by Nick Cole
What does she see?
What do you think she sees, my friend? She is young and so is he.
When the Boy was ready to go he turned and said, “I’ll try to be back before dawn.”
Then he was gone into the darkness. For a moment they heard his steps and then nothing. As if he had been swallowed by the night.
The Old Man sat down next to the fire.
His granddaughter watched the dark shape of the massive rock. It blocked out its section of the night like a piece of black velvet hung to blot out the stars. Or an empty place in the universe.
“Will he be okay, Poppa?”
The Old Man wanted to think about that question, but he knew he mustn’t. He knew he must give her an answer quickly. And when he responded, he knew he should’ve been faster. He knew when he saw the worry and doubt in her eyes.
“I think he will. He seems to know the ways one needs to survive. I think he has been alone for much of his life.”
“Na-ah, Poppa. He was raised by a soldier.”
How does she know that? When have they talked about it?
“He was?” asked the Old Man.
“Yes, Poppa. I had to ask him what a soldier was and he told me. Do you know what a soldier is, Poppa?”
I do.
But maybe his meaning is different from the one I know. I must listen more than I speak.
Yes.
“What did he say a soldier was?”
“He said it was someone who never gives up, Poppa.”
The Old Man thought of Sergeant Major Preston. The tank and all that the soldier had prepared for the Old Man’s village to come and find one day.
I think cancer got me. . . . God bless America.
Yes. That is what he wrote in the journal I found. I had not said that word “America” in a very long time before I read it in his journal.
And if I’m completely honest with myself, I had forgotten it.
What good was a word in the years of sun and sand and salvage that followed the winter that came after the day of the bombs? What good was “America” now?
It only reminded me of all that was gone.
The Old Man watched the fire.
But Sergeant Major Preston of the Black Horse Cavalry hadn’t forgotten about America.
And neither had the soldier who’d raised the Boy. Whoever he was.
They didn’t forget.
They didn’t give up.
“Yes,” he said to his granddaughter. “That is what a soldier is.”
She was silent. She pressed her lips together, which was her way when she had more to say or was very excited about something she wanted to do but had to be patient until she could do it.
Young girls are hungry for all the good they think life holds. That is their innocence.
“Poppa?”
“Yes.”
“He also had a wife.”
“Oh.”
“She’s dead but he didn’t tell me how.”
“He seems young for that.”
She was silent. And then, “Does he, Poppa?”
“Maybe not to you, but to me he is very young.”
“Well, that’s because you’re old now, Poppa.” She laughed and snorted.
The Old Man nodded.
“It’s true. But it means I did something right, doesn’t it? It means I was good at living. That’s what getting old means. It means you’re successful at living.”
She laughed.
I love her laugh.
I wish I knew all the secret words that would make her laugh anytime I wanted to hear it. Anytime I needed to hear it. If there is anyone in control of this crazy life, that is my bargain I’ll make with you. You can have anything you want. Just give me her laugh. Let me take it wherever I have to go after this.
Deal?
Silence.
And . . .
Please?
“He was in battles, Poppa. And he’s crossed the whole country. The whole United States, Poppa.”
Her eyes shine when she talks about him.
Her eyes remind me of my wife’s, her grandmother. When she was young.
She is always young to me.
“He has done a lot for such a young man,” said the Old Man.
“What is that, Poppa?”
“What is what?”
“The United States?”
I guess we never talked about that. We talked of salvage and ice cream and jet airplanes like my dad once flew across the world. Many things. But not the United States.
“It was our country.”
She said nothing. Thinking.
Then . . .
“Is it still our country?”
IN THE NIGHT, when the moon was falling to the far horizon, long after the Old Man had tried to explain the concept of “States” and then tried to remember as many of their names as he could, which was not many, he flipped the switch on the optics. He scanned the giant rock. He could not see the Boy.
She’d only wanted to talk about him. Even though I was telling her all about California and the other states I had been to, she only really wanted to talk about him.
Yes, my friend. That is the way of the young when they discover something. They are like Christopher Columbus discovering the “new” world.
Yes. Sergeant Major Preston wrote that in the sewer.
They think everything is new and they are the first and they ignore us Indians who’ve been here all along.
In the past, if I taught her everything I knew about how a small engine once worked or what telephones were, she couldn’t get enough of such things. The questions about those lost things would follow me for days. But not today. She only looked as though she were listening to me as I told her about states.
But she wasn’t.
No.
That is the way of the young, my friend. You cannot help who you fall in love with the first time. You just do. When you get up in the morning you don’t say to yourself, Today I am going to fall in love. You just do.
He is very handsome. Strong too. That is a good thing for these days. But she is still young.
But there must always be a first time for love.
