South

by Frank Owen

  The stopping didn’t hurt their escape much: if they were hunkering down someplace then the Callahans were doing the same. Stopped like a paused TV, Dyce thought, reruns of the Road Runner and Coyote in a rictus till the dogs stopped their barking outside and Garrett pressed play again.

  Dyce had learnt to feel the wind’s slow rising in his sinuses, a primitive thickening between the eyes as the air pressure changed and the cells responded, as if he were regressing: now man, then amphibian, reduced at last to bacteria, ready to start the cycle all over.

  He was grateful that no one traveled at night. That was one quick way to meet your maker, and it could be something simple, too, something laughable and deadly at the same time – a missed turning, a wayward root, a blind fumbling for a place to shelter from a sudden gust, a rabid field mouse striped with panic.

  The boys checked each other a couple of times a day without knowing they did it. Their ears had become attuned to the cough that turned wet, the sneeze that propelled a virus six feet through the air to the next carrier. So far, so good. Dyce laughed at himself. Being pursued like cowboys in an old-time Western, and all he could think was that he wasn’t sick yet. God darn, boy! You git goin’ and don’ stop till you hit the Klondike! Garrett looked at him funny, and Dyce sobered up.

  ‘’Member that time Dad took us to that cave up Salida way?’

  Garrett nodded, saving his breath. It was hard to forget. Turned out to be the last road trip they’d all take together before he died, before even the dregs of gas ran dry and folks left their cars abandoned on the roadside – the American Dream scoured for cloth and stuffing and engine oil and radiator water that turned out to be bitter with standing. Any color, Henry Ford had said. Any color as long as it’s black.

  The rock face had looked close enough until they were all out in the dust, treading the soft shale. Dyce had on his Batman pajama top, Garrett remembered that, a size too small already, and that their father offered to carry their backpacks even though he was sick by then. Proper sick, pale as paper. They scoured the cliff face, searching for the orifice their father had sworn he’d seen through the Lark’s busted windshield. When they all got up there it had disappeared.

  ‘We were up there for, like, days.’

  ‘Months.’

  It had been half an hour, max, but Dyce wouldn’t ever forget the feeling of clawing for purchase on the smooth, impersonal stone, praying for a crack to open up and let him in; the relief when it finally did. He bet that sex didn’t come close, though Garrett said different.

  That scramble among the rocks had stood them in good stead. Now they fled through the rocky landscape, sticking to the trees. Cowboys and Indians, thought Dyce. And the Indians always lost. He remembered – how had he forgotten? – that Garrett and his friends used to tie him to a bristlecone pine and poke him with whippy little sticks until he cried. He had never told. Eventually they had stopped whaling on Dyce. There was a little retarded boy called Teddy next door, and Garrett had discovered that he was mute. One time they left him trussed up for the whole afternoon. His mother hadn’t come to find him, or seen the rope burns: she was just happy that normal kids wanted to play with him. It wasn’t me, Dyce told himself. I was just watching.

  ‘Garrett.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Wind’s rising.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Can’t you feel it?’

  Garrett shook his head, the faint scars of his old acne making shadows on his cheekbones. ‘You’re the sensitive one, virgin.’

  Dyce let it go. He ran his hand through his hair. He would need a haircut again soon. Garrett just let his grow: he was the only guy Dyce knew who didn’t look dumb with a ponytail.

  ‘You know we need to start looking. Be dark soon either way.’

  Sometimes the looking was quick – a shack, an abandoned mine shaft, some convenient opening in the side of the earth that welcomed them in, as if it had been waiting. Other times they spent an hour or more searching for a likely spot, somewhere they could bed down before full dark. Once or twice they hadn’t been able to get there, and those nights weren’t worth the stretching out: the jeebies from dusk till dawn, praying the wind stayed away. Except it’s not a nightmare, Dyce told himself. This is just how it is.

  The boys stopped and dropped their packs, the buckles jingling like spurs. They listened for a minute, for steps approaching, the sound of a rock loosened by a misplaced hand or a scrambling foot. One of the advantages of sticking to the ridge was that you were always looking down on strangers approaching. Weird how you got used to the vigilance. We be some baaad-ass outlaws, thought Dyce.

