Trouble No Man

by Brian Hart

  Please hurry dad. It’s only gonna get worse.

  But he didn’t know how it could get worse, then, as usually happened, his unasked questions had been answered.

  He turns the truck around and backs into the barn. The bodies flop from the truck bed jointless and unruly onto a section of collapsed roof and broken lumber. Twisted and dead, he dislikes them even more. He hates them. He empties dozens of milk jugs of used motor oil, twenty years’ worth, onto them and lights the whole mess on fire with a small butane torch he finds in a cobwebby corner behind the motor oil.

  The only veterinarian he knows lives more than a hundred miles to the west, just outside Sacramento. She’ll welcome them. She’s the only friend they have left. But not believing for a second that the fuel in the red truck’s tank will be enough to make it or that the auxiliary batteries will hold a charge, he loads his bicycle and panniers and an old buggy-style bike trailer they’d had since his youngest daughter was born into the back of the truck, tosses in an armload of loose tools, a tire pump, bike tubes, a pair of foldable spares. Thinking the dog can ride in the bike trailer if and when the truck runs out of gas. If he can even cram him in there. He finds an old turnout blanket in the tack room and slides it under the dog and then swaddles him tightly so he can’t move. As an afterthought, he returns to the tack room for the last of the beef jerky and chucks it in the cab. Evil black smoke chases them out the barn doors.

  Turning onto the two-lane highway at the end of the drive, he’s surprised to feel relief, as if he’s on the other side of a thing, made it through a long night or a fever. The speed feels good, the response of the motor, the power and control. The dog is panting with its tongue out, curled like a playground slide. He passes the neighbor’s farm, the twelve-foot-high security gate is closed and padlocked, concertina wire tops the chain-link fence that surrounds the property. All the life the fence was built to protect is dead and gone but there’s a small solar-powered Eton radio on the windowsill of the barn chattering away beside the tink giving federal food-drop locations and points of process and extraction. Occasionally he’d switch it to FM and listen to the militia rants, preacher babble, peaceful resistance groups giving sad explanations of their failures. Hopes and dreams turned taxidermy, hides and heads. The stereo in the truck had been cut from the dash with a Sawzall leaving a ragged black hole and a tangle of multicolored wires. There used to be music.

  Through town, he scans the side streets out of habit and glimpses the undertaker lugging boxes up the ramp to his trailer. The motor stutters and he buries the accelerator keeping the rpms high, sensing now more than ever that momentum is his friend.

  Another twenty miles and he makes a sound as the breath goes out of him. He touches his pockets, confirms that he’s lost the box with her ashes. The truck slows as he lifts his foot from the gas pedal. The dog is panting on the floor, watching him with one glassy eye. The orange blanket is soaked with blood and the fuel gauge has already noticeably dropped, voltmeter at seven and falling. In his mind, he sees the redwood box being swallowed by flames. He settles his foot on the accelerator and drives on.

  The on-ramp to I-80 near Truckee is clear and as he drives up the short hill and gains elevation he can see people gathered in front of the gas station below even though the pumps are gone. They aren’t armed or looting, nothing left to steal, just standing and talking, and they turn and watch him go, one little boy wearing a backpack waves and he waves back. The Sierras are the mountains of the moon, burned black and without vegetation, and he can’t see it, but he knows the lake is nothing now, an algal murk puddle, archaeology, remembers the bumper sticker: keep tahoe blue. To conserve fuel he coasts out of the passes and doesn’t touch the brakes as he swerves by, and sometimes crashes through, the smaller of the fallen trees. The broken pavement could break a tie rod but it doesn’t. Gravity only wants him gone. The sky is unfinished with smoke and haze, waiting on Bob Ross to draw in the treetops and greenery. No depth left. How about some birds, Bob? Nice little birds. Happy birds. The unkind sun is chopped in half and Popsicle red at the horizon. Hardened mudslides and clumsy boulders cut the road but they’ve mostly been cleared leaving pale mud stains and bomb-pitted asphalt.

