SHE PICKS from eight in the morning until ten, stopping sometimes to stand up and straighten out her back. She looks across the fields to the spot where Maury stands chopping the wood like she taught him to. His large frame hunches over the stump where he places the tree rounds and raises the axe over his head and brings it down steady but not swift, putting the whole gravity of his mineral self into the gesture. She wipes the sweat from her forehead and fans herself with the panama hat and looks at the wide-open sky, the biggest sky she’s ever seen – it curls around at the horizon and almost comes back to meet itself.
When she fills a tub with the berries, she brings it to the shack in the middle of the fenced property and sets it on the porch. Then she goes back out into the fields. Five times she does this, setting the little tubs in a row.
This is a no-count business, she says to Albert, the freckled man sitting on a wicker chair in the shade of the porch.
I told you it weren’t gonna be easy.
He sips something from a plastic tumbler.
What you drinkin? she says.
Lemonade. Fresh squeezed. I might could give you a glass when you’re done.
She looks at the glass in the man’s dried-up hand.
Yeah, all right. I’m just takin a breather. Say, what you need all them bingberries for anyway?
Trade em. You’d be surprised the things people’ll give for fresh-pick berries.
I guess so. Listen, I been meanin to ask you – what state’re we in?
Little girl, on your travels you happen to notice some dead people walkin around? What state are you in? I’d say you are in a state of denial.
His hacking laughs turns into a cough. She takes a deep breath and waits for the man’s fit to pass.
I’m just kiddin you. We’re in Alabama. Just outside Union Springs.
Alabama? Dang. I thought we got further.
Where you coming from?
We were in Georgia a couple days ago. It’s slow goin – the roads you got here are a mess.
I’ll write a letter to our congressman.
Then something occurs to him, and he looks around the side of the house in the direction where Maury continues to chop wood.
You keepin an eye on that retard?
He’s all right. He does what he’s told.
Albert leans forward.
Listen up to what I told you before, he says. I don’t know if you quite got it. You come inside with me for a little bit, you can have all the berries you want.
Yeah, I heard you the first time. I’ll pass.
He leans back to indicate the conversation is over.
Suit yourself, he says. You best get back in that field if you wanna be done by noon.
She didn’t think it would be so difficult, picking the berries, but the plants are thorny and if she pulls at the berries too hard they crush to purple sap in her hands. She picks on, crouching like a toad among the bushes. By noon she is stained sapphire all over and when she sucks the blood from her pricked fingertips, it tastes like iron and bingberry mixed.
She goes back up to the porch for the last time.
There, she says. That’s ten tubs.
Good work, he says. That one’s yours.
What you mean that one?
She looks down and the other nine she lined up before are gone.
You said for every five tubs I picked I got to keep one. I picked ten tubs. What you tryin to pull? And where’s the eggs you promised for Maury choppin that wood?
Freckled Albert squints at her.
I don’t care for the way that retard chops. I wanted em chopped bigger.
She brushes the hair back from her forehead and licks her lips.
Open up your ears now, Albert, she says. You wanna listen to what I’m tellin you – and what I’m tellin you is this: you’re makin a mistake.
Again Albert laughs until the cough overtakes him and he hunches over, his body cramped and twisted. When he looks up again his eyes are circles of red.
What you gonna do, girl? You gonna get your retard to stomp me?
Without standing, he reaches one arm into the doorway of the shack and pulls out a shotgun that must have been standing just inside and points it at her.
Now shoo, he says. I ain’t a bad man is why you get one tub of berries at all.
You ain’t a bad man is why I’m not gonna kill you.
What?
He drops his guard momentarily, trying to puzzle through why she isn’t scared of him – and that’s when she grabs the barrel of the shotgun and jerks it forward to pop his finger free of the trigger, then with all her strength she shoves it back, stock first into his belly. He clenches his stomach and falls out of the chair. Then she turns him over and plants one knee on his chest, jamming the shotgun lengthwise across his throat.
Now here’s what I’m gonna do, she says. First, I’m gonna go inside and get my two tubs of bingberries, like we agreed before. Second, I’m gonna go out back to the coop and pluck me a dozen eggs for the work Maury did for you. Third, I’m gonna take along a jug of that lemonade you got – to even things out so I don’t have to resent you for the offence you given us. You got that?
He nods, still choking and gasping. She stands and backs down the steps of the porch.
Now why don’t you lay there a while, she says. You’ll get your breath back in a bit.
Around the side of the shack, the big man continues to chop with thick precision.
Maury, she calls. Maury! You can stop that chopping. We’re gettin back on the road.
*
Later, in the car, she puts a tub of the berries on Maury’s lap.
Eat up. You’ll like em. You can eat that whole tub if you want, it’s for you. I got us each one. Go on.
She takes one and puts it in her mouth to show him.
Mmm. I ain’t had bingberries in I don’t know how long. That Albert, he may have been a scoundrel all told, but he knew how to raise himself some crops, didn’t he? Go on, eat one.
Maury puts one of the berries in his mouth and a sour expression comes into his face. He opens his mouth wide as though hoping the thing in it will fly away on its own.
What’s the matter, you don’t like it? I swear, you got no feeling for the finer things in life, you big dummy. That’s a project for you to work on. All right, spit it out. Here, here’s a rag. Try not to make such a awful mess everything you do.
He spits the berry out and scrubs the rag across his tongue, but he’s still cringing afterwards, and begins a low moan, like crying except without the tears.
All right, she says. Hush up now.
The moan goes on long and low.
Hush up I said. Goddarnit, you would of thought I poisoned you. Here, drink some of that lemonade, I know you like that. But don’t drink it all up or I sure enough will leave you by the side of the road. You got that, Maury?
He drinks, and the moaning goes away. His gaze goes blank again.
Lord, Maury, you’re a big slobbery mess of devilment, ain’t you? You better hope Jeb and Jeanie Duchamp know what to do with you cause they’re your last chance. I’m depositin you there no matter what.
*
They drive on. She makes sure to keep the setting sun ahead of her and the rising sun behind. On some stretches of freeway you can really fly but you can just as easily get caught up in a tangle of crumbling overpasses and massive multi-car collisions, ancient burial mounds of metal and exploded upholstery.
Sometimes it’s better to stay on the side roads where the opportunities for detour are more plentiful.
And even though she knows it’s impossible, she keeps expecting to look behind her and see Moses Todd’s black car bloodhounding her trail.
Mississippi is one of the words she recognizes when she sees it. All those squiggles in a row, separated by vertical lines. She sees a sign that says Mississippi on it, and it doesn’t surprise her. Along the roads the trees have been overpowered by kudzu, like a blanket of green tossed over all the shapes of the earth. Driving through the small towns, she finds canted tree houses with rotted floors, plastic slides toppled over on front lawns, whole communities gone dense with the smells of honeysuckle and verbena. Elsewhere, on rolling stretches of back-road, desolate plantation land has long ago gone back to wildflower and weed, grazed over by riderless horses travelling in packs and mewling cows that stand like statuary on the hilltop horizons.
Just outside the centre of one Mississippi town, they come across a big marble building with columns in front like a plantation mansion except more stoic. The front doors are shut tight, so they go around back and find a window they can bust, high enough off the ground to keep the slugs out. She instructs Maury to roll a dumpster underneath it so they can climb on top and get in.
It’s a museum, she says when they’re inside. That’s what it is. Come on, Maury, let’s edify ourselves.
To be honest, the place makes her a little nervous – all those complicated cubicles snaking around each other like a labyrinth. She likes situations where she knows which direction to run if she has to. But everything is quiet. It looks like the place hasn’t been opened at all in twenty years or more. They stroll from room to room, standing in front of the artwork. Some of them are just patches of colour on canvas and these are the ones Maury likes, his eyes filling up with the colour, the thick textures of the paint.
She finds him, palm flat against one of the canvases as though feeling it for heat.
No touching, Maury.
She pulls his thick arm down.
This is art, Maury. You just can’t touch it like that. These things have gotta last a million years so people in the future know about us. So they can look and see what we knew about beauty.
He looks at her with those flat distant eyes of his, then he looks back at the painting.
Now you and me, we ain’t connoisseurs of nothin. Most of these we may not understand because they weren’t painted for the likes of us. But sooner or later someone’s gonna come along who knows how to read these things – and it’ll be like a message from another civilization. That’s how it works, you see? That’s how people talk to each other across time. It puts you on a wonder, doesn’t it?
In another room, she finds a painting that just looks like a bunch of trees, like a forest or something, but then she notices a little bitty cabin in the distance, just barely visible between the trunks of the trees. The light in the painting is something she can’t describe. It looks like night-time where we are standing, but it looks like daytime in the distance where the cabin is. She stares at the cabin for a long time, her mind filled up with the shape of it, the peacefulness of it. It looks like a place she would like to go if she knew how to get there.
She pulls her eyes away from it. She knows if she looks at the painting too long it will make her sad about the way things are.
In the gift shop she finds something for Maury – a ballpoint pen with a horse and carriage inside that moves back and forth when you tilt it.
Look at this magic pen I got for you, she says and tilts it in front of his eyes so he can see. His eyes focus deep, like he would like to put himself on the carriage inside that pen.
Go on, she says, handing it to him. You can keep it. It’s a present. Who knows, maybe today is your birthday.
*
At night they find places to sleep. Structures they can barricade, rooftops onto which they can climb. They look at the stars, and she makes up stories about what’s happening on the different earths going in circles around those different suns. Maury falls asleep easily, as though it were his natural state and wakefulness a chore to maintain. She herself has trouble sleeping. These are the times when she wishes she knew how to play a harmonica or a guitar or a mouth harp. She remembers the lighthouse, her magazines, pulling in the nets in the morning, circling the island like it was the perimeter of everything. And then her mind crowds with other things – a noisy parade of memories that frustrate her because of the way they play themselves out. These memories – it feels like she’s back there, like she has the moment to do over and make different choices. But she can’t, because they’re just memories, set down permanent as if they were chiselled in marble, and so she has to just watch herself do the same things over and over, and it’s a condemnation if it’s anything.
She’s taken to sleeping with her head on Maury’s chest. The sound of his heartbeat steady where other things are calamitous.
Daylight they drive.
I sure wish you could read, Maury. I mean, have a look at that lake.
The road opens up and they are driving along the shore of a shimmering body of water. Through the trees, she can see the sun scintillating on the rippled surface. It widens as they drive and the opposite shore retreats until they can barely see the houses and docks on the other side.
Look at the pair of us, she says. It sure would help if one of us could read.
She looks at him, his eyes far gone in the horizon.
Hell, she says. Who knows? Maybe you can read, you just can’t speak it out loud. Either way, it don’t do us much good.
She would like to see people swimming out there in that lake. Getting their enjoyment out of it.
I mean, that’s a beautiful thing right there, she says. I bet it’s got a beautiful name to it, too. Like Crystal Palace Lake or Lake Sparkle Heaven or something like that. And I bet that sign right there would tell us if either of us could decipher it.
She sighs.
Nope, she says. You and me, we’re not privy to the secrets of language. Good thing I got taught a few songs when I was little – and lucky for you I’m blessed with the voice of an angel. Watch out, dummy, I’m gettin ready to let go.
Take me out of the ball game!
Take me out of the crowd!
Buy me some peanuts and snapplecracks!
I don’t care if I ever go back!
So it’s hoot, hoot, hoot for the home range!
If you don’t care, it’s a shame!
Cause it’s one, two, three strikes you’re out
Of the ball game!
When the tank is half full, they stop at each gas station until they find one where the pumps are still working. She likes the smell of the fuel burning her nostrils.
On a narrow, two-lane road, they encounter a station wagon going in the opposite direction. A hand from the driver’s window waves them down and the two cars pull up next to each other in the road, their noses inverted. Temple keeps a hand on her pistol and rolls down her window. It’s an older man and a younger man in the front seat, and in the back seat two women and a girl. The girl looks at her over the tops of the seats, her thumb in her mouth and a sooty-faced doll choked under her arm.
The family is coming from Lafayette, headed through Baton Rouge to Slidell – heard there was a redoubt there, and it was getting tough where they are coming from.
The girl’s eyes, sleepy and hypnotic, meet Temple’s and for a moment they are locked.
Listen, the driver says, leaning closer to Temple through the window and lowering his voice. You have any shotgun ammo? We’ve only got a handful of shells left.
What kind? Temple asks.
Twelve gauge.
All we got’s twenty.
Oh.
Hey, your girl like bingberries?
She’s never had any.
Here, says Temple, handing the remaining quarter tub of berries through the window. Fresh picked a couple days ago.
We sure do appreciate it, the man says, taking the tub. She’s never had very much to cherish.
It’s nothin. I had my fill and this dummy of mine don’t even like em. But make sure she don’t eat em all at once, they’ll give her the runs.
Where you headed?
West.
He tells her she should take Levee Road north to the 190 instead of staying on this road. It’s a few miles out of your way, he says, but it’s safer. We just came across the Atchafalaya. There’s something on the other side. Some kind of town. You don’t want to go through there unless you’ve got no other choice. We saw some things.
What things? Slugs?
I don’t know what they were, the man says. Big is all I know. I wasn’t inclined to slow down and get a closer look.
She thanks him and looks again at the girl in the back seat, the tangle of blonde hair on her doll.
All right then, I guess we’ll be going, the man says. It’s a beautiful day for a drive. Beautiful day.
The cars pull away from each other, and she can see the station wagon receding in the rear-view mirror, stretching taut the mirror of her own journey, like going back in time as though hours were roads with two directions.
Marshland, long stretches of mudflat and barren reeds set asway by the hot breezes, a body here and there, festering in the muck and lit upon by carrion birds. A meatskin, finding himself stuck, unable to move, up to his neck in the mud, arms floating out crosswise as though he were treading water, motionless, nothing even to jaw at in this place of swamp and brittle grass. They come to a small rutted road leading off to the right. She supposes that’s the Levee Road the man told her about, but it’s in bad repair, a small shack toppled over into it – she can see it in the distance.
I reckon we can make it through whatever they made it through, she says and continues west down the swamp road.
Soon the road rises up on concrete pylons and the swamp becomes a lake of thick brackish water beneath them, green slime shifting in slow eddies across the surface. The road ends halfway across the bridge, the tarmac surface ripped away from itself and collapsed into the muck. She stops the car and looks across the gap where the bridge continues a hundred yards away, the ragged end of the concrete bent like an aluminum antenna. So she turns the car around and drives back and takes a side road that looks like it might circle the lake to the south. The road follows a narrow brown river, weeds and wildflowers overgrowing the verge, styrofoam cups and other ancient garbage caught up in the thorny limbs of bushes.
Around a bend she sees the thing in the distance. At first it looks like a man in the road, or a slug, but as she gets closer she realizes the thing is too big. It’s man-shaped, but it must be seven or eight feet tall. It lumbers along, its arms swinging like heavy chains on a revenant. When it hears the car behind it, it turns its head and she can see the face – human but disfigured, part of the skull exposed, one eye crazy-wide and the other sleepy-lidded, a pallor the colour of moss or rot. But it’s not a slug, because when it sees the car it retreats into the trees with a weird sideways loping gait.
Now what in holy hell was that? Temple says.
She gets to the place in the road where the thing disappeared and pulls the car over. She leans out the window and scans the treeline, but there’s nothing to be seen.
Hey! she calls into the dense brush. Hey, bigfoot! You can come out, I ain’t gonna hurt you.
Next to her, in the passenger seat, Maury begins to moan, a long low wail absent of meaning.
Hush up, she says. We’ll get movin again. I just gotta know what that giant was. Miracles’re sometimes hidden by unpleasing looks.
She opens the door and steps out, putting on the panama hat and taking the gurkha knife in hand. In the car, Maury continues to moan.
Come on, Maury, she says. Hush up, would ya? I’m listenin for the monster.
She steps off the tarmac into the tangle of ropy weeds on the shoulder. Evening is coming, but the cicadas haven’t started up yet. Instead the birdsong preaches clipped and constant through the air.
Come on out, monster, she says loud. You’re one of God’s own creatures. Ain’t no reason to hide.
Pushing through some viny branches, she comes into a clearing and finds a sight that makes her hush – and not just her voice but every part of her, like feeling silence in her deep guts.
At first she thinks it’s a row of dead infants all lined up, but then she sees they are pink plastic dolls. Baby dolls, some naked, some clothed in dirty, rain-blanched outfits, some with tangles of fake hair and some bald with painted forelocks. And not all of them are complete. A couple are missing one arm, one has no limbs at all, and another is just a torso lying like a fleshy lozenge on the packed earth. Most are nested on cradles made of twigs, with leaves for pillows. She sees one that has been knocked askew, the twigs scattered and the doll lying face down, its pink lace dress, stiff and reedy, twisted up to expose the legs bent backwards in an unnatural way.
It’s something she can feel in the back of her throat, her dislike of the scene, as though what she’s looking upon is unholy, the conjunction of chaos and order in a forced fit where everything is stretched and bent in the wrong way like those baby legs.
She hears the breathing behind her, a raspy, fluttering intake of breath – but her mind is gone to darker places, and by the time it comes back it’s too late. She turns to see the face a full two feet above her, skeletal and horrid, peeled half away, the bone dry and filthy grey, the gumless teeth, the intelligent eyes. Then she sees the arm like a tree limb, raised above her, and the stone clutched in the hand.
And when the hand falls, her mind explodes with light.
*
By the time she wakes, evening has fallen, the crickets and tree toads making their racket, the sky still umber with the leftover light of a sunken sun. She tries to get to her feet, but her head sways to right and left, and she can’t control it so well. She sits down hard and waits for the pounding and the nausea to go away. She finds the spot on the back of her head where the bump has already raised. Her fingers come back bloody, and she can feel that it’s already begun to scab over. She’ll be all right if she can stop the world from leaping around.
There’s a rustle of movement behind her, and when she turns she finds a girl with pigtails, who stands half hidden by a tree trunk. She looks like she could be seven or eight years old, except that she’s at least as tall as Temple – like an overgrown baby in a checked dress.
The girl peeks out from behind the tree trunk and picks at the bark nervously with her thick fingertips.
Temple gazes at her, trying to hold her vision in place.
Where’d you come from, little miss? Temple asks.
From town.
Temple can hear the engine of her car still running in the distance.
How long’ve I been out?
The girl doesn’t answer. She keeps her eyes trained on Temple and picks at the tree bark.
Come on, Temple says. I ain’t gonna hurt you. What you lurkin back there for?
The girl says nothing.
Did you see the monster? The one that hit me? You don’t have to worry, I ain’t gonna let him get you.
The girl looks around, but not fearfully. She mumbles something that Temple can’t quite hear.
What? What you sayin?
The girl repeats herself in a curiously deep but still frail voice:
I said I’m gon kill you.
For the first time Temple can see there’s something wrong with the girl’s teeth – instead of being in neat rows, they seem to stick out every which way, some of them even poking out from between her lips when her mouth is closed.
I’m gon kill you, the girl repeats.
What you wanna kill me for?
Y’ain’t no kin-mind.
Kin-mind? What you sayin?
Y’ain’t no kinnamind.
Kin of mine? You sayin I ain’t no kin of yours?
I’m gon kill you.
I don’t think so, girl. Go play somewhere else. It’s time for Temple to rise and shine.
She lifts herself to her feet, balancing herself with her arms outstretched as though she were walking a tightrope.
When she’s steady, she looks up and finds the girl has come out from behind the tree. For the first time she sees the girl’s bulk, thick all around like a walking log. There’s something wrong with her arm, and when Temple looks more closely she sees that all the skin of the hand and forearm has peeled back to expose the bones, the tendons, the brownish meat and muscle. It doesn’t seem to be a wound – she can see the muscles roiling with strength. In some areas there even seems to be a white chitinous crust formed in patches over the arm.
