The Rain

by Joseph Turkot

  More and more of the people we knew, some of them loved, started to turn to people for food. What else could they do? There’s no more fish there. The sea’s too brown now. So the talk started, all of it based on some old broadcast. Broadcast? Russell cuts in. Yea, something coming over the radio. My eyes glue to Ernest’s face. The idea of a radio signal triggers the thought that we have a radio, taken from the face eater boats we just passed. I don’t butt in though, I wait. He goes on: It was a looped recording, and it was about the Rainless Land. Russell is fidgeting and he coughs. Ernest pauses and looks him over. He’s making an assessment of his health, I know. I’ve been doing the same thing for weeks. Maybe he needs to know how easily he could take us out, if he has to. How weak we’ve really become. That our guns are just props holding us up so the wind and rain doesn’t blow us away. But he’s made it clear that face eaters would have eaten a dog before taking it on a sea voyage. Long before doing that. So he’s made up his mind that we’re not the enemy. And maybe we’re the same.

  What did the recording say? Dusty asks, finally his attention shifting from Clint. Ernest explains that it was just a broken voice, in and out of static, claiming that there was a safe haven, somewhere in Colorado. It wasn’t raining there, said the radio voice, Ernest goes on. Russell can’t contain it any longer and he says Leadville. Ernest doesn’t seem to know the name, or at least it doesn’t mean anything to him. That’s your Rainless Land, Russell fills in. We don’t know, says Ernest. That recording had been going for years. But a lot of us there, in Cooke City, got to talking. Talking about our options. There’s nothing left of the law in all of America, you know? he says. So the idea for a grand expedition started to eat at everyone. It took us about two years to get the boats together. And all the supplies. We had—what did we have when we first set out, Clint? All eyes turn to him, whose silent gaze is finally upset as he looks up in thought. Finally he retrieves a number. Fourteen I think, he says. Ernest tells us that fourteen ships left, staggered some of them, together some of them. Resilience had five other ships with her. Resilience? Russell asks. Our ship, says Ernest. A good crew of men. Ernest rocks back again and starts to fidget under his plastic suit. You all left in a hurry without suits? he asks us. We’re not ready to answer though, because we don’t know what he’s looking for under his shirt. But it’s just a tiny wooden tube, a pipe. He waits for us to answer, as if he wants us to now tell our own story before he’s finished with his. He takes out a small bag and a box of matches and puts them on the table. His eyes fall down to stuff his pipe with tobacco. He lights his pipe and then he looks again at Russell, waiting.

  Where are all the other ships? Russell asks. Ernest draws from his pipe and then tells us about a gale. A waterspout gale. We lost them, he says. Monster seas. It was black as night, and the swells were crashing. Couldn’t see them by the next morning. They might have reached the Rainless Land for all we know. More likely they’re on the bottom.

  I want to press him because I can’t believe that all those ships could disappear in a storm. One or two makes sense, but not that many. Ernest is reeling in thought, like a sadness of thought, as he smokes. Russell understands and waits. I look back at Clint, expecting his blue eyes to be on me again, but they’re not. His eyes are closed now. There is something painful in his mind, but I can’t tell what. Memories. The bane of people with hope. At least if they’re not stored properly, out of the imagination where they can return as real as the day they happened. I’ve learned to ignore most memories when they come up, because all of mine are about the East, where it was better. Where we should have stayed. Finally, Ernest goes on.

  So we couldn’t do anything else but sail on, right? We’re making a go of it anyway. The three of us. Keep her flying south. See what we find. Ernest is done, even I can tell. He won’t tell us anymore. And he makes it clear that it’s our turn with a fixed and blank look. He grunts as if to say that that’s the reason we’re all sitting here anyway—to exchange information. What we know. So that some kind of hope can be kept alive, despite how painful such a thing is.

  Russell summarizes our journey. Dusty listens intently, learning about us for the first time. Russell only spends a moment on each city. How the water rose, the flash floods started coming all the time. The chaos of panicking millions. He just tells about how much worse it got: Philadelphia, Pittsburg, Indianapolis, the Sea Queen Marie, Sioux Falls, Rapid City, Wyoming, and he stops at Blue City. He doesn’t talk about Blue City. He knows Dusty is hanging on every word. Russell tells our entire lives in the span of five minutes, and he comes to the point of Leadville. It’s the same as your Rainless Land, he says.