  They stretched and Garrett’s backbone clicked. He wasn’t used to lugging twenty pounds around the whole day. They’d gotten a bit too comfortable in Glenwood.

  Garrett gave Dyce a little push. ‘You go.’

  ‘Man!’ Dyce tried to stop his voice rising in a whine. Garrett was too old to be pushing him around that hard: it hurt. ‘It’s your turn!’

  ‘Yeah, but it’s your thing.’ It was the closest Garrett would get to a compliment, Dyce knew. He sighed. Another concession. Somewhere in his head there was a list.

  ‘Look after my bag.’

  ‘Duh.’

  Dyce wasn’t two paces off the track when the leaves and grasses began to twitch, as though they too were lengthening, cracking their spines. The wind had come quicker than he’d figured, which he knew meant it was going to blow hard, an all-nighter. He tied his cloth mask around his face, just in case, and went back to fetch his bag. Garrett didn’t say anything but Dyce read his eyes peering out from above the mask, hard with fright: You better find something DOUBLE quick. I’m watching you, little brother. Impress me.

  He beckoned. There had to be a rock face below them.

  The boys dropped off the side of the ridge, sliding where they could, clawing at silver beard stalks. The lip of rock above gave some shelter, a few more precious seconds to search, the difference between a full night’s sleep and twelve hours of suffering.

  3

  Beside a pair of young spruces, it was the only thing on the ridge, and at first Vida thought it was a scalp, its reddish strands blowing gently back: mermaid’s hair, white girl’s hair, hair like a horse’s tail.

  It was perched on the top of a long pole. Further down there were sets of instruments that looked like cups on a carousel, slowing and then speeding up as the wind sighed and puffed in tired gusts. It was picking up speed more steadily even as she watched. Fuck. Too far to get back to her ma and the house now.

  How much time? She swallowed against the parchment of her throat and squinted into the pale light. No one to block her way. There was never anyone out in the hills anymore. Crazy Lady this morning had been an exception. She’d followed Vida for ages but had fallen away a couple of hours back, still spitting gobs of phlegm onto the track and cursing her ghost dog for his desertion. She had been a big old sign, hadn’t she? Vida had to take more care: there were fewer people, but they were desperate.

  Hell, so am I.

  So far she had kept to the tree-line, out of sight. There was more wind on the plateau but it didn’t seem to collect the way it did in the valleys, ferrying the viruses onwards. Vida quickly breathed into her palm and sniffed, but there was no sign of sickness. She’d save her surgical mask for when she really needed it. That she had escaped so far was a true-by-Jesus miracle, isn’t that what her mama would’ve said in the early days? She heard Ruth’s voice: Man proposes; God disposes. Vida cracked her neck and shifted her sweaty backpack. Move on, girl, she told herself. One quick look. This time the voice that came through was the slippered mammy from the Tom and Jerry cartoons. Mm-mm-mm! Time’s a-wastin’.

  She limped out from the trees down onto the bald track.

  The box had once been painted white, its sides louvred against the wet. It was about her height and not a hive, after all. That was a real shame: honey was just about the only thing that helped a weeping
wound, and Lord knew she’d seen enough of those in the last few weeks.

  Vida peered through the peeling slats but the inside was dark and secret. It ticked faintly, like a mechanical heart. Or a bomb, Vida thought, and backed away again. Fuck, that was dumb. Could’ve been a booby trap. Don’t you learn?

  But there could be something useful inside, her rag-picking conscience insisted. Come on, Veedles. Open it up and take a look. How bad can it be? Vida scrubbed at her eyes with her knuckles and was newly disgusted at her hands, the scratches and scrapes, their ashy shade. She wasn’t ever going to get used to rubbing animal fat into her skin. She didn’t give a shit that it was something her ancestors had done: this was one law of her mama’s that she wouldn’t be following. A girl had standards: older fat stank, and the fresh stuff had better uses.

