Rootless

by Chris Howard

  I worked through till sunrise and left the head coated in a plastic tarp, exhausted as I slipped down the side of the scaffold that Alpha and me had set the evening before.

  At the bottom of the final ladder, Alpha was stretched on her back, staring up at the statue. She spread her arms and moved her legs, mimicking Hina’s pose as I dropped from the scaffold. I ran my fingers at the wound on my arm. Seemed like this pirate girl could act more like a girl or more like a pirate. And I reckoned the girl was a whole lot more to my liking.

  “How’s it coming up there?” she said, eyeing me.

  “What do you think?”

  “I think we got ourselves a real tree builder, that’s what I think.”

  I stared at her as she stared at the statue. And for a moment, I wondered what she’d do if I was to try running right then. I’d not get far, I reckoned. Even if I could make it to the city walls, there was no way I’d get over.

  “You born in this city?” I said, collapsing onto the dirt beside her. She rolled over so she was looking at me, and I studied her eyes for the first time. Before I’d been sort of blinded by the mohawk or the way that she moved, but her eyes were golden and brown and real pretty, too. Like sunlight on a muddy river.

  “What’s it to you, bud?” Alpha said, and I’d nearly forgot I’d asked her a question. Hell, I was still gazing into her eyes like a damn fool.

  “Just wondered if you’re a local girl.”

  “Why? Where are you from?”

  “Nowhere,” I told her. “Nowhere at all.”

  That day I hardly slept worth a damn. I kept waking to the strange sounds of the city, wanting to head back to the forest but then drowsing off again. Slipping in and out of dreams like I was waiting for something. And I reckon I was waiting on Alpha to come get me. But Alpha never showed.

  At sunset, I made my way outside, figuring a route that put me right above the mud pit. With the ramp raised up, you could hardly see the bodies twisted below, but I squatted on the walkway, checked to make sure I was alone, and then stared down at the squirming rags.

  “Sal,” I hissed, peering under the railing. “It’s Banyan.”

  A face glanced up from the shadows. The scrawny dude I’d spoken with before. “Got better, did you?” he called.

  “You seen my buddy? The fat kid?”

  I heard Sal calling, scrabbling into view. “Banyan,” he yelled. “Banyan.”

  “Right here, kid.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Getting free.”

  His face turned red and tight and he clenched his fist at me. “What about me?” he screamed, and I stood to make sure no one was paying attention to his ruckus.

  “Keep your voice down,” I hissed. “Someone’ll come.”

  “Don’t you forget about me,” he yelled as I sauntered away, and I could hear him calling after me. “Don’t you forget, tree boy. I got the number. The number you need.”

  When I reached the forest, I got caught up in my tracks again. In patches, the trees were still rusty. But many were now sparkling in the dusk.

  I watched the women working at the leaves and branches, scraping with wire and steel wool, just as I’d said. Alpha hooted and whooped at the sight of me.

  “You like it?” she called, her whole body coated in sweat. And the forest looked great, but I tell you, that girl looked even better. She strutted and shook on the scaffold, her body like a smokeless fire. Her skin slippery and gold.

  A pirate with green hair said something to Alpha that made all the women bust out laughing, and they kept staring at me as I pretended to be busy, checking their work. My face burned up red as they watched me. And that just made them laugh even more.

  Ahead of me, Jawbone dropped from the scaffold where she’d been working at Hina’s thigh.

  “Hell of a job,” I told her as she came toward me.

  “Yeah,” she said, smiling. “You, too.”

  That night, I got all the rebar curved how I wanted and then welded it together just right. Way I did it, the hair was shorter than Hina wore it, but it’d work better that way, putting the focus more on her face.

  I worked with Alpha beside me. She was good with the blowtorch, and the sparks shone in her eyes as the soot stained our skin. We welded till the sun was too high and then rolled back into the city, swelled by that good kind of tired when your body’s been worked to the bone.

  “So you build a statue,” Alpha said, as I knelt to drink from a rusty pipe. “And then you never see it again.”

  I splashed the dirty water on my face, the back of my neck. It was still early and the streets were empty.

  “Me seeing them ain’t what’s important,” I said. “Just so long as somebody can.”

  “And you make enough to keep drifting, one place to the next?”

  “Better than robbing folk blind and hauling them off the forty.”

  Alpha knelt beside me, cupped her hands under the pipe. “It’s called surviving, bud.”

  “Gotta believe in more than that.”

  She rubbed water over her arms, smeared the soot off her legs. “Like what?”

  “Like what you leave behind.” I pointed back toward the forest. “The statues, they’re like stories. They keep things from getting forgot.”

  “You believe what the Rastas say? That there’s still a place where real things grow?”

  “I don’t know. They say it’s over the ocean. And I’ve seen the Surge.” I nearly felt bad for lying to her. For not telling her there were trees growing someplace. Trees people were fighting to find.

  “So you like statues and stories,” Alpha said, making to stand. “What about old world songs?”

  “Never had much in the way of music. Though I guess I never had many stories, either.”

  “That’s what you get for just drifting.” She grinned. “Come on. You better stick with me.”

