Pavement Ends: The Exodus

by Kurt Gepner

  When Silas arrived with that gash on his forehead, she had practically crawled up the stairs to sew him up and she looked glassy-eyed. Hank wondered how she and her children were going to handle the move. At least her little ones had been mostly undisturbed. In fact Kalika, who had been the least ill of them all, had been pestering Theresa for release from confinement. Selfishly, Hank hoped that Theresa would keep the girl cloistered with the others, just to have one less child under foot.

  In his rounds, Hank checked on Patty and Amanda and found them dutifully feeding the furnace. He looked in on Camille and Susanna Rae, as they sorted and boxed the various dried goods, jars of fruit and vegetables and various bins of produce. In the attic he found Lexi bagging old clothes and sorting through boxes of photographs.

  "Hey, Sweet Cheeks," Hank greeted his oldest daughter. "What ya got going up here?"

  When Lexi looked at her father, he saw that her nose was red and her eyes were moist. "I was just looking at these pictures of the time we went rafting on the Rogue River." She held one up, pointing at it. "You caught Kyle, red-handed, trying to drown me. He was such a snot."

  "I remember that shot," Hank reminisced. "It was all I could do to keep my mouth shut and focus the camera."

  "I’m worried about him," Lexi said pointedly.

  Hank gave her a smile and said, "He’ll be fine. I’m surprised he and Izzy aren’t here already."

  "Are you sure he would come here?" she asked.

  Hank couldn’t hide his uncertainty. "He knows what we’ve got. He knows that we were going to be home yesterday. He usually makes logical choices, but I don’t know. I hate to say it, but he might try to get to Terry first."

  "But he would have gone straight to Izzy, right?" Lexi asked anxiously.

  "That, I’m sure of," Hank assured.

  "So, he would have his little girl with him," pondered Lexi. "You don’t think he would risk taking her across the Two-Oh-Five bridge and all the way to Gresham," she asked flinging her hand in an arbitrary eastwardly direction, "just to chase that pipe dream of getting back with his ex-wife... would he?"

  Hank drew in a deep breath and let it out. He shook his head. "I wish I could say for certain. What she did to him would have made me want to kill her." Hank blinked and said, "Hell… Part of me does want to kill her. But Kyle still loves her." Gnawing at his bottom lip, Hank shook his head again. "I’d like to think he would get over here with Izzy, first thing. But I just don’t know."

  Lexi tossed the picture in the box with a bitter shrug and said, "Oh well, I guess these are all trash, now. It’s not like we can eat them or wear them."

  Hank gasped. "Oh no..." he said and reached over to cover her hand with his. "These are priceless. They’re coming with us."

  "What?" Lexi asked with eyebrows raised.

  "When we find the time," he said with reverent sincerity, "we’ll have to go through and write everything we can remember, about each picture, on the back of every single one."

  "What?" Lexi repeated herself, exactly.

  "Two things, Lexi," Hank said as he held fingers up to represent his points. "First," he said with his index finger held high. "Most pictures that have been taken, for a very long time, are digital. They were e-mailed and blogged and burned to disc. They were displayed on cell-phones and digital picture frames and as screen savers on the office computer. Those are all lost. Every single one." Lexi’s jaw dropped as the fact hit her. "Second," Hank said, as he paused to bob two fingers in the air. "Almost everybody who did have printed photographs has lost them when their home burned down."

  "Oh my God," Lexi cried. "You’re right!"

  "Even if they don’t know who they’re looking at, people will want to see our pictures. It will remind them of a time that just went away," Hank snapped his fingers loudly, "like that! This is history. These pictures are precious."

  Lexi nodded solemnly, "Okay. I’ll treat them like gold."

  Hank patted his daughter on the shoulder and smiled. "Treat them like gold, but quit looking at them. Okay? We don’t have time for that, right now."

  With a cynical smile, Lexi said, "For someone who hasn’t got a lot of time, you sure are spending a lot of it wandering around and chatting."

  Shaking his finger at his daughter, Hank backed out of the attic and down the stairs. "You’ve been infected by your mother."

  Lexi toodled her fingers and gave her father a tight-lipped smile as he disappeared.