  Darkness now. The truck only has one dim headlight. The closer he gets to Sacramento, the more he’s dodging abandoned cars and trash, roadside stragglers, cyclists and cart pushers, instead of dried mud and wood. He loses time and burns fuel winding through the dark and bone-dry suburbs so he won’t have to face the security checkpoints on the freeway, because he knows enough to know that if he can’t prove the truck is his, they’ll throw him in the cages and leave the dog to die.

  He stops at the gate at the vet’s house and lays on the horn. When she finally appears, he gets out of the truck and comes forward so she can see who it is. He points into the cab.

  “Somebody shot him,” he says.

  The smile leaves the vet’s face and she pushes the buzzer to open the heavy iron gate and waves him in. She walks bent forward a bit with her elbows back and a limp, gifts from her final motorcycle wreck. She opens the passenger door and in the dome-light glow she checks the dog.

  “Come on,” the vet says. “Lift with me.” She helps the man lift the dog until he’s cradling it in his arms, then leads the way onto the headlight-lit porch and into the dark, cavernous cool of her house.

  They pass through the entryway, a single lamp lit in the living room, an open book on the couch, and out a side door into a wide hallway with swinging steel doors. Dogs begin barking in the kennels and he and the dog both turn and look at the sound. The vet opens the electrical panel and flips a couple of breakers and the LEDs overhead snap to life and she leads the way to her office and the kennels.

  He puts the dog down on the exam table like she tells him.

  “Are you OK?” She gives him a hug, touches his face.

  “I’m fine.”

  She opens an upper cabinet and pulls on surgical gloves. “You don’t look it.”

  The vet’s fingers work through the dog’s fur, probing for injuries. He hadn’t run out of fuel but the gauge was at zero for the last fifteen miles or so. He can’t remember when he’s last eaten. I need to get rid of the truck. He’d said that out loud. The vet tells him she can manage from here, and gestures him from the room. The dog watches him go.

  Outside, he unloads his bike trailer and his bags from the back and stows them safely along the side of the vet’s house, under the porch. He leaves the shotgun in the corner behind the front door. The gate shuts automatically behind him.

  He drifts through the dark neighborhood and the intersection at the bottom of the hill without his lights, then follows the road to the west toward the highway. Dark roads, he lets the rumble strips guide him. A few minutes later the truck sputters and dies and he eases it onto the shoulder. He lifts his bicycle from the bed and pedals away.

  That night the dog sleeps on a child’s mattress on the porch while they nurse paper cups of Walmart bourbon and watch a stream of ants march across the banister and up the side of the house.

  “Your hand,” she says. “I keep looking at it.”

  He closes his fist and puts it in his lap.

  “You don’t have to hide it.”

  “I don’t want to creep you out.”

  “Little late for that,” she says.

  The dog is dreaming with one eye open, making little yelps. Its hindquarter is shaved and iodine-stained, shiny staples bridge the incisions the vet made hunting for buckshot. The dream has a hold on the dog and he tries to run and it must hurt because he wakes up and gives a confused look at his hip. The man moves his chair over to pet him and talk him back to sleep.

  “I’m the last of your Mohicans, aren’t I?” the woman says later.

  He looks at her and smiles.

  A long minute passes. There are no jets in the black and hazed-over sky. “I might have something in the freezer for us.” When she returns she has a hoarfrosted pint of m
int chocolate chip ice cream and two spoons.

  “Put mine in the cup,” he says, and slurps the corn liquor from the nugget of ice cream and squirms with the hot and the cold and the pain on his palate.

  She holds out her gleaming spoon, sights down it like it’s a weapon. “Not that you need another reason, but your dog getting shot is maybe number six thousand and twelve for you to give up on your little homestead and get out of here.” She smiles as she watches the man slurp a hunk of ice cream out of his cup.

  “I’ve been trying,” the man says.

  “So, you’re going?”

  “I left her there.”

