by Nick Cole
It was a sedan, half sunk in the dirt that became mud every monsoon season and frozen clay in the winter that followed. Forty cycles of monsoon, chill, and withering summer.
The Old Man dropped his satchel and gathered brush and mesquite. It was early fall and the nights would be cold. It was important to get a fire going.
Once the fire was in bloom with sparks rising into the night, the Old Man retrieved his crowbar and the tin of grease. He searched the wreck, finding a pile of bones on the floor beneath the steering column. The seats had turned to springs and nothing remained of the foam or material that had once covered them. The backseat held nothing, and in the trunk someone had once lit a fire, probably camping under the roof of the car. The fire in the trunk had kept them warm.
The Old Man returned to the fire and removed the cold beans from his satchel. Unrolling his blanket, he found the tortillas but decided to save them for morning. He placed the tin of beans in the fire and waited.
Above, dashing comets and stars restlessly winked at one another. Was there some sort of communication among them? How far away were they? Once the Old Man had seen, on a night far from the village, a satellite moving up there. Long after the bombs. It crossed the sky steadily, almost slowly, still flashing its lights. Its power still on. The Old Man looked for it again tonight.
The beans tasted good.
That was how hungry I was. A hard day’s work and food tastes good.
Putting the beans down the Old Man returned to the car once more.
Why here?
He looked at the front of the car.
The driver either crashed into something or ran out of fuel. But for some reason the driver stopped here. Were you dying?
In the days of the bombs, the Old Man who had been a young man remembered the chaos and disorder. Remembered the authorities shooting people. Fleeing Los Angeles, he had been stopped at a checkpoint just south of San Clemente. For hours he had been stopped as military helicopters crossed the sky above the reactor close to the ocean. It had made him nervous being that close to a primary target, the big reactors. A man arguing with the guards in a car ahead of him began to scream. Then the man left his car and began running for the mountains on the far side of the road. The guards shot him. His family, his wife screaming, a wide-eyed child in the back of the car watching.
I have not thought of that for years.
Why would you?
The fire popped noisily for a moment and then the deep silence of the wasteland at night settled back upon him.
But you stopped the car here. Why?
The windshield still held most of its dirty glass. It had spider-webbed into a blanket of crystals. But on the passenger side the windshield held a hole.
Something was on the passenger seat and when you hit the rock that stopped you, whatever it was came out and left the hole.
It was impossible to see what was underneath the car, but the Old Man suspected a big rock, low and jagged, had snagged the axle and stopped the vehicle dead.
The Old Man returned to his satchel and retrieved the can of pitch. Taking a stick, he covered the end with pitch and lit it in the fire. He returned to the front of the car that lay at the top of a small hill. He turned away from the car and faced outward into the dark.
There is always a story. To find it I need to know what happened. You are wounded. You are fleeing the cities and have become wounded. You have no plan, few supplies, and as the day progresses, as you flee burning Phoenix or forbidden Tucson, you drive off the road. The roads are a mess, refugees and Army fleeing to Yuma, which will be nuked in a day or two because of its base and refugee camps. You drive off the road. You are not thinking clearly; driving too fast you are wounded and sick or hungry and you have begun to believe you will find something out here. Something that will save you. But the vehicle is running out of gas, so you keep driving to the top of ridges and small hills, racing up the sandy shale to avoid getting stuck, then looking to see if there is any refuge in sight. On this hill you race up fast. The ground on the far side was soft. Yes I felt that as I walked up. Suddenly as you gun the accelerator, you slam into the rock and out goes the one thing you managed to grab before the destruction. The car is hopelessly stuck and soon you die. Maybe you kill yourself with a pistol. But one of the countless salvagers who has wandered here has found that since, along with whatever supplies were in the trunk or backseat. Ah, a pistol and blankets and food, thinks my fellow salvager, what luck I have found good things. And he ignores the hole in the windshield. He has ignored the second rule of salvage. Be still and understand the story of what happened in this place. Quick action blinds.
How fast were you going when you hit the rock? Fast enough that it came upon you and took you by surprise? But not so fast, since you were nearing the top. Maybe you blacked out?
The Old Man walked outward from the front of the car. He thought of the size of the hole and the weight of the object as he walked down the other side of the hill scanning the ground.
Someone may have found it?
That does not matter. You are thinking as you once thought. Telling the story first. If you find the resting place of the thing and it is gone then you have won because you thought the way you are supposed to think. Some will always lead to more. That is the first rule.
I could wait until morning?
Why? You will sleep badly and all night think about where to look in the morning.
At the bottom of the hill was a dry riverbed. Holding his torch down near the ground he checked the bed for ash.
In the years after the destruction, flash floods of ash had filled the old stream beds as the snowpack of that long winter had finally come to an end.
If the thing had fallen into the streambed then it is lost. Carried off by rivers of ash in the years since. Also most travelers use streambeds to move. They are shady, there might be water, and the rains may have collected salvage.
