The End of the End of Everything

by Dale Bailey

  “Do you believe in angels?” Charlie asked.

  “I don’t know,” Tom said, and then Charlie slept.

  The truck jolted and the load creaked around them. Charlie began gently to snore, and Tom lay still, brooding over memories of Pap and the mother his half-imagined tales had summoned into the dusky air. Tom was dozing himself when Charlie stirred and flung an arm across his chest, spilling the chain from his open palm. Tom reached out to retrieve it. He held it at arm’s length, watching the chain unwind itself, the locket sparking in the dim. He eased out from under the boy. Charlie whimpered in his sleep and Tom smoothed the hair from the boy’s damp forehead. Then he slipped out to the tailgate of the truck and propped himself against the wooden slats that anchored the fluttering tarp. With the full sun of midday upon his face, Tom pried the locket open. Here in the light, the photo was clearer. Lily Overton—a rare and smiling Lily Overton he had not known before and could hardly have imagined ever existed—gazed up at him from within. He could not say how long he sat there like that, only that the truck braking and pulling off the road startled him back into himself. In the gloom under the wind-snapped tarp, Charlie stirred to wakefulness.

  “Tom?”

  “I’m right here, Charlie,” Tom said, thumbing closed the boy’s locket and slipping it into the pocket of his trousers.

  The truck shuddered to a stop. Tom swung himself over the tailgate into a howling chaos of wind. As he reached up for Charlie, Overton appeared beside him. “In the cab!” he cried over the wind. “Get in the cab!” Without thinking, without pausing to ask why, Tom hurried the boy before him, and lifted Charlie into the truck. Lily Overton huddled against the passenger-side door. Tom snatched a glance over his shoulder. Wind whipped out of the east, driving before it a billowing cloud of black earth that towered a mile into the sky. Grit lashed at Tom’s eyes. He could taste it in his throat and clogging his nostrils, yet still he stared back at the oncoming cloud with a kind of paralyzed horror. He might have stood there until it rolled over him had Overton not shoved him hard—Tom cracked his head a glancing blow on the doorframe—into the cab. Overton followed, struggling to slam the door against the wind. The truck rocked with the impact.

  The storm hurtled down upon them. The world beyond the windows disappeared into darkness. Fingers of wind scrabbled at the crevices around windows and doors. Dust swirled in the air. Half-blinded, Tom dragged his bandana over his mouth and nose. Powder settled on his face and hands, working its way stinging into his eyes and between his lips, where it tasted gritty on his tongue. The contained stink of unwashed bodies filled the air. The battering ram of the wind shrieked as it hurled itself against the truck. Charlie wept and huddled against Tom, burying his face in the boy’s ribs and gripping his fingers until the pressure made them ache. And through all the long storm—fifteen minutes? an hour? it felt like longer, it felt like forever—the locket burned in Tom’s pocket like a flaming heart.

  And then, as suddenly as it had begun, the storm blew itself out. One by one, they stumbled forth. A stark wasteland met their eyes, gray and flat as far as the eye could see. A diamond of sunlight flashed from the metal carcass of another truck, maybe a mile in the distance. Otherwise, nothing. Looking out across the waste, Tom imagined Pap, doggedly seeding a desert earth that had once thronged with stalks of succulent green corn, as if somehow, through sheer blind determination, he could summon it all back: the land that had withered beneath his feet, the wife buried beneath the weathered wooden cross in the back yard, the son he had lost. Recalling it, Tom fingered the silver oval in his front pocket, and a knot welled up in his throat. He rubbed burning grit from his eyes and surveyed the truck’s wreckage: metal dimpled with a thousand tiny pits, tires half buried in sand, tarp torn and dangling from a broken spar.

  “What now, Frank?” Lily Overton said, her voice rising. “What now?”

  And Tom saw Charlie digging in his pocket for comfort.

  Frank Overton spat brown dust. “Same as always, Lil. We push on.”

  Laughing humorlessly, she turned away.

