by Nick Cole
Sometimes the Boy heard himself asking, “ ‘What has happened here?” ’ Sometimes the cars were jammed together, as though frozen in a single moment of waiting. Sometimes they were overturned. Sometimes they were parked by the side of the road, every door open, every window broken. What was within was gone, even down to the seats. All that was left was rusting metal and an untold story he would never hear.
He looked at the cars scattered along the highway.
It is beyond me to ever know why such things have been left the way they are.
And yet I want to know.
He rode on, long after the sliver of a moon had completed its descent. It was dark and damp and cold. In the misty gloom he saw standing water in the surrounding fields and broken buildings.
The water looked like a rug.
Before long, he had ridden in close to the skeletal towers of the old state capitol in Sacramento. He heard frogs everywhere and even the highway was submerged. He came to a bridge that had long since fallen into the muck of the dark river below and he could go no farther.
It is too dark to find a way around, Sergeant.
He looked behind him and saw nothing in the misty night.
The frogs will warn me if anyone comes along.
Sorry—he pats Horse—we can’t have fire tonight.
He draped his blanket over his friend and rolled up in his bearskin at the side of the bridge, far out along it, almost to the edge of the broken span over the swamp below.
IN THE MILKY light of morning he surveyed the bridge. There was no way to the other side. The city, twisted, bent and broken lay all about him, submerged in the cold water of the wide river.
The course of the river must have changed in the years since the bombs.
Or because of the bombs.
He led Horse down an off-ramp and they waded through the watery streets of a long-gone city. Windows, regularly spaced, gaped and screamed in silent horror as they passed.
My whole life I’ve wanted to explore such places. But there is nothing here now.
Is this why Sergeant Presley said no? Because there is nothing left of the things that were once here?
At noon the murk had mostly burned off and they—Horse and the Boy—had crossed over to the far side of the river on an old rail bridge that still stood. The Eighty continued west on the other side of a field.
The Boy looked back at the dead city.
I could wander you for years and what could you give me back?
Could you show me who I might have been?
And why is that so important to me?
He tries for a moment to imagine what it must have looked like—looked like with people in it. People from Before.
That night, beyond the city, after a day filled with long silences punctuated by the last lonely birds of winter, he camped next to a wall whose purpose he didn’t understand. Why it lay next to the old highway or who built it and for what he did not know.
He ate three small rabbits that he took with the rifle in the afternoon and set wild corn in front of Horse.
The world is filled with wild corn and you want nothing more, Horse. Life must be pretty good for you.
He thought of the five rounds he’d fired to take the three rabbits.
Two had been wasted.
Yes. But if I am to use the rifle I must practice with it. I must be sure of it when I need it.
He reached into his bag and took out the charcoal. He shaved it with his knife and looked at the wall.
He drew a great bridge in long, sketchy strokes that ran the length of the wall. Then he drew the skyline of the hoary city sinking into the swampy river. Below, near the gritty pavement of the old highway, he filled in the moonlit water, reflecting the shadows of the city back up at itself.
The night was bitterly cold and even the fingers of his good hand ached like those on his bad side. Later he returned to the fire and warmed himself, looking at the mural.
Was that it?
It seemed as though there should be something more.
He thought of drawing Horse. Or himself. Or even MacRaven.
But nothing seemed right.
Lying on his side drifting toward sleep, facing the hot fire, the cold at his neck, he saw the city come to life.
And he lived there.
And there was a day . . .
The best day ever.
He awoke to the orange light of the coals in the deep of night and saw the shadowy city rendered on the wall. He could not remember what was so good about the dream of the day in that city before the bombs. Only that it was the best, and worth having, and that he had been cheated, as though a valuable piece of salvage had been stolen from beneath him while he slept.
It seems as though there should be something more to the picture on the wall, he thought again, remembering the dream.
And as he fell back to sleep he heard, I bet the people who lived in that city thought so too, Boy. I bet they did.
33
IN THE DAYS that followed, the Boy rode in quiet along the muddy river that reminded him so much of the big one back east, and the Possum Hunters and Sergeant Presley, when he had been young.
He felt old.
The days passed and towns on the map either didn’t exist or lay buried beneath wild grass and corn.
He passed a convoy of military vehicles forever parked in the median of the great windswept highway.
He smelled the salt of the ocean on a sudden shifting breeze.
It smelled of Texas.
But cleaner.
He passed rusting vehicles lying swaddled in the reeds that shot up out of the mucky fields and stood for a long time considering the wreck of an Apache helicopter, held longingly by a clutch of thorny rosebushes.
He climbed a high pass and saw long iron spikes cast to the ground, all in one direction, as if thrown by the hand of a giant. Large windmill blades lay buried in the dirt and grass.
In the town beyond, he saw the charred remains of buildings reaching up to the gray sky.
The wind and the clouds march east, lashing the buckled highway with spring rain. At the end of the day, the Boy felt as though much more had been required of him than just movement. He was exhausted.
