GOD IS a slick god. Temple knows. She knows because of all the crackerjack miracles still to be seen on this ruined globe.
Like those fish all disco-lit in the shallows. That was something, a marvel with no compare that she’s been witness to. It was deep night when she saw it, but the moon was so bright it cast hard shadows everywhere on the island. So bright it was almost brighter than daytime because she could see things clearer, as if the sun were criminal to the truth, as if her eyes were eyes of night. She left the lighthouse and went down to the beach to look at the moon pure and straight, and she stood in the shallows and let her feet sink into the sand as the patter-waves tickled her ankles. And that’s when she saw it, a school of tiny fish, all darting around like marbles in a chalk circle, and they were lit up electric, mostly silver but some gold and pink too. They came and danced around her ankles, and she could feel their little electric fish bodies, and it was like she was standing under the moon and in the moon at the same time. And that was something she hadn’t seen before. A decade and a half, thereabouts, roaming the planet earth, and she’s never seen that before.
And you could say the world has gone to black damnation, and you could say the children of Cain are holding sway over the good and the righteous – but here’s what Temple knows: she knows that whatever hell the world went to, and whatever evil she’s perpetrated her own self, and whatever series of cursed misfortunes brought her down here to this island to be harboured away from the order of mankind, well, all those things are what put her there that night to stand amid the Daylight Moon and the Miracle of the Fish, which she wouldn’t of got to see otherwise.
See, God is a slick god. He makes it so you don’t miss out on nothing you’re supposed to witness first-hand.
*
She sleeps in an abandoned lighthouse at the top of a bluff. At the base there’s a circular room with a fireplace where she cooks fish in a blackened iron pot. The first night she discovered the hatch in the floor that opens into a dank storage room. There she found candles, fishhooks, a first-aid kit and a flare gun with a box of oxidized rounds. She tried one, but it was dead.
In the mornings she digs for pignuts in the underbrush and checks her nets for fish. She leaves her sneakers in the lighthouse; she likes the feel of the hot sand on the soles of her feet, the Florida beach grass between her toes. The palm trees are like bushes in the air, their brittle, dead fronds like a skirt of bones around the tall trunks, rattling in the breeze.
At noon every day, she climbs the spiral stairs to the top of the signal tower, pausing at the middle landing to catch her breath and feel the sun on her face from the grimy window. At the top, she walks the catwalk once around, gazing out over the illimitable sea, and then, towards the mainland coast, the rocky cusp of the blight continent. Sometimes she stops to look at the inverted hemisphere of the light itself, that blind glass optic, like a cauldron turned on its side and covered with a thousand square mirrors.
She can see her reflection there, clear and multifarious. An army of her.
Afternoons, she looks through the unrotted magazines she found lining some boxes of kerosene. The words mean nothing to her, but the pictures she likes. They evoke places she has never been – crowds of the sharply dressed hailing the arrival of someone in a long black car, people in white suits reclining on couches in homes where there’s no blood crusted on the walls, women in undergarments on backdrops of seamless white. Abstract heaven, that white – where could such a white exist? If she had all the white paint left in the world, what would go untouched by her brush? She closes her eyes and thinks about it.
It can be cold at night. She keeps the fire going and pulls her army jacket tighter around her torso and listens to the ocean wind whistling loud through the hollow flute of her tall home.
*
Miracle, or augury maybe – because the morning after the glowing fish, she finds the body on the beach. She sees it during her morning walk around the island to check the nets; she finds it on the north point of the teardrop land mass, near the shoal.
At first it is a black shape against the white sand, and she studies it from a distance, measures it with her fingers up to her eye.
Too small to be a person, unless it’s folded double or half buried. Which it could be.
She looks around. The wind blowing through the grass above the shore makes a peaceful sound.
She sits and studies the thing and waits for movement.
The shoal is bigger today. It keeps getting bigger. When she first came the island seemed like a long way off from the mainland. She swam to it, using an empty red and white cooler to help keep her afloat in the currents. That was months ago. Since then the island has got bigger, the season pulling the water out further and further every night, drawing the island closer to the mainland. There is a spit of reefy rock extending out from the shore of the mainland and pointing towards the island, and there are large fragments of jutting coral reaching in the other direction from the island. Like the fingers of God and Adam, and each day they come closer to touching as the water retreats and gets shallower along the shoal.
But it still seems safe. The breakers on the reef are violent and thunderous. You wouldn’t be able to get across the shoal without busting yourself to pieces on the rock. Not yet at least.
The shape doesn’t move, so she stands and approaches it carefully.
It’s a man, buried face down in the sand, the tail of his flannel shirt whipping back and forth in the wind. There’s something about the way his legs are arranged, one knee up by the small of his back, that tells her his back is broken. There’s sand in his hair, and his fingernails are torn and blue.
She looks around again. Then she raises her foot and pokes the man’s back with her toe. Nothing happens so she pokes him again, harder.
That’s when he starts squirming.
There are muffled sounds coming from his throat, strained grunts and growls – frustration and pathos rather than suffering or pain. His arms begin to sweep the sand as if to make an angel. And there’s a writhing, rippling movement that goes through the muscles of his body, as of a broken toy twitching with mechanical repetition, unable to right itself.
Meatskin, she says aloud.
One of the hands catches at her ankle, but she kicks it off.
She sits down beside him, leans back on her hands and braces her feet up against the torso and pushes so that the body flips over face up, leaving a crooked, wet indentation in the sand.
One arm is still flailing, but the other is caught under his back so she stays on that side of him and kneels over his exposed face.
The jaw is missing altogether, along with one of the eyes. The face is blistered black and torn. A flap of skin on the cheekbone is pulled back and pasted with wet sand, revealing the yellow-white of bone and cartilage underneath. The place where the eye was is now a mushy soup of thick, clear fluid mixed with blood, like ketchup eggs. There’s a string of kelp sticking out of the nose that makes him look almost comical – as though someone has played a practical joke on him.
But the rightness of his face is distorted by the missing mandible. Even revolting things can be made to look whole if there is a symmetry to them but with the jaw gone, the face looks squat and the neck looks absurdly equine.
She moves her fingers back and forth before his one good eye, and the eye rolls around in its socket trying to follow the movement but stuttering in its focus. Then she puts her fingers down where the mouth would be. He has a set of upper teeth, cracked and brittle, but nothing beneath to bite down against. When she puts her fingers there, she can see the tendons tucked in behind his teeth clicking away in a radial pattern. There are milky white bones jutting out where the mandible would be attached and yellow ligaments like rubber bands stretching and relaxing, stretching and relaxing, with the ghost motion of chewing.
What you gonna do? she says. Bite me? I think your biting days are gone away, mister.
She takes her hand away from his face and sits back, looking at him.
He gets his head shifted in her direction and keeps squirming.
Stop fightin against yourself, she says. Your back’s broke. You ain’t going nowhere. This is just about the end of your days.
She sighs and casts a gaze over the rocky shoal in the distance, the wide flat mainland beyond.
What’d you come here for anyway, meatskin? she says. Did you smell some girlblood carried on the wind? Did you just have to have some? I know you didn’t swim here. Too slow and stupid for that.
There is a gurgle in his throat and a blue crab bursts out from the sandy exposed end of the windpipe and scurries away.
You know what I think? she says. I think you tried to climb across those rocks. And I think you got picked up by those waves and got bust apart pretty good. That’s what I think. What do you say about that?
He has worked the arm free from underneath him and reaches towards her. But the fingers fall short by inches and dig furrows in the sand.
Well, she says, you shoulda been here last night. There was a moon so big you could just about reach up and pluck it out of the sky. And these fish, all electric like, buzzing in circles round my ankles. It was something else, mister. I’m telling you, a miracle if ever there was one.
She looks at the rolling eye and the shuddering torso.
Maybe you ain’t so interested in miracles. But still and all, you can cherish a miracle without deserving one. We’re all of us beholden to the beauty of the world, even the bad ones of us. Maybe the bad ones most of all.
She sighs, deep and long.
Anyway, she says, I guess you heard enough of my palaver. Listen to me, I’m doin enough jawing for the both of us. Enough jawing for the both of us – get it?
She laughs at her joke, and her laughter trails off as she stands and brushes the sand off her palms and looks out over the water to the mainland. Then she walks up to a stand of palm trees above the beach and looks in the grassy undergrowth, stomping around with her feet until she finds what she’s looking for. It’s a big rock, bigger than a football. It takes her half an hour to dig around it with a stick and extract it from the earth. Nature doesn’t like to be tinkered with.
Then she carries the rock back down to the beach where the man is lying mostly still.
When he sees her, he comes to life again and begins squirming and shuddering and guggling his throat.
Anyway, she says to him, you’re the first one that got here. That counts, I guess. It makes you like Christopher Columbus or something. But this tide and all – you wanna bet there’s more of you coming? You wanna bet there’s all your slug friends on their way? That’s a pretty safe bet, I’d say.
She nods and looks out over the shoal again.
Okay then, she says, lifting the rock up over her head and bringing it down on his face with a thick wet crunch.
The arms are still moving, but she knows that happens for a while afterwards sometimes. She lifts the rock again and brings it down on the head twice more just to make sure.
Then she leaves the rock where it is, like a headstone, and goes down to her fishing net and finds a medium-sized fish in it and takes the fish back up to the lighthouse where she cooks it over a fire and eats it with salt and pepper.
Then she climbs the steps to the top of the tower and goes out on the catwalk and looks far off towards the mainland.
She kneels down and puts her chin against the cold metal railing and says:
I reckon it’s time to move along again.
THAT NIGHT, by firelight, she removes from the hatch in the floor the things she stowed there when she first arrived. The cooler, the canteen, the pistol with two good rounds left in it. Later, she takes the gurkha knife and the pocket stone down to the beach and sits on the sand whetting the edge of it in long smooth strokes. She takes her time with this, sitting there under the moon for the better part of an hour, until she can taste the sharpness of the blade with her tongue. It’s a good blade, a foot long with an inward curve to it. It whistles when she swings it through the air.
She sleeps soundly that night but wakes herself up just before dawn and gathers her things.
She puts the knife and the pistol and the canteen and her panama hat into the cooler and drags it down to the beach. Then she walks back up to the lighthouse to say goodbye.
It’s a sorry thing to leave your home, and this one’s been good to her. She feels like a pea at the base of that tallboy tower. She climbs the steps one last time to the catwalk and looks at herself in the thousand little mirrors of the dead light. Her hair is long and stringy, and she takes a band and ties it up at the back.
Then she reaches in and uses her fingers to prise loose one of the little mirrors and puts it in her pocket as a souvenir of her time here.
Truth be told, the inward gaze is something she’s not too fond of. But there are secrets that lurk in the mind, and she doesn’t want any of them sneaking up on her. Sometimes it pays to take a deep look inside even if you get queasy gazing into those dark corners.
Back at the bottom, she goes out and shuts the door, pulling it closed tight behind her so the wind won’t blow it open and stir things around in there. It’s a warming thought to picture it staying the same after she’s gone away from it.
She stands at the base and cranes her neck to look up at it.
Goodbye, you good old tower, she says. Keep standin true. Take care of whoever settles down in you next, dead or alive, sinner or saint.
She nods. It’s a nice thing to say, she thinks, like a blessing or a toast or a birthday wish or a funeral sermon – and she knows that words have the power to make things true if they’re said right.
*
Down at the beach, she strips naked and puts all her clothes and her shoes in the cooler with everything else and shuts the lid as tight as she can, stomping up and down on it a few times. She pulls it into the waves until it begins to lift in the current of its own accord, then she swings it in front of her and pushes it over the breakers until she’s beyond them and beyond the swells.
She swims towards the mainland, keeping far away from the shoal so the current won’t pull her onto the rocks. She keeps her arms around the cooler and kicks her feet, and when she’s tired she stops and floats and keeps an eye on the mainland to see which way the current is taking her. There’s a breeze that sweeps over the surface of the water, and it makes goosebumps on her wet skin, but it’s still better than trying to make the swim at midday when the sun is directly overhead and parching you up like a lizard.
She has no way to tell time, she’s no fast swimmer and it feels like an hour before she reaches the mainland and pulls the cooler up onto the beach. She sits on a rock wringing the saltwater out of her hair and drying her skin in the morning breeze.
The beach is deserted. She opens the cooler and takes out a miniature spyglass and climbs a set of broken concrete steps to a gravel turnout overlooking the shore to get the lay of the land. There are two cars parked down the road and some shacks in the distance. Against the horizon she can see a few slugs. They haven’t caught her scent, and they’re limping around in their random jerky way. She keeps her head low and focuses the spyglass again on the two cars. One of them is a jeep, and the other is a squat red car with two doors. All the wheels seem intact from what she can tell.
Back down on the beach, she combs out her hair with her fingers and from under the screen of her hair she can see a figure on the shore in the distance. She doesn’t need the spyglass – she can tell by the way it lumbers. Slug. She finishes tugging the knots out and ties it up into a ponytail.
Then she takes her clothes from the cooler and dresses.
The slug has spotted her and is headed in her direction, but its feet keep getting tripped up in the sand.
She pulls out the spyglass and looks through it.
The dead woman is dressed in a nurse’s uniform. Her top is medical green, but her bottoms are brightly coloured, like pyjama pants. Temple can’t tell what the pattern is, but it looks like it could be lollipops.
She closes the spyglass and stows it in her pocket. Then she goes back to the cooler, takes out the pistol, checking the rounds to make sure they haven’t got wet, and puts on the sheathed gurkha knife, which hangs from her belt and straps it to her thigh with two leather ties.
By the time she’s finished, the nurse is twenty yards away, her hands reaching out before her. Instinctual desire. Hunger, thirst, lust, all the vestigial drives knotted up in one churning, ambling stomach.
Temple looks one last time at the nurse, then turns and climbs the concrete steps up towards the road.
The other slugs are still in the distance, but she knows they will catch sight of her soon enough, and that a few have a tendency to turn quickly into a pack and then a swarm. So she walks directly to where the cars are parked and opens the door of the red compact. The keys have been left in it, but the engine’s dead.
She searches the jeep for keys and can’t find any, but there is a screwdriver under the front seat, so she uses it to rip away the cowling from around the ignition and prise out the cap on the ignition barrel. Then she feels for the notch at the end of the barrel and puts the head of the screwdriver into it and turns.
The engine coughs a few times and starts, the gauges on the dash rolling to life.
Okay then, Temple says. That’s a boon for the girl. Half a tank of gas, too. Watch out great wide open, prepare to be motored on.
*
The world is pretty much what she remembers, all burned up and pallid – like someone came along with a sponge and soaked up all the colour and the moisture too and left everything bone dry.
But she’s also glad to be back. She’s missed the structures of man, which are pretty wondrous when you put your mind to them. Those tall brick buildings with all their little rooms and closets and doors, like ant colonies or wasps’ nests when you bust open their paper shells. She was in New York City once, when she was little. They had it pretty well slug-free because it’s an island, and she remembers standing at the bottom of this terrific tall building, thinking that civilization’s got some crackerjack people working for its furtherance, and kicking at the base of the building with her foot to see if the whole thing would topple over but realizing that it didn’t and never ever would.
In the first town she comes to, she spots a convenience store on the corner and pulls up onto the sidewalk in front of it. Deep slug territory – there are meatskins milling around everywhere she looks, but they’re spread out so there must not be anything for them to hunt around here. And they’re slow, some of them even crawling. Nothing to eat for a long time, she figures. This place is written off – she’ll have to go further north.
But first she goes into the convenience store. She discovers a whole box of those peanut butter crackers she likes – the ones made like sandwiches with the bright-orange cheese crackers. She rips open one of the packages and eats it right there in the store, standing in the window and watching the slugs inch their way in her direction.
She thinks about her diet on the island.
Ain’t a fish swimming in the ocean, she says, could beat these crackers.
She takes the rest of the box and a twenty-four pack of Coke, some bottles of water, three tubes of Pringles, a few cans of chilli and soup, and some boxes of macaroni and cheese. She grabs some other things too: a flashlight and batteries, a bar of soap in case she gets a chance to wash, a toothbrush and toothpaste, a hairbrush, and a whole spindle of scratch-off lottery tickets because she likes to see how much of a millionaire she would have been in the old times.
She checks behind the counter for a gun or ammunition, but there’s nothing.
Then she notices the slugs are getting closer, so she loads up the passenger seat of the car with her haul and gets back on the road.
When she’s out of town, on a long stretch of two-lane road, she opens a Coke and another packet of peanut butter crackers, which taste like cloudy orange heaven.
While she’s eating, she thinks about how smart it was for God to make meatskins not interested in real food so there would be plenty left for regular folk. She remembers an old joke that makes her smile – the one about the meatskin who gets invited to a wedding party. At the end of it they have twice the leftovers and half the guests.
She chuckles, and the road is long.
*
She takes the coast road for a while, shaggy palm trees everywhere and overgrown beach grass coming up through the cracks in the road, and then she turns inland for a change. Gators, she’s never seen so many gators before. They are sunning themselves on the black tarmac of the highway, and when she approaches they skulk out of the way in no particular hurry. There are other towns, but still no signs of regular life. She begins to imagine herself as the last person left on the planet with all these meatskins. The first thing she would do is find a map and drive the country to see the sights. She would start in New York and then adventure herself all the way to San Francisco where they have the steep-driving hills. She could find a stray dog or tame a wolf, have it sit next to her and put its head out the window, and they could find a car with comfortable seats and sing songs while they drive.
She nods. That would be a right thing.
The sun goes down, and she turns on the headlights and one of them still works so she can see the road ahead of her but in a lopsided way. There are some lights in the distance, a glow on the horizon that must be a city, and she drives in the direction of the glow.
But on the road at night, you start thinking ugly, alone thoughts. She remembers, it must have been five years ago, driving through Alabama with Malcolm in the seat beside her. She was very young then, she must have been, because she remembers having to push the seat all the way forward, and even then she had to sit on the edge in order to reach the pedals. And Malcolm was younger still.
Malcolm was quiet for a long time. He liked to chew that gum that was too sweet for her, and he liked to put two pieces in his mouth at once. For a while she could hear him chewing next to her, then it was silent, and he was just looking out the window at the big black nothing.
What happened to Uncle Jackson? Malcolm said.
He’s gone, she said. We ain’t going to see him no more.
He said he was gonna teach me how to shoot.
I’ll teach you. He wasn’t your real uncle anyway.
To get the memory out of her head, she rolls down the window and lets the wind play in her hair. When that doesn’t work, she decides to sing a ditty she once knew by heart and it takes her a while to remember all the parts of it.
Oh, mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey,
Yes, mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey,
A kiddley divey doo, wouldn’t you?
A kiddley divey doo, wouldn’t you?
It’s on a long stretch of country road that the car dies, and she pulls over and pops the hood to look. It’s probably the fuel pump, but she can’t be sure without getting under the car and poking around, and the engine’s too hot to do anything for a while. She doesn’t have any tools to poke around with but she can see a house set back away from the road down a little dirt drive, and there might be tools there.
