by Frank Owen
‘You always had a way with words,’ said Felix. He wiped the blood and spittle away. ‘I was going to put you out of your misery, but I see that you won’t be needing me much longer.’
He got up, groaning himself at the ache in his legs. He rubbed the muscle there. ‘That scar ain’t never going to let me in peace,’ he told Tye. ‘Something else I got to thank you for.’
The man didn’t respond. Blood was pooling slowly in Tye’s eyes, a tide of red rising in a ring around the ice of his irises. Killer’s eyes, Felix had always thought. He noted the change and then he turned his back on the dying man. He went to where Dyce and Vida were standing by their new horses, unsure of what to do next.
‘Looks pretty bad,’ said Dyce. He was fiddling with the makeshift sack of mushrooms. Their smell rose, dank and earthy, as he handled them.
Felix shot him a look. ‘Not long now,’ he said.
‘Pity you had to shoot the horse, but I guess you had no choice.’
‘Only got the one shot in. Other one went a mile wide.’
‘Then what brought the horse down?’
They all limped back to the body of the animal. Tye grimaced and set his face against them. Vida could no longer tell what color his eyes had been for the vessels burst there. She pictured the ragged lungs inside his chest, a pirate’s flag that would never be lowered.
Vida stepped around the horse and leant her shoulder against it, so that the sweaty carcass shifted and the savaged foreleg came into view.
Clamped around it were two rows of rusted iron teeth: Tye’s bear trap – set for the black bear that had been sniffing nightly around the graves.
She sat back on her heels. She wanted to tell him what it was, but she realized that the whistling sound had stopped.
The harrier dropped from the sky as though it too had been shot, wings folded to its side. She reached the patriarch, but instead of cooing and rubbing her head against him, the bird began to peck at Tye’s slack face. Dyce and Vida watched, stunned. There was an audible pop and the bird wheeled away with an eyeball in her beak, the string of its nerve dangling like the reins on a bolting horse.
The bird wasn’t done with her master. She gulped the eyeball down, remorseless, and came back. When they could move, they managed to shoo her away. But she had been tenacious, making directly for the rest of the soft parts, pecking deep V-shaped gashes in his lips and lacerating the thin flesh of his nostrils.
The bird, soundless, disappeared into the sky, trailing skin from her beak.
Vida looked at the slippery death’s head that had been Tye Callahan. His eyelids were gone too, torn right away by the harrier.
‘I guess no one liked you,’ she told him. She shaded her eyes, mercilessly intact despite the things they had witnessed that afternoon, and looked at the clouds forming overhead.
56
Vida’s relief that Tye would not get up again lasted a couple of seconds. She couldn’t believe that the Weatherman had made it through, and yet here he was – saving their asses again. It was getting to be a habit. He even looked the same, though they weren’t used to seeing him fully clothed: the scraggy skin, now purpled in splotches with edges like doilies, the stitches, healing nicely. Mercifully, there was no dangling scrotum. He must have been a sight three days ago, when whatever was eating him had just taken its first bite.
Felix was looking at them with a mixture of sadness and respect.
Ah, fuck.
Here it came. Vida swallowed, helpless.
He’s going to say something about Garrett being gunned down by Walden in the shack. Shit, shit, shit!
The Weatherman nodded at Dyce. ‘Thought I recognized you folks. You Garrett’s brother, aintcha?’
Vida shifted from foot to foot, unsure of what to do with herself. The hard truth was coming back to get her like a fucking train – narrow gauge, she thought. Meaner than Tye, or Ed, or Ester with her cushion-baby and her milk fever.
‘Yeah. Allerdyce.’
‘Dyce, yes. I’m real sorry about your brother. Didn’t like him at the outset, but I reckon he was a good guy deep down. Definitely didn’t deserve to get himself killed the way he did.’
Vida felt her spine stiffening with dread. There it was, out in the open at last, like the trampled corpse at their feet.
Dyce frowned. ‘We talking about the same guy?’
‘Blond ponytail. Bad skin. That guy who got little Bethie Callahan up the pole, pardon my French.’
