Mom’s inching between Alma and this guy Ray while Alma looks frozen. “Hi,” she says quietly.
I keep my rifle in front of me while I hustle to Alma. Both these guys have rifles, but they’re slung behind their backs. If they have knives, I bet they’re fast with them.
“I didn’t know what happened to you,” Ray says to Alma. “You disappeared on me.”
“Yeah, we moved,” she says without looking at him.
Ray’s voice gets more menacing, less flirty. “Pretty bad of you to skip out on your debts. Come on back with me, and we’ll get them taken care of.”
Alma gulps. “I, uh… I—”
“Who’s this?” I ask as I step next to Alma, nodding toward Ray, turning to face him, my hand on the trigger guard. This freak is talking like he’s her pimp.
“Keno, this is Ray. Ray, Keno.” There’s a tightness in her voice, like anxiety.
Ray’s eyes get hard. He scans me up and down, sizing me up, my heart rate increasing by the second.
“I see.” Ray locks eyes with me. Then he looks back to his partner. “Let’s go, man. Just wanted to say hi to my little friend Alma.” His eyes are hooded and dark when he studies me again, then studies Alma, and says, “Y’all take care now.”
Ray and his compadre back up several steps, taking their time to turn around and saunter away, like they haven’t got a care in the world.
They’re fifteen feet away when Ray looks back. “Y’all need to be careful out here. Hidden dangers are everywhere.” And he winks.
He winked? What the fuck does that mean?
“Who is that guy?” I ask Alma. “Did he just threaten us? Is he threatening you?”
“A guy I used to know,” she says, hurriedly sticking bags of pecans into the wagon.
An old boyfriend? But he looks twice her age, plus his vibes are skeevy. I gape at Alma until she looks at me again.
“Was he a friend of your dad’s?”
“He’s nobody. Okay?” Alma glares at me quickly, drops to her knees, and starts scooping up more pecans.
I kneel in front of her, pecans digging into my knees, my hands a foot away from her shoulders and face, wanting to touch her but afraid she doesn’t want me to. Mom and Mazie start helping her.
“Why don’t we go home?” I ask Alma.
“We need these pecans.” She crawls away to scoop up more. I don’t like it, but she’s not changing her mind.
Y’all need to be careful out here. Hidden dangers are everywhere.
That freak Ray had to be threatening us. What’s he gonna do? Wait until we load up pecans, then kill us for them?
I give in and start scooping up pecans, too. The shells are damp, but the meat inside still looks good. We’ll have to dry them out right away, or even shell them. That’s gonna take a ton of work, but getting Alma home safe comes first.
At last, we have all the pecans the wagon can hold—about twenty bags. Alma’s spreading bags out in the wagon and not looking at me.
“Babe, are you all right?” I ask her.
“I’m fine.” She doesn’t seem fine; she’s agitated and far away.
When the wagon is loaded, Alma speed-walks ahead toward home without saying a word. I don’t know what she’s maddest about—seeing Ray or me asking about him.
Mom heads toward Alma. I take off my jacket and pad the top of the pecans. Then I pick up Mazie, set her on a bed of pecans, and try to catch up with Alma.
Who the fuck is this creep Ray? He makes me think of the hard-ass leader of the camo guys we saw when we got gasoline, but it was too dark that night for me to be sure Ray’s the same guy. The heights and shapes seem the same, and the dark hair, though Ray’s hair seemed cleaner. So, he washed it? Shit, that guy was ready to kill a member of his own gang.
I pull the wagon alongside Mom. Alma’s way ahead of us and showing no signs of slowing down. I ask Mom to pull the wagon so I can be sure no one follows us home.
I walk backward the whole mile home, except when I turn around twice a minute to be sure I can still see Alma up ahead.
At home, Alma stomps into the kitchen, smears bean paste on a tortilla, and shoves pieces into her mouth, slugging water between bites. She’s still chewing when she makes a similar sandwich for Mazie and then rushes up the stairs.