She looks into the dark horizon towards the city lights. Distance is difficult to determine at night; it’s possible she could walk it by morning.
Still, that house. It might contain something worthwhile.
She’s been out of the game for a long time now and she’s feeling bold – and anyway, she wants something to distract her from her night memories. So she straps the gurkha knife to her thigh, jams the pistol in the waistband of her pants – two rounds, emergency use only – and takes the flashlight and walks up the packed-dirt driveway to the house. She’s ready to kick the door in except she doesn’t have to – because it’s standing open.
There’s a stink in the house, and she recognizes it. Flesh mould. Could be corpse or could be slug. Either way, she tells herself to breathe through her mouth and make it quick.
She finds her way to the kitchen where there’s an overturned and rusting Formica table and peeling wallpaper with a strawberry vine pattern. Because of the humidity, patches of furry grey-green mould are growing everywhere. She opens the drawers one by one looking for a tool drawer but there’s nothing. She looks out the back window. No garage.
There’s a door in the kitchen, and she opens it and finds wooden steps leading down beneath the ground.
She waits at the top of the steps for a moment, listening for any sounds in the house, and then descends slowly.
In the basement there’s a different smell, like ammonia, and she sweeps the flashlight around to a table in the middle of the room cluttered with bottles, burners, rubber tubing and one of those old-fashioned scales with a long arm on one side. Some of the bottles are half filled with a yellow liquid. She’s seen this kind of set-up before. Meth lab. They were big a few years before when some people were taking advantage of the slug distraction.
She finds a workbench against the wall and roots around for a screwdriver and a wrench, but what she’s really looking for is a pair of pliers.
She sets the flashlight down on the tabletop but it rolls off and falls to the floor where it flickers once but stays lit. Good thing – she wouldn’t want to have to feel her way back to the car.
But when she turns, she sees something she missed before. By the stairs there’s a utility closet, and while she watches, the door of the closet, illuminated in the faint glow of the flashlight, shudders once and flies open as if someone has fallen against it.
Then she can smell it, the flesh-rot, much stronger now – it was masked before by the ammonia smell of the lab.
They stumble out of the utility closet, three of them, two men in overalls with long hair and a woman dressed only in a satin slip which has been ripped open to expose one desiccated breast.
Temple has forgotten how bad they smell – that muddy mixture of must and putrefaction, oil and rancid shit. She sees a faecal ooze sliding wetly down the back of the woman’s legs. They must have fed recently, so they will be strong. And they are between her and the stairs.
She puts her hand on the pistol and considers. Her last two bullets.
Not worth it.
Instead she sweeps the gurkha knife out of its sheath and kicks over the man in front, sending him crashing down to the cement slab of the floor. She swings the knife and buries it in the skull of the second man, whose eyes cross absurdly before he drops to his knees. But when she tries to pull the blade back, it’s stuck, bound up in sutures of wet bone.
Then the woman has her by the wrist in a tight fleshy grip. She can feel the brittle nails digging into her skin.
Leave go my arm, Temple says.
She can’t get the knife out of the man’s head, so she lets it go and watches the body drop backwards, dead, with her blade still stuck in it.
The woman is leaning in to take a bite out of her shoulder, but Temple drives her fist hard into the slug’s head, first once, then twice, then a third time, trying to dizzy the brain out of its instinctual drive.
But now the other man has got to his feet again and is coming at her, so she spins the woman around to get her between them and the man barrels into both like a bear hug that sends Temple crashing back into the workbench.
The smell, as they crush against her, is overpowering and her eyes flood with water that blurs her vision.
She reaches behind her, feels around for anything and comes up with a screwdriver which she grips hard and drives into the man’s neck. He lets go and totters backwards, but the angle of the screwdriver is wrong, it goes straight through rather than up into the brain, so he begins to walk in circles gurgling liquidly and opening and closing his jaw.
The woman who has hold of Temple’s wrist opens her mouth again as though to take a bite out of her cheek, but Temple swings her around and slams the woman’s forearm against the edge of the workbench so that it cracks and the grip on her wrist loosens.
Then she ducks and moves to the corpse, putting one foot on his face for leverage, and prises her gurkha out with both hands.
The woman is close behind her, but it doesn’t matter. Temple swings hard and true, and the blade whips clean through her neck and takes off the head.
The last man is distracted, clawing awkwardly at the screwdriver in his throat. Temple moves around behind him to catch her breath. His hair is long and stringy with flakes of paint in it as though the house has been crumbling to pieces on top of him. She lifts the knife and brings it down hard, two quick strokes like she learned long ago – one to crack the skull and the other to cleave the brain.
She picks up the flashlight from the floor, which is now slippery with blood and excrement. Then she finds a clean part of the woman’s slip, rips it off and uses it to wipe her gurkha clean.
Meatskin tango, she says. God-awful messy business that is.
*
See, there’s a music to the world and you got to be listening otherwise you’ll miss it sure. Like when she comes out of the house and the night-time air feels dreamy-cold on her face and it smells like the pureness of a fresh land just started. Like it was something old and dusty and broken, taken off the shelf to make room for something sparkle-new.
And it’s your soul desiring to move and be a part of it, whatever it is, to be out there on the soot plains where the living fall and the dead rise, and the dead fall and the living rise, like the cycle of life she once tried to explain to Malcolm.
It’s a thing of nature, she said to him while he chomped down on a jawbreaker he had squirrelled in his cheek. It’s a thing of nature and nature never dies. You and me, we’re nature too – even when we die.
It’s about souls and open skies and stars crazy-lit everywhere you look. She makes a decision to take a few things from the car and hoof it the rest of the way towards those lights on the horizon. And soon she sees a street sign and shines her flashlight on it. The letters she can’t decipher, they don’t look like the name of any city she’s been before that she can recall, but the number is 15.
And if it’s got a light fingerprint on the sky that can be seen fifteen miles distant then it must be no small town, and that’s the place for her, a place where she can make the acquaintance of a few people and catch up on goings-on in God’s green earth and maybe get a cold soda with ice in it. And fifteen miles, that ain’t nothing. That’s three, four hours of night vistas and deep cool thoughts, barring the sad ones.
She’ll be there in time for breakfast.
THE STREETS are deserted save for slugs and wild dogs. The city is too large to fence and its streets too snaky to patrol, but, Temple reasons, the electricity is being kept running for someone other than the slugs. The inhabitants must be hidden.
She climbs up on a billboard by a freeway on-ramp and eats a pack of peanut butter crackers while she scans the horizon.
On the way north she passed through a beachside community where all the buildings were sleek and pastel-coloured. The main strip was cluttered with restaurants that had once featured outdoor seating on the wide sidewalks – places where rich people in cream-coloured shirts must once have drunk cocktails. Now, though, most of the plate-glass windows were broken through, the crazed white reflection of the sun lighting up all the jagged points like fangs around the gaping black of the interiors. The pastel paint was chipping off in flakes and exposing the crumbling concrete underneath. And in front of some of the restaurants, the wrought-iron tables and chairs had once been piled up in defensive barriers that had long been breeched.
That was one pretty town, she thinks, empty as it was. Maybe she’ll go back there one day. But that was a low town, almost none of the buildings over six storeys tall. Unlike the city she’s staring at now, whose downtown, from where she sits, looks like a castle on a hill, all silver spires and metal majesty.
She climbs down from the billboard and walks another fifteen minutes towards the tall buildings of downtown, where the long shadows stretch across the street from sidewalk to sidewalk and feel good on her overheated skin. She finds a jewellery shop and stands for a long time staring in the window. There are dusty baubles hung around artificial velvet necks and rings set deep in cute little boxes. Meaningless. These objects once took the measure of value in a gone epoch. She has known people in her past who have collected such things, hoarding them against a future restored to the glory of a trinket economy. They collected them in small boxes contained within larger boxes contained within larger boxes still, and they brooded atop them like envious royalty.
But there is one thing Temple wouldn’t mind keeping in her pocket to put her fingers around and feel on occasion – a ruby pendant shaped like a teardrop, like her island. It has a gold setting attached to a chain, but if it were hers she would tear off the metal bits and keep just the stone, rolling it between her fingers.
Gazing at it, she sees a reflected movement in the glass of the shop window, a shape approaching her from behind.
Without thought, she draws the gurkha knife from its sheath and spins around, raising it over her head, ready to bring it down.
And that’s when she sees the rifle barrel pointed directly at her face.
Whoa there, mister, she says and lowers the blade. I was preparin to chop you for a slug. What’s the idea sneaking up on people like that?
As soon as he hears her speak, the man lowers the rifle.
I thought you were one of them, he says. You were standing there for so long doing nothing.
Well excuse me for takin a perusal.
He looks around. A good-looking man, in his thirties she would say, with straight blond hair that falls into his eyes. He’s freshly shaved and has a look of alertness that makes her think of a cat or a rodent, some animal that is always hunched for running.
It’s not safe here, he says to Temple. Come with us.
Who’s us, golden boy?
At that he puts two fingers in his mouth and whistles, and from around the corners of buildings and out of alleys rush a small army of men – maybe twelve all told – and they circle around her.
One man, wearing glasses, approaches her and begins examining her arms and the skin of her neck.
Are you hurt? he asks. Are you bitten anywhere?
I’m dandy. Lay off me.
He puts both his hands on the sides of her head and looks into the pupils of her eyes. Then he turns to the blond man.
She looks all right. We can do a full exam when we get back.
Not if you’re fond of breathin, she says.
Come with us, the blond man says. We’ll take care of you. You’ll be okay.
You got ice?
What?
You got ice to put in drinks?
We have freezers, yes.
Okay, then. Lead away, mister man.
They guide her through the lofty towers of downtown, shooting a couple slugs in the head on the way.
To keep the population down, explains the blond man whose name is Louis.
Louis is at the head of the group, and the others trail along behind scanning the area in all directions.
Temple follows, but off to the side, keeping a fixed space between herself and the others. There’s one man in particular she doesn’t like the look of. He’s skinny and has an oily mane of hair kept in place by a baseball cap – and he seems to be distracted by her. She can see his gaze on her, heavy, reflected in the dark shop windows. She slows her pace and falls to the back of the group to try to get away from him, but he simply does the same until they are together at the rear of the line.
My name’s Abraham, he says to her. What’s your name?
Sarah Mary.
Sarah Mary what?
Sarah Mary Williams.
How old are you, Sarah Mary?
Twenty-seven.
He looks her up and down, his eyes lingering with a little sneer over every part of her.
You ain’t twenty-seven, he says.
Prove it.
My brother Moses says I got an intuition for truth and lying. He says I can sniff out a liar at a hundred yards. It’s my secret talent. I can sniff you out, Sarah Mary.
She looks straight ahead, grinding her teeth and thinking about a tall glass of Coke with ice in it from top to bottom, and a bendy straw.
Let’s see, he goes on. I would say you’re sixteen, seventeen at the outside.
I lived some years. Don’t guess it matters how many.
Where’d you come from, Sarah Mary?
South of here.
See, that’s how I know you’re not bein truthful with me. There’s nothing south of here. That’s creeper country all the way down to the keys.
She can feel his eyes on her, trying to shimmy up under her clothes and press against her skin.
So what’s your story, Sarah Mary? You runnin away from a boyfriend? Lookin for someone to take care of you? You can tell it to me true, I’ll make sure you’re all right.
She bites the inside of her lip to keep quiet and trots ahead to the one who seems to be the leader, Louis.
Where we goin anyway? she asks.
Look up, he says.
Above her rise four identical towers, each taking up a full city block. There are retail stores on the ground level and most likely business offices on the rest of the floors. The four buildings are connected, about six storeys up, by enclosed footbridges to create one massive insular complex. You could safely house a thousand people in such a structure.
Louis leads the group around one of the buildings to the alley behind it where the concrete dips down to a loading dock. They approach a small door by the steel gate and look around once to make sure there are no slugs around to follow, then Louis quickly unlocks the door and ushers the others inside.
This your fortress? Temple asks.
When everyone’s in, he shuts the door, locks and bars it.
This is our fortress, he says.
*
They hand her over to a woman named Ruby, who feeds her and gives her new clothes from the barricaded department store on the ground level of one of the buildings. Ruby shows her a place where she can sleep on the sixteenth floor where the offices have been converted to residences.
Ruby tries to dress her in a sky-blue gingham dress, but Temple insists on cargo pants like the ones she already wears, except not torn and not covered in dried brown blood. Ruby examines the clothes when Temple hands them out to her from the dressing room, and the woman shakes her head and titches her tongue like some kind of desert bird.
You poor thing, Ruby says. It must have been a tough road for you to get here.
The road was all right, Temple replies. It was the meatskins were the problem.
Oh this world . . .
It seems like Ruby may have more to say on the subject, but she trails off as though despair has got the better of her.
Hey, Temple says, you got ice here, right? I’m thinkin a tall ice Coke would hit the spot right about now.
So Ruby brings her a glass of Coke with ice in it and the two go down to watch the children playing in one of the lobbies. A swing set and plastic slide have been dragged over from one of the department stores and hopscotch squares are drawn on the floor with chalk.
We have a school, too, Ruby explains. My sister Elaine runs it. Six days a week in the mornings. Education is the most important thing, of course. So we can rebuild when all this is over. Did you go to school?
I learned some things.
I was just a young woman when it started. I guess you weren’t even born yet.
No, ma’am.
This must seem like a strange world to you.
No, ma’am.
No?
The world, it treats you kind enough so long as you’re not fightin against it.
Ruby looks at Temple and shakes her head, sighing. She’s a chubby woman, Ruby is, with a round face and eyes that wrinkle on the sides when she laughs. Her hair is done up in a style that Temple has never seen before. It’s piled on top, mostly, but some of it hangs down too. She wears a long shapeless dress and sandals, and her fingernails and toenails are painted a pretty shade of burgundy red – exactly the same colour, Temple thinks, as spilled blood when it’s about twenty minutes old.
The sounds of the playing children echo off the marble walls of the lobby. There are twenty of them, of different ages. The windows are painted over so that, Temple assumes, the slugs don’t see them in here and start congregating outside. Large yellow floodlights are set up around the perimeter of the lobby to help out the diffuse sunlight absorbing through the thin layer of streaky brown paint.
She thinks of Malcolm, picturing him here among these other children. No doubt he would have wanted to go outside – he would have scraped the paint off the windows so he could see. But that was two years ago. He would be older than a lot of them now.
How many people you got here? Temple asks.
We have seven hundred and thirteen spread out between all four neighbourhoods. You make seven hundred and fourteen.
Neighbourhoods?
The four buildings. We like to call them neighbourhoods.
Is this all the kids?
Most of them. It’s hard for people to have children here. We have a doctor, but our medical facilities are limited. But also, it’s just hard for people to be . . . optimistic.
Oh.
Ruby smiles broadly at her, as though she herself is the prime emissary of optimism.
I like your hat, she says, nodding at Temple’s panama. We don’t have any hats like that here.
Thanks. I like your nail polish.
Do you? Do you want some? Most of the women here don’t bother to paint their nails, so we have a lot left.
Ruby takes her to back to the department store, to the cosmetics area, and shows her a rack of dusty glass bottles with a hundred different colours inside and names on the bottom that describe the colours. Temple settles on a kind of pink that’s called Cotton Candy, even though she has no idea what cotton candy is – even though it puts her in mind of lollipops made out of T-shirts.
Then Ruby rides the elevator with Temple up to the sixteenth floor where Temple’s room is, a little office with a mattress on the floor and a table with a lamp and an artificial plant.
The bathroom is down the hall by the elevators, Ruby says apologetically. We have to share.
Thanks, Temple says. For the soda and the nail polish and the food and everything.
You’re very welcome. I’m glad you’re here with us. We’ll take care of you, Sarah Mary.
Temple says nothing. She tries to imagine staying here, in this place, with these people, and she is surprised to find the idea is not entirely objectionable to her. She wonders if this means she is growing up.
Oh and one more thing, Ruby says. You can go pretty much anywhere here but it might be a good idea to avoid neighbourhood four. That’s where most of our men stay, our unmarried men – the ones who go out patrolling – the ones who brought you in today. They’re very nice men, most of them, very considerate and gentlemanly. But sometimes when you put them together they can get a little rough. I don’t want you to get the wrong impression about us, that’s all. We’re a very nice community.
Then Ruby leaves, and Temple finds herself alone. She finds the bathrooms – there’s a communal one, but she enters the single next to it, the one meant for wheelchairs. She puts her gurkha knife on the edge of the sink and strips down to nothing and gives herself a good wash with the towel and cloth Ruby has given her. Then she puts her head in the sink, letting her hair soak in the hot soapy water for a long time. Afterwards, she combs it out and looks at herself good and hard in the mirror.
Blonde hair, lean face with long eyelashes framing two bright blue eyes. She could be pretty. She tries to look more like a girl, holding herself in the way she’s seen girls do, pouting out her lips, and lowering her chin and raising her eyebrows. Her little breasts aren’t much of anything, and her bottom is flat but she has seen glamorous women in magazines with bodies like hers, so she supposes it’s all right.
She dresses again with the new underpants Ruby got for her. They are cotton with roses all over them. Ruby also got her a brassiere, but she doesn’t put that on.
Back in her room, she paints her fingers and toes cotton-candy pink but she is sloppy and doesn’t have much patience, so it gets all over her skin. Then she stretches herself out to let her nails dry and looks out the window at the darkening sky. The lights of the city come on as she watches. Some of them are on automatic timers, she supposes. But a few are real people like her.
She gets right up to the window and sees her breath cloud the glass. She says goodnight to the sunlit world and feeling the intense gravity of sleep press down on her, she lays down on the mattress, puts her palms together and whispers a prayer and listens to the low hum of the building, until her mind goes wide and dreams take her into the vast mazy open.
The next day she walks the buildings, smiling politely at the greetings she receives from the residents. They are happy to see a new face, they are happy to have their ranks swelled by one – another brick in the bulwark against the tide crashing against them from the outside. Some of them tell her stories of where they came from, the older ones spinning yarns about the world before. She has heard many versions of this story, but mostly they involve children riding bicycles down tree-lined streets in the afternoon, picnics in parks, going to grocery stores, meeting friendly people, or camping trips without a care in the world except mosquito bites.
These stories have always sounded suspect to Temple – gilt-dipped in nostalgia. In her own experience she’s found that happiness and sadness find their own level no matter what’s biting you, mosquitoes or meatskins.
She offers to help in the kitchen where a bunch of women are making what seems to her an elaborate meal. They tell her she can crack a bowl of eggs – they have chicken coops and gardens on the roofs – but when they see how long it takes for her to pick out all the shell from the bowl they shoo her out, telling her just to relax and get acquainted. She can help in the kitchen another time.
That night she goes to the conference room that they’ve set up as a theatre, and she sits in the dark with everyone else and watches an old movie they are projecting on a big screen. It’s a movie about spaceships and planets that look like deserts, and she watches, and a girl next to her hands her a bowl of popcorn and she takes some and passes it along.