He looked down into the tank and saw her face. She was deep in sleep, still wrapped in her bomber jacket.
I will take just her laugh with me to wherever I must go next. Please? Is it a deal? Just the memory of her laugh. Can I have that?
Silence.
In the night, the Old Man thought he heard a horse galloping down the highway above his head.
I am dreaming.
Maybe the horse is on the bridge.
Maybe the horse is part of the dream.
The Old Man fell back to sleep.
Chapter 37
The Old Man woke with a start.
I was falling.
Yes.
She was calling for me?
No, Poppa. I need you.
I think so.
I smell bacon.
He opened the hatch. The Boy and a Stranger watched the campfire and a cast-iron skillet between them in which the Old Man could see splattering grease leaping in the waves of heat that came up from the flames.
The Stranger wore clothing made of tanned hide. A necklace of bones. His hair fell in curls around a circle of baldness that had consumed the back of the top of his head. Large sad brown eyes turned to the Old Man and gazed upon him.
The Old Man dismounted the tank, feeling the stiffness of his sleeping position in each handhold and footfall that brought him jarringly to the ground.
The Boy stood and hobbled toward the Old Man.
The Stranger looked exhausted. It had been a long night for him also.
“I found him up there on top of the large rock,” said the Boy. The Stranger had turned back to the fire and the skillet.
“Was he alone?” asked the Old Man.
“Yes. He’s harmless. I don’t think we’ll get much out of him, though.” The Boy waited until the Stranger bent t
o inspect something within the skillet. Then the Boy raised his index finger to his temple and twirled it.
The Boy lay down near where he’d left his worn rucksack. He patted it once and then laid his head on it and closed his eyes. A moment later the Boy was asleep.
The Old Man retrieved a percolator from the tank and some tea, the last remaining packets in their supplies, and went to the fire. He set the percolator to boil on the coals and sat down across from the Stranger.
“Good morning,” he said to the Stranger.
The Stranger raised his clasped hands to his mouth, squeezed his eyes shut, and began to rock back and forth.
This went on for a while and the Old Man was content to wait for the water to boil and for the tea to steep. He sat out mugs on stones near the fire and poured the tea.
The day was still cool, though soon the heat would be up. In the blue shadows beneath the bridge, the Old Man watched the pork sizzle in the cast-iron pan and sipped his hot tea.
Like camping.
The Stranger produced a large meat fork and skewered a piece of sizzling pork, holding it out toward the Old Man.
“Thank you.”
The Old Man chewed.
Should I be worried about the quality of this meat?
Life has already made several attempts to kill you, my friend. This pork is probably the least of your worries today.
It’s good.
The Stranger ate none of the pork.
He watched the Old Man, nodding slightly with approval.
He’s not as old as me, but he is old enough to have lived through the bombs. Maybe he was young and never learned to speak. Maybe no one survived with him. Maybe he has been alone all this time.
“Your country is desolate,” said the Stranger in a high voice.
As if his heart was breaking.
As if he were on the verge of tears.
“Your cities are burned with fire: your land, strangers devour it in your presence.”
The Old Man nodded respectfully, chewing the pork. He picked up his tea and sipped.
“What’s your name?” he asked through another mouthful of pork.
The Stranger looked as if he were about to go on, as if the Old Man had interrupted him in the middle of his speech.
“Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hates,” continued the Stranger, almost pleading with the Old Man. “They are a trouble unto me: I am weary to bear them. And when you spread forth your hands, I will hide my eye from you.” The Stranger covered his brown liquid-filled eyes with the palms of his hands. Then he looked up and, putting his hands over his ears, he whispered in horror, “Yes, when you make many prayers, I will not hear: your hands are full of blood.”
Okay.
The Old Man’s granddaughter emerged from the tank, rubbing sleepy eyes. He saw her look about for the Boy. She saw her grandfather watching her when her gaze had finally fallen upon his sleeping form. She climbed down from the tank, eyes still half closed, and settled next to the fire. The Stranger held out pork for her from within the skillet.
She chewed.
Just like camping.
Okay, I will try once more. But I already know I will be sorry.
“Do you have a name, sir?” asked the Old Man.
The Stranger nodded emphatically.
Then stopped.
“Wash you, make you clean: put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes: cease to do evil.”
“We are not doing evil. We are on a journey to rescue some people who are trapped in a bunker to the east. In what was once Colorado,” said the Old Man reaching exasperation. “Do you know Colorado?”
“Learn to do well, seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, and plead for the widow,” continued the Stranger.
“That’s what we’re doing!” said the Old Man, surprised with himself that he was already upset.
Usually, I am much more patient.
The Stranger stopped. He leaned forward. There was hope in his voice when he spoke again.
“Come now, and let us reason together, says the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be wool.”
