Rootless

by Chris Howard

  “That where he is now? Hunting you up some trees?”

  The kid made a slobbery grin and pointed the nail gun back at me. I put my hands behind my head and tried to look relaxed about things, trying to get the kid to lower his guard.

  “Your dad must love you a whole heck of a lot,” I said. “Man could get himself killed looking for something that everyone wants and nobody has.”

  “No,” Sal said quietly, then he threw the nail gun on the floor with a horrible clunk. “He always said he’d take me with him. But they’re gone. All of them. Everyone except me.”

  “Maybe they wanted you to keep an eye on the place. Keep things safe.”

  Sal made a face. “Maybe they just didn’t give a damn about me.”

  I went ahead and stood, walked over and grabbed the nail gun off the floor. The fat kid just watched me do it.

  “You feel like doing a little tree hunting yourself?” he said, fixing me with a look.

  “Tree hunting?” I shoved the nail gun in his chest and pushed him to his knees. “Ain’t a good idea to go waving this thing around ’less you’re gonna use it, son.”

  “I ain’t your son,” he whispered, his pale cheeks quivering, his eyes about to cry.

  “Take it easy,” I said, pulling the gun off him. “You got enough corn to last all winter. Wait long enough and your dad’ll be back along. Though he might be empty-handed.”

  I went to leave, but Sal stopped me. His whiny little voice calling up from the floor. “You’re right,” the kid said. “He’ll never find them. He’s screwed. Completely screwed.”

  “Yeah?” I said, turning back to him. “And why’s that?”

  “Because he’s looking in the wrong place.”

  Frost had left behind a case of corn liquor, and Sal helped himself to a bottle as he sat amid the pots and pans on the counter downstairs. I still had the nail gun in my hand, but the kid was talking plenty without me pointing it at him. And that was good. Swinging that thing around at people leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

  “She’s got numbers.” Sal belched on the whiskey, acting like some shrunk-down version of his old man. “On the tree. Numbers on every leaf.”

  “So?”

  “So you ever heard of GPS?”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s like a map,” Sal said. “Or a compass. Plug in the coordinates you need to find and the GPS tells you where it’s at.”

  “And you believe that?”

  “They say there’s things up there,” Sal said. “Orbiting out of view. Moving across the night. Satellites, they were called. It’s them that tell the GPS how to get there.”

  “And you just punch in those numbers?”

  “Leaves pointing up give you the north coordinates. You add them together, then subtract the ones that point south, down toward her you know what.” The kid laughed hard, snorting out his nose like he’d just stopped breathing. “You get the easting coordinate the same way. The sideways leaves.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Crow’s been looking into this for years, that’s how. He knew the story long before he found the woman.”

  “So it’s a story, then. Don’t mean it’s true.”

  Sal rolled his eyes at me. “Of course it’s true, tree boy. If GenTech believes it. But Crow never knew about the last tattoo, that’s his problem.”

  “The last tattoo?”

  “Oh? You didn’t find it on your little midnight adventure?” Sal scrunched his face up, his skin all sweaty and gross. “The last tattoo’s on Zee, you idiot. Small and hidden. She probably doesn’t even know it’s there herself.”

  He plopped off the counter and turned his back at me, stabbing a pudgy finger right above his ass crack. “Base of her spine,” Sal said. “Right here. And that leaf points all the way down.”

  “How the hell’d you see it?”

  Sal turned and winked at me. “Told you she ain’t my sister.”

  Should’ve left right then, right?

  But the kid kept talking.

  “So they’re going to be too far north. Without the correction. But you get us a GPS, and I can get us to the right place.”

  “You can’t know all them numbers.”

  “Wrong again, tree boy. Wrong again.”

  Sal led us back to Frost’s empty study. I stared at the clean desk, the cold TV screen, but Sal dug me in the ribs and pointed at the ceiling.

  “She’s something, isn’t she?” Sal whispered, and I wasn’t sure if he meant the woman or the tree, but up there, plastered on the ceiling in a jigsaw puzzle of photographs, Frost’s wife was stretched out with her eyes closed and her top pulled off and the tattoo about as alive as it could be.

