by Nick Cole
“What is there now?”
“A swamp.”
“Who destroyed the outpost, I mean the place that you drew?”
“A man named MacRaven. He has an army of tribes.”
“How big?”
“More than you have in all the soldiers I have seen who carry your rifles.”
“The characters on your rifle indicate it was given to a man who was a known skin trader. What has become of this man and how did you acquire his rifle?”
“He rescued me from lions in the high desert beyond Reno. We fought together on the walls of your outpost. He did not survive and I took his rifle when I escaped.”
“Will this MacRaven the barbarian come here?”
“I don’t know.” Then, “If I were you I would plan for him to. He seemed that sort of man.”
“How do we know you are not part of this MacRaven’s barbarian army and that you yourself didn’t kill the owner of the rifle and come here as a spy or a saboteur?”
“I know ‘spy.’ I am not that. The other word I do not understand.”
“A destroyer. A terrorist.”
“I am not a terrorist.”
“And how do we know you are telling the truth?”
The Boy stopped for a moment. He was hot. Sweat was dripping down the inside of his mask. He moved to take off the mask and the Chinese general lunged forward with sudden vigor and command.
“Do not take that off! It is forbidden here for you to remove your mask.”
The Boy could feel his audience pressing themselves farther away from him, toward the back of the room.
The Boy lowered his hands from the mask.
The general walked closer. “I am sorry,” he said softly, his eyes speaking an unspoken message of friendliness. “They do not understand.”
“And why,” began the general again, “should we trust your account?”
The Boy stared for a long moment at the crowd surrounding him. When his eyes rested on the girl he forgot everything he’d intended to say.
He forgot . . .
. . . everything.
When he was reminded of the question by a gurgling cough from the Chinese general, he spoke.
“I don’t know why you would trust me.”
The audience murmured at the translation.
A discussion started.
“May I ask a question?” said the Boy.
Silence.
The general walked back toward the Boy.
“Ask.”
“What has become of I Corps?”
The general did not translate.
His face fell.
His mouth opened.
His shoulders slumped.
He seemed suddenly older.
The general shook his head to himself as if finishing an argument he’d started long ago and lost many times since. Then he looked at the Boy.
“They are no more.” And, “I know that for certain.”
There was no pride in his voice. No triumph. No satisfaction.
But there was guilt.
There was shame.
“When I was young I thought it would be different,” said the Chinese general very plainly. “I thought only of victory.”
The general sighed heavily.
“I know differently now.” He looked at the Boy, maybe beyond the Boy. “I am responsible.”
“You were there?” asked the Boy. “At the end of I Corps?”
The general whispered, “Yes.”
“If the man who brought me here,” the Boy indicated the troop leader, “would return to my things and bring me the bearskin I wear . . . I have something for you.”
Orders were given and the discussion among the Chinese renewed. All the while, the general watched the Boy and waited for the return of the requested bearskin.
I have given away all my intel, Sergeant. I know that is not what you taught me to do. But what good is it to anyone, now that all of you are dead?
There was no reply.
The bearskin arrived and the Boy laid it out and retrieved the map from inside the hidden pouch.
Sergeant, I’m doing this so that maybe they’ll trust me. I’m doing this so they’ll be ready for MacRaven when he comes. I remember what we both saw outside Oklahoma City.
The Boy stood.
He raised his right arm and saluted the Chinese general.
He held out the map.
Tell them who I was, Boy.
Tell them I made it all the way, never quit.
Tell them there’s nothing left.
“There’s nothing left,” said the Boy.
Chapter 39
The night air felt cool and dried the sweat on the Boy’s face as he was led back from the meeting beyond the gate. The wind had picked up from off the bay. It would be a long, cold night. The shantytown was quiet and only a single candle burned in the odd window they passed along its lanes.
In the shack it was warm from the heat given off by the brazier, its glow a dull orange. Inside, Horse raised a sleepy eye then returned to his rest and dreams. The troop leader left and came back with more hay. He said something in Chinese, a farewell perhaps, then closed the door to the shack behind him as he left.
The Boy took off the sweaty gear they had given him and went out the back door.
He walked to the end of the narrow two-plank dock and lowered himself into the freezing dark water of the bay.
It was cold.
Maybe the coldest water he’d ever felt.
He thought of the girl as he floated in the darkness.
Back inside the shack he put his clothes on and, as though he had known all along what he would do next, he took up the carved piece of charcoal once more.
He made a line. The outline of her hair. Long and straight. A curve over the top of her head.
Then another line for her delicate chin.
And a line falling away from the chin for her neck.
They’ll see this.
He put the charcoal back in its pouch and sat by the glowing coals of the brazier, watching the simple lines he had drawn.
The lines were enough to remember her by.
IN THE MORNING it was the troop leader who appeared once more. They both took Horse out into the mist and walked him along the bay’s edge, following a winding muddy street. Fishing boats lay motionless in the calm waters of the fog-shrouded bay.