I make an I-don’t-get-it face at Mom and drink water, too. I start to follow Alma upstairs, but she’s already heading back down with a basket full of laundry. Water’s dripping from her face and hair, like she’s dunked her head in a bucket.
“Alma, can we talk about this?”
She looks at my mother. “We have to dry these pecans. How do we dry the pecans?” She’s frantic.
“I saw an article in one of my mother’s books about it. You do your laundry, and I’ll find the book. Then we can take care of the pecans together.”
“Okay,” Alma says, sighing. Then she looks at me. “As you can see, I’ve got stuff to do.” She blasts out the back door with the laundry, slaps a washtub in front of the rain-barrel spout, and starts filling the tub.
I step outside. “I’ll handle the water. It’s too heavy for you,” I say, and she shrugs.
She dumps soap flakes into the washtub and sticks a washboard in there. The second I move the tub into the dead grass, she’s throwing in clothes and scrubbing the shit out of them.
“You’re gonna tear your clothes if you keep scrubbing like that,” I say. “How ’bout if I scrub, and you explain what just happened?”
“There’s nothing to explain,” she says flatly.
“He said you have debts.”
“I don’t owe any debts, and he knows it.” Alma scrubs at a T-shirt until she scrapes her knuckle on the washboard. “Shit!”
She’s about to keep scrubbing, but I lift her hand from the water, trying to put my face in front of hers, but she’s making it hard. “You’ll get blood on the clothes. You need a bandage. Take a breath.”
She tugs her hand away, sucks on her bleeding knuckle, and then examines it.
“I’ll take care of it. You can go to work now.” She stands up and goes in the house.
What is wrong with her?
When I come home with loads of firewood at dusk, Mom and Alma have pecans drying in trays, pans, and skillets all over downstairs.
“Have some pecan biscuits for dinner,” Mom says, “and help us shell these things.”
So, I eat a couple of biscuits—they’re good. I sit next to Alma, and we shell pecans by candlelight for hours without talking.
Fun times.
PART II
CHAPTER 19
It’s seven weeks since Nana died, and it’s been one lonely-ass winter. I can hardly look at my family anymore except for Alma. I mean, I look at them, but not for long. It kills me to see them so sad. I hope we’ll start smiling someday, but I don’t see how.
It took Alma days to start talking to me like normal, and she’s not that interested in being close anymore. I tell myself it’s the pregnancy, it’s the grief—which for her includes grief over her parents—but I feel like there’s something deeper, something related to the fiasco pecan hunt and that freak Ray. I’d like to ask Mom for advice, except Alma’s still not ready for others to know she’s pregnant. I try not to worry, but there’s this coldness like fear between us that was never there before. It hurts me, but my workload keeps me distracted.
We’ve been hunkering down for the winter as much as we can, but we have to beef up our soil with mulch and compost, prep the gardens to replant as soon as the frost danger passes, and keep ourselves warm, fed, and hydrated. We’re rotating our crops this year, putting the food we need most—like pinto beans—in the biggest backyards.
One exciting thing happened. While a bunch of us were in the Mint’s garage trying to figure out where the pump’s water comes from, Alma found two manua
ls—one for the pump, the other for the ten-thousand-gallon cistern tank it’s attached to under the Mint’s backyard. Holy shit, that was great. Nana wasn’t joking around.
After Eddie and Jack warned us that ten thousand gallons could be gone in no time just from cleaning up the backlog of filth in the neighborhood, we decided to let people take three gallons per person per week from the cistern to go with their other water, and we encouraged them to drink it for their health. The first thing that happened, though: people started turning up with clean hair. I did get a laugh out of that.
Having more water to drink is an enormous relief, especially for Alma and the baby.
It’s only been a year since Tasha died. Before that, four of the Beldings got poisoned by chemicals that spewed from the wrecked train and one of them got blown up. After Tasha, there was that monster Chas who made her pregnant. Now Nana. That makes eight people dead from only our little neighborhood since the sun zapped us sixteen months ago. No, there’s nine. Tasha’s baby died, too—my little niece or nephew, I don’t know which.
