Christmas 2006 was the last time he saw his parents. He was between assignments, on leave from Afghanistan, ready to deploy to Iraq, and he spent a good deal of his holiday eating. Everything from cinnamon rolls to meat loaf to asparagus casserole, everything he could get his hands on and knew he would not taste outside a mess hall for a long time. And sleeping. There was lots of sleeping. His old bed—its mattress cratered to his body’s shape, molded to his memory—comforted him, an assurance he always had a place there.
His last day on leave, Darren remembers his father pumping his hand furiously, his version of a hug, saying, “Good for you, you son of a B.” He remembers his mother smiling, touching his face and telling him how awfully faraway Iraq was, as if giving a friendly warning. “Aren’t you scared?” she said and he said, “’Course I’m scared.”
And he remembers that although he checked and checked, and kept on checking on the plane to Los Alamitos, California, as far as he could tell, he was not scared, he was not sad, he was not excited, he was not feeling much of anything, even when months later, he drove a tank through the streets of Baghdad, a torrent of stones and bullets raining all around him, tick-tack-ticking and whizzing and whining, as if to make a song.
Even then.
This numbness still infects him, though he did break down once, when he roared up to his parents’ St. Helens home in a storm of gravel. For a long time he stood at the front door, not knowing what to do, studying for clues in the wood grain. When he finally stepped inside he did so with care, to honor the tomblike stillness of the place and also to keep from stirring the dust, which in his lungs would breed tumors like pink mushrooms. Wood absorbs radiation like a sponge and the Geiger reading here was 1,000 microrems per hour.
When he found his mother lying in bed, a gun in her mouth, a family photo clutched in her mummified claw of a hand, a horrible joke came to him, and he said it out loud: “Quite the nuclear family.” He tried a laugh, but couldn’t pull it off, managing more of a cough. Then his face split open as rocks do when water freezes inside them—and he began to cry.
Outside he paced around and kicked an ash tree and a loose branch fell and struck his shoulder and its black color stuck to him for a week in an oval-shaped bruise that shrunk and paled and vanished.
Darren is not alone. There are others—Mexicans mainly—who live in the Dead Zone. Like him, most are here because they feel they have nowhere else to go. The invisible threat of radiation, the sores that fester on their skin, mean nothing compared to the overcrowding, the joblessness, the blackened economy found everywhere else.
Here they grow their own food. They drive Mercedes and BMWs. They live in enormous houses. They shop at the abandoned Nordstrom and at Brooks Brothers stores.
Darren sees them when he drives around. Last week he happened upon fifty or sixty people seeding a vast field with what he guessed was corn. The way they were dressed, you would have thought it was a cocktail party. On the edge of the field an old man in a tuxedo rocked in a rocking chair, stroking his long white beard. When Darren turned off the highway and rumbled down the long clay road that led to them, the old man rose unsteadily from his chair, lifted what appeared to be a cane, and fired. A white carnation bloomed from the front of the shotgun, followed by the roar and spray of buckshot that from a good fifty yards’ distance pattered harmlessly off Darren’s leather jacket. He got the hint and returned the way he came.
Which makes him cautious now, when he parks his bike on the highway shoulder bordering a Willamette Valley farm, where a dozen men hoe in the field. They raise their hands in hesitant waves and cram together in a huddle and finally decide to approach him, slowly, nodding too much and smiling too big, as if trying to convince themselves he isn’t a threat. They wear pistols and so does he. The gunmetal catches the light on this sunny May afternoon, advertising the possibility of violence, but they only want to talk, asking him in their broken English what news he has from the outside, if any.
“No sabe nada,” he says. Which is true. He knows nothing except what Katie tells him when they speak on his hand-crank CB radio, and their conversations always seem to center around him, what he is doing, when he is coming back. “Just come back,” she tells him, and he tells her, “Just don’t.”
Once the men realize he speaks Spanish, they all start talking at once, at a million miles per hour, their hands gesturing, flapping like a bunch of brown birds, which to Darren is what they sound like.
