Wasteland Blues

by Scott Christian Carr

  Chapter Three

  On the third day of the journey they came over a slight rise. The town of Sanger lay just ahead. Sanger served as a trading hub for all the villages and shanties for two-hundred miles around. A rough adobe wall encircled the town, and guards with old rifles stood at the gates. Beyond the walls, stunted apricot and olive groves dotted the hillside.

  “We going in?” asked John.

  “Yeah,” said Derek. “We’ll need extra water and food.”

  “I know,” said John. “But how are we gonna pay for it? I didn’t bring nothing for trade.”

  “Don’t worry,” Derek sneered. “The good Lord will provide.”

  The foursome passed through the gate just behind a scrawny herd of goats led by an even scrawnier shepherd. A pair of guards looked them over hard but let them pass.

  Once inside they paused. Compared to San Muyamo, Sanger was a bustling metropolis with a handful of two- and three-story buildings from Before and an open-air market. They had all been to Sanger at one time or another to trade what they’d scavenged from The Heap, but as always, it took a moment to get oriented.

  “Go over to The Atomic Cantina and get something to eat,” Derek instructed the others. “I’ll catch up with you later.”

  Derek made his way down the crooked and cracked pavestones of the central road that stretched from one end of the walled city to the other. He came to a wide dusty plaza with an ornate fountain in the center that had been bone-dry for as long as he could remember.

  He crossed the plaza and headed for the largest building in Sanger. Another left-over from the Before Time, Afore-the-War, it had a granite face and stately columns and clean angular lines. His father had told him it was constructed in the neo-Federalist style. It loomed over the plaza—over Sanger—with an air of quiet authority. In the Before Times it had been a bank. Now it was the seat of government for the trade-town. The mayor, the tax collectors, and the marshals all had their offices here. But Derek wasn’t interested in any of that. The building also housed a library.

  As he ascended the wide stone stairs, he remembered his father explaining why the library was so important.

  “This place is a storehouse,” David Cane had said, impatient as always. “Not for grain, but for knowledge. The books in here hold secrets that we need to uncover if we ever mean to rebuild. Everything from animal husbandry to irrigation to stoneworking and smelting to physics and astronomy. Stuff you won’t find in the Elders’ bibles,’ he spat. ‘It took humans thousands and thousands of years to accumulate all that knowledge. And just a few days to nearly lose it. But if we can preserve it, save it, and begin to understand it again, maybe it won’t take a thousand years to transform this wilderness. Maybe it’ll only take a few generations. Just imagine, Derek—perhaps even your grandchildren will enjoy electric light. Just like my father did.”

  David had taught his boys reading, writing and mathematics since they were children—or tried to at least. Teddy had never got past eight in his numbers and F in his letters. David had focused especially on math, which he believed was essential for rebuilding. He had held out great hope that treasures could be stored up in Derek’s brain.

  But Derek had been good with language, not math. He’d been reading and writing since he was five, and by the time he was a teenager he’d read all of his father’s books. That made him smarter, or at least more well-read, than just about everyone in San Muyamo, but that wasn’t saying much—the Elders could read too, though they stuck to their Bible. Only once had he attempted, in front of Elder Craston, to tell John of all the books in Sanger other than the Bible. John said nothing, and the Elder berated him, threatened to beat him, and worse, made him feel stupid.

  Derek never spoke of books or reading to anyone in San Muyamo again. The more his father had tried to encourage him, the more Derek had played the role of illiterate dummy.

  When it came to mathematics, Derek’s brain betrayed him. It was faulty. Weak. He could barely multiply, had to add larger numbers using his fingers and toes, and geometry, trigonometry, and calculus were black arts. And so David Cane despaired that the deeper studies of math would vanish from the earth, would have to be recovered painstakingly, eon over eon, by better people than his boys. Or perhaps lost forever, leaving the remnants of what passed for humanity to root in the ashes of the world like beasts for another millennia—no thanks to his idiot sons.

  ***

  Derek made his way into the dim coolness of the building. His footsteps echoed in the vaulted ceiling. He knew his way to the library on the top floor. A few guards checked his progress, but allowed him to pass when he showed them the contents of his rucksack.

  He ascended several flights of stairs, his footsteps echoing off the worn marble, the air cool and free of the ever-present dust of outdoors. At the top of the final landing he pushed open a heavy wooden door and stepped into a gated foyer. Light streamed in from large windows set along either side of the building, the only source of illumination—no lamps or torches were allowed up here.

  Derek came to the gates of the library and rang a bell. A small man in librarian’s robes came from within.

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve books for trade,” said Derek.

  The man ushered him in and led him through a warren of shelves. His eyes caught titles as they weaved their way into the inner sanctum of the place. Many farming books, some construction, some chemistry. A good history collection as well. Not a lot of math. Derek smiled. He would bargain well.

  They came to a small counter nestled deep in the back. He rang a tiny bell. From a doorway behind the counter came a corpulent man in clean robes. His dark hair gleamed with oil and his face was clean shaven.