Not to mention the long kitchen knife gripped in the skinless hand.
I’m gon kill you.
Easy there, Miss Muffet.
The girl comes at her, the knife raised. Temple trips her up and dodges the blade. But she takes the full impact of the girl’s body against her own. She’s knocked to the ground and all the wind goes out of her. Coughing, she hops up into a crouch, her head swimming, the girl standing over her with the knife.
Let up, little girl, Temple says. Or I’m gonna have to hurt you.
But the girl stretches out her leg and thrusts her foot into Temple’s chest, and it feels like a sledgehammer driving her backwards. She drags herself away from the advancing girl, watching those exposed fingerbones tighten skeletal around the handle of the knife.
Then a man’s voice, in the trees:
Millie, what the hell you doin, girl? I tole you just to watch her till I got back.
A man, different from the one she saw before, but big, with greying skin pulled away in parts, one eyelid sewn shut over a sunken hole.
He points to the knife in the girl’s hand.
Mama’s gon kill you she finds out you been in her kitchen. Come on, now, Mama told us to bring this one back too.
And they lift her, one on each side, and she can smell the reechy rot of their skin, and her head swims and her stomach bubbles, and she tries to use her legs to keep up, but most of the time she just feels her feet dragging along the ground.
*
They drag her to the road and she notices, through the blurry haze of her vision, that the car is empty. Maury is gone. She wonders where he could have got to. She wonders, in a distant way, if they have taken him away.
Further down the road they come to a small town, little more than a crossroads with small brick shops. She can feel her feet bump over the rails of an old railroad track running east and west, one of the long red-striped wooden guards pointing straight up to the darkening sky, another broken off a couple feet above the base.
She tries to walk on her own but stumbles and lets herself be carried. Her shoulders ache and her arms are sore where their bony hands are gripped around them.
The streets are empty. They drag her in the direction of a building on the corner. It is shaped like a town hall or a municipal building. It says something over the door, but she doesn’t recognize the words.
Then a voice she recognizes – a man’s voice – calls out from behind them.
Just one goddamn second, the voice says.
The hands let go of her, and she drops to her knees and keels forward. Her head turns in circles, as does her stomach, and the gravel on the street digs into her palms. It takes all her effort, but she turns and lifts her head enough to see.
Moses Todd, she says.
It’s him, sure enough. There he stands, like some kind of cowboy, in the middle of the intersection, a broken stoplight swaying slightly over his head, and in his outstretched arm a pistol levelled at the man standing over her.
Step away from the girl, Moses Todd says.
But something happens, and the man with the sewn-shut eyelid moves behind her suddenly and closes his hands around her skull like a vice and lifts her upright so she has to reach up and grab his wrists to keep her neck from snapping.
Put yer gun down, the man says, his voice wet and loud just behind her. Put it down now or I’m gon kill her.
Moses laughs and keeps the gun steady.
Look at the pickle you got yourself in, little girl. Seems like everybody in the world wants a share of your final breaths.
I swear hell I’m gon kill her, says the man again, wrenching her head slightly to the side.
Then Moses Todd raises his gaze from Temple to the man, and a serious look comes across his face.
She ain’t yours to kill, he says. She’s mine.
And the gun explodes and she feels a wetness spray the back of her head and the hands holding her up go slack and she drops to the ground. She looks behind her and sees the body of the man collapsed on the tarmac, the back of his head spilled open and a soft mushy hole in his face where his left cheek used to be.
The girl Millie who was standing on the other side of her is already running away around the corner of the brick building.
Temple manages to lift her body up to a sitting position, her knees numb beneath her.
Moses Todd walks over and towers in front of her. He looks down at her, almost sadly.
Now it’s your turn, little girl. I told you you should of killed me.
You did, she says, trying to find out where in her body all her strength was hiding at the moment. You sure enough did.
I reckon your life is mine twice over now, he says. Once by debt and once by forfeit.
I reckon it is.
You got anything else you want to say?
Her head swirls like a stirred pot. She feels for any spare force in her arms, but it’s not there. They hang limply at her sides. She’s tired. She’s never been so tired, and that’s saying something because she’s been tired a lot in the stretching span of her lifetime.
Don’t worry yourself about it, she says. I guess I could of seen Niagara Falls once – that would of been nice. But it don’t matter much.
Niagara Falls. How come?
Beats me. It’s just big is all I know. One of God’s marvels.
Moses Todd nods his head.
Yeah, he says.
She looks up at him, and the corners of his mouth creep up into something like a smile, a smile that says, It’s okay I’m with you there in your smoky little girl-head, and he sighs heavily and looks on down the road into the distance.
All right then, he says and raises the pistol to her forehead. It’ll be quick – you’ll start dreamin of heaven before you feel a thing. But you might want to close your eyes.
She does, she closes her eyes and thinks of all sorts of things, Malcolm and Maury the dummy and the lighthouse where you could see the vastness of the ocean, and she thinks about flying over that ocean and watching it unfold under her for ever and ever, skimming the surface and going faster and faster until everything blurs from speed and up and down don’t mean anything and the air becomes thick and solid around her and the face of God is right there too, nuzzling up against her, and amen she says, amen, amen, amen—
She hears the shot – and something’s wrong, because she knows she shouldn’t hear anything. But her head is mixed up, and she’s sweating a lot now, and part of her mind is still flying over the surface of the ocean – and she opens her eyes and sees Moses Todd before her, dropping the pistol to the ground and gripping his shoulder, blood coming out brown from between his fingers.
Son of a bitch, he says and starts to back away from her.
Then, from behind, a number of figures, there must be six or seven, large and malformed, move around her and tackle Moses Todd to the ground where he continues to shout out, Son of a bitch, son of a bitch. She’s breathing so hard that she can see little light explosions in her eyes. She eases herself to the ground and wonders when she will actually die because she’s awfully tired, so terribly tired, and Moses Todd is right – there are debts she owes to the perfect world and she feels like she has cheated them for too long already.
Inside the town hall are rows of desks scattered with the detritus of a different age. Dusty computer screens, mugs full of ballpoint pens, framed photographs, ceramic pots with viny plants long dead, their dry tendrils snaking along windowsills, here and there smears of black-brown dried blood across the blotters.
The screen of one of the computer monitors is broken out and propped up inside, grinning and still bespectacled, is the ancient dried head of a man.
They take her to the back of the building, through a pair of swinging doors and down a flight of marble steps into the basement – a large central room with a row of five or six jail cells against the back wall. Against another wall are two tables built high with teetering lab equipment, the kind she’s seen in meth dens, but not exactly. In the middle of the room there’s a metal table with high edges and a drain – an autopsy table – except this one is jury rigged with belts to help keep the body down. And next to the autopsy table is something that looks like a dentist’s chair. The linoleum floor is crusted over with flaky blood and dried bits of gore.
They put her in one of the cells and slam the barred door shut. She falls to her knees and climbs on top of an old cot against the wall. She can hear sounds of movement and grunting. There are meatskins in one of the cells, shifting around each other like nervous animals.
There’s a barred rectangular window high up on the wall in her cell, and she looks at the light coming through it and feels sleepy. The glass of the window is opaque with grime and crazed with fractures, and one small wedge of glass pane is missing altogether. Through that tiny opening she sees the sunlight bright and clean. God reaches you even in a basement, and she can’t keep her eyes open.
HEY, LITTLE GIRL. Wake up. It’s time to wake up.
She is dreaming of nice things – of pastures with dried grass coming up to her waist, of lakes where she can float stretched out on the surface, her skin tickled by the taut skin of the water, she like nothing but a little scurrying waterbug whiling away her time between the sea and the sky.
Time to wake up, little girl.
She knows the voice even before she opens her eyes. She shades her eyes and cracks them open, and the first thing she sees is the light coming through the rectangular window above her. Still daytime – she hasn’t been out long.
Rise and shine, lollipop. We’re in a fix.
Moses Todd is in the cell next to her, holding his bleeding arm.
She sits up. Her head is pounding, but the spinning has stopped. She can stand up all right. She stretches herself and walks in circles around the cell a few times to clear her head.
Then she hears a moaning from the cell beyond Moses Todd’s. She recognizes it.
Maury, she says and looks past Moses.
And there he is, her dummy, reaching his arm out to her through the bars and moaning plaintively.
I figured they got you, Maury, she says. She can feel her face smiling even though it hurts her head. I reckoned I was out one dummy.
Maury’s dense, flat eyes gaze back at her.
In the cell between them, Moses is using his teeth and his good arm to rip the sheet from his cot into a long strip.
This is touching, he says and holds out to her the strip of fabric through the bars. But why don’t you give me a hand before I pass out.
She backs away from him.
I ain’t helpin dress your wounds, Mose. You’ll just try to kill me again.
You knew I was comin after you.
It don’t matter. You bleed out, and I got one less hassle to deal with.
He chuckles, shaking his head.
I guess that’s right, he says.
He takes the strip and sits down on his cot and proceeds very carefully to circle his arm with it and knot it with his teeth.
Then the door at the other end of the room opens and two men come in – massive, like the others she’s seen. They have to duck to fit through the doorway. One has no shoes on – instead his feet are encased in a growth of chalky bonelike shell articulated with tendon between the plates that spread and contract when he walks. She wonders how far up the legs that bone goes. The skin of his face is half gone, revealing one eyeball, unblinking, rolling in a jellied socket. He looks like a corpse, like a meatskin, but he moves like the others – with human purpose and alacrity.
The man with him is less decayed. His skin is cracked open in places, and his hair has fallen out in tufts, but there isn’t any growth of bone that she can see.
The one with no shoes strides over to the bars of Temple’s cell, his bony feet clacking against the linoleum as he walks.
The girl’s awake, Bodie, he announces. He grips the bars of the cell and addresses Temple. Girl, you frighted Millie near to death. Why you wanna terrify a nice girl like her for? Why you wanna go messin around in her nursery? She got the makin’s of a true-hearted mother-woman in her mini-soul. It’s just low-down spitefulness to want to trample on that. You jealous cause she’s got a family what loves her?
His eye rolls back in its socket, moistening itself.
I got no interest in her baby nursery, Temple says. She was the one with the weapon.
Oh, he says, pointing to her gurkha knife where it lies on the table amid the lab equipment. I guess that there’s a passel of wildflowers. Mama ain’t too happy with you, girl. You’re jealous is what I think. But the family, it’s a iron-fierce thing. It ain’t for snatching up by strangers.
Hush up, Royal, Bodie says. We just here for a dose. Sit down.
The one called Royal stares at Temple a while longer with his unclosing eye, and then walks to the dentist chair where he straddles it backwards, embracing the back of the seat with his arms, laying his face in the headrest.
At the table, Bodie takes a syringe and fills it with clear liquid from a beaker that was positioned under one of the valved pipettes. He flicks the air bubbles out and goes over to where Royal sits.
You ready? he says.
Stick me, says Royal.
Bodie leans over and carefully injects the needle into the back of the Royal’s neck, up near the base of the skull, then presses down the plunger, slow, while Royal’s whole body seizes up like one contracting muscle.
Fuckity fuck fuck fuck, Royal says through clenched teeth when it’s over. His whole body looks strained to bursting, and his thin, ill-fitting skin shivers and tears a little with tiny wet pops. After a few minutes, his body relaxes and his breathing returns to normal.
Now me, Bodie says, and they exchange positions.
When Bodie is injected, he says nothing but she can see the muscles quivering with tension beneath his clothes.
Oh lord, Royal says, marching around the room in circles. I got a fire in me, Bodie. Right now? Right now I could fuck a hole in the world. I swear to God a’mighty, I could fuck a new Grand Canyon all by myself.
Settle down, Royal. We got things to do. Bring one of those for Mama.
Royal goes back to the table and fills a syringe with about twice as much of the clear fluid as either of them took themselves, then, yelping and clacking his feet against the ground, follows Bodie out of the room.
*
So, Moses Todd says when the two men have left, you wanna take a guess what that was about?
I ain’t ever seen anything like them before.
I can’t say as I have either.
They ain’t slugs.
Nope.
Then what are they?
He shrugs.
Mutants? he says.
Well, she says, they ain’t the prettiest things I’ve ever seen.
We’re in agreement there, lamb chop.
Hey, she says, what you suppose they’re shootin up? It ain’t meth.
Some concoction of their own invention looks like. Whether it’s got something to do with their size and their looks is what I’m wondering.
What you saying, they metamorphosed themselves?
I ain’t saying nothing except you won’t find me puttin that stuff in my morning coffee.
She looks behind her. On the other side is an empty cell and then the cell with the meatskins, seven of them, wandering around in circles, bumping into each other like blind people.
What you think they’re corralling slugs for? she asks.
I don’t know, he says. Could be they’re using them for somethin. Could be they’re eatin em. I seen it done before.
Yeah, she says. So have I.
You want to talk about an abomination, there’s one, he says, shaking his head. The food chain’s supposed to go one way if you ask me.
She hushes. She remembers the hunters she met. The plate of salty meat that tasted like rosemary.
Moses Todd sighs.
Well I’m tired of speculatin, he says. I’m just about ready to get out of here.
What you gonna do, bend the bars?
I don’t know. I’ll do somethin.
Great. When you got a plan, let me know what it is. In the meantime, I’m gonna get some sleep.
*
Later the girl comes in, Millie, the one from the woods. She has a loaf of bread that she tears into three pieces and pushes through the bars of each of their cells. Then she opens a sack, takes out three raw corncobs and passes those through the bars as well.
What you planning on doin with us? Moses Todd says.
But the girl doesn’t respond.
You know, we can’t stay here. We got places to be.
She leaves without saying anything.
Temple calls to Maury and holds up her corncob. She shows him how to shuck it and tells him to do the same with his.
The sun goes down, the rectangular window darkening. She sleeps.
*
Deep night, the sound of Maury’s heavy breathing and the inexhaustible shuffling of the slugs. She lays on her cot, thinking the world around her is so black that it makes no difference whether her eyes are open or closed. Her mind wanders in and out of tangled dreams, so shallow they have trouble flinging themselves beyond the walls of the basement where she lies.
From the carbon black of the cell next to her, she can hear the creak of cot springs and Moses Todd’s voice calling to her, barely more than a whisper.
Hey, girl. You awake over there?
Yeah, I’m awake.
Just this seems to satisfy him for a minute. Confirmation of awakeness, the fraternity of insomniacs.
Then he says, What you thinking about?
Me? I ain’t thinking about anything. You want a bedtime story, Mose, you came to the wrong person.
All right, he says. Fine.
She waits on his voice again but it doesn’t come, and after a while the dark begins to worry her with its fingering in all the corners of her wakeful brain.
After a while, she says, Why? What was it you were thinking about?
She hears him draw a big breath.
Oh, he says. Just somethin I saw a long time ago.
What was it?
It was in a place called Sequarchie, he says, speaking slowly. That’s in Tennessee. I was just passin through, and there was this young woman sittin out front of the hospital, on the kerb, leaning against a fire hydrant. They wouldn’t treat her, cause she’d been bit – had a man’s flannel shirt all bunched up against her neck. It was wet all through, and she kept trying to find a dry part to soak up the blood, but there wasn’t any dry part so she just used it for pressure. This was just after everything started, so there was lots of confusion. And that girl, she must of been eighteen, nineteen, she just come down out the hills where she was livin, and she hadn’t even heard that the dead they were comin back. I was a young man then, about her exact age, I guess.
He is quiet for a long time. She is beginning to wonder if he has fallen asleep when he starts up again.
Anyway, he says with a sigh. She tells me that her man, he died the week before, slipped and fell over a rock ridge while he was huntin, broke his neck. She buried him out back in a cedar glade by the stream, his favourite place to go off to when he had enough of the world. She thought that was it for her and him in this world, and so she commenced to mournin. Except – and she tells me this like I couldn’t believe it in a million years – except he comes back to her. He comes back to her one night, and she says it like it’s a revelation of pure love. He comes back to her, and he’s been so hungry with the missing of her that he tries to swallow her whole. That’s what she says. She keeps sayin it. He come back to me. He come back to me. And all the time, I’m lookin at her eyes, how they’re gettin cloudy at the edges, how her skin is goin grey, and I know what’s happenin to her, even though she thinks she just needs some stitches and can’t understand why they won’t give em to her. He come back to me.
What’d you do? Temple asks.
Moses Todd goes quiet again for a long time. She wonders if she shouldn’t have said anything.
Finally he says, I left her there. I should of taken care of it. I should of put her down. But I was young. That was before I understood that things have a way about em that needs to be respected, pretty or not. Ain’t no code but one that doesn’t feel like it fits exactly proper.
She turns on her cot and thinks that what he says is among the truest of things. Sometimes when there’s no light to see by, that’s when everything comes sharp and clear. She listens to Maury’s breathing, and the constant whisper-movement of the jailed slugs, and curls herself up into a tight ball of a little girl.
You wanna know what I was thinkin before? she says. She doesn’t wait for Moses to respond. I was thinkin of Niagara Falls. I heard people used to go there to honeymoon. Honeymooning on the edge of a big crack in the earth. Ain’t that something? That’s living it all the way up.
Moses Todd sniffs in his cell.
Let me ask you a question, he says. How come you weren’t headed up there instead of goin west like you were? I could of chased you north as easily as I did west. You might could have made it before we had to settle down to business.
I had an errand to run first.
Is that right. You wanna give me the details in case we ever get out of here? Sure make my life easier.
Goodnight, Mose. Don’t forget to say your prayers.
I never do, little girl. I never do.
*
In the morning, the girl Millie comes in again with more bread and, this time, slices of overcooked bacon and some wheat mush with milk in it. She brings it on a tray that she has decorated with plaid napkins and a flower in a bud vase, as though she were serving breakfast in bed to guests. She sets the tray nimbly on the autopsy table and brings a plate of food to each cell. But she looks confused and can’t figure out how to get the plate through the bars, so she sets it down on the floor and backs away and lets the three of them reach through the bars for their food.
Bon teet, she says.
Come again? Moses asks.
Bon teet.
Can you puzzle her out? Moses asks Temple.
I think she’s saying bon appeteet.
Well my goodness, he says. He turns to Millie and says, Mercy beaucoop, little lady.
He smiles at her in his way of fondness, and Temple sees that Millie likes the formality of serving, all the structures and etiquette of domestic life.
She folds her hands and watches them eat. When they’re done, she takes the plates, puts them back on the tray and takes the whole thing away. In the afternoon, she brings them a pot of brewed tea and some lemon slices.
Looks like you and me are her pretty playthings, Moses says to Temple.
As long as it keeps the food comin.
In the evening the two men come, Bodie and Royal, and they open Maury’s cell and lead him out of it. She watches, looking at the key ring to identify the right key if she should ever get her hands on it.
Hey, she says. Where you takin him?
You ain’t gotta worry, precious, Royal says. We gon take you too. Mama’s took an interest in the two of you.
What about me? Moses Todd says as they unlock Temple’s cell.
Everybody seen your type before, Royal says. Your future ain’t bright.
Bodie leads Maury out the door and Temple follows, her arm locked in Royal’s grip. Outside she squints her eyes against the sun. For a second she considers the possibility of making a break for it, but she sees others, standing at the corners or sitting on wicker chairs under the shade of overhangs, interrupting their conversations to watch their progress down the street.
How many of you are there? she asks.
We got twenty-three in our family, Bodie says.
Twenty-two since your fren kilt Sonny, Royal says.
He ain’t no friend of mine.
They turn a corner into a residential area and find themselves in front of a big white house with columns out front and shutters on the windows.
