Pavement Ends: The Exodus

by Kurt Gepner

  "Candice!" Hank’s tone needled straight through the muffled murmurs. Candice’s eyes snapped straight to Hank’s. With tight control over his voice, he continued. "Today, I was polite. Tonight, I seem to be as short on that quality as you are on manners." Her mouth dropped open. Hank jabbed his finger at her and said, "Shut it!" She flinched as if she could feel the stab from across the room. "I want you to realize a couple things before you say another word. First, you’re not living here."

  "But, I nev’r meant…" Candice tried to blurt.

  Hank was suddenly towering over everybody as he shot up from his chair. "I said, SHUT UP!" Candice fell against the chair back, shrinking into her seat. Susanna Rae and Dale leaned away from her, unconsciously separating themselves from the object of Hank’s rage.

  "The other thing you need to realize is that everybody in this room, except you, is family, friend or neighbor." He briefly paused, but drove on when her mouth opened. "You are under this roof, drinking and eating and clothing yourself with our hospitality! The only good you’ve done was when you called for help. That may have saved a man’s life. Since that moment, you’ve been selfish, condescending and rude. So before you say another word, it would serve you well to appreciate your situation a lot more than you obviously do."

  Having recovered somewhat from his initial attack, Candice sat up straight and lifted her chin. "Jus’ b’cause you’re a big man wif a loud voice," she sneered, "doesn’ give you the right to bully me like some thug. All that testosterone leaking out of your mouf doesn’ mean shit." Leaning forward, she pressed her hands into the arms of her chair. "I don’ haf to take this abuse from you!"

  Hank grinned with feral menace and stepped across the room to the front door. In anticipation of near-future events, Camille cleared the path of his chair. Hank opened the door and said, "You’re right, Candice. And I hope you make the choice not to."

  Evie spoke up at that point and said, "Hank! Don’t turn her out tonight." She looked directly into Candice’s eyes. "Let her sleep here tonight. Her clothes will be dry in the morning. She can leave then."

  "Fine," Hank said. "I’ll take first watch." He slammed shut the door and stomped out to the back porch.

  In his wake, a vacuum of silence strained at the fringe of every nerve. Everyone in the room looked at each other, at the floor, and at the ceiling. They looked everywhere and at anything but Evie and Candice. Candice sat pouting with arms crossed. Her pursed lips were drawn so tightly together that they were rimmed in white. She was in adamant study of the mantle clock, which ticked loudly.

  Knowing that something must give, Evie said to the room, "Well, I think we should all turn in. It’s way past my bedtime and I’m sure you are all tired too. Candice, I thought you might be comfortable on the sofa, right there. So if you aren’t objecting, I’ll bring you a blanket."

  "It’s cold in here," Candice said, without looking at her hostess. "I’ll need two."

  Evie blinked at the woman sitting in the office chair. "Okay," she said, pulling the word out long enough to make a sentence.

  Lexi leaned forward and cocked her head so she could clearly see Candice. "This sofa is over a hundred years old, so it might smell a little musty. But if you smell something like rotten eggs in the cushion, that was where I was sitting." She stood up and walked to the hall doorway. Camille clucked with mirth, while Dale snorted. Evie suppressed a smirk.

  Candice scooted her chair out of Lexi’s way when the young woman glowered at her. Susanna Rae followed her niece. As she passed Candice, she leaned down and said, "Sometimes, I can be a bitch. But whew, mama. You’ve got a talent."

  Camille stood up and pointed at Evie. "Why are you letting her stay? You should throw her out on her ear. My mother wouldn’t have ever let her husband get treated like that. She would have been on her ear, I tell you!"

  "I’m sure that’s true, Pops. Now go to bed," she said with a sigh.

  Camille stomped toward the hall, but stopped in front of Candice, who was nearly bent backward looking up at him. "If you’d a-been a man, I would a popped you right on the nose. You best be grateful that those two are good Christians."

  As he raged by, Candice threw back her fingers and said, "Whatever."