Felix saw that something was wrong with the picture: Dyce was confused and Vida had gone a terrible ashy color. She looked as if she was going to cry.
He kept talking. ‘Buried him best I could. I’m too old to be digging, but I’m a believer in the old ways. Walden I just covered over with rocks. He didn’t even deserve that, but he was kin and I try to do right. But I want you all to know that I put some dirt between your brother and the open sky. Hammered a cross in there too, even though I figured he wasn’t the type to go in for religion. I didn’t put no flowers on, now. I’m not a sissy.’
Dyce turned to Vida, a half-smile on his lips, as if to say, Are you listening to this crazy old man?
But he was met only with Vida’s horrified face. She couldn’t look away. Her eyes started watering.
‘Garrett’s dead?’
‘Dyce . . .’
‘He’s dead and you knew?’
Dyce stepped backward, as if an earth tremor had shaken the ground open between them.
‘Oh, God. Oh, Jesus Christ!’ His voice was hoarse with grief. Vida’s arms were dead at her sides, as if someone had punched her on the shoulder. What do I do? How do I take it back? How can I make this right?
He turned and stumbled back towards the bay, who turned her face and nuzzled at him. Vida wanted to call out, but her throat was too dry and swollen. She struggled for air as she watched Dyce throw himself onto the horse without checking the cinching, and then jab at its sides with his heels. Vida felt every one of the blows.
‘You really didn’t tell him?’ Felix asked. He shook his head.
Vida ignored him. She was weeping without sobbing, standing straight in the wind that was catching now at the leaves around them, at the fabrics that made up the shelters of Horse Head and the clothes of its inhabitants, at the fibers that made up her dumb, regretful body.
The storm was coming.
It didn’t matter.
She forced herself to watch as Dyce galloped away, the thin silver cord she had always thought was between them stretching thinner and thinner until she knew it would snap.
Vida bent over and hugged herself as if that would neutralize the slicing pain in her abdomen, but it only got worse. She doubled over and howled, and Felix winced. He wanted to cover his ears. That sound was more wolf than human, like one of the tame dogs turned wild who had seen its mate torn to pieces. She lowered herself by degrees until she was curled up in the dust of the road like one of the dead.
Nothing would have made a difference to Vida except perhaps her mother. Ruth must have known that. Now she separated herself from the curious throng that had gathered at the edge of Horse Head and made her way to her daughter as quickly as she could.
When she got to Vida she tried to put her arms around the younger woman, but she was defeated by the constellation of knees and elbows.
‘Vida,’ she said. ‘Vida, Mama’s here. Come on now, baby girl. I just want to hold you in my arms.’
Vida kept sobbing until the air in her chest was gone. After that the whole process began again, and Ruth saw that she would have to find some other way to get through to her. She sat down on the road beside her daughter as Felix tried to intervene.
‘Hate to interrupt, ma’am, but the wind’s picking up fierce. You know we got to get to shelter.’ He gestured. The clouds on the horizon were much darker. There were sheets of rain coming down in the distance like stone pillars: they promised the ruin of civilization.
Vida and Ruth both ignored his directive.
The sobs had stopped but the ratcheting of her breathing would have set off the alarm in a hospital room. Ruth put her arms around her daughter, and this time Vida let her.
‘Veedles. You remember that magazine I gave you?’
Vida nodded and wiped her face with both hands, smearing snot and tears over her cheeks. ‘Mami Wata,’ she said miserably.
‘Now,’ said Ruth, stern. ‘What would Mami Wata do? You think she would lie down in the dust and play possum when there were important things left to do? Things that lives depended on? I know it hurts, angel girl, but you got to do your crying later. Right now we got to move.’
Vida struggled to sit up, the shame flooding through her as if she had wet her pants. Her mother was right. Of course she was. Vida rubbed her eyes and strained to get her last glimpse of Dyce, the shadow of his shadow, a molecule, a mote.
And what she saw was that there was something different about the way he rode. He didn’t look lopsided anymore. It took Vida a while to work out what it was, but she got there.
Dyce didn’t have the mushrooms strapped to his saddle.
