South

by Frank Owen

  ‘Yep, long before. She was working in the labs up north for most of The War – only defected toward the end, came Southside. The magazines came with her, way they always did. Back then you could still buy them here. She met my stepdad, who worked first on a ranch and then in the museum. He was great. He actually liked us, you know? Then, when I started getting pocket money, I’d buy more photocomics. Any old ones. Then comes the first of the winds, and overnight there’s no new ones in the store. Then no store. People up and leave, heading further and further south. But Evert – my stepdad – wouldn’t go. Figured things were bad wherever, and home was home. So we stayed and we were just, you know, careful. Never far from the house.’

  ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘Wind got him, same way it gets everybody. Something that thinned his blood till it couldn’t clot. He died from a nick on his pinky, opening a can of spaghetti. You could have held that cut all you wanted and it wouldn’t stop. My mama tried tying nylon round it to slow the flow. When he died we took off south. We had big old hiking packs. I took a stack of magazines. Turned to burning them one by one as the nights got colder and the kindling got rained on. It killed me, Dyce.

  ‘Then we found that house. No one there so we took it, and that’s the place you saw. Now I got one left; it’s all that makes sense to be carrying.’

  ‘You got it here? Let’s see it.’

  Vida opened her bag and pulled out the photocomic, limp with age.

  ‘I’d have died from hypothermia before I torched this one.’

  Dyce took it. MAMI WATA, blared the cover. She Exacts Her Awful Revenge on Sinners in the City of Gold! A frowning white woman had appeared in a gilt mirror, her blue-black tresses snaking out from its frame. Before her, wrists up in an X of submission, cowered a black man in a fedora and boxy gray suit. His Greed Called Her Up!

  Dyce turned the pages gently. They were so thin he could see his thumbs through the fibers. Mami Wata looked like one mean lady – half-serpent, half-woman, and no escape for the men who crossed her.

  ‘I’ll have to read it properly sometime.’

  ‘Yeah. In the meantime, Beware her evil powers,’ Vida intoned. She took the magazine and packed it away again carefully. ‘And you?’

  ‘And me what?’

  ‘I spilled my guts, buddy. What about you, while we’re coming clean?’ Vida sat back and looked him clear in the face. Overhead the sky was darkening, the purpling bruise spreading as the night came on. ‘All I know about you guys is that Garrett knocked up the wrong girl and you’ve been in a world of pain ever since.’

  ‘Okay. What do you want to know?’

  ‘I want to know everything.’

  Dyce didn’t know how the words would come out, but there they were. ‘Our dad never went to war. Had a mental thing, just a bit slow with numbers and writing and things like that, made it that he couldn’t enroll. But he wasn’t dumb, you know? He saw what was coming. We got on with stuff. Listened to the radio, hearing after all those years how we were winning, or about to win The War – but it never ended. Then the original plague came, and people were talking about how weird it was that it only killed off our soldiers and not theirs. For the first time we were glad that he hadn’t gone to fight. But we still figured things would be okay. Your government protects you, right? I mean, why wouldn’t it?

  ‘Then in the talks – the concession talks, round about the time the South got royally fucked – my ma got sick. And nothing from The War even. Pneumonia. Regular fucking pneumonia. Course the antibiotics had all been shipped off to the frontlines. We gave her what we could, herbs and shit. When she died, my dad took to teaching us survival skills, like Boy Scouts, I guess. I think he figured there was no counting how many days he had left either, and he wanted me and Garrett to be okay. Hunting, trapping, skinning, filleting, that kind of thing. Pretty gross. Garrett really liked that shit. Enjoyed it. I liked the riding lessons. That was about it. I was better than Garrett. Just at one thing, but it was mine, you know?

  ‘Long story short, Dad caught a virus and died when I was eight and Garrett was ten. We go from settlement to settlement now, making our way, you know. Least we did. We’re a good bet. Handy.’

  ‘Fuck.’

  ‘Fuck Renard, you mean.’

  ‘I grew up hearing Fuck Renard, but it’s just something people say. It doesn’t mean anything anymore.’

  ‘Feels good, though.’ Dyce lifted his head and in the soft near-evening his feathery dark hair made Vida’s stomach flip a little. He looked like a wolf. ‘FUCK RENAAARD!’

  Vida waited till he had quieted down. ‘My mama says it was all a mistake. Said she knew firsthand, ’cause before the Concession Party went over, they found her and came asking about the North. Not a lot of defectors around, so she was gold. They asked about Renard, mostly, but they wanted to know everything she could remember. She said it seemed a little weird. But the thing was, Concession happened in Des Moines, and Ma had never been there. Still, she tried to help. Called it reparation. Not enough, though, ’cause when the Concession Party got up there, they went and killed Renard’s wife. It was a mistake. They were going for him. Pissed him right off, obviously, and now the viruses are his revenge; his punishment. No way to reason with a man like that. Nothing to lose.’

  ‘Heard similar. Sure as shit wish they’d have done it right.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  The first stars had appeared against the daylight, defiant. Dyce stretched into the silence. ‘Well, thank you for sharing your popcorn. But we better get back soon.’

