Emma spoke softly from behind Rodney. “I have a bit of beef jerky in my pack, you think I should give it to him?”
Rodney shrugged very slightly, responding in a low tone as well. “I guess so, I’ve already fed him, so it’s not like you’d be spoiling him.”
The coyote watched Emma go to her pack by the lean-to and retrieve a bit of jerky the size of a field mouse. She brought it to Rodney, thinking that this would be safer and less confusing. Rodney took the bit of dried meat and held it out to the coyote, who stood less than six feet away. The coyote sniffed at the jerky and then looked away as if he wasn’t very interested. Thinking that was just a ploy, Rodney tossed the jerky at the coyote’s feet. The hungry animal sniffed it again, nosing it slightly, then he looked up at Rodney as if to say, “Is that all you got?”
Cautiously the coyote took three steps to the frying pan, which rested on a log. A few small shards of scrambled eggs remained there. The coyote looked at Rodney and Emma and then back at the pan. Rodney made a gentle gesture toward the pan and said, “Go ahead, it’s yours.” He kept his distance from the pan, to make his intentions clear to the coyote. The three humans watched the coyote lick the pan perfectly clean, instead of eating a freely offered piece of beef jerky. All three humans privately added this to their list of the inexplicable.
To complete the surprise, the big male coyote took two steps away from the log and lay down, like the farm dog Rodney had accused him of imitating. Emma and Rodney looked at each other, eyebrows raised in mutual bemusement. Daniel slowly walked over to where the coyote now lay and carefully sat on the log, near the frying pan, a bit closer to the domesticated coyote. The coyote looked at Daniel expectantly and then stood up to sniff his outstretched hand. In a moment, he let Daniel scratch his ears and pet his head. That was as far as his dog-like behavior went, but it was enough to initiate a promising boy-dog relationship.
Later that morning, after they cleaned up breakfast and stowed bedding, Rodney made an offer unlike any he had even contemplated since he met Anna nearly twenty years ago.
As Emma repacked her large mountaineering backpack, Rodney approached a bit shyly. “What are you planning to do next?” he asked, circling toward what he had in mind.
Emma looked up at him, checking for non-verbal cues. She finished compacting her gear, then stood up and considered her answer. “I heard there was a town near here that hadn’t been totally destroyed, and that there were a lot of empty houses there. Is that Somerville, the town you mentioned last night?”
Rodney nodded, but his face said, “Wrong direction, I was hoping for something else.” Then his mouth formulated a more diplomatic approach. “Yeah, that’s a fair description of Somerville. But I wonder if you’d consider an alternative. I mean, I’m just a couple miles from town, but it really is an alternative.” He skidded off the road at this point, but a look on Emma’s face pushed him back on track. “I could use some help out here and I wonder if you two would consider sticking around to see if you like it.”
Emma was not the sort of woman who followed that kind of amorphous invitation with a demand for better definition. At least, if she had been such a person in some distant past, she no longer even recognized that version of herself. She looked at Daniel, who was calculating the coyote into the deal, and clearly signaling his vote with his eyes.
Not one to push, nevertheless, Rodney did feel the need to make room in his proposal. “We could get to work right off on a room for you and one for Daniel.” He nodded toward the barn, which Emma had little noticed before, and said, “I have beds and other furniture stacked in there.”
She looked at the burn-marked barn. She saw Blue plastic tarps through the damaged openings. Silently, Emma waited for some voice inside to warn her, as it had many times over the past few years. She could hear no such voice.
“We would love to stick around for a while,” she said, with cheerful gratitude.
The lightness that had lifted Rodney, between disturbingly odd occurrences, now rose to elation, elation that he barely managed to curtail. He laughed. “Great,” was all he said.
Being a boy, Daniel accepted the awkward smiles, and almost tortured body language, of the two adults, as a done deal. A more romantic person would have hoped for more. But romance had lost a good deal of credibility for Rodney, through a string of cataclysmic natural disasters, a world war against a power-grabbing dictator and the apparent dislocation of reality from its former place on Earth. In fact, Rodney had wanted his offer to remain mostly shapeless, for he had not fully recovered from Anna’s visit the night before.