  Dale and Val left quietly. Val turned to Evie as she passed Candice. "Thanks, Evie, for taking us in."

  After a loud, congested cough, Theresa thanked Evie, too. Bertel reached over and patted Evie on the knee. "You’re a good woman. You’ve done a good thing by these people." Then she looked over at Candice. "Even if some don’t recognize the extent of your generosity." She got up and added, "Please excuse me. I must check in on my little wards."

  "Speaking of wards," Pauline’s raspy voice suddenly cut through the quieting room. "I’ve got my own to check on." On her way out she looked down at Candice. "You’re lucky. I’d have shown you to the door."

  Evie excused herself from the awkwardness of being alone with Candice. She went about settling the rest of her guests into the various rooms of her house. It took a little while to make all of the arrangements, because she wanted everyone to be satisfied, particularly her family.

  For herself and Hank, she felt that she had no choice but to place them in the dining room on one of their two inflatable mattresses. Susanna Rae and Lexi, on the other hand, were sharing Camille’s bed as he snoozed contently on his couch. And Norah, Salvador and their two girls naturally occupied the guest bedroom.

  Theresa and her three children already occupied Hank’s and Evie’s bedroom where the nurse kept her family isolated. Evie assigned the Yost family to the office, which was across the hall from Theresa and adjacent to Camille’s room. They were sharing the other inflatable queen-size mattress. Pauline refused a bed, slouching in a chair next to Brian instead. Candice, of course, took the couch in the living room, with two blankets.

  The daycare children were given large, fluffy towels to use as blankets and slept in a row on the carpeted floor of the TV room. Bertel was content to make a bed of the Lay-Z-Boy recliner that she found in there, with just a lap blanket for warmth. The old woman expressed her deep appreciation and had to assure Evie of her comfort several times before the hostess would leave them all to sleep.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Clubbing darkness from the recesses of the storage shed with his Maglite, Hank angrily rummaged through boxes and bins. He was a wasp’s nest of agitation and needed to expend some of his negative energy. The most tried and true way for him to achieve that goal was to bang, slam and shove through a tangible, and preferably loud, obstacle until he gained his objective. In the end, his physical success translated into emotional relief. In this instance, he burrowed deep through piles of electronic gadgetry and other useless junk to scrounge out the remainder of their camping gear.

  As he was not much a fan of propane, all of their camp appliances were kerosene fueled. The versatility and durability of equipment that used kerosene or gasoline, and a little pumping, had always seemed more reliable to him. He finally came out with a two-burner camp stove. Then he found a hiking-sized, multi-fuel single-burner stove, two kerosene lanterns and a multi-fuel parabolic space heater. He ported them all up to the back porch. Then Hank set a ladder against the eves and climbed to the roof of the house.

  He sat with his back against the chimney that rose up from the basement, near the middle of the roof. His feet were planted on the solar water heater. It would still work, if they could pump water up to it. Hank thought for a moment about what he had put into building it. In reality, it was nothing more than a two-hundred-gallon water tank made of a few hundred feet of black painted, copper tubing behind some Plexiglas panels. The solar-heated water ran down to the basement, into the on-demand water heater. As soon as Hank had hooked it up, their gas bill had dropped by twenty-five percent.

  He pulled an ink pen and a small Moleskine notebook from his shirt pocket. The notebook had fallen out of a box while he scrounged for the camping gear. He had used several of the notebooks whil
e attending Clark Community College some years back, in a failed attempt to gain a degree. The attempt had failed, not for the lack of good grades, but for the sake of feeding and housing his family. Evie lost her job a week after he started classes. And though he resented her decision to take a break from the labor force just then, he understood that she had been on the clock for nearly two decades. Unfortunately, after two semesters of excelling in his studies, the Shumway's couldn't afford his pursuit any longer.