On the day he reached the bay, the weather turned warm. At least, if he stood in the center of the road at full noon and turned his face toward the bright sun, the day felt warm. In the shade of bridges and crumbling buildings, the cold had always been and always would be, just like the rusty destruction he found there along the bay’s edge.
He saw the bay from a high hill and on the far side of its blue water, he saw the great pile of rubble that was San Francisco, in the State of California. Only a few tall buildings remained standing. The rest lay buried in the piles of concrete and twisted rebar he could see even from this distance.
Ain’t never been nuked, Boy. Chinese wouldn’t do it. Needed a deep water port on the West Coast. Seattle, San Diego, and of course LA were all long gone. We fought for that pile of rubble for ten years.
The Boy could hear the campfire stories of the great battles and “ops” of the San Francisco of Sergeant Presley.
On Market Street we lost all our armor, Boy.
And . . .
I was the last one off the roof of the Ferry Building. Close one that day, Boy.
And . . .
I saw the TransAmerica Building go down after a Jay Thirty-three went in about halfway up. Dust for days after that one, Boy.
And . . .
The Army will be down along the East Bay. Headquarters in an old college library. That’s where you’ll find I Corps, Boy.
Tell them I made it all the way.
Tell them there was no one left.
Tell them who I was, Boy.
And . . .
You take everything with you.
34
I’M GLAD YOU died, Sergeant.
You thought they would still be here—waiting for you.
The wreckage o
f military equipment littered the highway that wound its way along the green-grass slopes of the East Bay. Broken concrete pads and burnt black fingers of framing erupted through tall wind-driven grass.
You crossed the whole country and lost all your friends, Sergeant. The general, even. Someone named Lola, who you never told me about. All of them.
The Boy passed a convoy of supply tucks, melted and blackened forty years ago.
“Five tons,” said the Boy as the morning wind off the bay beat at his long hair, whipping his face and shoulders.
Farther along, the tail rotor of a helicopter lay across the buckling highway.
Apache, maybe.
The KIAs and the MIAs and all the people you imagined were still here, waiting for you to come back—they’re all gone.
Later, as Horse nosed the tall grass, the Boy walked around three helicopter transports long since landed in the southbound lanes. They were rusty and dark, stripped of everything.
“Black Hawks,” he mumbled, sitting in a pilot’s seat, wondering at how one flew them through the air like a bird, which was impossible for him to picture.
Climbing up through the concrete buttresses that remained of Fortress Oakland, he came to the tanks.
Blackened. Burnt. Abandoned. High up on the hill he could see the ragged remains of canvas tents and the flower blossoms of spiked artillery pieces.
Sergeant, your dream of finding them here couldn’t have survived this.
He led Horse up the hill through the long grass and around the craters and foxholes long since covered in a waving sea of soft green and yellow.
When he reached the spiked artillery pieces now resting forever in permanent bloom, he could see the remains of the Army, of I Corps, below. All the way to the shores of the sparkling bay’s eastern edge he could see burnt tanks, melted Humvees, helicopters that would never fly, a fighter jet erupting from the rubble of the few houses that remained along the bay.
I followed you through the rain and the snow and along all those long moonlit nights while you told me about this place. The people. What we would find. Who you were.
And.
Who I might be.
He stood among the tent posts on top of the hill.
Of the Army he’d waited his whole life to meet, only ragged strips of canvas remained, fluttering in the breeze.
Off to the right, down along a ridgeline, he could see a field of white crosses. The graves were open and the crosses lay canted at angles.
I’m glad you died with your dream of this place, Sergeant, because . . .
. . . this would have killed you.
All the way.
Tell them who I was, Boy.
Tell who, Sergeant?
And who am I now, Sergeant Presley? Now that you are gone and the dream that you promised me is dead, who am I now?
But there was no answer.
35
HE SMELLED SMOKE.
The smoke of meat came to him on the wind of the next day, in the morning, before light.
At first light, he scanned the horizon and saw, across the bay, the columns of rising smoke. He checked the map. Sausalito.
He’d spent the day before combing the wreckage of the Army. There was nothing to be had. Everything that was left had burned long ago. When he went to the cemetery below the ridge, he found bones in the bottom of each open grave. Nothing more.
Maybe there is someone, maybe even I Corps, over there on the other side of the bay, Sergeant?
But there was no answer.
Someone was there.
Later he rode out to the north, crossing large sections of muddy bay where ancient supertankers rested on their sides. Occasionally he passed large craters.
At the northern edge of the bay, mudflats gave way to the tall brown grass of the estuaries. A long thin bridge, low to the water, stretched off toward the west.
A heron, white and tall, stood still, not watching the Boy.
The bridge may only go so far.
After a small break and time spent looking at the map, he decided to try and cross the bridge.
You would ask me why I was in such a hurry to get to the other side, Sergeant. You would say, Whatchu in a hurry about, Boy?