  * * * * *

  Susanna Rae cornered her sister in the kitchen when everyone seemed to be employed elsewhere. "What are you going to do?" she asked conspiratorially of Evie.

  Evie frowned and shook her head. Their rapport was nearly telepathic. She knew what her sister meant. "Everything is different, SuSu. All the rules have changed."

  "Yeah," Susanna Rae offhandedly agreed, "but you were ready. You were…"

  "I wasn’t anything," Evie cut in. "Besides, the odds of him finding out are next to none."

  "Have you looked around?" Susanna Rae demanded of her sister. "What are the odds that you’d have the only house with power after all this shit happened? Hell, Genevieve," she said, using her sister’s proper name. "What are the odds this shit would happen? Right now is not the best time to be playing the odds."

  Evie looked her sister in the eye and held that look for a long moment. "I don’t know what you are talking about," She said deliberately.

  Her hesitation was fractional, all but imperceptible, before Susanna Rae said, "Neither do I." It meant, I’m behind you one hundred percent. Evie turned back to her cutting board and Susanna Rae left, as if she had only been passing through. She nearly collided with Hank on her way to the front door. The big man was making his rounds. She smiled at him and he returned her an exhausted smile as he stepped past.

  * * * * *

  In the kitchen Hank found Evie cutting vegetables into a stew and immediately started a quarrel about use of them. He wanted them saved for planting when they got to the mountain meadow. "Potatoes, onions and garlic will grow," he said. Evie made it perfectly clear that they were needed as food.

  Finally, they agreed that Camille and Susanna Rae would sort through the bins in the cellar and pull out the roots that showed signs of sprouting. Those they carefully boxed and set aside. When all was tallied, they ended with about fifty pounds of plantable vegetables. The rest Hank conceded to the stew pot. To his collection, Hank added several left over seed packets that he found stuffed into a quart-sized Mason jar. They were leftovers from previous years of gardening. Another jar was half full of corn kernels from a garden Camille had attempted three years ago.

  In addition to his store-bought seeds, he had two-dozen sheets of paper towel that he kept in a manila envelope. The paper towels, at first glance, appeared to have a grid of red splotches spread across their surface. They were, in fact, Roma tomato seeds.

  He had taken the best tomatoes from last year’s vines and sacrificed them to the future. By placing the seeds on paper towel at one-inch intervals, when the juice dried, the seeds fused with the paper. Then at planting time, the towel was simply cut apart and the squares were planted in starter boxes. Water readily absorbed into the towel, which quickly broke down into the soil. Hank was grateful that he had been so caught up in his building project that he had not got the seeds started.

  After packing all of the garden goods carefully away, Hank got himself back in the U-haul engine compartment. While chaining the engine to the hoist, a quiet voice behind him spoke his name. Hank looked over his shoulder and saw Brody standing with his hands resting on the fender. Hank pulled off his glasses and dragged his sleeved arm across his forehead. "Hey, Brody. What’s up?"

  Brody didn’t say anything for a moment, looking down at the ground instead. Letting the silence build, Hank pushed himself into a squat and let the breeze cool him. Clearing his throat, Brody looked Hank in the eye and quickly looked away. "I thought about what you said..." He looked back at Hank to gauge his res
ponse. Hank waited, expectantly, for him to continue. Brody swallowed hard and cleared his throat. "It’s just that..." His voice cracked and he swallowed again. "You know, my mom and dad, they never cared what I did." Brody seemed to flinch and shot a glance at Hank, who remained quiet. Scuffing his foot across the gravel that bordered the pavement, Brody cleared his throat again.

  "It didn’t seem to matter what I did." He looked up at Hank, pleading with his eyes for Hank to understand. Hank kept his face impassive and said nothing. "You know, it’s like, if I, you know, stole something from a store..." Brody looked over at the fence. He cleared his throat, "My dad would say, ‘why do you let yourself get caught?’ And he’d laugh! He’d laugh and tell me about things he did when he was my age. And we’d joke about what I did. Mom would say, ‘it’s just a phase.’ Then she would buy me something and say, ‘see. We love you, even when you make a mistake.’ But it’s like it just didn’t matter. You know?"

