North

by Frank Owen

  The end of last summer had come and the snares were empty, day after day. Everyone had eaten the herbs and bark and ants till they were sick of the sight. Kurt saw the men side-eyeing his dog – a mixed-breed mutt with the snout of a borzoi and a bulldog’s underbite. Mason was the undisputed canine king of Glenvale, mongrel that he was: the king and only dog. Like horses, dogs had gotten rare – extinct, in most parts. This one had seen too many years of illness and not nearly enough food. One of his eyes had milked over and the other was on its way; his ears were fraying at the edges, bitten down by the mites. His ribs showed through skin pulled so tight that Kurt saw the lumpy surfaces of his organs and thought: Worms. That was where his food was going.

  On the first warm and windless day, when the men had judged it safe to forage far from camp, Kurt had stripped the cord from a kettle and set the old wire around Mason’s neck. Whistling, he led the dog out of camp, and no one stopped to question him. Kurt, even at fifteen, had been no man’s servant. Sometimes Mason went along for company – Kurt could spend hours crouched, watching his snares – but this time he had not taken his bag of sticks and string, nor the knotted fishing line.

  Downstream of the river that ran past the Glenvale camp was a small waterfall. It pounded into the pool below, settling into the color of rust. It had something to do with the alders overhead: they leant down and dropped their leaves, staining the water like tea.

  Poor Mason, said Kurt, when he got back to camp with the dog’s limp body in his arms. When that cougar had come charging out of the underbrush, it was foaming pink at the mouth – blood mixed with saliva – the way all the animals did when they caught what Renard had spread in the air. Mason took on the cougar, Kurt said, making his blue Callahan eyes round with grief. The big cat, rare to the point of imagining, crazy with disease, had smashed the dog into a tree stump. Kurt had been too late to save him, but Mason had certainly saved his life, hadn’t he?

  Kurt had held out the body, flopped in his arms but starting to stiffen, the animal’s tongue swollen and dark, lips drawn back in a rictus. The women looked at him, their hands over their mouths. He shoved the body at Bethie, but he should have known better. She had only looked away, nauseated.

  It was a shame to let all that good meat go to waste.

  No one had liked eating Mason, exactly, but no one ever liked what they were surviving on lately. Kurt couldn’t decide what the low point was – the boiled leather tongues cut out of every pair of shoes, or the dry-bone soup, or the millipedes, bitter as gall, that had to be wrapped in river weed so they slid past the tongue without making contact with the buds. Maybe, if the women had not been so hungry, so eager to skin the dog, they’d have noticed the burn line around Mason’s neck, thin as cord, the healthy eye spidered with burst blood vessels.

  Perspective. Kurt hadn’t killed a dog. He had saved a community.

  He’d watched Bethie eat her portion of Mason – three vertebrae, with the meat and sinews that joined them. Watching her pick her careful way, teeth and tongue, through his provision gave him a strange feeling, a friendly fire in his stomach that stripped him of his appetite and hardened his dick. He’d hidden it with his hunting bag slung in front of him. When it subsided, he had gathered his courage and gone to offer her his own plateful so that the feeling wouldn’t stop. At first she resisted, saying he should eat, but in the end she took it, didn’t she? She was starving by degrees. They all were. The tendons in her neck flexed as she swallowed, and the ivory pendant she wore moved with the motion. It would be warm from her skin. Kurt longed to hold it between his fingers.

  It was goddam perspective that got him North-side too. Seeing the Callahan clan for what they were – weak-minded men too shit-scared of old man Tye to think for themselves. No way he was hightailing it back to Glenvale with that chickenshit posse. It was Tye who could teach him something, Tye the only one who wasn’t afraid to stand up for himself.

  So he’d made sure Tye had caught sight of him in the treeline, hadn’t he? And then, just to make sure, he’d thrashed homeward as loud as he could without it seeming deliberate. The old man had fallen for it too – hook, line, sinker and swivel. There he was, giving himself a pat on the back for still being a step ahead of the cubs, unaware that Kurt had crept back, silent as a shadow. The old man had gone about his business, which was where things got real interesting. Northern scouts: goddam! Kurt had wanted to step out of the bushes and cut those motherfuckers down, but he knew that as soon as he was front and center, he’d lose any advantage he had. He told himself that over and over as he lay beneath the sumac, and he’d been rewarded. Tye had met with the Northern army, bold as you please.