He smiles and holds up his hands—like: I give up—and says, “Lento, por favor. Lento.” They are too quick and too complicated for him, but once they slow down, he enjoys their conversation, no matter how awkward and halting, their discussion of food, weather, where to find good gas, whether or not the military will hunt them down, kick them out.
“Not for another hundred years, they won’t,” Darren says and the Mexicans nod and say, “Bien, bien, bien,” as if the word were a knife to keep the camouflaged men and their Humvees and helicopters away.
Among the Mexicans there is a man—just a teenager, really—with lamb-chop sideburns and radiation lesions on his face. His arm in a sling, with blood-soaked gauze duct-taped around his bicep. He says his name is Jorge and when Darren asks what happened to his arm a silence sets in like after a dish drops at a restaurant. Jorge brings a hand to the bandage and says, “Los Angeles.” And while at first Darren thinks he is referring to the city, he is not.
Los Angeles is why a good portion of Portland has been reduced to ash. Los Angeles is why the state-capital building has Chinga Te graffitied in enormous looping letters across its doors. Los Angeles is why Darren nearly ran over, lying upright in the middle of the interstate, a decapitated head, its skin as black as its hair, its mouth boiling with flies.
An old man whose sun-weathered face could use an iron explains this in stuttery English. His hand rests on his pistol as if comforted by it. He says he originally thought Darren was one of them, with his motorcycle, but Los Angeles ride as a pack, as wolves would. “Besides,” the old man says, smiling, “They no look like you.”
“Like what?” Darren said.
“Like clean. Like football player,” he says with laughter and cigarettes in his voice. “Like big American hero guy.”
In a matter of seconds the way Darren perceives the Dead Zone has changed the way a flaming match changes the feel of a dry forest. He knows many people live here. He knows almost everyone is armed and a little desperate, a little crazy, or they wouldn’t be here at all. But he did not realize a gang of them had organized into a sort of Mexican al-Qaeda.
He asks the injured man why they attacked him.
“Por mi esposa,” he says. For my wife. His face tightens like a fist.
Already Darren knows the answer, but he asks anyway. “Y su esposa?”
“Muerto.” Once uttered the word hangs in the air and everyone concentrates on their shoes, except Darren, who stares into the man’s eyes as if into a mirror.
A rumble comes from overhead and they all shade their eyes and squint up into a sky filled with cirrus clouds that look like pale fish bones. Here they spot a fighter plane. Its sound strikes Darren as sad, something far away and going farther. He thinks of Katie and a moment later the plane vanishes over the Cascade Mountains, its contrail slowly dissipating behind it.
How safe and beautiful everything must look from way up there, Darren thinks, even if it’s not.
A couple months ago, back when Darren was stationed along the perimeter, a bunch of dreadlocked women wearing sandals and hemp necklaces pulled up in a van. On its bumper was a faded Nader 2012 sticker. When the women spilled out of the van, so did the smell of old sweat and herb gardens. They said they were on a mission. They said they had traveled all the way from Connecticut to deposit their art. Their art turned out to be a big egg, the kind in which a horse might incubate, made out of metal, painted white. The egg, they claimed, represented how life would eventually break through the hard shell of pollution.
Already it has begun—in the weeds creeping through the cracks in the asphalt, the deer bedded down at OSU stadium’s twenty-yard line. In a really weird way, Darren thinks, this one-time nuclear furnace has become an Edenish sort of paradise. With hardly any humans to mow and litter and hunt, nature thrives. But nobody—not even the microbiologists studying the area—understands the genetic ramifications of radiation. Darren has heard it all—woolly pigs with tusks like sabers, weird birds silhouetted by the open guts of the moon, an albino bear as big as a Plymouth sharpening its claws on a telephone pole—but who knows . . .
Every now and then he will see something that belongs in a zoo. Parrots roosting in fir trees or monkeys screeching from the Wal-Mart rafters. One night he heard a snarl—like great sheets of tin torn in half—that must have belonged to some big cat. On the Santiam Pass, along the saddle of the Cascade Range, he discovered an elephant, dead from winter or from radiation. It had its legs folded beneath it—it seemed to be kneeling—with its chin resting on its knees. The skin had faded in places and peeled away in others. Darren put a hand to its chest—to make it real—and his hand kept going. It broke through the leathery skin and into a cavity where everything felt like bonemeal.
