by Nick Cole
I was different then, he said in the wind and the night.
When he reached the end of the valley he felt tired enough to stop. He thought about buttoning up the tank and sleeping on the floor.
I need rest. I know I am very sick.
If you die… Or if in the morning you cannot get up… No one will know. Eventually The Horde will find the fort. The machine gun won’t keep them away for long. Once it runs out of bullets, what then?
He drank some water and pressed on. He passed a conical mountain, and then came to the gas station that had burned down at the edge of the town that was the farthest limit the villagers would salvage.
Just a ways more.
The Old Man in the book is not his name. His name is Santiago. In the book he wanted the boy with him as he fought the fish. Just as I wanted my granddaughter with me.
He passed the blackened ruins and a little later the moon fell low in the sky.
He topped the rise and saw the village. He turned off the tank feeling the heat dissipate quickly. He was just a mile off from the village but he could see it below. It was a collection of sheds and huts built around an old processing plant. It was his home. He could see the field of broken glass glittering like the stars above.
He left the tank, feeling hot and sore.
I will walk home and go to my house and in the morning they will see the tank.
There has never been such a fish.
He knew he made little sense. But it seemed right not to wake anyone.
Let them sleep in the village one night longer. To have the village one more night. Then they can have the world.
My journey was like the one in the book.
That is the thing about books. You take their journey’s with you.
You came home with something more than just the remains of a fish.
The book was never about the fish.
He neared the sleeping village and passed through unseen.
Even the dogs are asleep.
I want to tell my granddaughter the lesson of the book. The lesson that they can beat you, but they cannot defeat you. I must tell her that.
At the door to his shed, he wondered if someone might live here now. His thoughts were scrambled and came in waves. But he knew it was the sickness and the fatigue.
He pushed open the door and heard its sound, knowing it as his own. He loved the sound of it. All was as he’d left it. Still holding his rucksack, he lit a candle and carried it to the desk where he kept the book. He looked at the cover for a long moment and then set down his pack.
Your must tell her that.
What?
They can beat you but they cannot defeat you.
He put the book on his bed and lit a fire in the stove.
My friend in the book is safe.
Maybe just some tea. Then sleep.
But when he sat on the bed to take off his new boots, he couldn’t get back up.
Be sure to tell her.
I will.
For just a moment he mumbled, then lay down.
He dreamt of lions, playing on distant beaches at sunset. His granddaughter was right next to him, watching, both of them silent. Her little hand in his old hand.
She was going out again. In the dark, she gathered all the tools she would need, and when she found the claw hammer her grandfather had let her carry, she placed it in her belt. It was like having him with her. She needed that.
On the way to the cantina for the tea that the old women made while they fried the sweet dough, she felt the cold earth on her toes. This was the best time of day, she thought. This was the time when they would meet and she would go out with him to salvage.
She looked at his shed as she had every morning, its silent, gray, unlived in look a memorial to her grandfather.
It’s a good thing. That way you will remember everything he taught you. You will need it out there.
But as she looked this morning, she saw the wispy smoke in the chimney of his shed and she was angry.
Someone has moved in! It’s too soon…
She charged toward the shed door, intending to wake the village with her rebuke at whoever had taken her grandpa’s shed as his own. But then she was running and hoping. Hoping he had come back.
Like she knew he would.
She found him sweaty and hot atop his cot, mumbling in his sleep. She kissed him but he did not recognize her in his fever. His body felt thin and gaunt.
She hurried back to her parent’s door, telling all in one burst that he had returned. Then to the kitchen to tell the women.
Back at the shed, her father knelt by the side of the cot, crying and talking softly to The Old Man. She would nurse him back to health. She would make him drink soup. They needed to kill one of the chickens. Then when he was well, they would go out again to salvage, and then she too was crying.
Her little brother came running to her as he always did.
‘There is something on the road. Something wonderful.’ He pulled her through the lanes of the village to the edge of the highway.
Alone and in pairs, the villagers approached the tank atop the hill as the morning sun rose behind it. She didn’t care. Even though it was the greatest salvage ever, it was nothing compared to what she cared about.
Epilogue
The Chief Excavator stood atop the scaffolding, the wind blowing at his jacket. He stepped back from the hole he had just made with the cutting tool.
‘It’s your turn.’
The Doctor of Antiquities stepped forward. He had campaigned long and hard for this day. Now that it was upon him, he didn’t want to go through with it. From theory to paper, to committees and hearings, it had been one thing. The game of academics. But now those questions would be answered. He would have to find something new to uncover because the riddle of the tank would be solved.
His heart beat rapidly as he moved his light toward the opening, his head close behind. Inside, a wrapped body was the first thing he saw. He knew it was a body. The first residents of the reoccupation of Old Tucson, the foundation of their culture, had prepared their bodies in the same manner. But those bodies had all been found in the graveyards of Starr Pass.
‘It’s true,’ he mumbled.
‘You were right?’ asked The Chief Excavator.
The Doctor stuck his head and light back in the hole.
‘It’s a body. Probably an early warlord. Maybe the first to conquer the area. There is something on top of the body. A book perhaps.’
A strong wind, a danger at this altitude, gusted past The Doctor’s head and turned the ancient book to fragments, floating and swirling about the inside of the tank.
‘Looked like a book, I should say.’
‘Any clue how they got the tank to the top of the tower?’ asked The Chief Excavator. The Doctor stepped back and pulled a plastic sheet over the opening to prevent further wind damage.
‘We’ll never know how they did that.” He took in the panorama of the world’s oldest still-populated city. Towers and buildings raced toward the heights above, the Space Elevator beyond that, its thin diamond line tracing away into the sky above.
‘That was never the point of this project. We wanted to know who was in here. It’s our city’s oldest monument and no one knows a thing about it.’
‘So who was he?’
‘Can we ever know? Probably not. We will make some guesses from what we know about the survivors of that period. But we can never know for sure.’
‘So we can just guess a little better, is that it?’
The Doctor put his hand on the tank, feeling its ancientness.
‘I can say one thing.’
‘What?’ asked the reporter who’d come out to the historic district to cover the story.
‘Whoever put him here, in a war machine of the period, which was impossible as we know it by their standards after the catastrophe, to hoist a multi-ton vehicle to the top of this tower, whoever it was, loved him very much. He was very importan
t to them. I can say that.’
The End
Author’s Thanks
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Copyright © 2011 by Nick Cole
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living, dead, or undead, is purely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author or publisher.
Various quotes within are from the novel The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., from THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA by Ernest Hemingway. Copyright © 1952 by Ernest Hemingway. Copyright renewed © 1980 by Mary Hemingway. All rights reserved.
Edition: March 2011