Then there’s the people who never came home, like Alma’s parents and some people down our block I didn’t know. Plus, the folks out in the world we’re worried about: Uncle Pete, our neighbor Sonja and her son Cesar, Eddie’s brother Uncle Wayne and his girlfriend. And my dad Jimmy Simms out in California, or wherever he is. So many people who left the neighborhood, who didn’t have anywhere to go but wandered off anyway and might be dead now—there were dozens of them. And who knows how many people died from the solar ejection itself, between car wrecks and plane crashes and fucked-up hospitals, when all the electronics stopped dead in the same freaking second?
And that’s just around here. I figure the solar pulse must have hit the whole daylight side of the planet. That would be all of the United States—or what used to be the United States—Mexico, Canada, Central and South America, the Caribbean Isles. The pulse hit in the middle of the day here. It could’ve hit the western edge of Europe, too, or part of Africa or the eastern parts of Asia, with all the islands over there. Shit, where’s Australia exactly? They might be screwed, or Iceland or Greenland or the science stations in Antarctica where, without electronics, those folks would have died on the spot.
In the months soon after the sun zapped us, I used to stare at Nana’s globe and spin it around, thinking about what the EMP did to us. I never tried to figure out exactly where it hit, and I could’ve made a solid guess. But the thought of it was too overwhelming: all that death—and the suffering that’s sometimes worse than death.
I don’t know if Nana was right and God’s punishing us for ruining the planet. It could be that God is pissed off for eternity and we’re stuck with it. But to think like that strips my hope away, and my heart won’t beat without hope. It just won’t.
We might be doomed, but I’m going to hope forever, no matter the evidence, that we are not.
Mazie spends more and more time over here, even overnight sometimes. It’s Mazie who’s taking the loss of Nana hardest. She mopes around on her own too often instead of playing with the Zizzo kids. Nana was more of a friend to Mazie than her own mother will ever be. I have to do something for Mazie.
“I have a gift for you, Tater Tot,” I say one day when she’s sitting alone on our patio, spacing out. I hand her a decorated wooden box with a pair of Nana’s earrings inside it, plus a necklace of real gold with a ruby pendant. “These are things of Nana’s that you can take care of and save for when you grow up.”
“Wow, Keno. Really?” I’ve never seen such awe on Mazie’s face.
“Nana would want you to have them. And I have this that you can wear now.” I drop a small necklace of multicolored hippie beads into Mazie’s hand—a necklace that Nana wore sometimes for fun. “You’ll have to be careful not to break it, but you’re pretty big now and I think you can take care of it.”
“Sure I can.” Mazie puts on the necklace. Her face lights up with the reds and blues of the beads, plus a rush of excitement. Then she latches her arms around my neck and hugs the breath clear out of me. “Will you be my best friend now?”
“I’ll be your best friend forever.”
“Keno?” The corners of Mazie’s lips turn down.
“Yeah?”
“I forgot what tater tots are like.”
Aww, man. I cuddle up with Mazie and tell her everything I know about tater tots, and how I started calling her that when she was about three and always wanted more of them.
The Mint people stay to themselves now, which is great by me. We moved Mom in here at Nana’s house—I guess it’s our house, now. Mom sleeps in the old game room with no privacy, but she says she doesn’t care; she’s just relieved to get away from Jeri and Grandpa. Sometimes she takes Eddie’s bed when he stays with Phil.
I don’t know what they’re doing over at the Mint. We let Grandpa out of the cellar and took the garage keys away from him.
Not sure I’ll ever forgive him for threatening to shoot us, but he’s been quiet lately, so I’m grateful for that. He could be doing anything, though—like wasting that water, or pumping it into buckets and hiding it under his bed. Thinking about what Grandpa might be up to shuts my brain down. I can’t even go there.