The next day, though, she gets bored and antsy. She looks out the window on the third floor and watches the patrol leave the building and wind their way down the street like a tactical serpent. She likes the way they move, those men, like one body with many parts.
She can’t sleep that night and strolls the silent corridors of the buildings feeling her insomnia like a disease.
When the silence becomes too much, she walks over the footbridge to building four where she finds the men playing cards for pills. They are on the sixth floor, gathered in a large space that takes up two floors and amplifies in echoes all their sharp laughter and gravel voices. The lobby of some company headquarters, she supposes, some monolithic company that used to occupy multiple floors in the building.
At first the men look at her begrudgingly, as though she were an augur of their own embarrassment for themselves. The boisterous laughter dies down quickly as they, one by one, notice her. Then she says:
Go on. I can’t sleep is all. I ain’t here to gum up the works.
So the game goes on, tentatively at first, then building in volume and vulgarity as they lose their suspicion and forget her presence altogether. She likes the smell of their cigarettes and clink of their liquor bottles, and the crude language that tumbles like quarry stones from their hairy lips. New men arrive, coming in from night patrols, and she watches them go through a metal reinforced door off to the side carrying pistols, AR-15 rifles and 20-gauges, emerging again with their hands empty. Then they go to a table set up like a bar where a man with an apron pours them drinks.
Louis, the patrol leader, finds her.
How do you like the game? he asks.
I’m studyin it up, she says. It’s like poker with a little pooch mixed in.
Pooch?
It’s a game I used to play when I was little.
You following it?
Like I say, I’m studyin it up. What’s in the pot?
Uppers. Sleeping pills. Some painkillers. Speed mostly.
Uh-huh. Where’s a girl get some currency like that?
You want to play?
I could go a hand or two.
Louis laughs, a big friendly laugh. Then he digs into his pocket and takes her hand and slaps three blue pills into it.
Hey, Walter, he says to one of the men at the table. Why don’t you take a break. Shorty here wants to sidle up.
The men laugh and she takes her seat, saying, I don’t know what’s so side-splittin. Any moron can turn a card.
Oooh, they say.
She loses one of her blue pills on a bad first hand, but ten hands later they give her a Ziploc baggie to carry away her winnings. Three Nembutals, five Vicodins, twelve OxyContins, seven Dexedrines – and four Viagras she uses to repay Louis for fronting her.
What’s your name again? Louis asks.
Sarah Mary.
Well, Sarah Mary, I’m impressed. I’m impressed as hell.
All right, then how bout lettin me patrol with you all tomorrow?
He laughs again, jolly and warm.
You’re something else, he says. But why don’t you let us handle the dirty work?
From what I seen, you keep pretty clean.
Sarah Mary, let me buy you a drink.
He sits her at the bar and gets her an ice Coke. She stays there a while watching the game until that skinny rodent of a man, Abraham, comes in and sits down on the other side of her, his eyes all up under her clothes again. He’s with someone big who he introduces as his brother Moses, and Moses shakes her hand, nearly breaks her knuckles in his big fist. The two of them together look like the before and after of some kind of growth serum. Moses isn’t interested in talking, he sits at the bar and drinks and looks straight ahead like he can see through to the ugly other side of everything. He’s no man to be dallied with, she knows. She’s seen men like him before, dangerous because they’ve already come back from places these other, convivial men have never been. The souvenirs they bring back from those places exist everywhere in them, in their wet ruddy eyes, under their fingernails and in the dark patina on their very skin.
Moses just sits and stares, but his brother Abraham wants to talk, starts telling her about this girl that one of the other men nearly choked to death because she teased him and got him into one of the storage rooms and wouldn’t let him have any. And when he says it, his tongue slithers across his lips, and she can see spittle dried white in the corners of his mouth.
So she gets up, goes to the other side of the room and sits on the edge of a marble planter and watches the game, trying to ignore Abraham’s gaze, which she can still feel wanting to bite on her.
Fifteen minutes later, one of the men at the game accuses another of pocketing pills on the ante, and a fight breaks out, the two men clawing at each other over the tabletop and others trying to hold them back, until the table is overturned and a colourful spray of pills scatters across the marble floor and a wild grab is made for whatever anyone can get.
Temple’s seen enough. She leaves the lobby and climbs many flights of stairs, until she’s out of breath, to a dark, quiet floor where she can feel a curious breeze that she recognizes as authentic night air and not just the recirculated air from the ventilation system. She follows the breeze until she finds the source – a hole in the building itself. At the back of one of the wide-open office spaces there’s a set of windows, floor to ceiling, about eight feet wide, that has been broken out entirely. There are some chairs set up in front of the hole. An observatory.
There’s no one around, so she goes to the hole and, bracing herself with both hands, looks out across the rooftops of the city. She must be twenty-five storeys high, and it makes her dizzy, but she forces herself to look down anyway. Down there, in the yellow pools of the street lights that are not yet broken or burned out, she can see them moving lethargically, the dead, without direction or purpose. They move, most of them, even when there’s nothing to hunt – their legs, like their stomachs and their jaws, all instinct. She raises her gaze and her eyes blur teary in the cool wind and all the lights of the city go wild and multiple. She wipes her eyes, sits in one of the chairs and looks out beyond the periphery of the power grid where the black rolls out like an ocean. It’s a place she knows – knows beyond the telling of it.
She must be gone deep down the well of her brain, because she is not even aware of the man until he sits down beside her – a massive bearded figure who makes the chair groan when he leans back on it. Moses – Abraham’s brother.
I was just looking is all, she says, looking around and finding that the two of them are alone. I wasn’t doin anything.
The big man shrugs. He takes a cigar from the pocket of his jacket, bites off the end of it, spits it out the hole and strikes a match with his thumbnail, puffs the cigar into life. When he’s done with the match he flicks it out the window, and she watches the pale red ember disappear down into the dark.
She looks around. She watches him, not knowing if she should make a run for it. But he pays her no attention at all, just puffs on his cigar and stares out into the night.
Finally she says, What you want anyway?
This is the first time he turns to look at her, like she’s a ladybug landed on his knuckle or something.
I want lots of things, he says. But nothin you got the power to deliver.
She squints at him a little while longer but determines the threat is not an immediate one, so she sits back.
That’s just fine, she says.
And for a while their gazes over the city are perfectly parallel.
He takes a puff of his cigar and then asks her a question.
You ever seen a slug with no legs?
She can’t figure out the direction of the question, but it seems safe to answer it.
I did a few times, she says. Walkin all arms and elbows like a katydid.
Uh-huh. He puffs the cigar again and goes on. You know, I heard of one commune over in Jacksonville decided to make a perimeter of gas-pipe fire to keep the slugs scared off. What you think of that?
I think that commune’s dead reckoned by now.
How come?
Because meatskins ain’t scared of fire. Too stupid. March right through it. Then all you got is a bunch of walkin torches trying to eat your guts.
He nods slowly, and she sees that he already knew that about fire and meatskins. He was just testing her.
Sarah Mary Williams, he says, pronouncing each name as though reading it on a billboard in the distance. My brother Abraham doesn’t believe you come up from the south. He’s suspicious-minded like that. Me, I believe you.
Go ahead and both of you believe whatever you like. It’s a free country.
They are quiet for a while. She inhales the smoke from Moses’ cigar, and it tastes sweet in her lungs. When it seems like he has nothing more to say, she gets up from the chair and turns to leave. That’s when he speaks again, without looking at her, with no recognition of her going or coming.
This hole here, he says, gesturing to the dark space of night sky in the maw of the broken-out pane. It was here when they first came. Somebody must of jumped. When they took up residence, they just widened it and made it into a scenic lookout.
Who’s they? Ain’t you one of them?
I’m a traveller by nature. I been lots of places. The provender of the earth’s good enough for my kind. Abraham, he likes this place. I ain’t so sure though.
How come?
Right at this moment, this place is a fortress. But if a man was inclined to do so, he could open up one of those loading-bay doors in the middle of the night, and suddenly we’re in a death house.
That’s when he looks up at her, his eyes level with hers even though he’s sitting and she’s standing, squinting at her through the smoke of his cigar, his fingers picking flakes of fallen tobacco from his beard.
You know what I think? she says.
What do you think?
She points through the hole into the dark throat of the diseased landscape.
I think you’re more dangerous than what’s out there.
Well, little girl, he says, that’s a funny thing you just uttered. Because I was just now thinkin the same thing about you.
She leaves him sitting there, glancing back just once before she goes through the stairwell door, observing how the cloud of smoke from his cigar gets pulled in wisps out the dark gaping hole in the glass wall, as though it is his soul, too large for his massive frame and seeping out the pores of his skin, wandering circuitous back into the wilderness where it knows itself true among the violent and the dead.
*
Back in her small room she takes a Nembutal and falls asleep almost immediately. It’s probably the pill that makes her slow to comprehend what’s happening an hour later when the key is slotted into the door. She is so deep down inside herself that it’s difficult to climb that ladder to the top where things are actually happening. The key in the door, the rattle, the turning of the knob and the airy squeak as the door swings inward once and then back shut. She scrambles to the surface of her consciousness, arriving there and shaking herself awake just as the light in her room is turned on.
Abraham, she says.
I came to kiss you goodnight.
She squints and rubs her eyes against the sudden light. He’s standing, hunched over and swaying a bit, drunk. His leer makes her take stock of what she has on – just a T-shirt and underwear.
Get outta here, Abraham.
Hey, he says, looking around, is this your blade? Pretty nifty.
He picks up the gurkha from the table, unsheathes it. Then he swings it through the air a few times, making swishing sounds with his mouth like a boy playing swords.
Put it down.
He sets it back down on the table, but not because she asks him to.
You played some good cards tonight. You’re one of those tough girls, aren’t you? One of those rough and tumble girls. You like to play with the boys.
She pulls herself up on the mattress, her back against the wall, her head still cloudy and muddled.
You better get, she says.
But you’re still a girl where it counts.
He comes around the table, steps up onto the foot of her mattress and stands over her. She draws her knees under her but can’t quite fold herself into a crouch. Then he unzips his pants and pulls out his flaccid genitals. It looks like a bouquet of deflated birthday balloons.
Put it in your mouth, he says. Make it big.
You best stow that. I ain’t kiddin with you, Abraham. Put it away now.
Come on, Sarah Mary. Everyone around here’s the family type. All the girls want to nest. Sometimes a man’s just gotta get his nut and go back to killing creepers. What do you want and I’ll give it to you. Pills? Liquor? Just do me this one favour. Just put it in your mouth for a little while.
I said stow that business. I don’t go in for silliness with the likes of you. I ain’t playin now.
The fog around her head begins to lift, and she can see him take two steps forward towards her, his crotch getting so close to her that she can smell the thick mustiness of it.
But you’re so pretty, he says. I just want to cum on you a little bit.
That’s it, she says.
She curls her hand into a fist and drives it forward hard into his crotch. It feels like punching a sack of warm giblets. It makes a smacking sound and sends him collapsing backwards, his pants falling down around his knees while he writhes on the floor at the foot of the mattress.
But his groans evolve into something like growls, and he picks himself back up, his face tomato red, his eyes wet and his teeth clenched.
I didn’t wanna have to do it, she says. Come on, Abraham, I’m just tryin to get along round here. Don’t muck it up for me.
He doesn’t listen. With one hand he cups his genitals and with the other he reaches and grabs her gurkha knife.
You little cunt. I’m gonna split you in half.
He lunges forward and she ducks and puts her hand out to divert the blow. The blade goes over her head but she feels a quick iciness on her left hand and when she looks down she sees that the knife has taken off half of her pinky finger. The blood spills down her wrist and makes her hand feel slippery.
There’s no pain yet, just cold, but she knows to expect it later so whatever she’s going to do, it better get done now.
She’s got her back to the window and he’s coming at her again, but when he raises the knife over his head to strike, her hands dart up, grab the wrist and twist it backwards so his whole body falls forward, face down. Then, still holding the arm up at an angle, she brings her foot down on it at the elbow and hears it splinter-snap like a wet tree branch.
Now he’s wailing loud and guttural, all the blood driven up into his face and the tendons of his neck standing out hard and long.
Shush up, she says, trying to quiet him. Shush up now, people are gonna hear you.
But he keeps screeching, and she turns him over and slaps his face like you do with hysterics. She supposes it’s not so much hysteria as excruciating pain that’s his current problem. So she looks for something to stuff in his mouth, finds the bra that Ruby got for her which is padded and has some bulk to it, and jams it between his teeth with her fingers.
Hush that noise, she says. Come on, hush it.
She puts her left hand over his mouth to hold the bra in place, and the blood from her finger streams over his cheek and into his eye and down into his ear. She kneels on his chest to keep him quiet, presses down on his mouth trying to leave his nose free, but something is wrong because in a minute he begins turning purple and convulsing and then he stops moving altogether.
She takes her hand away from his mouth and looks into his heavy-lidded eyes that are already beginning to cloud over.
Doggone it, she says. Why do livin and dyin always have to be just half an inch apart?
She goes to the desk and takes a ballpoint pen from the drawer and puts the tip of it in his nostril and drives it upward sharp and hard with the heel of her hand to keep him from coming back.
Then she takes the elastic band from her hair and winds it tight around her pinky finger to hold the blood in and sits back against the window to take a breath.
She shakes her head.
I liked this place, too.
IT’S ALMOST four o’clock in the morning when she knocks on Ruby’s door.
What’s wrong? Ruby says with a mother’s instinct and immediate wakefulness.
You gonna have to sew me up.
Temple steps into the room, carrying a heavy green duffel that clatters noisily when she sets it down. Then she shuts the door behind her and lifts up her hand for Ruby to see.
Oh my God, what happened to you?
I got hurt.
We have to get Dr Marcus.
We’re not gettin Doctor nobody. I already been to the clinic and hunted myself some Lidocaine. I figure you got a sewing kit, and I just need your help on this – just a stitch or two – and then I’ll be on my way.
You tell me what happened to you.
I promise to give you the entire picture when I’m not bleedin out here on your carpet.
Ruby looks again at her hand.
Come here into the light, she says and brings Temple around, sits her on the side of the bed and lays her hand out on the tabletop under the lamp.
Here, Temple says, handing Ruby the Lidocaine and the syringe.
How much? Ruby asks.
I don’t know. Just a little, I’m gonna need that hand.
Ruby injects it into the fleshy part of her palm just below the finger.
I don’t know why Dr Marcus can’t do this.
Come morning the men around here ain’t gonna like me much. Sometimes they get curious notions of brotherhood, men do. You got a needle and thread?
Ruby goes to a drawer and sifts through it. What colour? she asks, flustered.
I don’t guess it matters, it’s just gonna be blood black in a minute.
Oh, of course. It’s silly, I just can’t think straight.
Come on now, it’s just like mendin a sock.
Ruby gets the needle and thread, and Temple can feel her hand numbing. She reaches under the nightstand for one of the magazines piled there and puts it down to catch the blood. Then she takes a good look at her pinky finger. It’s gone just above the first knuckle, a clean cut through the bone which shows as a yellow twig poking through the end. She uses her other hand to draw the skin up over the end of the bone and pinch it shut like a foreskin.
There, she says to Ruby. Now just run that thread through there a few times and tie it off. It’ll be okay.
Ruby does it and Temple looks away, staring at a picture of a vegetable garden Ruby has hanging over her bed. In the middle of the vegetable garden are three bunny rabbits and a girl wearing a bonnet. The pain comes sharp through the dullness of the Lidocaine. She feels dizzy but clenches her teeth to keep from passing out. She pulls one of the Vicodins from her pocket and pops it in her mouth.
When it’s done, Temple undoes the elastic hairband from around her finger and watches to see what will happen. A little blood oozes out the seam at the end, but not much. She wraps her finger in gauze and tapes it.
You did some nice work, thanks.
I never did that before.
Well, I reckon I should—
But when she tries to stand, the room spins around her and she has trouble looking forward and her neck feels loose and squirmy, incapable of keeping her head arranged straight.
Are you all right? Ruby says, but her voice sounds like it’s coming through cotton. Like it’s coming through lollipops made of T-shirts. Like it’s coming through the cottontails of all the bunny rabbits in all the vegetable patches in the world.
Temple says, I’ll just sit a sec—
And that’s when the darkness comes and swallows her complete.
The next thing she knows, she’s lying under the covers in Ruby’s bed and there’s sunlight shining full and bright through the window. No one else is in the room.
Doggone it, she says and swings her feet to the ground. Her head still feels afloat on purple ether, and her eyes seem a step behind where she’s trying to look. She’ll have to move slowly. She stands, supports herself against the wall and makes it to the window and back to the bed. For a few minutes she just walks back and forth between the window and the bed until her eyes start seeing straight and her head gets anchored to her body.
Ruby comes in.
You sure stirred the pot, Sarah Mary Williams. They’re out looking for you. Say they just want to ask you some questions and get to the bottom of things but I don’t like the look in their eyes, some of them. I’ve seen it before.
She opens the closet door and begins to shift through the clothes hanging there.
They say you made a mess of that Abraham Todd.
I wouldn’t of done it if—
You don’t have to tell me. Those Todd boys have hearts as black as I’ve seen. God help you, I’m sure he deserved whatever you gave him. But now his brother Moses has you on his agenda, and that’s a man without an ounce of foolishness to distract him from his set course. And that means we have to get you out of here. Here, put this on.
Temple’s hand is throbbing now, so Ruby helps her take off her clothes and stuff them in the duffel bag.
What happened to the bra we got you?
Temple says nothing and raises her arms so Ruby can drape her in the yellow cotton sundress she has taken from her own closet. It has lace trim, and it itches against her skin.
What’s this for? Temple asks.
It’ll attract less attention. Everyone around here who’s not out hunting you is dressed up for services.
Services?
It’s Sunday, sweetie. That’s what we do on Sundays.
It’s been a long time since Temple has distinguished between days of the week.
Then Ruby scrubs Temple’s face with a washcloth, takes a hair clip, puts it between her lips, does something with Temple’s hair and then slips the clip in and locks it down.
There now, Ruby says. Don’t you look nice.
Temple looks in the mirror. There’s a soft pillowy girl looking back at her.
I look like a muffin. Where do those men think I got to?
They think you already left. They’re out looking for you in the streets. Apparently someone also broke into the armory last night.
Ruby’s glance lands on Temple’s heavy duffel bag sitting by the door.
I just took one or two is all.
It’s all right, Sarah Mary. You’re going to need some help. I don’t like to think of it – you out there with all those things. I wish you could’ve stayed with us, but that Moses Todd isn’t going to let it happen. Come on, now. We just need to get you as far as the elevator.
Temple uses her good hand to swing the duffel up onto her shoulder while Ruby opens the door and glances up and down the hallway.
Here we go.
On the way to the elevator they pass one family – a man, a woman and a little boy. They are talking about airplanes and how they stay up in the air and if the boy will ever see one in real life. Ruby and Temple smile and say good morning as they pass.
They are alone in the elevator and Ruby presses a button that says P2. When the door opens they are in a deserted parking garage packed with cars. Temple follows Ruby to the end of one of the rows where she stops behind a mid-sized Toyota with its tail light busted out.