  Vida looked at the torn nail of her thumb and saw it again in the sand outside their house, the clapboards shifting and creaking as she worked, as if the place would loose itself from the soil and move into some deserted town on its own. Vida imagined her mama inside, cocooned in her blankets, breathing shallow and feeling each blow of the spade as if it would separate her ribs from her sickly spine. The grave had to be deep enough that the coyotes couldn’t get at what was in it, but the earth knew the lie for what it was, and resisted.

  Vida stared at the weather box, weighing up the risks of opening it. Just do it, Pandora.

  She circled the container and its wooden marker pole, skew against the sky, looking for clues. Now there, at the very top, was something she recognized: not a scalp but a stuffed bird perched on top, beak into the wind. A rooster in his past life, Vida thought. He looked nothing like that now, as if someone was working from memory when they made him, and they hadn’t been paying attention the first time. The thing reminded Vida of the story her ma told about Medio Pollito, the half-chick who was cosseted in his coop. When he left home to search for his other half, he was torched for his arrogance: burnt to a cinder, Ruth always said, and Vida suddenly wanted her world back, with its talking animals and ordinary people, where good was rewarded and evil punished. She wanted to believe in the magic of numbers and the safety of community and Black don’t crack, but right now it was just her and the box, watched over by the zombie cockerel in the fading light.

  Girl, get over yourself – it’s not voodoo; it’s a weather vane.

  Vida edged forward and poked at one of the slats. The plank rattled, loose as a tooth in a glass jaw. She wiggled it out of its brackets and inspected the interior of the box. It looked like the tiny hospital rooms her ma used to work in during The War, the way she’d described them, anyways: glass and steel and their accurate, useless measurements of time passing. At least the air was fresh back then. Here was a maximum–minimum thermometer – even Vida could see that – but also some other devices. A barometer, she guessed, although she had never worked out why people needed something to tell them what the weather was doing when they were right in the middle of it. And that? A little brass sphere like an alchemist’s globe. A hydrometer, maybe. Lately she had come to appreciate water in all its forms. Dragging a stew pot across the countryside and then heaving the thing home twice a week made you appreciate a drink, especially since the borehole ran dry.

  Could she use these instruments? The mercury? Maybe siphon off some alcohol? How heavy would they be to lug around? Vida had learnt the hard way to keep her pack weight down. She envisioned herself ripping the thermometer and hydrometer from their nails. Probably not worth the effort, especially in the hard wind coming.

  The real question was: would someone be coming to check on the weather box? Before The War, containers like this were inspected every twenty-four hours, but now weather prediction wasn’t just a hobby for an eccentric, or part of a government program. Vida remembered the bald TV man who had stood in front of a synoptic chart, tapping at it with his baton. Teeth, he had joked, and pointed to a cold front coming in, its blue back arched like the Loch Ness Monster. Teeth and gums. Vida wondered if he was still alive now all these years later. Back then the weather was an inconvenience; at worst a chance to stay home from school. But the wind had turned out to be more important than they had thought, and not only because it carried the spirits of the dead with it, the way her ma’s stories said it did.

  The wind had turned out to be very fucking important indeed.

  And here it came. Vida watched the little leaves shaking. Shit. There was no way to make it back in time, the wind was rising fast and her limbs were Jello from the climb. Old lady’s legs. Vida searched her bag for the surgical mask, and then put it away again. Not yet. They got saturated too quick. Save it, she told herself. Use the blue bandanna and save the good one. And MOVE! Look for a place to wait until the worst of the wind is over. You know what to do.

  Vida scanned the rock she had covered already that day. A crack: that was all she needed. Some small and kindly sheltering space.

  It didn’t take long.

  She crept into the cave as far back as she could, hugged her knees and waited.

  4

  Up ahead the rock split and shadowed and Dyce shifted like a dog to inspect it. No game trails; no bones or fur. It smelt okay – not great, but who was keeping score? Not like they were packing a can of Lysol. The wind was whipping the air around his face, anyway. Dyce reached an arm into the cracked darkness and waved it in the merciful space inside. It would have to do. He dropped his bag and squeezed in sideways. When Garrett arrived, he followed the sound of his brother’s buckle straps, and they slithered like bullsnakes into the dark.

