retreating Old Man and the Boy.
Teeth gritted.
Jaw clenched.
A fire burns in the darkness behind his too-large puppet face and coal-black eyes.
The tank’s engine whispers into its roar.
The Old Man is dragged upward across the hot armor and rests, catching his breath and holding on to the turret, while the Boy pours water over his burning old head.
Thank you, he thinks he says aloud but is not sure if he has.
The circus before the Stockade races away behind them and even though the Old Man can only see the colors and pennants in the distance, he can feel those hateful eyes of the Fool still on him.
Watching them.
Following them.
Chasing after them.
Chapter 34
The Old Man is sleeping on the deck of the tank, inside the turret. When he awakes, he feels the rumbling engine and the grinding treads shuddering through the frame all about him. He looks up and sees the Boy in the hatch. It is still daylight in the hints of sky he can see beyond the Boy.
I feel like I’ve been drinking.
You were.
Yes, but more than I actually did.
The Old Man rubs his face, feeling saliva along his cheek.
I was really sleeping.
He sits up and feels dull and faraway and thirsty. The Boy sees that the Old Man is awake and climbs out onto the turret and the Old Man rises into the hatch. They are headed north. It is late afternoon.
I’ve been asleep most of the day.
The old highway winds through a ponderosa of wide dry fields and clusters of stunted oak. Stubby fortresses of rock erupt suddenly throughout the landscape.
It feels quieter here. I can tell, even above all the noise of the tank. It feels like we are climbing upward now. Climbing to the top of the world.
Later when they shut down the tank alongside the road and the noise of the engine has faded, the Old Man hears the quiet he’d suspected might be there and it envelops their resting place for the night.
We are heading up onto the high plateau now.
There is no sound of bird or beast. The smell of dust and grass are heavy in the early evening. His granddaughter sits on her haunches, watching the fire the Boy had built, the two of them waiting for the beans and rice to heat.
They would be just fine without me.
The Old Man watches the dry slope of the land and red rock and the stubby trees packed tightly together.
It feels like no one has been here for some time.
So where did the circus come from?
The thought of the Fool sends a cold shiver through his thin muscles and chest.
The whole thing felt wrong.
Maybe you just overreacted, my friend?
No. No, I don’t think I did. There was something wrong about the whole . . .
When you were young, you noticed that older people were always afraid. Afraid of kidnappers and telemarketers. Afraid of the new. Afraid of the unknown. Maybe you are old now and afraid of new things, my friend?
Maybe the old of my youth were just cautious. And I am old.
He walked back to their small fire, smelling the smoke and the food and the heavy scent of sagebrush thick in the first of the evening cool.
“Poppa, tell me all about elephants,” she said.
The Old Man looked at the Boy. The Boy watched him.
Is he nodding? Does he want to know about elephants also?
Remember he too is young. To the young the world is exciting and not frightening. The world is elephants and not . . . fools or clowns?
Psychopaths.
Evil.
“What do you want to know about them?” he asked as she handed him his plate. In the first bite he knew he was starving.
I am hungry like I was when I was young. So maybe I am not old.
You are old, my friend. Like me.
“Where’d they come from? What do they eat? Can they do other tricks? Was that the biggest one you’ve ever seen? You know, Poppa, tell us everything.”
Chewing quickly, shoveling another bite into his still-moving mouth, he looked at the Boy.
The Boy nodded.
And so the Old Man told them all about elephants. All about Africa. All about lions and things he’d read in books and been taught in school when he was young.
Later, when the fire was low and he could hear them both sleeping, he lay still and watched the stars above.
I did not think I knew so much about elephants.
Chapter 35
The road wound higher and higher into the forests that surrounded Flagstaff. For a while the going was slow as the tank maneuvered around lone eruptions of pine that shot through the lanes of the old highway.
In time, the crumbling remains of buildings poked through the unchecked growth, and when the Old Man went to consult the map as to how much farther they might go that day, he could not find it.
When did I . . .
When the Fool shook your hand.
The Old Man replayed the moment in the miles to come, as his granddaughter called out her intentions each time they needed to maneuver off-road.
“Okay, Poppa, we’re going around this crazy tree.”
I was pretty out of it yesterday. I could have dropped it in the dust perhaps.