  “Director, this one has books for trade,” said the attendant.

  “Well,” said the director. He leaned his bulk against the counter and dismissed the attendant with a flick of his fingers. “Good day to you, lad.”

  “Good day, director.”

  “Shall we see what you’re offering?”

  Derek reached into his rucksack and removed a textbook: Introduction to Algebra.

  The director’s eyes widened. He reached forward and opened the book, flipping pages carefully. Then he looked into Derek’s eyes.

  “Where did you steal this?”

  “It’s my father’s,” said Derek.

  “Really?” said the man. “Tell me truthfully, who’s skull did you break to get this book?”

  “No one’s,” said Derek, his anger rising. “It belonged…belongs to my father. Now it’s mine. We’ve come to your library before. His name is David Cane.”

  “Cane?” said the director, searching his memory. “From San Muyamo?”

  Derek nodded. The director frowned.

  “And he’s given you this book for trade?”

  Derek nodded again. “We…we need the money.”

  “A book of this value…I must have some way to ascertain ownership,” said the director.

  “Then ask me a problem,” said Derek. “I’ll tell you truthfully that I didn’t get far beyond chapter five of that book, but my father got at least a little into my hard skull.”

  The director looked at Derek for a long moment, then thumbed to an exercise in chapter two. He made Derek solve for X several times. Derek did so correctly. It was an old trick. He had fooled his father nearly as easily as the librarian—it had only been a matter of time and reprimands before Derek had taken it upon himself to memorize the answers to all the problems in the first five chapters of the book. His father had seemed pleased as Derek feigned consternation, pretending to puzzle over the slippery calculations and muddle over the tricky twists and turns of the mathematical riddles. It had been easy to memorize the answers, much easier than trying to figure them out fresh each time, a practice which seemed wastef
ul to Derek’s mind.

  And in a way Derek had learned a great lesson from his gambit—he had learned at a very young age that no one, not his father, not anyone, was privy to what was going on inside Derek’s head. His mind was his own. An obvious lesson, in retrospect, but an important one. He had since cultivated that sense of concealment, practicing the talent of keeping his thoughts disguised and his intentions masked. The skill had gotten him out of a great many tight situations.

  No one could see that inside he was rotten.

  “Well then,” said the director. “I can offer you….”

  “I’ve another as well,” said Derek, reaching into his rucksack. As he removed the second math textbook, a leather-bound edition fell out onto the counter. Before he could retrieve it, the director snatched it up and gasped.

  “You are quite the traveling scholar, aren’t you?” he said. “I haven’t seen a copy of Don Quixote in twenty or thirty years. And what other treasure? Geometry? You’re full of surprises lad. I’ll give you seventy-five script for the lot. You can use it in the market.”

  Derek snatched the novel away. “That’s not for sale. It belonged to my mother.”

  “And I suppose you can read as well,” said the director.

  Derek flipped open the book and read. “…he so immersed himself in those romances that he spent whole days and nights over his books; and thus with little sleeping and much reading his brains dried up to such a degree that he lost the use of his reason…”

  The director blinked. “I misjudged you, indeed,” he said, closing the book in Derek’s hands. Then his eyes fluttered and he recited aloud from memory. “He was spurred on by the conviction that the world needed his immediate presence. But, Neither fraud, nor deceit, nor malice had yet interfered with truth and plain dealing.”

  The librarian opened his eyes and fixed them sternly on Derek. “Remember that, boy. If you’re not going to part with that book, one hopes you might learn a thing or two.”

  Derek said nothing. He could read, but the Before Times language confounded him. He hadn’t gotten beyond the first few pages of his mother’s book.

  “Well then. Thirty script for the textbooks?”

  Derek sighed and placed Don Quixote on the table. “Seventy-five, then.” He needed supplies more than he needed his mother’s old book. And he would still have his memories of her. She had died when he was young, just six or seven, a cancer that had started in her womb and then spread through her whole body, a dark birth that took her life.

  The librarian said nothing. For a moment he looked at Derek with mild amusement and then turned, cradling his newly purchased textbooks in his arms, and retreated to his office.

  ***

  Derek pocketed his earnings and made for the exit, but stopped. His father’s words resounded in his head, “This place is a storehouse. The books in here hold secrets that we need to uncover to rebuild. Everything from animal husbandry to irrigation to stoneworking and smelting to physics and astronomy.”

  Derek turned back to the desk. Behind it stood the card catalog. No one was allowed to remove books from the library—if you wanted a book, a librarian would look it up and then stand over you as you read it. But the director was nowhere to be seen. Probably shut himself in his office to drool over his new possessions. And the other librarian was still by the gate. So Derek leapt gracefully over the desk.

  He yanked open the card catalog. To his dismay, Derek could only find a single listing for Wasteland. He frowned, and closed the file drawer. He jumped back over the counter and quickly located the appropriate aisle. After a few minutes search he found the book. It was not what he had expected.