But it’s the dogs that have become the wildest.
They now run in packs. They live in the woods and in the abandoned houses, probably cozying up to the couches and beds they were for so long forbidden to dirty. They came for him once, near Prineville, at the bottom of a canyon, his engine’s noise drawing them from the juniper forest—ears perked, heads cocked—as if summoned. They gave chase, howling like demons, their dark shapes surrounding him. They popped their teeth and he kicked at them and nearly lost control of his bike. They kept pouring out of the woods—altogether there must have been fifty of them. He dodged their bodies like a halfback and zoomed up and up and up the switchback highway that rose from the canyon, until he reached its plateau, a viewpoint overlooking the dry basin of Crook County. He parked and got off his bike, and sure enough, several hundred feet below him, gray and black and brown, the dogs raced along the highway, their own little gang, following his scent.
He remembers this now, when he pulls into a G.I. Joe’s parking lot and hears the muffled noise of dogs fighting inside. He came here to stock up on bullets. He did not come here to risk his skin. Under any other circumstances, no big deal, he would have gone on to the next place—but behind all the scratch-and-snarl racket comes a high-pitched and unmistakably human scream.
When he left his liquidator post along the perimeter, he gave up his military-issue 9mm Glock along with his fatigues, preferring the heft and power of the.357. Everywhere he goes he takes the revolvers with him and he withdraws them now, when climbing through the store’s busted entrance, its broken glass surrounding him like a snaggletooth mouth.
At the cash registers he pauses. He imagines women with big hair and trashy makeup counting change and flipping through tabloids, and beyond them, construction workers buying claw hammers, ranchers buying udder cream, camouflaged men buying hunting licenses, all of them giving him a nod, all of them ghosts.
G.I. Joe’s is one of those whatever-you-need-we-got-it sort of places. Darren makes his way past cross-piled rock-salt bags, past shelves of Shasta soda pop and off-brand potato chips, past display stacks of Penzoil and antifreeze, toward the back of the store, the source of the sound.
Birds squawk and flutter in the rafters. Flies and hornets buzz around his head. Leaves crunch beneath his boots. Spiders have spun webs over everything. He remembers there was once a smell to stores like this—fertilizer mixed with rubber mixed with PVC fumes mixed with hydraulic oil—that was a good smell, no longer, replaced by the heavy stink of an animal’s den.
He peeks around Aisle 10 and sees the dogs gathered around a Die-Hard battery kiosk, on top of which squats a Mexican girl, maybe ten years old, maybe ten feet off the linoleum, her long black hair falling to either side of her head. She watches the dogs calmly, as if they are stuffed animals and not something she needs to fear, until one of them, a big standard poodle, stands up on its hind legs and sort of pushes at the kiosk, shaking it. She screams.
This sends the dogs into convulsions, exciting them even more. They jitter and prance and wag their whole bodies and howl like some kind of mob hungry for an execution. Darren counts twenty of them—Rottweilers, German shepherds, Labradors, even a wiener dog. Their coats are knotted and filthy and jeweled with burrs.
“Hey,” he says. “Hey, dogs!” At once the whole horde turns to look at him, panting, hesitantly wagging their tails. He wonders if two instincts—those of loyalty and hunger—fight inside them. He doesn’t know what to say, so he says, “Bad dogs.”
At this some of them peel back their lips, showing their teeth, while others whine and stutter-step forward, as if he were an old friend they hardly recognized.
There are more dogs than there are bullets in his revolvers, Darren realizes, and suddenly he feels vulnerable. The poodle, a mud-caked mess of hair, moves toward him, looking at once ridiculous and frightening, like some four-legged breed of Sasquatch.
“Sit,” he says. “Sit. Stay. Roll over.” But the poodle keeps coming.
He lifts the revolvers. They seem incredibly heavy in his hands. The poodle lowers its head and begins a sort of hunch-shouldered charge. Saliva swings from its teeth when it opens its mouth to bite him. He puts a bullet in its leg and it screams in a terribly human way before collapsing and rising again and limping fast and far from him, leaving behind a trail of blood.