  I scrambled up, and we started along a broken path. And as I followed behind her, I felt like I was being tugged toward something. Like how the needle on a compass points north.

  In a far corner of the city, we reached a crooked stone building, and the dirty flag raised above it showed a falling yellow sun. Alpha banged at the door, then pushed it open, leading me inside.

  “Captain?” she hollered into the silence. “You here?”

  There was no answer. We were alone, out of the sunlight.

  And we were surrounded by hundreds of books.

  I stared around at the walls, the shelves full of pages and dust. All that paper. All those words.

  A plastic desk sat in the middle of the room, and in the corner there was an old bathtub full of CDs. Piles of books had been stacked like towers across the floor. It was beautiful. Cluttered and sealed off from the world. My old man would have loved it.

  “Where’d you get these?” I said, rushing to the shelves and running my hands along the soft covers, the cardboard spines.

  “They were passed down to Jawbone,” Alpha said. “Along with the right to read ’em. I’m not even supposed to come in here. But she’s a good one, the Captain. Reads to us all the time.”

  “Yeah?” I grabbed a book and started thumbing at the pages. “You heard Lewis and Clark?”

  “Don’t think so.” Alpha stared at the book in my hands. “You can read?”

  “My dad used to.”

  “Where’s he at now?”

  I stayed quiet. I felt sort of pissed for bringing it up at all. It was none of this girl’s business. And even if the books had blown me away, wasn’t this just a waste of my time?

  “Said you were heading to Vega,” she said.

  “I am.” I slammed the book back on the shelf. “Once I get the hell out of here.”

  “Don’t worry, bud. I’ll help you finish it. Soon as the sun goes down.” She came over and straightened up the shelf beside me.

  “You could let me run now. If you wanted. You could show me which way to go.”

  “What’s the rush?
You got a girl waiting?” She said it half like she was joking.

  “Ain’t got no girl, damn it. It’s my old man. He’s in all kinds of trouble.”

  “Then I tell you what, you finish the statue like the Captain wants, and I’ll drive you back to the forty. First chance we get.”

  “You would?”

  “Sure.” Alpha leaned against the shelves and studied me. “Most folk are just busy trying to keep alive. Seems like you’re different, bud.”

  “Thought you were just about survival.”

  “I thought you said there’s something more.”

  It was like she wanted to believe it. Or she wanted to believe in me, maybe. I picked up a book and glared at the cover, my brain all jumbled and fried.

  “I know how it feels,” Alpha said, her voice soft. “My mom raised me here and left me here and I used to wish for a whole lot different.”

  “And now what?”

  “I quit wishing, that’s all. There’s folk who think the pirates are gonna come back together. Bring down the Purple Hand. But that’s just dreaming. I had a baby sister, and I used to whisper her promises and they all ended up lies.”

  Girl made my dizzy. First she’d shot me, then she’d healed me. And now she was going to tell me the things that lay heavy upon her?

  “Hard to be alone already,” she said. “Ain’t it?”

  I looked into her brown eyes like she might blink me inside them. And the room seemed to turn for a moment, as if the world was trying to spin me toward her.

  “I ain’t alone,” I said, losing my balance and knocking over a stack of books on the floor. “Not as long as my old man’s alive.”

  I was exhausted all of a sudden, and I sank to the ground.

  “What’s he like?” Alpha said, sitting beside me.

  “He’s smart. Real smart. And he can be funny as hell.”

  I wanted to say more, but I remembered the night Pop got taken. I pictured myself shut inside the wagon as the dust storm raged, strangers creeping around outside. I’d been frightened. Too frightened. And I’d just stayed in the wagon, safe, waiting on Pop to come back.

  I put my head in my hands.

  “I gotta finish that statue,” I whispered.

  “Then you’d better go get some rest.”

  She was right. Outside the sun was too high and too hot, and I let Alpha guide me back to the shack. She left me alone, and I sprawled on the cot. But my mind worked too fast to quit.

  I kept picturing myself in that room full of stories, surrounded by the beautiful books. And where was my old man? Trapped and alone somewhere. No books. No pretty girls to make eyes at. Did he even remember the future we’d mapped out together? The forest we were going to build of our own? I imagined us in a house with ragged tin walls, surrounded by cast-iron branches and leaves we’d change in the fall and the spring.

  Usually spring comes before the killing. That’s what the old Rasta had said. And now those words just stuck to my brain.

  Murderers, the old Rasta had told me.

  Murderers, the lot of them.

  I headed back to the forest before the sun even started to drop. Told myself I had to stay strong. Had to keep my head in the game. Had to finish that statue, get Sal, and then get us to Vega and find that damn GPS.

  It was near dawn by the time I’d wrapped the finishing touches. Alpha was working below, and the sun had just started to blur the horizon, painting the eastern edge of the earth with a smear. I watched the pink embers grow and hover, the sun bubbling up.

  “Here it comes,” I yelled down. And I drew the tarp back from the face that was now cloaked in iron threads, watching as Alpha studied her thousand reflections in the splintered rays of dawn.

  She pulled herself up the ladders and scaffold, moving effortless and alive. And when she reached the top, I could smell the taste of her sweat mixed with leather and steel.

