by Anthology
“Don’t.” And when Gnash glared at me again, “You’ll make him cough. He can’t talk when he’s coughing.” But I was too late.
Old Jerry twitched as if he’d been hit in the gut and coughed so hard that snot and blood spewed out of his mouth. Gnash cursed and fell back onto his ass. I would have laughed if I hadn’t been so horrified by the sounds Old Jerry was making, like bricks crashing against each other but with a sucking wet sound added.
I crawled to him and struggled to turn him onto his side.
The rest of the slime burbled out of Old Jerry’s mouth onto the jacket under his face. My jacket. The whole mass was mostly blood shot through with streaks of yellow-green. I swallowed. I’d never be able to wear that again. It made my stomach churn to touch him and risk getting some of that slime on me. Since my jacket was ruined anyway, I teased one of the sleeves from under his chin and used it to wipe his face.
He mumbled something but the words were garbled.
“Ask him about the treasure,” Gnash said, poking me in the back.
I wanted to tell him to ask himself, but I didn’t want another slap. “Jerry, hey . . . Old man . . .” My shirt sleeve was barely damp now, but still cool. I patted his fevered face with it, careful not to get near his mouth. I didn’t want any of that slime on me, any more than Gnash did. “Talk to me.”
“Ask him,” Gnash hissed.
Old Jerry opened his eyes. For a moment, I thought he was going to just come right out of his stupor and start talking. His gaze went to the cut on my face, or at least, I imagined it did. I raised my hand up to it, trying to cover the blood.
“Do you think there’s a better place?”
We were at my favorite place in the city, at the edge of a field. It used to be called a “green,” according to Old Jerry. The only green in the city now was the occasional weed poking up through the trash, and even then, it was more a sickly yellowish green.
“A better place than what, girl?”
I waved my hand all around us. “Than this. Gram said she was sure there a better place. That’s why she told me to come down. But . . . I don’t think this was what she meant.”
Facing the green was a building with all its rooms showing. Its wall had fallen into a heap at its feet, leaving all the rooms inside showing. It looked like a bunch of little boxes, stacked one on top of the other. I liked imagining that each box had its own color, and furniture and pictures on the wall, just like the pictures in Gram’s books.
In our box, Gram and I sat in a room painted the color of Old Jerry’s eyes. Gram was clacking her knitting needles together, making a sweater with all the colors of the rainbow. I was sitting on the floor, surrounded by books. I loved books.
We’d had a few books, and I’d brought my two favorites with me when I came down. But Gnash had burned them two hard, cold months ago last winter. I’d grieved to see them go, but Gnash was right. Better warm without books than dead with them. I could recite them by rote, but it wasn’t the same as it was to holding the pages between my fingers, as smelling the papery, dusty scent.
I came out of my reverie to find Old Jerry smiling at me in a queer way. Like I’d just said something stupid.
“I’m sure your Gram must be right,” was all he said.
Old Jerry looked up at me. His fingers moved, creaky, like he wanted to reach out. But he just croaked, “You know.” Then his mouth twisted up, and his eyes rolled up in his head and he gave one last, long sigh. A horrible, gurgling one. Then he went limp under my fingers.
Slowly, I closed his eyes. And my own. Hot tears stung the backs of my eyelids. I tried to blink them away. I hadn’t cried since my Gram died, even with all that had happened, and I’d promised myself I never would again. Yet here I was crying over a crazy old man, who hadn’t even believed his own stories. How could he say treasure didn’t matter, then act like it did in the end?
Gnash reached over me and poked Old Jerry, apparently brave enough to touch him now that there was little chance of being spewed on. “Shit!”
He got up and dragged me to my feet by one arm. He adjusted his fingers to a better grip and shook me.
There’d be finger-shaped bruises on the soft underside of my arm tomorrow.
“So what is this treasure? Where is it?” Gnash demanded.
“I don’t know.”
Gnash shook me again, harder this time. “He said you did.”