  Charlie though, Charlie was not so strong. “Mama,” he said, “my locket, it’s gone—”

  “Oh, Charlie, honey,” Lily said, kneeling to look him in the eye. She gripped his shoulders, drew him into her embrace, and scanned the sea of dust that stretched lone and level as far as she could see; she imagined her son staggering through the wind that had swept down upon them to carry it all away—everything they had ever loved or dreamed of—and she knew that Frank was right: the only thing to do was move forward into the bleak mystery of the future. You moved on. There was nothing else to do.

  And Tom? Listening, he flushed, knowing that this was his opportunity to return the necklace. Yet there was something in him that could not surrender it, not now and maybe never, not even to this boy he had come to love as he would have loved the brother he’d never had. There was something in Lily Overton’s smile, something in her eyes, gazing up at him from the tiny portrait, that gave him hope, a reason to go on, to keep following the path his feet had laid out for him.

  Lily mended the tarp while Overton and Tom repaired the spar that had held it taut and Charlie grieved the loss of that lone, precious thing that his mother had given him to clasp and comfort him through the long prairie nights. Light faded from the sky. Trucks crept past, grim men unsmiling at their wheels, and they did not stop to help, for what help could anyone provide when even the land itself had been stripped clean of sanctuary? Then the hard business of dislodging the truck from the sand. Lily took the wheel, goosing the accelerator. Charlie watched as the boy and the man took places at the rear, shoulder to metal, and rocked the battered vehicle in its ruts until at last they worked it free.

  Tom stumbled to his knees when it gave and fishtailed onto the road, where runners of dust snaked across the packed earth. Frank Overton laughed and clapped him on the back. Tom wiped sweat from his forehead. He wound the necklace in his pocket about his probing fingers.

  It was full dark by then.

  They camped alone, huddled around a niggardly fire Overton built from wood he had stored away against such a day. Charlie wept himself to sleep, and the boy lay long awake as the fire burned itself into embers. When even Overton slept, he dug from his pocket once again the silver chain and wound it tight around his hand. With a dirt-encrusted thumbnail, he pried open the tarnished locket and squinted down at the tiny photograph there, which he could not see in the darkness except with his mind’s eye. At last, tucking the locket away, he slept, unaware that he was not the only one awake.

  Lily Overton, curled close against the fire with her arm tucked around her boy, had watched him through slitted eyes slip the chain from his pocket. She’d seen its dull glimmer by the glow of the dying fire, and had known it for what it was, or had anyway suspected, and felt course through her something stronger—something stranger—than the resentment alone that should by all rights have been hers: a sorrow deep as rivers that she had lived to see such a world that had such children in it.

  Lily never spoke of it, not even to Overton. Why the boy should want the locket, she could not say; but her own child looked upon him with such boundless adoration that she would not deny him that light in an otherwise dark and hopeless season. So she held her peace, and when he slipped free the locket in the late morning hours to stare down into the portrait which by the dying embers he could not see but only imagine, she watched with half-lidded eyes and wondered. By day, for Charlie’s sake, she managed to keep things as they had been between them—distant, known but unnamed.

  Time slipped on in the eternal rhythm of the road—seventy-five miles at a stretch, a hundred on a good day, as much as the wheezing old truck could bear—three days, four, five, she could not say how many. Only the talk of the men around their midnight fires changed. Angels were on every lip now, luring them onward, and Tom felt once again that familiar itching in his feet. Yet something held him back, something he dared not speak alo
ud even in the privacy of his own mind: a sense of something impending, like the crackle of air in the moments before a storm. So he was not surprised when it happened. None of them were surprised, not truly: it had the sense of something long ordained, an inescapable doom that had all along been hurtling toward them.