  The moon was not quite a quarter full, but the sky was clear enough that it illuminated the pages well. There were some notes on the first page and a name and phone number on the last. He thumbed through the rest and counted one-hundred-eighty-seven clean pages. He read the first page. It was in his handwriting, but he didn’t remember writing it.

  inexorable

  Victim of the Sound Bite

  - Headline & Sound Bites & News

  Briefs – Age of Misinformation

  - Public Opinion vs. Complete Truth

  - Short sighted profiteering

  * Constitutional Amendment

  - Budget Must Balance

  - Spending May Exceed Budget Only in

  Time of Declared War

  - Congress May not Delegate Its

  Authority to Declare War

  * Sometimes a system must collapse

  before people see that it’s not

  holding up.

  Hank wondered what he might have been thinking at the time. He may have written it during his Political Science class, or Sociology. He didn’t know. The last line seemed rather ironic. For a moment, Hank examined the basic composition of the notebook. There were twenty three blank lines per page. And enough pages to hold six months of his thoughts if he filled one per day.

  Given what he had already done, he wondered if the notebook would be used to convict him in court. Maybe it would prove him insane. It didn’t matter, either way. Hank committed himself to filling one page a day in this little notebook. He would do this, because someone might need to know, someday, what had happened. He was not a historian, nor a journalist, but he knew his point of view might be important, long after his bones had turned to dust. Hank touched the pen to the top left corner of the empty page and got the ink flowing with a tight little scribble. Then he began to write, without pause, to the end of the page.

  Day Ø Near midnight

  In every lifetime, there are just a few defining moments where a person can point and say, "right there! That’s where I changed." Now is that time for me. Not because of what happened, but because I have made a decision. For everybody, the world has changed. Some will adapt, but many will not. For all of my life, I have allowed myself to be taken advantage of. It didn’t matter to me. Now I will stand and be the leader that Evie has always believed me to be. Today, in this moment, for the sake of my family, it matters. I will not let them down. I will not disappoint Evie. She has always been my best friend. She has always encouraged me. Today 26 people are surviving under my roof. I don’t know the names of 5 children. (does it matter?) More people are coming. Even with our provisions we won’t last a month, unless we take action. I can save them. This is my defining moment.

  When he finished, Hank read what he'd just written and thought it was a bit over the top. Oh well... He thought to himself and laid the page ribbon between the next leaves and closed the notebook. He secured it shut with an attached elastic band and slid it into his shirt pocket. Still reflecting upon what he'd just written, he thought that he should have described the events, or listed the people in his house. With a shrug he thought, there’s always next time.

  His ponderings wandered to a place that he had avoided, until this moment. Hank brought his brothers to mind. His deepest worry was for his youngest brother, Warren, who lived in Butte, Montana with his wife and children. They had been suffering a blizzard there for a few days. It was part of the same storm system that had just passed over Vancouver. If his brother’s region had just endured this new tragedy then the fires would have exposed tens of thousands to a murderous environment where they still expected three days of snow. How many will die? Hank wondered morbidly. If only he can get his wife and kids up to the cabin, where there is food… Hank tore his mind away from the bleak possibilities.

  Warren is instinctually resourceful, he thought and heroically determined. He may not have had the most advantageous childhood, but he’s clever. Hank let his mind wander over their experiences.

  He and Warren had been similarly disturbed during their adolescence. But where Hank had gone to live with his grandparents on their farm, Warren had gone to live with their father in Los Angeles, California. Warren got in a lot of trouble in the big city streets. And his obsession with fast cars and extreme sports had, more than once, landed him behind bars. But everything changed when he met Heidi. She gave him a reason to straighten up and their children, Naomi and Ryan, gave him a reason to get ahead. Now, even though he was fighting cancer, Warren ran a thriving business specializing in custom four-by-four and off-road vehicles. He could fix, tune or modify anything. "If it can run, then I can make it run off-road," was his motto. Hank still chuckled when he thought about the Chevy, Vega station wagon that Warren had converted into a 4X4.

  Definitely a useful skill, Hank appraised. In fact, I’ve never known anyone who was more mechanically gifted, but I’m not sure how much use that will be in the middle of a blizzard, without shelter. He tried to consciously stop thinking on the subject, but his mind refused to submit to his will. If they got to the lake… Hank shook his head, vigorously. There was no point dwelling on something so far away. Warren and his family were either dead or alive and Hank would not likely find out which for a long time.

