by Mic Roland
Martin pointed to Susan’s low-top fashion boots. “We’ve got a good bit of walking ahead of us. You should change out of those city shoes. Your sneakers would be a lot better for walking in.”
“That’s okay. These are pretty comfortable.”
“Suit yourself.” Martin shrugged. “I’ll take the wheels end again. You take the handle.” He tucked his walking stick under his arm and maneuvered them through the brush, down closer to the water’s edge. His legs ached, making his steps unsteady. He hoped that going down nearer the shore would hide the dead man from view. It did not.
Susan dropped the handle of her bag and gasped. “There’s a man laying on the ground up there. You said there wasn’t anyone hurt out here.”
“You asked about ‘on the road’.”
She shot him a stern glare. His gray-area mincing was not appreciated.
“I saw him when I went to check on things.” Martin whispered. “I didn’t want to upset you.”
“Too late for that! Is he hurt? Or is he…?”
“Yeah, I think he’s dead. That’s the crook I was telling about who was pinned down last night. Looks like his friends didn’t get him out.”
“We should go check or something, right?”
“In normal times, I’d say yes. But, these aren’t normal times. I’m guessing that’s blood beside him and a lot of it. There’s nothing we’ll be able to do for him. I couldn’t call 911…or anyone else. My phone still says there’s no cell service. And, we don’t know if any of his buddies are still up there.”
Susan crouched a bit and looked around. “Oh.”
“What we do need to do,” Martin whispered. “Is to get away from here as quickly and quietly as we can and get you safely up to a hotel so you don’t have to spend any more nights in the woods.” Martin lifted the handle and put it in her hands.
“I suppose you’re right.” She continued to stare at the dead man. “I’ve never seen a dead person before. I feel kinda sick.”
“Then it would be best not to look.” Martin pulled at his end of the roller bag, and the two continued walking. Susan stumbled a few times since she kept looking back towards the body.
After they had walked far enough around the reservoir that 93 was obscured by trees, Martin stopped. “We’re going to have to climb this fence, I’m afraid,” he said. “The fence is curving back around and I don’t see any breaks. How about I help you over first, then hand over your things?” Susan nodded.
She climbed the fence unsteadily. Martin occasionally flinched as if about to help her, but stopped when he realized where his hands would have to go. Susan rolled over the bar and dropped to the other side. Martin hefted the bundle up and over. It felt twice as heavy as he remembered. He scrambled up and over the fence.
“Well, now we have a choice,” he said. “Back down the ramp is 93. We take that north. That’s the direct route up to the hotels. Or, we can go up the ramp and take Route 28. The two run parallel-ish, but 28 would be longer. Which would you prefer?”
“28 sounds fine by me,” she said. “I’ve had quite enough of the highway. I want a ‘road less traveled’ about now.”
“Okay, 28 it is. Maybe we’ll find a store open or something. We’ll be wanting more to eat than a half a bagel and need to get more water too.” He shook his empty water bottle.
“And we should tell people about that guy laying back there,” she added. “What if there were other hurt people back there?”
Shortly after reentering the old suburb of Stoneham, Martin and Susan came upon a crowded Mobil station. Despite the early hour, long lines of cars were already lined up on both streets. A few engines idled. Here and there, a person stood between the cars with a gas can at their feet. Other people stood in clusters chatting, sometimes laughing.
“They look like they’re camped out to buy the latest iPhone or something,” Martin said. “From the look of things, they’ll be here a long time. Without power, the pumps won’t work, but they look like they plan to wait.”
“Hope, maybe?”
Martin and Susan threaded through the line to the little station building. Inside, Martin found several people sitting on rust-mottled metal chairs, discussing when the power would come back on. Clearly, they were just waiting for it. Martin interrupted and told them about the gunfight. A couple of the men had heard shots, but did not seem interested in details. Martin tried to tell them about the dead body on 93, and how there might be hurt people out on the highway, but the consensus was that Martin was mistaken and watched too much television. They resumed theorizing about the outage.