I tried to pry his fingers off my arm. “He was crazy out of his mind with fever. I don’t know anything about any treasure.” I reached down pulled the blanket up over Old Jerry’s face.
Gnash was distracted enough that he didn’t even protest.
I picked up the jacket Old Jerry had been wearing. It was a fair exchange, I guess. Maybe more than fair. The leather was worn, but it at least had a good thick padding. I could stick my finger through the holes in mine.
Gnash squeezed my arm again, leaving a new row of fingerprints on my forearm. “Don’t bullshit me, stupid. I seen you talking to him lots of times.”
“I talked to him. But he was like all the old ones. Always talking about the befores, you know, and—”
“The befores!” Gnash looked suddenly bright-eyed and avid. He let go of my arm. “Maybe he had a stash somewhere. Of old stuff.”
It was a dream most people had . . . the fantasy of finding a stash of before stuff, cans of food and fancy stoves that ran on gassed air and shiny metal knives. Treasure. Always treasure.
I didn’t think the idea held much water. “Old Jerry wouldn’t have drifted in and out, lived down under, if he had better.”
Gnash narrowed his eyes at my daring to question him, but I guess even he thought it made sense. I slipped the jacket on. Maybe its thick padding would protect my arms from Gnash’s bruising grip.
I looked at the lump of leftover man covered in an old blanket and was shamed. There I stood, following along with Gnash’s train of thought, admiring the jacket I’d salvaged, when its former owner lay dead at my feet.
I was determined to drag the body away somewhere and bury it. That’s the least I could do for him. It was so cold, I didn’t think the smell would bother us for a while. But it would draw dogs and cats, and worse, those on two legs looking for an easy meal, would come skulking around.
I swallowed. Death and feeding . . . that was all part of life. Someday, I’d be dead, too, and something would feed on me so that it could go on living. Even if Gnash bothered to bury me, even then it would be worms.
Somewhere there had to be something better. I’d thought that here would be better when I’d left the mountains. But I’d been wrong. It was different, but it wasn’t better. In fact, it was maybe worse. In the mountains, I’d looked after myself. In the mountains, I knew what was safe and what wasn’t. I hadn’t needed anyone like Gnash to show me the ways of living and dying.
“You know . . . there’s other places, girl. There’s places where a smart girl like you could make her way.”
I thought he was making fun of me, playing back at me the stuff I’d told him my gram had said. That had been right after the time I locked myself out of the building. Some smart girl that was. I’d set in the hall, blue with cold and shaking with hunger, for two days until Gnash came back.
“Maybe . . .” I said, but let my voice die away as I thought. Maybe . . .
“What?”
I jumped a little at Gnash’s voice. I’d almost forgotten he was there. I wasn’t used to him being interested in anything I had to say. “Maybe the treasure’s in his stuff.”
Gnash looked at me with what I now recognized as stupidity. Why’d I ever think this guy was smart? But he was smart. About how to stay alive. How to find stuff that other people wanted. How to make people beholden.
“In his stuff,” I repeated. “Where he flops.”
“Where does he flop?”
“He’s a drifter,” I cracked, exasperated. “Where do you think?”
Gnash didn’t like that. He didn’t li
ke that one bit. His eyes narrowed and his punching fist clenched.
I backed away quickly and looked down. “Sorry.”
Gnash didn’t say anything, but his fist unclenched. “So?”
“Down under. He lived down under. I don’t know . . . down under.” I thought for a minute, chewing the inside of my cheek. “But I know some of his buds when I see them.”
Gnash nodded slowly, thinking, his face pulled sideways like he was chewing on the inside of his cheek, too. “Okay,” he said finally. “Let’s do it.”
Gnash went upstairs before we left. He came back carrying a bat. I knew what made the pocket of his coat look so bulky . . . ragged pieces of crete, slipped into the toe of a sock. I’d laughed to myself the first time I’d seen him pocket his special weapon, but then I’d seen him use it. I hadn’t laughed afterwards.
