by Diane Cook
“Are we allowed?” Debra asked, voicing the Community’s hesitation.
“Who cares if we are allowed,” Carl said. “The question is, Is this something we want to do?”
“Well, I care if we are allowed because I don’t want to get in trouble,” Debra whispered as though worried someone other than them was listening.
“If we get in trouble, we get in trouble,” said Carl.
“But this seems like a big rule to break if it’s a rule at all. I worry we’d get kicked out.”
“We won’t get kicked out,” said Carl.
“How do you know?” asked Dr. Harold.
“We won’t get kicked out. It’s not in the Manual.”
“We can definitely get kicked out for breaking some rules.”
“But this isn’t one.”
“Are you sure about that?” Dr. Harold said. “Are you sure it doesn’t say that in the Manual?” He glanced at Debra eagerly. No doubt he was attempting to defend her.
Carl sighed. “I mean, yes, I guess so. I don’t know.” His shoulders and face drooped into a superior despair at having to field such inane questions.
The truck driver whistled, then called, “There’s plenty of room for you all, if that’s the problem.”
“One second, sir,” called Glen.
“When did you get so scared, Debra?” said Val, in a pitying tone. She touched her arm quickly, consolingly. But she was trying to make her feel foolish. Debra growled at Val, and Val smirked back.
Bea held her hand up. “I really don’t remember there being any rule about rides, Debra.” She paused.
And Carl erupted, “Exactly, this is stupid.”
“I’m not finished, Carl,” Bea said. Carl’s face fell. He knew he’d been baited. Debra’s face brightened. Bea continued, “But of course we can look in the Manual.” She said it calmly, even though she thought this was an idiotic endeavor. Just get in the fucking truck already, she wanted to scream. But she hated Carl and Val’s bullying ways more than she hated this time waste. If someone needed to look at the Manual to feel okay, then they looked at the Manual. It’s how they’d always operated. Carl and Val were becoming more ill-tempered about other people’s needs, and she wouldn’t have it. “Is that okay with everyone?” she cooed.
Everyone nodded except Carl and Val and, Bea noted, Agnes, who was paying close attention to the proceedings rather than playing Shadow Tap with Sister and Brother.
Val was carrying the Manual, and for a brief moment, she held it tightly and sneered at them, showing her teeth in threat. But she finally pulled it out, and also the folder of all the addenda that had accumulated over their years of walking, the result of new rules sent down from the Administration, and ever narrowing interpretations of wildness and wilderness.
As she gripped the cover to open it, the truck driver called out, clearly irritated now, “Well, I didn’t mean for it to be so hard. You want a ride or not? This ship has gotta go.”
They all looked at one another, at the Manual that looked so large and unwieldy, then at Debra, who frowned and looked longingly at the truck. “I just don’t want to get kicked out,” she said, even as they all moved urgently toward the rig.
Then they were hoisting one another onto the tall bed and hauling up the food bags, bedding rolls, the smoker, the garbage, the Manual, the Cast Iron, the Book Bag, all of their belongings. They sat dazed as the truck cranked into motion. Bea leaned against the side and propped her feet up. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had her feet up. Everything in her body sloshed back and forth, settling into an unknown ease. The wind in their hair was so different from when the wind just blew in across the plain, from somewhere else. This wind was soft like careful fingers. Then, as they picked up speed, it got wild and they were trying to push their hair out of their eyes.
The driver cranked open the back window so he could talk to them. He used to work in the Manufacturing Zone, he told them. “But that’s a lonely life,” he said. “Bleep. Bloop. Bleep. Bloop.” So he’d taken a job with the Shipping Districts, and now he sees a bit of this crazy country.
He seemed energized by the company. He barely breathed before launching into his next sentence, about a fish he caught in a river by the road. “Well, I didn’t catch it exactly. It just kind of flopped out of the water and onto the road. The river was flooded, I guess. There was water in the road. It was flopping there. So I grabbed it.”
They all looked at one another. What he was describing was against the rules, but they weren’t going to tell him that. So they just nodded.
