by Nick Cole
“Where are you?” he calls out.
From high above he hears her voice.
“I found a ladder, Grandpa.” She is straining to pull herself up. “If it leads to the roof, I can look around and see where the box is.”
He shines his light about and can see nothing of her.
His mind thinks only of rusted metal and snapping bolts that pull away from crumbling walls with a dusty smuph.
And falling.
A moment later he hears metal banging on metal and knows it to be the sound of a crowbar smashing against a door. The sound is a familiar cadence to him and reminds him for a moment of the comforts one finds in what one does. The music of salvage.
He shines his light high into the rafters and finds her against the ceiling.
She is so small.
She is so high up.
I regret all of this.
Her crowbar gives that final smash he knows so well, when the wielder knows what must give way will give way with the next strike, and a frame of light shoots down within the darkness, illuminating the Old Man.
“I’m through, Grandpa!”
No one will ever stop you will they?
“I’m going up, Grandpa.”
Please be safe!
A few minutes later, the longest minutes of the Old Man’s life, he can hear her voice shouting down into the darkness in which he stands.
“I see it, Grandpa! It’s on the roof of another building. It’s very big.”
LATER, AFTER HER descent, in which he can think of nothing but her falling and knowing he will try to catch her and knowing further that both his arms will be broken and that it doesn’t matter as long as he saves her so he must catch her, they climb again onto the roof of the other building.
The yawning blue sky burns above their heads as they crawl out onto the wide hot roof.
The roof is bigger than a football field.
Along a far edge, the container, its parachute little more than scrappy silk rags, sinks into the roof.
The Old Man approaches cautiously, feeling the thinness of the roof beneath his feet. He waves for her to stand back and let him go on alone.
When she obeys, he proceeds, one cautious foot after the other, ready to fling himself backward onto the burning floor of the roof.
At the container he finds the heavy lock.
He knows this kind of lock. He has broken it many times and if one knows how to use a crowbar, the design of the container and the position of the lock will do most of the work.
The Old Man knows.
Forgetting the precarious and illusory roof, thinking only of salvage, blinded by salvage, he breaks the lock.
The doors swing open on a rusty bass note groan.
The Old Man smells the thick scent of cardboard.
Inside, stacked to the ceiling of the container are thin boxes, one lying atop another, long and flat.
He takes hold of the topmost and drags it away from the container onto the roof and back a bit where he feels it will be safer to stand.
Bending over the box he reads, seeing his granddaughter’s little girl shadow lengthen next to his, as the day turns past noon. He reads the words the military once printed on these long flat boxes.
“Radiation Shielding Kit, M-1 Abrams MK-3, 1 ea.”
Chapter 15
“By the time communication with the outside world had completely failed,” explained General Watt after they’d re-established contact, “fourteen military-grade nuclear weapons had already been used within Colorado alone. I determined that it would be beneficial to you and your team to obtain a shielding kit in order to protect you, once you enter Colorado.”
The Old Man watched the radio, thinking.
He held the mic in his trembling fingers, his weathered thumb as far away as possible from the transmit button.
“We have no idea . . .” General Watt paused, her voice tired. “I have no idea how bad things are above. But I wanted you to have some protection. Just in case. That’s the reason I directed you to obtain the Radiation Shielding Kit.”
“And was that also the reason you didn’t tell us what we were going to find until we found it?”
You know the reason, my friend. You are angry at someone because they lied to you in order to save their life.
I am angry because . . .
Because of that, my friend. Because of that, and nothing more.
“Is there anything else you’re not telling us, General?” asked the Old Man.
“No,” replied General Watt. “There is nothing. I know very little beyond our limited access to a failing satellite network. In truth . . .”
Pause.
Static.
The Old Man saw the satellite in his mind, aging, drifting steadily out over the Pacific horizon once more.
“The truth, General.”
“Call me Natalie.”
“The truth, Natalie,” said the Old Man softening his tone.
“The truth is, I don’t even know if this plan will work. It is merely our last chance. I didn’t want to tell you about the Radiation Shielding Kit because I estimated that you might not want to become involved if you knew there was a possibility of being exposed to high levels of radiation. Though I have no contact with those on the surface, I hypothesize that a fear of radiation poisoning has evolved into a healthy respect, if not outright avoidance policy, among postwar communities.”
Sometimes she sounds so detached. As if the world is little more than mathematical chances and equations that must be solved so that an answer can be found.
And hoped for, my friend. After so many years of living underground, what else might she have except some numbers that give her hope?
And if I know she is lying to me, why are we continuing down this road?
Because you don’t know if she is lying to you.
“All right, General,” said the Old Man. “I’m sorry. Thank you for trying to protect us.”
I should turn back now. We . . .