  “So you’ve come all this way for the same thing?” Ernest says. “And come a much greater distance than we have.” Ernest asks about the law in the East. He asks if there was any. Russell tells him there hasn’t been law since two years after the rain started. Ernest tells him it’s the same everywhere then. Then a great silence comes into the room, because all the information that we were hoping for, and that they were hoping for, seems like dead weight. It all amounts to nothing. Nothing more concrete than what we’d each already known. And all of the sudden the thought seems as obvious to everyone else as it is to me—that we’re completely useless to each other. But Ernest says something that knocks me back, and I’m hit harder even by Russell’s reply to it.

  Ernest just leans back in his chair, like he has been doing every few minutes, takes another smoke, and looks at each of us. So then it’s settled, isn’t it? You won’t get far in that little boat. The seas are rising. It’s getting colder. His meaning is clear to me, and I see Clint react in surprise, as if the underlying suggestion is as unexpected to him as it is to us. Dusty misunderstands, and thinks that Ernest means to gut us too, clean out our insides and throw it in a barrel for fish bait. He moves toward the rifle. Join us, Ernest clarifies. Dusty stops and realizes. It all sounds like a trap still, in part of my mind, but I haven’t heard a man talk the way Ernest talks in a long time. He sounds like Russell used to sound on board the Sea Queen Marie. Filled with optimism despite the rain, the exposure, the cold, the face eaters. More than just gnawing pressure. More real than anyone had sounded in Blue City except for Dusty. He means what he says. And Russell understands this immediately. He says we have things on our boat. Gas, food, medicine, a stove. He forgets what else we have—what they missed on the face eater boats—the map, the radio.

  Ernest tells Clint to help us get everything that can’t be lost on board the Resilience. We should keep both of the boats, he says. We don’t know what we’re up against in the South do we? A man from the North and a man from the East.

  I want to ask about the strong currents, waterspout alley, and the fact we’re heading right for it. But there’s no time. Russell is up right away, following Clint back up into the rain. Hold on a moment, says Ernest. He stands at last from his chair and walks to the corner of the room where shelves are lined with gear and barrels. He fetches a rain suit and tosses it to Russell. Standing at the stairs, Russell looks at him and just nods. He can’t say thanks. We haven’t shown them our worth yet. And that’s the way of things. Nothing comes for free. But he puts on the plastic suit anyway and heads out into the rain. Come on, Russell calls, and I know he’s saying it to me. There’re more here, hold on, Ernest says, and he walks back over and tosses Dusty and me dirty plastic rain suits of our own. They’ll be too big I think, but they’ll keep the saltwater welts off. Then he disappears up into the rain, leaving us alone. Complete trust. Dusty and I look at each other, and Voley stands at attention, ready to chase after everyone who went up the stairs.

  My body screams at me that it’s starving, and I wonder if Dusty is thinking about food too, with how worn his face looks. But it’s something else. I can get that radio to work. If he has batteries, I can get it to work, he says as he pulls on his plastic suit. I believe him for some reason. Ernest’s optimism is contagious. He’d acted sure we’re going to be okay with
out ever saying it. It was just the tone of his voice. And I saw it filling Russell up. We’re so close to Leadville. And it’s starting to infect me too. Do you think that recording is still going? I ask. Dusty tells me that in Utah there was never anything coming over the radio. I spent days listening, he says. But nothing ever came on. But who knows he says? And then he gets up and leads Voley up into the rain.

  I pause and look around the room. The warmth is with me again, against all odds. We’re still going. I pull over my plastic suit and I’m struck blind by a memory. My mom. I feel like I can remember her for a second. It’s strange, because I know I don’t have any memories of her. I was too little when she died. It’s like the flooding memory is just a feeling. Family. But it’s produced a face I feel like I recognize. It’s still there, deep in my mind. The idea of her love. That I had a mom once.