Inside, the house is musty and dark. The stench of decay is stirred up with other smells, lanolin, magnolia, sickeningly sweet soap – as though someone were trying to wash the stink off a corpse.
Mama! Royal calls up the stairs. Mama, we brought em like you tole us. We comin up.
*
He’s tetched, this one, Mama says and reaches her hand out to Maury. Tetched by the spirit. You wanna be part of my family, honey?
She is as close to a monster as God allows, Temple reckons. The woman is massive, even larger than the others, maybe ten feet if stretched to her full height instead of stretched out on a mountain of pillows in the middle of the room. She is naked, but her nakedness doesn’t count for anything because of the bony plates that cover almost her entire body, as though her skeleton had melted away and been reformed on the outside of her. Her voice is low, almost a man’s voice – those oversized vocal chords delivering nothing but bass notes from her gullet – and her rasping breath turns her attempts at sweetness grotesque. They call her Mama, and Temple wonders how many of them she is actual mother to – it wouldn’t surprise her if it was all of them, because Temple can see she’s a world Mama, like the earth itself, a potent blister of life.
When she moves, a myriad clicks and pops come from her exoskeleton, and Temple thinks that’s what an insect must sound like if you could get your ear small enough to hear it. It seems difficult for her to move, as though the gravity of her own body were working against her – her muscles unable to keep pace with her size and the weight of her bony growth.
There are sockets for her eyes and mouth in the scabby bone plates covering her face, and she has painted them with lipstick and eyeshadow in clownish imitation of generations gone.
Bodie stands beside her holding a glass of lemonade with a straw, and every now and then she leans over to take a sip, her bulk rolling to and fro against the floorboards.
You got a mama, honey? she says, turning her attention to Temple.
I guess I must of had one once, Temple says, trying to breathe through her mouth so she doesn’t choke on the perfumed air. That’s how it works, don’t it?
You don’t remember her?
Nah. She probably got et up.
You know what? You can miss somethin you never knew. Do you miss your mama, honey?
Temple gives this some thought. The woman’s big voice is brute and animal, but there is still true mama in it.
I guess sometimes, she says. If they was handing out mamas down at the five-and-dime, I reckon I would take myself one.
Of course you would.
But you gotta look at the world that is and try not to get bogged down by what it ain’t.
The woman nods and sips her lemonade, the end of the white plastic straw smeared with lipstick. Again Temple thinks of making a run for it, but she would never make it down the stairs. And then there’s Maury to think about.
The woman coughs, a grating cough like rusted machinery. Then she recomposes herself.
Do you like our family? she says.
Sure, Temple says. In particular, I like the way you keep people locked in basements.
The woman’s face contorts into an angry frown just for a moment before she closes her eyes and collects herself and begins to explain something.
We got something you don’t have, child, she says. We got something unique. You wanna know what it is? We got loyal blood. We watch out for each other. That’s how we come to survive for so long. My family, it’s the oldest family in the county. Hell, I guess by now we’s the oldest family in the state. That’s what I mean, survivors. See, long before this plague of foolishness descended on the world, we was livin apart – up in the woods where there wasn’t no one to bother us. We had our land. We made our food. We was one family, and we stayed one family for six generations. Blood is holy blood. It’s God’s gift, and it ain’t to be watered down. My children is the gift of the spirit, and let them be legion.
By the end of her speech, the woman is worked up, and she has snailed across the floor until she is right close to Temple’s face, her breath coming hot and powerful on her cheeks. Then she leans back, pulling herself together once more.
She sips the lemonade, her bones clacking.
See, she goes on, this plague is sent to cleanse the earth. It sweeps with prejudice, honey, and it favours those strong enough to keep together. What it does is sweep away the mess of commonness, and what it leaves behind are those Americans who keep America stored up in their blood lineage. What lineage are you trailin, girl? Do you know what togetherness is? What have you ever been together with? We got us the blood of the nation, you better believe it.
Uh-huh, Temple says. So you all are the inheritors of the earth?
That there is God’s truth, girl. The question is are you smart enough to see it.
Temple considers. She thinks about the people she’s known, the things she’s seen. She thinks about the nation she’s travelled since she was born, the derelict landscapes, the rain that washes the blood and dust into rust-coloured puddles.
Finally she shrugs.
All right, she says. So you’re the inheritors of the earth. It ain’t the wrongest thing I ever heard.
The woman leans back, satisfied.
But, Temple continues, that don’t mean I can stay here and be your pet. You can keep old Moses – he ain’t nothin but trouble anyway. But Maury and I, we got places to be.
To everyone else they’s a curse, the woman says with a wave of her chalky crusted arm. To us, they’s a blessing.
Who you talking about? The meatskins?
After the plague, we come down out the hills and took up our place in our rightful homes. And the shells of the lost, them that walk a foolish death, they contain the blessing for us as knows how to pluck it out. Our family, we’s nourished on the blood of God and the foolishness of the past – and we grow as giants on the earth.
Okay, Temple says. You got your ear to God’s lips. I got it already.
The woman’s hand shoots out and grabs Temple by the neck, tightening its bony claws around her throat. The fingers are huge and encircle her neck completely. Temple struggles to breathe, but Royal holds her arms behind her.
You’re a mouthy girl, the woman says. You don’t be careful, it gonna get you kilt.
She releases her grip, and Temple falls to the floor gasping.
Then the woman’s gaze falls on Maury.
Bodie, she says, there’s somethin special about this one. He’s a bright light in the firmament. Blank as any child of God lookin for a home. You look you can see that pureness in his eyes, sure as anything. I wanna see what the family blessing does for him. Get Doc.
*
They are returned to their cells, and she blinks her eyes to adjust them again to the dark.
How’s Mama? Moses Todd says.
She’s a big white lobster.
So what’s the story?
They’re the inheritors of the earth. Used to be they were just hillbillies. Now they’re the inheritors of the earth.
And what else?
And we best get ourselves out of here, toot sweet. Whether they like you or hate you, it seems like things might culminate in unpleasantness. Oh and also, I think I figured out what they’re shootin up.
At that moment the door of the room swings open and Bodie and Royal come in followed by another man, smaller, more human-sized, with glasses and long wisps of hair circling the crown of his bald head. He has a peevish, sneering expression on his face, as of a man who dislikes the company he keeps.
This time I want me a full dose, he says to the other two.
Come on, Doc, Bodie says. You know it ain’t our choice. Mama don’t like you messin round with your fine motor skills. You’re the only one knows how to harvest the stuff. From what I can tell you can’t get it just by squeezin their heads like lemons. You gone, we ain’t got nothin.
The one called Doc sneers and examines the array of slugs tripping over each other in the cell.
That one, he says, pointing to a woman with dried blood caked on her chin in a way that makes her look like a ventriloquist’s dummy. I reckon she looks fresh.
Good choice, Doc, Royal says, unlocking the cage. We just picked her up day before yesterday.
He leads her out, pushing the others back and swings the door of the cage shut. Then, while Doc sorts through a bunch of instruments on the table and preps the lab equipment, Royal begins to play with her, offering his arm up like a bone for a dog, leading her around the room and laughing.
She opens her mouth and lunges at him, and he steps back out of range of her teeth. He laughs shrilly.
Come on, he says. I know you want a taste of Royal in yer belly, dontcha?
Having led her around the room twice, he gets her to the foot of the autopsy table and with a quick movement takes her by the back of the neck and twists her around and pushes her back onto the metal surface where she squirms trying to rise. Then he takes the leather belt straps and flings them over her torso and legs and fastens them tight so she can’t move.
You’re a lively thing, ain’t you? Hey, Doc, you ready to go yet?
Gimme a few goddamn minutes. It ain’t carvin a pumpkin, it’s surgery.
It’s okay, this one’s a downright pretty one. Seems like she could get used a little before we get started.
He looks at her lasciviously with his one rolling eyeball, and Temple looks away. This is one thing God has nothing to do with.
*
Temple’s perspective is obscured, but from what she can tell the operation seems to involve splitting the slug’s head open and extracting something from it. Bodie holds the head straight between his hands while Doc gingerly makes a cut using an electric bone saw. Temple wonders why they don’t just kill her first and not have to contend with a wriggling body, but then she determines that it must make a difference whether the thing is active or not when they do the operation. They take pains to go only so far into the slug’s head, and only in a particular place near the base of the skull. Only after the procedure is over does Doc say, Okay, and then Bodie takes a long blade, a butcher’s knife, and drives it up into the hole they made in the skull until the woman stops moving.
Doc holds in his hand the little grey piece they removed from the woman’s brain and takes it to the table where he looks at it under a lamp with a big magnifying glass. Then he puts it into a little machine with some kind of chemical and turns it into a thick liquid that can be poured into a beaker, and lights a bunsen burner underneath it.
Through much of the procedure, Temple sits on the ground with her back against the bars of the cell looking up at the broken rectangular window and the tiny shaft of sunlight illuminating a stream of dust motes in the stale air of the basement. She remembers again the Miracle of the Fish – the silver-gold bodies darting in circles around her ankles as though she were standing in the middle of another moon – the way things could be perfect like that on occasion, a clear god, a god of messages and raptures – a moment when you knew what you were given a stomach for, for it to feel that way, all tense with magic meaning.
It has become something to her, that memory – something she can take out in dismal times and stare into like a crystal ball disclosing not presages but reminders. She holds it in her palm like a captured lady-bug and thinks, Well ain’t I been some places, ain’t I partook in some glorious happenings wanderin my way between heaven and earth. And if I ain’t seen everything there is to see, it wasn’t for lack of lookin.
The blind is the real dead.
Through the tiny broken-out place in the window above, she sees a little touch of movement. She focuses on it, watching it inch along, little more than a finger shadow against the daylight. It’s a green caterpillar, and it pokes its way through the hole in the glass and along the sill of the window.
And she thinks:
Ain’t no hell deep enough to keep heaven out.
*
The mixture on the lab table makes its way through various pipettes, spiral tubes and beakers where Doc adds teardroppers full of other ingredients. He then boils them, stirs and checks their colour against the light of the lamp until finally a valve is opened at the far right and a clear distilled liquid begins, drop by drop, to empty into the bottle from which they filled their syringes the day before.
Royal unstraps the immobile corpse, slings it over his shoulder and carries it off. When he comes back, he and Bodie sit in two folding metal chairs and wait for Doc to finish the process.
How’s it goin, Doc? Royal asks.
Goin fine. That was a juicy one you got there. We gon get plenty product outta that one.
Royal slaps his knee.
I knowed it, he says. I tole Bodie when we found her she was gonna be a ripe one. Didn’t I say just those words, Bodie? Didn’t I say she was gonna be a ripe one?
Bodie doesn’t answer. He is leaning over the lab table, and his eyes are fixed on the bottle filling slowly with the clear distillate.
Royal’s lidless eye rolls back in his head. He chuckles to himself and mumbles again, Sho enough, those is the words I said.
Finally Bodie stands at his full height, and he points to Maury.
All right, then, he says. Get the retard outta his cage. Lord knows why, but Mama took a likin to him, wants to see him jacked up.
Royal goes to the cell door and opens it and says, Come on, Mr Buffalo, you gonna get a shot of the high life.
Temple wants to stay back. She wants to watch the shaft of light coming through the broken window. She wants to watch the progress of the caterpillar as it makes its way across the windowsill. She wants to shut down her mind to so many things. But she can feel the panic blooming in her like something that had been planted a long time ago. She feels it blooming in her stomach and chest, and there ain’t nothing that ever bloomed so fast and so forceful.
Hey, she says and grabs the bars of her cell. What you wanna go and do that for? That dummy never hurt you.
Shut up, girl, Royal says. Stop bein a pest.
Yeah, she says. I get it. Inheritors of the earth, and you spend your time beatin up on dead people and dummies.
Royal’s lidless eye quivers in its socket in an absurd mimicry of anger.
You best shut your mouth, girl.
What you gonna do, eyeball me to death? You got me beat in a staring contest, I’ll give you that.
Moses Todd chuckles in the cell next to hers, stroking his beard.
You shut up too, Royal says, looking back and forth between the two.
I promise you one thing, Mr Royal, Moses Todd announces, she ain’t easy to kill, that one.
Royal begins to breathe heavily, clenching and unclenching his fists. His eyes move back and forth between Moses Todd and Temple.
Goddamn you both – goddamn you straight to hell. You ain’t part of this family. You got nothin like what we got. There’s the holy and then there’s what you are, and you don’t watch out I’d just as soon pop your little heads like—
Royal! Bodie shouts. Royal!
Royal checks himself but doesn’t take his eyes off them.
I got the retard, Bodie says and leads Maury over to the chair. Whyn’t you get the girl out and we’ll do her next. Just for kicks. After she sees up close what her doggie does under the needle.
Royal smiles and runs his tongue along his teeth. He opens the door of her cell and says, Come on, sweetness, we gonna have some fun.
You best not touch me, she says, going rigid all over.
But he throws his huge form through the door and grabs her by the hair and turns her head around so that it’s either go with him or get her head twisted off like a bottle cap.
Don’t worry, he says, getting his lidless eye right up close to her face. I decided you’s too ugly to rape.
Do what you want, Moses Todd calls from his cell, but you kill her and I’m gonna rain hell on you.
Royal pulls her by the hair to the other side of the room and turns her around to face the chair where Maury sits gazing at her with his blank, uncomprehending eyes, moaning loudly.
Hush up, Maury, she says. I’m all right. They ain’t hurtin me.
Royal is behind her, pulling her back against his body with one hand gripped around her left wrist, pulling it up behind her back so hard she expects her shoulder to pop out any second. His other hand is still seized on a thick twist of her hair, which he uses to manipulate her head on the bearing of her neck like a marionette. He pulls her face close to his and laughs, and she can smell his breath, rancid, see the little red tears at the perimeter of his skin where it’s peeled back from his skull, and she can hear his eyeball rolling around in its gelatinous cavity.
You the monster, he hisses at her. You the monster. And I’m gonna eat off your eyelids and then we gonna gaze on each other and you gonna see who the monster is.
He tugs at her hair again and turns her head to face the chair where Maury continues his long, low wail – a spectacular and feeble lament like a creature grousing at the brightness of the inviolable moon.
He does not resist as Bodie holds him down, and Doc holds aloft the syringe.
She says something, barely audible. It’s a whisper, even to herself, and another part of her mind listens close to hear what the words are. It’s like a message coming from somewhere else, and she can’t make it out. She says it again, a little louder this time, but it still doesn’t register.
What’s that? Royal says. What you sayin?
She’s thinking of a thousand things – waterfalls and lighthouses and record players and men who travel with wonder and the deafening mumble of cicadas in the dry grass of the plains. She’s thinking of corpses piled high and all the dead things that still move and the hard rain that falls and drives the mud and waste into all the corners and seams of the world, and she’s thinking of airplanes and little boys and grown men with grit teeth and beards and others with soft moans that bleat on and on without cease unless you find the right song to sing and you fill the car with your voice so that he doesn’t have to hear his own crying loud.
He ain’t mine to save, she says.
What’s she said? Bodie asks. He and Doc are both looking at her now.
Do it, she says. I don’t care. He ain’t mine to save.
And she’s thinking of iron giants – tall iron men with hardhats, resting their hands on the tops of oil derricks, and she’s thinking of rage, like an ember or a burning acid swallowing up all her knotted viscera. Blindness like the kind that leads men to perpetrate horrors, animal drunkenness, the jungles of the mind.
She has been there before. She promised never to go there again. God heard the promise. He showed her the island and the vast sea and the peacefulness that was so pure and lonesome it was wider than anything.
He ain’t mine to save.
She says it loud this time.
He ain’t mine to save.
She says he ain’t hers to save, Royal says.
I heard her, Bodie says.
What’s she mean?
She means, Moses Todd explains quietly, survival ain’t a team sport.
But she hears none of this, because the rain in her ears is coming down too hard, and the iron man, symbol of progress and strength, is towering over her, and she is kneeling by the shape of a small boy, holding it to her. And what she is saying to this shape of a boy that is no longer a boy is this: Malcolm I’m sorry Malcolm Malcolm I’m sorry the planes are flying Malcolm I’m sorry Malcolm look at the giant Malcolm look at the planes I’m sorry Malcolm Malcolm don’t go away you can’t go away.
And she can’t hear anything in the room because the cacophony in her ears is too much, her voice making the words:
He ain’t mine to save. He ain’t mine to save. He ain’t mine to save.
Royal jerks her neck around again and this time she sees something new in his face, panic distilled out of dead laughter. And she focuses on his gaping eye and thinks, Please, please, I don’t wanna, I don’t wanna, he ain’t mine, please don’t— But it’s too late, and before she knows it her right arm has shot up, the fingers of her hand have latched on behind the decaying skin of his ear, and her thumb like a spike drives itself into that lidless, exposed orb. It feels like a ripe peach, clear fluid trickling down her palm and her wrist, and then the blood starts coming.
He is screaming now and lets loose of her hair and her left arm and covers the gory socket with both hands, his whole body careening backwards against the cinder-block wall.
So loud in her head. The blood, when it flows, flows dense and diluvial over the earth – first red like tomatoes then brown like mud then black like char. So loud. She sees herself move, as if from a distance.
Her gurkha knife is on the other side of the room, and she topples the metal autopsy table, sending it crashing to the floor. Doc drops the syringe and backs away, but Bodie rises up to face her.
I’m gon swallow you whole, he says.
But she doesn’t slow down, flinging herself against him, she rips at his face, and strikes out with her fists everywhere at once. He’s huge, and hard like a tree stump, and he picks her up and flings her against the lab table where she feels glass shattering all around her. The gurkha knife is out of reach, but she looks for something else and grabs the butcher knife they used in the operation, swinging it up just as Bodie descends upon her. It cuts him across the middle, and his shirt gapes open to reveal a surface of tiny bone plates grown over his stomach muscles.
He looks down and sees the blade did nothing to the skeletal shell of his midriff, and he grins at her, a deliberate murderous grin. He comes at her again, and she takes the handle of the butcher knife with both hands, braces herself, shoulders to knees, and thrusts the blade forward as he approaches – and this time it goes in up to the haft.
It misses the heart, but his eyes go wide and there is unleashed from his gullet a choking cough filled with whole marshlands of boiling blood. He halts, frozen in mid-strike, his fingers and the corners of his mouth curling. She uses her weight and pushes downward on the handle of the knife as hard as she can, the ribs between which the blade is jammed acting as a fulcrum and driving the metal higher into his chest, ripping through lung and artery. He coughs again, this time vomiting a spray of blood and bile over her hair and face, and falls over sideways, dead.
Mama’s gon kill you, Mama’s gon kill you.
She looks up and Doc has her gurkha blade raised up, ready to strike her down. But he’s no fighter. He swings and misses, and she kicks the blade out of his hand, takes it herself and swipes him with a sideways blow that takes his left arm almost completely off. The limb dangles there by a thin string of muscle and tendon.
Another strike, and she’s aiming at his skull, but she misses and the blade lands to the left, between his neck and shoulder.
She wipes the blood from her eyes with the heel of her hand and wants to tell Doc to stop screaming, if he could just stop screaming so she could concentrate and do it quick, but her voice doesn’t work, her voice is somewhere else with that other part of her brain, and the flood in her head can’t be stopped.
She unjams the blade from his shoulder and swings it again, backhanded left to right, and it swipes clean through his skull just at the bridge of his nose. When he falls over, a grey mess spills out of the overturned cup of his cranium.
Letting the gurkha knife fall clattering to the ground she hears a whimpering behind her. It’s Royal, holding his eye and cursing softly at her.
Goddamn you, goddamn you, you ain’t got nobody.
