The Pulse

by Scott B. Williams

  He could give all the pep talks he wanted, Casey thought, but there was no way to describe riding in this heavy rain as anything short of misery. She had to squint and keep her head down just to keep from being blinded by the pelting drops that splattered on her forehead. The pavement beneath her tires was two inches deep in standing water that couldn’t drain off the roadway as fast as it came down and made steering and braking treacherous. As if that weren’t enough, the fenderless front wheel threw spray in her face from beneath while the rear wheel kicked up a rooster tail of more spray that soaked her back side from the bottom as thoroughly as the falling rain drenched her from above. In less than twenty minutes, everything she had on was soaked through and through.

  The highway took them through the town of Folsom, but in the rain their passing was hardly noticed, a decided advantage of traveling in these conditions. “Not many people are going to be out in this unless they really have to be,” Grant said. Though they continued to pass disabled vehicles on the side of the road, no one was out and about in Folsom except for a handful of people standing around here and there under the shelter of awnings in front of darkened storefronts and gas stations. Some waved as they passed, and one man yelled out to ask where they’d come from and if they had any news about the power outage, but no one harassed them or asked if they needed anything. Once they were north of the city limits, they had the road to themselves again, though in the limited visibility it was hard to be sure there were no potential threats lurking just ahead, out of sight. The terrain had changed from flat to rolling hills, and with every climb Casey and Jessica slowed to a crawl.

  “It’s only about nine more miles to the river,” Grant said as they passed a fork where Highway 450 split off to the northwest and 25 curved away to the northeast. “Highway 25 will take us almost parallel to it for a while, and then it crosses over on the bridge at Franklinton. We’ll camp for the night somewhere before we get to the bridge, though. Franklinton is a bigger town than Folsom and I don’t want to be close to it tonight. We can ride through tomorrow morning and then keep going north until we get to the state line. Then it’s only a few miles to the cabin.”

  Two more hours of slogging through the rain at a slow pace put them past the side road leading to Bogue Chitto State Park. Grant said it would normally be a good place to camp, but considering the conditions, it would be better to avoid any kind of developed campground and ‘stealth camp’ somewhere just off the highway where no one would see them. They found a spot on a dead-end logging road leading off the highway to the east. The muddy dirt track was too slippery to ride on in the rain, so they dismounted and pushed their bikes a hundred yards to where it ended at the edge of a dense forest of river-bottom hardwoods. Pushing on a short distance into the trees would have made them completely invisible to anyone passing by on the highway even if it had not been raining, but, much to Casey’s disappointment, a steady shower continued to fall. Grant dug the nylon tarp out of his backpack and began unwrapping the cords attached to the grommets in its corners. Then he stretched another piece of rope that was wrapped up in the tarp between two trees that were spaced about 10 feet apart. This line he pulled tight and tied off so that it was parallel to the ground and about four feet high. “This is our ‘ridgepole’,” he said. “Help me pull the tarp over it and we’ll pitch it so that it’s like an A-frame tent.”

  Casey and Jessica did as he asked and Grant secured the two corners on one side to the bases of nearby saplings. There was nothing convenient to tie the remaining two corners to, so he took out his machete and quickly cut two stakes from another inch-thick sapling, sharpened the ends with a few deft strokes of his blade, and then pushed them into the soft ground. When he had pulled these last two corners tight, the tarp did resemble an A-frame tent, only one with no walls and no floor.

  “Wow, you know what you’re doing, don’t you?” Casey said.

  “It’s just basic stuff,” Grant said. “We used plastic tarps similar to this in Guyana. Our Indian guides there were the real experts in setting them up in no time flat. To them, any piece of plastic is a luxury. They can build just as dry a shelter with palm fronds or other foliage, but it takes a little longer.”

  “But this is hardly going to be dry,” Jessica said, pointing out the wet leaves and muddy ground under the tarp as they crawled under it to get out of the rain.