  “What do you mean, you left her?” The vet shakes her head, takes a breath. “Honey, she’s already gone.”

  “I left her ashes at the house. I have to go back.”

  “You haven’t told the girls yet, have you?”

  “No.”

  “I can usually get online a couple times a week. You could at least email them from here.”

  “I need to face them.”

  “Skype or whatever, that won’t work. Email is about as good as it gets.”

  “I know. That’s not facing them.”

  The man closes his eyes again and imagines the fire rolling over the redwood box. “It gets quiet here now.” Eyes open, he sees she’s giving him a strange look. “It used to be so loud.”

  “I don’t want to ask the obvious,” she says, “but how exactly do you plan on getting there? It’s a long ways.”

  “I’ll get there.” Whenever he speaks, he feels the strings of confession. His soul is brittle. “I got my bike and a trailer for the dog.”

  She studies him with a long sideways look. “I can give you three reasons. It’s too far. You’re too old, and that dog is too big to lug behind a bike. Maybe you should leave him with me and get yourself a nice Chihuahua. There’s a three-legged Jack Russell in the back that would be happy to go with you. Take the shotgun you left behind my door and the Jack Russell.”

  The man motions to the dog. “You said he’d be as good as new.”

  “He’ll be fine. But it’s gotta be what, twenty-five hundred miles?”

  “You think I’m too old,” he says.

  “I already told you that. You are too old, you old dipshit. What about that truck you showed up in? Why didn’t you just keep it and drive that?”

  “It’s not mine. I wouldn’t make it out of the city before I got arrested. Too many checkpoints.”

  “You made it into the city.”

  “I was lucky.”

  “Whose truck was it? Why don’t you tell me what happened?”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “You aren’t going to tell me?”

  “No.”

  “Fine, jerk. I don’t want to know.”

  “You’re right. You don’t.”

  “OK. Take 49 up to the middle fork of the Yuba, then backroad it home. Nobody will bother you out there. It’s all neighborhood by neighborhood here anyway, some are militia, but most of them aren’t. People are planning on coming back from this.”

  “Are you?”

  “I just take care of the strays.” Her voice isn’t devoid of hope.

  He absently caresses the stump of his finger.

  “Seriously, you could take my pickup.”

  “Not unless you’re in it,” he says.

  The woman shakes her head and looks away. “The cops are all in barracks now,” she says. “They’re doing tours with the National Guard, working with the Border Patrol and whoever else. Around here, in the city, actual law enforcement is out of the picture except for the Code Enforcement, and the codies mostly don’t do anything they don’t have to.” She eats another spoonful of ice cream, talks with her mouth full. “Welcome to Sacramento.”

  They finish their ice cream and their drinks and she takes his cup and puts it inside the empty carton and adds hers and stabs it all down with the licked-clean spoon.

  “You’re mine too, you know,” she says. “You’re the last man on earth.”

  “There’s others,” he says. “They’re everywhere.”

  “Last man I’d eat ice cream with.” She slugs him gently in the shoulder. “My nine-fingered friend.”

  He feels light and easy, happy. Didn’t think that was an option.

  “I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” he’d said to his wife on that last day. “I’ll take us on a last tour, a big trip.”

  “You don’t have to. You just have to keep our girls safe.”

  “They’re as safe as they can be right now.”

  “They’re so much smarter than us. I know you think that we should’ve gone with them.”

  “We will. Don’t worry. When you get well.” He touched her hair and she leaned her head against his hand.

  “Two old useless fuckers in Alaska,” she said, “making our kids feed us oatmeal and wipe our asses.” She looked up at him and smiled. She looked so tired.

  “I can’t do this, it’s killing me.”

  “You wish.” She smiled, all of her soul coming through.

  “Even now you’re flipping me shit.”

  “I’ll always be flipping you shit.”

  “I love you.”

  “You don’t need to say it.”

  “I need you to say it to me.”

  “I love you,” she said. “You’re my whole life. You’re my heart.”