He broke the grip of awkwardness by getting busy with making the house a home for Emma and Daniel. “Come on in my front door,” Rodney said with a smile, gesturing to the porch. “And we can work on a plan to get some rooms ready as soon as possible.”
With Daniel trailing a bit behind, and the coyote standing on the porch peering through the open front door, Emma and Rodney walked around the rough beginnings of the first floor. An intact foundation had offered the promise of a good start. Joists in place over the half basement constituted the greatest progress Rodney had made inside the house. The front and back door each looked finished, the front porch and the lean-to bracketing the future house in a backward, but understandable, plan.
They decided that they would leverage the existing structures and build the front room, or parlor, first and use that as a temporary room for Emma and Daniel. Rodney mentioned a partition for privacy, remembering Emma’s comment about Daniel getting too old to share a bed with. And that started their experiment in working together to build a home.
Later that morning, the three of them rode into town in the van. Rodney introduced Emma and Daniel to Jay, who was busy with customers and didn’t have time to reflect on the shooting and all that surrounded it. He did agree to sell Rodney all of the two-by-fours he had, taking in payment a quality pair of binoculars and the automatic rifle that seemed to need some kind of repair. Jay stopped to comment on Rodney giving up a weapon with the political situation still uncertain, but they both knew that selling one weapon didn’t leave Rodney disarmed.
Rodney made a circuit of the town, for Emma and Daniel’s sake, and then headed to Pete’s place at the Post Office. The three of them walked into the small lobby, through the glass door that Pete had reinforced with an iron grate. When the old-fashioned bell over the door sounded, Pete shouted from a back room.
“Hello, who’s there?” He sounded preoccupied, but friendly. Then they heard a woman’s voice, lower and more intimate.
Rodney responded to Pete’s question. “Hey Pete, it’s me, with a couple of guests.”
“Guests?” Pete said, as he broke away from what he was doing.
First Pete appeared behind the counter and then Jenny. She smiled broadly, just like Pete, except that Pete’s smile was tinged by curiosity, and Jenny’s only by a welcome.
“Pete, Jenny, this is Emma and Daniel.”
After polite greetings all around, Pete got to the point of his curiosity. “So Emma, where’re you from? You one of Rodney’s relatives he never mentioned?”
“No.” Emma smiled, slightly embarrassed. “We were just passing through and Rodney took us in last night.”
“They’re gonna stick around at my place for a while and help me with the house,” Rodney said.
Pete’s arched eyebrows betrayed his surprise, but Jenny stuck with the welcoming smile. She looked at Emma, dressed in jeans and a military jacket.
“Emma, why don’t you come with me a minute,” she said a bit mysteriously. Then, to Pete and Rodney, she said, “Just girl stuff. You guys don’t mind us.”
Emma appeared both surprised and charmed by Jenny’s overture, following obediently into the back room. The men heard Jenny ask her, “What size are you?” The response was appropriately muffled, as the women passed out of earshot.
Pete turned to Daniel. “So, you ever build a house before, Daniel?”
Dani
el shook his head.
“Well, you can learn a ton from this guy then, he’s a master carpenter. Stick with him and you could make a career of it.” Pete blathered on, not making any other point than to impress the kid with the carpentry skills of his friend.
Daniel looked a bit disappointed. “I’m not really so interested in being a carpenter,” he said apologetically, taking Pete too seriously. “I wanna work with computers.”
Pete was going to release the career pressure, but stopped and refocused. “Yeah? You know something about computers?”
“Some stuff,” Daniel said humbly.
“Well, come on back and take a look at my computer here. It’s saying something weird about a network and I can’t figure it out.”
Daniel looked a Rodney who smiled and nodded.
“You could at least take a look at it,” Rodney said. “Just ‘cause Pete can’t figure it out doesn’t mean it’s very difficult.”