“Of course,” the driver continued, “I didn’t know the first thing about how to prepare it. You all probably would have feasted. But I just threw it back. Wow, did it feel weird in my hands. Slippery and sharp. It smelt too. And it looked scared to shit. Which is also part of why I put it back. I hate to scare anything.” He rubbed at the scruff on his face. It made a sound Bea could hear over the roar of the engine. “I haven’t seen a fish in, well—” he said. “A live one, never. It kind of disgusted me, to be honest.”
He turned in his seat as the truck rumbled down the road. “Sorry again for scaring you, kiddos.”
Bea winced, afraid the truck might hit something without his eyes on the road. But what was there to hit? The road melted into the playa.
“Are there always this many cars?” Bea yelled.
“Ha, what do you mean? I haven’t seen any.”
“We’ve seen a lot.”
“Well,” he said, and rubbed his scruff again, and it made Bea tense in some long-forgotten way, like chalk screeching. He said, “It’s a holiday weekend. So maybe people are on the move. It would be mostly Ranger families, maybe a few from the Mines.”
“Is there a big town nearby?”
“Nearby? Not exactly. Nearest? Yes.”
“And so people in this town are allowed to just drive around this place?”
“Oh no, just this stretch of road. And you need permits. Place is a prison. Locked up tight.”
The rain was now spittle. Out at the edge of the playa they could see the clouds breaking. A morning rain, not a full day’s deluge. Steam rose off the playa, the mix of hot and cold and wet weaving a fine curtain in front of their eyes.
The driver peered at them using the rearview mirror. “Crazy what you’re doing, you know,” he said quietly, almost to himself. But Bea heard.
The driver cleared his throat. “Where you headed?”
“The next Post,” said Carl.
“Oh, yeah? What’ll you do there?”
Carl sighed and said nothing. His aim was mystery.
“Paperwork,” said Bea.
The driver laughed hard until he coughed, and it seemed like a real laugh. But she couldn’t be sure. “That’s rich,” he said, chuckling some more, repeating the word. “Paperwork.”
Bea said, “Yeah, I guess everyone has to do it. Our paperwork, your permits for the road.”
“Yep,” the driver said, a little wistfully.
“Lots of rules to follow,” she said. She was thoroughly enjoying this everyman conversation.
“For everyone but the Rangers,” the driver said, laughing joylessly.
“Oh, come on. I’m sure they have some rules,” Bea said. “Everyone has rules.” She knew for a fact Rangers followed rules, because she and Ranger Bob had bonded over their interest in following rules.
“Not everyone and not the Rangers,” the driver said, serious now. “No, the Rangers can pretty much do what they want, when they want, where they want. They’re in charge around here.”
Regret pulsed through Bea. Why did Glen have to be so old? If he’d been Carl’s age, maybe he would have known about the Rangers. They didn’t take Carl because he was a bastard, but wasn’t Glen everything they’d be looking for? If Glen had been a Ranger, Agnes would never have gotten sick. They could have lived here in an actual house. A home. She sighed and realized she was really missing her bed. What an absurd thing to
miss now, over five—six? seven?—years later, she thought. She looked at Glen. He was staring into the sky, a happy little smile on his face. Of course, she wouldn’t have met Glen if he’d been a Ranger. She wouldn’t have had Agnes if she’d been a Ranger’s wife. She’d have some other kid. Bea looked at Carl and saw he’d been listening to her conversation with the driver. His jaw was set, red heat rising into his face. She could read his mind. A life without rules had evaded him, because somehow he’d not understood that people who enforce rules don’t have to follow them. It was too much. How had this tragedy happened?
Bea groaned and lay down against the wooden flatbed. The vibration from the road and the might of the truck made her queasy.
Under the grime and the dirt of the truck bed, she could see streaks of purple paint that said something, possibly something important about this truck. Or something that had been important years ago. Perhaps it was nothing.
Agnes turned to her with wet eyes. She touched the truck bed.
“Isn’t it pretty, Mama?” she said.