  They sat cross-legged in the gloom, breathing into their sleeves, waiting like runners to get their breath back. They tried to measure the lungfuls so as not to disturb the air. Keep the outside out and the inside in, sang Dyce’s brain. Easy to say, but the veil was thin. He lowered his arm and breathed, nice and shallow to start with: acclimatizing, expanding to fill the space.

  The cave held the stale human smell of leakage and occupation. In the old days that had made for warmth and companions; now it meant contagion and quarantine. They strained for tell-tale noises – shuffling, swallowing, breathing – but the wind outside made it all but impossible. Dyce gave up.

  ‘Fire?’

  Garrett shrugged, his universal response. A small angry flame flickered in Dyce’s chest and he damped it down. It’s just us, he told himself. The two of us. We have to make nice. He could hear Garrett swallowing hard against the rawness of his throat. That was where every phage struck, even if it came through the eye or the ear or, worse, the privates, like those vampire catfish that wriggled up this one guy’s dick when he swam in the Amazon. Anyhow, a virus always attacked the throat first: it loved the mucous membranes, and it felt like a rusty nail moving down the gullet.

  No fucking fire, then. They were used to these dark hibernations: sometimes they lasted a day or two. Dyce remembered how, early on, they used to curl into balls and cover their faces like mummies, unable to talk – or unwilling. You ran out of thoughts, Dyce decided, a place between sleep and death. It was as bad as solitary confinement. People lost their minds.

  And, like prisoners, the boys had found ways to keep themselves busy in the dark, single-minded as moles, sick of each other. Dyce felt around in his bag, his heart giving a quick clench when his fingers missed it, but it was there alright, his eternal stick of wood and the knife that went with it – an Opinel his dad had given him, worn down now, the slot in the handle too big by double for the blade that folded into it. Dyce made mermaids. He always had. If he did enough carvings in the dark of hibernation, he would eventually make something perfect and recognizable and whole. Someday, with the right time and effort, he would make an instrument. What Dyce missed most was rock ’n’ roll.

  It hadn’t happened yet. Dyce knew that when the wind died and they emerged in the sunlight, Garrett would name the misshapen thing he had carved and turn it bad. ‘Horse,’ said Garrett, and Dyce’s siren with her fish tail and blank face
became a hoofed and galloping animal, extinct. ‘What is that? A fucking phage?’ and there she turned in Dyce’s hand, venomous, sharp-toothed, inevitable. ‘The Michelin Man?’ and the abandoned dead rose before him, their joints thickened. The carvings that turned out okay were the ones he had done the quickest, from the fewest strokes: with enough practice you internalized the muscle memory. If only he could stop himself showing them to Garrett every single time.

  Dyce blamed the swan.

  When he’d first started carving he’d sat out in the yard and tried to make something from the ivory piano key he’d found in the gutted pre-school. He hadn’t intended for it to be a swan. It started out as a mermaid, but Garrett had seen its torso and figured it was a bird, the tail its wings. It was the only thing he’d ever asked of his little brother, and Dyce, dumb-struck by approval, had obliged. Garrett hung onto it for a couple of years, polishing it on his pants-leg in the dark till it was smooth, almost wet to the touch. He gave it to Bethlehem even before he’d caught scent that she was pregnant. Dyce had asked Garrett as they high-tailed out of Glenvale whether he’d taken the swan. ‘Jesus, Dyce!’ was all Garrett had said. Had the Callahans ripped it from her throat when they laid her in the ground? Dyce could see them telling each other it was too pretty to go down in the darkness.

  Fuck them all.

  He ran his fingers over the stick’s ivory bark, a good piece of birch. He wasn’t up for whittling today: lately everything made him feel tired, and he was having a hard time seeing the point of the running.

  ‘Garrett.’

  A gusty sigh in the darkness. Garrett was opening his bag, Dyce could hear. Looking for his tools, maybe. Or the salt tablets. Sometimes they helped.

  ‘Do you really, really know where we’re going?’

  ‘I told you. The coast.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘You know why.’