  Derek had hoped for a volume of maps and instructions, things that they could use to help navigate the great chemical wastes and radiation marshes. Instead, all he found was a slim chapbook. He flipped open to the first page, a section that apparently proposed to instruct on the proper burial of the dead. Perhaps there were added precautionary measures that needed to be taken in the Wasteland due to the profundity of radiation and great diversity of scavengers and wildlife.

  ***

  April is the cruellest month, breeding

  Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

  Memory and desire, stirring

  Dull roots with spring rain.

  Winter kept us warm, covering

  Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

  A little life with dried tubers.

  Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee

  ***

  Derek knew what a tuber was—a huge, snakelike worm that lived beneath the sand. A bug. They had been known to come up and swallow infants, carry children off, and exsanguinate adults and cattle in mere seconds, but he had no idea what a Starnbergersee might be. Something equally horrible, no doubt. Apparently the Wasteland was full of unknown dangers. They would have to be on guard. Someone would have to be awake and alert, on watch at all times. They would sleep in shifts. It would be difficult—Teddy could not be trusted as a guard, and Derek was unsure of Leggy’s willingness to cooperate—but they would make do. Of that much he was certain.

  He continued to read.

  ***

  With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,

  And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten

  And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.

  ***

  Apparently, this book chronicled the travels of an earlier group’s journey through the Wasteland. Unfortunately, much of it seemed either to be anecdotal or just plain nonsensical. Derek wondered what in the world a Hofgarten might be, and he feared that by the time they found out, it would be too late.

  He grunted. He doubted that the book would be of any use whatsoever, but still, the travelogue of Mr. T.S. Elliot and his companions might prove handy at some point. He resolved to study it later, in greater detail.

  He looked cautiously about for spying librarians, and quickly dropped the small book into the folds of his jacket. Then he left the library, and never looked back.

  ***

  Derek found his companions sitting at a small table at The Atomic Cantina, a dim and smoky old watering hole that boasted a corn-mash still and Friday night cock fights. Leggy nursed a small glass of something clear and potent from the still. Teddy was on his second steaming mug of goat milk and a plate of eggs and beans. John, who toyed nervously with the crucifix around his neck, had nothing.

  Derek tossed the bundle of scrip onto the table.

  “Christ Jesus,” choked Leggy. He snatched up the bundle and stuffed it under his shirt. “You want to get our throats slit? Don’t ever go flashing a wad like that out in the open.”

  “Make a list of what we need,” said Derek. His cheeks turned red, but he refused to acknowledge that the old man had embarrassed him. “We’ll stock up for the journey. Whatever’s left over we’ll split up and spend. That scrip’s only good in Sanger.”

  “You make your own damn list of what we need,” said Leggy, and then winked at John. “I got business to attend.” He kept some of the scrip and carefully passed the rest to John under the table. “I’ll meet you back here in two hours.” With a shove he wheeled himself back away from the table and turned toward the batwing doors.

  “I’ve gotten friendly with some of the ladies at the brothel on the other side of this dungheap of a town.” He winked at Derek.

  ***

  The old man didn’t look back. He hoped that Derek would not resort to violence in such a public place, that he would let him go and trust that he’d come back. There was a semblance of law in Sanger, and like as not, Derek must know that kidnapping was a criminal offense. Leggy pushed his way closer to the door, the metal wheels of his chair grinding over the stone floor, his heart pounding in his chest.

  It w
asn’t until he had reached the doors that Derek finally called after him. “If it’s just a lay you’re after, then we should be seein’ you again in about half a minute.”

  Laughter resounded throughout the bar.

  As Leggy passed through the doors, Derek offered a final warning. “Don’t make me send Teddy out to find you.”

  Out in the bright midday sun, Leggy breathed a sigh of relief. He looked back and forth, up and down the street. All about him were tents and stands, buyers and sellers, peddlers and traders of almost every commodity the apocalypse had left to offer. A skinner carefully led his donkey, laden with panniers of goat cheese and jerky, toward a circle of trading caravans in the town’s main square.

  Leggy had no intention of visiting a whorehouse. He just wanted a few minutes to himself before the journey began in earnest. He wheeled himself into the market.

  Nearby, an old woman stood behind an even older card table, hocking her meager vegetables—desiccated things that had struggled their way up through the sandy, irradiated soil only now to lay plucked and withering in the harsh desert sun. “Getch’yer taters!” she hollered, “Getch’yer greens! I got onions!”

  It was good to be away from San Muyamo. Things had been getting bad there. They’d long since run out of diesel, and none of the traders that rolled through the village would accept anything from The Heap in trade for fuel. Without diesel, there was no need for the generator—and without the generator there was no need for old Leggy.

  As he wheeled deeper into the maze of market stalls, he admitted to himself that he secretly welcomed his recent kidnapping. He’d become smaller during his convalescence in San Muyamo, sour and timid, too timid to do himself what the Elders would eventually do some day—roll his chair ten miles out of town and let the sun and the heat and the bugs finish the job they’d started when they took his legs at the knees.