by Selina Rosen
Come on… if someone can save you without working up a sweat and they don’t do it then you’d call that person an asshole, right?
The house wasn’t cold at all now, in fact it was nice and warm. But it was still really dark and the clock said it was eight-thirty. It wasn’t hard to see why it was so dark. The window was covered with snow, and judging from how little light was coming through, it was either still snowing or really overcast.
“So you think everything that happens just happens by chance?” Lucy asked.
I got up and started to get dressed, still not wanting to have this conversation. “Yes, mostly. And mostly when you check out even the most bizarre coincidences… Well they aren’t all that bizarre at all.”
“Mom!” Billy came screaming into the room while I’m standing there in my bra and boxers trying to pull my thermal underwear on, and I damn near fall over. “Sorry but,” he held out his phone, “it’s Cherry, Mom. On the phone. It’s Cherry.”
Lucy gave me a smug look. I won’t pretend to know why.
I took the phone from my son. “How are you?”
“Fine. Long story short, after talking to Billy at the Waffle Hut one day I looked up your website and me and my room mate Evelyn are hold up in my car. We made it into an igloo. We have water and heat and food, but… I don’t know how long the food will last, and we aren’t really warm.”
“I’ll tell you what… You have the charger line for your car?”
“Yes.”
“You can keep your phone charged off your car battery. As soon as there is a break in the weather me and Billy will come get you. In the meantime you need anything you can call and I’ll try to talk you through it. You even just need to talk, you call. If you don’t leave the phone on more than five minutes a day that car battery ought to last a long time. Is there anyone else around? Anyone that you could pool stuff with who maybe has a better shelter?”
“My part of town is just gone. We didn’t see anyone, and I mean no one. the whole time we were putting up our shelter and gathering food and stuff. I heard a chainsaw going, but that was way in the distance. When we came out of my bathroom yesterday morning, my bathroom and a couple of closets were the only things standing as far as the eye could see, just rubble… a couple of bodies.” Her voice was a little choked as she said that last bit, something about seeing dead people just reminded people how close they’d come themselves. “Everything here is just a tangle of wires and wood and brick and cars. It took the garage off clean and Evelyn’s car was just gone, but mine was still sitting there not a scratch on it. Really…” Her voice was choked again. “I don’t know what happened to all the people.”
“Billy said a lot of people were leaving town.” I gave the phone back to Billy. “Don’t keep her on the phone too long.”
Billy nodded and left the room nearly floating on air. “Stupid-assed people. If they’d all just stayed put, worked with what they had,” I mumbled, and finished putting on my thermal underwear bottoms. Lucy was just looking at me. “Everyone is so pathetic. They were just looking to get someplace with electricity and running water because they can’t even begin to imagine how you can live without it.”
“So… that’s just a coincidence?” Lucy says.
“That people are fucking idiots?” I ask.
“Your son’s girlfriend?”
I turn to look at her, some annoyed by her willful ignorance because I know the bitch isn’t stupid. “Listen… Arkansas is one of the safest places in the country, except for the damned tornados. That’s why I’m here. Billy met this girl. He talked about his crazy mother with the bunker and the multi-million-dollar-making web-site because let’s face it, if you had a crazy mother who kept preaching the end is near that’s what you’d talk about, too. So she looked the web-site up and read it and she’s using what she learned. There isn’t anything mystical about that.”
“Come on I’m sure your son has dated other girls. What are the odds?”
“He didn’t date this one, which means she has a brain. Someone with a brain looks at the web-site. They may not have bought the whole thing, but they at least do like Billy did and they get a survival kit together and pick out the safest place in the house and put it there. Shit starts happening so she gathers water and food and brings it in that hole with her and when the coast is clear she takes an idea she read on my site and she does it.
“The brain is a computer. It logs in items and then uses the data when it needs to. No magic, no giant puppet master in the sky pulling our strings. If there is a God—and believe it or not I usually think that there is—then he’s not this guardian, father, punisher, the Bible-thumping idiots have created. God doesn’t make things happen. God creates and then walks away. Otherwise, if I believe God can hear prayers, then why doesn’t he answer them? If God is everything the zealots think he is, then he sits on his throne and passes judgment, decides who deserves help… saving, and who doesn’t. And it’s all arbitrary because assholes get everything they want and nice guys finish last and they always have. He tests us? What the fuck is up with that? If that’s the way God really is then fuck’em. And if fate guides our destiny then why do we even bother to get up in the morning? Won’t the same thing happen whether we get up or lie in bed and do nothing?”
I finished dressing quickly and stomped out.
See I told you I didn’t want to have that freaking conversation.
I was taking care of the animals when I realized Lucy hadn’t followed me, no doubt because she had to get dressed or she was just that pissed off by my little speech. Here’s the thing with me, don’t ask the question unless you’re ready to hear the answer.
Billy came out and just started helping me, his brother was probably still in bed. Jimmy would rather sleep than eat or get laid. He was lazy. On top of every other flaw that boy had, he was so damn lazy he thought rolling over was a work out.