The walk to the underground was different. I hadn’t been outside at night since my first days in the city. Everything looked strange in the dark. Colder and bigger. The wind still slammed down the tunnel of the street, but it sounded different. Darker. At some intersections, we could see by fires set in drums. There were people dancing around them, or standing with their hands held out to the flames. Gnash walked quick, keeping to the middle of the street, only slowing a little when we moved into the pitch black away from the fires.
I’d never been down under before. I’d expected to have to go down. Instead we walked across a big empty space that was mostly lumps of black street pocked with holes where the red dirt showed through. One step, we were outside with a bit of moon showing through the clouds to light the way, the next we were inside, in the dark, like in a cave.
Gnash stopped just where the gray light turned to black, his breath hard and fast. For the first time since I’d met him, I saw he was as scared as me. I’d never seen it before. Maybe because I’d been so scared myself. Maybe he was scared all the time, just like I was.
He saw me staring at him, and he snarled, “What you looking at, stupid?”
And I heard Old Jerry’s voice, saying, “You’re not really stupid, you know.” Only this time, it didn’t sound so much like a question as he was telling me. I just shook my head at Gnash and stepped into dark.
There was only a little ways where we couldn’t see where we were going, but it felt like a long ways. I put my hands out and slid my feet, just going little baby steps forward, and I could only have taken a few steps when I realized I could see again. Just a little at first, then I could see better.
Buildings. Well, not buildings exactly. More like . . . houses. Little houses, like the one Gram and me had lived in, shoved up against each other. Some still had signs above the doors. “Candy Kitchen” and “Souvenirs” and “Victoria’s.”
There were fires in barrels and laying bare on the ground, just like above, except down here, they left a smoky, sooty feel to the air. The smell made my head start to hurt. We edged around them, keeping to the shadows, away from the people hunched around the fires.
Then, we turned a corner, and we were facing a picture. A whole wall filled with pictures taller than my head. Like a picture in a book, only lots bigger. One showed a small mountain with black clouds rolling out of the top and across. The next one showed a bigger mountain with fire pouring out of it. The pictures were faded, but the fire still looked hot enough to burn.
“So how did it happen?”
Old Jerry had taken me way up top of one of the buildings. I was out of breath from all the climbing, but tickled by the view. It was like being at Old Charlie’s Bunion, except instead of bare dirt and scraggly trees, I could see hills and paths made of crete. They rolled up and down and snaked all around each other until I got dizzy trying to follow one to its end.
“Did what, girl?”
I waved my hand all around us. “This? All this? There’s so many paths and roads . . . there must have been lots more people here, before. What happened to all of them? All my gram would ever say was it was ‘man’s inhumanity to man.’ But I never knew what that meant.”
Old Jerry looked around. At the piles of rubble and the couple of people we could see, walking along one of the wide roads. On the top of a building a few streets over, there were three or four young ones. You didn’t see young ones much anymore. They were beating on a big pipe with sticks and yelling. Their skinny, young voices echoed at us from a dozen directions.
Old Jerry said, “The way I heard it, it didn’t start with men being mean. A mountain blew up.”
“A mountain blew up! I never seen no mountain blow up.”
He shrugged. “Me neither, but that’s the way it was told to me. A yellow mountain blew up. And then another mountain blew up. And then people started to get mean. Hurting each other, killing each other over treasures. And I don’t reckon they’ve much learned their lessons yet.”
Gnash prodded me with his bat. “What does it say?”
I looked away from the picture to where he was standing. At the bottom of the picture, there was writing. I read it, puzzling over a couple of words that didn’t make much sense. “On March 29, 2005, the volcano under Yellowstone National Park, long thought to be dormant, erupted, bleeding a river of red hot lava and spewing clouds of ash and gas into the atmosphere.”
“You can read.”
The voice came from right behind me, and I jumped, wheeling so fast I knocked Gnash into the picture wall. He wheeled back, brandishing his bat.
The old man who stood facing me didn’t seem too dangerous, but I wasn’t any good at telling.
“Yes,” I said slowly. Didn’t seem like much point in saying no, since he’d heard me read it.