She says nothing. Amidst the mess on the table she finds a bunsen burner with a heavy metal base and, gripping it tight around its rusted chrome stem, takes it over to where Royal lies shrinking on the ground.
Hey, Royal says. What you doin? Stop it – I ain’t done nothin to you. I ain’t done a goddamn thing to—
She gives her fist a backward swing and slams the rounded base of the bunsen burner against his jaw. She hears a crack, and his upper and lower teeth no longer meet the way they should.
Then she starts in on his head, watching herself from behind the curtain of torrential rain falling in her brain, and she doesn’t stop until long after the body stops twitching.
AMID THE hot stench of fresh offal, she rises to her feet like the dreadful ghost of a fallen battlefield soldier, her hands tacky with the thick pulpy dregs of death splayed wide. The echoes of clamour having died on the puddled ground, the only sound in the room is the thin insectoid buzzing of the three exposed bulbs suspended in ceramic sockets from the ceiling. Even the imprisoned slugs themselves have paused in their perpetual movement to gaze with acquiescent eyes upon the scene of the massacre, as though in harmony with the inexorable and silent melodies of grim decease – as though in deferential recognition of the community of the extinct.
She rises to her feet and blinks, her eyes like bleached wafers set against the brown mizzle of blood already drying in flakes on her cheeks and lips and neck. She raises no hand to cleanse herself, marked as she is with a violence, ritualistic and primitive, like those hunters who would decorate themselves with the ornamental residuum of their prey.
Maury seems unfazed by the destruction surrounding him. When she approaches him, he touches his fingertips to her face as though to wipe away the mask of gore and recognize again the girl he knew before.
Well I’ll be go to hell, little girl, Moses Todd says in an awed whisper from his cell. Do you mind tellin me what that was all about?
She says nothing. She helps Maury from the chair and kicks away the blood-spattered debris on the floor so he won’t step on it.
I mean, Moses goes on, you opened up enough killing for twenty people on those three bastards. I ain’t complainin, I’m just sayin.
She picks up the gurkha knife and stows it under her arm and leads Maury towards the door.
You got a burnin flame in you, Moses says. I sure wouldn’t want to be the one to come between you and your chosen path. But I guess I am that one, ain’t I?
She ignores him.
You got kinda fond of your new acquaintance there, he says. Maury. That’s a good name. I had a cousin named Maury once. Truth be told, I don’t know what happened to him. Probably got eaten.
She looks at him, and he is sitting on the ground with his back to the wall looking mighty comfortable.
I’ll be seeing you, little girl.
She says nothing and leads Maury out the door and up the stairs to the big central room of the municipal building. She sets him down in a chair away from the window and looks out into the street. There are some of them out there, not many. One of them is the girl, Millie, who is drawing pictures with chalk on the tarmac in the middle of the intersection.
Maury, she says. You stay here. You hear me? Stay here. I’ll be back in a minute.
He sits silently, squinting his eyes against the sunlight coming dusty through the windows.
She goes back down the stairs. She steps over Royal, whose head is crushed like the afters of a pulpy melon, and stands in front of Moses’ cell. She stands there a long while, just the two of them looking at each other, before she speaks.
I got somethin wrong with me, Mose.
What’s that, little girl?
Look.
She gestures behind her to the congealing carnage behind her.
You just defending your friend, Moses says.
It wasn’t— she says, and she can feel her voice getting whispery now, as though the dead behind her were great listeners of secrets. She says, It didn’t have to be so much. It didn’t have to be like that. I got a devil in me.
Come here, Moses Todd says. She doesn’t know what else to do, so she goes to the bars of his cell and he reaches through them towards her. He puts his fingers on the side of her head by her ear and rubs his thumb across her gore-spattered cheek, then he holds his thumb up to show her the smear of brown blood.
Look, he says. It comes off.
She nods, breathes in deep once and looks around the room again.
All right then, she says and she feels like she’s agreeing to some contract with the natural world except that she doesn’t know what it says because she can’t read it.
Listen, Moses says. He sees she is preparing to leave, and there is a sudden pragmatism in his voice. I can’t promise you I ain’t gonna kill you. That would be a lie, and I can’t tolerate a lie. But I can offer you a deal you’re probably too smart take. You get me outta this cell, and I’ll give you a twenty-four-hour head start. You got my word.
She studies him for a moment.
Did you hurt those people? she says.
What people?
The Griersons. Did you hurt them?
Little girl, you misapprehend me if you think I go around hurtin nice folk. The old woman even made me a sandwich for the road.
I ain’t playin with you, Mose.
You think I wanna tangle with you and you still slick with blood from your butchery? It was ham, the sandwich, with mustard and tomatoes from her own garden.
She looks at him sideways, but he has never lied to her yet.
I figured somethin out about you, she says.
What’s that?
It’s the car. The car I been drivin all the way from Florida. You got an electronic tracker in it. It’s true, ain’t it? That’s how come you keep findin me.
He gives a hangdog smile and strokes his beard.
They put trackers in all those cars, he says. The woman who gave it to you, Ruby, she didn’t know that.
Uh-huh. I knew it. I knew you wasn’t that good.
He laughs, hearty and ursine.
I’ll still find you, he says. If this here cell ain’t my grave, I’ll find you. Count on it, Sarah Mary Williams. Mutants or no, we still got business.
She nods. I know it.
Their eyes meet, and it is possible that what they see in each other is the eerie inversion of themselves – like coming face to face with some bent-up carnival mirror.
She sighs and turns away from him. She goes to the corpse of Bodie, leans down to take the haft of the butcher knife and tugs hard until it comes loose and slides out from between his ribs. Moses watches her as she hands the knife to him through the bars of his cell.
Take it, she says.
He doesn’t move. He sits there, his back against the wall, considering her. There is something in his face that she doesn’t want to look at. Loathing she can handle, she knows what to do with antipathy. But affection she can’t abide.
I ain’t givin you the keys, she says. This knife, it don’t mean nothin. It’ll give you a fightin chance, but I hope they put you in the ground, you understand?
He rises to his feet, and without changing his expression at all, he dusts off his hands and takes the knife from her.
I ain’t savin you, she says. This ain’t savin you. You somehow make it outta here and track me down, you best come with a furious rage – because I got no use for your sympathy.
He nods, his eyes on her like he’s reading a book he’s just getting to the end of and can’t be interrupted.
I ain’t saving you, she says again, even though she doesn’t want to and even though each time she says it it sounds to her less like an oath and more like a plea. I ain’t saving you, you understand me?
Those eyes on her, brutal and profound and even paternal. And when he says it, he says it like signing a grave contract:
Understood.
She turns to leave, but before she reaches the stairs, Moses calls out to her.
One more thing, he says, and even though she stops to listen she doesn’t turn around. His voice has a challenge in it, as though he would diminish her. I’ve seen evil, girl, and you ain’t it.
Then what am I? she says, still not looking at him.
She waits for a moment longer, but when he doesn’t respond she continues up the stairs, feeling his eyes follow her all the way out.
*
Temple finds a window in the back of the place that leads out onto an alley, and she steals away, taking the big lumbering man by the hand and pulling him along to keep pace with her as she sprints from one coverture to the next, until they are far enough out of town that they can slow their pace.
They keep the road on their left and follow it until they arrive back at the place where the car is. Someone has pushed it into a ditch where it sits angled downward into the weeds, and the driver’s door hangs agape.
The duffel bag full of guns is gone, but she finds one pistol with a full clip she stowed beneath the driver’s seat. There’s a burlap sack wedged in the corner of the trunk, and she takes that and fills it with whatever she can salvage – some clothes, including the yellow sundress Ruby gave her weeks before, some maps she was using to navigate her way west, a half bottle of water, a lighter, and the remains of a large packet of cheese crackers.
In the glove compartment she finds the die-cast fighter jet she got in the toy store. She turns it over and over in her hands.
Hey, Maury, come here.
She holds it out to him, but he doesn’t take it.
Look, she says. It’s an airplane. Like up in the air.
She points to the sky and then illustrates how the jet fighter would fly through it, making swooshing sounds to accompany the demonstration.
Here, you can have it.
This time he takes it and holds it in his palm, staring down at it as though waiting for it to take off on its own power.
Don’t lose it now, she says. Put it in your pocket.
She also finds, pushed all the way into the back of the glove compartment, the plastic bag with the tip of her finger in it. It’s shrivelled up like a raisin and grey all over except the nail, which is still painted soft pink. She looks at her other nine fingernails, and there’s not a trace of that cotton-candy polish left anywhere. Instead, there’s blood caked black and hard under the tips of her nails, as though she has claws meant for digging instead of fingers.
She rolls the plastic bag into a cylinder and stuffs it into her pocket.
Say goodbye to the vehicle, she says to Maury. We’re hoofin it for a while till we can find us some new wheels.
They skirt the town on their way back, but in the distance they can hear hollering and wailing – deep cries of anger and mourning.
I guess they found the mess we left, she says. You suppose they’ll come after us, Maury? We gotta watch our backs. I wonder what they done with ole Mose.
A couple miles out of town they pick up the railroad and follow it east so they can stay off the main road, but still be able to move quickly and see if anyone’s coming up behind them. Temple uses the gurkha knife to cut Maury a walking stick, and he lets it drag along the wooden ties, producing a rhythmic tap of wood on wood like the cycling of an ancient pedometer measuring the unfolded distance of their journey.
The sun dips lower in the sky ahead of them, and their shadows are the only things that follow, stretching long and distorted behind. Their feet crunch on the gravel of the rail bed, and she notices that the rails themselves are not rusted brown but shiny, and she wonders if they are still in use by someone.
The sun goes down but the sky stays bright for a long time as though they are walking along the very perimeter of a flat earth. It is still light when the dry, kudzu-choked trees on their right thin to reveal a river running parallel to them.
Ain’t that a sight, she says.
The water is broad and slow-moving, the verge is thick with reeds. She looks hard into the distance behind them but sees nothing.
Come on, Maury. You need a bath almost as bad as I do.
So they strip off their clothes and walk into the water as the grimy supplicants of a desecrated earth – the man’s body pale and thick, almost hairless, sitting like a sunken stone in the shallows, motionless as the water finds its course around the simple obstruction, and she, like a tiny despoiled innocent washing away the marks of her ruin, dunking her head under the water as if there she would find the baptismal kingdom of heaven and rising up again with the pink of her flesh beginning to show through the mask of putrefaction. She runs her fingers through her hair and watches the water sweeping away the clots of blood and tissue, the splinters of bone. From above she might be seen to carry a tail like a comet, she the bright head followed by an elongated swirling deltoid of red-brown muck. Afterwards, she sits waist-deep and picks away bits of glass buried in the skin of her face and hands, and she rinses her cuts in the cool water until the burn ceases.
Then she takes her clothes from the grassy verge and soaks them in the water and wrings them until all the crustiness is gone out of them – though the rusty stains won’t come clean and, she supposes, never will.
By the time they emerge purified from the river, the sky has grown an inky purple, and stars are visible between the smoky night clouds.
They gather twigs and debris from the woods, then she piles it up and uses a tangle of dry grass to light a fire behind a rocky outcropping where it won’t be seen from the direction of the town behind them. She drapes her clothes over the rocks near the fire and watches the steam rise from them in wispy grey tongues while they dry. The night wind comes cool and her skin prickles all over with goosebumps.
She watches the fire and feels sleepy, and when she pokes it with a stick, the embers fly up into the air like a crazy squadron of insects, then simply disappear as if they’ve got lodged in one of the many folds of the night.
She looks at the man sitting next to her, his flat eyes brimful of contemplation of the flames. There is only so much room in that head of his, and right now the space is occupied with the shape-shifting vision of the fire.
The thing that happened back there, she says. I mean, it ain’t like you asked – but anyway.
He doesn’t take his eyes off the fire.
I mean, I guess I been around meatskins too long, she continues. Sometimes it happens where I’ll lose it. Like a switch got flicked somewhere in my brain, you know? And then my hands’ll start rippin and tearin and they don’t care about the whys or wherefores.
The fire pops and sizzles with the sap from the branches they found.
And it’s wrong, it’s a sin as big as the world we live in, bigger even – to lay your hands on a creation of God’s and snuff it out. It don’t matter how ugly a thing it is, it’s a sin, and God will send a terrible vengeance down on you for it – I know, I seen it. But the truth is – the truth is I don’t know where I got off on the wrong track. Moses, he says I ain’t evil, but then if I ain’t evil . . . If I ain’t evil, then what am I? Cause my hands, see, they ain’t seem to got no purpose except when they’re bashin in a skull or slittin a throat. That’s the whole, all around truth of the matter. Them meatskins, they kill, but they ain’t get any satisfaction out of it. Maury, you sure are wanderin a lonely earth, full of breach and befoulment, but the real abomination is sittin right next to you.
Overhead, the moon is just a sliver in the sky, like a candle flame, delicate and tenuous against the irreducibility of night. Like you should hold your breath for fear of blowing it out altogether.
If the big man next to her has comprehended a word of what she has said, he does not show it.
She nods to herself.
I guess what I’m sayin is, she announces at last, we better get you to Texas so you can get shut of me.
DAYS OF waft and wayfaring. They follow the tracks and keep the morning sun behind them. Maury walks beside her, his feet trammelling along invariably – a gravitational movement, he is given direction only by her. When she walks into the woods because she thinks she hears something coming, he follows without question or confusion. When she stops to look at the sun or soak her feet in the river that still runs parallel to them, he stops also.
When the crackers are gone, they eat berries, and fish caught from the river in a burlap sack she finds among the rubble of the railroad tracks. Where the tracks cross roads, she looks for cars suitable for driving, but the railroad has taken them out beyond the urban areas. She considers trying to get back to the main highways but decides instead that they may be better off where people are unlikely to follow. Besides, it’s peaceful here with the tracks and the river running straight and twinned. They go for hours at a time without seeing a single meatskin, and the ones they do find are sluggish from hunger, some not even able to stand.
Once, in the morning, while she is splashing water on her face, she sees a figure floating aimlessly down the river. It’s a meatskin, flailing about with slow movements, unable to right itself or keep its head above water, carried forward by the slow current – perhaps, she imagines, as far as to the sea.
Another time, in a clearing next to the tracks, they come across a pile of cremated human corpses. The brittle mass is taller than she is, and all the tangled, burned limbs have fused together and petrified into something resembling a black igloo. When the wind blows, the charred flakes of papery skin whip back and forth like tinsel. There are no signs of life anywhere, and she wonders what such a construction could mean out here, away from the common flow of human discourse.
On the third afternoon, they are passed by a motor-boat going upriver carrying ten or fifteen people, including two children who look at her through oversized sunglasses. The driver of the boat swings it around but does not cut the noisy motor. He waves to Temple, and she waves back. Then he does a thumbs-up, thumbs-down gesture with his hand, questioning her status. She gives him a thumbs-up in return, and he signals back, circling his thumb and forefinger into an okay. Then he swings the boat back around and continues to drive it upriver.
During the day, the dry dust is kicked up under their feet, and they have to keep moving so it stays behind them. If they stop, the cloud of their own passage catches up, making them choke and cough and sputter.
Sometimes they find caved-in shacks in overgrown clearings, and they search these for useful items and curiosities.
At night she boils water in old cans she finds by the tracks. She adds berries and aromatic leaves she knows are not poisonous.
Riverwater, she says. It ain’t the elixir of the gods, but it goes down all right when you’re thirsty.
Sometimes she sings to keep herself company.
She was light and like a fairy,
And her shoes was number nine.
Herring boxes without topses
Was sandals for that Clementine.
Drove her ducklin’s to the water
Every mornin just at nine.
Hit her foot against a splinter,
Fell into the foamin brine.
Ruby lips above the water,
Blowin bubbles clear and fine.
But alas I weren’t no swimmer.
Neither was my Clementine.
In a churchyard near the canyon,
Where the murple do entwine,
Grow some rosies and some posies,
Fertilized by Clementine.
In my dreams she still doth haunt me,
Robed in garments soaked with brine.
Then she rises from the waters,
And I kiss my Clementine.
How I missed her, how I missed her,
How I missed my Clementine,
Till I kissed her little sister
And forgot my Clementine.
And she laughs and laughs, kicking at the dry dirt with the toes of her shoes.
Get it, Maury? Clementine’s sister, she must be a peach!
The clouds come, then the rain, and the scorched earth swallows it through every pore. It could rain for days straight and never collect a puddle, so ashen and raw is the hard dirt they tread. They do not take shelter but continue to walk, liking the tonic feel of the droplets on their skin. She turns her face to the sky and sticks out her tongue and lets the rain trickle down her throat. The low tintamarre of thunder in the distance sounds like a medieval cannon reaching them not just over a stretch of miles but also a stretch of centuries, as though they are following the river back into their own primitive pasts. When it gets too close, the lightning turning the sky stark white for photographic instants, Maury begins to moan and refuses to move further, his hands opening and closing on air.
It’s okay, Maury, she says. That shivaree ain’t gonna hurt you. It’s just God makin a spectacle of himself at the marryin of earth and heaven. He’s gotta do it every now and then so we don’t forget who’s in charge. Come on, just keep your eyes on the tracks, and give a listen to my vocal melodies. I’ll sing you through it.
She takes him by the hand and the two march on. Her voice carries high and far into the grey sky above until the clouds pass and the sun shows through in long straight ribbons, so clear and defined it looks like you could slide down them if there was a ladder that could reach that high.
On a big rock jutting out over the river, they lie flat on their backs and let their clothes dry out, and she feels the tickle of the droplets on her skin and it feels excruciating and delightful.
If you close your eyes and look at the sun, she explains to Maury, you can see the miniature animals that live on your eyeballs.
When she looks over, she sees Maury has fallen asleep.
She sighs and looks again at the receding clouds.
My lord, she says, a girl can sure enough cover some ground in this life. I bet I got places to go that I don’t even know exist yet.
*
It is their fifth day walking when she hears the noise. At first she thinks it’s thunder again, but the sound lasts too long, it just keeps going, not like thunder or a crashing wave, the things of nature that break once and then sputter out. She reaches down and feels the steel rail with her hand.
We best step to the side, Maury. This could be our ride if they ain’t a train full of mutants – but I’m guessing the inheritors of the earth ain’t the ridin-the-rails type.
She takes the gurkha knife from her sack and holds it behind her back.
Could be trouble, she says, but truth be told my feet could use a break. Stand up straight, Maury, and try not to look so evil of portent.
A diesel engine comes into view from the east followed by three boxcars, their doors slid open like the black maws of giant fish. It begins to slow immediately after coming around the bend, and when it stops it stops for her, the beast of steel and chain and grease inching to a halt on the tracks just feet from where she stands with Maury, its air brakes coughing and metal straining against metal, reminding her of David and Goliath or other stories where the monster pauses and kneels down, its limbs creaking, to take the measure of its puny foe.
She grips the blade tighter behind her back.
She neither smiles nor frowns. She is aware of all the sounds around her, the chirping birds, the rippling of the river in the distance and the wind through the trees.
The locomotive engine is shaped like a bulldog, pug-nosed and jowly. It is painted a forest green with a yellow winged emblem across the front of it, but the dust of a thousand journeys has collected on the surface, giving it the look of something that has recently risen from the earth.
A door in the side of the engine slides open suddenly and the sooty face of an old man emerges. He’s wearing a baseball cap, and he takes it off and fans himself with it as he looks Temple and Maury up and down.
At the same time, she begins to notice the faces of other men peeking out the sides of the boxcars further down.
The old man spits into the dirt and wipes his mouth with the sleeve of his shirt.
You two in trouble? he asks.
I don’t know, Temple says. Are we in trouble?
Not by us you ain’t.
That’s good to hear.
The old man wipes the sweat from his forehead and leaves a streak of black.