  “Can I touch it?” she said.

  “Go ahead.”

  She ran her fingers over Hina’s glittering face and tapped each one of her reflections, laughing when she glimpsed me behind her.

  “It’s incredible,” she said.

  “I like seeing you in it.” It was like the words got spoke before I’d thought them. Like my mouth had played a trick on my brain.

  “That so?” Alpha turned to face me.

  My skin prickled, being right up close to her. My bones felt heavy and loose. And my mind started racing and my heart beat fast, hard to know which was quicker.

  “So,” she said. “You’re done.”

  “I reckon.”

  “You reckon.” It was like she was bitter about something. I started to speak, but she cut back in. “Relax, bud. I’ll get you back to the road and you can keep on drifting.”

  “I ain’t drifting,” I shot back at her. “I got a father to find.”

  Alpha laughed again, but her laugh had lost its juice. She went and sat on the edge of the scaffold and peeled off her boots, dangling her feet over the top of the forest. And I stood where she’d left me, staring down at where the ferns gave way to the crumbled old streets.

  “So you’re always gonna live here?” I said. “In Old Orleans?”

  “There’s worse places.”

  “You seen ’em?”

  “Not unless they’re between here and the forty.”

  “So you never really been anywhere.”

  “Where else is there to go?” She said it like she was all done talking, but I thought about the sprawl and the Surge and the endless miles of dirt between them. And I thought about the electric lights, the skyline of Vega, like concrete mountains all sparkled and bright. And above it all, just the steam rolling down and the ash blowing off the lava that pours out of the Rift.

  “Niagara’s worth seeing,” I said. “The Soljahs got a whole city built behind waterfalls. It’s something to look at, anyway. Though with the water crashing, you can’t hardly hear yourself think.”

  For a moment, I thought about telling Alpha about the trees and Pop and the old Rasta with the bark in his skin. The GPS numbers and the Promised Land. But how could I trust her? I reckoned she’d be loyal to that captain of hers, and there wasn’t room in this for an army of pirates. And besides, I didn’t want to become just Alpha’s ticket to something. She’d offered to help me out, get me back to my wagon. And it had been since Pop had been taken that I’d seen a helping hand.

  “So what happened to your sister?” I said, sitting down next to her, trying to get her to look at me.

  Alpha let the question hang for a moment. “Starved.”

  “Shit.”

  “She’d barely started walking.”

  “You couldn’t get her nothing to eat?”

  “It weren’t that. Corn made her throat swell tight. Once my mom was gone, there wasn’t a thing I could do.”

  “So it weren’t your fault.”

  “Don’t make it easier.”

  “My mother starved,” I said, not knowing what else to say. “I was just a nipper. Our wagon broke on the Thousand Mile Road, and my dad was gone too long trying to scavenge up parts. Said he staggered back to find my momma starved to death and me just barely breathing. And sometimes I think about what she must have done. Giving herself up so I could keep hanging on. Gotta be that’s the worst way to go.”

  “All the ways are the worst way,” Alpha said, and it’s probably true.

  I waited for her to say something else, shoot me a glance. But she just stared down at her toes and the treetops, her face glum.

  I watched the sun come higher. I turned to the west where the world was still black and shadowed. But then I froze. Because there, creeping out of the edges of night, was the biggest damn vehicle I’d ever seen.

  It was like a city on wheels. Trundling toward Old Orleans on tires that looked too big to ever be in a rush.

  “What the hell is that?” I whispered, standing.

  “Looks like you’re staying another day.” Alpha knelt alongs
ide me. “Can’t be out on the plains when they’re prowling. They’ll be here by nightfall, though. Every year, son of a bitch is right on time.”

  “Who?”

  “Who do you think? King Harvest. Ready for the trade.”

  “What is it you trade him for?”

  “Our freedom,” she said. “Give him enough bodies so he won’t take our own.”

  I knew it was a day of endings, one way or another. The sun already seemed too high, like it was arcing too fast. And there was not a damn thing I could do about it. By nightfall, King Harvest would be at Old Orleans, and I had till then to rescue Sal, or there’d be no knowing the right place to go. No way to find Pop.

  I followed Alpha off the scaffold, unbolting and tearing apart our metal tower as we descended, my work finished. Almost.

  “You said she used to light up,” I said.

  “Used to.”

  “Then I better see if I can wire her right again.”

  Alpha set to scrubbing the shine back to a mess of ferns, and I laid fresh cable through the undergrowth, running it from an old generator to the base of the statue. Hina’s foot was arched up with the heel high, and you could access the inside by crawling up through the ball of the foot. I grabbed wire and tape and my headlamp, scooting myself inside the metal and searching for circuits to patch.

  I pulled myself up, tracing the curve of her calf, the straight line of shin, running new wire where she needed it, taping her electrics back together like they were veins in her skin.

  As I climbed through the statue, swinging between her hips and crawling down along her dancing leg, following the tunnel through her outstretched arms and working my way up where her brain would be, I came to know the work in a whole new way — seeing the statue from the perspective of the creator, learning the steps by which she’d been built. The seams and the joint work, the weld marks and support beams.