Bea watched Agnes lick the rusted metal of the truck grate, exploring it fully. She thought of the way Agnes ran after rabbits, or climbed trees when they came across them. Of course she wasn’t sick anymore. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was there was nothing for her in the City. Schools were training grounds for jobs that needed filling. Rooftops didn’t have paths, flowers, gardens of vegetables. They had water-collection tanks, solar grids, cell towers, and barbed wire to guard it all. No one was ever outside unless they were going from one building to another. A few blocks from their building was one tree, gated so no one could touch it. Somehow, it still bloomed every spring and people came from all over to see its tissue-tender pink flowers. And when the petals later dropped, people crowded around the gate to try to catch those that drifted in the wind. The rest rotted around the trunk. It was one of ten trees left in the City. They were lucky to live near it.
The driver was saying something about buildings: “New buildings. All just built. It’s the new Post after the old one didn’t work.”
“Why didn’t it work?” Glen asked, always the seeker of knowledge.
The driver didn’t answer his question.
“This Post has hot springs. And the old cowboys built a little shack over it so it echoes.”
“What old cowboys?”
The trucker barreled on. “Sometimes it’s too hot. Like, it gets a surge of something awful from below. Can’t go in it then. It’ll burn your skin off. But I’m hoping to get a little soak in. My back. This seat.”
“How do you know when it’s too hot?” Debra asked.
“Ya throw some meat in it,” the driver said.
Dr. Harold elbowed Debra. “We’ve done that,” he stage-whispered to the group as though they didn’t know. Debra turned away without comment.
“It’s really nice,” the driver said of Post. “You’re going to love it.”
When they reached the top of a rise they didn’t know they’d been climbing, they saw Lower Post laid out ahead. Behind it a border ridge with a craggy surface that seemed impossible to fake. A carpet of sage lay all around the truck. They were finally past the playa.
The truck was hurtling down the road, their speed clear now that there was some visual landmark to gauge it. The Post would have seemed big, but it was dwarfed by everything: the expansive land, the endless sky, the humped shoulders of the border ridge. But Lower Post was man-made, and so, to Bea, it felt bigger than everything around it.
Of course, it was deserted.
“Remember, holiday weekend,” the driver said, shifting the truck, slowing it to a stop in an empty parking lot. “Long weekend too. They won’t open till Monday.”
“What day is today?”
“It’s Thursday. End of day. And you know what that means.” He sang these words as he hopped out of the cab and whipped a towel around his neck. “Soak time,” he sang again and jogged toward a shack set a ways off from the tight ring of Post buildings. The metal roof of the shack quivered against the horizon, steam shape-shifting it in front of their eyes.
They climbed down from the truck bed as awkwardly as they’d climbed up, asses in the air, feet dangling until the body shimmied over, clumsy handing off of heavy objects. Dinged fingers and a couple of broken grouse eggs.
This Post was the living version of the one they’d just passed. The buildings were whole and covered in fresh paint. The metal roofs gleamed. They were new, rust-free, admiral blue. Corrugated metal. Carl lobbed a rock and it clanged against the roof, hollow and bright, then slid down the pitch, falling back into his hand. He tossed the rock to Brother. The children played the new game in earnest.
The adults wandered the buildings.
Debra whistled. “This is a big fucking Post.”
Three larger buildings hid behind the main semicircle of buildings. They looked the same, had the same layout of windows, some curtained with cloth that still held the fold creases and others frosted. Inside one, a fluorescent light zapped on and off. They must have been bunks or barracks.
The inner circle of buildings looked official, and were labeled, officially. The Office, the Garage, the Horse Barn, the Arsenal. The Arsenal? Bea thought.
Aside from the erratic light in what must have been a bunkhouse bathroom, the rest of the Post was in shadow, and it became darker as the sun set. Even now, after all these years, Bea was still surprised by nightfall. Days never felt like they would finish. The sky was too big and filled with light until the very bitterest end. Sometimes it was as though the sun blinked out as suddenly as a lamp turning off. But she had noticed, long ago, in the first year, that the key to nighttime was in the clouds, if the sky held any that day. When it was time, the bottoms of the clouds turned black. They reflected the dark world below before Bea even registered that the darkness had arrived. The clouds revealed what everything else refused to accept. The clouds were the warning: Get the fire built and hunker down. The night has come. Above her, the bottoms of the clouds were dark as coal.