She looked around her in the road and there it was – the shirt-sack with its redeeming burden, lying abandoned beside her patient horse, who had somehow avoided trampling it.
Vida got up and went around Ruth. Her mother watched her carefully but said nothing.
When Vida picked up the sack she felt the terrible mixture of hope and unhappiness mingle in her chest. The shirt’s fabric was soft between her fingers, Dyce’s smell of biscuits still clinging to its folds. Its medicine burnt; he was here, he wasn’t here.
She brought the precious sack back to Ruth and Felix, and said in her new voice, thick with sorrow, ‘Come on. Let’s get out of the wind. I have something to show you that will make this all worthwhile, I swear.’
57
There was only one thing on Dyce’s mind as he spurred the horse on, and it wasn’t what he had expected, considering the bomb Felix and Vida had dropped on him.
Ears McCreedy.
The horse had circled back to the familiar decaying road, and she wanted to stop there. Dyce made her follow the rough line of clear ground that the asphalt made, all the way to the abandoned town where he and Vida had spent a night. They raced down the main street. He didn’t even turn his head to look toward the cinema, though he felt its emptiness yawning towards him. Goddamn it! He’d opened up to her! Told her things he hadn’t thought he knew about himself, and for sure had never told anyone else. And all the while she was sitting on the only secret between them that mattered: a leash to keep him close.
Dyce kicked at the horse, angry, making her pay in Vida’s place, and they sped up as she tried to rid herself of the Devil on her back. They rode on, Dyce didn’t know for how long. Time had gone soft, saline and saturated with tears. The horse knew her way, unerring, and followed the trampled grass that led up and up to the cracked fence at the top of The Mouth.
The town had already done all the burning it ever would, but it still smoked, and Dyce coughed at the acrid smell. It was a time for masks if ever there was one. There were already creatures come to investigate, called down from the hills by the smell of carrion: cats and dogs. And coyotes and bears and wolverines. The darkening sky overhead promised a lean time ahead, and they had to make the most of it while they could. He thought again of the disastrous all-you-can-eat buffet – and then of his dad, and then of Garrett, dead and gone too, and his stomach twisted. The waste of it. Dyce checked the clouds again and his heart shrank. Their bottoms were weirdly teat-like, lobed like bubble wrap, the sick yellowish-gray that came before tornadoes. The low pressure was making his head feel stuffed with cotton wool. He had to be quick.
It was like walking through a graveyard after an earthquake, but Dyce thought he was fine until he saw Julia’s wasted body lying among the others. He recognized her by her dress that was tugged at by the wind, a snake skin, brittle with age and yellowed with useless milk. Of all the corpses pecked at by birds, or tugged at by dogs or coyotes, hers was the only one left untouched. As he rode past he could see the pattern of footprints around her, a circle demarcating the unclean, and he did the same.
When he came to the remains of the saloon Dyce dismounted, but he found that there was nowhere left to tether the horse. He wrapped the reins around a dead man’s boot. He looked a little like Ed, but between the head wound and the scavengers, it was hard to tell for sure. The horse whinnied in protest, but Dyce ignored her.
He stepped into the hot black debris, careful, trying to work fast, testing the ground for its heat. It was not easy to find their shack. They’d all collapsed, fused and disintegrated, a mess of metal and molten plastic and blackened wood.
He judged the place where he thought it ought to have been and began hunting through the debris. He covered his bare hand with his shirtsleeve and lifted the fallen sheet of corrugated iron that had protected their possessions from the flames. There was something atomic about the way their things had stayed where they had been left. Everything was a zombie relic: blackened, carbonized, gone to hell and come back again, the same and not the same.
Dyce lifted a small furry body with his boot. It was too hot to touch with the bare skin. He flipped it over. Ears’s fur was singed into beads, and his eyes were gone. Dyce picked him up gently and held him like a baby in his arms.
Vida’s things were here too, also burned and brittle: her canteen, her jacket, and the fucking remedy book. She thought she knew everything. Dyce didn’t want to take it, but he couldn’t bring himself to leave it there; the years of being bookless had turned paper into gold.