So if it landed in the stream then it is as good as gone.
Looking back to align himself with the car, he climbed up the rocky slope to the far side of the dry streambed. A few feet away he found a battered aluminum ice chest, half sunk in the mud and hidden by a mesquite tree that had grown up around its base. It was empty. Someone else had found it. Had followed the clues and found the thing in the dried mud with the broken cover.
The chest was too light to have made the journey from passenger seat through the window down the hill and across the streambed to land where it did. Whatever had once been inside had been heavy enough to propel it that far.
In front of the fire, the Old Man sat cross-legged and treated himself to one of the tortillas. He congratulated himself on finding the ice chest and thought little that it contained nothing. Instead he was happy that he had found it. Maybe the curse was a lie. It was he who had been lazy, easily accepting the blame of the curse. He was to blame. If so, then things were changing.
He finished the tortilla, put more mesquite on the fire, and took only a small drink of water so he did not have to pee in the night. He rolled himself in his thin blanket and was soon deep asleep. In the night when the fire was low, he awoke thinking, ‘I am sleeping really well tonight,’ as though he had accomplished a great thing that had eluded him for some time. Pleased, he fell asleep once more.
Chapter 4
The next day he crossed into the dunes of the wasteland. The scrub and hard rock gave way to smooth sand pink with the rising sun. By noon the landscape faded and the pink of morning turned a blinding white.
It was still early fall. It wasn’t as hot as it had been earlier in the year. The Old Man sipped the bottle of water, only half full now, and felt the heat more than he had expected to.
I need to look for water. Soon I will go too far and if I don’t find anything, then even making it back to the village might be impossible.
Maybe they are looking for me.
In the night, toward dawn, he had dreamed of the child in the backseat of the car of the sc
reaming man the guards had shot. She was the same age of forty years ago but the Old Man was still old, even though he had been younger that long-ago day than her father.
In the dream he was back in the village. The child, who was a girl most surely, had knocked on his door. After letting her in the Old Man gave her cold water and she sat down at his desk, looking out the one window he had salvaged from an overturned semi.
Have you been walking all night to get here? he remembered asking her. As if a night’s journey accounted for all the years in between that day and the dream.
But the child remained staring out the window, lost in thought and when she turned back to the Old Man she looked at him smiling. Then she said, It never happened, y’know. In the way a child who is young can affect a certain seriousness.
But the Old Man wasn’t sure if she meant her father being shot by the side of the freeway under the shadow of the reactors. Or something else.
He woke with a start, and already a desert breeze was blowing across the soft blue of first morning. He rose quickly, promised himself some breakfast later and was soon away from the wreck. The dream had bothered him. And he wondered if the dream of the child and the wreck of the car weren’t the cause of it.
Later, he felt better as he walked through a line of dunes. He was away from what was known to him of wrecks and the worst kind of luck. The wasteland was new. It was unknown. In a few hours, by nightfall, he would be farther than anyone had tell of in the depths of the wasteland. If anything, that was something.
So why did the dream bother you? It’s noon, so speak it now and be done with it so the child does not return tonight.
Ahead, the wasteland fell deeper into a series of white dunes, and the Old Man entered them, weaving about the floor of them rather than climbing to the top of each.
I’ll do my best to keep a rough bearing north and maybe a little east. I’ll need water soon.
East is cursed.
Then my curse and the curse of the east will cancel each other out.
He couldn’t remember what that was called; it was a law or something, something he had once learned in school.
How strange, he thought in the silence between the dunes. School. To think, once I attended a school. An elementary school, a school after that, and then even a high school. College. I couldn’t even begin to explain school to the young of the village.
I am thinking too much. That is why I had the dream of the child. Too many things are coming up from the past and it is making my mind race. The silence of the wasteland is good for thinking.
You must think about water and salvage. You can’t just think about the past. If you don’t find water you won’t be able to find something out here and bring it back to the village.
The shadows began to lengthen and soon the shade of the dunes became cool. Gathering stray brush he set up his camp in the lee of a long dune and soon had a fire going.
There had not been the least sign of any salvage, anything man had made, or even the presence of man. The Old Man sat chewing a tortilla and thinking about this. Usually back near the village, even though it was the desert, there seemed to be nothing but the things of man’s past. All the collected salvage. The wrecks, the dead towns and settlements. Bones.
But how long since anyone had been through the wasteland? It had been forty years since the bombs. The years since, reasoned the Old Man, had been too hard. Too close to the bone for anything that didn’t yield enough profit to allow survival to the next day.
Maybe that was why there was no salvage in the wasteland.
Staring into the fire, he thought of the child.
Did she survive that day?
Not if she remained on the West Coast, especially from Los Angeles to San Diego.
But if she had survived would her life have been good?
She would have less memories of what was lost. That is a kind of “good.”