“Natalie.”
“Natalie,” agreed the Old Man.
Natalie.
“The shielding kit will protect you through most of southern Colorado. All you have to do is get close to the collapsed backdoor entrance and then aim the Laser Target Designator at the back of the mountain. We’ll do the rest.”
The rest.
Do I want to know what the rest is? Not today. There has been too much already for just today.
That is the love of letting things go for now.
THE DAY THAT follows is hot and dusty.
They pass through the crumbling remains of eastern Southern California.
All day long they maneuver through scattered debris, time-frozen traffic jams, and long-collapsed overpasses while the Old Man scans the western horizon.
I was raised over there, beyond those mountains that stand in the way, near the sea. Like you, Santiago.
I have not thought of those places since the bombs. Which is not true.
In the days after, I thought of them all the time.
And then you married your wife and forgot them, my friend.
Yes. There was the work of salvage and you had to concentrate to dig out its story. There was no time for where I had come from. There was no time to think of where I could never go again. There was salvage. My wife. Our shack. My son. His family. My granddaughter. They were my salvage and they replaced all those burned-up places that were gone.
“Grandpa, how will we know where the 395 is?”
I thought only of them, my new family, in the days that followed the bombs.
“Roads lead to roads,” he said. “If we follow this big road, we will find another road. In time we will find this little highway once called the 395.”
The dull hum of the tank’s communications system.
“Some always leads to more, right, Grandpa?”
“Right.”
Some always leads to more.
THAT NIGHT THEY camp near the off-ra
mp at the intersection where the big highway spends itself into the untouchable west and the little ribbon of road the map names the 395 drops off into the lowest places of the earth. Death Valley.
They eat rations heated in the Old Man’s blue percolator and sit around a campfire made of ancient wood pulled from the wreckage of a fallen house built long before the bombs and well before the science that would reveal their terribleness.
Yucca trees, spiky and dark, alien against the fading light, surround them and the silent tank.
The Old Man thinks of the fuel gauge and its needle just below the halfway point.
The drums atop the tank are empty.
If you think all night you will not sleep, my friend.
Natalie says there will be fuel, of a sort, in China Lake.
General Watt.
Natalie.
She sounds old. Like me.
“Grandpa, why do they call it the Death Valley?”
She has been quiet for most of the afternoon. Her questions have been few, as though the place that makes all her questions is overwhelmed by the road and our adventure upon it.
Maybe the world is bigger than she ever imagined, my friend.
“It was called Death Valley even before I was born.”
“So not because of the bombs?”
“No. When people first crossed this country I guess they didn’t like Death Valley, so they chose a bad name for it.”
“Did everyone avoid it?”
The Old Man tries to remember.
Instead, he remembers other things.
Ice cream.
A place he worked at.
Steam.
The beach.
“No, I remember people went there on vacation. It was a place people needed to go and see what was there.”
She watches the fire.
He can see each question forming deep within her.
I can almost snatch them out of the air above her head.
Tonight, when I sleep, I would like to really sleep. Only sleep, and no nightmares.
Especially the one nightmare.
Yes.
The one in which she is calling you as you die, as you abandon her.
As you fall.
As you leave, my friend.
Yes. That one.
No, Grandpa, I need you.
Yes.
“Will it be dangerous there?” she asks.
The Old Man searches the night for one of Natalie’s satellites.
“No. No more than any other place we have been.”
“I’m not afraid, Grandpa. Just the name, it’s a little scary.”
“Yes. Just a little.”
She laughs.
I know what it is like to be afraid of a name and also a nameless thing. My sleeping nightmare is like Death Valley to her.
“Since we might be the first people to cross Death Valley in a long time, we could give it a new name. One that isn’t so scary.”
She stops chewing and he watches the machine inside her turn. The machine that makes an endless supply of questions. The gears and cogs that labor constantly so that she becomes who she will become in each moment and the next.
Sometimes she is so exact.
It might be against her rules to change the name.
To change the game.
No, Grandpa. I need you.
I would change that if I could.
“What could we call it?” she asks.
She is willing to rewrite history. Willing to make something new. Willing to change the rules of the game.
“I don’t know. I guess . . . when we get there we could see what we think of it and then come up with a new name. What do you say about that?”
They both hear a bat crossing the lonely desert, flying up the desolate highway, beating its leathery wings in the twilight.
Tomorrow we will follow him beyond those rocks and down into the desert at the bottom of the world.
“I would like that, Grandpa. Yes.”
IN THE DARK, the Old Man is falling into even darker depths.
I was falling.
No, Grandpa. I need you.
Yes.
The nightmare.
If only I could change it like we’re going to change the name of Death Valley.
The Old Man drinks cold water from his canteen.