  And that wasn’t the end, neither. Kurt had also seen what happened next: that whole army poisoned by Garrett’s brother and that mouthy girl of his; seen Tye’s trophy – the syringe with its antidote – and seen where it had dropped too, still with a quarter-inch left in the plunger. By the time it was over, the slopes were empty – just the needle sticking into the dirt like a stray arrow. He’d cleaned that needle off on his sleeve, then washed it in the river and let it rest for a few seconds on the dying embers of a campfire. It burnt when he jammed it into his arm and he wasn’t sure he’d hit a vein, but he’d gotten his dose of antivirals – enough, anyway, to have kept him alive this long.

  Yup. It was all down to perspective, for sure. There was more to life than surviving so you could obey orders and hold Tye Callahan’s dick while he peed.

  Now Kurt rubbed his hand through his wet hair. Bethie was dead and that was that. So was the old man, though he felt no particular pang. Kurt got gingerly to his feet and shook the last of the Platte River water out of his ears and the thoughts of those two doomed Callahans from his head. He needed a plan.

  It didn’t look good from over here. There was no way he was getting back into the water as it was, with its sticks and logs and guttering, the flotsam a hail of knives as the floodwaters rushed them onward, and so he would have to wait on his concrete island. He needed to rest. He could shelter on the leeward side when the rain got too hard.

  The luck of the Callahans was on his side. The next day, near midday, a gold pickup came by, an old couple sitting high inside, propped like puppets. Kurt noted the peeling sticker of the wrench and faucet across the driver’s door: DRAIN SURGEON, it said. Natural disasters sure put money in some men’s pockets.

  Kurt raised his arms and hollered until the driver caught sight of him. The old man got out and stood beside the pickup, thumbs hooked in the straps of his dungarees like Uncle Remus, judging the situation – a fair-headed white boy stranded on some pilings in the middle of the river.

  He made up his mind and went back to the pickup, conferring with his wife on the passenger side. She had been knitting something in dark green wool, as far as Kurt could make out, but now she set her handiwork down and got out of the car. The old man began wrangling a battered toolbox from the flatbed, then they both came sliding down the riverbank like Jack and Jill, the mud leaving grayish-brown smears on their clothes. The man waved to Kurt, but the water was too loud to hear what he was saying. He handed one end of the coiled rope to the woman and walked upriver, away from her, looking around, searching for something. He bent to reach into the reeds and emerged with a plastic milk bottle. He half filled it with water and tied the rope through the handle. Then he threw the bottle as far as he could into the water. The woman held onto her end, and the river swept the bottle to Kurt.

  The boy grabbed the weighted rope. The man, slipping in his mud-caked boots, went back to where the woman stood. They signaled for Kurt to tie the rope around his waist. When they were set and the river was clear of debris as far as they could see, the man raised a hand and counted to three by raising his fingers – thumb, index, middle.

  Kurt slipped into the water and felt the sharp yanking of the rope as the couple reeled him in, hand over hand. When he could stand, the man waded in and helped him out of the water.

  �
��Are you all right?’ yelled the woman, but Kurt didn’t answer. He raised a rock from the riverbed as big as his fist and crunched it into the old man’s face. He fell forward into the water, terminally surprised. The woman started screaming, her mouth a purple O, the way they always did. She turned to run up the slope but slipped. Kurt caught her by the ankle and dragged her backward. She was kicking and shrieking; all he had to do was wait for the current and just let her go. He watched both the good Samaritans tumbling over and over in the water until they vanished beneath the foam.

  ‘Drain surgeon, huh? How about first Southerner to kill a Northerner since the War?’ said Kurt. He untied the rescue rope from his waist.