Where you headed? he asks.
West.
Good thing. You don’t wanna be goin east. There’s bad business back there.
Is that right?
Slugs I got used to. But after a while you see more’n you want to see and you just stop lookin.
Uh-huh.
The old man nods his head at Maury.
What’s his story?
He don’t talk. He’s just a dummy.
The old man’s eyes go back to studying Temple – but just in a studying way, not trying to get a bead on her or anything like that.
How old are you? he asks.
Fifteen, she says, taking a chance on the truth and the fatherly instincts of the man in the cap.
Fifteen! You’re too young to be wanderin the countryside. Too young by a mile.
I tried to be older, she says. But it’s somethin that’s hard to force.
He chuckles, rubs his eyes and looks out over the shrubby verge to the river below and then back at her.
What you got behind your back? he asks.
She reveals the gurkha knife, holding it up to show him.
What were you planning on doin with that?
If you turned out to be trouble, I was gonna kill you with it.
The old man looks at her with eyes still as toad ponds in the aftermath of a storm when the air is gluey with ozone. Then he begins to laugh.
*
The old man’s name is Wilson. He and his men, eight in number, run the rails between Atlanta and Dallas, picking up strays like Temple from the cactusland and delivering them to safer, more populated communities. They also break up clumps of slugs where they come across them, putting nails in their skulls with a butane-powered nail gun, then piling them up and burning the corpses.
Wilson was an engineer going way back. He was on a run back from D.C. when the trouble started, that first day when the dead began to get up and walk around like living folk. His family, his wife and his two kids, they were already got by the time he reached home. Everything changed all at once. This new world, now a quarter of a century old, it wasn’t anything he ever got to confront with his family standing beside him. The world changed and he changed all at the same time. He aims to keep moving since it seems like there’s nowhere to settle and no one to settle with. He remembers, he says, that Wilson of before – but only just barely.
The others are ex-military men, mostly. Some mercenaries who floundered without an economy to exploit, opportunists who, having gathered piles of cash, found themselves at a loss for anything to spend it on that couldn’t be taken for free and with the world’s permission. America having changed to benefit them, their accounts suddenly cleared, they reverted to the only actions that still seemed mercenary in this topsy-turvy landscape: they rode the countryside like desperadoes, helping people.
There they sit, at a rickety card table attached with brackets to the inside wall of the boxcar so that it doesn’t spill over with the starts and stops, playing Omaha poker and drinking booze out of tin mugs, or sitting with their legs out the open side of the car, watching the landscape go by and breaking down their guns to clean them, or carving miniature figures out of basswood with pocket knives. There they are, the new knights-errant of this blasted homaloid – lost men who find other lost men and carry them to safety by their dusty collars.
They belong, Temple thinks. They have the stink of belonging wherever they go. This world is their world, and they take possession of every yard they cover, and they run the sun to its grave every night.
*
Point Comfort? Wilson says. He takes off his cap and scratches his head. I think I heard of it. An hour south of Houston, maybe. What you want to go there for?
Maury’s got relatives there.
You sure about that?
No I ain’t.
That boy is sure lucky he ran across you.
I’m just droppin him off. He can’t stay with me.
Uh-huh. He looks at her a good long time, nodding and contemplating as if there were a news ticker going across the surface of her eyes.
Well, he says finally, what you do, you ride with us to Longview, and maybe from there you can hitch a ride south. I know some people.
It would be a kindness of you, she says. My feet were gettin tired of covering ground.
That boy of yours, he like lemonade?
I guess, she shrugs. He’ll drink it, leastways. He don’t like bingberries.
Then she looks at Wilson and feels like she’s been caught somehow but she’s not sure how. He smiles and gazes through the glass at the tracks that roll on before them in parallel lines that converge in the distance.
Like I said, she clarifies, he ain’t no kin of mine.
She and Maury ride in the third boxcar along with some refugees. They are huddled and helpless and look at her through eyes that seem to predict death. They are already gone, these women with their infants clutched to their breasts, these men nursing their open wounds and wondering what contagion is already spreading through their bloodstream, these sons and daughters of the earth whose spirits have already leaked out through the rips in their flesh and the cankers in their brains.
Temple hates them instinctively. Wilson, like an inadvertent grim ferryman, does not know that what he brings home is a boxcar full of death. And these dead are worse than the meatskins, because they lack even hunger.
She sits in the open doorway of the boxcar and watches the world scroll by. Maury, next to her, turns the die-cast jet over and over in his hands.
Here, look, she says.
She takes it from him and shows him how to hold it from underneath and look at it from the side so that it looks like it’s flying through the air as they move.
You try it, she says. See? See it flying? It looks like it’s going fast, right? But real jet fighters go even faster. They go faster than the sound barrier.
Maury looks at the toy between his fingers, and everything about him goes quiet and peaceful.
You like that, don’t you? Old as you are, I guess you saw a lot of planes when you were a kid, huh? I guess you remember them pretty good. I seen some, but not a lot.
She looks at him, his eyes.
You look like you’re flyin away in your head, Maury. Like you’re movin speedy between the clouds. Me, too. Me, too.
And she turns her back on the lost and the dead and the trampled-down, she leaves them to their airy graves, while she and the big man next to her look upward at heaven and find there not just gates and angels but other wonders too, like airplanes that go faster than sound and statues taller than any man and waterfalls taller than any statue and buildings taller than any waterfall and stories taller still that reach up and hook you by the britches on the cusp of the moon where you can look and see the earth whole, and you can see how silly and precious a little marble it really is after all.
*
The next time the train stops, she takes Maury and climbs into the next boxcar. There are fewer people there because it is less well appointed. In the last boxcar there were mattresses and bottles of water and a worn-out old couch and some chairs. This car is mostly bare. A few of Wilson’s men scale the outside of the cars to come here and sleep when their own car is too noisy. And there are some others here, too, men sitting on the boards and leaning against the walls, smoking, their eyes lit up briefly by the cinder between their fingers. Another man sleeps in the corner with a Stetson settled on his chest.
She takes Maury by the hand to the dark corner where she might be able to sleep some. She tells Maury to lay down, and he obeys, and she settles next to him and folds her hands under her head and waits for the rocking of the train to put her to sleep.
In her dreams, there is a man. At first she thinks it’s Uncle Jackson, because he comes and puts his arms around her, and behind him is Malcolm. But the way Malcolm is looking at her, she knows something is wrong. He looks fearful, and she wants to tell him that there’s nothing to be scared of. But he points to her forearm that’s still wrapped in an embrace around Uncle Jackson, and she sees that boils have surfaced all over her skin, and she thinks, That’s funny I must be dead already and I didn’t even know it. And then she tries to apologize to Malcolm, because he is right to be afraid of her, because she realizes that she would eat him given the chance, that she would eat him all up starting with his cheeks – and that the hunger to consume, she would like to tell him if she could, is not so different from the hunger to protect and keep, or maybe it’s just her own perverse mind at work. But then Uncle Jackson’s arms get tighter around her, and she realizes that this man has a beard whose scratchy hairs are tickling her face, and that Uncle Jackson was always clean-shaven, and that the man holding her isn’t Uncle Jackson at all. And she starts to say, Wait Mose, wait Mose, but she can’t say anything because Moses Todd is squeezing all her breath away because she’s a meatskin and the only things that Moses Todd hates more than Temple herself are meatskins, and so it stands to reason that he should want to squeeze the life out of her and that Malcolm should be fearful of her – it all stands to reason—
And when she opens her eyes, it’s true, there he is, Moses Todd, standing above her in the boxcar, saying, Well, look who it is!
And with an instinctual violence, she strikes out, landing a quick punch on his jaw, then rolls out from under him and stands.
Whoa, he says.
But she’s already on top of him, grabbing him by the neck and with her other hand quickly unsheathing the gurkha and raising it for a kill strike.
Whoa there, he says, shrinking from her, holding up his hands in submission. Easy, darlin. It’s me. I ain’t gonna hurt you. It’s me, Lee.
Lee.
Her eyes refocus in the dim light of the boxcar, her mind clears of the phantasms of sleep, and she notices that all around her other men have risen to point guns and other weapons at her.
It’s okay, says the man who she has by the throat. He says it to everyone else in the boxcar. I just startled her is all. That’s what I get for wakin a dreamer.
Lee. Not Moses Todd at all. Lee. The hunter. Lee, the man who gave her a taste of slug flesh spiced with aromatic rosemary. The man who spoke to her of Niagara Falls. He was the man sleeping in the corner of the car with the Stetson hat.
Lee, she says aloud.
That’s right, darlin. It looks like we’ve been miracled together once more.
*
I’m sorry I punched you, she says.
He moves his jaw back and forth, feeling it with his fingers.
I’ve had it worse, he says. But one thing’s for sure – I won’t be wakin you up from any naps any time soon.
The train has stopped at an intersection in a small town where Wilson and his men are looking for survivors and supplies. One of Wilson’s men, a big Mexican they call Popo, strolls casually about, approaching the slugs as though he would ask them for directions, but at the last minute raising the nail gun to their heads. Temple and Lee, sitting on a wood-slatted bench under the awning of a store, watch from a distance. They can hear the hissing pop of the nail gun, and they can see the slugs stand still for a moment, as if surprised, wavering a little in the breeze, then collapsing to the ground as if they were balloon animals deflated by a sudden leak.
What happened to your friends? she asks.
Well, Horace, he got too close to a slug. Took a bite out of his arm. He wasn’t right after that. Kept waitin to die or to turn or something. He lasted it out for a while, longer than any of us expected him to.
What happened to him?
I don’t exactly know for sure. See, Clive and I woke up one morning, and he just wasn’t there any more. All his stuff was there, but the man himself was gone. We waited for him till sunset, but he never showed up. Maybe you feel the change coming. I don’t know. Maybe death is a shameful thing. Maybe he went off to be by himself when it happened.
Lee lights a cigarette, leans back on the bench, stretches out his legs and crosses his ankles.
And Clive, well he wanted to keep on going just the two of us. But I was gettin kinda tired of the plainsman routine, if you want to know the truth. I told him I reckoned I would light out for the west, see what kind of society I been hearin they got in California. We parted right, and we put up a marker for Horace under a pepper tree where no one’s gonna bother it. It’s nothin to nature, but it did us some good.
He flicks his ash to the sidewalk and slides the back of his hand under his nose.
How about you? he asks. He nods in the direction of Maury who’s sitting on the kerb with a bunch of wild-flowers clasped in one thick hand. Looks like you picked yourself up a travellin companion.
She tells him about Maury, about how she found him not long after she saw Lee last. About how he was carrying his granny down the road followed by a whole parade of meatskins looking for a feast. She tells how she found a slip of paper in his pocket with his name and the address of his relations in Texas and how she’s been trying to tote him there, but that every time she turns around there’s something else that delays her and gets in the way of her undertook mission.
She has seen some things, she says, but she doesn’t feel like going into detail. Suffice to say, she’s been in the mix.
Well, he says, leaning back and studying her like the poorest doctor in the world, you got some scrapes and bruises, but it looks like you got a handle on surviving.
Yeah, she says. Stayin alive ain’t the hard part. The problem is stayin right.
What you mean by that?
What I mean is I done some things I don’t care to talk about.
Little sister, we all got a collection of those things.
Maybe so, but it’s one thing to feel like there’s a few rotten things knocking around inside you like some beans in a can. But it’s another thing to feel like those things are what your heart and stomach and brain are built out of.
She shakes it off, sits up straighter and crosses her arms across her chest.
It don’t matter, she says. It just comes from thinkin too much. That’s why you can’t slow down for long. You gotta keep your brain tired out so it don’t start searching for things to dwell on.
He nods and takes a drag of his cigarette.
Can I ask you one thing, though? he says.
We’ll see.
When you clocked me earlier. Who did you think I was?
That’s one of the things I don’t like to think about.
Who?
Just a man I left to die.
*
Wilson runs the train slow enough for anybody needing a ride to flag it down, but just fast enough to keep the slugs from climbing aboard. Sometimes they try, reaching out and catching hold of the metal flange. Sometimes they hold fast and find themselves dragged for the better part of a mile before their grip loosens and they fall to the wayside like clods of dirt shed by the machine.
Sometimes they are on the rails and are crushed under the train, leaving twisted and indistinguishable masses of biology behind.
When night comes, the land is tar dark. The running lights on the train penetrate just barely into the scrub as they pass by it, a scrim of weeds and thorns from which, every so often, she can see the pale faces of the dead watching her progress, as though these rails lead directly to a grim asphodel underworld where the host of the haunted give guidance and pay respect to these pilgrims from another place.
In the distance there is sometimes the faint glimmer of firelight, dim and implacable. Wilson claims these are mirages, nocturnal illusions that would recede forever if you tried to pursue them. Like the shimmering sylphs of old that led travellers over precipices or into mazy, unending caverns. Not all the magic of the earth is benevolent. She watches them intently, and at times they seem close, these misty, glowing lights, sometimes just out of reach, and she finds herself leaning forward, reaching her arm out towards them into the dark beyond the door of the boxcar.
That’s a good strategy for a quick amputation, girl, one of Wilson’s men says, and she draws her arm back into the car.
The following day, which is Sunday, some of Wilson’s men climb into the refugee car for a Christian service. Popo the Mexican reads passages from the Bible in a low monotone.
The field is the world; the good seed are the children of the kingdom; but the tares are the children of the wicked one;
The enemy that sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the world; and the reapers are the angels.
As therefore the tares are gathered and burned in the fire; so shall it be in the end of this world.
They pray, some silent, some mumbling their lips, some blowing their cigarette smoke upward to God in heaven. Temple watches. The god she knows is too big to need the supplication of the puny wanderers of the earth. God is a slick character, with magics beyond compare – like lights that tempt you into the belly of the beast, or sometimes other lights, like the moon and the glowing fish, that lead you back out again.
The night comes, and when the sun rises again it rises over a motionless desert, over streets full of rusty, broken-down automobiles, over tumbleweed towns filled with derelict buildings, signposts twisted and bent so that their arrows become nonsensical, pointing into the dirt or up into the sky, billboards whose sunny images and colourful words flap unglued in the breeze, shop windows caked with the grime of decades, bicycles with flat tyres abandoned in the middle of intersections, their wheels turning slowly like impotent tin windmills, some buildings charred and burned out, others half fallen down, multi-storey tenements split down the middle, standing like shoebox dioramas, pictures still hanging on the upright walls, televisions still in place on their stands teetering over the gaping edge of the floor where the rest of the living room has collapsed to the ground in great mountains of concrete and dust and girder like the abandoned toys of a giant child.
Indeed, to look at the landscape you might think not that the world has undergone a devastation, but rather that it has been put on hold in the middle of a construction, that, in fact, the Builder’s holy hand has been halted temporarily, that the skeletal structures speak of promise and hope and ingenuity rather than of wreck and ruin.
But there are other places too, what used to be travellers’ oases, clusters of gas stations, fast-food restaurants, motels. The windows are intact, the electricity still flowing, the sliding glass doors still operational, the recorded music still playing on tinny, distorted speakers. Ghost towns. Lost to the world entirely, these places are so dead that even the dead don’t inhabit there.
These towns Wilson and his men treat with quiet respect, as though tiptoeing through a graveyard. There is something ominous and lonesome in this kind of wholesale abandonment. Ghostly, the way the rot and decay have not found their way here through the wide desert. Being left behind by devastation is still being left behind.
THEY REACH Longview, Texas, when the sun is at its highest point in the sky. The burn is dry and purgative, and it feels like her skin is being sanded smooth by the weather.
The centre of town is barricaded, and there are men stationed with guns, but when they see the train they wave, and someone moves the city bus they use to block the tracks. When the train is within the barricade, the bus closes off the tracks once more.
Three by three, Wilson says. Nine city blocks they got secured here. Biggest stronghold east of Dallas. This is your stop if you’re still plannin on heading south.
There are children playing in the street, and when they see the train, they drop their bicycles to the ground and run towards it, their mothers admonishing them not to get too close. But it’s not just children. People of all ages and sorts emerge from the doorways and storefronts to gather around the train as it grinds to a slow halt.
Wilson’s men know the women here, and they find each other in the crowd and move off together in pairs, some of the women slung cackling over the shoulders of the men, their behinds stuck in the air and slapped like you would slap a sack of grain.
Other townspeople help the refugees down from the boxcars, and Wilson himself consults with a man and a woman, the elders of the town, to decide which of the refugees should stay and which should be taken on to Dallas.
Once the train is emptied of its passengers, the children begin playing Cowboys and Indians, using it as a massive prop.
I’m huntin a nice cool drink, Lee tells her. You want one?
I reckon Maury and me’ll just look around a bit.
Suit yourself. But try not to beat up on anyone while we’re here, what do you say?
She stands in the middle of the street for a while, not sure what to do with herself. Her place, it’s been proven over and over, is out there with the meatskins and the brutishness, not here within the confines of a pretty little peppertown. She tried that before, and it didn’t work out. What she really wants is to feel that gurkha knife solid in her hand, her palm is sweating for it but she keeps it sheathed so as not to frighten the children.
She tries folding her arms over her chest, and then she tries clasping her wrists behind her back, and then tries stuffing her hands in her pockets, but nothing seems quite right, and she wishes it were just her and Maury outside, where she would know there was something to be done, like building a fire or hiding from pursuers or slaughtering a meatskin.
After a while a boy approaches her. He is a little taller than she is, and he’s wearing a plaid shirt tucked into his jeans and a belt of braided leather strips that has a big silver buckle with a horse on it.
My name’s Dirk.
Hello, Dirk.
Are you going to tell me your name?
Sarah M— Temple, I guess.
You guess? You don’t know?
It doesn’t come naturally to her, but she’s trying out the truth since this seems like such a trusting kind of place.
It’s Temple, she says.
Where are you from? he says.
Lots of places.
I mean, where did you grow up?
Tennessee mostly.
I know where that is. I’ve seen it on a map in school, I mean. I was born here, and I haven’t been anywhere else except for Dallas once on the train. It isn’t safe other places.
Safe ain’t something I’m used to.
Temple, you shouldn’t say ain’t.
Why not?
It’s poor grammar, he says, as though he’s quoting something. It speaks to a lack of sophistication.
Poor grammar’s the only kind of grammar I got.
How old are you?
I don’t know. What day is it?
Dirk looks at his digital watch, which also shows the date.
It’s August fourth.
Reckon I’m sixteen now. My birthday was last week.
She tries to remember what she must have been doing on the day itself, but being on the road swallows up the lines between days.
Sixteen! he says happily. I’m sixteen too. Do you want to go with me on a date?
A date?
We can go to the diner and get a Coke.
With ice?
They always serve it with ice.
Okay, let’s go on a date.
They walk to the diner, and Dirk insists upon holding her hand. He is disappointed when Maury begins to follow silently behind them, but she refuses to leave him. The diner is a real diner, with a counter and stools and booths and everything, the kind she’s only seen in a state of dusty decay on empty roadsides. Dirk wants to sit in a booth, but Temple doesn’t want to pass up the opportunity to sit at the counter, so the three of them take stools next to each other. Dirk orders three Cokes and, having decided to play a more chivalrous role, unwraps Maury’s straw for him.
Do you like music? Dirk asks.
Yeah. Are there people who don’t?
We got lucky, we have a whole music store in town. It’s right down the street. I bet I could name a hundred different musicians you’ve never even heard of.
I’d call that a pretty safe bet.
I like some rock and roll, but mostly I listen to classical composers. Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff and Smetana. That’s the music for people who are really civilized. Have you heard Dvorak’s ninth symphony? It’s the most beautiful thing in the world, and it makes you feel like anything is possible.
