Every molecule of air on earth has its part to play in the whole. Myriad life forms dance in what appears, to human eyes, to be empty air.
Air is not empty.
Air is alive.
The angels of the air sing the songs of the spheres.
21
A hot wind was blowing the White People away. In the gathering silence, the Real People met to dance the Ghost Dance and their dead came alive again. Their land was repeopled by ghosts.
One of the ghosts was George Clement Burningfeather, who went to the reservation because he had no better place to go.
Throughout his life George had been suspended between two worlds. His name was indicative of his dilemma. His mother liked to claim that her paternal ancestors came over on the Mayflower, which was a lie. The Clements had been in New England for generations, however, as had her maternal ancestors, the Murphys. George’s mother didn’t talk about the Murphys very much. They were hard-working Irish farm folk and not suitably patrician from her point of view.
George’s father was also a New Englander, but of considerably older stock. He was a relict of the all-but-extinguished tribe of Pennacook Indians, and when he had had too much to drink he claimed to be a prince of the tribe.
When she had had too much to drink at a cocktail party in Boston, Samantha Clement met him and believed him.
She thought he was exotic, and was soon showing him off to her friends in Manchester and Concord, expounding on the romance and hinting at the virility of the noble savage.
In point of fact, Harry Burningfeather was neither noble nor savage, and once his virility was blunted by familiarity, he tired of the white woman who had seduced him into marriage. He skipped out for parts unknown, leaving her pregnant with George.
Although the birth certificate said Burningfeather, Samantha raised her son to be George Clement. Period. She reverted to her maiden name and stripped the house of anything that could possibly remind her of her Indian interlude.
Except George.
Who had a questioning mind.
One look in a mirror was enough to assure the boy that his Amerindian features came from somewhere other than Mayflower stock. When he started going to school, other children who had listened to their parents’ gossip were happy to tell him about his origins.
He came home crying, dirt-smeared, with a bloody nose and a black eye, and vehemently informed his mother, “I’m George Burningfeather and you shoulda told me!”
Samantha tried to spank it out of him. But there was a stubborn streak in the boy. The more she spanked, the more Indian he became. When her back was turned he sneaked into her room and used her lipstick to streak his face with warpaint.
From that point on, there was war between Samantha and her son. She provided him with a good education, smart clothes, a decent secondhand car when he entered college, and an icy reception whenever he was foolish enough to appear at home with his father’s features stamped on his face.
Inevitably, he escaped as soon as he could.
George Clement Burningfeather attempted to escape to the stars.
Metaphorically speaking.
But by the time George graduated, the space program as such had run out of impulsion. With NASA as his goal, George had acquired a thorough grounding in the sciences, but no one was sending manned missions into space anymore. There were too many problems demanding attention on earth.
George had to settle for being an earthbound meteorologist, his only extraterrestrial explorations taking place among the wind currents and isobars in the atmosphere. His job was to try to figure out why the climate was going belly-up. Metaphorically speaking.
“We’ll lick this thing, of course,” his immediate superior assured him. George hated that term. It implied that he was T. Dosterschill’s immediate inferior, which he was not. Except on payday.
“There’s nothing science can’t accomplish,” Dosterschill frequently insisted with a bland arrogance that set George’s teeth on edge. “Improved recycling techniques, improved substitutes for toxic chemicals. We’ll get a handle on this. We have to. No one’s willing to give up the way of life technology’s made possible. Hell, I don’t intend to start keeping my beer cold in a wooden icebox with a cake of ice either, know what I mean?”
George knew what he meant. What George did not know was how to make mankind’s tardy efforts have any meaningful impact on a problem that was rapidly escalating. Recycling was not enough. Neither was cloud seeding nor improved methods of nuclear-waste disposal nor writing endless papers on the Greenhouse Effect.
Nothing science could do made an appreciable difference.
When the question was of academic interest only and there were very few academics left to ponder it, George went to the reservation.
It wasn’t a Pennacook reservation. There weren’t enough Pennacooks left to need one. It was simply the nearest Indian reservation George could discover through a cursory search in the deserted library, but it would do.
“Fuck you, Dosterschill,” he said the day he hung up his identity badge for the last time in the echoing locker room. Dosterschill wasn’t there to hear him. He had been one of the earliest casualties in their particular department.
The two black men, Hill and Webber, were still there, as was scrawny little Gerry Gomez, the one they called Whitesox. A couple of the women too—Mary Antonini and the blond with the long legs, the one the guys never believed was a natural blond. She was still at her desk when George walked for the last time toward the big glass double doors. “I won’t be back,” he called to her over his shoulder.
“Have a nice day,” she said. The words sounded foolish but there was nothing else to say.
Given all the electronic information available, finding a reservation had been easy. Finding a bus that was still running in that direction was the hard part.
Finding any public transportation at all had become very hard indeed. But George didn’t want to drive a car. He felt it would be curiously inappropriate to take a car with him in his flight to his chosen world.
All his life, George had had a strong sense of what was appropriate.