  “So many numbers,” I said, squatting down and craning my neck.

  “And I got them all locked right here. Zee’s, too.” Sal tapped his greasy head. “But I say we bring the pictures with us.”

  “With us?”

  “I told you. Get me a GPS and I can find us the right place.”

  “Sure. GPS. Anything else you might need?”

  “If Crow found one, we can find one.”

  I thought about it. “Only one place worth looking.”

  “Vega.”

  I stared at the ceiling, studied the tree. “How about you just tell me the number?” I said. “The correction.”

  Sal shook his head. “I’ll never tell you.” He glanced at the nail gun. “That’s why you’ve got to take me with you.”

  “Take you with me, huh?”

  “That’s right.” His voice got scratchy. “You need me. Like I need you. And together we can catch us some trees, Banyan. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  He was right. It was all I wanted. That forest could give me my old man back and a whole new life and a future like that’s all the Promised Land you need. I knew I’d do anything to get there.

  Anything at all.

  The forty is the only road west, and it takes you all the way to Vega. If you’re lucky.

  Head across the plains in the hot months and the locusts will strip your bones once you hit the corn. So you wait till winter falls and the corn has been zapped by cold. Locusts don’t hatch again till spring so the forty should be good to go. All you have to worry about is pirates. And poachers.

  Plus you got to pray that you don’t get taken. Sure, folk go missing all over. Most places you go there’s someone disappeared without trace. But it’s worse on the plains. Just like the sun burns worse and the dirt blows worse and the hazard winds don’t ever seem to quit.

  Bits of the forty are solid, old tarmac sticky beneath the wheels. But mostly the dust slows your tires as it clouds up your windshield. And sometimes you got to drive blind.

  Sal had found the camera and the bag full of photos, right where Zee had stashed them below the passenger seat. Now he kept messing with the camera, shooting pictures at the brown sky as we drove west.

  “Shouldn’t waste it,” I told him as he held up another blurred image.

  “Why?” He turned and snapped a picture of me with my hands on the wheel.

  “’Cause it ain’t yours.”

  “Whatever. What kinds of trees do you think are growing there, anyway?” The kid had the camera up his shirt now, taking pictures of his belly.

  “Who cares? I don’t reckon beggars can be choosers.”

  “I read books all about them. Apple trees and banana trees, mangoes and limes. Walnuts and cherries and peaches and plums. Hey.” Sal shoved the camera in my face. “Smile.”

  I grabbed the camera from him and shoved it beneath my seat. And it wasn’t long before Sal had grown bored enough that he was curled up and napping, the road bouncing his head against the car window, his mouth all scummy with spit.

  The bag was open at Sal’s feet and I leaned over and riffled through the images we’d peeled off Frost’s ceiling. The tattoo coordinates all mapped out on skin. Then I flicked through the pictures Zee had taken. Shots of Crow and Sa
l were mixed in with ones of me rigging the understory. And I hardly recognized myself in those photos, my face lost in concentration, my hands buried in their work.

  I checked the fuel gauge and we were doing pretty good considering how much weight I’d added, what with the juice and the corn and slobber boy. Another day or so and we’d be across the plains and heading into the cornfields, that shimmering zone of thirty-foot plants and crop poachers and field hands and GenTech agents. But the cornfields couldn’t be counted on. Not yet. Because up ahead, through the dirt clouds, I began to spy our first signs of trouble.

  Pirates.

  Whole damn bunch of them.

  There were two trucks. Built like tanks and feasting on a group of strugglers. God knows what the people had been doing trying to cross the forty on foot, but then I guess they’d probably not started out that way. Take the long road and anything can happen.

  I tried to gauge the numbers, their distance ahead, but the dirt swarmed back and sealed the future from view.

  “Wake up,” I said, loud enough for Sal to bang his head on the ceiling. “We got company.”

  He couldn’t see through the dust clouds so he just stared at me. “They don’t look like traders,” I said. “And we look pretty ripe for the picking.” I pulled the wagon off the road.

