by Frank Owen
But even her successes hadn’t bought her Mama’s love in its purest form: that was reserved for the strangers who limped to her door, weeping and crying out that they were dying when what they were doing was giving birth. Vida had returned from a day out setting deadfalls, her fingernails blue to their moons from being crushed by rocks too delicately set – but with a haul of three prairie dogs to compensate. When she reached the porch she sang out, ‘Davy! Davy Crockett! King of the Wild Frontier!’ Vida was looking forward to the evening. Mama would make a proper meal and devote the tiny skins to the patchwork in progress, and she could soak her sore hands.
But when she stepped inside, Ruth was in no mood for coddling or praise. She sat, knees together, in the raggedy armchair, paying no mind to the spots of blood on the carpet.
‘Mama? What happened? You hurt?’
Ruth was glassy. ‘Young girl. Fifteen, maybe. I helped her.’
‘She gone?’
Mama nodded. ‘Said her sisters were waiting for her. But they didn’t want to come inside.’
Vida wanted to move on. Her muscles ached, and Mama was being creepy. Birthing always eclipsed any other achievement, and Vida was sick of it. She held up the booty.
‘I got prairie dogs. Three of them.’
Mama nodded. ‘Her name was Ester. She spelled it out for me, when she could breathe. You know what she said?’
Vida sighed and dropped her arm. ‘I don’t, Mama. What did she say?’
‘Said, “Ester is the Queen of the Underworld”. I told her I never knew that.’
‘Why would you give your child a name like that? It’s bad luck.’
Ruth shook her head. She sat in that armchair a long time before she got up and moved around the kitchen. Vida got out the vinegar and scrubbed at the bloody spots in the carpet.
In the camp now, Vida regarded her new traps and decided to go out with them. The appetites on Dyce and her ma were far outpacing any stocks the camp could provide. It wasn’t rationing, exactly, but when everyone was ill, the little food they grew or found had to be as nourishing as they could make it. She felt guilty with every mouthful of her own, worrying about the next, sicker, person who might need it more. But Vida’s patients had proved that they were on the mend. She could go out into the surrounding scrubland and feel that her conscience was clear.
Back when you could still get supplies, Ma had once traded a half-full gas canister for a dozen tubes of expired peanut butter. They would use up a tube until it was done – squeeze it from the bottom, roll it up tight to press the last speck from the cold nozzle. That’s what Ruth was now, thought Vida, an empty tube, paper thin, rolled and massaged and trodden on until she had given up all she could. She needed to be refilled.
‘Gonna catch me some peanuts,’ she muttered to herself.
The man who was following her could see Vida’s lips moving when she turned to the side every now and again, but he was not close enough to hear what she was saying. Pete had followed her out into the scrubland where she was laying the traps and assembling a couple of deadfalls for unwary prairie dogs. He had thought that his stoop and dragging foot would attract her attention, but they were some way from the camp now and he had realized that revealing himself would be more and more awkward.
He hunched down further and tried to quiet the dragging sound of his slow foot – stepping over the obvious sticks, avoiding the driest grass. When she finally stopped and took off her pack, he crouched low. To show himself now would prove he’d been stalking her, but if he waited half an hour he could stumble out and act just as surprised as she was. Oh, I didn’t know you were going this way too! What a coincidence! And so he watched her through the grass like a big-game hunter.
She sat first for a while to gain her strength: any exertion burnt scarce calories, and Vida had made sure that she was getting hers mostly from the early spring roots and pin cherries. Catching a couple of rats or shrews would be welcome. Ma, especially, had eaten her fill of dandelions, and they were all craving meat – dense, hot protein to rebuild their wasted muscles.
The sun was up and the wind down, the ground dry from lack of rain. It was, if you were sensitive to them, criss-crossed with the pathways of tiny travelers – ideal for traps. In the early days back home, Vida could set ten or fifteen traps and come back the next morning for eight or nine critters. But the camp was different. Too many people, not enough resources. You couldn’t leave a trap overnight; a strangling chipmunk or a squealing mouse caught under a deadfall would be snapped up by a wild dog.