  Hank gave him a shallow nod, but said nothing. Brody opened his mouth to speak, but only managed a weak croak. He clacked his teeth together and cleared his throat again. He licked his lips and sniffled. "I... I..." Brody’s eyes were brimming with tears as he looked up at Hank. His mouth slammed shut again, and his chin quivered with the effort to hold back his emotion.

  Finally, Hank cleared his own throat and said, "Often, the thing that most needs doing is the hardest thing to do." He leaned toward the boy. "I’m listening, Brody."

  With a hard swallow, a sniff, and a clearing of his throat, Brody looked up at Hank with forlorn eyes and said, "I’m glad they’re dead." He couldn’t hold back anything after that. His face contorted into a mask of anguish as his words crashed hard into his own ears. Hank looked down upon the poor orphan and felt his heart ache. The boy had been so privileged, but the only thing he’d ever wanted was his parents to take an interest in him, to know who he was becoming.

  Hank let the boy cry, his face buried in the crook of his arm where he leaned against the U-haul. Watching his shoulders heave with the sobs of his confusion and grief, Hank wanted to reach out and embrace him. But he knew Brody’s barriers. He had not learned how to receive real affection, especially from a man. So Hank gave Brody the only thing he could during his moment of deepest truth. He shared his presence.

  In time, Brody wiped his nose and said, "I’m being stupid."

  "No," Hank said with earnest sympathy. "You’re being human."

  "Well," Brody said as he pushed his thumb across his eyes, "being human sucks!"

  "Sometimes," Hank said with a chuckle. "But we humans are capable of doing great things, when we choose to."

  "Yeah… so I’ve heard," Brody said.

  "You know something great that you could do, right now?" Hank asked with a cheerful lilt in his voice.

  Brody sighed and rolled his eyes. "Fine… I’ll help you with the engine."

  Hank beamed. "Great!"

  Brody lent the vigor of raw emotion to the job and in short order they had the engine dangling above the U-haul.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Not long after the U-haul was freed of its engine, Tom returned and drafted the two teenage boys to push his VW Microbus from his house to the Shumway’s. He had loaded it with everything from a storage shed in his back yard. By the time the three got back with Tom’s contribution, they were drenched with sweat and staggering with fatigue. Their effort was well worth it, however, as the Microbus was only a few parts shy of being operational and the other goods would be quite useful at their destination.

  By twilight the entire house had been picked through and was either packed in the now-locked U-haul, under a tarp on the flatbed trailer or staged in the living room. The Duck Truck was still empty. None of the furniture, save one piece, was included among that which was to make the journey. Evie’s bed was being stored in the area called "Grandma’s Cabin."

  The smell of cooking food teased their appetites, and had everyone smacking their lips with anticipation. For dinner, Evie had prepared a hearty stew, but the main course was the steak Jeremy had brought home. Hank mixed garlic powder, fresh ground peppercorns and sea salt with finely chopped sprigs of freshly clipped Rosemary to make a rub. This was how he always prepared steaks for the open flame barbeque.

  His family title was "Master of the Que." And this evening, in that regard, was no different to any other night. Their barbeque was nothing more than a fifty-five gallon drum with a few augmentations to accommodate a grill.

  The second batch of steaks was ready to be laid over the fire when the dogs began to bark aggressively at the front gate. Norah hollered from the house, "Dad! Visitors!"

  They had been turning people away all day, such was the lure of cooking food to the hungry and homeless. So far it had not been a problem. In the daylight people were still behaving rationally. They could still be told No. The children were under constant supervision by one or more adult and the consensus was that the men would openly display their firearms and act hostile toward strangers. Norah’s call sent a shiver of dread down his spine. It would not have come, if the situation were easily handled.

  With the platter of seasoned meat held high, Hank stepped past Jeremy and Brody, who were both laying waste to heaping plates of food. He set the platter on the defunct stove and grabbed his shotgun as he swept through the house. Silas was already in the living room, and so was Dale, with Donkers in hand. Norah went to look in on her husband when her father arrived.