I can’t give you one of the nice ones, Ruby says. But it’ll be weeks before they notice this one’s missing. It runs, and it’s got a full tank, I checked already. Here, give me that.
She takes the duffel from Temple and puts it in the passenger seat of the car.
Now you listen to me, Ruby says, taking Temple by the shoulders and looking straight into her eyes. I know some nice people north of here about an hour. They’ll take care of you – tell them you know me. Just follow the signs for Williston and look for a gated compound off the freeway. You got that?
I got it.
You be careful, all right?
Temple doesn’t know what to say, but the moment calls for something.
You done a good thing here, she says. It’s an act of generosity that goes past the ordinary. You’re a right person, like a queen or something.
Go on now, Ruby says, looking worried and teary. I suspect you’ve got more troubles ahead of you than behind.
*
She drives north for an hour, but she can’t find the place Ruby told her about. The signs are no help. Once she was a safe distance outside the city, she stopped by the side of the road to study a sign and found the name of a town that was fifty-seven miles away. She thought it might be Williston because that would be about an hour’s drive. So she memorized the look of the name and followed the signs, but now here she is and there’s nothing like a compound at all.
Then it starts to rain and she pulls into the parking lot of a strip mall and shuts down the motor and listens to the drops drumming on the roof of the car.
The rain is bad luck. It stands to reason, she thinks, that the rain ought to come and wash away the impurities of the world. A cleansing like the holy flood was, to slough away the dead and bring dandelions and butterflies to bear every which way on the ruined surface of the world. But it doesn’t work like that. Instead, it just gets cold and damp and shivery in your collar, and afterwards, when the sun comes back from behind the clouds, there’s just more mould and rot than there was previous, and the stink rises like gas from every soil and stone.
*
The rain comes down hard, and she would rather wait it out inside somewhere. There is a warehouse-sized toy store in the strip mall, the colourful sign over the glass doors with all the letters still intact – which she takes as a sign of good things.
She reaches into the duffel and takes out one of the pistols, an M9, and ejects the magazine to make sure it’s topped off. Then she pulls the car up onto the sidewalk under the store’s overhang, right in front of the wide glass doors, and gets out.
The smell of the air is already worse – ozone and canker mixed. The pestilence dribbling to the surface and oozing into puddles of decay on the asphalt. A film coalesces over the water, a waxy skin that splits like gelatin when you tread on it.
Inside the electricity is out but the tall windows in front cast a workable grey light over most of the store. She walks up and down the aisles, fingering the dusty packages and trying to imagine a family room filled with colourful plastic dolls and cars, abstract magnetic construction kits, spacecraft adorned with stickers, miniature pianos with keys that light up when you press them. Silly, the casual and disposable fantasy of such objects.
In one aisle she finds a rack of miniature die-cast vehicles. She takes one, a fighter jet, and tears the plastic open and holds the thing in the palm of her hand. She remembers the boy earlier this morning asking his parents about airplanes. And she thinks of something else from a long time ago.
Malcolm in the passenger seat, on their way to Hollis Bend, him pointing at something through the windshield.
What’s that? he said.
She looked up and saw a streak in the sky like a sliver of cloud and an object at its head like a tiny metal lozenge.
It’s a jet, she said. An airplane. You’ve seen em before on TV. Must be from that military base back a ways.
I never seen one for real before.
Well now you seen one. Not too many around any more.
How come?
Hard to fly, she says. Takes a hell of a long time to learn, I expect.
How do they stay up there?
What? Listen at what you’re sayin. Birds don’t have any trouble staying up there. They do just fine.
Sure, but they flap their wings. How come the jet don’t have to flap its wings?
Cause a jet, it rides the wind.
How does it do that?
It just does, she says. It’s how they build it.
Oh. What if there ain’t no wind?
You get movin swift enough, you make your own wind.
How?
Here, look, roll down your window. All the way. Now make your hand flat like this. That there’s your wing. Now keep your hand like that and stick your arm out the window.
He did so, and his hand danced up and down.
You feel that? You feel how that air wants to lift up your hand? That’s how a plane works. It’s called aero-dynastics.
What’s that?
It’s the name of what I just got done explaining to you.
Oh. How come you know about that?
I don’t know. Someone told it to me once.
And you remembered it?
Sure did. And I got it told to you, and now you’re gonna have to find someone to tell it to. That’s how it works. That’s how civilizations get themselves built.
Aerodynastics, Malcolm repeated to himself under his breath. Aerodynastics.
Okay, boy, now roll up that window – it’s gettin frosty in here.
She’s still lost in the memory when she hears a sound at the end of the aisle and looks up to discover a meatskin pulling itself along the linoleum towards her. He’s ancient and desiccated, his skin shrivelled and flaking around his mouth and the knuckles of his hand. Probably been trapped in the store for years without anything to eat. A dry clicking sound comes from his throat, and when he tries to open his jaw she can see his thin cheeks tearing. It takes him a long time to get near her.
She points the M9 at his forehead and pulls the trigger. There’s no blood. Only a poof of papery dust as the slug collapses.
When she goes back outside again the rain has tapered off. According to her watch she’s been wandering the store for the best part of an hour. She gets into the car and tosses the die-cast jet into the glove compartment. Then she takes one of her pills – she’s not sure which one and doesn’t care. She just wants to feel different than she does right now and it doesn’t really matter which direction that different might be.
*
It is after ten o’clock that night when she comes across the hunters. The further north she goes the more populated the roads become. It seems like she passes a car every thirty minutes or so, and each time they both slow down and try to meet eyes or wave or smile or pretend to tip a hat or give a military salute or something to pay homage to the kinship of nomads. But when night falls the streets go bare again. Night-time, most people like to hole up and wait for the sun.
But the hunters, she sees their campfire from the road. It’s more of a bonfire really, and they’ve got it set up in the parking lot of an elementary school. She circles in her car seeing the heads of the three men rotate to watch her, their bodies hunched and motionless.
She gets out of the car and approaches them, making her face into a wall.
The men look her up and down, but they make no move. They are roasting something on a spit, and the light from the fire makes dancing shadows on the façade of the school building. A minor holocaust on an earth erased by night.
One of them is wearing a cowboy hat, and he tips it back on his head.
Evenin, princess.
I ain’t no princess, she says.
You coulda fooled me. You’re a little late for the cotillion, darlin.
She’s still wearing the yellow sundress that Ruby put on her earlier, and she’s embarrassed.
They are drinking something from metal tumblers and eating meat and beans from tin plates.
I’m comin from down south, she says. Lookin for a place called Williston.
Williston? You gone past it. It’s about twenty miles back the direction you came. You’re nearly to Georgia now.
Shoot, she says, looking into the deep dark horizon behind her. I knew it.
Clive here’ll draw you a map, but it’ll be hard to puzzle through in this dark.
I guess not. I reckon I’ll just keep goin north. It never pays much to go backwards to someplace you already been.
North to where? says the one named Clive. It’s not so safe for a little girl to be wandering around the countryside by herself. I don’t know if you noticed, but we got a little bit of a zombie problem.
She shrugs.
They don’t bother you so much, she says, if you can stay out from between their teeth.
The men laugh.
Well, that’s true enough, Clive says. What happened to your hand?
Just a scuffle, she says and secretes her hand behind her back.
Listen, says the one in the cowboy hat, how about you join us for a little supper before you head back out there? We found some whisky too if you’re interested. What do you say, road warrior?
She looks back at the car and then at the road ahead.
Well all right, she says. But just for a little bit. I like to keep advancin.
They are hunters, they tell her, and they travel from place to place, living off the land and trying to see the lengths and breadths of this great nation of ours before it goes under for the last time. There are still majestical things to see, they tell her.
We been all the way through the northern states and even into Canada, says the one called Lee, the one with the cowboy hat.
Tell her about the waterfall, says Horace, who sits on the ground, leans back on his palms and looks up into the starry sky.
Sure, Lee says. Niagara. Used to be a place honeymooners would go. Maybe you seen some movies. All this water, pouring over the cliffs, a thousand rivers falling down all at once, like somehow there was a mistake in the crust of the earth and someone had taken away half of a lakebed. And the force of it, water against water, so strong you can feel the spray on your cheeks a half a mile distant. I never seen anything like it. See, that’s the kind of thing that just keeps on going, century after century, no matter what us puny humans are doin all a-scurry over the surface of the earth.
They fill up a tumbler from the bottle and hand it to her. She drinks and feels the whisky radiate down her chest and into a tight ball of warmth in her gut. Then she tells them about her own wonderment – the Miracle of the Fish, and they all agree that it’s a marvel.
Horace scoops some beans onto his plate from a pot they have steaming at the edge of the fire, then he cuts some meat off the spit and passes the plate to Temple.
Have some, he says. We got plenty.
What is it?
That there is creeper meat.
Slugs? You aren’t telling me you’re eatin slugs.
Sure are, sweetheart, Lee says. Ain’t nothin wrong with it. Either they eat us or we eat them – which would you rather?
Ain’t it poison?
Not if it’s dressed right. We been out here goin on five years. So much food walkin around a man could live just fine by rifle and bow.
What about the rot?
We hunt the fresh ones – the ones that ain’t been around too long.
She examines her plate, tilting it towards the firelight to get a better look. The slices of meat are oily inside and charred black on the surface. She puts her nose to it.
It smells like rosemary.
The men smile, Horace looking hangdog and pleased.
Well, Lee says, just because we’re out here in the wilds don’t mean we have to forego the finer things. Horace is a downright culinary wizard. What you’re smellin there is a spice rub of his own concoction.
What the hell, she says. I’m game.
She puts the meat in her mouth and chews, letting the juices coat her tongue and teeth. Then she swallows and looks at the men who are leaning forward, anticipating her response.
It’s good, she says, and they holler gladly. Tastes like sow.
Always said, Lee laughs, the only different between man and pig is a good spice rub.
She eats more, and they pass the bottle around and refill their tumblers. When they see a slug approaching in the distance Clive shows her how good a shot he is with the bow, pulling back the string, putting his cheek right up to his hand to aim and sending an arrow right through the eye.
She claps appreciatively.
Horace has a guitar, and he sings about moons and women and loneliness, and she gets sleepy listening to it and breathing the thick, smoky air.
Her head gets wobbly from the whisky and the tiredness and the talk of God’s great earth, and they tell her she can lay down on one of their mats till morning – they sleep in shifts anyway. She eyes them suspiciously.
It’s all right, Sarah Mary, Lee says. We ain’t gonna mess with you. We know places to go when that’s what we want. Besides, you’re one of us. You might as well get a good night’s sleep. I got a feeling you’re gonna want to be goin your own way in the morning.
So she lays down and stretches out on the pallet, facing the fire to keep warm.
She begins to drift off, but before she does she remembers something and lifts herself onto one elbow.
Say, she says, my real name ain’t Sarah Mary Williams. It’s Temple.
We’re happy to know you, Temple, Lee says.
Yeah, she says. All right then.
And she lays back and looks at the stars, and when she closes her eyes she can still see them.
*
When she wakes in the morning, there are two new men who weren’t there the night before. They are leaning on a truck, and Temple’s hunters are consulting with them. She sits up, puts her arms around her knees and wishes she wasn’t still wearing that ridiculous yellow sundress.
The two new men are dressed in jeans and denim jackets and they have rifles hooked in the crooks of their arms, their conversation seems friendly enough.
Lee looks at her and comes over to where she’s sitting. He seems concerned, his mouth moving around a lot as though the inside of his cheeks were itching.
Who’re they? Temple asks.
Just some friendly folk is all, Lee says.
How come you got that look then?
They been telling me they had an encounter with someone on the road. Big guy. Rough lookin, bad teeth. Say he was looking for a blonde-haired girl, wouldn’t say why. But they figure it couldn’t of been good.
Where?
Just goin into Williston.
Uh-huh.
She gets to her feet and starts towards her car.
I don’t guess there are many blonde-haired girls travellin this way by themselves, says Lee.
I don’t suppose so.
She opens the door to the car and unzips the duffel bag on the passenger seat and takes out a pair of pants and a shirt. Then she pulls the sundress over her head and tosses it into the back seat.
Lee shields his eyes and turns away. The other four men in the distance look at her where she’s standing in just her cotton underpants.
You wanna tell me what you did to get this guy on your tail?
I killed his brother, she says, slipping the shirt over her head and then pulling the pants on.
Did he deserve killin?
He deserved something – killin’s just the way it happened to go. You can turn around now.
Lee turns and looks at her. Then he looks squinting into the distance.
Where you plannin to go?
North. Just north. He can’t follow me for ever, I got a lot of patience for travellin.
Yep. He nods and kicks the tarmac with his shoe and looks into the distance again. Then he says, You might think about comin with us.
He is a man at least two decades older than she, yet he possesses the intense frailty of boyhood.
Lee, that’s real nice. I want to thank you and Clive and Horace for being so agreeable to me. But you got somethin good going here. You’re seeing the wonders of this wide country. But me, I got a chasin problem. I’m always either being chased or chasin somebody. And I don’t expect I would feel right about pulling you all along with me, gettin you off your chosen course.
Well, says Lee.
Yeah.
I guess you’ve taken care of yourself so far.
I guess I have.
HER HAND throbs, and she reaches into the duffel on the passenger seat to find her pills but comes up instead with the plastic bag she put the end of her pinky finger in. The road is straight, and she holds an even course while she holds the bag up to the light of the windshield to examine its contents.
The amazement is that it still looks like a finger. There it is, like a magic trick, like all of a sudden the whole rest of the body is going to pop out from behind a curtain and reattach itself to the finger with a lot of showy prestidigitation. The nail is still painted cotton-candy pink, and the skin around the edge of the wound is drying out and shrivelling slightly.
Strange to think how it used to be a part of everything she did for her whole life, and now it’s on its own. She goes to put it back in the duffel but changes her mind and puts it in the glove compartment instead.
*
Subdivisions. Those magnificent bone-white homes, duplicated row after row on grids that seem to grow like crystal with the sharpness and precision of God’s artisan-ship, with those softly sloping sidewalks, square patches of overgrown lawn and the garage doors like gleaming toothy grins. She likes them, the way the homes fit together like interlocking blocks. When she hears the word community, this is the image that comes to mind: families nested in equally spaced cubes and united by a common colour of stucco. If she was living in a different time, she would like to live here, where everything is the same for everybody, even the mailboxes.
Here among these pretty homes, on a four-lane road with a wide grassy island in the middle where banyan trees are planted at equal intervals, she finds an accumulation of meatskins, a trail of maybe twenty, all loping awkwardly in the same direction. She pulls the car up past them to the front of the line where there is a large man trying to outpace the congregation behind. In his arms is the body of an ancient woman, no larger than a child.
She slows the car beside him and rolls down the window.
Hey mister, she says, you’re collectin quite a crowd. You’re gonna be in a bind if you get tired of walking before they do.
The man looks at her with flat grey eyes, empty of comprehension, and keeps walking.
Come on now, she says, that’s one grim parade you got behind you. Whyn’t you and your grandma come around to the other side and get in the car. The least I can do is get you a head start if you like derbyin so much.
The man looks at her again. He is big, with unwashed hay-coloured hair that hangs in strings and a dishpan face with slow, heavy-lidded eyes that seem too small for the breadth of his flat cheekbones. There is something on his forehead that looks like soot, and he breathes through his mouth, his lower lip jutting out. He begins to trip and stumble over his own feet, and she gets the impression he has been walking for a long time already. The old woman in his arms is dead, but it doesn’t look like she’s been dead for long.
You’re a dummy, ain’t you? A little slow in the head like? Well all right, dummy, we’ll do it your way.
She pulls the car on ahead and shuts it off, then reaches into the duffel bag for the AR-15 scoped rifle and slaps a cartridge into it and gets out of the car.
The man keeps walking past her, and she gets down on one knee and leans against the side of the car to steady herself and then starts firing. The sound isn’t a crack like some of the older rifles she’s used. This one is military issue, and it gives a muffled pop with each shot like the crank of an engine.
The first two she hits in the head with one shot, which she can tell by the spray of blood and bone and the way they drop already motionless and dead before they hit the ground.
The third, a woman in a nightdress, she hits in the shoulder, which spins her around, and it takes two more shots to get her in the back of the head.
The next shot hits the neck of an obese slug, and he puts his hands up, birdlike, to stop the flow of blood. Then she hits him in the forehead.
She fires until the clip is empty and then reaches into the car for her gurkha knife to finish off the rest and make sure they stay down. She rises up out of the slop and fans herself with her panama hat, feels the breeze on her face and breathes in the pure air sweeping down through the palm trees lining the street.
The man has set the ancient woman delicately down on the sidewalk by the car. He crouches beside her, gazing at Temple with a look of abject irresolution.
I shoulda let you die, dummy, she says. What you thinkin pulling a train of slugs behind you like that? You ain’t destined to survive this world. Most likely I just went against God’s plan for you, fool that I am.
He looks up at her and back towards the carnage behind her.
Do you talk? she asks. Or are you the kind of dummy that don’t say anything?
He reaches down to the corpse of the old woman and uses his knuckles to move her hair out of her face. A low moan escapes his mouth, inarticulate, like a mewling baby.
How long your granny been dead? Not too long I guess. But you best leave her go before she starts creepin around again. Cause when she does, she ain’t gonna be thinking about feedin you soup no more.
She goes to the car, opens the door and gets in. The day is bright and the road ahead is wide open, the breeze is cool and feels nice on her skin. Her hand is feeling fine. But she knows she’s not going to get that picture out of her head – the picture of that man kneeling by his dead granny and fixing her hair for her. So she climbs back out of the car.
Doggone it, she says. Come on, dummy, let’s put your grams in the ground.
In a nearby garage, she finds a shovel, two small fence pickets and a ball of string. She loads them into the man’s arms and leads him out into one of the small garden plots where the soil is loose. Then she hands him the shovel.
Go ahead, dummy, start digging. She ain’t none of my grandma.
She points and the man digs. He stands a full two heads taller than her, and his shoulders slope downward as though it is difficult to bear the dense, lumbering weight of his body. She has to show him how to use the shovel, how to hold it, but when he drives it into the earth it sinks deep and true. Meanwhile, she takes the two fence pickets and puts them crosswise and uses the string to tie them together tight.
Now you gotta put her in it, she says when the hole is deep enough. She points to the ancient bony body and then to the hole.
He lifts the old woman and gently sets her down on the raw clay earth, then looks to Temple for further instruction.
Okay, um, now you gotta get some flowers. A whole bunch.
She picks a tiny wildflower from beneath her feet.
Like this, but bigger. There’s a bunch round the front of the house. That way. Go on.
He goes, and she takes the pistol she brought from the car and gets down into the grave. She examines the woman closely, touching her fingers and her wrists. Then she pulls up the eyelids and sees the eyes. They are rolled back in the head, but they are already beginning to rotate ever so slightly.
Temple tries to prise open the mouth, but the teeth are clenched shut. She puts her fingers under the old woman’s nose.