Pete watched as Vida collected sticks and searched for the right kind of heavy rock. She lay flat on the dirt for minutes to set up each trap. Alone, she seemed to move differently, heavy and distracted. When she was done setting up a couple of the traps, she leant against a boulder and threw stones at a rotting tree stump. Pete was glad to see it.
There was a rustling in the grass behind him, and Pete turned as quickly as he could, his back wrenching. The porcupine bustled towards him, as if the grass had grown legs and was rising up against them.
Pete leapt up from his hiding place, his knees popping, and ran towards Vida’s boulder.
‘Hey!’ she began, but then she saw the rustling porcupine, determined to attack. Vida picked up one of her heavy stones and threw it as hard as she could. Her stepfather would have been proud of her, she thought. I hope you’re up there watching, Evert. Pete was trying to scramble up the boulder.
The porcupine stopped, trembling like a pensioner caught in traffic. Its head was gashed open. Don’t let it suffer, Vida, came her mama’s voice, and she went as close as she could.
The porcupine had given up trying to lacerate its enemies. It lay down, spines clattering, like a show pony doing sums in the dirt. Vida kept hammering at its head with the rock, fueled with a kind of cold rage. When she stopped she realized that she was salivating.
‘Remind me not to piss you off,’ Pete said.
Vida turned the porcupine over with her boot, careful not to get caught on the quills. Then she took it by the feet and brought it over to Pete. It was lighter than she expected.
She laid it in the open ground to inspect it. ‘Leader of the army that scared off the Callahans, hey? You can come on down.’
‘I didn’t know what it was,’ Pete defended himself.
Vida found a twig and prized open the creature’s bloodied eyelid. Inside, the whites were clean, the iris strong and brown.
‘What you doing out here, anyway? Spying on me?’
‘No, no. There’s a rogue black bear around. Comes at night to dig through our graves. I’m just doing a sweep for paw prints.’
Pete noticed Vida’s raised eyebrows and he dropped the pretense. ‘Actually, I wanted to talk to you. Away from the rest.’
Vida narrowed her eyes. She had had these talks before, with young bucks in other settlements. Vida had always blamed it on the way she looked. In places where everyone else was sick, her blazing health and energy made her shine like a torch. Oh, for a lazy eye!
She worked the twig into the porcupine’s mouth and pulled it open. Behind the yellow teeth the tongue was pink. She leant in and sniffed. It was okay: raw, like butchery meat, and musty, like pine.
‘People at the camp, they’re starting to experiment like you did.’
Thank God it wasn’t the I’ve-loved-you-since-I-met-you speech. Oh, really? came Ruth’s voice in her head. What would you do if it WAS that speech, honey child? Flutter your lashes and say, ‘Oh, thank you, kind sir! But my heart belongs to another!’
Vida banished the voice and frowned, turning the porcupine over to check its glands. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Rumor is that yesterday’s funerals were both folks who’d tried your theory and got it wrong.’
‘Shit.’ Vida set the creature down and stood up fast.
‘Course that’s their choice, right? That’s the risk. Not as though they had more than a couple of weeks to live, anyways.’ Pete shrugged, his
crooked shoulder set higher than the other. ‘But I been thinking we need a system. Can’t be hit-and-miss like this. There’s got to be some way of making the process more, more, scientific.’
‘And?’
‘And, I figured, since it was your idea, since you got it right, maybe you’d take the lead – like you suggested, set up some sort of clinic.’
‘Me? No. That wasn’t what I was suggesting. But you ought to ask my ma. She used to be a nurse up north. When it comes to sickness and such, she’s the one person you want to know.’
‘How many people you know?’
‘Maybe five. Including you.’
They laughed.
‘I’ll make you a deal,’ Vida said.
‘What?’
‘Carry this guy back to camp, and I’ll run the idea past her.’
27
The porcupine meat definitely helped, in all kinds of ways. Dyce struggled up and insisted on skinning it, despite the effort it cost him. Vida stood back and let him do it, though it gave him the shakes so bad she was afraid he would hack a finger off with his knife. She told herself that it was a good sign that he was tired of lying around. The quills off the porcupine they stuck into the soil so that any skin flecks would rot safely. They could give you blood poisoning if you weren’t careful.