Pete protested and Rodney laughed. Daniel enjoyed the banter, relieved at the normalcy of the relationships he was finding.
As Rodney and Daniel passed through the same wooden door that Emma and Jenny had, they could hear the women’s voices from deeper in the house, Emma’s deferential tone harmonizing with Jenny’s gently prodding generosity. Pete led them down the short hallway to the back room of the post office. The back door of that room stood opened to a staircase that led into the house in which Pete and Jenny had lived for about twelve years.
On the desk, in the middle of the post office back room, sat a battery-powered computer with a wide, glass-thin display. Pete moved around the desk and clicked the wireless mouse so that a message maximized on the display.
“Ya see? It says I’m connected to this network, but we don’t have a network here.”
Daniel stepped over next to Pete and offered to take control of the mouse. Pete surrendered it readily. “Go for it.”
Daniel clicked around for a few seconds and then swore. Then he looked at the two men to see if he should apologize for his language, but they just looked curious about what he had found.
When he saw that he was safe from rebuke among his elders, Daniel blurted out his discovery. “You’re connected to the Internet.”
Pete and Rodney looked at each other, then Pete reclaimed the mouse. He clicked on the symbol for searching Internet content and up popped a news page. All three of them stared. This was not the propaganda-filled Internet of the Dictator. This looked more like one of the news sites from before the war, with pictures and headlines about real events.
“But how?” was all Pete could say.
Daniel again answered him literally. “Well, you were ready for a connection all along, it’s just that they weren’t up and running on the other end. “
For Pete, that answer missed the point. His question came from a budding hope that things had really changed for the better, and in a big way. All three of them stood staring at the screen. The headline on the main news page seemed almost playful. “We’re Back in Business and Under New Management.” The last they had heard, the Internet was firmly under the control of the Dictator, offering the perfect platform for global propaganda and manipulation. “New Management,” implied that the rumors about the Dictator’s demise bore some truth. The power of the Dictator had apparently slipped from his hands on a much wider scale than just abandoning his occupation of small towns in Iowa.
By the time Emma and Jenny returned to the post office, the three men were clicking and scrolling through story after story about war and conquest, and the complete destruction of the world-wide empire of the Dictator. What had always seemed humanly impossible to Rodney, a single man leading a government that stretched around the globe, was now finally broken.
Just when they found the article Pete and Rodney wanted to see most of all, entitled, “There’s a New Sheriff in Town,” the computer locked up. Daniel’s best efforts could not restore the Internet connection, even when the computer had finished restarting. It appeared that the resuscitation of the Internet had been short-lived, although the sketchy infrastructure of their region could easily account for the renewed outage.
Nevertheless, the disconnected network left the frustrated surfers to fill in huge blanks. “New Sheriff?” That irreverent tone implied a great deal more freedom than what the previous government allowed. Rebels like Rodney all referred to him as “the Dictator,” soldiers more commonly abbreviating that title to the first syllable. They refused him the respect of using his proper title, “The Director,” a big business title that Rodney, and those like him, considered deceptively docile.
Emma stood with a canvas athletic bag over her shoulder, a bag that appeared quite full, and Jenny held a jacket in her hands that she had intended to have Daniel try on. But both women forgot these things and joined in the frustrated and ecstatic conversation, once they heard what the men had found. Could this just be the work of hackers, playing a prank in the wake of a dismantled government, a sign of chaos and anarchy? Such a flippant treatment of global revolution seemed incredible, even to people whose concepts of possibility and reality had been severely stretched in recent days.
Pete summed up his conclusion when the excited babble of conversation waned. “Well, at least it’s clear that something really has changed and the Dictator has lost at least some of his control,” he said. Then, after a pause, “Maybe it’s just shock, but I don’t feel as happy about that as I thought I would.”
Rodney said, “Or maybe it’s just well-justified caution, about getting too hopeful that the new government is any better.”
Everyone nodded.
Rodney noticed the bag Emma was holding, he looked at her with a question in his eyes. She smiled back and looked at Jenny, whose green eyes brightened, as their focus turned from the grand scale to the personal.
