by Nick Cole
“The people that were rescued,” said the Boy. “They said their leader, a man named Ted, was taken on ahead of them a week ago. They wanted us to look for him if we go north.”
“How could we possibly find him?”
“They said he wears glasses and has a thick mustache. And that he shaves his head.”
“I’ll . . . it seems doubtful, but I’ll try.”
The Boy simply nodded.
In an hour it will be hotter.
The worst of the day’s heat is still to come.
I must hurry now.
He turned to the Boy.
“I’ll make you a deal,” said the Old Man suddenly.
The Boy cocked his head, not sure what to make of the Old Man’s unexpected smile.
“I’ll make you a deal. We’ll trade.”
“Trade what?”
“Words. You take mine and I’ll take yours.”
“How?”
“I don’t know how, other than that we just decide to. I want to take everything with me. I think that would be wonderful.”
Her smile.
Her friendship.
“I think I’ll need it wherever I am going. And you, can you let go?”
“I don’t know.”
“When we found you in the desert, you kept asking who you were. I don’t think you wanted to be you anymore. So you can let go now. You should, because you’ve carried too much for too long. Yes. That’s my answer. And I’m letting go too. But I will take everything with me. Am I just a crazy old man for wanting that? For trading words with you? Am I crazy?”
“No. You’re very brave.”
“I’m afraid too.”
“Sergeant Presley said that’s part of being brave.”
Chapter 49
“Oh, Poppa, her name is Pepper. Like what we had for the whole trip. I don’t know why, I just thought it would be a perfect name for her because when you think about it, Pepper is kind of a funny word, like donkey. Isn’t it, Poppa?”
“It is.”
I feel numb.
I don’t want to do this. I don’t want things to end this way.
Remember what the Boy said, my friend.
You take everything with you.
“Are you okay, Poppa?”
“Yes. I’m fine.”
“Do you want to come watch me ride Pepper now?”
More than anything I have ever wanted to do in my whole life. And I don’t even like horses, they’re dangerous.
“You must be careful with horses.”
“Oh, I will, Poppa. The careful-est.”
“You can call me Grandpa now. Like you used to.”
“No, I like Poppa now. It’s fun. Poppa.” She giggled.
That. I’ll steal that giggle and take it with me. I will steal everything there is that is worth anything in this life and I will take it with me. You are mine, giggle.
They arrived at the tank and the Old Man said, “Wait here,” and climbed up onto the tank. He leaned down into the hatch.
You will go with her now, my friend Santiago.
Teach her.
Teach her that life cannot defeat you. Only we can defeat ourselves.
He held out the book to her.
“Read this.”
“Now, Poppa?”
“No. Later when . . .”
Don’t say, When you want to remember me. Then she’ll know. She’ll cling to you and she’ll want to go with you. She won’t let you go on alone if you say that.
No, Poppa. I need you.
“. . . later. It’s my favorite book.”
“The Old Man and the Sea, Poppa. What’s it about?”
Easy words caught in the Old Man’s throat as hot tears began to fill his eyes. He jerked his head away as if he’d seen something on the tank that needed attending.
“It just reminds me of you and me and all our adventures together, when we used to salvage.”
She looked at it for a moment, then stuck it in the pocket of her shiny green bomber jacket.
“Okay, now we’ll go see Pepper, Poppa. Pepper Poppa.” She laughed and said it three times fast.
That. I’m taking that with me too.
Please, can I take that?
“The Boy asked for me to send you over to him near the tents. He’s going to teach you how to make a halter for your horse. Then we’ll all watch you ride. I have a few things to finish here, so get going now, okay?”
“Okay, Poppa. You’re gonna love Pepper.”
Don’t.
Hug her.
You can’t. She’ll know.
If I could have that. If I could take that with me . . .
You can’t.
“Give me a hug,” he said quickly as she started to skip away, her hair whipping wildly.
She did.
Don’t squeeze her too tightly, she’ll know.
And this hug, I will take this with me. I don’t know where I’m going now, but wherever it is, I’m taking this hug with me.
“Bye, Poppa.”
And that too.
Bye, Poppa.
And she was gone.
He’d already given her things to the Boy along with his own gear. When he saw her tiny shape disappear among the tents of the Mohicans, the horse people, he knew it was time for him to go. He climbed into the hatch. He started the auxiliary power unit. He waited.
You must.
And yet, I don’t want to.
Megan. Sunshine. Her unwishable wish.
The engine spooled to life, its hum whispering death.
I’ll have to pass by the tents. Why didn’t I think about that?
He was heading for the road when she came out.
She was running for him.
Tears streaming down her face.
And the Boy caught her.
Holding her back.
Her mouth moving.
No, Poppa. I need you.
I am slipping away.
The worst has come upon me.
No, Poppa. I need you.
She struggled, but the Boy was too powerful. He held her. She hit him, scratched him. Beat at him. He didn’t flinch.