He continues to speak of things mostly foreign to Temple, but she sips her Coke and fishes ice cubes out of her glass with a spoon and crushes them between her teeth, and the world he tells her about seems like a very nice one, a very quaint one, but also one that doesn’t quite accord with the things she’s seen and the people she’s known. Still, she likes his big visions and his grand tomorrows, and she wouldn’t spoil them for anything.
He describes how the administrators of the town have plans to expand, to move the blockades back and build the town out, block by block until they’ve retaken the whole city. All they need are people to defend the borders, and new settlers are arriving all the time, strong people filled with skill and wit and vision.
And once we have all of Longview back, he says, his gestures growing more expansive by the moment, then we grow even further, east until we meet Dallas and south to Houston. We can do it. All it takes is people. And when we connect with those cities, we can march on the rest of Texas and take it all back and claim it for civilization. We can play Dvorak from speakers as we go because he wrote that music for a new world, and we’ll be building a new world, and pretty soon the gobblers won’t have anywhere to go but into the ocean.
Gobblers? she says.
You know, he says. Outside. What do you call them?
It’s a funny name. I just never heard them called that before.
Oh.
He looks deflated, and she feels sorry she said anything, and then she feels irritated for having to feel sorry for this boy with the big, silver belt buckle.
But he gathers himself together again, tying himself into a bow tie of optimism and gladness, and takes her by the hand and walks her up and down all nine city blocks of Longview, Texas.
Her palm is getting sweaty, and she tries to squirm it out of his hand, but he won’t let go. He smiles as he talks to her and looks straight ahead, as though confident that once they are married he will have a whole lifetime to gaze upon her.
What do you like to do? he asks her.
What do you mean?
Temple, it’s frustrating the way you always ask what I mean.
He sighs and smiles at her, bolstering his patience.
For example, he explains, I like to listen to music. And I like to read books and write stories, and we have a guitar I like to play sometimes. What do you like to do?
Most of the things she likes to do are related to the project of staying alive in the world, and those things don’t seem to be on the same level as playing a guitar. She tries to conjure up a fitting answer to his question, but she can’t.
Those same things, she says. I like those same things.
We have a lot in common, he says.
Right. Look, I gotta go.
All right.
Still holding her hand, he positions himself directly in front of her.
I enjoyed our date, he says.
Sure. Me too. Thanks for the Coke.
I would enjoy doing it again some time.
That’s fine, but I ain’t stayin in Longview. I mean, it’s a nice place and everything, but Maury and me, we got somewhere else to be.
He girds himself, taking the news like a man.
I won’t forget you, he says.
Yeah, okay.
He kisses her, and it feels strange, like kissing a child on the lips. His mouth fails to connect to hers the way it should, and when he pulls away she has to wipe the spit off her lower lip. She thinks of James Grierson. His kisses tasted like whisky, and they landed right and true.
She says goodbye to Dirk and leads Maury back to the train where she finds Lee waiting for her.
Where you been? he asks.
I been on a date.
A date? He begins to laugh heartily. So the warrior princess of the wastes inspires a young man’s fancy.
It ain’t funny.
But it is funny, and she laughs along with him, the two holding their bellies and rioting against the dying daylight.
*
Wilson introduces Temple to a man named Joe who, on Wilson’s word, agrees to loan Temple a car as long as she returns it on her way back north. He tells her Point Comfort is south of Houston a little way, about a day’s drive depending on the roads. He gives her directions, unfolding a big map on a table and tracing the route with his finger. She pays close attention to the numbers of the freeways. The 259 to Nacogdoches where she’ll pick up the 59, and that’ll take her almost all the way there. In a place called Edna, she’ll take the 111 to the 1593.
Aren’t you going to write any of this down? Joe asks.
It’s okay. I got a good memory. 259, 59, 111, 1593.
Well, here, take the map at least.
He traces the route with a yellow marker, folds the map into a neat rectangle and gives it to her along with some sandwiches made by the woman who operates the diner, and some clothes gathered up by the town’s welcoming committee.
Later that night, Lee finds her sitting on a sidewalk bench near one of the barricades where, seated in lawn chairs, two men with big floodlights illuminate some meagre distance of the night.
He sits down next to her.
When’re you headin out? he says.
In the morning. Joe says if the roads are good I could be there by nightfall.
Uh-huh. And these people you’re taking Maury to, what if they’re not there?
I don’t know. I reckon I’ll bring him back here or take him to Dallas. Plenty of people’ll take him in.
Then what?
She shrugs.
I figure I’ll look around a little. See some things.
Listen, he says, turning to her. I suppose you won’t let me come down south with you?
You suppose correctly.
How come?
You die, and that’s one more thing I gotta carry around with me.
Temple, I’ve been livin off the land for years. I ain’t gonna die.
Sooner or later you are. I just don’t want you to be standin next to me when you do it.
You’re hard as nails, girl.
Not really.
I know.
She can feel his gaze on her, and she doesn’t want to meet it. She looks at the street. There’s something in the asphalt that makes it glisten under the streetlamps.
How about this, he says. How about you forget Point Comfort? Come with me to California instead. We’ll take the train to Dallas and we’ll ride west from there, all three of us. What I hear, they got whole cities under protection. You could walk in a straight line for an hour and never come to a blockade. Like civilization restored.
What about Niagara Falls? Is that inside the blockade?
He sits back against the bench, defeated.
You get old, Temple. The wide world is a pretty adventure for a long time, it’s true. But then one day you wake up and you just want to drink a cup of coffee without thinking about livin or dyin.
Yeah, well, I ain’t there yet.
Goddamnit, girl, what happened to you? You got things to tell. You could tell me.
Maybe so, she says. But I ain’t there yet either.
*
On the road south, Maury is silent. He plays with his fingers and looks out the window, his eyes focusing on nothing in particular. In the morning, a light rain greys out the sky and falls in speckles on the windshield, but an hour out of Longview, the rain clears and the sky breaks apart into clouds that look like rag piles against the brilliant blue.
All around is flatland – desert waste dotted with tufts of pricking weeds and dry grass. All along the road, cars are pulled off to the shoulder or half rolled over in ditches. She peers into each as she goes by, looking for sheltered survivors and being relieved to find none. At the wheels of some of the cars are corpses, most of them skeletal, the skin and flesh eaten away, the bone ground clean and white by sandstorms. Others, undiscovered by slugs or locked away behind doors that slugs can’t open, are untouched, their skin leathery, burned brown, shrunk taut over the bones of the fingers and the face.
Otherwise nothing. She stops the car and shuts down the engine, she rolls down the windows to listen. Barren and empty, the landscape speaks nothing to her. This is a world of deafness.
Her thoughts go to sorry places. She thinks of God and of the angels who will decide whether or not she enters heaven. She thinks of all her crimes, of all the blood she has spilled on the earth. She thinks of the Todd brothers, one of whom she stole the very breath from, her hands as good as throttling his windpipe, and the other she let die by the hands of mutants when she could have saved him. She thinks of Ruby and her pretty dresses and the pink nail polish that is completely chipped away, and the Griersons who had pretty things, too, like record players and pianos and model ships and grandfather clocks and polished marble tabletops and iced tea with leaves in it. But thinking of the Griersons also makes her think of the lonesome men trapped in that big house, sorrowful James Grierson, and Richard Grierson, whose horizons were always beyond fences he wouldn’t dare climb, and the clear-eyed patriarch caged in the basement confused about what he was. Him too she stole the life from.
It’s true she must have hands of death for so much of life to get extinguished by their touch.
And she thinks about an iron giant of a man, and a boy called Malcolm who may have been her actual blooden brother, and the shape of his body, so loose in her arms and so light like he was made of thread.
*
She knows she’s outside of Nacogdoches when she begins to see signs for the 59. There, framed against the ruins of a derelict carnival, she discovers an old woman gathering the flowering buds from a cactus.
She gets out of the car and approaches the woman, who doesn’t seem to notice her.
Are you all right, ma’am?
Mis hijos tendrán hambre.
The old woman continues to pick the cactus flowers, gathering them in an apron wrapped around her waist.
I don’t speak nothin but English. Do you speak English?
Mis hijos necesitarán comida para cuando regresen.
Do you live around here?
The old woman seems to notice Temple for the first time.
Venga. Usted también come . . .
She gestures for Temple to follow. Temple fetches Maury from the car, and the two follow the old woman to the high sturdy fence surrounding the old carnival. They walk the length of the fence until they come to a gate closed with a chain and a lock. The old woman pulls a key from a fold in her skirt, unlocks the gate and ushers them inside. She guides them through the strange colourful machines, broken-down things with long necks, lines of coloured bulbs, torn vinyl seats and twisting tracks.
Temple would like to study the machines, and she imagines them in action, grinding away with grease and glitter like gaudy dinosaurs.
The old woman leads them to a sheltered place where a large wooden awning provides shade over the top of a number of picnic tables. In the centre of the area, there is a fire pit with a makeshift hob built over the top of it and a blackened pot.
Sientése, the woman says. Sientése.
Do you live here? Temple asks. Nearby is a trailer with its door ajar. Is that where you sleep?
Temple waits for a response. When she gets none, she shrugs.
It’s safe enough, I guess, Temple says. You been doin all right so far, haven’t you?
The old woman does something with the cactus flowers and puts some of them in the pot, which is already steaming with other ingredients, and she stirs it with a wooden spoon. A short distance from the fire Temple finds two grave markers – just wooden crosses with photographs of two young men nailed to them.
La guerra se llevó muchos hombres buenos. La luz del día dura demasiado tiempo.
I don’t understand what you’re sayin, Temple says. She points to her ear and shakes her head. I can’t understand it.
The old woman breathes in the steam rising from the pot, then ladles some of the soup into a plastic bowl and hands it to Temple with an old metal spoon. Temple tastes it, and it tastes good. It tastes like what the desert would taste like if places had flavours, and they do – and she eats it up and most of Maury’s too, since he is reluctant to do anything but explore the textures of the place with his fingers, paint peeling from fibreglass clown faces, splintered wooden platforms, rust caked on gears and wheels, colourful plastic flags whip-snapping in the hot wind.
She thanks the old woman, though the woman pays her no mind and collects the bowls into a pile, puts them aside and sits with her legs crossed on the ground and starts to chant something that sounds like a prayer or an incantation.
Soy una sepultura –
doy a luz a los muertos.
Acojo a los muertos –
Soy una sepultura.
The old woman repeats the words over and over, her voice never deviating, ceaseless and monotone. The sharp edge of shade cast by the overhang creeps further away, as though evening were something that grew larger in patches, seeded by the shade spots of day. Then the voice terminates suddenly, cut off like the removal of a plug from a socket, and the woman takes an impossibly long scarf from a wooden chest and begins knitting with two needles at one end of it. The scarf snakes away, dusty from being dragged along the ground, patchy with a harlequin assortment of yarns, its tail end buried somewhere in that trunk behind her.
Temple waits, but the woman says nothing more, and the shadow crawls further away.
Maury is in the distance, looking into the eyes of a painted dragon.
Temple speaks. She explains to the woman that she has travelled a long way, and that for knowing all the names of the places she has been to she still feels lost, even though she knows that’s impossible because God is a slick god and wherever you are is where He wants you to be. She tells the woman that she has done bad things – things God would not like – and sometimes she wonders if God could be angry at her, and if she would know the difference between a blessing and a punishment because the world is wondrous even when your stomach is empty and there is dried blood in your hair.
She tells the woman that she has been travelling all her life that’s worth remembering, and that her mind feels almost filled up already, with people and sights and words and sins and redemptions.
She tells of how you have a special amazement for all the beauty in the world when you are evil like she is, probably because beauty and evil are on the opposite sides of a wall, like lovers who can never really touch.
She tells of the people she has killed, she lists the names for the ones she knows and describes the others, but she can’t remember them all, and she knows she shouldn’t forget things like that and she would write them down except that she can’t read or write because when she was supposed to be learning her letters she was busy hiding in a drainage ditch because her foster home got eaten up by meatskins.
And she tells of her biggest sin of all, the thing that turned her from one thing to another, from a human into an abomination. She tells of a boy named Malcolm whom she killed, and how it happened at the feet of an iron giant because God wanted to remind her of her smallness. How she got itchy to explore the factory warehouse behind the iron giant because of what marvels might be hid there, and how she told the boy Malcolm to wait in case there was a nest of meatskins inside. How she only intended to pop in and pop back out, but she found a little office up an iron stairway overlooking the warehouse, and in the office there were blueprints on the walls, covering all the walls, that blue not quite like any other blue she had ever seen. She tells of how magical they were, those white lines like chalk fibres against that blue, the figures and numbers and arrows like the very nomenclature of man’s grandeur, the objects they described like artefacts lost and gone and hinted at in undecipherable etchings for future races smarter than herself to puzzle over. And they were a wonder, those mortal imaginations splayed wide on paper, testaments to vision far beyond her own weary head, testimonials to the faith in the power of human ingenuity to shape something out of nothing, to stand back and behold it and to nod and say, Yes, this is what I have made, this is a thing that did not exist before in the history of the world.
And she tells how her mind went after those imaginings so far that she got lost in them and did not notice how dim and red the light filtering through the murky windows had become, how much time had passed. And that when she did become aware of herself again, running panicked back outside where she had told Malcolm to wait, she saw there a whole cluster of meatskins, fifteen or twenty, moving towards him and one of them already there. One already got to him. Already got him, the boy, Malcolm, her given charge. They could have come from anywhere. She had not heard his screams because she had become deaf to all but the throb of her own pixied brain.
And that’s when she laid hell upon them, the slugs, slaughtering them, one at a time, every which way, without thought or reason or heedfulness. And she tells that while she was doing it her blood went crazy – the blood in all her veins boiled and beat like a drum and made her see black hell everywhere she looked, made her monstrous with the sin of vanity, the sin of thinking herself immortal like the iron giant. She tells of bringing the gurkha blade down and relishing the thunk of it getting buried in a skull, the wicked enjoyment of it, the heinous illusion that her death-mongering was righteous, that her touch was a sword of light – and the passion, the deep-down lust that drove her to strike out to the right and left, as though her body were hungry for death, as though she had become one of them and would consume black death and eat the very souls of the living if she knew where to find them. Such is the demon in her.
And when it was finished, her clothes soaked through in blood and bile and crusted with greying tissue, she wiped from her face the gore she had ripped from the bodies of the dead – the issue of her own feral cannibalism – and only then was she able to open her eyes full to the stinging, punishing orange light of the failing day.
It was too late. The boy Malcolm was torn open, neck to navel, and it was as good as if her own vicious claws had done the ripping.
She tells the old woman how she held the body of the boy, rocking it and trying to close with gory fingers the zipper seam down his middle. She tells how she sat so long with the boy in her arms that the sky rained down its tears and baptized him and washed him clean for the grave, and how she dug the grave with her hands in the mud at the base of the iron giant and laid him in it, and how she prepared him for heaven by cutting off his head with the gurkha knife so that he wouldn’t get lost and wander back to the surface of the earth like so many had done – and how the brutal task caused her no suffering because she knew by then there was evil in her and that no action, however grotesque or unholy, could be ill-suited for the thing she had become.
She tells then of wandering lost, of isolating herself from the eyes and hearts of good men, of shutting herself away in abandoned houses and, when she was discovered by the generous of spirit who came to save her, escaping even further into the evacuated wildernesses of the country. Weeks at a time without seeing another living person. Exercising her voice with raspy song so as not to go mute.
She tells of moments when she would forget, when her own simmering evil would seem to dissipate and let through the clear spectacle of life. One had to be careful of those moments, because they were fleeting and intended not for her but instead for the delectation of other children of God. Or, if they were meant for her, they could break her heart as easily as mend it, because all that beauty in the suffered world was the same kind of beauty that had got her lost and made her forget her charge, and held up for her loathing gaze her own selfish soul.
She tells of the island, the lighthouse, the moon and the Miracle of the Fish.
She tells the old woman these things while those ancient fingers work the clattering needles against each other, but Temple leaves her there in the outspreading shade – because the only common language between them is the argot of desolation, whose words are really just meant for the deafness of the wide, wide sky.
THE ROAD south from Nacogdoches is clear and straight, leading them over flat and rough-hewn terrain. In the distance ahead, the horizon is darkened to the colour of coal by a long, thick line of clouds.
Looks like rain, Maury. To tell you the truth I wouldn’t mind a bit of coolin down.
The man stares out the window.
You ready for the big homecoming, Maury? Ready to deliver yourself from this crazy girl you got tied to?
His eyes are focused on the asphalt ribboning out before them.
Yeah, well, you ain’t ever been much company anyway.
By the time they get to the massive urban sprawl she assumes must be Houston, the clouds have crowded out the sky and a dense drenching rain drums resonantly on the roof of the car. She drives slowly, because the roads are unreliable and any puddle could conceal a fatal pothole.
The freeway she’s on, the one numbered 59, takes her straight through the middle of the city. Looking down over the guardrails of the roadway, she can see the slugs out there wandering in the rain, some looking curiously upward only to get rain in their eyes. Others sit in the overflowing gutters watching the small rivers of water course over them. Sometimes the dead can seem clownish or childlike. She wonders how people could have let such a race of silly creatures push them into the corners and the closets of the world.
She comes to a collapsed overpass, the rubble of one roadway fallen onto the surface of another, and she has to turn the car around to find an exit and navigate the city streets to pick up the freeway further ahead. It seems there are no survivors in this city. The slugs crowd around her as she drives through the streets, pawing at the car when they can get close enough, lumbering behind at a snail’s pace, goaded on by instinct rather than logic. She wonders how long they continue after her once the car is out of sight. They must keep going until they forget what they are after, until the image of the car has evaporated from their minds. And how long is that? How long is the memory of the dead?
Downtown. The business district, towered over by monoliths of glass and steel. The rain continues, and some of the intersections are flooded, great urban seas as deep as the undercarriage of the car. Garbage collects in small flotillas – stained rags of clothes, plastic wrappers and cardboard containers, sheets of old, withered skin, the follicles of hair still intact, fragments of paper, business documents by the thousands that have settled onto the streets like autumn leaves falling from the demolished offices in the skyscrapers above, thick grey faecal matter, gluey and bubbling, even a clump of fake yellow flowers, floating in the midst of it all like a nightmare bridal bouquet.
She looks up at the office buildings. The shattered windows leave black gaps like missing teeth in a old man’s grin. Out of one pours a miniature waterfall, and she guesses that the roof of the building must be caved in. She pictures the rainwater streaming through the structure, down the concrete stairwells, across the dense carpeted expanse of cubicles, finally finding its way to the exploded glass window. She would like to see it up close. She wouldn’t mind climbing up in one of these wrecked buildings and exploring. But at the moment she has circumstances.
She looks at Maury in the passenger seat.
You do keep a girl so she ain’t quite livin her own life. You know that don’t you? A big heap of trouble is what you are.
She looks at him. He’s fascinated by the way the rain circulates around the stationary city, the shapes the water makes as it finds its direction.
Maybe Jeb and Jeanie Duchamp will be able to make you eat bingberries, what do you think?
His eyes blink slowly, his mouth hangs open a little.
Maybe they know what to do with you, cause I’m at my wits’ end. Your granny must of been a woman of endless patience. I’m glad we gave her a right burial. What you chewin on, just your own tasty thinks?
His jaw moves in small slow circles like the jaw of a cow.
Anyway, she says, turning her attention to the flooded road ahead. Maybe I’ll stop here on the way back – put on my explorer’s hat once I unburden myself of you.
She comes to a big building like an opera house or something, and the streets become a confusing tangle in the deepest part of the downtown area. She turns this way and that with no time to stop and think. She has to keep the car moving so the slugs don’t have a chance to collect in one place.