“Thanks, Mom. Cherry says she wouldn’t have made it if it hadn’t been for you,” Billy said. He pulled a couple of books of hay out and stuffed them into the goat feeders. “She said she can’t wait till we can come and get her.”
“Yeah,” is all I say because I know it’s a bad idea to go get a couple of more people, and I just seemed to be working really hard at doing all of the things I’d so carefully told everyone else not to do in this situation for years.
Being a nice guy sucks. And yeah I know I’m a chick but in my head I’m a guy, alright? Not a man trapped in a woman’s body, not a man at all, but a guy.
“So… you get a little last night?” Billy asked, grinning like a shit-eating dog.
“No I didn’t. The girl had a boyfriend. She’s straight. Now you or your stupid brother…”
“Mom!” Billy held up his hand and made a face like I’d told him to kiss a pig. “She’s really old.”
“Old?”
“Yeah she’s as old as you are.” He made that face again.
“Oh she is not, she’s maybe thirty-five,” I said. I was forty-five at the time. “And thanks a whole fucking lot. Old! Why don’t you do me a big favor and go check the power in the batteries and if it’s dropped below half crank up the methane generator?” He nodded and, chuckling, went off to do my bidding. I was blissfully alone for all of three whole seconds and then there was Lucy. I could tell because when she walked in the barn the billy goat bleated, telling me that he had decided that she was one of his girls. She guessed I was in the milk room and of course couldn’t get in without letting Spot in and I wasn’t done milking Harriet so there was a little goat scuffle, but no spilt milk.
“Sorry,” she said. I was thinking that she needed to be smarter than the goats to handle them, but I didn’t say it just shrugged and kept milking.
“So what is this insurance you were talking about?” she asked.
I was so glad she didn’t want to talk about God and fate and shit like that, that I gladly answered. “One of them is filled with toilet paper…”
“Ye
t you’re making us wipe with four sheets.”
“I’ll tell you what. When you build a bunker and I crash on you just before the apocalypse you can make all the rules. Until then I make them, you got that?”
She nodded, looking dully chastised.
“Listen, I don’t mind hard work, and I don’t mind roughing it or doing without certain comfort items, but I want to wipe my ass with something I can throw away. Now you’re thinking that’s a hell of a lot of ass wipe out there, but I’ve done the math and it will only last three people about forty years. Now you’re here and I’ve got to go pick up two more—and girls wipe every time they pee and… Unless someone starts up a toilet-paper factory, when the smoke clears we’re going to run out of paper eventually. Then I’m going to have to do without something I didn’t ever want to do without.”
Lucy nodded. I put Harriet out and Spot in and started milking her. “So what’s in the other ones?” she asked.
“Lots of different stuff. Dry goods, animal feed, beans, rice, flour, corn meal, seeds—lots and lots of seeds. All sealed in plastic wrap. Literally tons of nails and screws, nuts and bolts. I’ve got six four-wheelers in boxes. Twenty chain saws. Every kind of hand tool you can think of by the gross. Anything that won’t get hurt if it freezes. Books and chain and rope, prescription drugs, other medical supplies…”
“How did you…”
“You have enough money you can get anything,” I answered. “Clothes, lots of clothes of every kind, blankets, cast iron pots and pans. If a civilization can be cultivated from the ashes, it’s going to be a very different economy with very different values and wealth. And I’m going to be the richest person on the planet.”
She looked at me through squinted eyes suspiciously. “What is your IQ?”
“Don’t know,” I answered. It was mostly a lie I hadn’t had an IQ test since I was thirteen. My IQ had been one forty-seven then. It had immediately caused me nothing but trouble—teachers expecting me to do better in school than I was. Parents who thought I was acting all uppity because I was smarter than they were. Hell, there are loud farts that have more intelligent things to say than they ever did. Besides, it’s a stupid-assed test, and I knew a guy with a higher IQ than I have who believed climate change was a hoax and that Jesus was the son of God… Such stupid shit as that.
“I bet you’re off the charts,” she said, as if I was committing a capital offense by being smart, and I knew why. I have a Southern accent and walk around in animal shit and build things. I’m not supposed to be able to have intelligent thought. Let me tell you something; it takes some brains to build stuff, not just any idiot can do it, not just any idiot can even learn how to do it.
Hell, Jimmy still can’t hammer a nail straight or level a board.
Poor Jimmy.
“Well, sorry to disappoint you,” I said with a smile. “If it helps, I am crazier than a shit-house rat.”
Lucy laughed then. It was the first time I’d ever heard her laugh, and it wasn’t a bad sound at all. “Why do you keep saying that?”
“Because it’s true.” I shrugged. Having finished milking Spot I stood up, hung my milk bucket on it’s hook on the ceiling, and waited for Spot to finish her feed. When she finished I took her out of the head gate, opened the door, and said, “Out damned Spot!”
When Lucy laughed at my joke I was in love.
It doesn’t take much for me, and let’s face it, she was the only woman besides me and she has an amazing rack.
“You don’t strike me as the sort of person who reads Shakespeare,” she said. No doubt again because I had a Southern accent walked around in animal shit and built things. However her statement did explain why my boys had never laughed at my really great joke.