  I see her there very plainly. She’s warm and right next to me and gently touching my hair. I love you, she says. And then I shut it off, or it shuts down on its own, because it’s all made up. Delirium from hunger and fatigue. You have to stop cracking, I tell myself. I climb the stairs into the cold again. I know I’ve been slipping, ever since I met Dusty. I haven’t told Russell, but he’s guessed it. I know he has. And the problem is that he’s cracking too. We’re both getting too soft when there’s nothing to prove we’re any closer to hope than we’ve been in years. It’s all an illusion, I have to remind myself. And then I help get what’s needed off the boat and we tie it up nice and strong and Ernest calls the other member of his crew in from the wheelhouse and we eat more fish than I thought were even alive in the great brown sea.

  Days start to slip by, nearly a week. It’s the longest time we’ve had company since the Sea Queen.

  Russell is up in the wheelhouse as usual with Ernest and his men. Dusty and I are under the deck tinkering with radio again. It’s the same thing—no life, when all of a sudden, static erupts out of a speaker. I got it! shouts Dusty. Voley chases his tail in a circle and barks, like he’s congratulating him, kicking bad batteries that roll across the planking. No one above hears us and no one comes down.

  We move in close and bump into each other. It’s the first time we’ve touched since we were under the tent on the boat together. I move back but we still huddle close and listen in. The radio is crackling, in and out, but I can’t help but feel like someone is suddenly going to start talking. But nothing happens. It’s just static. But at least it’s on. We wait forever and nothing comes. Finally Dusty says he wants to conserve the batteries. These were the last ones I had to check—there are no more, he says. I think about the tent we left on the bank of Blue City island. Batteries in there, brand new. But all that has probably been blown in a mudslide to the bottom of the ocean with our canoe by now. Dusty shuts it off.

  I look around the room. We’ve got a couple bunks that we sleep in, tucked in the corner. Ernest and Russell have taken to each other with great enthusiasm, discussing Leadville and poring over the map. Looking for the best path in through the Rockies so we’re not grounded on shoals. Ernest was upset he’d overlooked so much good gear on the face eater boats. We weren’t intending to slow down for anything, he’d said. But a map and a radio and a gun was a big oversight. He was quite upset about it when we brought it aboard and showed him.

  Everyone calls Ernest’s other crewmate Clemmy. So I do too, if I have to get his attention. He is quiet, and acts like Ernest, but with fewer words. I can tell he’s battling something inside, some kind of loss. Just like Clint. Russell thinks they lost something in the gale. Maybe their families. But I wouldn’t dare ask Clemmy. And I don’t like to talk to Clint at all.

  I’m still trying to prevent the feelings of bonding, but it’s become very hard. The crew is filling a void of some kind that I shouldn’t need filled. Dusty has had more trouble than me. I can tell he doesn’t like Clint at all. He thinks there’s something going on with him. I think it might have to do with Clint always looking at me. Like he’s attracted to me. Russell said something to him once, when we were trading shifts steering the motor boat. Every day we have to go down and get on it so that it doesn’t get dragged sideways against the swells and slow the Resilience down.

  It had been my shift. I was climbing down the rope ladder and Russell saw Clint watching me. I couldn’t quite make out their exchange. But when I turned back to look, I could tell as clear as day what was happening. It was over his stares. Russell was tearing into him. I saw Ernest walk over and I almost panicked. I didn’t have a gun on me. I didn’t know where Ernest’s loyalties would fall. But Ernest went up and ripped right into Clint, just like Russell had been doing. He seems to understand something—they both seem to understand something that I don’t. It’s not that I think he’s evil, or strange, but that he’s attracted to me. I’m sure I’ve felt it before from men. But I can’t be so sure that I doubt Russell’s judgment over mine. At least with Clint. I think about Dusty, and how Russell never shows that same sentiment. And there’s something about Voley—the way he acts around Clint. He won’t just go up to him, looking for attention, the way he does with the rest of us. For some reason, he keeps his distance. But when all of us are together, it’s often Clint that Voley watches.

  I’m looking at our bunks when Russell comes down the stairs. He hasn’t coughed in days. He’s rejuvenated by the fish. That’s what he says it is, anyway. And he says he can’t wait to start running again. As soon as we hit land. Leadville. I’m going to run every day. And that’s what he’s come down to talk to us about.