The bus rattled down an empty superhighway between expanses of parched earth. Heat waves shimmered on the pavement ahead. When George boarded the bus, there were two other passengers, but they soon got off. George moved up to sit behind the driver and stared over his shoulder at the mirages. If the driver saw them, he didn’t say.
He didn’t say much of anything, though George tried several times to start a conversation. At last the bus driver growled, “Look, fella, you got your troubles and I got mine, okay? I don’t wanna hear yours, and I don’t wanna talk about mine.”
What happened to the friendly, courteous driver on the TV ads? George wondered.
For that matter, what happened to TV?
Not enough people around to produce television anymore. Not enough people to watch it, either, or buy the products it tried to cram down their throats, the glossy, elaborately packaged, outrageously trivial necessities that people had come to believe they could not live without.
Gone with the wind, George thought. The few of us who remain don’t need the tube anymore.
The few who remain. Myself and the bus driver.
The great empty yawned beyond the smeared windows of the bus.
At last the vehicle shuddered to a halt. “Your stop,” the driver said.
Shouldering his duffel bag, George got out. He hadn’t brought much with him. A closetful of suits he would never need again had been left behind, along with the stereo and the CD and a superb collection of jazz. And an avalanche of polyethylene grocery sacks trapped between the refrigerator and the wall.
In George’s duffel bag were two pair of clean jeans, T-shirts, socks, underwear, a Levi’s jacket, a pair of cutoffs, a canteen, a compass from L. L. Bean, a Swiss army knife, matches, a dog-eared copy of The Martian Chronicles and another of Tomorrow the Stars, a small cache of emergency rations, a flashligh
t with spare batteries, a dop kit containing toiletries, and a string of rosary beads.
The rosary had been passed down through the generations of his mother’s undiscussed Murphy ancestors, then buried at the bottom of Samantha Clement’s cedar chest, out of sight and mind. When she died and George was going through her things, he found it and pocketed it on an obscure impulse.
He had briefly considering putting a packet of condoms in his duffel bag, then laughed ruefully.
How ironic, he thought. AIDS and contraception have both become irrelevant.
For a while he played a dark game with himself. Spot the Irrelevancies. Mink ranches. Renewal notices for magazine subscriptions. Sunlamps. Politicians’ promises.
Insurance.
The broken line down the center of the highway.
When the game became too depressing, he stopped.
He stood on the heat-shimmered highway and watched the bus dwindle into nothingness. He doubted if the driver would bother to finish the run. For miles, the man had been driving with one hand and using the other to scratch furiously at the bleeding back of his neck.
George started walking. According to the directions, the reservation lay some two miles west of the highway. He squinted at the brassy sky. The glare was so pervasive he could not tell west from east. He paused long enough to take the compass out of his bag, consult it carefully, and clip it to his belt before starting off again.
He soon came to a road, of sorts; two deep ruts carved in the now hard-baked earth. The ruts were deep enough to break a man’s ankle if he stepped wrong.
Sweat trickled down the back of George’s neck.
He was thankful for his hat, a fine old silver-pearl Stetson from his college days, when he was a country-music fan. He had long since abandoned both hat and country music, but he had resurrected the hat again from the back of his closet. A Stetson kept a man’s face and neck in the shade.
He shifted his duffel bag from one shoulder to the other, trying to remember if he’d put the Vaseline back in the bag. He’d smeared himself liberally with it before getting off the bus, covering all exposed skin … but had he left it on the seat when the driver called out his stop?
Feeling suddenly panicky, he threw down the duffel bag and began pawing through it. Must have done, must have done, must have put it back, wouldn’t dare go out without it anymore … ah! There! He gave a great sigh of relief. The petroleum jelly was in his dop kit, with the white gunk for his lips and a bottle of aspirin in case he got too hot.
George put the white ointment on his lips and applied a second coat of Vaseline to his face and the backs of his hands. It wasn’t as good as a real sun-block, but those had disappeared from drugstore shelves months ago.
When the reservation finally appeared on the horizon, it proved to be a disheartening straggle of ramshackle buildings with the dreary look of a place where dreams were born dead.
Well, what did you expect? George asked himself.
As he got closer he made out two rows of army-type wooden barracks sagging beneath unmended roofs. There was a store, of sorts, with rusted gas pumps in front, a porch, and a screen door permanently ajar, since the screen was too torn to be of any use anyway. Beside the store a few goats bleated in a barbed-wire pen, and some scrawny hens, half-denuded of feathers, scratched in the dust.
Beyond the barracks were some individual shacks with roofs of corrugated tin. The temperature under that tin must be enough to cook a roast, George thought. Surely no one tries to live in there, at least during the day.
So where is everybody?
His guts twisted. There might not be an “everybody.” There might not be anybody.
He had just assumed this would be one place where …
George began to run forward in spite of the heat.
“Hallooo!” he shouted. He could hear the desperation in his voice.
There was a muffled response from inside the store. A tall, lean man came out onto the porch, shading his eyes with his hand. “What do you want?”
George squinted up at him. “My name’s George Burningfeather.”