  “So what do we do?” He was panicked. “You think they’ve seen us?”

  “They’ve seen us. Pirates tend to pay attention to things on the road.”

  I jumped out and pulled my goggles down so I could see. The dust was bad. Real bad. And that was about the only good news out there.

  I yelled for Sal to get his fat ass out of the wagon, and I showed him how to shovel at the sand with his fingers.

  “Quick now,” I told him, trying to peer through the dust clouds. “Quick as you can.”

  As Sal scraped at the side of the road, I set to work on the engine, snapping hoses free and switching pieces out. Then I unloaded the buckets of juice and half the corn, found my book and the bark and stashed them with the pictures and camera inside Zee’s bag. I buried everything in the channel Sal had scooped out. I worked at the ditch with my bare hands, clawing as deep as I could go. Then I poured the sand back on top of the supplies and pounded the dirt flat.

  I watched the road ahead.

  Still nothing but dust.

  I checked the nail gun.

  “For all they know, it’s just me that’s out here,” I said. Sal just squinted and pointed his face in my direction. “So I’m saying you should run,” I told him. “Scram. Out there off the road, and lay down low. Just don’t go too far. You’ll not find your way back.”

  Sal didn’t budge. I was pretty sure he was going to start crying. Hell, he was probably already crying.

  I grabbed him my extra goggles out the back of the wagon, yanked them down over his head. “Pull your shirt up so you can keep breathing,” I said, the dust blowing worse now. Got so you couldn’t see past your nose. But we could hear engines. Two of them. Growling up closer with every stupid moment Sal stood waiting.

  “Go on,” I yelled. “Scram.”

  And finally he took off running, fast as his stumpy legs would move. I watched him trip and fall, scramble up and keep going. Then I lost all sight of him at all.

  I slammed down the hatch to seal up the wagon. I ran to the front where the hood was still gaping wide. And right before I turned back to the engine, I spotted the silhouettes of those two pirate vehicles, their oily color leaching through the dust storm, looming closer with every second.

  I had the nail gun tucked at my waist and my shirt pulled down over it. And I kept faking at the engine as the pirates rumbled closer. They had music blasting, a regular party rolling up. The electric sound of guitars split the air as the first truck sank to a stop.

  The wind went soft and the dust eased a little. I turned from my engine and made a big deal of peering up at the truck closest to me, flashing the dumbest grin you ever seen. I yelled out, about as loud and cheery as I could manage. Act like you got nothing to worry about. That was my plan.

  Each one of those tankers had nine sets of wheels and a solid box on the back, guns spiky off the top and pointy out the side. I studied the lifted tires with rubber knuckle tread, the graffiti, and tinted windows.

  The music stopped and the engines sighed, then fell silent.

  I waded over to the truck closest, waving my hands in the air, and just as I reached the cab, its door came flying open and all I could see was legs.

  Thighs. Holy shit. As strong as they were pretty. The girl leapt out of the cab and stared down her broken nose at me.

  Seen one pirate, you seen a hundred. The mohawks and the rubber boots. Three-foot hair and six-inch heels. If she was older than me, there weren’t much in it, but her eyes showed the true mileage, if you know what I mean. A rifle of some sort hung loose off her shoulder. Goggles dangled from her neck, like the dust didn’t bother her a bit.

  “Something wrong with your wagon?” the girl said, crossing her arms as she looked me over.

  “The power converter.” I shrugged. “Think the fuse is fried.”

  “Where you heading?”

  “Vega.”

  “Alone?”

  “Why? You want to come?” I pushed my goggles up and squinted in the dust, as if I might match her in some way. “I could use a little company.”

  The pirate threw her head back in the storm and laughed, her breasts rocking inside her fuzzy pink vest. Then she stepped closer to me and lifted my shirt up. “So what’s this for?”

  “It’s a nail gun.”

  “You always carry it shoved in your pants like that?”

  “Not always.”

  “Just a regular joker, huh?”

  “Just stuck on the side of the road, sister,” I said. “Any chance you got parts for a trade?”

  “Why? What you got in the back?”