  “No, it’s not going to be all warm and cozy, but at least it’ll keep the rain off of us while we try to sleep.”

  “I don’t know,” Casey said. “It seems pretty cozy to me. Especially with all three of us crowded under here.”

  “Just be glad Joey didn’t come too,” Jessica said. “I know I am. He couldn’t have handled this anyway. He would have freaked out so many times already.”

  “Yeah, you’re right about that,” Casey said. “I’m glad it worked out this way. He wasn’t good for you anyway. You’re better off without him—we all are.”

  “Well, I want you both to know I’m really proud of you,” Grant said. “You two have been real troupers ever since we left the city. I knew you could do it, though.”

  “Not without you making us, Grant,” Casey said. “I still can’t believe you wanted to be burdened with us tagging along. You could be sitting by that woodstove right now, in the comfort of your cabin.”

  “And then what, sit there with no one to talk to for no telling how long until this gets fixed? No, thanks. I spend enough time alone in everyday life. I wouldn’t have this any other way. I’m just glad you two were insane enough to come along with me, and I hope you don’t go stir-crazy from being stuck there with me.”

  “After what we’ve seen since we left yesterday, we’d be crazy to do anything else but go with you, I think.”

  “Yesterday…” Jessica said. “I can’t believe it was only yesterday that we left. It seems forever ago…so much has happened. That dead man…the motorcycle gang…crossing the Causeway…. It’s hard to believe that just yesterday morning I was stupid enough to follow Joey back to his house.”

  “Time does seem distorted,” Grant agreed. “That happens with this kind of stress.”

  “I just have to wonder what tomorrow will bring?” Casey asked. “Besides more rain, that is.”

  “The rain is a given, I think. But so is getting to the cabin if our luck holds out. Right now, I think we should try to get a little more comfortable and get some hot food inside us. That does more to make a person feel better in these kind of conditions than anything else.”

  Grant unpacked the sleeping bags and Casey and Jessica spread one of them out and temporarily suspended it from the overhead guy line for some semblance of privacy so she and Jessica could get out of their wet clothes on one side while Grant changed his on the other. They all still had some dry items of clothing protected by the garbage bags lining their packs that Grant had given them before they left. With dry clothes and sleeping bags, the night under the tarp would be much more tolerable. The garbage bags and their wet clothes under them provided some insulation from the ground and a relatively clean surface upon which to spread out the sleeping bags. This done, Grant assembled the stove and boiled water to cook a couple of packages of rice pre-mixed with dried cheddar and broccoli, and they ate huddled together under the tarp as night closed in and swallowed their hidden camp in inky blackness. A compact LED headlamp that ran on two AAA batteries provided enough light to eat by when Grant hung it overhead, but beyond the tiny circle of illumination it cast, the darkness in this dense stand of forest was more complete than anything Casey and Jessica had ever experienced.

  “This is scary,” Jessica said, her voice barely above a whisper, as if she were afraid something unseen out there in the night forest might hear her and come their way.

  “It is creepy,” Casey agreed. “Are there bears or anything like that in these woods?”

  “There’s nothing to worry about,” Grant said. “The only animals we need to fear are the two-legged kind, and we’re way out
of sight of the road here. But to answer your question, there are a few bears around in the river-bottom swamps in Louisiana and Mississippi, but they are so rare you hardly ever see one. And they’re certainly too shy around humans to be a threat. They’re not like the bears in the mountains and places where they are plentiful. Snakes are the biggest wildlife danger in these woods, but unless you’re walking along through here at night without watching where you’re stepping, you don’t have to worry about them either.”

  “Who would be stupid enough to walk out here at night?” Jessica asked. “You can’t see anything out here.”

  “Just take the light and watch where you step if you have to go out to go to the bathroom tonight. But most likely, even the snakes won’t be moving around in this weather.”

  “There’s no way I’m going out there for anything tonight. I’ll hold it ’til morning.”