  But he could worry about his brother, Matthew. Matt was at work, Hank knew, because he had talked with his sister-in-law, Marissa, that morning. Matt, Marissa and their two children, Ella and Steven, lived in Portland just across the bridge. From doorstep to doorstep it was a fifteen-minute drive on a good day. They were close enough for him to help.

  Matt, he knew, would start walking home as soon as possible. He worked in Hillsboro, some twenty or thirty miles away and Matt was tenaciously dedicated to his family. I wouldn’t be surprised if he were home before morning, Hank thought. Things might get hairy along the way, but there was no doubt in Hank’s mind that, if his brother could walk, he would beeline for his family.

  Marissa, on the other hand, spent her full time keeping up the house, home-schooling their children and building her e-bay business of selling restored antiques. She would have been home with the children when everything went haywire. She was entirely capable of taking care of herself and her children, but Hank could not help fearing for their wellbeing. He loved his niece and nephew every bit as much as his own children and the thought of them suffering without food or shelter made his heart ache.

  His mind wandered back to his brother. Matt’s upbringing was as different from his own as it was from Warren’s. After their parents divorced, both Hank and Matt initially chose to stay with their mother. But after Hank was sent to live on the farm, Matt excelled, both academically and athletically. His exceptional talent at both got him a scholarship to Willamette University, were he studied computer sciences. A lot of good that is, now, Hank mulled. He put aside his worries over Matt with one final thought, I’ll figure out something.

  Down in the yard, he saw the dogs trot by. Kodie’s mottled white coat shown like a beacon compared to the sleek black coats of Reggie and Tessa. A ghost with shadows, he mused. Clouds had been slowly gathering, partially obscuring the quarter moon. Without its light, it was all but impossible to see anything beyond fifty feet. The eerie, scintillating sheets of the Aurora provided little benefit in that regard. Even though he couldn’t see much, however, Hank was determined not to use his flashlight without urgent cause.

  Drawing in a deep breath through his nose, Hank could smell that the air wasn’t clean. It was clear, but the burnt polymers and pla
stics from millions of square feet of wall-to-wall carpeting and every other modern luxury still lingered everywhere. Now, however, they were particulates in his lungs.

  Hank chuckled to himself. In the house, he thought, they are particulates. Outside, they are pollution. That was one of the sales lines for the Rainbow Cleaning System, which was nothing more than a glorified, water-based vacuum cleaner. Maybe the line was just something the salesman came up with, he wasn’t sure. His beard produced a satisfactory scritching sound when his fingernails attended to a tingle along his jaw.

  The dogs passed by again. Hank was getting tired and his back was starting to ache. His knees had been throbbing since he sat down and he alternately stretched out his legs for relief. The dogs passed by again. He realized, just then, that an ache had developed in his left shoulder joint and he had a searing charley horse just under his left shoulder blade. Alternating between rotating and stretching his arms, he tried to work out some of the pain. The dogs passed by again.

  He pondered a great many plans, allowing his mind to wander around his circumstances. Thoughts arose of their own accord and he examined each fleeting idea as it bounded by.

  If we walled and roofed the apartment over the shop, that dwelling plus this could probably hold fifty people. We would live like rats, but we would be sheltered. There just isn’t enough arable land nearby to feed that many mouths. Of course, some of our diet has to be made of animal fat and protein. The eggs from two chickens, or a portion of the milk from a cow or goat would provide those nutrients well enough. Where are we going to get all those animals?

  Hank ticked off a quick inventory. Right now, we have ten hens. They weren’t supposed to have more than eight chickens (nor any roosters) according to city ordinance, but through the years they’d had as many as twenty hens. We have twelve ducks (two are drakes) and three turkeys for Thanksgiving, one tom and two hens. Hank shook his head. We’re better off than most, but that’s not the best scenario, he thought.