  4

  Felix woke wet and numb and stuck between two inbred hack-berry saplings, like a shred of meat between a man’s molars. But at least he was out of the water and under the struggling low-lying sun, praise the Little White Baby Jesus. He couldn’t feel his fingers. He didn’t remember hauling himself out of the river, or stumbling up this slope. He did remember falling endlessly forward into the rivulets of rain that wiggled over each other, the watery knots making mermaids’ hair of the drowned grasses. He turned his wrists over, the flesh puffed and bruised from the impact, as if he’d been cuffed in the night, or doing push-ups in the mud.

  The portion of the Platte River he could see was curved and unpredictable, still foaming brown from the storm. The near bank was littered with logs, their ends straw-pale and raw in the early light. They lay stiff as the sorry corpses of the stray dogs that had been too terrified by the thunder to be rounded up. Their bodies bobbed by every now and again, bloated bladders with sticks for legs.

  ‘Coulda been me,’ Felix told the last one. ‘Could, woulda, shoulda. Wasn’t.’ He coughed out a chuckle and went back to assessing the damage.

  Further along the river he could make out the wind-torn shapes of demolished structures – old or new damage, he couldn’t tell. If he turned his stiff neck and looked south, out near the horizon, he could see the concrete slabs of the fortress Wall – and beyond that the ragged clouds, still coming in fast with the last of the rain. As he looked back North-side, there were jagged splinters of cladding sweeping past in the river, tumbling over and over in the swell like the teeth of a circular saw.

  Felix patted himself down slowly, amazed that he was not worse off from his time in the water. He lay back between the saplings and pieced the sequence together – the rolling over, how he had at least remembered to turn his face sideways so he could breathe through the rain without choking, like a rebirth on a couch or at a church. But still – he would have been fucked. The water had washed him back down the oily slope toward the river again, undoing all his precious progress, until he’d been snagged hip and neck by the twin saplings.

  He couldn’t say when the rain had let up. It was even now speckling the patches of his clothes dry enough to show it; he had been too dazed to notice. The river still thundered in his skull like a hangover, an ache like pneumonia. The shivering hadn’t quit, either, and the dimpled scar on his thigh from the long-ago bullet ached worse than the day he got it. He rubbed the place through his pants leg, thinking about the shiny purple tissue, the X where his knife had dug for the lead like a terrible treasure. He shook his head. It was still weird to think about. Shot in the leg by a moron: ole Tye Wrong-Toilet McKenzie! But that fucker had got his just deserts, as they say in the classics. Yes indeedy. Crushed under a horse, and then his own harrier stripping the flesh from his dead face. It gave Felix the heebiejeebies. He peered into the sky as if he might see the speckled bird circling overhead, waiting for its chance, like a buzzard.

  That made him get up, slow and sore, from between the saplings. He had to struggle against the outline of his own body in the mud where the streams had washed around his arms and legs. Now, upright, he regarded the depression in the muck, his ghost limbs caught by the spindly trunks. His arms were spidery; his head had been severed from his body.

  ‘Fuck that,’ he told the river and the mud. ‘That’s the Platte for you: too thick to drink, too thin to plow.’ He scuffed at the alien imprint with his damp boot. ‘So fuck you. I’m alive.’

  He turned and limped up the slope away from the river – any place but here – squelching as he went. As he retreated, the water’s threats faded, and he could feel the squeeze of his stubborn old lungs and the clench of his shrunken stomach, measuring their workings against the weak morning sun.

  Dripping, he passed over the jagged edge of a road, the verge washed loose in black clumps of asphalt, and suddenly there it was, squatting in the wet, the first sign that the previous night – the last forty years – hadn’t been a dream. A diner, by God, a low-roofed mirage, the gutter hanging drunk.

  It stopped him in his tracks, but the idea of what might be inside got him going again, double time, his eyes pinned to the building in case it disappeared on him. Now he had to pick his way around the storm debris like a crash-site investigator – clothes stripped from washing lines, terracotta potsherds dashed down from balconies, Styrofoam balls like white ticks clinging to whatever brushed against them, and always the leaves and twigs and branches, green to their innocent cores. Every time he thought he was used to it, there was a sudden rust-free razor, a doll’s head, a defunct water cooler from an absent office.