  But when they had finished eating and the cooking pot was empty, Grant scraped it out and washed it in the rain running off the edge of the tarp, then boiled more water for tea. After drinking a couple of cups of hot tea Casey and Jessica did have take a short trip out from the tarp before going to bed, but they went together and stayed close, checking the ground carefully with the beam of the light after what Grant had said. When they were back in their sleeping bags, Casey found it hard to believe they could be so comfortable in such miserable conditions with so little. The night wouldn’t be half as bad as she had imagined, and besides, she was so tired she felt like she could sleep anywhere.

  When she awoke the darkness was replaced by the foggy gray of dawn, and the heavy downpour of the night before was now lighter, but a steady, soaking shower was still falling and showed no sign of letting up. Grant already had the coffee ready, and after they all had a cup he made a pot of oatmeal. The hardest part of the day, he said, would be leaving the shelter of the tarp and getting back out on the road. The hot breakfast would help, but after that there was nothing to do but face another day of riding in the wet. When Grant had taken down the tarp and helped repack the bicycles, they pushed them back to the highway along the muddy logging road and set out to the north again. The highway was still deserted, and riding was a bit easier in the gentler rain compared to the afternoon before.

  They hadn’t gone a half mile when there was a loud popping sound from Jessica’s bike and then her chain came off the gears, forcing her to stop.

  “What happened?” Casey asked.

  “Looks like that cheap Chinese derailleur finally broke,” Grant said. “I was afraid of that, as much noise as it’s been making.”

  “What am I supposed to do now?” Jessica asked. “Does this mean I won’t be able to ride it?”

  “I think I can get you going again,” Grant said. “You just may not be able to shift gears, at least not on the rear cassette. Hold on, let me get my tools.”

  Grant dug around in his pack until he found what he was looking for. It was a chain-breaker tool that allowed him to remove enough links from the chain to shorten it so that the rear derailleur could be bypassed altogether. After doing this, he then took the broken derailleur completely off and placed the chain on the middle cog of the eight-speed gear cluster.

  “That should do it. I’ve put it in the gear you’ll probably need the most on these roads. If we come to a hill you can’t climb in that speed, you can still use your other shifter to drop down to the smaller chainring up front.”

  “Ingenious,” Casey said.

  “Bicycles are simple enough. No big deal really. A lot of people prefer single-speed ‘fixies’ anyway. It’s kind of a trend, even.”

  Grant’s repair worked fine. With the inferior rear derailleur gone, Jessica’s bike ran much more quietly. The terrain became flatter again anyway, as the highway here ran in the bottomlands of the Bogue Chitto River. When the route finally took a right-angle turn to the east towards the town of Franklinton, Casey and Jessica got their first look at the river that was to play such an integral role in their lives in the near future. Riding across it on the bridge in the rain, they saw its rising waters swirling among fallen trees and stumps, coursing through a jungle-like forest of tall hardwood trees that leaned over its current from walls of greenery along the banks. Both upstream and downstream of the highway crossing, there was nothing but wild, dark woods on both sides of the river.

  In the outskirts of Franklinton, the highway turned north once again. They stopped for a few minutes under a large open roof covering gas pumps at a convenience store, when two local policemen who had switched from cruisers to horses waved them over and asked where they had come from and where they were going.

  “What do you mean, they won’t let us in?” Grant asked, in disbelief.

  “I’m just telling you what we’ve heard,” one of the officers said. “Officials in Mississippi are turning back refugees from Louisiana. They say they can’t take care of their own people, much less hundreds of thousands of people coming up from New Orleans and Baton Rouge. They’re afraid it’s going to be like another Katrina, where they’ll have a flood of people coming in who won’t leave for months—or maybe ever.”

  “This situation is a lot worse, and they do have a point,” the other policeman said. “Nobody has power, either here or north of the state line, so what would they do with a bunch of refugees?”