Get a whiff of this, granny, she says. Come on now, open up.
The old woman’s head tilts slightly upward and her jaw opens to try to get her teeth around Temple’s fingers. Temple puts the barrel of the pistol in the mouth and points it upward and fires. Then she quickly pulls some handfuls of loose dirt into the grave and puts them under the old woman’s head to hide the mess and climbs out of the hole.
When the man lopes around the corner from the back of the house looking frightened, she shows him the gun and points to a nearby tree.
Ain’t nothin to worry about, she says. I was just takin a potshot at a squirrel. It got away. You got them flowers?
He has a handful of them, pale and broken-stemmed with roots and gobs of dirt hanging from them.
They’ll do, she says. Now come on and fill in this hole.
He does it, and she watches his slow movements, which seem to her like tectonic movements of the earth, glacial and resounding, full of pith and mineral.
She takes the picket cross and hammers it into the soil at the head of the grave.
That’s so God knows where to look when he comes to find her, she explains. Now go ahead and put those flowers on there. Go on now.
He puts the flowers down and looks to her.
All right then, dummy, I guess you got a better chance of staying ahead of them slugs now that you’re unburdened of granny. God only knows what you was made for, but I reckon you gonna find your place among saints and sinners.
Halfway back to the car she realizes he’s following her, those weak cloudy eyes looking down at her legs, following the shadow she casts on the pavement.
What you doin, dummy? You can’t come with me. I ain’t the one to take care of you. I ain’t a kind and gentle creature. You understand me? Look here, you got the wrong girl. I’ll feed you to them meatskins just as soon as look at you. I don’t need no halfwit to have to worry about.
She looks at the car and then back at the man.
Doggone it, dummy. You got a fate same as I do, same as everybody. Your livin and dyin ain’t on me. It can’t be. You stay there now and stop following me.
She puts her hands up to indicate he should stay, and she backs slowly to the car. She gets in and shuts the door and looks one last time at him, standing there in the middle of the street like a tree stump.
Then she drives away, gripping the wheel tight, and the thick throb of pain comes back into her hand, and she grabs on to it and doesn’t let it go because it feels like an earned suffering.
*
Over the next rise, there’s a convenience store and a gas station. The pumps are still working, and she fills her tank and then gets some food. She finds some cheese crackers, takes them outside and sits on the kerb to eat them, while in the distance some slugs wander to and fro oblivious of her.
She remembers Uncle Jackson, when he first found her and the boy Malcolm holed up in a storm drain, living off squirrels and berries.
Where’d you come from, little bit? he said.
There she was, not yet ten years old probably, snarling at him, baring her teeth like a beast of the earth.
Feral, huh? he said. I’m not convinced. I see the glimmer, girl. You’ve got smarts whether you like it or not. My cabin’s that way, about a half a mile. Come by when you’re tired of the drainpipe.
He showed her how to shoot, how to hold your breath when you are aiming at a distance, how to drive a car and how to start one without a key. He fed her and Malcolm oatmeal in ceramic bowls.
He said, How long have you been taking care of that boy?
A while.
Are you his sister?
She shrugged.
We was raised in the same place, she said. Everything got mixed up. Nobody was sure.
He nodded.
Come here, he said. I have something for you. It’s a khukuri.
What’s that?
He shuffled around in a chest in the corner of the room and brought out something wrapped in a blanket. It was a blade that bent inward and shone red in the firelight. It was beautiful, and she wanted to touch it. She thought it would feel cold, that it would make her fingers feel vibrant.
It’s Nepalese, he said. There were warriors in Nepal called gurkhas. Very strong, very fierce. Resilient and self-sufficient. Like you. They carried blades like this.
What you call it? Cuckoo?
Khukuri. But if you can’t remember that, you can just call it a gurkha knife.
She remembers, later, Malcolm, just a couple years younger than she, asleep on a mound of blankets in the corner, Uncle Jackson’s snoring from the other side of the room, the light from the remaining embers of the fire casting a pale glow through the cabin – and her turning the blade over and over in her hands, her eyes closed, feeling the weight of it and the balance, getting to know it, putting it against the skin of her face and her lips.
It was a gift. It was the first gift anybody had given her since she could remember.
In the parking lot of the convenience store, she gets to her feet and returns to the car and sits in the driver’s seat for a while, thinking about a lot of gone things.
Finally she starts the car and swings the wheel around and drives back to the subdivision.
He’s still standing where she told him to stay, pulling on the ends of his greasy hair and squinting in the sun.
She pulls up next to him and rolls down the window.
How long were you gonna stay there, dummy? she asked. What was your plan exactly, just wait until the slugs gave you a reason to move? I never seen such a fool as you – and I seen some foolishness without compare in my life.
His sad thick eyes look into the car. She tries to follow the gaze, but what he’s really looking at is inside his own head. He has a skillet face, a frame like vegetal growth, sluggish eyes and a mind with no doors or windows.
She reaches over and opens the passenger door, then tosses the duffel bag into the back seat.
Well come on if you’re comin, she says. But I ain’t promising you’re gonna live.
*
He keeps tugging at his hair and scratching, and pretty soon she figures it out.
You got head critters, dummy.
In the next town, where the water lines are still pumping, she finds a house with a spigot on the side yard and a hose attached.
Bare yourself, dummy, she says. He doesn’t understand, so she has to show him by unbuttoning two of his shirt buttons. His eyes watch her fingers intently. Go on, she says, don’t be shy. You got no luggage I ain’t seen before.
He strips himself down and stands in the middle of the overgrown yard. He shuts his eyes tight and holds onto the rag she gives him while she sprays him front and back with the hose.
Now wash, she says, miming the action for him. He moves the rag around on his body, trying to mirror the gestures she makes. Harder, she says. That soot ain’t just gonna brush off.
Finally she gets impatient and takes the rag from him and scrubs his back and his front above the waist and his arms.
Now you gotta take care of yourself down there, she says, pointing to his crotch. This girl ain’t full service.
He circles the rag lightly over his genitals a few times.
Close enough, she says. We find a place to stow you, and someone else can teach you about personal hygienics.
A few blocks away, in a commercial strip, she finds a hair salon. She bashes in the window, takes him in the back where the sink is and shows him how to wash his hair. For a long time he just sits in the chair with his neck leaning back on the sink with the semi-circular cutout, letting the water wash over his scalp.
It can’t hurt him to have a good long soak, so she spends the time washing her own hair and combing it out and using the scissors to trim off the ragged ends.
When he’s done in the sink, she puts him in one of the swirling chairs before a mirror and takes the electric clippers and cuts his hair down to the scalp. Then she shaves his face and finds some good-smelling cream to slather all over.
Look at you now, dapper Dan. Now you won’t befoul our ride.
Across the street she spies a tall office building, higher than anything else in the area. They cross and find a way in and ride the elevator as high as it will go. Then they walk through the empty corridors until she finds what she’s looking for, fire stairs leading to the roof.
She climbs atop a large metal air-conditioning unit, and he sits next to her. Then she takes out her small spyglass and scans the horizon all around. The sun is low in the sky and the clouds are deep orange and look burned at the edges.
Let’s take in the view for a little bit. What do you say, dummy?
She looks at him, a big man with a physical density to him, a thickness of body and shape. His eyes look like they are peering out of deep wells in the earth. The skin of his face is worn and leathery.
How old are you anyway, dummy?
He looks out at the sun descending behind the clouds.
I’m guessin you’re a solid thirty-five. That means you were around before all this slug mess started happening.
He puts his hand to his newly shaven face.
I wonder if you remember it. Does that gone past still haunt up your dummy skull? Do you remember the first time you saw a meatskin? Did you recognize it as somethin different, or does everything walkin on two feet look the same to you?
She looks at his eyes, and they seem to be staring at nothing.
You know something? I knew another dummy once before – it was in the orphanage home where I grew up. He was my age, though, and he wasn’t a non-speaking dummy like you. He could talk, but not very good. And he was runty, born to be slug food, if you ask me. Not like you, you’re like a bear or somethin. Downright fortitudinous is what you are. Anyway, Malcolm and I, we liked to take him around with us. Malcolm especially, he was always trying to teach him things, like how to blow bubbles in his soda with a straw.
She looks down at her hands, the pink polish on the nails, the stump of her left pinky finger wrapped up in gauze. It aches, and the aching seems like a symbol of something.
Anyway, she says, I don’t wanna be talkin to you about Malcolm. Forget I mentioned it in the first place. What we gotta do, we gotta find a safe place to unload you. Cause followin me around everywhere is a sure way to get yourself eat up. That’s our mission, dummy, to find you a new home.
She looks through the telescope onto the horizon. In the distance she can see a black car approaching on the same road she came into town on herself.
See now, she says, I knew I was feelin something not right. You gotta trust your gut to guide you true, that’s lesson number one.
She looks through the telescope again and the car dips behind a foothill.
See, it’s possible that that’s just anyone – but you know what my gut tells me? My gut tells me that’s my old friend Moses Todd, who’s got some business he’s gonna want to finish up with me. It’s a wonder how he’s trackin me, but you can’t put nothin past these southern boys. They just sit around waiting for somebody to kill their brother so they can get started on some vengeance. It’s like a dang vocation with them.
She collapses the miniature telescope, puts it back in her pocket and takes one last look at the sunset, which is really and truly a thing to behold.
*
She takes the road north out of town and drives fast for an hour, dodging slugs wandering in the middle of the road. She hums tunes, and the big man hunched in the seat next to her seems to like it. He does not smile, she does not know if he can smile, but his eyes take on the look of a child lulled near to sleep.
The next city she comes to is a big one, growing up around her like something organic. Thick with overgrowth, it has reverted to wilderness and old times under the shadowed canopy of spindly oaks. The trees grow beards of Spanish moss that hang nearly to the ground and float their ancient white tails in the breeze. Spreading out from the main avenues like twigs from branches, the broken asphalt roads give way to brick lanes, brittle barbeque shacks with torn screen doors and collapsing roofs tucked into alleyways behind big white colonials hidden behind gates of thick ivy, which, in turn, are secreted behind the commercial districts of block stores and low-stacked parking garages. In the middle of town is a square that must have been the site of some final showdown. There’s a huge marble fountain, long dry, filled with eviscerated corpses gone to bone and black. In the middle of the fountain is a marble statue of an angel, her wing tips pointing still unbroken towards the sky. A dead man hangs slung around her neck as though he would ride with her to heaven except that his lower half below his waist is gone, which makes him look like an absurd hand puppet tossed profanely over something holy.
The slug population is dense. Temple has to slow down to avoid hitting them, and she has to keep moving to keep them from congregating.
Downtown the city is overrun; it is a grotesque panorama. They walk, some of them, in twos and threes, sometimes even hand in hand like lovers, lumbering along, slow and thick, blood crusted down their fronts, stumbling over the bony remains of consumed corpses. Their gestures are meaningless, but they hearken back with primitive instinct to life before. A slug dressed in black with a white preacher’s collar lifts his hands towards the sky as if calling upon the god of dead things, while a rotting woman in a wedding dress sits open-legged against a wall, rubbing the lace hem against her cheek. Here, the monstrous and the perverse, the like of which Temple has never seen before. A slug with no arms nestled up against the swollen belly of a corpse recently dead, chewing away at its exposed viscera like a piglet at the teat of its mother. These, the desperate and the plagued, driven to consume beyond their usual ken – a swarm of them pulling apart a dead horse with their hands, using their teeth to scrape the offal from the backside of the bristly skin. Some even so bubbling with abomination that they turn on each other, by instinct preying on the weak, pulling them down, the children and the old ones, digging their teeth first into the fleshiest parts to give their clawing fingers some purchase, a mob of them backing a pale-faced girl against the concrete base of a building, she opens her mouth to defend herself, sinks her teeth into the arm of one of her attackers, but there are more, a groaning, howling brood like coyotes on the concrete plain. And, too, a carnival of death, a grassy park near the city centre, a merry-go-round that turns unceasing hour by hour, its old-time calliope breathing out dented and rusty notes while the slugs pull their own arms out of the sockets trying to climb aboard the moving platform, some disembodied limbs dragging in the dirt around and around, the hand still gripping the metal pole – and the ones who succeed and climb aboard, mounting to the top of the wooden horses, joining with the endless motion of the machine, dazed to imbecility by gut memories of speed and human ingenuity. And the horde, in the blackout of the city night, illumined only by the headlights of the car, everywhere descending and roiling against each other like maggots in the belly of a dead cat, the grimmest and most degenerate manifestation of this blighted humanity on this blighted earth – beasts of our lost pasts, spilling out of whatever hell we have made for them like the army of the damned, choked and gagging and rotted and crusty and eminently pathetic, yes, brutally, conspicuously, outrageously pathetic.
They gather, the horde, and she eases her car through, pushing them out of the way or down under her wheels, which crunch over their limbs or torsos. If she stops, if the car stalls, she is dead, she knows. To go faster would be to risk damage to the car, so she pushes through at a steady pace, while the man sitting next to her watches with blank eyes the crowd of walking bodies in the pool of light ahead of them.
This is a sight indeed, Temple says. We got armageddon every direction it looks like. They got a plague of meatskins here, don’t they? I don’t know about you, dummy, but it’s been a long time since I been reminded so of the end of things.
She leans forward in the seat and grasps the steering wheel more firmly.
Still and all, she says, this does give us one advantage. Brother Todd is gonna have a nightmare time following us through this mess, especially after we stirred em up like we’re doin.
She drives the car forward, and the city of the dead moves in jerks and eddies around them.
By the time the sun comes up, they have made it to the outskirts of the city, a series of rolling hills capped by multi-storied gable houses with stone entries and marble steps. She has turned off the main road and is now travelling west as best as she can figure it, and the slugs have thinned out considerably.
Beyond the clusters of houses, the road opens up and they find themselves in estate country – wide tracts of grassy land with mansions set way back in the distance. Most of the fields are enclosed by sturdy white horse fences that circle the property. Many of the fences are worn and broken through in spots, and now slugs graze where horses used to.
The road climbs up over a rise and reveals a valley on the other side. To the south of the road is untended grassland, but to the north is the largest estate she’s seen yet. Even from this distance she can see the size of it, that mansion of gloating white, built up on the top of the hill as though it were crowning majestically the earth itself.
She pulls over.
Ain’t that something, she says. Let’s take a look.
There are eight columns in the front, she can count them from where she stands in the road, and a driveway leads from the gate straight up to the house with a circle out front and a fountain in the middle of the circle spitting water high up into the air.
Look at that fountain, dummy. I’ll be damned if there ain’t someone livin there. And I got an idea about how they keep them meatskins away.
The fence surrounding the property is different from the others in the area. Instead of being white wooden planks, it consists of metal wires strung horizontal about six inches apart.
You stay away from that now, she says. You probably don’t even know what an electrified fence is, and I guess it’s best you don’t find out first-hand.
She tells the man to stay by the car. She approaches the wide gate and discovers that it too is wired.
Doggone it, she says. How we gonna get in there? Here, wait, I got an idea.
She goes to the car and gets a pistol from the duffel bag in the back seat.
You’re lucky I’m the brains of this operation.
She points the pistol in the air and fires three times in deliberately paced succession. The reports echo loud through the canyon.
Now, she says, that’s gonna draw somebody’s attention. Let’s just hope the residents of Castle Cleanteeth up there get curious before our local meatskins do.
A few minutes later, she can see a figure come around from behind the house rather than from the front door. It’s a black man, and he’s wearing a green smock, the full kind of smock that has a bib and ties neatly around the waist. He’s tall, but she notices as he gets closer, taking his time walking down the driveway with a delicate step, that he seems even taller than he actually is because of a quality of pride that emanates from him. Around his temples, his close-cropped hair is greying, and his half-smile is polite but distant.
Can I help you, miss? he says through the gate.
What’s your name?
Johns.
Johns? Like John except more than one?
That’s correct. May I help you?
That your house?
Belle Isle belongs to Mrs Grierson.
Well I don’t know what you just said, but how about lettin us come in and get some rest? We’re just travellin through, and it looks like you got some hospitality to spare.
I’m afraid this is a private residence, miss.
Private residence? Where you from anyway? I don’t suppose you been informed that your downtown’s got the worst slug infestation I ever seen. There ain’t no private residences any more, mister. There’s just places where slugs are and places where they ain’t.
I am sorry, you’ll have to try somewhere else.
He begins to turn away.
Wait, hold up now. Mister, do you know how old I am?
I do not.
I’m fifteen years old. You gonna feed a defenceless fifteen-year-old girl to the meatskins, just to avoid setting another couple places for supper? How’s that gonna sit with your conscience? Because I know it would sure enough bother me.
He looks at her for a long time, and she does her best to put on her truant waif look.
Then he lifts a panel on the stone column, punches in a code, and the two sides of the gate roll back automatically.
Thanks, mister, you’re a right guy.
And this gentleman is . . . ?
Oh, don’t worry about him. He’s just a dummy. He won’t steal nothin of yours.
Johns presses a button once they are through and the gates close behind them.
She has a desire to run up to the circle and bathe herself in the fountain and cry out to the mistress of the house, Yoohoo, Mrs Grierson, I’m here for a visit! But she decides to play it safe and not make anyone nervous. These people seem to have it pretty good, and she doesn’t want to spook them. So she holds her hands behind her back like a little lady should, and she follows Johns up the driveway to the house.
INSIDE, the house looks like something she’s seen in movies – metalwork frilly like lace, the whole place kingly and oblivious. The front entrance opens onto a long hall that extends all the way through to the back around a central staircase that winds in a circle up to the second floor. Descending from the ceiling like a shower of ice, is a chandelier that seems to hold the light locked selfish in its crystals rather than giving it out. The floor of the entry is marble black and white diamonds, and along the walls are grandfather clocks, half-circle tables with model ships and mahogany sideboards with sprays of flowers or ancient yellow dolls under glass bells.
The place seems untouched by the mass walking death everywhere else in the world. She looks for the stand of guns by the door, but instead she finds a rack for coats and umbrellas, a closet for muddy boots. There are no boards nailed across the windows, instead there are layers of lace and muslin tied open with thick burgundy ropes that have large toylike tassels on the ends. There is no blood crusted brown on the walls and the floors. No lookout stations. No gunner nests. It is as though she has entered a different era entirely.
The first thing she hears when she comes through the door is a song being played on a piano. She assumes, of course, that it’s a recording until the song stops abruptly then starts again, and she realizes someone is practising something on a real piano.
The song is a peaceful one, but also full of chords that make her ache. It’s a sad peacefulness.
Who’s playin the piano? she asks Johns.
Mr Grierson practises in the mornings.
And who’s that on the wall?
She points to a portrait of a man dressed in an old-fashioned grey military uniform standing beside a woman seated in a long red gown. Behind them is a flag with an X on it, which she recognizes as the one belonging to the South of the olden days.
They are Henrietta and William Cuthbert the Third, great-great-grandparents of Mrs Grierson.
I’m gettin the picture. In other words, this is the Grierson estate.
It is called Belle Isle.