Whatever, Martin thought. So much for doing one’s civic duty.
“I could use a little girls’ room,” said Susan.
Martin spotted two keys hanging on the wall. They had grease-smeared Mickey and Minnie tags hanging from them. “Here you go. I’m going to look for some water.” He found a vending machine, but the door was unlocked and the bins cleaned out.
“Rats. I was hoping for some snacks for the road,” he said to himself. A soda vending machine was likewise open and empty. Martin walked around the building and found a garden hose attached to a faucet. There was still pressure. The water tasted strongly of iron, but was better than nothing. He drank his fill then topped off his bottle.
Susan returned with a sour expression. “I should have used the woods like you suggested. That was more disgusting than any woods.”
Martin suppressed his I-told-you-so urges. “Here, drink deep from this. I’ll refill it for the road.” The iron water only deepened her sour expression. “I know, I know,” Martin said. “But we need to be drinking more water. We’ll see if we can find better, but for now, at least we’ll have this.”
While she drank, Martin continued. “I tried to tell the guys inside about the fight on 93 last night, and the dead guy, but they didn’t care. I don’t think they believed me.”
Susan pointed across the street. “Hey. People are going in that Friendly’s Restaurant. It must be open.”
“Great.” Martin said. “Let’s go see if they have anything to eat. I’ll tell them about the dead guy.”
The inside of the restaurant was lit only by the daylight coming through the many windows. All of the booths and tables were full of people. Most sat quietly. A few carried on hushed conversations. No one had plates in front of them, only red cups.
A large-boned woman in a brown apron stood behind the counter. Her face clearly had a go-away expression, but Martin approached her anyway.
“Hi, excuse me. There was a shooting last night on 93, back there by Spot Pond. You probably heard the shots, right?” The woman’s eyes turned to fix on Martin, but her expression remained unchanged.
“There was a lot of shooting last night on 93. We were okay behind some rocks, but there’s a guy laying out there beside the guardrail, dead, we think. Our phones don’t work, or we would have called 911. So we thought that we should…” Martin’s voice trailed off. His civic duty was falling on stony ground again.
“Our phones don’t work either,” the large-boned woman said.
“I suppose not, I mean, it doesn’t seem like anyone’s phones are, but we just thought we should tell someone. There could be others up there, hurt…”
“That’s the police’s job, not mine. Is there anything else?” Her tone suggested that there should be nothing else and that Martin should move along.
Martin stepped back, frustrated at the woman’s indifference. He shifted to more immediate needs. “You wouldn’t happen to have…”
The large woman preempted Martin’s question with a canned statement that she was clearly tired of making. “No, we don’t got any food. Power’s out. Everything’s spoiled. Sorry.” Her last word was anything but apologetic.
“Oh. Not even some…”
“Nope.” She took a breath then launched into her second canned statement. “No bread, no muffins, no buns. That stuff was gone yesterday. All I got now is rotten meat, melted ice
cream and spoiled diary.”
“What about water?” asked Susan.
The woman was taken aback for a moment. “Yeah, I guess I got water, but there ain’t no ice or anything, and you’ll have to share a cup ‘cuz I’m running low.”
“That’s okay,” said Susan cheerily. The woman shuffled slowly into the kitchen.
“Weird that no one seems to care if anyone’s hurt back there,” said Martin.
“Maybe shootings aren’t all that rare here,” Susan offered. “Boston certainly isn’t like Chicago or anything. I could never live in a place like that, but even here, they happen. People get used to them, I suppose.”
“I don’t think I could get used to that,” Martin said, mostly to himself.
The large woman returned with a red plastic cup. Instead of offering the cup to Susan’s outstretched hand, she kept the cup close to her apron.
“That’ll be five bucks.”
“What?” Susan’s voice had a tinge of outrage.