Those who survived those weeks of bombing, each one struggled with a question that determined whether they would keep salvaging or give up and die.
What was the question?
Can you let go of what is gone?
I think at first I felt that I could not go on. The things I lost were too painful and I could not imagine a life without them. I remember feeling awful. All the time. But I cannot remember when I changed. When I thought of salvage. When I thought of what was today and not of what had been or what was lost.
For a long time he sat hugging his knees, watching the crystal of the sky turn and revolve, and when the fire had burned down to red ash, he moved his blanket close to it and sat for a little while more, listening to it pop. Soon the sky began to grow dark. ‘In a few nights,’ he thought, his last thought before sleeping, ‘we’ll have the moon.’ Funny saying “we” he wondered, sleeping.
Chapter 5
There were no dreams that night and when he awoke, the sun was already well up and the heat a part of the day that could not be separated from it.
His face was heavy from the night as though the sleep had been more fight than rest. Instantly he wanted water and knew that any drink would be his last.
Then it will be my last.
Draining the bottle he decided he would find the water he would need to continue the journey or that would be the end of it.
I have in me what remains. So I have to be smart. If I dig and find no water, I will have sweated for nothing. I must find water.
He continued on now, bearing more east than north.
East is evil and that is why things are not going well. You should have continued north. Why are you going east?
The dunes continued in their sandy smothering brilliance and before long he began to think of the ocean and the book.
How would it be to have such a skiff as that in the book? To have ropes and a hand-forged hook. To catch the tuna and eat it raw with a bit of salt and lime.
He did not have salt and limes in the book. He wanted them but he did not have them. He ate the tuna raw.
He caught himself, sweating, almost sleeping as he walked, thinking that this was just a day at the beach, as if, in any experience that was his, he’d ever had a day at the beach.
But I did. I remember the sting of saltwater on burned skin. I remember hot dogs and mustard and blown sand in the buns.
It was the thought of the watermelon that jerked him back to the present. Sweet, cool watermelon on a windy afternoon at the beach. School buses idling to take the children back to school during the last week of the school year. No more books, no more teachers’ dirty looks. He saw his father’s handwriting as he thought of those words. Summer would never end.
“Everything ends,” he croaked to the dry silence between two monolithic dunes, as he trudged upslope through the clutching sand.
It is so hot that even the scorpions won’t come out.
In the distance, the sun sank lower in the sunburned sky, as dunes began to grow long cool shadows pointing thin fingers to the east.
Without making camp he lay down in the cradle of a shady dune and fell to snoring.
When he awoke, the sun had fallen behind the highest dune and a stiff breeze lifted sand, sending it skirting across the smooth surfaces of the dunes. The body of a dead bee lay in the foreground of his skewed vision. His head pounded and he knew he was beyond any point of thirst he had ever experienced. Already his hand was half buried.
I have been asleep but a few minutes. The sand doesn’t waste time.
Not ready to move his aching head, he remained staring at the dead bee in the canted landscape. He wasn’t sure, but the sun seemed in the wrong position. If that was the case then it was not a few minutes but maybe the next day, and if that was the case then things were even worse than he had first thought. A new day of heat among the dunes.
There is little hope.
So at least, you have some hope.
It’s just a saying. I actually have no hope.
No, you said you have little hope. Why?
Why a little? A little hope would have gone a long way for that dead bee. But for you maybe it is too little.
The bee.
The Old Man shook himself upright. His face sandy, he stared wildly about, then closed his eyes as his head began to throb.
Bees always fly straight to water. Big Pedro had taught him that. And he had seen it. Many times.
The bee is dead. How can a dead bee lead you to water?
He was an ambitious bee. Like me.
Or he was cursed. Like you also.
Then this brother is a bee to me, he declared in confusion. I will find more bees. His brothers are my brothers. Some always leads to more and where there are more bees they will lead me to water.
It is morning so it will be cool for a while, but not long. Bees like the heat.
Bending low he gently picked up the dead bee.
I will find us some water, my brother.
He placed the bee in the tin of grease and snapped the ancient lid shut.
That way seems familiar but dunes are all alike.
Heading into the sun now he climbed the first dune, and far to the east he saw blue ridges shadowed in the rising sun.
East is evil and cursed.
Ah but there are two of us now. I have my brother the bee and he has his brothers.
Soon the sun was hot, as first he climbed a dune, then descended only to start the process once more. It is the only way, he told the bee. It is the only way I can be sure I am heading to the ridge.
At the top of each sandy dune he scanned for swarms or movement of any kind. His eyes were still good and yet he saw no bees.
Maybe in the rocks, brother. Maybe that is where we will find your home.
At the full blaze of noon the Old Man descended the last dune into a short sandy scrub of low bushes. A few miles away lay the now red rock ridge.
For a moment the Old Man considered digging among the scrub for water but the plants were papery and did little to convince him of the chance of appreciable water.