  For Overton, at the wheel that afternoon, it began as thickening traffic. He gained upon the truck in front of him until they were creeping along, hood to bumper, and the car a mile or more behind them closed the distance. Overton glanced at his wife, squinted through smoke at the windshield, took a long last drag, and pitched his cigarette out the window. Soon they were barely moving at all. And then they weren’t. That was how it began for Tom and Charlie—with the long, slow swing of gravity as the truck braked to a stop, stirring them to wakefulness. They hunkered down at the wooden tailgate, splinters digging into their fingers, and stared out at the sunlit afternoon: cars and trucks piled high with the salvage of a hundred broken lives, idling by the dozen in the hard-packed dirt road or parked helter-skelter along the weedy shoulders or abandoned altogether in the fields beyond. Sunlight flashed off metal, the smell of exhaust hung in the air, and where there should have been noise—the blat of horns, the cries of frustrated drivers—an eerie silence prevailed. Men stood in the crook of open doors, looking west into the baking sky. Women stood beside them, hands slanted across their eyes. Somewhere a child was saying, over and over, in a whisper that carried in all that endless silence, “What is it, mother? What is it?” And even here the great migration never ceased. Staring soon gave way to walking: entire families, small children clutching at their mothers’ hands, every one of them silent and entranced, blank faces turned to the sky as they wound among the cars, the noon sun bleaching the world of color. There was no hurry—no one ran or cried aloud. There was only a blind imperative, as if in this, like so many other things, they had no choice.

  Overton turned off the engine, and met them as Tom and Charlie came around the truck. “What is it, Tom?” the boy said. “What is it?”

  But Tom, if he heard the boy at all, did not respond. He only gazed at the horizon, where dark specks hurtled upward into a porcelain sky. It could not be, Tom thought, so much his father’s son. But his feet had a mind of their own. Overton, standing by the open door of the truck, took his shoulder—

  “Tom,” he said.

  —and for a heartbeat they stood like that, man and boy. Overton’s words echoed inside Tom’s head—It was an angel of death that took him—and an instant of blank horror seized him. Charlie hugged his waist, weeping. Even Lily gazed at him across the hood of the truck. And then the horror passed.

  “Don’t,” Overton said. “Please, Tom, wait—”

  “I have to, don’t you see?”

  “We’ll go together, then,” Overton said, as if he’d known it would come to this in the end, and so they did, the four of them, wending their way through the maze of cars, struck dumb with an irresistible compulsion to see it, to know it for themselves, angels of death or angels of light or no angels at all. Others walked beside them, men and women, their faces haggard with care, and children, too, boys on the very precipice of manhood (or already plunged over the other side), and girls ripening into the fullness of their bodies at last, silent, their expressionless faces turned to the sky, where, ever more clearly, the dark specks resolved themselves into human figures flung up into the vault of heaven. Their boots scuffed the earth. Their breath labored in their lungs. Their tongues moistened chapped lips, and somewhere a woman—no two women, or three, or more—wept. Charlie clung to Tom’s hand as they ranged ahead. Overton and Lily followed, and what thoughts came into their minds—if any thoughts at all—none of them could say: only the relentless magnetism of the west and a blind, white roar inside their heads.

  Gradually, the snarled traffic fell behind them. The throb of abandoned engines faded. The stench of gas dissipated. They emerged into a belt of treeless prairie, wind-swept and hot. Beyond it, a crowd had gathered, a ragged crescent a hundred strong or more, Tom couldn’t say for sure. More people than he’d ever seen in one place anyway, as though three or four or ten of the gypsy encampments had piled in on top of one another, all of them silent, all of them staring blankly ahead. Tom shrugged his way among them, the boy clutching his leg now, and they parted to let him pass, until at last he drew up against the far edge. If the Overtons followed he did not know and did not think to care.

  Upward they looked, upward every one, heads craned slack-jawed to the sky, their faces blank as eggs, scrubbed free of kindness or humanity, except that some of them were weeping. Beyond them—twenty feet or thirty, maybe more—a great crevasse had cloven the prairie. Tom could hardly imagine the agony of stone, the mighty crack of earth as the continent tore itself asunder. Two or three vehicles, doors flung open to the air, stood askew upon the plain where they must have slammed on the brakes when the earth split and the road crumbled and plunged into the abyss.

  Tom might have paused there—it was like a great hand had scrawled an invisible line in the dust beyond which few dared venture—yet something drew him on. He could feel it beating in his breast, this blind imperative, he could feel it itching in his restless feet. Kneeling, he peeled Charlie from his leg. Looking up, he saw that the Overtons had drawn close behind him.

  “Go to your mother now, Charlie,” he said, and the boy snatched at him, and drew Tom close against him.