The thing I never wanted to happen is happening to me right now.
And . . .
You take everything with you.
The good.
It was all good.
It just is.
He passed tents.
She must have seen our gear and put two and two together. She’s a smart girl. The smartest.
I love you always.
That’s what the Old Man kept saying as he drove the tank past them all. Past the Boy.
Past her.
I love you always.
Read my lips.
I love you always.
No, Poppa . . .
I love you.
Always.
Chapter 50
The road leads north through the last of the grassy plain as the Rockies rise up in dark defiance of what the Old Man must do within the space of this day.
This morning I thought about death.
I thought to myself, ‘Everyone has a last day,’ as if my last day were something that might never happen or happen so far in the future I didn’t need to be bothered by thoughts of it on such a fine day. But it seems today will be my last day.
Why are you silent, my friend from the book?
Santiago?
But there was nothing. No words.
Maybe they are with her now.
Maybe I will have to catch the fish all by myself now. Just like you did, Santiago. My friend from the book.
The Old Man drove and tried to remember passages from the book. As if that would start his friend talking to him again. But he could think of nothing because of his fear of what lay ahead. As if his mind were the last of the grassy plains that were fading all too quickly into the South, a place he would never go again.
You would say, It wasn’t as bad as you’d imagined it would be in all those
nightmares. Yes, you would say that. You would say that to me, Santiago. You would tell me it wasn’t as bad as I’d thought it might be.
But it was.
Then, don’t think of it. Her laughter, think of that instead.
But he couldn’t.
And then he did.
THE RUINS OF little Raton lay at the beginning of the foothills. The last of New Mexico as the map might have told him. Green trees with almost gray trunks, their leaves danced back and forth, shimmering in the breeze.
On the other side of Raton the road immediately disappeared beneath a long-ago mudslide now hardened and swallowing the road and the bottoms of the trees. The Old Man could see the tops of rusting cars and the edges of buildings poking out from beneath the calcified mud.
He proceeded forward in starts and stops as the road disappeared now and again, its winding course climbing through chopped granite hills. The forest began to thin, and as the Old Man topped a small summit and looked out onto the valley and the lands of the North, he saw a country burned and long dead.
Trees beyond counting lay fallen like struck matches, like burnt toy soldiers knocked over in long rows.
Instead of earth and dirt, there was gray and ash.
Instead of shimmering granite, there was blackened heat-torched rock, melted and blasted.
The Old Man knew if he turned off the tank at this moment and simply listened, he would hear nothing. He would hear the absence of everything.
AFTERNOON THUNDERSTORMS began to form out over the gray and foreboding mountains that rose up in hacked and jagged peaks.
The Old Man looked behind him and saw the gray smoke that had been belching up from the engine had grown thicker and more acrid.
He looked down to check the fuel and engine gauges and saw the temperature climbing. He was down to less than half a tank besides what was left in the two fifty-gallon drums. His eyes fell to the dosimeter.
The radiation is very high here.
You would say, What does it matter now, my friend?
But the voice of Santiago, the one he had carried in his head through the wasteland, and listened to, and even at times longed for, was silent and would not come to him.
You would say that to me.
Beyond the valley and into the next, the scorched and broken earth grew worse if such a thing were possible. Trees grew up through the fallen matchsticks of their ancestors and were little better than dark-barked twisted fiends that seemed barren and even tormented.
There were towns ahead but I wonder if even their foundations remain. On the map they were called Starkville and Trinidad, which seem like places my friend in the book might have gone when he was a sailor and sailed to Africa.
And saw the lions on the beach at sunset.
Did you ever go to a place called Trinidad, Santiago?
Silence.
Then perhaps you did.
In what might have once been Starkville, the Old Man saw the rising stumps of buildings and twisted pipe jutting up wildly through the gray ash and furnace-roasted rock. Within the forest of twisted pines the Old Man saw weird and misshapen man-shaped figures wandering through the ash.
Who are they and what do they know?
Now the day was turning dark and gray. The sky overhead seemed swollen. As if it were pulsing.
If it is possible, it is even hotter that it was.
Soon I will need to drain the fuel drums.
The Old Man drove on, leaving Starkville in ash that sputtered up to mix with the heat and belching smoke from the engine.
A few miles later, the highway could be more clearly seen and was not altogether ruined.
There must have been rains here and what covered the highway has been washed away.
The road carved up a small mountain. Alongside the road, through a dark forest of the twisted fiend-trees, the Old Man could see weighted shacks caught in the act of slow collapse. Like drunkards burdened by the weight of their own misery. At the top of the rise he looked down and saw Trinidad.
The blackened and gray remains of the little village lay in the saddle of a small valley. Beyond, leaden plains of ash stretched off to the north.
I am close to the end of this.