The rain comes down hard and there is no sun by which to navigate. She passes some buildings twice, even three times, and she looks for signs with the number 59 on them. Once she arrives at a large intersection and cannot decide which way to go. On the side of one of the buildings, she finds a fellow traveller’s message hand-painted in dull red. There’s an arrow pointing down one of the roads, along with letters scrawled as tall as a person:
SAFE ROAD
What do you reckon that says, Maury? she asks. I wish sometimes people would write in pictures. A skull or a happy face or somethin. That alphabet, it just ain’t friendly to my cause.
Warning or invitation, she doesn’t like the look of that sign, so she chooses one of the other roads and follows it straight down the rain-soaked avenues, and the desolate city towers over her and tolerates her creeping through it like an ant. Eventually, she begins to spot signs that say 59, and she follows them and finds the freeway that continues to take her south.
The city has seen other lost travellers like her, seeking safe passage from one end of its labyrinth to the other. Too far south, its population could not hold against the plague of the dead and its inhabitants fled to other cities, leaving this one a forgotten husk of a place. Some groups have tried to establish a foothold here and been overrun. Once, even, a band of twenty raiders made their home in a gutted movie theatre in the heart of the city. They set traps for other travellers, painting signs on the sides of buildings to lead them towards dead ends where the raiders would attack and plunder their supplies, and leave them to the neutral army of slugs swarming the streets.
If one were to follow these signs, one would come upon cul-de-sac graveyards, aged skeletons, whole or in pieces, hanging out the windows of automobiles, jammed partway into the gutters so that the rainwater has no place to drain, some even arrested in pathetic gestures of escape, clawing with wasted fingerbones at the barred doors of empty shops where their lower halves had been consumed while their hands had locked in moribund spasm around the door handles.
But now, in following the signs, one need not fear the hostilities of the raiders, for they too were overrun, years before, in the theatre they had been using as their home, where they had learned how to run the projector, and where they had all watched the ancient reels of Gone with the Wind over and over until they knew the lines by heart and wondered, each individually, if it weren’t possible for such an era to come again on this earth.
*
The rain comes down like something incontestable. It rains as though it were going to be the last rain ever – Noah’s flood, a rain of oceans, like the seas have been picked up into the clouds and dumped on all the land. It rains through the night, sometimes so hard that she has to bring the car to a halt because she can no longer see the road.
She shuts off the engine, makes sure the doors are locked and sleeps until she is woken by the crackling explosions of thunder that leave the air smelling of mineral and burn. In the lightning flash, she can see the line of the horizon, impossibly long, impossibly distant, but clear and distinct like the edge of a stage she might stumble off if she isn’t careful.
She rubs her eyes and drives on.
Every so often, she looks in the rear-view mirror thinking to find Moses Todd there, his headlights, pursuing her still. Truth be told she doesn’t know whether she fears it or desires it. But she knows it’s impossible. Even if he had survived, she has left behind the car with the tracker. There is no way for him to follow her, no way for him to imagine that she would come down here into a blasted wilderness long ago given up by civilization.
And the rear-view mirror remains empty.
Because the rain has slowed her down, it is morning by the time she reaches Point Comfort, the weak light of day filtering cold and cadaverous through the rain clouds that are still spitting drizzles of water down from the sky.
It’s a small community on the edge of a lake, block after block of square two-storey houses with patches of lawn in front that have long since gone to weed and wildflower. Other than the restoration of nature to its more primitive form, the area is untouched by devastation. It’s one of those places that must have been evacuated early on, emptied out so that the slugs had no reason to come here, and so far removed from safe society that it remained undiscovered by looters and raiders.
Ghost town.
Looking down the residential streets, she sees that the mailboxes are intact and form a pretty little line like tin soldiers – some of them even with their flags raised. The street lights are still lit, which means that the town must be contained on the periphery of a power grid that’s still operational.
There are cars still parked in the driveways, bicycles still overturned on the sidewalks. One of the houses must have been undergoing renovation at the time, because its back half is covered in plastic sheets that funnel the rain down into puddles in the bare mud of the backyard. Some of the garage doors stand open, and she can see the appurtenances of suburban life lined up along the inside walls: the mowers and lawn chairs and kayaks, gardening implements whose functions she cannot interpret, hammers and saws and drills hanging from hooks on large holed boards suspended over workbenches.
The white doors are wide and welcoming, though the shrubbery has grown tall and blocks out many of the first-floor windows.
She looks at the man in the passenger seat beside her.
This is one lonesome place, Maury, she says.
He stares ahead and seems agitated, a tiny whine building in his throat.
You recognize any of this?
The quiet whine continues – song or lament, it’s impossible to tell. His eyes are blank and untelling.
I’ll tell you one thing, Maury. It ain’t lookin so good for the Duchamps. Looks like your relations got out of here right quick when the first alarm bells rang. Smart, I guess. But that means they could be anywhere in the country now. If they’re still alive at all.
The whine becomes louder.
Somethin’s eating you all right. You recognizing this place? Or you just wailin at that old grey sky? Sometimes I wish you could talk, you big dummy. It sure would be easier on the both of us.
She looks around. The rain has tapered off, but the windshield wipers still clear away a thick muzzy moisture like dew that blurs her view.
Well, she says, I guess we could at least find the house while we’re down here. It’s good to make a hundred per cent certain in these cases.
So she drives around until she matches the name from the green street sign with the name written on the fragment of paper in Maury’s pocket. Then she continues down the street until she finds the number of the right house, 442, and pulls to the kerb before it.
That’s when she notices, distinct as anything, and unlike any of the other houses in the area, a strange flickering glow coming from the front windows.
*
You ready for a miracle, Maury? she says. Cause it looks like we got the makings of one right here.
But it feels, if she lets herself admit it, not quite like a miracle. They sit in the car and she watches the house for twenty minutes straight – that strange flickering glow that looks like firelight. She waits to see if it will spread, to see if the house is on fire, maybe struck by lightning in the last storm. But the light remains steady. She starts the car and drives around the block, and then she drives around the other block, circling the house from behind. Then she pulls up to the kerb again and sits for ten minutes longer watching the glow. There are no figures in the streets, dead or living, no other houses that have any signs of life, and nothing else about this particular house that seems out of the ordinary.
Come on, Maury, she says finally. Let’s go take a look and see if the Duchamps are home. You stay behind me – I ain’t exactly sure about this.
She unsheathes her gurkha knife and moves slowly up the walkway. Rather than going straight to the front door she crosses the lawn and peers tentatively into the front window. The source of the glow is indeed a fire, burning steadily in the living-room fireplace. Otherwise there are no signs of life.
Not knowing what else to do, she knocks on the front door and stands rigid, the gurkha held behind her back, held in a quivering grip, poised to strike.
She waits and knocks again, louder this time.
They ain’t answering, she says to Maury, her voice barely more than a whisper.
She tries the door. It’s unlocked, and it swings inward with a noisy echoing creak. In the still of the neighbourhood, as the rain lifts and leaves behind a pillowy silence, she feels like the sound of the door opening can be heard all the way up and down the street.
This ain’t no guerilla mission, that’s for sure.
She steps into the narrow hallway and tries to look everywhere at once. Nothing moves. The fire crackles and pops.
The only other sound is Maury’s quiet moan, which comes from behind her and moves around as he steps past her into the house, disappearing quickly around the corner into another room.
Wait, Maury, wait—
She follows him into the dining room and finds him opening the doors of a china cabinet and removing something the size of a baseball, but clear. Then he takes the object and goes to the corner of the room and sits down on the floor with his knees drawn up, running his hands over the thing.
What’d you find, Maury?
She stands over him and reaches out her hand.
He looks up at her as if deciding whether or not he can trust her, then he takes the object and puts it in her hand.
It’s a paperweight. A glass sphere with a flat spot so you can put it down and it won’t roll away. Inside the sphere is something that looks like a flower, ribbons of inky colour twisted and turned into a radial pattern. She hands it back to him.
You knew right where that was, she says to him. You been here before. You remember it, don’t you? How long ago? You must of been just a kid.
He holds the thing as a child would hold it, coveting the feel of it, keeping it protected until he is safely alone so that he can then gaze into it and take the full measure of its beauty.
She feels something large inside her, something expanding, like a balloon blowing up in her chest.
I’m glad you found it, Maury. I’m real glad of that.
The dining room looks like it has been untouched for years, as though the tenants of the place had evaporated just prior to the dinner hours. Four places are set around the table, plates, forks, spoons, knives, napkins, all of it coated over with a torpid layer of dust. She draws her fingertip across one of the plates and a shiny strip of white appears.
Stay here, she says to Maury. I’m gonna look around.
She goes back to the fireplace and looks closely at the wood. Some of the logs in there haven’t been burning for more than an hour, she determines. On the other side of the front hall is a small sitting room with a floral upholstered couch and matching chairs. There’s a chessboard on the coffee table, and all the pieces are lined up in perfect symmetry. She has a hankering to take one of those horse-shaped ones and stuff it in her pocket, but she doesn’t. Maybe because of the museum neatness of it all, she feels that here, more than anywhere else she’s been, these things belong to someone. To take the horse piece would be stealing.
The kitchen is as tidy as everything else. No signs of struggle or even of hasty evacuation. No signs of anything left behind, no chairs topped over, no messages written to those who might come later, nothing. Not even any signs of daily life. No coffee mugs left in the sink, no dishes left behind in the dishwasher, no washrags left crumpled on the counter.
What goes on here? she whispers to herself.
She prises open the door of the refrigerator, which has long since burned itself out, and she finds shelves of ancient decayed food, blackened and shrivelled beyond even the stink of perishable things.
Back in the dining room, Maury still sits in the corner, turning the crystal orb over and over between his thick fingers.
Stay there, Maury, she says. I’m gonna check upstairs.
At the top of the carpeted stairs, she hears a sound coming from down the hallway – a faint hiss that makes her think of water running through pipes.
Hello? she calls.
Her voice is brittle against the overwhelming emptiness of the place. It unnerves her to hear herself sounding so puny, and she determines not to speak again.
She moves down the hall, pushing the doors open one by one – standing aside as she does to avoid whatever might leap out at her.
Bathroom, bedroom, office, linen closet. She grips the gurkha more tightly as she approaches the room where the hissing comes from. The door is ajar, and she notices another glow, blue this time, coming from the room.
She pushes the door open with the hilt of the gurkha knife and finds a small den with a couch facing a large wooden entertainment centre, the kind that takes up a whole wall and has a hundred little doors and drawers. The sound she’s been hearing is coming from a large television. The static on the screen fills the room with a sickly blue light, and a constant, invariable hiss comes from the speakers.
There hasn’t been an active broadcast in years, not since before Temple was born. And even if the television had been left on when the residents left, these tubes burn themselves out after a few years.
She considers the possibility that the house is haunted. She normally doesn’t put truck in such things as ghosts, but she’s coming over with a certain kind of black feeling that she can’t identify. She’s never been this close to life before the slugs – and also never so far away. Her skin goes taut, and she wants to turn off the television, but she is afraid of disturbing anything, as though the spirit voices of the dead, the really dead, might admonish her.
She backs out of the den.
There’s one more room at the end of the hall, and she approaches it slowly and pushes the door inward. The master bedroom.
She had abandoned hope of finding the Duchamps in residence, but there they are. On the big frilly bed, atop the comforter and fully clothed in fine apparel, are two corpses lying side by side. They are not laid out on their backs like bodies in coffins. Instead, they are on their sides, curled up in fetal positions, the woman nestled in the S-shaped figure of the man, his arms wrapped around her torso in one of those forever embraces.
She approaches the foot of the bed. The two have been dead for many years. Death is all about skin, Temple knows. It dries to paper thinness, it shrivels and tautens around the knuckles and the other bones to create shrink-wrapped skeletons. It changes colour – grey then brown then black, but it frequently holds its hair follicles in place. Another thing it does, it pulls tight around the face, which prises open the jaw and gives the dead an expression of wild and outraged laughter.
Two hysterical, laughing mannequins in dusty embrace.
The clothes, the corpses, the cobwebs – they are all inextricable from each other, adhered by dry decay that forms a scaly cocoon around all of it.
Jeb and Jeanie Duchamp, she whispers.
All the miles, all the long broken roads, all the blood she’s spilled.
Doggone it.
She goes around to the bedside table and picks up a prescription pill bottle. It’s empty. She sets it back down on the tabletop, trying to place it exactly where it was – in the small coin-sized circle in the dust.
Then she kneels down to look into the face of Jeanie Duchamp. It’s like a wasp’s nest on the pillow – like something that would contain thousands of hidden burrows and cavities if you were to break it open. That’s where the past lives, stored up in the puny hollows of our heads.
Her eyelids are sealed shut and sunken, collapsed over the dried-out sockets. Her cheeks are flaky and coated with dust and remind Temple of the pages of an old photo album where the pictures have all come unglued. Her mouth is gaping wide and her teeth like pearls. Laughing, laughing. Inside she can see her tongue, shrivelled to a piece of beef jerky, like a stump in the floor of her jaw. Laughing, laughing. Shrivelled tongue and flaky skin and teeth like big oyster pearls.
What you laughing at, grandma? she asks. I got your boy. I brought your boy to you – your nephew, your cousin, whatever he is. I brought him.
Jeanie Duchamp says nothing.
He’s a good boy, Temple continues. He don’t talk much, and he ain’t so bright, but he’s a good boy. You would of liked him.
Jeanie Duchamp laughs and laughs.
Yeah, Temple says. Anyway. What am I supposed to do now? I’m tired. I’m tellin it to you straight. I’m worn out.
Jeanie Duchamp is silent.
Look at you, Temple says. What you know anyway? You ain’t nothin but a big set of teeth.
And then the response, spoken by a voice behind her, a voice she recognizes immediately and realizes only then she has been expecting, since the houses she explores only ever seem to be haunted by one person, the voice of Moses Todd himself:
All the better to eat you with, my dear.
SHE RISES and spins around all in one motion, her hand bringing up the gurkha knife, gleaming dully in the dusty room.
But Moses Todd is out of range of her blade. He stands calmly in the doorway of the bedroom, and he has a pistol pointed at her head.
Steady down now, little girl, he says. We got some business to finish between you and me, but there ain’t no need to make a big mess out of it.
He is different from when she left him in the basement cell in the town where the inheritors of the earth lived. For one thing, he has trimmed his beard shorter than she remembers it. For another, he has a long strip of red paisley fabric, probably an old bandana, tied at an angle around his head so that it covers his left eye.
I been waiting for you, he says, must be goin on a week now. I was beginnin to think you weren’t comin. I guess you took the scenic route.
How? she manages to say. She can’t figure it, Moses Todd, alive, here in Point Comfort, Texas. How could he have known she would be coming here?
How? she says again.
How about we go downstairs and sit for a while. I built a fire for you and everything.
She thinks about Maury in the dining room, turning the crystal orb over and over between his fingers.
I ain’t goin downstairs with you, Mose.
Suit yourself, he says. We’ll grim fandango it right here then. Take a seat.
He motions towards an upholstered chair in the corner of the room, and she sits. He takes a wooden chair with a woven cane seat from the other side of the room and sets it in front of the door, straddling it backwards and crossing his arms over the top of it. The chair creaks and groans under his weight. The gun remains in his hand, but he uses it now more like a pointing finger than an instrument of violence.
If you’re gonna shoot me, then shoot me, she says, challenging him with an instinctive boldness.
Oh I’m gonna shoot you, little girl. I’m gonna shoot you right in the head.
The sobriety of the words deflate her in an instant. He has no intention of letting her live. It’s a sombre truth, even for him apparently.
She leans back in the chair, resting the gurkha knife on her legs. There’s nothing for her to do but wait for his move. In the meantime, she wants to know a few things.
So how? she asks.
Well, he smiles and strokes his beard. Funny thing about that. Your friend Maury told me. Not told me so much as showed me. When we were all locked up. See, after you were knocked out, you spent a lot of time asleep. Your big pal, me and him got friendly. He even showed me a little piece of paper from his pocket.
The address.
That’s right. By the way, you caused quite a stir in Mutantville. I guess they were all pretty close, cause they didn’t care much for you killin three of their own. You never seen such ugliness weepin over ugliness. I tried to explain how it wasn’t really your fault, how you just got a problem with killing people’s kin. Like a disease or something. But they just weren’t in the mood to listen, I guess.
Shut up, she says quietly.
He shifts in the chair, and it creaks loudly in the dense air of the room.
Anyhow, he says, I got out of there eventually. The blade you gave me helped, so I do thank you for that. But it still wasn’t easy. They got my eye.
He points casually with the barrel of the pistol to the place where the bandana covers his left eye.
Yeah, he goes on, it cost me an eye, and I had to take a hostage before they would let me go. Girl named Millie. I guess you met her – you had a run-in with her in the woods? She ain’t too happy with either of us, me for takin her and you for killin three of her brother-cousins. Ain’t it funny how violence breeds violence? I still got her with me. I was gonna dump her on the roadside when I was far enough out of town, but I didn’t.
How come?
I don’t know, he says. He shrugs and looks almost embarrassed. Where’s she gonna go, the way she is? Remember how she brought us those vittles all neat and proper? Figure I’ll drop her back near her home on my way back, long as she stays out of my business.
Temple says nothing, and Moses Todd gets suddenly defensive.
You got your charge, he says, and I got mine. Well, anyhow.
They sit quiet, the two of them, for the space of a minute, and many unspoken things hang like snaky vines between them.
Finally she says, I reckoned you was dead.
She says the words without either animosity or relief, but simply as a statement of truth. Throughout all he has said, her mind dwells on the fact that Moses Todd is sitting here before her even though she left him for dead. She is thinking about how he died once in her mind already, and how he came back to life to sit and talk with her here in this abandoned little town in Texas. And that leads her to thinking about the nature of all things, about how dead things have trouble staying dead, and forgotten things have trouble staying forgotten, and about how history isn’t something from an encyclopedia – it’s everywhere you look.
She supposes there’s more past than present in the world today. On the balance.
I was beginning to suspect the same thing about you, Moses Todd says. What took you so long?
She shrugs.
We walked some of the way, she says. Then we caught a train, but it moved slow.
A train? He looks bemused.
Yeah.
Hell, he says. I ain’t seen one of those runnin in . . . must be fifteen, twenty years.
Yeah, it was somethin to see.
She smiles a little in memory, despite herself.
Steam engine?
Naw. Diesel.
When I was a kid, he said, before all this, there was a station yard near my house. At night I would jump the fence and climb all over the trains. I tried to hide it from my ma – she didn’t like me out there. But my palms gave me away. They were black as anything.
He looks down at his palms as if to find the soot still there. He shakes himself out of the reverie and glances over at the corpses on the bed.
Jeb and Jeanie Duchamp, he says. What do you think of that?
What’s to think of it?
They took the quick way out, he says. Must of been right after it all started, they been dead for a while. Cleaned up the house, got gussied up, and swallowed a bunch of Nembutal. Didn’t want to see the future world, I guess.
I guess not.
She looks at them, the dead embraced. She realizes something: she hates them for being dead.
So what was your plan next? Moses Todd asks. If things here didn’t work out, where were you headed?
I don’t know, she says. Hadn’t thought that far. Maybe north.
Niagara Falls? he asks.
Niagara Falls.
I was there once, he muses. You stand on the top of a cliff by the falls and lean over the rail, it’ll take your breath away.
That’s what I heard.
Too bad, he says, referring to the unfortunate matter of his own quashing of her plans.
Yeah, she says, too bad.
Hey, Moses Todd says, gesturing with a nod towards the corpses on the bed, did you notice their ears?
What about em?
Take a look. Go on, I ain’t tryin to trick you.