Whatever you say. Let me just wipe the blood off my feet so I keep from trackin it in.
Johns gives her a withering look, and she smiles back sweetly.
How shall I announce you? he asks.
Your normal way is fine by me.
What name shall I give?
Oh, Sarah Mary Williams.
And his name?
You can just call him dummy – me and him don’t stand on ceremony, do we, dummy?
Johns swings open one of the tall sets of doors off the entrance hall to reveal a parlour filled with floral-patterned couches and chairs, and a massive black piano with its lid propped up to reveal all the strings inside. At the side of the room a nicely dressed woman sits at a card table playing solitaire and sipping a drink with what looks like crushed leaves in it. She seems to be in her seventies, but regal seventies, handsome-looking, wearing a gown like Temple’s never seen before in real life, full of shimmer and rustle.
At the piano sits a young man dressed in a full suit, his hair slicked back, and his body leaning and swaying with the music he’s playing. When he turns around, Temple sees his delicate green eyes and his closely shaven face, and she supposes that he must be five years older than she is.
Mrs Grierson, Johns announces, this young lady and her friend were travelling by and needed assistance. Miss Sarah Mary Williams.
We don’t really need no assistance, Temple says, just maybe a bite to eat or somethin.
Well, isn’t this a lovely surprise! Mrs Grierson says, getting up from the table and sweeping across the room to take Temple in her arms and kiss both her cheeks.
Sir, welcome, she says, holding out her hand to the large slow-eyed man standing next to Temple.
Oh, never mind him, Temple says. He don’t know how to shake—
But to her surprise, he holds out his hand and lets Mrs Grierson shake it.
Come in, come in, Mrs Grierson says. I want you to meet my grandson Richard.
The young man at the piano stands and bows slightly in their direction.
Grandson, Temple says. With all the Mr and Mrs talk going on, I figured the two of you was married.
Oh my no. I’ve been a widow for as long as I care to remember. Now it’s just myself and my boys – my two grandsons and their father. Their poor father isn’t well at the moment, I’m afraid. Would you care for some iced tea?
Temple looks at the glass on the card table.
What you got in it, plants?
That’s fresh mint. We grow it in the garden.
Sure, I’m game.
So Johns goes out and a woman who looks like she could be Johns’s wife or sister brings in a tray with glasses of iced tea on it, sets it on the coffee table and goes out again. They sit around on the couches and talk. Temple makes a special effort to be cordial and ladylike and she tries not to gulp down her tea like she wants to, but rather sip it like Mrs Grierson seems to be doing. She tries to remember to wipe her mouth with the little cloth napkin by her drink rather than with her sleeve, and she sits back and crosses her legs like someone once told her she should rather than sitting forward with her elbows on her knees, which is obviously the better way to sit if you have to defend yourself all of a sudden.
Now tell us where you hail from, Sarah Mary, Mrs Grierson says.
Me? I’m from the area, just two towns over.
She pointed in a direction.
Oh, you’re from Georgia? I could tell it. I know a Georgia peach when I see one. Which town? Lake Park? Statenville?
Statenville. That’s the one. Me and him grew up there. He’s my brother. My mama waited fifteen years to try again after him because of the way he turned out.
You shouldn’t be travelling by yourself, Richard says. He has a child’s voice, despite his age, and when he uses it to sound authoritative it trips over itself. It’s a good thing you found us. We’ll take care of you.
Thank you, Richard, Temple says politely. I like the song you were playing before.
That was Chopin. I can play others. You should stay with us, it’s not safe outside.
Oh, Richard, Mrs Grierson chides. Let’s not talk about unpleasant things. I can’t remember the last time we had a girl in the house, other than Maisie. You know, Sarah Mary, I never had any granddaughters. I have some wonderful frocks upstairs that I bet would fit you perfectly. Before dinner we can go up and have a look around. Of course you will both stay as long as you like. We have plenty of room for guests.
Two grandsons? Temple asks.
Pardon me?
Before, you said you had two grandsons?
Oh, yes, Richard and James, my two boys. It’s just the four of us left, I’m afraid. But they are fine boys. Such handsome and talented boys.
My older brother, Richard says, likes to seclude himself in his room when he’s not wandering in the fields. He is my brother and I love him, but he can be—
Richard, Mrs Grierson warns.
I was just going to say elusive, Grandmother. Elusive. Wouldn’t you say that sums him up fairly well?
My boys, she says to Temple. They take such good care of me.
*
The first thing she does is ask Johns to open the front gate so she can bring her car up from the road and park it in the back of the house.
Then she and her companion are shown to adjoining guest rooms by Maisie, the woman who brought them iced tea earlier, whom Mrs Grierson refers to as a girl even though she must be almost twice Temple’s age.
You like it here? Temple asks when Maisie is on her way out.
Where else is there, miss?
I mean, they treat you all right?
The Griersons are very kind.
Temple nods and looks around at the lace doilies and floral wallpaper above the wainscoting.
To wake up in this house, she says, you might never guess the world’s got half eat up, huh?
Pardon me?
Never mind.
Temple finds an old-fashioned claw-footed tub in the bathroom and decides to take a soak and give her throbbing hand a rest.
I’m gonna be in there for a while, dummy, she says. Don’t break nothin. Here, you better put your hands in your pockets.
She makes a gesture and he does it. Then she goes into the bathroom and closes the door. Later, when she returns, he is sitting on the edge of the bed fingering something with his right hand that he must have pulled from his pocket.
What’s this you got? she says, taking the slip of paper from his hand. First I find out you know how to shake hands like a proper gentleman and now this. You sure are full of secrets today, dummy.
The slip of paper has some numbers and letters on it. It looks like an address with something else written across the top.
How long you been hangin onto this? she says and tucks it into the pocket of her pants. I reckon now I gotta find out what it says, don’t I?
Mrs Grierson comes and leads her to a different room where she takes great delight in sending Temple into a huge square closet and watching her emerge in different colourful dresses. Each time Temple comes out, Mrs Grierson claps her hands to her lips and grins, then she sweeps over and makes various little adjustments to the outfit because Temple has invariably put it on incorrectly.
This is the second time in just a week that Temple has been costumed by gentle women. She dislikes it but acquiesces because serving as a dress model counts as currency for some species of women, and Temple knows she will owe Mrs Grierson a certain not-so-small debt.
Aren’t you lovely! Mrs Grierson says. You must get a great deal of attention from the young men.
Usually the kind that needs beatin down.
Oh, you’re a scamp. You can’t fool me, I remember what it was like to be young.
What was it like?
Dangerous, she says, as though that were a good thing. Of course, Temple realizes, the danger of her youth was probably in coming home late or getting caught sneaking some whisky from the family bar, or kissing one boy by the arbor while another one waited for you on the porch swing out front.
At dinner, they all sit around an oversized polished table in the dining room. Mrs Grierson sits on the end, and there are two places set on the left side for the Grierson boys and two places set on the right for her guests. Temple has been outfitted in peach taffeta for the occasion, and her hair has been artfully piled on top of her head.
Mr Grierson is still too ill to join us, I’m afraid, Mrs Grierson says. I’ll have Maisie take him a plate in his room.
I guess if he’s as hungry as I am, Temple says, gulping down her entire glass of ice water with lemon, it don’t matter much to him which room he gets his grub in.
Mrs Grierson and her son look at her with their hands folded neatly in their laps.
Oops, Temple says. Sorry. It’s been a while since I dined all polite and everything. It don’t come natural to me.
Doesn’t, dear, Mrs Grierson says.
Temple looks at the empty place beside Richard Grierson.
I suppose we’re waitin on your brother?
James will be down directly, Mrs Grierson assures her.
And almost immediately after she says the words, the dining-room doors swing open and James Grierson comes in and drops himself into the chair beside his brother.
James, we have a guest, Mrs Grierson says.
Buzz, buzz, says James.
It is evident that he is the older of the two, not because of any physical indications but simply as a result of the spiritual weight he seems to lug around on his shoulders. He is paler than his brother, and dark in the places where his brother is light. His eyes are sunken and weary, broken of all the plastic dignity in Richard’s gaze. Nonetheless, he is handsome in a severe way – the kind of man who makes Temple’s insides roil around all curious and bothered.
Sarah Mary, Mrs Grierson says, would you like to say grace?
Oh, uh, I best not. I never get the words right.
So Richard does it instead:
Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, in everything give thanks, for this is God’s will for you.
Amen, says Mrs Grierson, and Temple follows with an amen of her own.
And praise Jesus that we’re not dead yet, James Grierson says. Then he looks at his brother and adds: Some of us.
James, Mrs Grierson warns.
The food is the best that Temple has ever tasted. Salty chicken and dumplings, a puffy corn casserole, green beans with mushrooms and crunchy onions on top, cornbread, and for dessert a peach cobbler that makes her want to run her finger across the plate to get every last bit of it.
So, Sarah Mary, James says, elongating her name as though he’s not too fond of it, where are you from?
She’s from over in Statenville, James, Mrs Grierson answers for her.
Is that right? he asks. You like Statenville?
It’s okay, I reckon.
I didn’t know there were still survivors in that town.
There’s a few.
It must be horrible out there, Richard interjects. For a girl your age to be exposed to such monstrosity. Those things.
He shudders.
They ain’t so bad, she says. They just doin what they supposed to do. Like we all are, I guess.
Are they supposed to eviscerate children? James asks suddenly. Are they supposed to play tug of war with the intestines of God-fearing men?
James! Mrs Grierson says, I’ll not tell you again—
Are they supposed to digest entire populations?
James, that’s enough! I refuse to hear such horrible things at my table!
You refuse, James chuckles, looking at his grandmother. You refuse.
Then he pushes back his chair and tosses his napkin onto the plate and marches from the room.
Mrs Grierson watches him go and collects herself and then smiles in a dignified way at Temple.
I apologize for my grandson’s behaviour, she says.
Ain’t no problem, Temple says. Sometimes you gotta bust apart to get yourself put back together.
Life has been hard on him, Mrs Grierson says.
He was in the army, Richard adds.
*
I gotta get out of this place, dummy. We can stay a few days to try and lose ole Moses, but I ain’t got this far in my life just to get familied down inside an electric fence.
She looks at him. He sits on the edge of her bed where she put him, his fingertips poking at the air as though something were there and his concentration intent upon it.
It’s an enigma what you seein in this world, dummy.
She considers.
Still, this ain’t a half-bad place for you. Give em a few days to get attached, and we got you a new home. Plenty of people to make you dinner and watch you don’t get yourself hurt.
She nods her head and puts the curtain aside to look out the window.
They’re a little nutty, sure, but it’s about as nice a place as you or me’re ever gonna see in this life.
Later, after the sun sets, she creeps out to the car to smuggle in the gurkha knife, because she doesn’t sleep well unless she’s got it at hand. The car is parked behind the house where the hill continues to climb up into a densely forested part of the landscape. From where she is, she can see a faint path winding up through the trees and a dim figure standing at the foot of the path.
You gettin an eyeful? she says, loud enough for whoever it is to hear.
But the shape doesn’t respond, turning instead and ascending the path, disappearing into the dense foliage.
She looks back at the house once, the lighted squares of window beckoning with the kind of security that comes with knowing what to expect. Then she sighs and looks at the shoes Mrs Grierson gave her. They match the taffeta dress, but they aren’t going to survive tromping through the woods.
It’s a shame, they are pretty shoes.
*
There is no moon, and she follows the path up through the trees more by feel than by sight, sweeping the gurkha knife in front of her. She worries less about stumbling than she does about walking into the electrified fence along the perimeter of the property.
The path winds back and forth up the side of the hill. Every now and then she thinks she can hear footsteps other than her own. Behind her or in front of her she can’t tell, but they stop when she stops to listen.
A blind dark like this, she’s not doing any sneaking up, so she calls out.
Whyn’t you come on out, whoever you are, and we’ll make a midnight constitutional together. Otherwise I might could hack you by accident.
There is no response, and she looks back in the direction of the house. It is hidden behind the trees, but she can see the faint glow of it in the lower part of the sky. She continues up the hill.
Soon she emerges into a clearing at the top, and it’s a divine sight. The infested city is below her, lit primitive by a few meagre lights shimmering in the night air. In those pools of light she can see the slugs stumbling densely together, tiny in the distance. The only sound is the rustling of the leaves, a peacefulness incongruous with the thick tableau of horror below.
The clearing must be used frequently. There is a park bench, and a small white-painted iron table with a glass top. On the ground next to the bench are two empty bottles. Dead soldiers, Uncle Jackson used to call them.
I have a gun aimed at your head, says a voice behind her. Don’t turn around.
Temple turns around. It’s James Grierson.
I said don’t turn around.
I heard you.
You think I won’t shoot you?
I never seen anybody shoot someone without some reason, good or bad.
I think you’ve got that wrong, little miss. If you haven’t noticed, reason is something we seem to have a dearth of in this world.
Then I guess you better kill me with that first shot, cause if I make it over there with this blade, I’m gonna mess you up permanent.
He gazes at her down the barrel of the gun, a look of consideration on his face as though he is thinking about whether to cast her in a play rather than shoot her. Then he lowers the gun. In his other hand is a bottle, and he raises it to his mouth and drinks.
It’s a beautiful night, he says. Pitch-black, the beasts of hell lowing in the distance. How about sitting with me and having a drink?
He seems to have lost interest in the gun altogether.
All right then, she says. That’s more neighbourly of you.
He sits on the bench and sets his gun on the table, and she sits on the other end of the bench. They look out over the city, and he hands her the bottle and she drinks from it and hands it back.
That’s good whisky.
Hirsch bourbon, sixteen year. Only the best.
They drink.
Look yonder, he gestures down towards the city. A plague of slugs descended upon us. A scourge of evil bubbling up from hell.
He laughs, but she can’t tell whether it’s because he’s joking or because he isn’t.
I don’t know about evil, Temple says. Them meatskins are just animals is all. Evil’s a thing of the mind. We humans got the full measure of it ourselves.
Is that right? Are you evil, Sarah Mary?
I ain’t good.
James Grierson looks at her in a hard, penetrating way. His skin is pale and almost glows against the black night. He looks like someone who could slap you or kiss you, and you wouldn’t be able to tell which one is coming and it would mean the same thing either way.
You’re a soldier, he says to her. Like me. You’ve done things you’re not proud of. You’ve got a fierce shame in you, little girl. I can see it – burning in your gut like a jet engine. Is that why you move so fast and so hard?
She looks out over the city of slugs. She can feel his eyes on her, and she doesn’t like to think about what they are seeing.
You were in the army?
I was, he says and takes a drink.
For how long?
Two years. I was stationed in Hattiesburg. We were trying to take back the city.
That ain’t no small task.
We had rescue stations set up, radio transmitters. We were working building defensive walls. But they just kept coming.
Slugs, they like to be where the action is, she says.
We thought we were taking a stand. We killed them and burned the remains. The women tended to the bonfire, and you could smell the smoking corpses day and night. We rotated shifts, a barrage of bullets, and then the clean-up crews. And then there would be more after that. They just kept coming. You wouldn’t have thought there were so many dead.
And then what?
It was too much. We ran low on ammo. Everyone was exhausted. A girl fell into the fire and her mother tried to pull her out and both of them died and had to be burned. The worst was the psychology of it. You can’t fight an enemy like that. There’s no way to win.
So you gave up?
We fell back. We spread out to secure locations. They gave us the option to go home, and I took it.
You were gonna take care of your family.
He holds his bottle up to the sky.
The Grierson dynasty holds fast to its glorious history. It closes its eyes to modernity in all its forms.
He leans over to her and points the bottle in her face.
I’ve been around more living dead in that house than I was when I was piling them up in a bonfire two stories high.
He passes the bottle to her and sits back. She drinks.
Your family, they’re just doin what they know how to do is all.
Just like the slugs, right?
I reckon it ain’t the first time the comparison’s been made.
He looks at her again, and she can feel her skin go taut.
Where exactly are you from, Sarah Mary Williams? And don’t tell me Statenville. I’ve been to Statenville, it’s a ghost town.
I’ve been down south for a while. Found myself a nice little place, but the meatskins were fixin to move in. Before that I did a lot of travellin. Alabama, Mississippi, Texas. Once I got as far north as Kansas City.
What about your parents?
What about them?
Where are they?
Beats me. I guess I must of had some. But they either roamed free or got dead before I got any recollection of em.
What about—
He points down towards the house.
Is he really your brother?
Him? Huh-uh. He’s just a dummy I picked up a ways back. He don’t talk much, but he follows directions real good. Bet he could haul quite a load, big as he is. Would be a good worker to have around if anybody had need of one.
So you don’t have any family at all?
She shrugs and sniffs, wiping her nose on the back of her hand.
Not really. There was a kid once. Malcolm. It could of been he was my brother but all the papers in the orphanage got burned. And there was Uncle Jackson, but we just called him that. He wasn’t a real uncle or nothing.
What happened to them?
Uncle Jackson, he got bit.
*
Where it happened was up on the ridge where Uncle Jackson liked to hunt rabbits. He was crouched down in a gulley taking careful aim when he felt the hands on him, the teeth sinking into the flesh of his forearm. He said he never saw the thing coming at all. That it must’ve been there in the leaves for who knows how long, just waiting for some food to come along, like a Venus flytrap or something.
She met him as he was coming back to the cabin.
You’re gonna have to do something for me, little bit. It’s not gonna be pretty. Are you ready to do it?
She nodded.
He led her to a fallen tree and rolled up his sleeve. He put his arm out and told her to tie it tight above the elbow with his belt. She did it. Then he told her to use her gurkha and take it off.
Just one quick stroke. Do you think you can do it?
It’s gonna hurt you bad, ain’t it?
It’s not gonna hurt as much as the alternative, little bit. Now you go on. Thirteen years old, maybe, but you’ve got a hacking arm on you the kind I’ve never seen before. Can you do it?
She nodded.
He put the loose end of the belt in his mouth so he wouldn’t scream when she did it.
She brought the blade down quick and firm like he had taught her before.
Afterwards, he couldn’t walk so straight, so she got under his good arm and took him back to the cabin and laid him down on his cot.
What happened to Uncle Jackson’s arm? Malcolm said. He gazed around Temple’s body at the man lying on the bed. He was a worrying kind, Malcolm was, and sometimes you had to make him breathe into a bag when he got stirred up.
He got in an accident.
Was it meatskins?
It’s gonna be okay. Go to the well and bring me back some water.
But where’s his arm?
Go on like I told you.
They heated water on the woodstove and put damp cloths on Uncle Jackson’s forehead and tried to get him to drink. He was fitful for a long time, his head jerking back and forth, his good hand clutching at the space where his other arm should have been.
Eventually he slept, and so did Malcolm. And she sat up and watched the man in the glow of the firelight.
He woke after midnight, but he wasn’t the same. There was a quietness to him as of someone given up.
How you doing, little bit?
I’m all right, she said.
It got me, he said. I can feel it.
But your arm. It could be we got it in time. You might not change.
He shook his head.