“Poppa, we’ll go to the right of this collapsed bridge, okay?”
Or anyone in the circus or the town could have snatched it from me.
“Poppa, how do you think that truck managed to flip itself across all the lanes? What a bad driver he must’ve been!”
Or it is somewhere here with us and I have simply misplaced it.
They passed the fire-blackened remains of a vehicle, the likes of which the Old Man had never seen before. Three blackened skeletons lay next to its massive wheels, still twisting in agony.
Or laughing.
In the end, when we are all skeletons, who will be able to tell if we were crying or laughing at what has happened to us?
And . . .
It won’t be important anymore.
“What kind of car was that, Poppa?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen its like before and maybe the fire made it unrecognizable.”
“Why do you think they just sat there and let it burn, Poppa?”
He didn’t answer.
“Why, Poppa?”
“Because there was nothing they could do about it.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
No, it doesn’t.
THE STOCKADE AT Flagstaff was a collection of fallen pine logs that had once formed a wall for defense and since had been dragged away from a hotel that overlooked the old highway.
The Old Man let the tank idle outside in the parking lot of the hotel. They watched, waiting for somebody to come out and greet them.
The Boy’s strong hand rested against the tomahawk.
There are leaves and debris here. No one has been here in quite a while.
Yes. No one.
The Old Man turned off the tank and listened. He could hear a crow calling out stridently.
I have a very bad feeling about this place.
What kind of bad feeling?
The kind that says I do not want to know what I might find in there. That kind of feeling. The feeling of knowing that whatever you find, you won’t like it.
The Old Man dismounted and the Boy followed.
As his granddaughter began to climb out of the driver’s hatch, he motioned for her to stay. Her look of displeasure was instantaneous.
“It’s your turn to guard the tank,” he called back to her.
She sat down, dangling her feet over the side.
The Old Man heard the crunch of gravel beneath his boots as he and the Boy crossed the tired parking lot.
In the lobby they found nothing. No one.
The old furniture was gone. Instead there were desks.
As though someone had set up some kind of headquarters here.
And where are they now?
And where will we find fuel?
“What do you think happened here?” asked the Boy.
There is a story of salvage here. But what it is, I don’t know.
“I can’t tell. They had walls. They had shelter. If they were attacked, there should at least be bodies.”
The Boy limped through the dusty light to the back of the lobby.
He’s heading to the bar. There was always a bar back that way in these kinds of places. How does he know that?
Maybe he knows more of these places alongside the road than I do. Maybe he was born and raised in these places. Maybe they are as familiar to him as my shed would be to me.
You don’t live there anymore, my friend.
It’s hard to think that I live or lived in any other place, ever. My shed will always be home for me.
After a moment, when he could see only the dim outline of the Boy, he called out, “Did you find anything back there?”
The Boy returned, holding a coffee mug.
He held it out to the Old Man.
Inside, the remains of a punch-red syrup had dried into a shell at the bottom of the mug.
The Old Man smelled it. He smelled the heat and the straw and the sugar and the Fool.
The Circus had come to town.
THEY HAD DRIVEN through the remains of the town and now the heat faded as the summer day bled away. In the afternoon, a cool pine breeze came up and dried the sweat on the Old Man’s back.
North of town, a massive rock the size of a small mountain loomed high into the darkening sky. Flagstaff, falling into disrepair, surrendering to time, settled as night birds and small animals began their first forays into the early evening.
Above him, the pines that were reclaiming the town, growing up through roads and sidewalks and buildings, whispered together making a soft white noise.
They parked the tank underneath an overpass, and as they began to make the night’s meal, the Old Man wandered through the remains of a nearby gas station.
There is nothing left here.
How could there be after forty years?
All those years of living and salvaging in the village, I thought that much of the world was the same as Yuma, or Los Angeles or the cities I had seen on TV. Destroyed. I felt as though our little village was the only place in all the world that had survived.
Remained.
Then you found Tucson and all these places. The Dam. The outpost. All the other places that seemed to have had their own stories since the bombs.
Yes, they were not all “nuked” or touched by war as we had imagined.
But everything is touched by our downfall.
Yes.
Everyone in those days ran for cover. Into the hills. Into the wilderness. Wherever they could, thinking only of escape. Unprepared for what it takes to live in such places . . .