He picked the book up from the dirt. Pages were missing, cracked and crumbled, and those that remained were halfway to charcoal. The burnt inks stank: the smell would never go away.
That was that. Dyce looked around. There was nothing else he cared about.
When he got back to the place where he had left his horse, she wasn’t there. Dyce turned in a circle. She had managed to drag Ed down the main street. Now she was standing wide-eyed at the mouth of the collapsed mine, stamping her feet and snorting in disgust.
Dyce trotted down between the feeding carnivores and freed her reins from the corpse. ‘Sorry, old girl,’ he said. ‘Things got a little hinky back there for a second.’
The camp’s lower perimeter fence had burnt too. Dyce could see the ebonized earth where the fire had ventured into the grasslands and then been blown out. The church was gone, vaporized, as if it had never existed. It had long since passed from being holy to the refuge of the hopeless. He kept looking. The lonely man in his poncho was still swinging from his tree, as if his purple face and popping eyes had been set on purpose to witness the entire spectacle. Dyce couldn’t look away. The body kept turning in the wind, like one of the Weatherman’s instruments.
Then he led the horse away, up toward the ponderosas. He packed the remedy book and Ears McCreedy in the horse’s saddlebag and then hoisted himself back up. He rode on. The passing terrain blurred under his horse. He and Vida had walked this way, but keeping watch for viruses made everything deathly slow. They’d had to stick to the ridge line for protection instead of blazing a straight line across open ground, and they’d had to stop often and be quiet and watch the hills and the tall trees, instead of just walking. Dyce wondered now how they’d ever got anywhere without horses. He imagined himself riding for the coast, Garrett mounted beside him – a couple of real cowboys, suave and invincible – and then the horses pulling up at the foamy breakers, leaving deep gouges in the sand. Dyce had never seen the ocean. No one he knew had. But there were pictures of beaches: the sand always looked clean, washed over and over by the relentless waves. The rocks there had no sharp edges.
‘You float better in salt water,’ Garrett had said when Dyce first complained about the plan to get to the coast and across to the other side. ‘Buoyancy changes ’cause the water’s denser with the salt dissolved in it. It’ll hold you up, like Jesus walking
on the water.’
He looked at Dyce, pretended to eye him up and down, and delivered the punch line: ‘You look pretty dense yourself. Not a hundred per cent sure it’ll hold you, little brother.’
Garrett had had a good laugh and while he did, Dyce made a note to put a spider in his brother’s bed. He hadn’t got round to it. Never would, now. All the lists, the IOUs, the concessions, the victories, they were all wiped clean.
Finding the Weatherman’s shack wasn’t difficult. There was something in Dyce that brought him back to the place, a magnetism that relied on smell and sound and touch as well as elevation. He’d had an image of the place in his mind, grown from the seed of his blind and fragile recollection – but when he came to it, it was entirely different. Dirtier, that was for sure. The shack itself was ramshackle, stained brown with rust, meant to go under the radar. But the surroundings were something else – the glade of sweet almonds and the stream and the way it was all set at the foot of a decaying dam wall that was, in turn, set at the foot of a mountain, as if they were backdrops stored in the wings of a stage production.
But there were no footlights here. This was illuminated by real sunlight – filtered through the storm clouds of the apocalypse.
He tethered his mount to the old hitching post and said, ‘Now, I hope you’ll consent to stay a while. I got business to attend to.’ She twitched her ears.
Dyce walked around the back of the shack. The graves were there as the Weatherman had said, side by side. Walden’s cairn had been pillaged, the rocks pulled away by some scavenger. They had eaten their fill of what they could reach before the meat turned bad.
Beside that was Garrett’s grave, a shoddy job. The cross had lost its horizontal beam, and the rocks laid over the top of it were mismatched and thrown together – no respectful cairn here, nosir.
Dyce took a breath and began to pull the rocks away. When they were cleared, he dug down into the earth with his hands, the grime pushing deep under his fingernails until they bled. He needed to see Garrett’s face, no matter what he was now. He needed one last look to make sure he was no revenant, no mistake.