His granddaughter sleeps, her face peaceful.
No, Grandpa. I need you.
The Old Man lies back and considers the night above, though his mind is really thinking of, and trying to forget, the nightmare all at once.
I wish I were free of it.
I wish I could change the rules of its game.
If she called me by another name, then the nightmare wouldn’t frighten me anymore. Then, I would remember in the dream that she calls me by another name and I could hold on to that.
And thinking of names, his eyes close and the sky above marches on and turns toward dawn.
Chapter 16
The morning sky is a clean, almost electric bright and burning blue. The desert is wide, stretching toward the east and the north. Small rocky hills loom alongside the road.
They have finished their breakfast and make ready to leave.
The Old Man starts the auxiliary power unit and a moment later, the tank. He watches the needles and gauges.
What could I do if there was a problem with any one of them?
Natalie might know something.
We should get as close to Death Valley as we can today. Then cross it tomorrow.
He watches his granddaughter lower herself into the driver’s seat. She smiles and waves from underneath the oversize helmet and a moment later her high soprano voice is in his ear.
“Can I drive today, Grandpa?”
“Stay on the road and when we come to an obstacle, like a burned-up car or a truck that has flipped across the lanes, stop and I’ll tell you which way to go around, okay?”
“Okay, Grandpa.”
They cross onto the highway and she pivots the tank left and toward the north. She overcorrects and for a moment they are off-road.
“Sorry, Grandpa!”
“Don’t worry. You’re doing fine.”
She gets them back on the road and the tank bumps forward with a sudden burst of acceleration as she adjusts her grip.
“Slow and steady,” he reminds her.
“I know, Grandpa.”
They drive for a while, crossing through a high desert town whose wounded windows gape dully out on the dry, brown landscape and prickly stunted yuccas as peeling paint seems to fall away in the sudden morning breeze of the passing tank.
“Are you excited about finding a new name for the valley we’ll cross tomorrow?”
She doesn’t reply for a moment as the tank skirts around a twisted tractor trailer flipped across the road long ago. Inside, the Old Man can see bleached and cracked bones within the driver’s cab.
“Yes, I am.”
The dull hum of the communications system fills the space between their words. Each time they speak, they sound suddenly close to each other.
“If you were going to give me a new name, what would it be?”
The dull hum.
Wheels turning.
“Why would I do that, Grandpa?”
Why would you indeed?
Because I am frightened that I might die and leave you abandoned out here, all alone.
Because a nightmare torments me and calls me by the same name you do.
Because I am trying to change the rules of the game.
And.
Because I love you.
“Oh, I don’t know,” says the Old Man. “Sometimes ‘Grandpa’ makes me feels old.”
“But that’s who you are. You’re Grandpa!”
Silence.
If we can change the name of a valley, can we change my name?
“I don’t know,” he hears her say. “You’re not so old, Grandpa.”
“I know.”
“But I guess . . . I guess if you wanted to be something else, I could call you . . . Poppa, maybe?”
I like that.
If I were Poppa, then when I was stuck in the nightmare, I could remember my new name.
And then I would remember it is just a nightmare, and that all I need to do is wake up.
I don’t ever want to be anything else but Poppa.
“I like Poppa. It sounds young. Like I’m full of beans.”
Silence.
They start up the grade that climbs into rocky wastes beyond the fallen buildings of the little town that once was and is now no more.
Where did all the people go? To our west is the Central Valley, Bakersfield, and the Grapevine. I remember passing by those fields on long highways. Long drives are some of my first memories. We had family in Northern California.
Fried chicken.
Summer corn.
White gravy with pepper.
Sweet tea.
The Kern River.
There was a song about the Kern River. My father always sang it when he thought of home. When he found himself in places far away, places where the big jets he flew had taken him. Places not home.
“Poppa?”
The Old Man felt the heat of those long-gone kitchens and early Saturday evenings when the Sacramento Delta breeze came up through the screen doors. Evenings that promised such things would always remain so.
How did they promise?
The Old Man thought.
Because when you are young and in that moment of food and family and time, you cannot imagine things might ever be different.
Or even gone someday.
“Poppa!”
That’s me. I’m Poppa now.
“Yes. What is it?”
“Just practicing. You need to practice too if you’re going to be Poppa now.”
“Okay. I’ll be ready next time.”
“Okay, Grandp—I mean . . . okay, Poppa.”
Fried chicken.
Saturday dinners.
The heat of the oven.
The Kern River.
Poppa.
THE DAY WAS at its brutal zenith when they saw the Boy crawling out of the cracked, parched hardpan toward the road. Their road. Dragging himself forward. Dragging himself through the wide stretch of dust and heat that swallowed the horizon.