I would say, “I want to know what’s in Sausalito.”
Then you would say, You always did.
That is what you would say.
But the voice didn’t say anything.
The Boy had not heard the voice since the open graves and the tattered canvas.
The ride out into the marshes made the Boy feel lonely—lonelier than he’d ever felt in all his life. Other than the heron he’d seen at the eastern side of the thin bridge, he saw no other life.
That is why I feel so alone, because there is no other living thing, he thought. He’ll speak to me again.
In the afternoon, the wind stopped and fog rolled in across the bay. Faster than he would have ever expected, the fog surrounded him and he could see little beyond the thin road ahead.
Only Horse’s hooves on the old highway broke the silence.
He expected some bird to call out to another bird, but there was nothing. No one to call to, even if it were just another bird.
It was then he began to think the bridge might never end—that he would ride forever through the fog.
And what about food? I can’t go off in those marshes to hunt. I would be stuck. And Horse, what of him if I have to run?
Stop. You would tell me to stop, Sergeant.
The road will end. And if not, I will turn back and go the long way around the bay.
The thought of having to ride back through the eerie stillness at night did little to comfort him, and for a long time he rode on until at last the bridge began to rise back onto dry land.
See, I had nothing to be afraid of, right, Sergeant?
36
THEY WORKED IN the small bay. They were tall and brown skinned like the Chinese of Auburn.
The day had turned cold and gray.
For a long time the Boy stood with Horse, watching them from the dusty road. In time they became aware of him and began to gesture to one another regarding him. Still, they continued to work with their long rakes, sweeping beneath the cold dark water of the bay. Out in the deep water beyond, whitecaps were beginning to form.
I thought I might find the Army here, Sergeant.
His voice had gone now. It had left him in the fog of the bridge over the marsh.
No, it was before that. It was when he saw the open graves and the bones within.
Maybe the knowledge of what happened to I Corps finally killed you, Sergeant. Killed you in a way death could not. Killed the mission you left me to finish.
In time they came in from the water, rolling down their pant legs and donning leather-skinned long jackets trimmed with sheep’s wool. A man, older than most, but not the oldest he’d seen, waded out through the tall grass to the road and climbed the embankment to where the Boy sat atop Horse.
Standing in front of the Boy, he said something in Chinese.
He repeated it.
The Boy shook his head.
The man was weathered like the sides of their clapboard shacks.
The Weathered Man stared off toward the bay for a long time. His face was tight and brown, his cheeks red like apples. He watched the dry brown and gray shacks of their farm.
He is wondering what to do with me, thought the Boy.
The Weathered Man turned and walked down the embankment, and as an afterthought waved his hand at the Boy, as if he should come along with him.
There was a fire pit outside a long weathered barn that reached out into the gray waters of the bay. The rakes were stacked neatly against the side of the old building.
The Weathered Man drove a stake into the ground for Horse and returned shortly with hay. He laid it down in front of Horse and reached up to caress the long nose, muttering softly in Chinese once more.
He pointed toward a worn long table near the
water’s edge and the fire for the Boy to sit at.
A giant blackened grill was placed over the fire and then piles of green wet seaweed atop the grill. Salty, white smoke rose up in billows. The rest of the people worked at cleaning small, flat stones they’d brought in wide baskets up from the waters of the bay.
Rough clay plates and cups were set out. There was fresh hot bread and a stone crock of creamy butter, another of red sauce, and another of a pungent dark liquid that smelled of fish and salt.
The wind rose up off the bay in breezy gusts. The Boy’s left side was stiff, and he massaged what he could to work life back into the thin muscles of that side.
More of the Chinese appeared, coming from inland, setting down rakes and hoes to go down to the bay and wash their hands in the stinging cold water.
More round loaves of crusty bread were set out, as the flat stones that had been brought up from the bay went onto the grill.
They eat stones? thought the Boy, who had seen many different people eat many strange things.
The Weathered Man watched the fire dully, his eyes far away as he stood over the grill with a short rake, moving the stones about.
Shortly, the stones came off the grill and were thrown onto the long flat table. More stones were laid upon the grill and the Chinese sat down, each grabbing at a stone and prying off a hidden lid. Then they raised their stones to their mouths and slurped. They threw the stones into a basket and each of them reached for the next stone, this time adding either the red sauce or the dark liquid smelling of fish and salt, or even the creamy butter, and in some cases a bit of one or the other, and for a few, all three.
The Weathered Man sat down on the bench next to the Boy and looked at him and then the stones. The Weathered Man took one, cracked the lid and slurped, watching the Boy.
The Boy reached out and took one. He peeled back the lid with difficulty, as his withered hand was required to hold the stone. Inside he found the oyster, gray and steaming, swimming in liquid. He ate it, feeling it slide into his mouth and then explode in warm saltiness as he chewed its meat. He looked into the shell where the oyster had once been and found a pearl-colored base swirling white and gray.