“Sounds perfectly reasonable, ma’am. Thank you.” Martin stepped up to the woman and pulled a bill from his wallet. Susan looked dismayed at both of them. “I assume this is for the cup.” The woman nodded. “So we could get a refill?” The woman glowered, but nodded.
Martin gestured towards the far end of the counter. “Let’s go stand over there and enjoy our water, shall we?”
“Five dollars for a glass of water?” Susan said in a scolding whisper. “And you just paid it?”
“I know, I know, but we needed more water. And it tastes better than the gas station water, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah, but still…”
“We needed water more than I needed the five bucks.”
The angry furrows in Susan’s face disappeared. “Huh. The water-and-diamonds paradox.”
“The what?”
“It was one of those things Mr. Skinner used to talk about. One is useless, yet expensive. The other is vital, yet cheap. Value systems. I always thought it was sort of silly and abstract when he was talking about it, but I just experienced it. Weird.”
“Hmm. Water and diamonds, eh? I’m going to guess that water will be treated like diamonds down here when the pumps run out of backup power. Drink up. I’ll see if I can get our ‘free’ refill before our charming hostess changes her mind. We can take it with us.”
Outside of the restaurant, Susan kept looking back. “Did you notice? All those people just sitting in a restaurant that had no food.”
“I thought it was odd too. Since this outage looks like a major one, you’d think they would be home getting things squared away, or something.”
“Hmm,” Susan mused. “I didn’t do all that much in that last outage. I lit a few candles. Ate cold food. But it never occurred to me to go sit in a restaurant that also had no power or food.”
“This is only the second day, so maybe they’re still in that denial stage,” guessed Martin. “Biding time with familiar routines, waiting for somebody somewhere to flip the switch and make everything go back to normal.”
The walk up Route 28 seemed ploddingly slow. Martin’s legs still ached. Block after block seemed the same. Martin had time to study the patterns of the houses around them. Here and there were the occasional big old farmhouse from the 1800s, back when the area was mostly farms growing food for the city folks. Between the big farm houses were bungalows from the 1930s, little capes from the post-war 40s, and ranches from the 50s. A few splits from the 60s must have filled in the last of the old fields and forests. Land that had grown food a hundred years ago had become a continuous mat of houses and tiny yards.
Toys lay strewn in those yards. Minivans were parked in driveways. The scene could have been any autumn Sunday morning, except for it being Tuesday. The sameness of all the little yards, hedges and homes made it feel like they were making no progress at all. The gray day gave the neighborhoods an air of bleak uniformity. Now and then, a car would turn onto 28 and travel north. The sound of a generator could be heard humming somewhere a block or two away.
Martin and Susan did not talk much. Martin was lost in his own thoughts. How far had they traveled? It felt like many miles, but probably wasn’t. His plan to walk home had not counted on delays from helping someone else. Part of him wanted to resent Susan for slowing him down, but resentment was a fire that would not light. He had a cozy home to get to. She did not. He had his comfy chair and books to look forward to. All she had was trundling along behind her in a roller bag. The least he could do was to get her set up in a hotel for the night.
He tried to focus on the future. After his good deed was completed, he could make better time. He had a golf course marked on his map as a way point. From Google Earth, it looked like it had a fair amount of woods and a pond. Could he get that far before nightfall? Such a gray day would turn dark sooner than usual. Would twilight find him anywhere suitable for an overnight camp if he did not reach the golf course? He did not relish the idea of traveling after dark through an unfamiliar area.
“Hey,” Susan called from behind him. “Could we take a break? I’m getting kinda tired.”
Martin snapped out of his million-questions trance. “Oh sure. Sorry.” He pointed to a low concrete retaining wall along the sidewalk at the next house. Susan nodded.
She sat down heavily then flopped onto her back over the brown stubbly yard. “Oh, this feels good.”