  “But we’re not refugees,” Casey said. “We have a place to go. He has his own cabin, on his parent’s land.”

  “I understand,” the first officer said. “But they are turning people back. We’ve already seen people coming back here through Franklinton. You’re the first we’ve seen today, out in this weather, but a couple of days ago some people who had running vehicles were reporting they couldn’t get in.”

  “The thing is,” the other man said, “you all have to have proof of Mississippi residence or they’ll turn you back. You have to show them your Mississippi driver’s licenses or some other official I.D.”

  “We’re screwed,” Jessica said. “All I have is a California license.”

  “And mine’s from Louisiana,” Casey said.

  “Mine too,” Grant said. “But we own our own land there. It’s right on the Bogue Chitto. My parents bought it more than fifteen years ago.”

  “I’m sorry to be the one to bring bad news, but I just felt like we ought to flag you folks down and tell you. I figured you were planning on passing on through when I saw the way y’all were loaded down. I hated to see you ride on up to the state line only to be told you can’t cross it.”

  “I appreciate it,” Grant said. “But we’ve got to try. I’ve got to see this for myself. Everything we need is in that cabin. I don’t know what we would do or where we would go if we couldn’t go there.”

  SEVEN

  BY SUNRISE THE SECOND DAY after leaving Isleta Palominito, the Casey Nicole had sailed some 220 miles in just under 24 hours and made landfall off the Samaná Peninsula, on the rugged north coast of the Dominican Republic. Scully insisted on keeping their course several miles offshore, and from that distance it was impossible to tell in daylight whether or not the electricity was out on the first part of the island they could see. But from what Artie could glimpse of the land they were sailing past, there might be little indication even at night. Much of the coast here appeared to be a rugged wilderness of steep, jungle-cloaked mountains, with jagged cliffs of gray rock looming like the walls of a fortress over the sea. In only a few places were there breaks in those cliffs, and in some there could be seen the openings to small bays or coves, where Scully said there were a few tiny villages and farming settlements.

  “Dem Dominican in some of dis place got no light even before Jah strike down de technology of Bobbylon,” Scully said, as Artie scanned the wild-looking coast with Larry’s binoculars. “Lot o’ dem livin’ de simple life. Catch de fish, grow de coconut, spend time wid dem family. Livin’ de way Jah people supposed to live.”

  “That looks like a village we’re passing now. I can barely make it out, e
ven with the binoculars, but it looks like a bunch of small houses or huts under that grove of palm trees beyond the beach there. I can see smoke too. I wonder what that’s all about?”

  “Always fires in dem village like dat. Cooking fire, burning some brush, making charcoal.”

  “So that’s not a sure sign the lights are out?”

  “No, but by dark we sailin’ past de big cities on de island. Puerto Plata got about 150,000 people. Lot of light in dat place. But I t’ink all de lights made by man, dem out all over de world.”

  “Well, I hope you’re wrong, but we shall see tonight then. I guess it doesn’t matter much one way or another to those villagers. I suppose you can’t miss what you don’t have. But tell me, Scully, do you really think people would be better off without technology? I know modern civilization is not perfect, but still, isn’t life the old way a hell of a lot harder?”

  “Life in de island not so hard as you t’ink, Doc. In dis place we got de sun. Nevah cold all de year. Good weather for a mon and good for crops too. In dis place we got de sea an’ all de fish it provide, and wind to make de boat go. Not so hard dis life in de island, but bettah in de old days when all Jah people livin’ dis way. Now dem got big city even here. Cut down de forest, catch all de fish, an’ pushin’ Jah people into de bush to build de big hotel and casino on de beach. De youth of de island, now dem don’t want to live de simple life. Now watchin’TV an’ computer too, an’ want de flashy cars of Bobbylon. Too much stealin’ goin’ on and killin’ too, because dem not content wid de ganja herb. Want de cocaine and de money dem get to sell it. I t’ink it’s good now de TV, it can’t play.”