They crossed into a ruined section of the shantytown.
Ruins from Before.
Buildings with chunks of concrete and whole sections missing. Buildings where the plaster facade had fallen away long ago. Buildings from which metal girders twisted wickedly upward. Buildings that had fallen into little more than piles from which rusty strands of rebar sprung like wild hair.
A work crew hovered over the ruins of a building, testing it with their crowbars and the occasional shovel. Other men moved piles of rubble in wheelbarrows.
They are removing the town that was here Before, Sergeant.
They came to a building. It was in better shape than most.
Inside they found the Chinese general.
He hobbled forward, his big frame leaning heavily on a bent cane.
“I have studied the map you gave me.” After a pause the general continued breathily, “Can you tell me about all those places? What is there now? That’s what we wish to know. Our outpost was our farthest settlement. We cannot go south due to the nature of contamination in that area, so it seems we must know what lies to the east. If we could go over the map together, you might tell me a little bit about each place. If that would be acceptable to you?”
The Boy thought of the girl.
He thought of leaving this place.
He had left every place he had ever been.
He wondered if he might see her here.
If he left he would never see her again.
“Yes.”
“Good,” said the general and led him to a large desk. The map lay spread out across its expanse.
The floor that surrounded the desk was a sea upon which books rose like sudden and angry waves. Leaning against the walls were all manner of things. Tools, ancient rifles from Before, many things the Boy had no name for.
“So we know you came through Reno. What were your experiences there?”
The Boy thought for a moment. How did one describe the fear of an unknown mad animal lying in wait in the dark? How did one describe that laughing terror and the single leering face seen as a shadow through dirty glass for even just the part of a moment?
“Reno is like a hole where an animal lives.” He thought of the bear cave. “Where something that isn’t human makes its home now.”
The general laid his finger on the map over Reno.
“Colonel Juk was their commander. I have always wondered, over the years, what became of his unit and the men we sent there. Their last report told of being dug in and facing American armor coming out of the desert to the southeast.”
The Boy watched the map and all the places Sergeant Presley had been.
“How is it like a wild animal in a cave?” asked the general.
The Boy thought for a moment. He approached a wall and moved aside a heavy machine gun, dusty and untouched. He cleared a space along the wall.
He took out his charcoal.
He began to draw.
He drew the blind window-eyes of a corpse that was once a city. In his mind the angles were somehow distorted and maniacal. The buildings took on a surreal aspect, as if sanity hadn’t been a requirement for their architect. As if the years since, and the madmen within, had somehow turned the buildings “wrong.” He drew the bridge they’d passed under. The Boy, Horse, and Escondido. It was an open mouth, full of smashed teeth. He drew a high window, a long window twisting to the side, almost bending away from the perspective of the viewer. A window among a hundred other lunatic windows in shadow. In it the Boy placed the shadow of a man seen for just a moment. With a few quick lines he began the face, the jaw, the hair, and before he could add more to those few scribbled, hesitant, unfinished lines, the lunatic seemed complete.
When the Boy turned back, the general, watching him, nodded.
The old soldier turned to the map, his finger still resting above the word “Reno.”
“I understand.”
After a moment of looking again at the map, the Chinese general cleared his throat.
“Tell me about Salt Lake City.”
And then . . .
She entered, carrying a tray of teacups and a pot.
Chapter 40
At the end of the week General Song sat in his patched leather chair from Before. Shoulders slumped. Eyes wide. Staring.
On the walls that surrounded him were many charcoal markings formed into drawings.
At Des Moines, two figures, a small boy, eyes wide with terror, and a black man, his face an angry curse—heavy oversize packs on each of their backs—ran across a field of sickly grass. Above them, crows—all the crows in the world—swarmed, diving and attacking them. In the foreground, a crow swooped away from the boy and the man. The crow’s eyes were two black oblongs of animal indifference. The wings seemed to rise in triumph. Its beak was open as if the cawww! that must come from it was a mighty roar. All the birds were rendered with such malevolence.
Beaks open.
Claws reaching.
Wings spreading.
One could almost hear a sonic sea of victory caws as each bird swooped and dived, wheeling overhead.
Herding their prey.
Carnivorous now.
Finally, after the end of the world and an ocean of wild, genetically powerful corn that had broken and overtaken the lands of middle America—surviving what civilization, mankind, had not, in Des Moines, Iowa—crows ruled the land.