She gets up and walks to the side of the bed and leans over. Coming from each of their ears is a little runnel of blood, dried black and crusty against the grey cheek.
She sits back down in the chair.
Someone took care of em, she says. So they wouldn’t come back.
Now isn’t that a thing to ponder? Who do you reckon did it? Jeb could of done Jeanie, of course, but who did him? Whoever it was didn’t want to move the bodies. Romantic sympathies is my guess. What you think? Son or daughter – weeping as they are forced to put the finishin touch on death? Nosy neighbour? State police doin a last evacuation sweep? Who do you reckon?
I don’t know, she says. There’s lots of people around who’ll do the right thing. It ain’t everybody who’s bad.
Now that’s a true thing, he says. He nods and smiles, gratified by the notion. That’s as true a thing as you ever said.
Anyway, she goes on, the Duchamps ain’t worth anything to me now.
Moses Todd looks at her curiously.
Not touched by their tragedy? he asks.
It ain’t no tragedy. It’s just foolishness – the kind I can’t tolerate. The kind that makes them worse than the meatskins.
How?
At least the meatskins found somethin worth desiring. They keep on and keep on till the very last minute when they fall over in a pile of dust. They haven’t got notions of takin themselves out of the world.
Many people find the world intolerable, the way it’s become.
How’s it become? It ain’t become nothing different since I been in it.
Moses Todd smiles at her, a smile that acknowledges her age.
I’m serious now, she goes on. I want to know – how’s it become?
It got . . . Moses Todd starts to answer and then considers, thinking about his answer, as if it were of paramount importance to get it just right. Then he continues:
It got lonesome.
She looks at him through squinted, disbelieving eyes.
People weren’t lonesome before? she says.
People were. The world wasn’t.
She nods.
And here’s another thing, she says. Before, back in the basement, you said I ain’t evil. How come you said that?
Cause it’s true.
What you know about it?
I can tell, he says simply. You’re a book I know how to read, little girl.
But you never answered me before. If I ain’t evil, then what am I?
You’re just angry. Just grievin like everybody else. Only you don’t like to admit it to yourself. It ain’t so complicated.
She turns this over and over in her head. It never quite comes into clear definition, but it has the sting of truth to it. She puts his response away in a pocket in the back of her mind to think about it later.
Then Moses Todd rises from his chair and moves towards her. He sighs and shakes his head slowly, like someone who wishes the moment could last but laments the slow sure passage of time.
He smiles gently.
I reckon we know why we’re here, he says.
I reckon we do.
How about you put down that blade of yours?
Just because you ask me to? I ain’t gonna make this easy for you, Mose.
He raises the gun and levels it at her head.
Put it down now.
He stands just out of chopping range of her arm. No matter how quickly she moves, he will have the upper hand. It’s a silly way to die. She drops the gurkha knife to the floor, and Moses Todd takes two steps forward and kicks the blade under the bed. Now the barrel of the gun is twelve inches from her forehead.
Why are you doin this, Mose? You don’t wanna do this.
Want’s got nothin to do with it. You know that, little girl. You killed my brother.
He wasn’t a good man.
Moses Todd shrugs sadly.
Some people, he says, they hide themselves away from the eyes of the world. They hunker down and shiver. They find four walls high enough to put between them and everything else. Those people, to them the world is a frightful place. See, you and me, we’re different. When we are called on to move, we move. It don’t matter the reason or the distance. Revenge or ministration, reason or folly – it’s all the same to us. We may not like it, but we go. Because you and me, little girl, we’re children of God, we’re soldiers, we’re travellers. And to us the world is a marvelment.
The things he says strike her as true, despite herself. And his eyes are filled with a kind of pleading, as though he needs her to understand him, as though the gun at her head were instead a hand held out in brotherhood.
Which it is, she knows.
A fellowship of life that talks in a language of death.
His will to destroy her, and her will to remain undestroyed – both things are beautiful and holy.
So what now? she asks.
Now you die, he says simply.
All right, she says.
You best turn around.
Nah. You gonna have to do it lookin in my face.
It won’t stop me.
I know it.
It’ll be easier for you if you don’t see it comin.
Easy ain’t my way of doin things.
I’m gonna do it.
Do it then.
She looks in his eyes, she sees herself reflected there, a creature of violence, a brutal thing, a sad thing. Then she looks at his hand, steady, the finger on the trigger of the gun. She focuses on that finger, watching for the slightest twitch.
She has one chance. The edge of a moment, a fingernail clipping of time – the speck between his brain telling him to pull the trigger and his finger actually doing it. That’s her window. Too soon and the gun follows her with a clear sharpness of mind. Too late is too late. But there is that fragment of a second, she knows – that shadow between thought and action. It’s where regret lives, the mind already apologizing for the actions of the body. She knows it. God knows she knows it. She knows what it feels like on the skin, in the fingers. She can see it as good as with X-ray sight.
Moses Todd, his eyes, his lips behind that dark beard, the barrel of the gun, the finger on the trigger, the twitch, the moment – there.
She lunges down and forwards, the gun exploding over her where her head was a millisecond before. She drives her head into his belly hard, buckling the big man in two, and she grabs the pistol by its barrel and twists so it comes lose from his grip. But before she can turn it on him, he uses the back of his hand to smack it across the room where it thuds against the floral-papered wall and drops behind the nightstand.
Damn it, little girl.
Moses Todd catches his breath and pushes her back against the chair and gets his hands around her neck, his thick thumbs digging into her windpipe. She grabs his wrists and tries to squirm out from under his grip, but his arms are as heavy and dense as the freshly cut limbs of trees.
You gotta die by my hand, little girl, he is saying, his voice full of something other than anger. That’s all, you just have to. Otherwise none of it makes any goddamn sense. You know it. You and me, we got vision.
Her eyes are filled with stars on the insides of her lids, her head feels like it will float away, her throat can’t swallow, and all she hears through the sound of her own heart pounding is his voice saying words like the advice of a sage man.
We got vision, he says again.
She kicks out with her foot and gets him hard between the legs, and the hands are gone from her throat. She’s choking and coughing, and her lungs are filling with air, and her head is still pounding – but she no longer feels weightless, she has gravity and force, and she gets up and runs past him out the door.
Behind her there’s a throaty bellow of pain that deepens halfway through into a snarling fury. Moses Todd crashes against the door jamb and throws his limping body forward just as she comes to the head of the stairs at the end of the hallway.
Lead him away from Maury, is what she’s thinking. Lead him away from Maury. Outside. Whatever’s gonna happen can happen outside the house. Maury don’t need to see it nor hear it. Maury’s seen enough in his time.
She bounds down the steps and swings the front door open.
Then everything slows.
She looks behind her quickly. She can see Maury’s face, in the dark, peeking at her from the corner of the dining room where he still sits, quietly holding the crystal ball with the flower in the middle of it.
Maury. His name repeated in her mind. Maury. Maury. Maury. As if to affix it there for good. As if to emboss it on the old leather of her weary brain. And then it mixes with another name. Malcolm. Again Malcolm. Always Malcolm. So many things stored up for later. So many things to look at and think about when it’s quiet.
Maury.
Then she turns away and runs out the front door, one, two, three, four full steps before she sees the girl standing in front of her.
It doesn’t register until it’s too late.
It’s Millie. Mutant girl. Inheritor of the earth. Millie with teeth like shovels, a grotesque overgrown child, like a doll grown taller than Temple herself, her skin ripped at the joints and peeled back entirely from one hand – as though her insides were growing faster than her outside.
She’s still wearing the same checked dress as the last time Temple saw her. And her voice, huffing and inarticulate, groaning and bovine:
I’m gon kill you.
She’s holding something in her hand, pointed in an awkward underhand at Temple.
Only after Temple hears the shot does she realize it’s a gun.
Temple stops and falls to her knees on the still wet and overgrown grass of the front lawn.
Something’s wrong. It’s the kind of wrong you feel all the way through you. She feels it in her toes, and behind her eyes, and in her knees that are already wet from the moisture absorbing through her pants, and in deeper places still.
Something’s wrong, and when she puts a hand to her chest and looks at her fingers, she knows what it is. There’s blood. She’s leaking out life through a hole. Here in the ghost town suburb of Point Comfort, Texas, she’s leaking away.
There is no pain – just travel.
On her knees, she stays still as a supplicant ready for communion. It is very quiet. All of a sudden, there is no hurry. There will be time for everything. For the breezes that blow and for the rainwater drying in the gutters, for Maury to find a place of safety in the world, for Malcolm to come back from the dead and ask her about birds and jets. For the big things too, things like beauty and vengeance and honour and righteousness and the grace of God and the slow spilling of the earth from day to night and back to day again.
It is spread out before her, compressed into one single moment. She will be able to see it all – if she can keep her sleepy eyes open.
It’s like a dream where she is. Like a dream where you find yourself underwater and you are panicked for a moment until you realize you no longer need to breathe, and you can stay under the surface for ever.
She feels her body falling sideways to the ground. It happens slowly, and she expects a crash that never comes because her mind is jumping and it doesn’t know which way is up any more, like the moon above her and the fish below her and her in between floating like on the surface of the river, floating between sea and sky, the world all skin, all meniscus, and she a part of it too.
Moses Todd told her if you lean over the rail at Niagara Falls it takes your breath away, like turning yourself inside out. Lee the hunter told her that one time people used to stuff themselves in barrels and ride over the edge.
And she is there, too, floating out over the edge of the falls, the roar of the water so deafening it’s like hearing nothing at all, like pillows in your ears, and the water exactly the temperature of your skin, like you are falling and the water is falling, and the water is just more of you, like everything is just more of you, just different configurations of the things that make you up.
She is there, and she’s sailing out and down over the falls, down and down, and it takes a long time because the falls are one of God’s great mysteries and so high they are higher than any building, and so she is held there, spinning in the air, her eyes closed because she’s spinning on the inside too, down and down.
She wonders will she ever hit the bottom, wonders will the splash ever come.
Maybe not, because God is a slick god, and he knows things about infinities. Infinities are warm places that never end. And they aren’t about good and evil, they’re just peaceful-like and calm, and they’re where all travellers go eventually, and they are round everywhere you look because you can’t have any edges in infinities.
And also they make for ever seem like an okay thing.
MOSES TODD stumbles out the front door just in time to see the girl’s kneeling body fall gently to the ground, like a house of cards that crumples beautifully, soundlessly, with the complicity of the breeze.
His girl. His little girl.
No, he says beneath his breath.
Then he sees the mutant girl, standing there with the gun still held awkwardly.
No, goddamn you! he bellows and moves towards the mutant girl with long strides, tears the gun from her hand and presses the barrel against her bony ribs and fires twice into her chest.
She stumbles back, looking surprised, then falls forwards to the ground, the blood already beginning to make red flowers on her chequerboard dress.
Goddamn you to hell! Moses Todd cries, gazing down at the girl and firing three more shots into her torso where she is lumped motionless on the ground.
It was just us, he says, not sure exactly what he means. It was her and me.
He fires once more, carelessly, into the back of the mutant girl’s head. He wishes he could kill her again, kill her over and over until the terrible surge in him subsides. Until all the fury and fear and love and loss in his chest gets scrubbed away with the cleansing grit of violence.
He walks back to where his girl lies on her side in the grass. He crouches over her and puts his fingers to her delicate white throat to check for a pulse, but there is none, as he knew there would not be. He brushes the hair out of her face and tucks it behind her ear.
She knew about the forces of things, and she understood about America the Beautiful, and she was unafraid, except of herself.
The calamity over and done with, Point Comfort, Texas, has receded back into its abiding silence. The moist, buffered quality of the air after days of wet torrent, the absence of voice or birdsong, the collected rainwater still dripping from the eaves and gutters of the houses all up and down the street.
At the end of the block something moves, and he sees a pair of ragged coyotes frozen in mid-stride, gazing at him. Drawn by the gunshots, maybe, the promise of activity in these suburban deadlands. Their eyes are locked with his for a few moments, then the two bony creatures wander off to scavenge elsewhere.
He remembers places like this, what they were like before the slugs came along. The truth is they were about the same. The rows of houses like headstones in a cemetery. Defended, even then, against the onslaught of the real.
He looks again at the face of the girl. He wonders where she went, that little firecracker life, that smouldering, spitting, whizgig of a girl. He wonders if he can tell from the expression on her face where she’s gone to.
And he smiles because he can.
The angels would want her for sure.
*
He takes care of her so she won’t come back – a single shot in the head, where it won’t muck up that face of hers.
Then he drops the pistol to the ground, stands and stretches himself and breathes in the steamy air as the morning sun breaks through the clouds and the moisture everywhere around begins to evaporate.
He walks back into the house and through the door that leads to the garage. He finds a shovel, brings it out to the overgrown front yard and digs a grave deep enough that the coyotes won’t dig it up. It takes him the better part of an hour. When he’s done, he lifts the girl down into the grave and marvels at how light she is. He wonders if she was heavier when she was alive – if there was some quality of life that gave her weight enough not to go sailing off into the air every time the breezes blew.
He lays her gently down and arranges her hands over her chest. He adjusts her clothes so they sit right and aren’t bunched up around her shoulders and thighs.
Standing over the grave, he tries to think of some words to say but none of the prayers he knows seem to apply to this situation, so he just says:
Little girl. Little girl.
And then he says it a third time, because three times seems right:
Little girl.
He fills in the grave and lays the grass pieces back over it, and she is so wee that the earth is barely higher where she lies.
In what used to be a flower garden around the back of the house, he finds a red brick and sits on the front step, using his pocket knife to carve her name into it:
SARAH MARY WILLIAMS
And then he digs a little hole at the head of the grave and embeds it halfway into the earth so that the angels will be able to find her when they come looking.
Something else occurs to him, and as a last thing he takes the gun he set aside before and lays it on top of her grave because, after all, she was a warrior too.
*
He goes back in the house, climbs the stairs and walks down the hall to the bedroom of Jeb and Jeanie Duchamp where he puts the room back in order, replacing the chairs where they sat before, using the indentations in the carpet as a guide.
Then he gets down on his hands and knees, lifts the bedskirt, reaches his arm under the bed and feels around until he finds what he’s looking for. He pulls it out and turns the thing over in his hands.
The gurkha knife. The blade is still bright, in places, and reflects back to him his own aged and doleful eyes.
He glances around the room once more and goes back downstairs where he’s almost out the front door before he hears a sound coming from the dining room.
The big thick-limbed man sits on the floor in the corner holding something in his hands and staring blankly at Moses Todd with those flat ceramic plates where his eyes should be.
So that’s where you been hidin, Moses Todd says. I was wonderin where you got to.
He takes one of the chairs from the dining table and turns it around so he can sit facing Maury. Moses Todd is a big man, and his weight stresses the old wood of the chair which has not felt the burden of a person in twenty-five years.
For a while the two men just look at each other, the one in the chair leaning forward on his knees and turning the gurkha knife round and round so that its glint from the sunlight creeping through the windows travels in a wide orbit around their constellated bodies.
This weren’t how it was supposed to be, he says eventually.
He wants to explain it to someone, explain how things got off the track.
She didn’t deserve to die so light, he says. Dying oughta have a design the same as living.
He looks for something in Maury’s face and nods, satisfied with what he’s found there. Then he gestures with his chin to the thing Maury is holding.
What you got there?
Moses holds out his hand and Maury gives him a glass orb with something in it that looks like a flower but isn’t.
Moses Todd rolls the thing around in his palm, liking the absolute weight and shape of it. There aren’t many things in the world so clear and distinct as this.
Pretty, he says.
Maury’s gaze shifts, querying between Moses Todd’s face and the object in his hand.
You want to know something? Moses Todd says. I had a little girl of my own once. Her name was Lily like the flower. Her mother, she took her to Jacksonville in a caravan. I was supposed to meet them there, but they never showed up. The whole caravan, it just disappeared. I spent two years driving those roads back and forth between Orlando and Jacksonville.
He pauses in memory.
Two years of looking for somethin, you begin to see it everywhere. Lily in her mother’s arms, like ghosts. Behind every billboard. Just around every damn corner. It got so bad I had to stop lookin. The abundance of gone things, it’ll bury you.
He turns the glass orb over in his hands.
She would of been about her age now, he says, nodding in the direction of the front yard.
He hands the sphere back to Maury, who holds it in both hands close to his chest.
It is indeed a pretty plaything, he says.
Then he stands and looks at the gurkha and remembers the girl’s small, roughened hand wrapped tight and firm around the hilt.
Well, says Moses Todd, I reckon you and this are my inheritance.
He tells Maury to stand up, and the man obeys. Then he leads him out of the house to the edge of the grave in the front yard and tells him to say his goodbyes.
Maury stands before the mound of earth looking confused, and his attention is distracted by a plain, muddy-feathered bird that lands on a branch in the tree overhead.
All right, Moses Todd says finally. It’s time to light out. We’re heading north, and there ain’t any point in waitin on the dead.
THEY DRIVE NORTH.
By the side of the road, just past the Mason-Dixon Line, Moses Todd sees a woman struggling with herself on the ground. He pulls the car over. It is difficult to tell whether she is sick and heading towards death or already gone and heading back from it. The directions of ends and beginnings are polar and perfect in the way they fit together.
He waits to make sure and then puts a bullet through her forehead.
In Ohio, there are wild horses galloping over the hills.
Maury holds his crystal ball in his hands, and when he falls asleep it slips to the floor of the car. Moses Todd reaches over to pick it up and puts it in the cupholder on the centre console, where it fits as though it were made for just that object.
Moses Todd speaks seldom except to other travellers they meet on the road.
He decides, late one night, that he will kill anyone who threatens Maury, and his sleep comes easier after that.
In a hardware store, Moses Todd gathers a water stone, high-grit sandpaper, honing oil and a buffing chamois, and in the evenings when they rest from driving, he sharpens and polishes the gurkha knife until it looks for all the world like a mirror.
They drive through seven states to go from Point Comfort, Texas, to Niagara Falls, and it takes them two weeks.
They can hear the roar of the falls two miles away.
At the end of a small overgrown path, the trees clear and they find themselves at a cliff overlook from which they can see everything. Like the earth turned inside out and feeding its own wide gullet. So much water, you have no idea how much. There is a rusty metal rail sunk into the rock, and Moses Todd grips it tight with both of his rough heavy hands, a thin layer of mist coating the skin of his face and arms.
He was here once before but that was in a different lifetime, when wonders were rare and announced – like amusement parks or school trips.
Now they are everywhere, for the delectation of those among the survivors who might be hunters of miracles.
And the beauty he looks over is fathomable only by a girl who would have felt the measure of it as deep as to her dazzled soul.
Acknowledgements
Above all, I need to thank Josh Getzler for his incredible professional savvy and his ongoing friendship, and Marjorie Braman for her sensitive and invaluable editorial wisdom. Also, my thanks to the early readers and supporters of this book: Maria Carreon, Phil and Patti Abbott, Amanda Newman, John Reed, Alanna Taylor, Anne Dowling, Annabella Johnson, and particularly Steven Milowitz, a true friend. I owe more than I can say to my mother, Delores Maloney, who has always believed in me with a ferocious loyalty, and my father, Sam Gaylord, with whom I used to read books and eat cheesecake at Art’s Deli on Ventura Boulevard. And, most of all, I am grateful to all the teachers I have had over the years, particularly Richard McCoun and Carol Mooney, without whom my life would have been unutterably sensible.
For Megan
Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant.
John Updike, Couples
First published 2010 by Henry Holt and Company, New York
First published in Great Britain 2010 by Tor
This electronic edition published 2010 by Tor
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ISBN 978-0-230-75533-8 PDF
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Copyright © Alden Bell 2010
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