Martin sat down, blew out a long sigh. They had not been traveling long, so he felt embarrassed to admit that it did feel good to rest. He was certainly no triathlete. He consoled himself that they were both still tired from the previous day’s adventures and the cold night sleeping in the woods, sitting up, afforded little good rest.
Whether those were reasons or excuses, Martin resolved to make better time by pulling Susan’s load and his backpack. She could probably walk faster if unencumbered.
Perhaps, he thought, if he refreshed his feet, he would feel more perky. He took off his shoes and socks.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Changing socks. I’ve found that on long hikes, it helps to let my feet air out now and then. Happy feet are…um…no…that’s not how it starts. Never mind. I forget how that goes. Anyhow, I probably should have done this before we started out this morning, but it felt way too cold for bare feet. What about you? Even if you don’t want to change shoes, it would do your feet some good to…”
Susan sat up quickly. “No no. I just need a rest. That’s all.” She tucked her feet behind her.
Martin shrugged. “Whatever.” He realized that she only had few miles left to go, so perhaps it was not all that necessary. He put on fresh socks and clipped his old ones to the side of his bag.
“How about I pull your load for awhile. Give you break,” Martin offered.
“Okay, but only for a little while.”
As they walked further up 28, more cars passed by. A few people walked in from side streets to trudge up or down the street. Ahead, Martin could see more activity. The gas station on the far side of the intersection had lines of cars and people like the Mobil station had. The convenience store parking lot on the near side had a dozen people clustered around between parked cars. An imposing figure of a man with a gray crewcut stood in front of the store.
Susan read the sign out loud. “Andrew’s Market. Looks like they’re open.”
“Cool. Maybe they some food,” Martin suggested. They moved in closer. The tall man glowered, arms folded high across his barrel chest. He blocked the convenience store’s door. His posture alone told Martin that something was not right. Seeing the grip of pistol sticking out of his waistband confirmed it.
A fleshy little man in pajama pants and slippers was pleading with the gray-haired man. Several roundish women, also in pajama pants or sweats stood behind pajama man, urging him on.
“Aw c’mon Andrew. We’re outta food. The wife’s hungry. Stop n’ Shop is way too far to walk.”
“Cash only,” said Andrew with a vague accent.
“I already told ya, we don’t got cash. My EBT balance is good, I swear. Same as cash! You always took my card before, remember?”
“That was then. No power now. No card reader. Cash only.” It was a slavic accent: Russian maybe.
Several in the crowd, apparently in the same predicament as pajama man, murmurred amongst themselves.
“You could write down how much we buy,” said one of the round women. “And when the power comes back on…”
“No writing down. Cash.”
Martin stepped up beside pajama man. “I’ve got cash.” He showed the corner of a $20 bill folded in his hand. Pajama man scowled at Martin. The women behind him were more vocal in their disapproval.
“Okay,” said Andrew. “You go in.” He pulled open the door, but took a quick step in front of pajama man who made a move towards the open door. After Martin and Susan had gone through and the door closed behind them, Andrew resumed his Black Knight pose. Martin could not make out the more heated exchanges through the glass, but it was clear the pajama folk were upset.
“I don’t know if you’ll find much in here to spend your 20 bucks on,” said Susan. She pointed to the rows of low shelf units, mostly empty.
“Whoa. Looks like the locusts have been here, “ said Martin. Colorful signs advertised for chips and candy, but the racks were empty. Helpful labels identified where canned soups, crackers, cookies and snacks would be, but the shelves were bare.
“Locusts don’t like artichoke hearts…” Susan held up two jars. “…or olives.” What remained on the shelves were inedible goods: cat litter, laundry soap, sandwich bags and air fresheners. “Not much in here to make a meal out of. There’s some ketchup and mayonnaise here, and a bottle of vinegar.”
The woman behind the counter watched them carefully. She looked apprehensive, so Martin approached casually, smiling broadly.
“Business has been pretty good, I see.” He pointed to the empty candy racks beside her.