Outside Madison, Wisconsin, powerful dogs with short necks like bulls and wide mouths full of canine teeth surged forward. Real hatred could be found in their snarling muzzles as opposed to the crows’ mere soullessness. The black man leaned hard on a door. His face was twisted in rage, his eyes focused. Next to him was the Boy, long hair covering his face as it turns back toward the approaching pack of wild dogs. A long hallway trailed off to the horizon. Someplace abandoned. An old shopping center. They were trapped. The fierce dogs bounded toward them. In the lead dog, every muscle was perfectly and beautifully rendered like taut cables of charcoal-driven power. There is an urgency the viewer feels when looking at the black man, who must open the door if he and the Boy are to survive. It is the kind of picture one looks at then turns away from, praying that such a thing will never happen to them.
Or to their loved ones.
“Who is the black man?” he’d asked the Boy.
“Sergeant Lyman Julius Presley.”
At Detroit, sailboats were piled high against a beach of black rocks and garbage. The sky was overcast and gray. The lake struck the shore hard, almost angrily. ‘One could hear,’ thought the general, ‘the damaged spinnakers and tangled tackle clanging compulsively in the wind while occasional ancient spars groaned in torment.’
“Were you with Sergeant Presley when you made it to Detroit?”
“I was always with him.”
“What is your earliest memory of him?”
“We were walking on the road. He was carrying all our things and I kept falling behind him because I was still little. He was singing one of his marching songs about Captain Jack and he said to me, ‘Keep up, or I might leave you behind.’ ”
At Cincinnati there was a river. There were no buildings. No trees. Only a dark hill on the horizon. A road sign, unreadable, bent forever away from the place.
“Why did this Sergeant Presley keep going, even though all the evidence seemed to indicate that his country was destroyed?” asked the general.
The Boy simply looked at the picture and then, when the general felt as if the Boy would not answer, the Boy spoke.
“He told me one time that he couldn’t quit. That to quit was to die. That he’d quit once, before I met him, and a lot of people got killed.”
And.
“I’ve always thought that those people getting killed had something to do with where I came from.”
At Pittsburgh was the American bomber. The nose and cockpit were in the foreground as the fuselage stretched away, cracked in the middle. The only wing visible lay collapsed. A car lay trapped under the nose. Rusting cars dotted the landscape of the freeway.
“How come you never asked Sergeant Presley about where you came from?” asked the general.
“I did and he told me that the past wasn’t important anymore because it was just wreckage and junk and not worth going over. He told me that the only thing that was important now was the future.”
“And yet he was still looking for his country under all this wreckage, like that of the bomber on the wall?”
Silence.
“He said America was more than just the things we’d seen: the rubble of the cities, the broken highways, the burned-up tanks. He said America was a good idea. And that as long as he was alive, the good that was in the idea was still alive.”
At Baltimore, a shaven-headed man with malevolent eyes held a shovel. A twisted farmhouse, windows out of perspective, rose toward the ceiling of the room where the general sat. A woman, scrawny and underfed, looked at the ground with bruised and blackened eyes. She stood behind the malevolent man, in his shadow. In an orchard in the background, under a crescent moon, wild figures leapt about a fire as something man-like lay atop a grill, its legs splayed, its arms akimbo.
“Who are they?” he asked the Boy.
“They are the Cotter family and they’re evil.”
And there were other pictures . . .
The general leaned back in his chair.
This was what happened after war.
‘I remember,’ he thought. ‘Before it all, before the bombs even, I remember walking down a boulevard in Beijing; the cherry blossoms were just beginning to fall. I remember the p
osters, and the songs about bravery and our country that we thought we loved so much. I remember I was very proud of my uniform and that when the time came I would earn its inherent respect. I remember thinking I would do anything for my country.’
We all thought that way.
Anything.
We had no idea.
We were wrong.
Chapter 41
The Boy had drawn a story wherever the Chinese general had placed his finger on Sergeant Presley’s map. If the Boy had been there or knew something about the place, he had rendered it in charcoal across the walls of the general’s study.
“One day,” said the general, “we must go to these places and find what is left there. Not to conquer as our current leaders wish and which will only bring the wrath of the barbarians down on us as it has already. But we must go to these places in order that we might make something new. What you tell me in your drawings may one day make a difference to those that must go to these places on the wall.”
And each day she had brought them tea in the afternoon.
And one day . . .
After she set the tea down and while the general stood close to the wall studying a picture of Little Rock, Arkansas, in which the Boy skinned a deer with trembling hands, the girl moved next to the Boy.
In the picture, the Boy was laying out the heart and liver on a crumbling table inside a large building, a library perhaps, by the look of the collapsed bookshelves. There was a river passing outside shattered and dirty windows. Among the collapsed shelves of books, the black man built a fire from fallen volumes. There was hunger on both of their faces.
The general said little once the picture was finished and as he studied it. He stood silently before it, consuming its every detail. Today, the girl did not leave as she usually did once she placed the tray of tea on the large and very old desk.
The Boy, because the day was cold and his withered side was stiff, reached for the tea, already inhaling its hot jasmine aroma. And she caught his hand just before he grasped the cup.
He looked into her eyes.
She squeezed his hand.
He was frozen.