I can feel it, he said. It’s in me. Whatever it is, it’s part of me now. You’re gonna have to take Malcolm away from here.
No, she said. You don’t know. You’re sick but it might not be that. You could make it, it might not be that.
Listen to me, little bit. You have to know this, it’s important. When it happens, you can feel it. All right? Are you listening? When it happens you’ll know.
But—
Give me that pistol from the table.
She brought the pistol to him. He popped the cartridge.
Now take out all the rounds except one.
It could be—
Come on, little bit. You do what I’m telling you. Just leave one round. You’re gonna need the rest.
She did it.
Now you take the guns and put them in the trunk of the car, and you take Malcolm, and the two of you drive away from here and don’t come back. You got it? You listening to me?
She wiped her eyes on her sleeve and shook her head.
Temple, I’m talking to you, he said, his voice coming harsh and sudden and causing her to straighten up. Now you’re gonna do exactly what I tell you, do you understand?
Yes, sir.
I’ll be all right here. I’ll take care of myself before it gets a hold of me.
He gripped the gun to his chest.
Now you’ve got bigger things to think about, little bit. You’ve made a home out of this world somehow, I don’t know how you did it, but you did. And that means you can go anywhere in it. Every place is your backyard. You understand me?
Yes, sir.
Never let anyone tell you you don’t belong where you’re at. You’re my girl, and you’re gonna climb high and stand over all of them.
Yes, sir.
Now go on out of here. That’s my girl. I’m gonna remember you. That’s a dead man’s promise. Wherever my mind goes, it’s gonna have you in it.
*
Everybody’s got a time to die, Temple says. That was his. I guess God’s got it all written down somewhere, but it wouldn’t do no good to read it anyway.
He passes the bottle to her and she drinks. There’s a warm blush spreading through her chest and into her cheeks, and she fingers the smooth taffeta of her dress. The warm night air tickles the back of her neck and gives her shivers.
How long were you with him?
Two, three years, she shrugs. I ain’t so good about time.
And you’ve been travelling ever since?
More or less.
What about the boy? Malcolm. What happened to him?
Her lips close themselves tight, and she looks straight ahead into the purple black horizon.
It was the giant outside of Tulsa. That’s where it happened. Under the giant. An iron man in a hard-hat, standing proud, eight storeys tall, with one elbow akimbo, one fist on his waist and the other resting on top of an oil derrick. A severe and mighty thing, looking like a soldier of God who could shake the earth with his footsteps. The locals had told her about it, said it was an artefact of the past, a towering homage to the petroleum industry during its heyday decades before.
Malcolm had to see it.
So they took a detour and stopped and gazed up at it and felt puny.
Who built it? Malcolm asked.
I don’t know. The city, I guess.
Why?
She shrugged.
I don’t know, she said. It makes people feel good to build somethin big. Makes people feel like they’re makin progress, I reckon.
Progress towards what?
It don’t matter. Up higher or down deeper or out further. As long as you’re movin, it don’t matter much where you’re goin or what’s chasin you. That’s why they call it progress. It keeps goin of its own accord.
Do they still build things like this?
Not much, I don’t guess.
Is that cause there ain’t no progress any more?
What you talkin about? There’s still progress. It just ain’t in iron man statues any more.
Where is it then?
Lots of places. Like inside you.
In me?
Sure. In the history of the planet, there ain’t never been a kid like you before. A kid who’s seen the things you seen. A kid who fought the same fights you fought. You’re a new thing altogether. A brand new thing.
He scratched an itch on his nose and thought about that. Then he looked up again at the iron man.
Anyway, he said, I like it. It ain’t never gonna die.
He was right. He made her take the detour, made her stop and look up at it. Then everything after happened the way it happened, and there’s nothing she can do to go back and change it – but he was right about the iron man. It was a powerful sight and spoke of ingenuity and human pride and the deathless spectre of evolution, a thing of mightiness that cast its shadow far out past the road, and beyond that to the fertile plains of America. A country of foolishness and wonderment and capital and perversity. Feeling like God at supper in the sky, horizons pink and blue, a frontier blasted through with breath and industry, like God himself could suffocate on the beauty of the place, could curl up and die at beholdin his own creation, all the razor reds of the west and the broke-down south always on a lean, elegant like, the coyote howl and the cannibal kudzu and the dusty windows that ain’t seen a rag of cleaning since—
Hey, James Grierson says. Where’d you go?
She realizes she hasn’t said anything for a long time. There are some things she doesn’t like to think about because thinking about them takes up every part of her mind and body.
Huh? she says.
I asked you about the boy. What happened to him?
He ain’t with me any more.
Did— What happened?
James Grierson and his pale skin and his dark eyes. He is different now than he was before. He could swim in circles in the air.
To shut him up, she leans over and kisses him hard on the lips. The bottle between them falls to the ground. She can taste his breath, it tastes like her own breath, and he takes her head in his hands and kisses her like he would consume her if he could.
She kisses him hard for a while, and it’s like the two of them are wolves nipping at each other.
She lifts her body and swings it over to straddle him on the bench. Then she reaches down and unzips his pants.
Hey, he says, pulling away from her kisses. Wait. We can’t, you’re—
It’s okay, she says, feeling the wetness from his lips on her neck. I can’t have babies.
She reaches down and takes it in her hand – it’s hot like it’s been cooked through – and she presses herself down hard on his leg.
But, wait, he says again. It’s not right. I’m twenty-five and you’re—
Hush up, she says. Just do it. I’m done thinkin. Just come on and do it.
She covers his mouth with her own and reaches under the taffeta dress to pull aside her underwear. She lifts up and sets herself down on top of him, and her knees begin to ache on the wooden slats of the bench, but the thing inside her is a living thing and she likes the way her body holds onto it, she likes to think about what it feels like to him, that part of her that makes her a girl. And the word stutters through her head, girl girl girl girl – and she believes it, she knows it to be true – dang if she doesn’t believe it right in her stomach and her toes and her very teeth.
*
The next day she wakes while the sun is still low in the sky. She goes to the window and looks out over the smooth driveway and the canyon, that long cut in the earth, and the flat painted sky beyond.
She opens the connecting door into the next room and sees the bulky shape tangled in the sheets and blankets of the bed. Both pillows are on the floor, and one hand is resting on the nightstand where it has knocked over the alarm clock.
You’re a paragon of helplessness, ain’t you, dummy?
She rights the alarm clock and tries to pull the sheets up over the sleeping figure. But when she does, the blankets come untucked and expose his feet. So she goes to the other side of the bed and tries to cover his feet back up, but she can only find a triangle end of the blanket and it doesn’t seem long enough to do anything with. Finally she drops the blanket altogether and stands looking down at him with her arms on her hips.
It’s a good thing we found you this place, dummy. One thing’s for sure, a mama I am not.
Coming down the stairs she can hear music in the parlour. Mrs Grierson is sitting in a chair with a high fan-shaped back, listening to records and knitting something long and baby blue.
You’re up bright and early, Mrs Grierson says.
I don’t sleep much.
You’re a busybody like me.
Guess I am.
She sits with Mrs Grierson and changes the records for her when they get to the end. She has never seen a record player before, except in movies, and she likes how delicate the mechanism is. The music is joyful and quick and has a lot of different horns, and it sounds like something that a room full of people wearing skirts and sweaters would be dancing to.
There is a formal breakfast later in the morning, with biscuits, jam and coffee, and all the Griersons sitting around the table, Richard and his mother trying to make pleasant conversation, James looking at Temple only when she is not looking at him. She can see it out of the corner of her eye.
After breakfast, she takes some biscuits on a plate up to the room adjoining hers, and Maisie helps her with the slow bear of a man, getting him up and feeding and dressing him. Maisie is good with him and talks to him like he’s a 220-pound baby, and he seems to respond to her voice.
Then she finds she has nothing to do. Mrs Grierson is playing solitaire in the parlour, and Richard is practising the same song on the piano over and over with no variation that her ear can tell. James is nowhere to be seen. She wonders how people can live this kind of life, trapped inside a house with windows everywhere showing you where else you could be.
So she goes outside and walks around the house and down the driveway and back and up into the woods overlooking the house. She finds the electric fence and follows it around the perimeter of the property trying not to get her feet too muddy. It’s a good-sized property, and it takes her half an hour to walk the circumference of it. On the side of the house is a grape arbor with a trellis, and a wooden swing hanging from the branch of a tree. She sits on the swing and kicks herself forward and back a few times.
What are you doing?
James Grierson appears behind her and leans against the tree.
Nothin, she says. Just tryin out this swing. It’s creaky, but it works.
That’s not all you’re doing. You’ve been around this property twice already this morning. You doing reconnaissance?
Nah. I’m just put on a wonder about how the world can all of a sudden get so small you can walk around it twice in one morning.
He nods.
What you doin following me anyway? she says.
Listen, he says. Last night . . . I shouldn’t have . . . I didn’t mean to . . . I think it was a mistake.
What you mean? You mean you ain’t in love with me? You mean you don’t wanna put me in a puffy white dress and marry me?
She laughs.
All right, he says, looking down at his feet. I was just trying to clarify. I was just being—
You mean I sullied my blossomin girlhood on a man who ain’t got noble projections in mind for our future?
She laughs again. He looks miserable.
When you gonna make me curtsy to your father for approval?
That’s enough, he says, and there’s a fierce anger in his eyes.
Okay, okay. I’m just joshin with you. You Griersons are a touchy bunch. One minute it’s biscuits and model ships and the next minute it’s outrage and horror. Your family is livin at the poles when everyone else has gotta make do in the wide middle of things.
I apologize. You talked about meeting my father.
He’s sick, right? How long’s he been sick?
About a year now.
That’s some sick. What’s the matter with him?
The matter with him is that he was born a Grierson. This family is a sickness.
Oh, come on now. They ain’t so bad. Maybe a little kooky, but they got heart.
Heart! he scoffs. You want to see heart? Let me show you heart. Let’s go – I want to introduce you to my father.
Hey now, she says. I was just jokin about that. I ain’t got to meet any more Griersons. I’m about up to my ears in them as it is.
Oh, you’ll like him. He’s different. He’s more relatable.
He takes her by the wrist and leads her back up to the house, except once they’re inside they don’t go up the main staircase but through a door in the kitchen that leads down into the basement. It’s musty, and there’s a smell she recognizes, and when he flips a switch the lights go on and she sees a cage made out of bare wood and chicken wire, the concrete floor covered with hooked rugs.
At first it seems like there’s nothing at all in the cage. Then she sees him huddled in the corner.
Meet Randolph Grierson, James announces. The patriarch of the Grierson family, Mrs Edna Grierson’s prized son, a monument to American aristocracy – and my father.
The head moves slowly, raising itself to expose the desiccated lips and sunken eyes, the grey skin, patches of which are fallen away and blackened at the edges. The gaze itself is muddy, as of a blind man whose eyes follow sound rather than light.
James, how long’s your daddy been dead?
I told you, about a year. See, the Griersons have a hard time letting go of things. Maybe that’s what you were referring to when you were talking about the family having heart.
Randolph Grierson has a look she’s never seen in a meatskin before. He paws at his head with torn fingertips and his skin is coming away in flakes, but his eyes are red and wet – liquid with vitality and pursuit. He looks enquiringly at the two figures studying him through the chicken wire, as though to ask the questions that are both big and simple: what is the shape of the earth and where are we on it?
He drags himself across the floor and puts his fingers through the chicken wire to reach for her. She looks down into those eyes again, weighing that puzzled gaze.
He ain’t ever seen another meatskin, she says.
No, he hasn’t, James confirms.
He doesn’t know what he is, she says.
I guess he doesn’t. Jesus.
He shakes his head.
She reaches out her hand and touches her fingers to those of Randolph Grierson.
He knows somethin’s crooked, she says, but he don’t know what. Like he’s done somethin wrong he don’t know how to pay for.
Hey, be careful. He’ll bite you if you give him a chance. Alive, he was the very picture of honour and noblesse. Dead, he’s just like every other slug.
I guess, she says and crosses her arms. He’s weak. What you been feedin him?
That’s the problem. My brother thinks he can trick him into eating pig meat or cow meat or horse meat. But Big Daddy Randolph Grierson is having none of it.
I seen it happen, them eating animals, but not much. They gotta be desperate, and one of em’s gotta be a little crazy and show the others what to do.
He studies her.
You’ve been around them a lot, he says.
I travelled around. They’re a tough job to avoid when you’re on the road.
Well, did you ever see one kept as a pet?
No, I ain’t ever seen that.
So the Griersons still have the power to surprise. In any case, I’m half amazed my grandmother hasn’t tried to feed you to him.
Sure. She loves her son.
That’s not her son.
I guess.
*
It’s a grand house and she learns to call it by its name, Belle Isle. She likes to explore all its corners because there are things everywhere to discover. Pastel green dollhouses with white gables, miniature lead wood stoves complete with full sets of pans, and shelves of old picture books that she can take down and spread open on the rug and peruse to her heart’s content. The hallways upstairs are crowded with doorways and rooms, and no one tells her not to go into them.
Once she opens a door and finds a room like a workshop. Under the far window is a table cluttered with tiny instruments, metal clips, miniature vices, dowels of light wood, splinters and flakes of brass. In the centre of the table there’s a model ship held upside down on a stand, its hull half covered with toothpick strips of copper. There’s a thin layer of sawdust over everything, and she draws a smiley face on the tabletop then blows it clear. The walls are covered with world maps, and there are places marked on them with red Xs, and dotted lines – travelling routes – drawn across the wide blue oceans. She uses the tip of her finger to trace one of the dotted lines from X to X across the demarcated seas of the world.
Who told you you could be in here? says a voice behind her.
She turns and finds Richard Grierson standing in the doorway, his fists clenched at his sides. He is five years her senior, but he’s one of those young men who still hasn’t got fully shut of his boy self.
I was just takin stock, she says. It’s quite a captain’s cabin you got here.
He shakes himself out of his previous anger and straightens the lapels of his jacket.
I apologize, he says with a formality that makes him seem almost feminine. We’re not used to visitors. You are of course welcome in this room any time.
So you’re the one responsible for all the ships I see around here, she says.
I am.
You got a good touch, she says. It takes a fine hand to play music and build itty bitty boats. My hands, they’re made for a larger scale.
She holds up her hands, with the one missing pinky, to show him, and he winces slightly.
Yes, he says. Well . . .
You do the maps too?
No, he says. I just found them in books. James brings some to me when he finds them.
I know you didn’t cartograph em or anything, but the routes, you drew them?
Yes.
What are they of?
His face brightens, and he comes to stand beside her and pulls some books off a low shelf.
These are the places I’m going to go when everything is back to normal. I’m going to sail around the world.
Really? You can do that?
People have. Look, have you ever heard of New Zealand?
I didn’t even know there was an old Zealand.
Look here, he says and opens the books onto bright photos of rolling hills, tall mountains, curving beaches, foreign markets populated with street stalls and colourfully dressed people – picture postcards from all the world round – a collector’s set of beautiful places. And here’s Australia, and this is Tahiti. And Madagascar. Even Greenland, which isn’t green at all but frozen in ice all year long.
Gosh, she says. You know how to get to these places?
He closes one book and looks down at the binding of it.
I would try, he says.
Then why ain’t you goin now? she says. Greenland ain’t coming to you. What you waiting for?
He looks at her uncomprehendingly.
With things the way they are? he says. It would be impossible. But one day, when the world gets back to the way it’s supposed to be.
What you know about the way it’s supposed to be? You ain’t that much older than me. You were born into the same world I was.
But I’ve read about it, he says, sweeping his hand across all the worn spines of the books on the shelf. All these books. Hundreds of them. I know what it was like – what it’s going to be like again. Grandmother says it’s only a matter of time.
Richard Grierson smiles, but it’s an inward-pointing smile, a smile of someone folding himself back up for storage in the colourful corners of his own crayon fantasies. She looks at the books, their titles hazy with a thin film of sawdust, and she looks at the toy ships built for imaginary journeys along the red dotted lines of a child’s map, and she looks at the exotic pictures in the books still open flat before her, and she understands that these places are just places of the mind, and she wants to be able to exalt his wild dreams and imaginings along with her own, but there’s something about them that make them the saddest thing she’s ever seen.
*
She stays in the house another week, longer than she meant to. She feels herself getting antsy, walking the fence during the day, helping Maisie in the kitchen just to have something to do. Mrs Grierson teaches her a card game called pea-nuckle, but she gets too good at it and has to let the old woman win half the time out of pure graciousness. Nights, she takes the path to the bluff and looks out over the city and counts the lights. Sometimes James Grierson goes up with her, and sometimes she is alone. Sometimes she passes by his room in the middle of the night and the door to his bedroom is open. She finds him lying on the bed waiting for her. They do their business, when he’s not too drunk, but she doesn’t sleep in his bed, because she’s not used to sleeping next to someone and she doesn’t want to get accustomed to it. In the dark, she wonders where the light is coming from that is reflected on the surface of his eyes. They drink from the same bottle, and he tells her she can come with him the next time he makes a run for supplies.
She nods, thinking she’ll be long gone by then. She imagines the road, the car, by herself again, the long, narrow tarmac leading forward deep into a country that keeps unfolding, dead and alive.
She wonders where she will go next. She’s been down south for a long time now, almost as long as she can remember, flying like a blackbird back and forth from post to post along the same decaying fence. Maybe she’ll go north to see Niagara Falls where Lee the hunter had been – all that water tumbling over the edge of the earth, the river never running out of it. It is something she would like to see, no doubt about it. And then maybe up into Canada since she’s never been to another country before, except maybe Mexico, and only because the border isn’t so clear any more so she may have tipped over it to the other side once or twice when she was in Texas.
Or the beaches of California that she’s seen in tattered magazines published decades before. Palm tree sunsets, the wide white meridians of sand, the piers projecting out towards the horizon and the water crashing violently against the barnacled pilings. She has heard that there are places in California to live – large areas fenced off and safe. Places where commerce has resumed and governments have been re-established on a small scale. Oases of civilization. It puts her in mind of a new world. She might like to see something like that.
Or the snowy mountains where she could build a castle of ice. She saw the snow once before in the mountains of North Carolina. You could drive hours along a snowy road without seeing one slug – they don’t naturally take to the cold. They don’t die, but they slow down to a stop and freeze in place. She remembers one small town built up around an abandoned ski lodge. A community of frozen meatskins, like statuary in the streets. She walked among them and wondered what God had to do with a tableau like that one, for surely He must know that such a thing existed.
Even Richard Grierson knows that the world is a wide place. And the way she figures it, it’s as much hers as anybody’s. Only there are some things that stay with you no matter where you go.
And James comes to find her on the bluff one evening after dinner when there are no clouds in the sky, and the lights of the city below seem like dazzling reflections of the stars.
What do you know about someone named Moses Todd?
And she can feel her insides twisting up.
How you know that name?
Because that’s the name he gave when Johns found him down at the gate. He’s in the parlour at the moment. Richard is giving him a recital.