“Burningfeather.” The man came to the edge of the porch to get a better look. “Take off your hat.”
George complied.
Instantly he was aware of the unshielded sun beating down on him like a weapon.
The man on the porch studied his features. “What tribe?”
“Pennacook. Well, half,” George added, knowing dishonesty would be inappropriate at the end of the world.
“Half. Yeah. Well. I never heard of the Pennacooks.”
“New England tribe. All gone now, or almost.”
“’Cept you?”
“I’m the only one I know of.”
“And you’re just half.”
“Yeah,” George agreed, “but I’m alive. And I don’t have any skin tumors.”
The man said, “Then you better put your hat back on quick. At least until you get up here on the porch.” He turned away and went back into the store.
George followed him with a profound sense of relief.
It took his eyes a few moments to adjust to the low interior light, after the fierce brightness of the day outside. Then he saw that the store was far from empty. A couple of dozen people sat, stood, leaned, lounged around its walls, occupying straight chairs, perching on boxes, propping their elbows against shelves. Men, women, children. A gawky teenaged boy. A little girl with huge black eyes and her thumb in her mouth.
The sight of the children gave George a jolt of joy.
The children had been the first to die. Out There.
Already he was thinking in terms of Out There and In Here.
“This here’s George Burningfeather,” the tall man told the others. “Says he’s a Pennacook. New England tribe.”
“How come he didn’t go back north, then?” a man wanted to know.
“The database in our library didn’t show any reservations in the part of New Hampshire I came from,” George explained. “And since I was living down here, and this was the nearest one, I just sort of … gravitated here, I guess you’d say.”
“Yeah,” said the tall man. “We know. Getting pretty bad out there, is it?”
George shifted his duffel bag from one shoulder to the other, uncomfortably aware that no one had invited him to set it down. “Pretty bad,” he confirmed grimly.
“Many left alive? We got a radio, but it’s broke.”
“Some. Not enough to keep the country running, though.”
“How about the rest of the world?” another man asked. “White people dying everywhere?”
“People are dying everywhere,” George corrected. “Caucasians are losing the highest numbers to malignant melanoma, but the various viral diseases are getting everybody.”
“Africans and Orientals too?”
“Everybody,” George said again. “There’s more than enough death to go around, from a number of causes.”
“What about survivors?” the tall man asked.
“The last reports I read said that aboriginal people like the American Indians and the Maoris in New Zealand appeared to have the highest survival rate overall, but we don’t know why. Could be genetic, could be pure accident. There aren’t enough scientists left alive and working to find out.”
“‘We’?” said the tall man suspiciously. “You some kind of scientist too?”
“Not a biologist or a geneticist,” George said quickly. “Just a meteorologist. I mean, I was. Out there.”
“A specialist in the weather,” one of the women said. “So you understand why it’s gone so wrong.”
“Nobody fully understands,” George told her regretfully. “We only know some of the factors involved. Once the problems began multiplying exponentially, we—”
“Expo what?” someone interrupted. Indian eyes stared at George like polished stones.
“Faster and faster,” he simplified, hoping he wasn’t sounding condescending. “It all began goin
g sour at once. Drastic changes in the climate, the expanding hole in the ozone layer, a decrease in breathable oxygen in the atmosphere—we think that might be partly the result of the huge number of trees cut down in the rain forests—it just piled up on us. Added to that there were so many pollution-related allergies. And the diseases. All those deadly new viruses, one after the other. People dying.” George blinked as if to blink away a memory. “People dying,” he repeated. “Most of the experts who might have come up with some answers died with the rest.”
“Are you saying there’s no one left alive who knows what to do about the heat?” a man asked, as if it was somehow George’s fault.
“What to do about it? No. But we do believe it’s an unnatural planetary warming caused by environmental damage.”
“Caused by man,” said the woman who knew what a meteorologist was.
“Yeah,” George admitted. “It very much looks that way.”
“But man doesn’t know how to undo the damage.” She was not asking, she was stating a fact.
“Yeah.”
George looked at the woman with interest. Her speech indicated education. She was in her early thirties, perhaps, though he had no skill at assessing the age of an Indian face. Her features were unlike his, less rounded, more chiseled. A different tribe. One of the Plains Indians?
Sweeping his gaze around the room, he became aware of a variety of different types. This reservation was occupied not by one tribe, but by individuals from many.
As if reading his thoughts, the woman said, “We’re all survivors, like you.” Her face softened slightly, not enough to be a smile, but at least enough to mitigate the severity of her bone structure. “My name’s Katherine,” she said. “But people call me Kate. Kate-Who-Sings-Songs.”
“And I’m Harry Delahunt,” the tall man volunteered tardily. “That’s Sandy Parkins over there, and Jerry Swimming Ducks and his wife Anne, and Will Westervelt—he’s half Indian, like you and …” Harry continued around the room, introducing people. They variously nodded, raised one forefinger in token greeting, or just met George’s eyes impassively. Their names were as diverse as their faces. Some used Indian names, others did not.
The Elementals Page 24