  [3]

  M>35

  CA 96118

  “You’ll be too busy and you won’t want to play with me or do anything.”

  “That won’t happen.”

  “You will. Mama will have a baby and you will. Myra’s mama had a baby and now Myra doesn’t get to play. Myra gets yelled at if she plays.”

  “I don’t really know Myra or her mama. I only met her the one time at the birthday party.”

  “My friend Myra.”

  “That’s not. I know who she is. Don’t cry. You don’t have to. I don’t understand how you can have the maturity to be so immature about this.”

  “You aren’t my papa. You won’t love me because you’re not.”

  “Never. Goddamnit. I’m, hell—you’re—we’re each other’s, OK? Don’t be a dick about this. Your mom isn’t even pregnant. We just wanted to ask you and see what you thought.”

  “You don’t be a—what did you say?”

  “It’s not going to be any different. Don’t you want a brother or a sister?”

  “I want a big sister.”

  “But you’d be the big sister. No matter what.”

  “Then I want a brother.”

  “Either way, we’re a family. We each get the love we need allotted to us at any given moment. It’s fluid, like water.”

  “What is allotted? Like a lot?”

  “Kind of. It can be.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Love flows around, you know, sometimes one of us is in deeper than the others but we’re never out of it.”

  “We can’t get out of it?”

  “No goddamn way.”

  “We conserve water.”

  “That we do.”

  “You won’t forget to draw with me?”

  “Never.”

  “Is it like a swimming pool or is it like a lake?”

  “Yes, both of those.” He taps his shovel against her little yellow toy shovel. “C’mon, these potatoes aren’t going to dig themselves and when we’re done we’ll unleash the pigs.” Glean is the word.

  “They aren’t on leashes, silly. They’re in their pigpen or their piggy house.”

  “One pig’s leash is another pig’s pigpen. I’m a serious fella. And I mean it, you gotta quit calling me silly. Get moving. Let’s spread these spuds out there on the ground so they dry in the sun. Your mama says that’s the best way to clean them. They dry and you brush them off. No water required.”

  “I just said that. And you always say that. You and Mama. Silly.”

  “Oh, there it is again. We’re trying to sa
ve water is all.”

  “Like when we brush our teeth? Or have a brother?”

  “I probably kind of tangled things up with the love-and-water metaphor, didn’t I?”

  “I’m not tangled. What is a meta for? What does it do to people?” One by one she gathers up an armload of scabby Yukon Golds.

  He sticks his shovel in and kneels down to work with her. “I need to be more careful with my—”

  “What?”

  “Words.” He considers grabbing the wheelbarrow or a bucket or something to move the potatoes but doesn’t see the efficiency in walking to the barn and finding a bucket and walking back. He uses his T-shirt like a basket and has the girl load him up.

  “I want tattoos like you.”

  “Nope. No can do. They’ve run out of tattoos.”

  “What? Who did?”

  “All the tattoos have been caught and captured and put onto people’s bodies and there aren’t any left.”

  “Are there mamas and papas?”

  “Of the tattoos?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No, they’re all gone. Like the dodo bird. And before you ask, a dodo bird was a flightless bird that was hunted to extinction—you know what extinction is.”

  “Dinosaurs are extinct.”

  “Right. Tattoos, dodo birds, dinosaurs, opioid pain drugs, and strip clubs. Gone forever. This is the last row and we’re done.”

  “I’m tired.”

  “You can go to the house if you want.”

  “No.”

  “OK.”

  “Can we let the pigs out now?”

  “No, we still have to let these potatoes dry and then we have to bag them and move them to the cellar.” Listing more than three things on a to-do list always pisses her off but he’s continued to do it anyway, partly because he takes pleasure in pissing her off. “Your mom wants to move some of the electric fence over so they don’t break down the garden fence again.”

  Her brow furrows and she crosses her arms over her chest, then just as quickly her face relaxes and she loosens her grip on herself. His lists don’t mean anything will ever get done. She knows that as well as he does. “Are we still getting a puppy?”