At the sound of the gunshot—a whipping crack that bottoms out and echoes away—the other dogs scatter, diving down the aisles. Seconds later Darren hears them outside, barking and yowling.
The wiener dog is the only one who lingers, peeking from behind the kiosk. Darren holsters his guns and lifts his arms and says, “Yaaaaah!” and the dog releases a tiny stream of pee before trotting off to join its pack.
Darren looks at the girl and the girl looks at him, looks away, and then gets brave enough to maintain a stare. She wears a too-long T-shirt, jean shorts, and Velcro tennis shoes. He raises his hand—the universal sign for hey—and she does the same. They each manage a small smile. “Speak English?” he says.
Her expression does not change and Darren sees in it the same thing he saw in the wiener dog: a mixture of fear and loneliness that at once makes her want to rush forward and back away. He decides to let her settle down a moment, get comfortable with him.
Nearby is Hunting and Firearms. The glass display case has been busted open and looted of most everything except some lousy grandpa-style pocketknives. Behind the counter Darren pokes around and among the mess of broken glass and spilled cartridges he finds what he is looking for: three boxes of.357 bullets and a handful of shotgun shells. He fills his coat pockets and returns to the kiosk.
“Seriously, you gotta come down,” he says. “Down. Pollado.” Or is it derriba? He can’t remember. He motions with his hand. “Down. Down. Before they get brave and come back.”
She doesn’t move, except to blink. She has these eyes, as deeply brown and moist as expensive chocolate. Her eyebrows coming together to form a silent question: is he dangerous?
“No estoy peligroso,” he says. “No kidding. I’m a good guy. Yo estoy su amigo.”
“I’m not stupid,” she says with a soft accent. “I can speak English.”
He puts out his hands as if he has given up looking for something. “Okay. This is a good thing.” When she doesn’t say anything, just keeps staring at him, he speaks to fill up the silence between them: “You’re American then? Or Mexican?”
She gives her eyes a theatrical roll and says, “I’m Latina,” and Darren thinks: this is why I hate kids.
“L
ook,” he says. “Whatever. We need to get going.”
Except to sneeze into her hands she does not move.
“Salud,” he says and kicks an empty Pepsi can and it rattles a few feet down the aisle. “Where are your parents anyway?” He immediately regrets asking and in his chest gets this jab of dread when she scrunches up her face and starts breathing heavily like kids do before they really lose it.
“Forget it,” he says. Before she can second-guess him, he holds up his hands and twiddles his fingers and says, “Come on.” After a hesitant moment, she scoots her butt toward the edge, dangles her legs, and falls into his arms.
Outside the sun has retreated behind some clouds. The dogs are nowhere in sight, but his bike is wet with their urine. You belong to us, bub—they are saying—this is our territory now.
“Jeez,” he says.
“Gross,” the girl says.
He’ll wash it later. For now he wants to get away from here. He feels too exposed, in the middle of this parking lot, with the danger of dogs lurking nearby. A wooded lot neighbors the store and Darren thinks he can hear the muffled crunch of footpads there. He straddles the bike. “Will you sit next to me?” With a thumb he indicates the seat behind him.
She tilts her head, but stays where she is, a couple feet away, staring at the bike and then at him, not afraid—Darren doesn’t think—but shy, or maybe just disgusted by the sour smell. He notices how skinny she is, her collarbone like a bicycle handlebar. “You hungry?” He removes from his jacket pocket a Snickers bar, unwraps it, and takes a bite. When chewing he makes mmm-mmm noises.
She holds out her hand and says, “Please,” like a kid at a supermarket checkout. He breaks off a piece and tosses it to her. She snatches it from the air and eats it with smacking open-mouth chews. “You want the rest?” Darren says, “You got to get on the bike.” She surprises him with a smile, her teeth just a little buck. Something like agreement or acceptance passes between them. He tries to make his smile as genuine as hers and finds it isn’t hard. “What’s your name anyway?”
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