Of wilderness.
Of desert.
Of wasteland.
The Old Man found a cash box underneath the counter inside the gas station, hidden on a small ledge out of sight.
He pulled it out onto the countertop where once lottery tickets and quick snacks must have waited for purchase. Now there was nothing.
How did they miss this?
The Old Man opened it and found a stack of brittle paper money lying within.
When you are coming for food you take what you can find. You’ve been living in the wilderness and all you’ve brought is long gone. Days turn to months. Months turn to years. So you go into town. Hoping that somewhere in it is a bag of stale chips or even a can of soup or stew that might still be good. Your mouth waters at the thought of such once-common delicacies.
You no longer think of lobster.
Or even money. What good is it when you’re starving?
There was a kind of canned stew I loved in college. But I grew tired of it. I remember I didn’t even buy any of it that last year.
What was it called?
The Old Man thought about all the times he had shopped for it, prepared it, eaten it.
And now I can’t even remember its name.
He returned to the tank in the blue twilight of evening.
The Boy and his granddaughter had already eaten and when he approached through the darkness he could hear his granddaughter laughing.
The Boy must have said something, which is strange because he never talks unless he is spoken to.
He sat down to his plate of beans and rice. His granddaughter handed him a few fire-warmed tortillas.
This is like camping. When I was young we went camping a few times. It was like this.
You are thinking too much about the past and not about the present. You need fuel and to find a map so you know where you are going.
I remember the map mostly. All the way to Albuquerque, turn left, go north.
You cannot afford to make a mistake, my friend. Your fuel tanks won’t suffer a wrong turn.
“Have either of you seen my map?”
The fire popped.
His granddaughter and the Boy each shook their heads.
The Old Man sighed to himself.
“I think I may have lost it.”
Or the Fool took it, my friend.
I don’t want to say that. I don’t want to make him seem more frightening than he already is.
Why?
Because it will worry them.
No, why are you afraid of him?
Because there is reason to be afraid of him. Of that, I am very sure.
“Do you think it is lost for good?” asked the Boy.
The Old Man set his plate down, rubbing his fingers together because it had gotten hot as it lay next to the fire. He picked up the plate again. He sighed.
“Yes,” he confessed.
It is best to admit the truth, even when you don’t want to. Even if it makes you look old and foolish. We have too little fuel to afford my pride.
Yes.
&nb
sp; The Boy stood up and disappeared into the darkness. The Old Man could hear him rustling through his pack. Then he was back by the fire, standing above them.
The Boy held out a folded map that glistened in the firelight.
The Old Man took it and began to unfold it.
It was larger than his map.
The entire United States.
Roads crossing the entire continent.
And . . .
Notes like “Plague” and “Destroyed” and “Gone.”
Has he been to all these places?
The Boy sat down and stared into the firelight.
He is somewhere else. Somewhere else with someone else.
On the back of the map were names and words and identifiers that hinted at the details of an untold story.
CPT DANFORTH, KIA CHINESE SNIPER IN SACRAMENTO
SFC HAN, KIA CHINESE SNIPER IN SACRAMENTO
CPL MALICK, KIA RENO
SPC TWOOMEY, KIA RENO
PFC UNGER, MIA RENO
PFC CHO, MIA RENO
PV2 WILLIAMS, KIA RENO
And . . .
Lola.
Lola.
And who was Lola?
When the Old Man looked up at the Boy again he’d meant to ask him how and why and even, where, but the Boy was staring at something high up. Something on the massive rock that loomed above Flagstaff. The Old Man followed the Boy’s gaze.
High up on the rock burned a small campfire, and above it the stars wheeled like broken glass moving in time to some unheard waltz.
Chapter 36
The Boy sat by the fire sharpening his tomahawk.
“What’re you going to do?” asked the Old Man.
“I will go up there. Near there, and see who it is. Maybe they know where we can find the fuel that’s supposed to be here.”
The Old Man started the tank and backed it out from under the overpass. When he came back to the fire he said, “We can watch you through the night vision. If you get in trouble maybe you can signal us from up there. We could try to come up and help you.”
The Boy nodded as he finished lacing up his old boots. He stood, stretching the weak part of himself, twisting back and forth. The Old Man watched his granddaughter watch the Boy.