  “I won’t,” he sobbed. “Not you, too,” and once again Overton’s words echoed in Tom’s mind: It was an angel of death that took him.

  “Go,” Tom said, standing to thrust the boy away.

  “I won’t, I won’t let you go.”

  And Tom: “Go, I hate you. I hate you, don’t you see?”

  The boy reeled, sobbing, and Tom stood. He met Lily Overton’s pale blue eyes and turned away and the chasm drew him in, thirty feet, and twenty, and there he paused, gathering his courage. A great wind, smelling of dry and ancient stone, shrieked out of the frigid heart of the planet. It flattened his pants against his legs and pressed his shirt rippling against his torso. And now, looking the length of the crevasse, he saw other lone sojourners approach the pit. Some fled back to the safety of the crowd. Still others hesitated as he had and crept closer, step by cautious step. And still others—three, no four, five, six, and more, how they fixed and fascinated him—stepped to the edge, hesitated, and hurled themselves into the abyss. The wind flung them skyward in silence, their bodies tumbling in silent apotheosis, smaller and smaller until they ceased to be human at all, ceased even to be dark specks against the bone-colored canopy of heaven. His hand crept into his pocket and seized the necklace. He felt the terrible gravity of the pit, and found that somehow—his feet would have their way—he stood at the crumbling lip of the void. Wind scoured his face and tore at his clothes, and a fierce longing sprang up within him: to leap out into the screaming air, to step out of this hard, dry world and let it take him up into the mysteries beyond—

  Then a voice came to him, a woman’s voice, a thin and paltry thing in that screaming wind—

  “Charlie!”

  Tom snatched a glance over his shoulder and saw the boy wrench free of his mother’s grip and hurtle toward him. He crashed into Tom, seizing his leg, and for a moment Tom thought that they were both going to stagger over the edge, no longer bound to earth, and plunge forever into the sky. An awful image possessed him—of Charlie’s terror-stricken face as that cold, howling wind tore him away from Tom’s grasping fingers and sent them spinning skyward, each to their separate heaven. What he thought of then was dozing away those lazy afternoons in the truck, with the small boy’s sweaty head on his shoulder. What he thought of was that spendthrift flow of words, his mother’s sole gift to him, and his gift alone to Charlie, wrested by imagination from the colored plates in the family Bible. What he thought of was angels.

  Tom dragged the boy away from the abyss—three feet, six, ten and more—and kneeling before him
, dug out the locket. He pressed it into Charlie’s open palm, the silver chain whipping upright in the wind, and closed the small fingers about it. Then, step by step, Tom Carver’s feet carried him away from the abyss, beyond the reach of that shrieking wind, to Charlie’s waiting parents. Lily Overton went down on her knees to accept the boy into her embrace. She hooked her chin over his frail shoulder, and met Tom’s eyes.

  “Tom,” she said.

  Eating at the

  End-of-the-World

  Café

  She’d seen them once, the dead and damned, hooded blind, their hands bound at their backs. She’d seen blue lightning leap sizzling from electric prods as gray men in blue uniforms harried them stumbling down from enormous canvas-covered army trucks. She’d heard their cries, their moans, the shouts and the mocking laughter of the men in blue. She’d smelled the stench of their roasting flesh.

  That had been her first night at the café. Afterward, in the ashen rain, Eleanor had gotten turned around somehow, missed the train station. When the fence loomed up before her—fourteen feet high, topped with coils of razor wire, and bound at the distant corner by the skeletal shadow of a sniper tower, the smoking red haze of the pit beyond—a fist closed around her heart. Recoiling in horror, she’d turned away and fled for miles through night-plunged streets, tears streaking her face. When a taxi hove up out of the dark, she’d flagged it down, blind to the expense; she just wanted to get away from that place, it didn’t matter how much it cost. But the heat inside the car couldn’t warm her and the aimless chatter of the cabbie provided no comfort. She resolved to give up the job, even if it meant that she and Anna both starved, but even then she knew that she would not. She could not. There were no other jobs, not for the likes of her, anyway, and so she resolved instead to forget what she had seen, to put it out of her mind forever.