Afterwards, Vida gave them out around the camp; they were useful for sewing or skewering or digging out splinters. She was not so generous with the soup, but people would understand, wouldn’t they? There was not a lot to spare after Dyce and Ma and Vida had picked it apart, and Vida set the remains, mostly skin and bones, over the fire to boil down into a broth as they sat in a triangle around the flames.
Vida talked most, speaking into the gaps, as much for Ma and Dyce as for herself. If you told it enough, the story turned true – the Callahans chasing them, the hunting bird, Stringbeard and the Lazarus family, how Garrett had made for the coast. She watched Dyce as she talked, and wanted to stroke his hair. She wondered if he saw his brother in the bow of a stolen boat, one hand on his hip, the other shading his eyes from the glare of the sun as it flashed on the dolphins leading the way to his promised land. It was an ice-water shock to her every time she remembered where he really was: buried, hopefully, out behind the Weatherman’s shack. Or worse – picked apart by roving coyotes, his femurs cracked and thrown into the corners of the continent.
Ruth listened close, looking hard at the two of them as if their bond was something visible, a thick rubber band. Sometimes she circled a hand to tell Vida to back up a little and explain again, especially about the murdering Callahans. Often her eyes were wet, but it was hard for Vida to tell if they were tears of pity or pride, or if the burst blood vessels had learnt to heal quicker under the film of moisture. Either way, she was grateful for the cure.
When the stories dried up, they bedded down for the night, and it was a relief to lay down when the sun went, not worrying about the revenge of the Callahans or the pursuit of wild creatures, unless you counted Ears McCreedy, who went everywhere that Dyce did. Vida and Dyce had taken to sleeping alongside one other. The spring weather was fair, and their little shelter was hardly big enough for two; three was impossible. Dyce had spent one day collecting wood and grass to extend it, a tiny alteration to their home that Vida called the granny flat. Ma took the hint and curled up there, leaving Vida and Dyce to enjoy the comforts of the main house. This is how it happens, Vida told herself. You work your whole life – you teach them everything you know – and then you hand it all over to your kids: the house and how to live in it. She was tired in a way she hadn’t ever been – the fatigue that comes when the body is exhausted and the mind is overworked.
At first the intimacy had just been the touching of sides to keep warm, but as Dyce grew stronger, so did his interest, and Vida was glad to waken in the night and find someone’s bold arm draped over her. The end of the world made some things easier, but relationships weren’t one of them.
In the morning they went about their work as if the connection hadn’t happened, and it seemed easier to ignore it, the same way that she didn’t ask him about how he sometimes twitched and called out in his dreams. She knew that, behind his eyelids, he was seeing Garrett.
In the daylight, Vida tried not to give it too much thought as she worked herself into a state of tiredness that would give her sleep. But in the afternoon, when she was helping to cover over the grave of one of the recently deceased, she found herself scraping the soil back with a flattened stick and looking forward to the night. Not to the sleep itself with its softness and obliteration, but to the time when she and Dyce could touch, and she would feel his hot, sweet breath on the back of her neck.
That night she lay pressed against his spine in its furred flannel and reasoned with herself.
He’s still a stranger.
He’s too young and green.
This is just lust. The natural survivor urge, is all. The clockwork of our bodies.
And the kicker, if the other reasons hadn’t been convincing: he’s going to leave you for sure when he finds out you lied. You killed his brother twice.
Before, it had always been Ruth and Vida to the bitter end, amen, but now things were hazy. She planned to ask Ma about what Pete had suggested – she really did – about her leading the plan to combine viruses. She was only waiting for her ma’s energy to return so that they could discuss it.
Wasn’t she?
Vida sighed and turned over. Dyce stirred and she craned her neck to check on him. The goddamned squirrel was posed near the pillow, his shiny black eyes fixed on her face. ‘Relax, Ears,’ Vida told him.