  One of the trucks began blasting its horn at us, voices yelled through the dust. But the girl just raised her hand to silence them. She threw open the back of the wagon, peering in at my bag of tools, the scattered bags of popcorn. I was pretty sure I’d left enough in there to look realistic. Bit of food. Bucket of fuel.

  “Grab that,” she said, pointing at the juice.

  “What for?”

  “You’re bringing it with you. Your tools, too.”

  I reached for the nail gun. Panic coming over me. I tried to pull the gun up, point it at her, but the pirate just crushed her knee in my chest and I felt my arms go floppy. She grabbed the gun off the ground and shoved it at my arm, lodged a nail there so fast I’d no time to scream.

  I staggered back. Fell. The pain surged through me like my arm had caught fire. My body writhed in the dust. The pirate girl snatched me up with one hand, grabbed my bag of tools with the other, and then she dragged me across the road to the back of her truck. My heels scraped through the dirt, my arm was ready to explode. I just stared back at my wagon, and for some reason, the worst of it was that hatch left hanging wide open, the car filling up with sand. Like the wagon had rolled its last mile and the world was telling me that nothing lasts forever.

  Nothing, Banyan. Least of all you.

  “Watch out, ladies,” the pirate yelled into the belly of the truck as a hundred eyes blinked shiny from its depths. “This one’s a charmer.”

  She hoisted me up and hurled me inside the tanker.

  And the tanker was full of bodies.

  Nothing but skin and bones, wound tight with terror, painted in piss and vomit. They were slumped in puddles of sweat on the floor. Stinking like week-old shit.

  Every lousy part of me screamed and jerked and hustled, and my arm pulsed and my head spun. But there weren’t no escape.

  I screamed till my mouth was frothy. Tried to bolt. But the pirate pushed me back until I felt flesh beneath me, fingers clutching me, the slimy mob absorbing me in its gristle.

  As the door slammed shut and sealed in the gloom, I squirmed an
d wriggled and gasped for air. The smell almost stopped me from breathing, but I fought to stay conscious, wrestled with myself to keep my eyes peeled.

  For what?

  Nothing to see but broken teeth and yellow skin. Nothing but bony flesh. I wound my way up to a wall as the wheels began moving. The music cranked on in the distance, and the squealing guitars knifed through the moans that whimpered out of my mouth and out the mouth of every sucker in there. Every now and then, a voice rose up or a fist pounded at the metal — one of the newer captives, I guess, one of the ones I’d seen stumbling on the road. But mostly the fear suffocated the sound out of everyone. It kept us pressed down, muffled in the dark.

  What now? I thought. What next?

  I shuddered. Broke out cold and sweaty. I was captive. The wagon would rust. And my book would crumble and the bark would fade and every one of Zee’s pictures would turn blank like bits and pieces of nothing that ever mattered anyway. And my father would fade, too. Just like a photograph. He’d be killed in the spring and I’d be killed before him and there’d be no one to remember either one of us in the end.

  I turned my face to the wall and sobbed. I clutched the nail in my arm and wished only to be numb. There was nowhere further to drop.

  But then it was worse.

  Because then the truck stopped and the door groaned open a little. “This one with you?” a woman called in at me.

  I couldn’t turn. Couldn’t look at all. I just felt Sal grab a hold of me and hold on tight, the poor little bastard screaming so loud I could barely hear the door clanging shut behind him.

  They played the same damn album. Over and over. Cranking up the volume at all the same places until we got wherever it was we were heading.

  All I wanted to do was black out. Disappear. But I knew I had to stay awake and pay attention. So that’s what I did — eyes closed but my ears pricked. And I counted that album cycle through four times before the truck stopped. So I figured we’d been driving about four hours. And at this speed, off-roading it, I guessed that put the wagon at a day’s walk. If you knew the direction.

  When the wheels stopped rolling, voices broke out inside the tanker, wobbling and whining, choking on bitter sounds. I tried to picture something safe in my head, something good, and I imagined I was back in the Tripnotyst’s memory box and trees were growing all green around me.