  Along with every able body in the South, Felix had got used to decay up close, but this looked like fresh damage. Back home after the first virus, when people gave up on maintaining things, there’d been a gradual kind of decline. Folks held on a long time, and buildings were slow to age, but in every house someone was dying, like a plague newsflash or a medieval woodcut; no one gave too many fucks about peeling fascia boards or a few loose shingles or a patch of blistering damp. No, sir. Fucks are in short supply when you’re puking your guts out, thought Felix. No time for neighborly niceties.

  This, though, was simple storm damage, he was pretty sure. The gutter had been fine maybe yesterday and it’d be propped up and working again tomorrow. The screen door that had blown off its hinge and sagged against the flagstones – that sort of shit would be straightened and reinforced tout suite, good as new. The rest would be swept up and dumped somewhere out of sight. Some things could be fixed so that you didn’t remember they’d been broken in the first place. But you had to start on the fixing before too long or you’d never get a handle on a decent repair. And of course, every single thing he’d left behind south of the Wall was beyond that point. If it was working, then that was all you could rightly hope for. Count your blessings and say your thanks before bed.

  There was a rectangle of bare wood above the broken door, where the name of the diner had been, Felix reckoned. It didn’t make much difference. SAM’S or JEAN’S or BOB’S. They were all the same. There’d be a sweaty cook inside there, Felix thought as he marched, a man with a faceful of stubble and a disappointed past, even now slicing and sizzling a haunch of bacon against his arrival, shoveling flapjacks onto a couple of clean white plates.

  As he got closer, Felix saw that there was an animal hunched in the window: a grubby tabby cat. As he paused to peer in at the plate glass, the cat lifted a leg and began to lick its balls. Felix cracked a grin. He could feel the pale sun warm on the back of his neck, and there was a sign just above the cat that made the saliva spring under his tongue and his stomach flip over with delight: HOT COFFEE HOT COFFEE HOT COFFEE.

  ‘Fuck everybody in the North, cat,’ he said. ‘Fuck ’em sideways to Sunday. But if there’s coffee behind that counter, I reckon I can put aside my grievance for fifteen minutes. A half-hour, tops.’

  The screen door of the diner lolled against his grip but lifted easily enough. Felix opened it wide and rested it flush against the wall. He had to lean hard against the glass of the door to get it open. The water had swollen the frame against the jamb, but it gave, and the mechanical chime jangled. He had a sudden vision of everyone in this town a robot, like some science-fiction story, but the big white w
oman with her back to him was real enough. More than real: the vast pink of her flesh in the tented house dress made her blood seem too near to the surface. Felix blinked. Fat people were scarce in the South.

  The woman still hadn’t seen him. She clicked her tongue in annoyance as she squinted into the lard-speckled lid of the grill behind the gas plates. He stood dumbly in the doorway and looked at the rolls her bra made on her back, like sausages. Then he cleared his throat.

  ‘Don’t listen to what the cat says,’ she said. ‘We’re closed.’ She was still examining her reflection in the grill lid, fiddling with her hair in its bun. The flesh on her arms jiggled. ‘I just come in to sweep the place out. Mind the buckets.’

  Felix looked down at the dirty puddle squares of the linoleum and then up at the ceiling. It looked like the joint between two gypsum boards had burst open. The water was still dripping sulkily into a row of empty buckets beside the cash register. Their sides were scratched. Some had CLEANER written on them in black marker. Maybe there was a war on buckets too.

  ‘No coffee, then?’ he asked.

  ‘Nope.’ She shook a couple of loose hairs from her fingers and Felix watched them float gently to the linoleum. She finally turned around and got a good look at him leaning there, wet through and still shivering, his paper-thin skin bluish in the daylight, a resurrection man. She gaped at him.

  ‘Jesus Henry Christ! You don’t need coffee! You need a defibrillator!’

  Felix tried on a friendly smile. ‘Yup. It’s coffee or I die right in your diner.’

  She hefted herself around the counter and picked her way across the linoleum. She was wearing oversized rain boots, and there was something funny about that, but Felix knew better than to laugh.

  ‘First things first, cowboy. We’re going to get you to sit right down, okay?’ She jutted her chin at a booth near the window. He nodded.