Below the Old Man lay brick buildings that had weathered that long-ago, worst-of-all-worst days, when nuclear weapons had fallen like downpours in a thunderstorm. Windowless holes gaped bleakly out upon ash and darkness like a nearsighted man fumbling through the end of the world. Down in the streets the Old Man could see rusting and tire-less cars. A highway bridge that once crossed over the road connecting both halves of the town seemed recently demolished. The stone lay scattered in all directions like bits of protruding white bone jutting up through the fire-blackened skin of a corpse. In front of this, before the idling tank and the Old Man, great logs and machines had been piled to block the road. On a panel truck whose charred side had been brushed mostly clean, there was a message in that sickly neon-green slop-paint.
“Welcome, Nuncle!”
I could drive over it. I could crash through their makeshift barrier.
But the bad tread. You would tell me to be careful of the bad tread, my friend Santiago.
Yes.
To the right, an off-ramp led down into the remains of Trinidad.
Chapter 51
Narrow streets barely accommodated the tank as it forced its way east through Trinidad. The Old Man crushed long rusting vehicles and machines that had been dragged into the street. Ahead he could see an intersection.
If I turn left, that might lead alongside the highway, and then at some point, I could get back onto it.
Silence.
The Old Man watched the dark buildings that crowded the sides of the street, peering through the cracks and missing windows for sign of an ambush. Crushing a small car, he felt the right tread slip for a moment, and when the Old Man pushed harder to re-engage the gear, he was horribly convinced it never would. A moment later, though, the small car disappeared beneath the treads on a hollow, plastic milk carton note as the right tread re-engaged and pulled the massive Abrams forward.
In the moment before the explosion, the Old Man was thinking about colors. It was as if the landscape, the town, the sky, all of it, had been repainted by an angry lunatic artist with only three oily paints on his sad palette.
Bone white.
Ash gray.
Bloody rust.
That was when the building to his left exploded outward into the street. It was maybe five stories tall, packed tightly against other buildings that must have once been something in the days of gunfights and circuit judges. The explosion came from inside the building, near its supports. Brickwork concussed outward toward the tank. If the brick had been recently made instead of the two-hundred-year-old building material that it was, time rotted by the frontier birth and nuclear death of America, it would have killed him. Instead, it sprayed outward in a dusty rain of red grit that pelted the tank like a sudden downpour. Something large hit the Old Man on the side of his helmeted head, but he felt it disintegrate with a rotten and rusty smuph.
The Old Man ducked down inside the hatch, looking upward. As if in slow motion, he could see the roof of the building turning down toward him. Without thinking he reached up, grabbed the hatch, and slammed it shut as the building didn’t so much as fall on the tank, as slide down on top of it. The tank rocked sideways and the Old Man was thrown down onto the loader’s deck.
‘It’s too much for just me,’ was his last thought.
WHEN HE CAME to he got to his feet, feeling weak and shaky. Red light swam eerily across the interior.
He remembered the building falling on him. Its slow-motion fall that seemed like a cresting wave looming over him. The oddness of seeing the building’s roof shifting down toward him as it moved from the horizontal to the vertical.
Am I stuck? Is there so much debris piled on top of the tank that I’ll never be able to get out from under it?
And . . .
What if the bad tread has finally broken loose having come so close to the end of this journey and yet, I’m still so far away!
The Old Man climbed into the commander’s seat and took hold of Sergeant Major Preston’s jury-rigged controls.
Please work!
He pushed forward and heard the engine spool up into an urgent whine. Something crumpled in front of the tank and then the sound of grinding gravel and dirt being churned angrily enveloped everything. But he didn’t feel the tank move forward.
I’m stuck.
Sudden panic roved about his bones and fingers, creeping its way into his skull.
Stop!
He pulled back on the control sticks, urging the massive tank into reverse. For a moment nothing happened, then, slowly, the tank began to move. Backward. The Old Man could hear debris falling away from the front of the tank.
Through the optics he could see the massive building sliding away from the gun barrel.
If I rotate the turret I’ll be able to see what’s going on behind me, but I might drag it into another building and bring that one down on me too.
The Old Man reversed back along the street until he recognized things he had crushed or other hauntingly familiar aspects from the moments before the building had exploded.
The first thing that crashed down onto the tank was a sink that came from out a window high above. Its porcelain shattered into a million bright shards, some of which nicked the optics. Now all manner of objects were raining down from the buildings along the street. The Old Man could see misshapen men suddenly appearing in gaping window frames to hurl down sinks, and paint cans full of rocks, and large pipes.
I need to see what’s behind the tank. They could have another trap ready, or even more explosives to bring down another building.
Ahead, there was no way around the dust-blooming pile of the fallen building. The rain of objects increased to an almost cacophonic pain in the Old Man’s ears.
To his left, he could see he’d backed up past the remains of another tall building whose bottom floor had once been a café or a diner. He could see vinyl dining booths ripped and shredded within the darkness.
The Old Man gunned the engine and pivoted the tank.
There is no other way than this!