“Crimson is red?” interrupted his granddaughter.
The Stranger nodded emphatically and continued.
“They shall be as wool. If you are willing and obedient, you shall eat the good of the land.”
The Old Man stood. He was shaking.
I am angry and I do not know why!
You are angry at this man, my friend, because he will not answer a simple question.
Yes, that is why I am angry.
“What is your name, sir?”
When the Stranger did not immediately answer, the Old Man began to turn and walk away. A few steps and he heard the Stranger say, “Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah. I am as one crying in the wilderness.”
When the Old Man turned back, there were tears streaming down the Stranger’s sunburned cheeks.
Don’t be angry with him. He can’t help . . .
He’s crazy.
The Old Man sat down next to the fire again.
If you’d watched civilization go up in flames. If you’d watched what came after and had to survive any way you could through all those years alone. How could you not be crazy, my friend?
I did. I watched. I survived. I’m not crazy.
But you had the village. Your wife. Your son. Your grandchildren. Maybe he had no one.
The Old Man sighed and sipped his tea again. He had another piece of bacon.
“I think you understand me,” he said to the Stranger.
The Stranger nodded.
“But for some reason you speak in riddles and I don’t know why. So I will tell you that we are headed east to find some people who have asked for our help. We need fuel. Were you part of the people who lived up here?” The Old Man pointed toward the abandoned hotel that had been the center of the outpost.
The Stranger shook his head in the negative.
“Did you know them?”
The Stranger nodded.
“We need their fuel. Do you know where it is? Is there any left?”
The Stranger nodded again.
Chapter 38
“And they shall be desolate in the midst of the countries that are desolate, and her cities shall be in the midst of the cities that are wasted.”
The Old Man watched the Stranger as he worked at pulling up the grating that covered what must have once been a pool inside the skeletal remains of a gym.
That is his answer to what lies east?
Yes, my friend. That is his answer.
When the metal cover was pushed back, the hint of kerosene bloomed in full. Inside the empty pool, salvage-fashioned fuel tanks lay along the bottom.
My eyes are burning from the fumes.
The Old Man waved the others back and dropped down into the shallow end of the dry pool. He tapped his scarred knuckles against a tank and heard the hollow echo of a half-filled volume.
Will it be enough?
It will have to be.
They brought the tank in through the shattered remains of the floor-to-ceiling windows. It crushed ancient fitness machines beneath its treads. Above them a barn owl screeched incessantly, refusing to flee into the daylight.
He has been here for some time.
If he waits, we will go away. But he must wait until we have taken all their fuel.
When they had maneuvered the tank as close to the pool as they could, they stretched out the pump hose until it barely reached the farthermost tank.
The fumes could ignite in a moment so we must be very careful.
“Go out and look for some salvage,” he told his granddaughter. “See if there is anything we can use.”
“Food would be good, Poppa.”
“Yes, food would be good.”
When she was gone he breathed a little easier.
If we explode she will at least
be safe.
She will be all alone.
Yes, but she won’t be dead.
The Boy took charge of the fueling once the Old Man had shown him how it was performed. Now they waited in the silence of the ancient pool area, the APU droning like the pumps of the pool must have once done.
The Old Man turned to the Stranger.
His words are church words.
As though he will only speak what he has seen or read. As though it is his punishment or his penance. But he understands. I know he does. How has he made it all this time? What is his story of salvage?
“What is your . . . what is your story?”
The Stranger who had been watching the fueling process with both amazement and amusement turned back to the Old Man with laughing, mirthful eyes.
The Stranger seemed to want to say something. Then stopped himself and simply shook his head. When the Old Man seemed to accept this, the Stranger turned back to watch the fueling.
The map.
The Old Man climbed up into the tank and retrieved Sergeant Presley’s map, though he thought of it only as the Boy’s.
Again he was amazed at the information contained in its markings.
It’s the story of someone’s life.
Is that not true of all maps, my friend?
True. And also, our stories are the maps of our lives.
The Old Man stopped.
Our stories are the maps of our lives.
Yes, my friend.
He spread the map out on the ragged rubber floor of the gym, in a space between crushed pieces of fitness equipment.
“Excuse me?” He spoke loudly trying to get the Stranger’s attention.
The Stranger turned.
He saw the map. If the look in his eyes when he’d watched the tank drink up all the fuel had been one of amazement, the look in his eyes when he saw the map was one of awe.
He fell to his knees and a moment later his short thick fingers were tracing the roads. Tracing them back east. Tracing them to New York. Landing on Brooklyn.
And he wept.
His shoulders shaking.
Sobs gushing forth in tremendous heaves.
“By the rivers of Babylon,” sobbed the Stranger. “There we sat down, yea we wept, when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying sing us one of the songs of Zion.”