THEY LET HIM IN before James knew what was happening, he explains to her. He was already sitting on the couch when James saw him, sipping iced tea and listening to his brother Richard play. An arm extended over the back of the couch and one leg crossed expansively over the other. He smiled when he saw James.
Good evenin, the man said, rising from the couch and extending his hand.
A big man, and his clubbed fist closed over James’s hand like a softened brick.
James, his grandmother said, let me introduce you to Mr Moses Todd. He’s travelling.
A pleasure, James said.
Another of your grandsons, I reckon?
My boys, she nodded. Their father is ill, so he won’t be joining us. But we have another guest, and I’ll introduce you to her when she returns. Sarah Mary likes to take walks in the evening.
James noticed something lock down in the man’s eyes.
It’ll be my honour to say hello to her, Moses Todd said.
We’ve been so blessed these past few days, his grandmother said. Richard, James – haven’t we been blessed?
Very blessed, Richard confirmed. And lucky for them, too – it’s not safe out there.
*
She follows James Grierson back down the path and stops at her car. She takes a pistol out of the duffel in the back seat and then they enter the house through the kitchen, making as little noise as possible.
In the hall outside the parlour, she can hear Richard at the piano playing a song that reminds her of a lullaby. Between the notes she can hear the wooden ticking of the grandfather clock by the door. She waits until the song is done and she can hear clapping, which means that Moses Todd’s hands are occupied, and then she throws open the door and advances forward with the gun aimed steady at his head.
He is as big as she remembers, thick as a tree and craggy as one too. His dark beard is untrimmed, and his greasy hair is swept back from his forehead.
He continues to sit, unmoving, when he sees her, but a smile emerges on his lips.
My goodness! Mrs Grierson gasps, putting a hand to her mouth.
What’s happening? Richard says.
Hello, girl, Moses Todd says, and he rises to his feet stretching himself to his full Paul Bunyan height.
I’ll kill you if you take a step, Temple says.
You certainly will not, Mrs Grierson says. I don’t know what this is about, but—
Richard, James says, take Grandmother upstairs.
But what’s happening? Richard says again.
Goddamnit, Richard, just do it.
Richard shrinks into an anxious knot like a snarling badger, but he goes to his grandmother and takes her by the arm and leads her out of the room.
They listen to the footsteps ascend the stairs.
It ain’t nice to point guns at guests, Moses Todd says.
You’re my guest, James says. Not hers. And she’s the one with the gun.
That’s a true thing, Moses nods in acknowledgement.
Move over there, Temple says, pointing to a dark wooden chair with a seat cushion made of patterned satin. Go slow.
Moses Todd sits in the chair and James gets some rope from the basement and ties his wrists to the arms and his ankles to the legs.
How you know you’re on the right side here? Moses Todd asks James while he’s knotting the rope.
She’s been in this house eight days and hasn’t killed anyone yet, James says. And you have a troublesome look about you.
Fair enough, Moses says. But did she tell you she killed my brother? And she did it with her bare hands, like an animal. Is that something she mentioned over your evenin vittles?
James casts a brief look in her direction, but doesn’t wait for either confirmation or denial.
I guess you two have some things to talk about, he says. I’ll be in the next room. You’ll call out if you need anything?
Temple nods.
How you been, girl? Moses says once James is gone.
I been fine.
He sucks in his lips, and his whole beard changes shape like a sea urchin, and she can see his white tongue moistening the corners of his mouth as if he’s settling in for a long speech.
Nice accommodations you found for yourself, he says and uses his head to gesture all around him.
Yeah, they’re right people. A little screwy, some of em. But they do keep a household.
How’s the food?
Best I ate in a while.
She sits down on the couch near the chair and rests her elbows on her knees. She sets the gun on the coffee table, and he looks at it. It would be within his reach if he were not tied.
You better be careful, girl. You best be sure I can’t bust this rope and make a grab at that.
If you can do it, I invite you to. It’ll finish the job one way or the other.
He looks at her for a long time, his eyes searching her, but not under her clothes like where his brother’s eyes went. The eyes of Moses Todd dig into her head and make curious explorations.
A hearty laugh bursts from his throat, and she jumps a little. She can see little bits of food crusted in his beard.
You got qualities, child, he says. You sure got qualities.
How’d you find me anyway?
I’m a tracker. Grew up with hunters in Arkansas. Filthy men, you wouldn’t like em. But they taught me how to track and hunt. And there ain’t many tow-headed girls on the plains these days – yours ain’t a hard trail to sniff out.
She looks him up and down, suspiciously.
I don’t guess you’re that good a tracker, she says.
I’m here, ain’t I? Hey, did you see the horde they got downtown a couple miles back? Downright blindin – I was drivin through them like mosquitoes. You don’t wanna get caught in the middle of that without a quick means of exit.
Yeah, I saw it. They learned to eat other things. Horses, raccoons. They’ve gone cannibal, some of em.
Is that right. He shakes his head. Now that is a unqualified perversion of nature, ain’t it?
It don’t bode well for starvin em off, she agrees.
I reckon when you leave here, he says, you won’t be going back through town then.
She looks at him.
Listen, she says. I know why you’re comin after me. I know what you intend.
I guessed as much from bein tied to a chair at gunpoint.
Your brother, I took care of him – so he wouldn’t come back, I mean. I wouldn’t wish that on anybody. I took care of it.
I know you did, and I’m obliged. But it don’t quite make up for killin him in the first place.
I got to tell you, he wasn’t a good man, your brother. He tried things. He was movin to take unsolicited liberties with me.
Moses Todd lowered his head and looked sadly into his lap for a moment. Then he raised his eyes and spoke softly to her.
To be honest, he said, I sort of figured that might be the case. He shouldn’t of done it. And you have my right sympathies about that. Abraham and me, we were cut from different cloth.
He took a deep breath and looked straight in her eyes again, but differently this time.
But the fact is, you and me, we ain’t in control of the fates remitted us. We just got to discharge them the best way we can, according to whatever frail laws we got. Who made Abraham Todd my brother? Who delivered you into his mitts? It ain’t me, and it ain’t you, girl. That boy was my flesh and blood, idiot or no. Yeah, he wasn’t a good man. But that don’t make no difference. And you know it.
She sighs and sits back on the couch.
Yeah, I guess I do.
We’re just playin the parts written down and put before us.
I know it, she concedes.
Yeah, I can see you do. You got a sense of these things, same as me. You understand there’s an order to the world – a set of rules, same for men and gods. See, a lot of people think the planet’s out of whack because of the creepers – they think everything’s up for grabs, blood and mind and soul. You and me, we dwell on the land, not just behind the walls. We know the look of God is still on us. I respect you for havin such clear vision, just bein a girl and all.
She scratches an itch on her knee.
You’re a talker, she says, ain’t you?
You gonna say my talk is false?
No, I ain’t. I’m just gonna say it’s a big thought for a small evenin. I don’t know what to do with that kind of palaver.
It is for sure a deep well to descend – and you and me, girl, we’re two meagre intellects. So what are we gonna do now?
Well, she says, leaning forward again, I got a few ideas about that.
I’m eager to hear em.
I reckon you’re gonna stay tied to this chair for a while. And me, I’m gonna go out to my car and get in it and drive on outta here and get some good distance between you and me. And tomorrow morning these nice people will untie you and let you go on your way. You ain’t got any projections on hurting these people, do you?
They ain’t done anything to me. Apart from tying me to a chair, and I believe I’ll hold you accountable for that.
I’m putting you down for an honest man, Mose.
As you can see, girl, we live in a world that don’t ask or need dishonesty. You got my word.
That’s fine.
But I reckon you oughta shoot me now, he says, still smiling and licking his lips beneath the scraggly beard.
You ain’t done nothin to me.
Not yet. But I give you another guarantee, my word as a man under the grey heaven of death. The next time I see you, I sure am gonna kill you.
His eyes, again, catch on the inside of her head and go hunting around in there, and it feels like someone is watching her through a dark window of night. He sits there, tied down, like an Egyptian statue at the entrance of some ancient underworld cave.
She doesn’t want her secrets to be his secrets. She stands and takes the gun from the coffee table.
Well, she says, you ain’t done nothin yet but be a pest to me. And I don’t reckon I can kill you for that.
You got a righteous honour to you, girl. You and me, we’ll sweep a little more of the dust away from the earth before we settle down to cuttin throats.
*
Upstairs she sits on the bed next to the man with the slow grey eyes and the pan-shaped face. She thinks about how similar in stature he is to Moses Todd, except this man paws at the air and drifts without thought of creation or the hand of God. She rubs her hand back and forth over his shaved head and feels the bristly hair coming in. He cranes his neck and looks questioningly at her hand, and she shows it to him, palm up, fingers splayed. He covers it with his own giant mitt.
All right, dummy, she says. I guess this is where we part ways.
He plays gently with her fingers.
Be good now. They gonna be surprised to find you still here in the morning and me gone, but they’ll treat you good. Just don’t let em feed you to that daddy of theirs, and you’ll be okay.
She smiles at him, and he continues to toy with her fingers.
Just kiddin with you, dummy. They ain’t gonna hurt you, they’re good folk.
Her plan is to tell James Grierson to watch over Moses Todd while she makes her getaway. He’ll be too distracted to notice what she left behind.
The Griersons, they’ll take care of the dummy. Better than she can. She’s no wet nurse, no righteous saviour of meek men. She knows where she belongs – with the cannibals and the madmen, with the eaters of flesh and the walkers of a blight land, with the abominations. She’s done things that mark her for ever, as good as a brand on her forehead – and her denial of them would be fruitless. It would be vanity.
*
Where are you going to go? James Grierson asks.
North, I was thinking. She shrugs.
They are in the library on the second floor. There are French-style doors that open onto a balcony at the front of the house, and bookshelves piled high with colourful volumes. She wonders, as she sometimes does, about what it would have been like to have grown up a hundred years before she did. She pictures herself sitting at a desk, learning her letters, some grey-haired woman in a spiffy dress at the front of the room using a long stick to point at a map of the world, taking tests hunched over at a little wooden desk, chewing on the end of a pencil. But it’s hard to keep that world in focus, and her imagination gets away with her and she imagines a meatskin bursting into the room and all the children fleeing and her taking her gurkha from her bookbag and planting it solidly in the meatskin’s skull, feeling the thick, catching resistance as the blade sinks home. And then all the other children cheering her, and her grey-haired teacher nodding in approval. It makes her grin to think of such scenes.
He’ll follow you, James Grierson is saying.
I guess he will. But he ain’t so good a tracker as he says. Besides, with half a day’s head start there ain’t no way he’ll be able to find me.
I’ll keep him longer.
Nah, half a day is enough. He’ll beat on outta here quick if he still thinks he might be able to catch me. You keep him longer than that and you’ll risk him doin some damage before he goes.
I can take care of him.
Sure you can, but your granny don’t want no fuss, and neither does your brother or Johns or Maisie for that matter. They all do a pretty fair job of keepin the world at a distance. I guess there ain’t no need in bringin a war into their parlour now.
You sure you know what you’re doing? You can’t just wander the country your whole life.
Who says I can’t? I only ever seen a couple interesting alternatives. And those situations – well, either they don’t last or I don’t seem to harmonize with them. I’ll be all right, I guess. If I find something worth stoppin for, I’ll stop.
He shakes his head and smiles.
I might be inclined to go with you if it weren’t for the Grierson heritage that needs overseeing.
You got your mission and I got mine. There ain’t no use dreamin about romantical road trips.
Well, he says, pouring her a glass of bourbon and raising his own, you can drink with me any time. It’s an honour.
Thanks, she says and drinks. Next time I’m through this way I’ll stop in and say hello to the family.
The estate, no doubt, will be intact.
To Granny Grierson, she says and raises her glass.
To Granny Grierson.
To Richard the gentle piano player!
To Richard!
They go on to toast his father and Johns and Maisie and the dummy and each other and anyone else they can think of, and they kiss once, he with an arm like a girder around her waist, and then they laugh and start all over again with the toasts, and by the time they are done she’s not exactly drunk but her thoughts are thick and soupy. And once inside her room she feels like she could lie down and get an hour’s sleep, but she knows if she did she might not wake up till it’s too late, so she goes to the bathroom sink and splashes some water on her face and opens the window and walks around the room a few times, and waits for time to speed back up to where it should be.
*
Except half an hour later when she’s getting ready to make her escape, there’s a knock on her door and it’s James Grierson, leaning against the jamb looking wretched and holding a highball in one hand and a revolver in the other.
Need a favour, he says, his words slurring together. You know what? I don’t think Sarah Mary Williams is your real name. Am I right? It doesn’t matter. You’ve got secrets, but it doesn’t matter. Will you do me a favour?
What you doin here, James? You oughta be layin down before the floor flies up and hits you in the face.
It doesn’t matter, he says again. The road is long. You’ll leave. The Griersons will hold sway over the valley and the mead.
Come on now, I ain’t feelin so hot myself. What you aiming to do with that gun?
Gun?
He looks surprised to find the pistol in his hand. Then it comes back to him.
Oh this is for you. I want you to kill my father.
She looks at him, tottering in the doorway, lamely offering her the pistol.
Come on, she says, taking his arm and leading him back down the hall to the library, where she lets him fall back on the couch. She takes the bourbon and the pistol and sets them both on the end table.
You gotta get some sleep, she says.
You’re going to do it, aren’t you? he says. You have to do it. You’re the only one. It’s spite and shamefulness keeping him penned up like that. He was a good man . . . anyway, a decent man. It’s shamefulness. He doesn’t deserve it.
I don’t reckon he cares much either way, truth be told. But if you want to put him down so bad, why don’t you do it yourself?
He looks at her, his face contorted, his eyes blasted – they have witnessed the worst kind of ignominy. He tries to raise himself up, but sways and falls backwards again.
He says finally, He’s my father.
She studies him. He despises the very family he will die to protect. A tattered flag on a grey morning, abject, glorious, inutile and perverse.
All right, she says. All right, dang you.
She stands, and he covers his face with his hands.
Thank you, he says. Thank you, thank you. Keep your secrets, Sarah Mary Williams. You are owed.
She’s almost out of the room when he stops her.
Wait, he says and points to the gun on the end table. Don’t forget this.
Never mind that, she says. I ain’t aimin to wake up the whole goddarn house.
In the basement she pulls up a stool and sits at the cage door and exchanges a long gaze with Randolph Grierson, who sits slumped against the wall and lacks the energy to pull himself up. His eyes have all the red-rimmed sunkenness of an ancient animal.
I don’t know, Mr Grierson, she says. I gotta say it don’t feel exactly right.
The fingers of his hand grasp weakly at the air, and for a moment he reminds her of another slow-moving, dream-witted man she is fond of.
It don’t seem right, she continues, the destruction of what a family loves – or even what a family hates, for that matter. A household’s got its own spooks, and it ain’t for strangers to come bullying in to exorcize them.
She puts her fingers through the chicken wire, and he struggles to move a little in her direction.
Yeah, I know, she says. You don’t care one way or the other, do you? All you want is a little chum in your belly. I guess you’re lucky like that. You got a whole household can’t let go of you – one generation on either side that can’t bear either to look at you or forget you. That’s a lot of passion you got stirred up around here, Mr Grierson. And you’re off beyond the pursuit of its meaning. I reckon there’s a kind of freedom to it.
She leans forward now, her elbows on her knees.
Beyond the pursuit of meaning and beyond good and evil too, she says. See, it’s a daily chore tryin to do the right thing. Not because the right thing is hard to do – it ain’t. It’s just cause the right thing – well, the right thing’s got a way of eluding you. You give me a compass that tells good from bad, and boy I’ll be a soldier of the righteous truth. But them two things are a slippery business, and tellin them apart might as well be a blind man’s guess.
She stands and undoes the latch on the cage and swings the door open. She advances two steps in, stands over the slow, grasping figure of Mr Grierson and unsheathes the gurkha knife.
And sometimes, she says, sometimes you just get tired of pokin at the issue. Those are the times you just do something because you’re tired of thinkin on it. And that’s when the devil better get his pencil ready to tally up a score, cause the time for nuances is gone. And you think, that’s it for me on this world. You think, all right then, hell is my home.
And she raises the gurkha and brings it down.
*
On the way back upstairs, she goes into the parlour where Moses Todd is still tied to the chair.
You thought better of killin me? he asks.
Nah. I just want to ask you something.
Shoot.
You ever have questions – I mean big questions now – that you can’t find the answers to?
Sure do.
I’m talkin about the kind of questions that follow you around for years, she says.
I know what kind of questions you’re talkin about.
So what do you do about em?
He shrugs.
Not much, he says. Some of em answer themselves after a while. Some of em you just stop thinkin about. Some of em accumulate.
You ain’t much help.
Moses Todd smiles, sucks his lips into his mouth, his beard making a sound like a brush against concrete.
Stop playin around, girl. You know it as good as I do. You step outside under the sky and there’s answers everywhere you look. Why you think you’re roamin in the first place?
I’m runnin from you.
No you ain’t – at least not as hard or fast as you could be runnin. You just know that out there is where to look for the answers, even if you ain’t found em yet. It’s more than what most people got.
Then a change comes over his face, and he looks conspiratorial.
Hey, if you wanna untie me, we’ll see if any answers come to you when I got my thumbs diggin into your windpipe.
She stands and considers smacking him one across the face but she doesn’t want to know the feeling of that beard of his.
See you later, Mose.
Count on it, little girl.
*
Did you do it? James Grierson asks when she enters the library.
It’s done.
The look on his face is like a dead tree, drained of all its sap.
You’re leaving then, he says.
Yeah. You’ll watch Mose for me while I go? I don’t want him gettin ideas.
I’ll watch him.
All right then.
She turns to go.
Listen, he says, sitting up on the edge of the couch. Listen, I have something to say.
What is it?
I— the thing I have to say is . . . I lost my father tonight.
She looks at him, a tragic figure with dark hair and notions that torture.
You’re gonna be all right, James. Every house needs a man. You’re it now.
Right, he chuckles to himself.
There is nothing else she can say. She opens the door and is almost gone when she remembers something. The slip of paper the dummy had in his pocket. She stops a moment, considering. Part of her says to leave it lie, to stop messing around in what’s none of her business. But there’s another part of her too.
She goes back to the couch where James Grierson sits.
One more thing, she says and hands him the slip of paper. Can you read this?
He looks at it.
What does it mean? he says.
Out loud, she says. Can you read it out loud?
Why?
Just . . . a favour, okay?
He looks at it again and recites:
Hello! My name is Maury and I wouldn’t hurt a fly. My grandmother loves me and wishes she could take care of me for ever, but she’s most likely gone now. I have family out west. If you find me, will you take me to them? God bless you!
Jeb and Jeanie Duchamp
442 Hamilton Street
Point Comfort, TX
Doggone it, she says.
And in this way the paths narrow for the tempters of fate. She thinks of Malcolm, of the iron giant, the edifices of lost men, the boiling in her belly more wicked than fiend or meatskin. The voice of God speaking with colours that are not hers.
She should have left it alone.
She sighs.
All right then, she says. You want to read me that address one more time?