  “According to Clemmy, we’re going to be there tomorrow. Leadville. You hear me Tan?” he says. He holds his smile for a long time and looks at me, and then, he just rushes in. Years of struggle are in his hug. He’s brimming with it. I feel it flow through me. I think of all of our long shots, and the terrible and endless moving, just to make it through each day. All of it finally coming to an end. He pushes me back and kisses my forehead. Then he lets go and turns to Dusty.

  We still haven’t told Dusty about what happened on Blue City. I don’t think he’d try to turn us around anymore if he knew, but neither of us will tell him. And we don’t talk about it either, it’s just an unspoken decision, a psychic understanding between Russell and me. It has to be kept secret. Our own ugly secret.

  Russell extends his hand, out toward the boy who tried to kill him. He keeps it hanging until Dusty finally takes it. It’s like Dusty has somehow started to let the optimism of Leadville get to him too. They shake hands. Both of them smiling, and Dusty starts to laugh. He’s laughing for the first time, and I hear the beautiful sound and drink it in—it’s relief. I want to squeeze him, and to take him to the bunk. But I can’t. It’s all too overwhelming. And I think for a moment of a startling insight about our drastic turn of fortune—the man above, Ernest, must be Poseidon himself. He has to be.

  Russell once told me the story of the Old Gods. They could come down from their great mountain, even though theirs wasn’t covered in rain. And they could appear as people. They could help whomever they saw fit. It was some sort of divine justice. If you made good choices, you were taken care of. But Russell never said he believed in that—it was just how those stories went. But somehow, in this moment of happiness, I think about it, and it makes sense. I half believe in it. We’re being repaid for all the months we’ve gone without sinking to the worst levels of human behavior. We’ve kept some sense of right and wrong, and that’s the veneer, and everything it’s built around. And now, this ship, this crew, it’s all here to reward us for how we’ve endured everything—the rain, the wet, the cold, the empty driving force that compels us to live despite the hanging question that we don’t know what for. Even if we got to Leadville, what would it be for?

  And I realize—surely it’s for this. A sense of family. Community. Love. Being here for each other. And all the armor that’s helped us survive, as we reach the doorstep of Leadville, is thrown out the window. We’re heading towards something other than Lea
dville—we’re heading toward being real live people again. I kneel down next to Voley as Russell tells Dusty he’s proud of him for sticking with us. He doesn’t go into anything more detailed than that. He just goes quiet and looks at us both. Then he reveals it, what he’s really been holding back from us. You ready to see it? he says. And we’re completely ruined because we get it—they’ve spotted land, there’s land up there and no one’s told us. We’re down here toying with the radio, and the reality of the dream is in their vision above. I can’t get mad though, I just run up the stairs past him. He laughs. So does Dusty, but he’s chasing at my heels. And Voley somehow gets there first.

  There it is—the vast range of the Rocky Mountains. I don’t have to ask. Everywhere in front of us are the spiking tops and vast tabletops of the mountain range. Many of them appear high above the water, and it looks like the rain sea is much lower than it was in Wyoming. I can’t be sure until we’re closer, but I think there’s more land than I’ve seen since Indianapolis. Ernest comes out of the wheelhouse and into the rain. It’s so much colder than it’s ever been. The water slaps my face, but I don’t pay it any attention. I can’t. The view has paralyzed me more than any freezing water could. And I throw my arms around Dusty in a fit of joy, and Ernest smiles. He’s smoking his pipe. He’s a man of endless fish and tobacco. Poseidon himself. He smiles and tells us what we know—Over that pass, somewhere back there—and he points to nothing I can see—is Leadville.

  Russell has had plenty of time to work over Ernest. And Ernest is sold on Leadville now too. Both of them have given up the idea that it’s not raining there, because we’re too close now for that to be true. But it doesn’t matter. The sight of these mountains is enough to squash the last doubts. The matter of the face eaters—whether they had been coming or going from Leadville, is no longer debated. It’s a downer, a remnant of the hopeless past. The lawless, reckless life of gloom. Ernest and Russell are on the same page, and they’ll have none of it anymore. Dusty turns to me, apprehensive because Russell has come up behind us. And somehow, my love of Russell has changed. And his love of me is completely clear to me for the first time: He puts his hand on my shoulder. And his other goes to Dusty’s. He understands.