They unrolled skin tarps and beds. Some went for kindling, though the land was so manicured within the property that there wasn’t much, and they had to walk far for some dead sage on the outskirts.
Carl and Val built a fire that smoked and hissed and snapped the tiny dried branches to ash. It smelled like everything their lives had become. Under hot sun or around the fire on a cold night, their world was sticky with sage.
As they were getting their eating implements out, they heard the truck turn over and the tires begin to grind. The driver’s soak was over and now he was someone they would never see again. They watched his red taillights dissolve to pinpricks, then disappear. They looked down the road, hunting the horizon for more lights coming, but there were none. The traffic was gone. The holiday had begun, and they imagined no one would be coming by until Sunday. Bea counted on her fingers, naming the days of the week out loud for the first time in years, like they were words of a foreign language. Four days. Forlorn, she looked over at the campus of buildings and saw that life in the desert had already aged them. Anything in the middle of nowhere looked lonely, and all things lonely looked worn down.
“We’ll hunt tomorrow,” said Carl. “We’ll stay until it’s processed. By then we’ll know why the fuck we’re here.”
They made acorn cakes and portioned out some meat. It was a moonless night so far, and unless they sat against the fire, they couldn’t see their hands in front of them. In the distance they heard the sound of horses tremoloing their lips at the dark. Perhaps they were the horses of the Horse Barn, Bea thought and listened to their soft nibbles of grasses, the brush of their necks against one another. Bea noticed the darkness brought a quiet to the Community. They cleaned up. They went to bed. The silence was heavy, as though they were sullen and shaking off a fight.
* * *
In the morning, two horses stood in the corral in the middle of the buildings and watched the Community with what seem
ed like disdain. A hunting party left at dawn, and the rest of them timidly entered the steaming derelict shack for a soak. This felt ancient. A structure from long ago, somehow preserved even as the land was re-wilded.
Condensation dripped from the roof, the echo pinging between the water and the metal. The soft wood walls were etched with names and drawings. Taken out of context they seemed like ancient pictographs. An etched horse looked like a sign to communicate horses were nearby. But these were more recent history. From the days when local kids might have driven out here to hide from their parents, to imagine they were adult and free. Now, to the Community, it felt like salvation, as it probably had for everyone before them.
When Bea lowered herself into the warm water, it was almost too hot, and at first her skin cringed against the heat. But soon an ease she couldn’t remember feeling before settled over her. They all wept a little before they laughed. The hot spring filled an old concrete tub about the size of the flatbed they’d been on. They needed a stroke or two to reach the other side. The mineralized water was slimy, syrupy, and they flailed into the middle, then returned to the side, venturing out again and again, thrashing back to the pocked concrete edge, like kids learning to swim. Bea went under the water and listened to her heartbeat. She bobbed her ears slowly under, then out, under, then out, alive, dead, alive, dead. The sulfur would stay on their skin for days. It felt like a tonic.
Bea looked around for Agnes and saw the girl gingerly stick a toe into the water, then pull it out. She repeated, wincing. It had been a long time since she’d had a warm bath. It had only been brisk mountain streams for most of her memory. Bea swam over to her and put her arms up for Agnes to take. Agnes shook her head, but Bea didn’t lower her arms, and finally Agnes melted down into them and Bea carefully pulled her into the water, turning her around. Agnes was light in her arms, buoyed by the water’s mineral heft. Agnes laid her head on her mother’s shoulder and Bea felt her relax. The way her daughter clung to her, she was transported back to their apartment, desperately clinging to her daughter, who she was certain was about to take her last breath. Slipping back into that anxiety took mere seconds, and she felt her heart begin to pound beneath the water. But no, Bea reminded herself. She is well. She’s healthy. She’s safe. Not only that, she is extraordinary. You did it. She nodded to herself, but it only made her feel wistful.