“I had a huge pile of clothes I finally got through sorting this week, you know, just in case things get back to normal.” Jenny saw the blank look in Rodney’s eyes. “Jay isn’t interested in selling women’s and children’s clothes.”
“Are you gonna open a shop?” Rodney asked.
“She should,” Pete said.
“Hmmm.” Jenny avoided answering.
Emma seemed embarrassed about the attention, so Rodney changed the subject. “Okay, we’re gonna head back to the house and get some work done. It can’t stay this sunny forever.”
“Thanks,” Emma said to Jenny who just grinned back. She was busy wondering about Rodney and Emma making a home together. Rodney and Emma, who sensed her curiosity, led Daniel out the door, avoiding the awkwardness of those unspoken questions.
During the ride back toward the farm, Rodney overcame the silence with a question about the Internet connection. “So, Daniel, you think Pete’s computer was just setup for the Internet and when they got it back up and running he just had the connection back?”
“Yeah, I guess so,” Daniel said. “Do you think those things we saw on there were true?”
Rodney thought a moment. “Well, you know what they used to say, you can’t believe everything you read on the Internet.” He looked at Daniel and grinned meaningfully.
“So, it said that there was a war and the Dictator lost?” Emma pursued.
“‘A new sheriff in town,’ was the way it said it,” Rodney said. The tone excited him but made the headline seem less credible.
Emma apparently agreed. “That seems like a strange way to say it.”
Daniel defended the Web site, hopeful at the news. “But you don’t think they could have written that if there was still a Dictator?”
“I wish we could tell why that connection went down,” Rodney said.
“We would need another computer to test if anyone else can connect,” Daniel said. Rodney took note, silently committing himself to keep an eye open for an available computer. They had become carefully controlled commodities in recent years, but, just like weapons, it was still possible to get hold of one.
Then Emma br
oke back to that embarrassing subject they had avoided. “Jenny was so nice.” Rodney let that sit there so she moved on. “She could tell I needed some new things, but she was so good at making it easy for me to take them without feeling bad. It was a marvel to see her maneuver that.”
“She is a great lady,” Rodney said. He let himself briefly consider what sort of things she might have gotten from Jenny. He hadn’t given a thought to women’s clothes in a long time. Clearly, he was heading into new territory.
CHAPTER FIVE
During the next week, Rodney framed in two new rooms and used old wood from the barn to cover the outside of the first floor. The weather did begin to turn colder, but only gently so, still no threat of anything like snow.
Daniel named the coyote “Socks,” because of his long white legs, and because the animal seemed to want to be a dog. “Socks” sounded like a good name for a dog.
In Emma, Rodney had found a comfortable companion. He had worked with a wide variety of people, in civilian and military roles, and had never connected so seamlessly with anyone, when it came to daily work. The years of rising, and eclipsing, crises had worn away at petty concerns, pulverized trivial fears and greatly reduced annoyance thresholds. Having conquered the challenges of survival, Emma and Rodney had found freedom from many of the fears that preoccupied people before the destruction of thousands of cities and the death of billions of humans.
Daniel, in spite of earlier protestations, did enjoy learning carpentry from Rodney, from the minutest skill, to the planning and overall design of the project. This particular project began to build hope into the boy’s soul, healing over the open wounds of anticipated death and accumulated loss. As dangerous as it felt, Daniel allowed himself to expect more, to hope for a new life and to release some of his vigilance.
When Rodney ran out of nails or wood, or needed something new, such as wallboard and mud, he broke off from his cutting, pounding and scavenging and made a trip to town. Jay had begun to surrender his monopoly in several lines of merchandise. Jenny’s new resale shop for women and children’s clothes was joined by a small electronics recycling store managed by Sara’s daughter, Randi, and by a building supply business started by the two Korean men, Hyo and Young. The most notable characteristic of the latter was the peaceful and cooperative manner in which they had taken up residence in town, and had opened a place for themselves in the local economy.
The REIGN: Out of Tribulation Page 7