“Don’t remember seeing anybody young as you in down under before.” He smiled as he said it, but he was watching Gnash and the upraised bat.
He sounded like Old Jerry, like he just wanted to talk, but before I could say anything, Gnash stepped forward.
“We’re looking for Old Jerry’s flop.” It was his mean voice. The one he used around people he wanted to scare.
The smile left the old man’s face. His hand shifted to his hip, hovering near a knife on his belt. “I don’t know you.” His voice was a bit louder this time. There was two old men and an old woman several feet away, sitting on bedrolls. One of them climbed slowly to his feet.
Gnash shifted slightly on his feet, gave me an un-gentle shove to the side, one of his hands moving toward his pocket.
I could tell something bad was about to happen. An old guy who probably had never done anything worse than steal food was going to get socked.
I could hear Gnash’s teeth grinding against each other.
“Look,” I took a step in, putting myself part way between them and Gnash. “Old Jerry’s a friend of mine. He’s—” I was about to tell them he was dead, but maybe they’d want to go through his stuff, too. “He told us we could stay down here tonight.” I searched around, trying to salvage a thought in my brain, some excuse for what we were doing down here.
The old man squinted at me, like closing his eyes down would make him see better in the dark. “You’re that mountain girl. Old Jerry talked about you.”
A bit of the tension between my shoulders eased. At my back, I could feel Gnash relax a little, too. “Yes. Yes.” I realized I sounded a bit too eager, so I took a breath and started over. “Yes, I came down from the mountains.” I pointed. Silly. Like they could see outside to the hills.
Old Jerry’s friend squinted at us again. There was a long quiet. The other man, the one who’d stood up, came ambling over. But I had the feeling he wasn’t as easy as he looked. Just as he got close, the old man pointed toward a dark hole in the wall about twenty feet away. “Over there. And don’t you go messing in Old Jerry’s things. He’s real particular about them.”
I nodded. “Thank you, sir. We won’t.”
When I turned, Gnash was halfway there already.
I shrugged and smiled at the two old men, noticing how much they looked like Old Jerry. Leathery skin, fa
ded eyes, stooped shoulders. Yet, just like him, they looked hard. Like that leather that had aged and toughened.
I could feel their eyes on my back as I hurried after Gnash. I had a scared thought, just as I slipped into the narrow space behind him. I was wearing Old Jerry’s jacket. What if they recognized it? What if they thought to wonder why? They might think we’d killed Old Jerry for his treasure.
I peeked back out, but they’d gone back to their fire.
Gnash was already searching, pawing Old Jerry’s bedroll aside to see if there was anything under it.
There wasn’t much to Old Jerry’s stuff. There was a box, made out of real wood, standing on its side, and it had books in it! I wondered how he’d kept them from burning it all. Two books and a piece of paper folded many times, with lots of writing and squiggles on it. It took me a minute to recall the name of it. A map. Maybe it was a map to a better place.
Except . . . if there was a better place, why was Old Jerry here? He’d talked about all his drifting. About the places he went, and they hadn’t sounded any better than Lanta. Places like Columbus, the city where the man who discovered the States lived. And Birm, where if you had the right kind of trade goods, you could still get a real metal knife. And down into the Panhan, where you could eat as much fish as you wanted, if you could just catch them. But you had to eat a piece and wait a while to see if it made you sick. One of the other drifters hadn’t listened to the locals and had gorged himself. He’d died of the fire sickness, with big pieces of his skin falling off wherever he touched himself.
Having as much to eat as you wanted had sounded pretty good to me, but then Old Jerry said fish was all they had. The plants there were dying, just like in the mountains. I asked why he drifted there, and he laughed and said for the tan, which didn’t make any sense. But lots of Old Jerry’s talk was like that.
A second bedroll stood on its end at the back of the little room. A pair of run-over shoes, crusted with red dirt, stood beside it. There were a couple of empty tins, large enough to hold a tiny fire. A cup with not enough water in it to even wet my lips.