But what if Pete’s plan worked? What if Ruth took on her old nursing role again and chose to stay in the ghost colony? She would want to do her bit, Vida knew. That wouldn’t work for Vida, would it? She was pretty sure she didn’t want to live here. The place was for sick people. They were getting better under their own steam, sure, but Vida wasn’t one of them. She already felt claustrophobic: everyone knew her name and greeted her by it. What if her ma stayed and Dyce wanted to move on? What would she do then? Stay, stay. Stay with Ma! That’s the way it’s always been. Always will be. Right?
Vida sighed. She would never get to sleep this way, worrying about everything coming to get her in the days ahead. She was here, now, and the smell of Dyce was making her crazy. I’m tired, she thought. I’m tired, and it’s wearing me down. It’ll be easier in the morning.
She reached one hand down between her legs, where she found she was already wet, and electric. She rubbed at herself – one minute, two – and then came the shudder in the darkness, the single good and true thing in the last forty-eight hours.
Dyce lay on his side, listening to Vida’s breath speed up, the little pants for air as she tried to keep herself quiet, and then the sighing as she subsided. It was all he could do not to turn over.
28
It took Felix two days to bury the boys.
Garrett was first up. He’d kind of liked the kid. Reminded Felix of himself all those years back in New York. All mouth and nothing out of reach. Walden he’d not spoken to before he’d turned the way he was now, icy and slack-jawed. Felix could judge him only by his sun-shy skin and the hair still parted cleanly, even though the boy had struggled in his death throes. Garrett’s grave was deeper, the stones piled up in a cairn. Walden had a couple of spadesful of dirt thrown over his chest.
‘Sorry, boys. I know I’m playing favorites. Looks like someone got killed by a rockfall right next to a grave,’ Felix told them when it was all done and he stood regarding his work. ‘But that’s just the way it is. The fucks are running real low right now. Real low.’ He reckoned they would understand. Walden would, anyhow. Even in death he had the look of the underdog.
Felix hobbled back inside, made it back down the stairs to his room so he could lay his carcass down. He didn’t feel much better than the two boys back there in the dirt. Some of it was the guilt. He’d not been out to check o
n the weather boxes for – what was it now? One, two, three, four, five, six days? – and that was bad. Staying a step ahead of the wind relied on data, on the familiar circuit he walked as often as could, like a nurse doing hospital rounds. Once a day would be ideal, of course, but a man could end up chasing his own raggedy tail. He’d been meaning to go the day that Vida and Garrett and Dyce stormed in, just as soon as the wind died down. But that day had run away in a blur, hadn’t it? His head hurt when he thought about it. Felix ran his questing fingers over the rough stitching in his scalp. The day after that was what? Tye’s visit. Then he had begun the digging of Garrett’s grave – and underestimated how much the manual labor would sap his strength. He’d slept late the next morning and only got round to Walden’s grave near noon, and it showed.
He couldn’t wait another day. He’d have to get going even though it was already late. Felix tried to get up again but his legs were shaking and his body would not obey the order to stand. He slapped at one thigh.
‘Come on, old man! You’re not dead yet.’
He managed to get up. What did he need? His bag was packed with the usual: some jerky to chew on, get the blood going again; water – always water; and then his notebook. He thought a while and then added his Llama Danton. Felix didn’t usually take the gun with him on his rounds: it was bad juju. That kind of thinking made a man twitchy, and twitchy was an invitation. But knowing that Tye Callahan was in his neighborhood unsettled him some. ‘Better safe, eh?’ he told the gun. He sat back down on the lip of his cot. That was all he could manage. It would have to be tomorrow.
Felix set out early the next morning, but he was frustrated straight away. He didn’t have enough information to make the wind calculations as accurate as he wanted. He had his face mask tied loose around his neck, ready for when he needed, and now he tugged at the material to loosen it. He hadn’t used the thing for over a year; it was more habit than anything else. Once a ladies’ scarf, now it was a pale and ragged paisley worn to the warp and weft. Maybe one of them hippie chicks had worn it at Woodstock for a bikini. His thigh and back muscles were complaining as he climbed the incline, but they warmed up slowly when his body realized he wasn’t going to get back to bed any time soon.