Jack hasn’t come for dinner since the day of Nana’s funeral. Alma and I went to see him a couple of times. He’s too goddamned sad to be okay, but Jack is a tough old guy, and he’s philosophical. He still does his neighborhood chores, so he’s not hiding out or wasting away. That gives me hope for Jack. He seems to know he’ll always be sad, and he’s resigned to it.
Really, if anyone’s going to waste away from heartbreak without Nana in the world, it might be Grandpa. He doesn’t have his anger at her to keep him going anymore. He looks half-dead already. I can’t think about that, either.
CHAPTER 20
Because I made that promise to Nana about getting us some electricity, and since our food security depends on freezers, I’m spending winter nights digging through Nana’s books. I found instructions for building solar arrays and climbed all over the roof when the weather let me.
Our panels are fancy and industrial compared to the ones in the book. Even if we rig up something using our panels with this setup, it will only give us power during sunlight. We can’t run freezers with it. I know there’s a way to get our panels to generate power around the clock, but I don’t have it figured out. Windmills are just as frustrating. We don’t have the parts we need to make any of this stuff work.
I wanted us to have freezers in time for the broccoli and greens, the first fresh veggies we’ll get in March. But that’s not gonna happen. I’ve tried so damned hard to get freezers running, and I get disappointed every single time.
I’m failing Alma. What if I can’t keep her alive? Maybe she knows this. Maybe she’s lost faith in me. Man, I hope not.
Tonight, Eddie’s staying with Phil, and Mom took Milo and Mazie to visit their parents.
I’m in bed with Alma, and it would be a perfect time to make hot, passionate love, but she’s being all cold and stiff.
“What is it, Alma?” I ask her. “Is it the grief?” And then a more frightening idea pops into my head. “Is something wrong with the baby? Are you sick?” My hands are poised behind her back where she’s facing away from me. I want to touch her and hug her, maybe cry with her. I feel so lonely when she’s like this.
She sighs and looks over her shoulder at me. “I’m not sick, and, as far as I know, the baby is fine. You don’t need to worry.”
“But how can I keep from worrying when you haven’t been yourself for weeks?”
“It’s not you, Keno. I just don’t… I don’t feel like talking about it, okay?”
“I don’t get that, but if you say so.” I slump down in the bed, working my pillow.
Then someone bangs on the front door. Shit. No one does that at night anymore. I yank on some pants a
nd bound down the stairs. It’s Silas and Grandpa.
Before I can say a word, Silas blurts out, “I was patrolling and found Hank by the park, swinging this damned machete. Almost shot him before I realized who he was.” Silas holds up the enormous machete; it gleams in the moonlight.
“Shit, Grandpa. What were you doing down there? You coulda got killed!”
“No one else is doing anything about prowlers. Figured I’d do it myself.”
“Hank,” Silas says, “I was watching for prowlers. That’s how I found you. We patrol night and day. You oughta know that.”
“I’ll take the machete,” I say to Silas. “Thanks for bringing him home.”
“Not a problem. But we can’t have him doing this, you know.”
“Yup. Grandpa, am I gonna have to lock you in the cellar again? You can’t go around doing crazy shit like this.”
“How crazy is it to let prowlers roam around here all the time?”
“Shut up, Grandpa, and get in here.”
He grumbles, but he steps inside.
“Sorry, Silas.”
“Goodnight.” Silas walks away, shaking his head.
I close the door and whirl around to Grandpa. Alma’s watching from the top of the stairs.
“Grandpa, you have to sleep here so I can keep an eye on you. Go upstairs to the futon.”
“Where you puttin’ my machete?”
“None of your business. Go upstairs.”
“Don’t want to climb those stairs.”
“If you can walk to the park, you can climb the damn stairs.”
“Shit,” he says. “You’ve got no respect for your elders, boy.”
“I’ll give you respect when you earn it.”
Grandpa stands there huffing at me. From the look on his face, he wants to break me in two. The feeling is mutual. He shuffles up the stairs but keeps glaring at me.
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