  Through the front window, Hank could see three uniformed police officers and three fire fighters. There was just enough of the twilight left that he could see the metallic sheen of the badges pinned to their chests. By the way they stood, respectful but without fear of the gnashing canines, Hank could tell they were accustomed to dealing with dogs.

  Giving a quick glance to Whisper, Hank handed the shotgun to Silas, who readily took the weapon.

  "Nice," Silas spent a moment to admire it as he took the weapon.

  "They look like ducks," Hank said, "and walk like ducks…"

  "But are they really wolves, come to eat your ducks?" Silas finished.

  Hank gave him a stoic nod. "I’m about to find out." As he approached the door he turned to Dale and said, "Go downstairs and come up the side steps." Dale shot off toward the hall. The position would give him a perfect view of the gate across the floor of the front porch. Silas took a spot against the wall, next to the front door. Hank opened the screen door and stood, framed by the doorway. He pushed a smile up to his lips and seeded his voice with cheerfulness. "Ev’nin’ folks," he said with an exaggerated southern drawl. "What brings y’all ‘round these here parts?"

  Reggie and Kodie were both stretched to full height with their paws on the gate. The pair of massive dogs were baring their teeth and ferociously barking while Tessa dashed back and forth, expressing a more general warning at the strangers. The firefighters stood in a cluster behind the police officers, who were standing in a loose line about five feet from the gate.

  The middle officer was a petite woman in her mid-thirties, with tendrils of dark hair protruding from a French braid. Within arm’s reach of her left hand stood a gangly officer in his early twenties. His bulging Adams apple bobbed frequently under his narrow, jutting jaw. The brim of his wide trooper hat rode low over his eyes. To the right of her, antagonistically glaring at the canines, was a blonde officer who looked barely old enough to drive. He stood with a wide stance and a palm resting on his pistol.

  "Sir," the female police officer shouted up to the porch. "Will you please call off your dogs?"

  "Sure," Hank drawled with a broad, humorless grin. "Reggie, Kodie," he said in a commanding voice. "To me!" Both dogs dropped to all fours and bounded up the steps to sit directly in front of Hank. Tessa followed and stood upon the top step, bravely barking at the strangers from her new perch.

  "Tessa. Come," Hank commanded. Tessa continued barking. Hank dropped his voice an octave and bellowed, "Tessa!" The dog silenced as he snapped his fi
ngers and pointed at his feet. "Come!" She wagged her body and meekly approached the person she perceived as the alpha male. Hank bent over and caressed her chin. "Good girl." Her wagging became ecstatic as he took a hold of her collar. "Inside with you," Hank told her and guided her through the open door. He let the screen door close behind himself as he stepped out. To the other two dogs he pointed at the gate and commanded, "Stay. Watch."

  "Thank you," the female officer said. "Are you Hank Shumway?"

  Hank opened his mouth and paused. After a moment he asked, "I don’t suppose one of you has a piece of photo I.D. that says you work for the police department, do you?" He had dropped the mock drawl.

  The woman pulled a thin wallet from her front pocket and held it open, high enough so he could see. On the front was a golden police shield. Hank smiled and put his hands together, as if in prayer. Opening them, palm up, he said politely, "I’m terribly sorry, but would you humor me and toss it up to the porch?"

  Without hesitation, the woman tossed her wallet up to the porch. Reggie tensed, but did not move. Hank bent and picked up the wallet. There were two, clear pockets on the inside. In one there were several business cards for Sgt. Chelsea Yuris of the Vancouver Police Department. In the other pocket was an identification card for the same, with the picture of a clean, smiling woman named Chelsea Yuris.

  Hank looked at the woman standing in front of his home. Like her partners, she was grimy and scruffy and she looked plain worn out. But she was obviously the same person. Hank tossed the wallet back to its owner and asked, "How can I help you, Officer Yuris?"

  She spoke as she reached for the gate. "We would like to ask you a few questions. Can we come in?"

  "No," Hank said and with a look of surprise on her face, she came up short of opening the gate. "Officer Yuris," he said with a respectful tone, "I’m going to be blunt. I don’t expect you to appreciate this, but I am not going to allow you to on to my property without a court order in your hand."