“Yep, I kin read an’ even wipe my own ass on occasion,” I said, making an idiot face and trying to sound like the “special” kid who used to pump gas down at the general store even though it was self-serve and no one paid him to do it.
“That’s not what I meant,” she said quickly.
“Yes it is,” I said, grabbing the milk bucket and starting back for the house. “It’s exactly what you meant. You’re surprised that I’m smart and surprised that I know Shakespeare because I look and sound like a hick. The whole damn world all caught up in how things sound and how they look, what makes things high class and low class. You know in his day Shakespeare was not celebrated as a literary genius. He was considered the worst sort of hack.
I heard the generator start up and Billy came walking out of the hall that went to the shop. I handed him the milk and shook my head toward the kitchen. He took it and went without a question. He could tell I was mad. I started to fill the rabbits’ hay feeders; I had pellets for them, but I was already rationing those and that meant they’d need more hay.
“What makes someone who’s a professional—like say yourself—better than someone who's working class like myself? Money? Hell, I had more money than I could spend, more money than you, that’s for sure. Smart clothes, a house that’s too big, and a car that burns more gas than a semi? People like you who thought being green meant you changed the four-hundred bulbs in your energy-eating home from iridescent bulbs to compact fluorescents, who were willing to conserve only as long as it didn’t get into your comfort zone—what makes you better? What makes anyone better than other people? Really better. Is it how much money they have, what they think is entertaining, what education they have, what job, how they dress, whether they are respected by other people who only respect such things as money or power? Maybe what makes someone better than someone else is that they live within their means, that they are entertained by the things around them, what they actually know, whether their job pays the bills and they are proud of what they do, that they dress for comfort not to impress, and that they respect everyone until they prove they don’t deserve anyone’s respect.”
I had finished haying the rabbits, and I turned to face her. She looked startled, so I’m guessing she was starting to understand that I really was crazy, and I had one of those moments where I wanted to quit screaming at her. Where I knew that the things I was saying were just mean and irrelevant at the time, but I just couldn’t keep words from pouring out of my mouth.
“Maybe, Lucy Powers, the thing that makes some people better than other people is that some people actually care about something besides themselves and their stupid-assed shit!” I was screaming then, and Lucy seemed to be on edge like maybe she could see that I was capable of violence. Which I am, and… Well I don’t know why I was so mad right then. Maybe because I had just caught myself starting to have feelings for her and then she once again as much as called me an idiot or… Well she wasn’t calling me an idiot but she was saying that she was surprised that I wasn’t one, and now I think about it what pissed me off was that I was starting to have feelings for her and she represented everything that I hated about people.
“You judged me before you ever met me. Well, do I look like such a crack-pot now, do I?” I demanded.
“No,” she said. “I’m sorry, but you are way over-reacting. Do you think maybe you could stop yelling before you start a stamped?”
“No! Because I told you… I’m fucking crazy! And goats don’t stampede especially not in the barn when there are only six of them.” I turned on my heel, walked to the hall that went from the barn to the shop, and opened the door. I tried to slam it but Lucy was in my way. “God dammit! I’m trying to get away from you so that I can go somewhere and calm the fuck down. You want me to stop screaming, don’t you?”
“Yes… but I don’t want to be alone.”
“Then go help Billy in the kitchen or go crawl in bed with Jimmy.”
“But… I don’t know them.”
“You don’t know me!” I thundered in disbelief. If she had looked around at the animals right then, she would have known I was prone to such fits over seemingly nothing at all because the animals didn’t even take notice of my bad temper. Normally animals wil
l run in terror when idiots start yelling, but mine were so used to it that they didn’t pay any attention to me unless I was yelling at them. And, yes, they do know the difference.
She started crying then, really crying. Even more than she had cried last night after she’d tried to call everyone and no one answered. Crying… Well the way I had expected her to cry all along. You know, like the world was coming to an end.
I know that women cry to get what they want. It’s manipulative, and do you know why they do it? Because it works. She threw her arms around my neck, rested her head on my chest, and just cried long, racking sobs. I hugged her and patted her back.
“I’m sorry Lucy.”
This only made her cry louder and harder. I scooted us back out of the hallway into the barn and shut the door because it was cold in there and I hadn’t really had any reason to go to the shop except to get away from Lucy and… Well it didn’t look like I was going to be getting away from Lucy any time soon.
The crying made my mad go away, so I guess it was a good thing. “Look… I’m sorry, Lucy. That was just me being me. Remember I told you I was crazy.”
She sobbed and then she was mumbling things into my chest that I couldn’t actually understand but that she obviously thought I could and something must have been a question because then she was looking at me, her eyes already red and puffy, and her nose running and I had to say, “I couldn’t understand a word you said.”
As I wondered how much of the wet on my shirt was tears and how much was snot, I pulled a handkerchief out of my pocket and wiped her nose like I would do a kid. It wasn’t exactly clean, but hey if she could put her snot on my shirt a little of my DNA on her nose wasn’t going to hurt anything.
“Do you hate me?” she cried, and then she was crying on my shirt again.
“No, I don’t hate you.”
“But you don’t like me,” she cried, and it took me a few seconds to translate it but I finally did.