  They walked fast through the dim streets back to the museum, past the dead-eyed streetlights and the car husks and the littered bones that had once been dogs or cats or people. They reached the shelter as the sunglow turned maroon behind the mountains. Dyce stepped inside and Vida followed, closing the door behind them. The row of high windows along one wall filtered the last warm light into the room.

  ‘Wow,’ he said.

  Sitting heavily in the main space were the remains of an old steam engine, with every removable part unbolted, or hacked off, and taken. It looked like a missile, a long metal tube, made for speed and destruction, hurtling into the dark. Behind it was a painted diorama of the old west, dusty scrubland and wide open sky – and on a stand in the foreground was a stuffed bison.

  ‘Garrett would have liked that, huh?’ said Vida.

  Some desperate survivor had re-skinned the thing, slit it along its sutures from chin to asshole and peeled the pelt off. All that remained was the snot-yellow cast they’d made from the dead animal – two halves glued together and bolted to the floor. The ghost of a ghost.

  Dyce stepped close and patted it, then knocked on its forehead. His knuckles rang: It was solid.

  ‘Ever wanted to ride a bison?’

  ‘Never.’

  Dyce jumped up and swung his leg over its back, then sat up as if he was racing a horse.

  ‘Yeehaa!’ He twirled an imaginary lariat.

  Vida rolled her eyes. It’s a bison, not buckskin. How young is he, anyway? Like he’s asking me to put a quarter in the slot. Like I’m a mom at a mall.

  Then she caught herself. No more default; the soft shell hardening into the unthinking carapace. She was being her own mother, always berating Vida for wanting to play, wanting to enjoy herself. Because what had happened then was that Vida had stopped asking to splash in the stream or climb the oak or watch the stars in the night-dark sky. If Ma had been with them, they’d never have gone to the cinema; her credo was waste not, want not. If it wasn’t tangibly beneficial, then it was off the list and out of the question.

  Vida came over to Dyce and laid a hand on the bison.

  ‘There room for two up there?’

  He grinned and slapped its bald flank.

  ‘Shift over,’ Vida said.

  She jumped up behind him and landed on her stomach. He reached a hand back to help her to sit.

  ‘Where we going, cowboy?’

  �
�How about the Narrow Gauge Locomotive Museum?’

  ‘It’s always been a dream of mine.’

  Dyce leant forward as though the bison was at top speed, galloping through the grassland. Vida leant too, her breasts pressing against his back. They’d been close like this, slept each night in Horse Head curled into one other – but night was different, and they had told themselves it was body heat. Here they were in the last of the daylight, wide awake, close and touching, their bodies rubbing as Dyce spurred the creature on.

  And they were alone too, for the first time: alone and healthy, with something to celebrate.

  Vida reached her arms around his waist, felt the meat on his ribs. She wiggled closer so that her legs lined up with his, and pressed against him, heat flooding her groin.

  Please, she thought. Please let him take this the right way. If he makes me ask, I think I’ll die.

  Dyce leant backwards into her chest and rested his head on her shoulder.

  ‘This is the best I’ve felt in a while,’ he told her.

  ‘You feel pretty good. It’s true.’

  ‘Best I’ve felt in weeks.’

  ‘Months.’

  ‘Years. In fact, since I saw Garrett’s ass getting hauled off that Tarmac.’

  ‘I’m happy to help,’ Vida told him.

  ‘But you know, I was thinking,’ he said.

  ‘Thinking what?’

  ‘That I could feel even better if I really tried.’

  ‘And how would you do that?’

  ‘Like this,’ Dyce said, and guided Vida’s hand to the warm bulge in his crotch.

  35

  Vida remembered something she’d once read about real love being shared sleep. It was true.

  But it was also possible to lie awake in wonder. She supposed that they must have drifted off, because she didn’t feel tired – not the bone-aching weariness that she had come to know over the last few weeks. Now she lay on her side and kept her eyes closed, but the light behind her lids told her it was morning. She had heard Dyce’s breathing change: he’d been awake for a while too.

  And he would be looking at her skin.

  Vida let him. They would have to have the talk some time, and she may as well get it over.

  He was moving his hand over her hip; Vida felt the calluses on his palm.

  ‘You’re so smooth,’ he said. ‘Why are girls so smooth?’

  Vida rolled over and faced him. ‘The teeth are on the inside.’

  In the early light his body looked bullet-ridden, the scars welted, big as quarters.

  She put her own hand on his chest and slid it down over the sparse fur of his belly, lower, lower, down to his penis, with its hard head and their shared smell. In another time Dyce would never have been this muscled, or this thin, but deprivation made statues out of even the meekest men. Flabby meant relaxed, and relaxed got you killed in a hundred ugly ways. Now all the white boys looked like Jesus on the cross. Vida bent her head and gave him an experimental lick. Sticky and salty, but clean and honest as tears.

  Dyce shivered. Then he held her head. ‘But seriously,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you have even the tiniest scar or something?’

  Her tongue stopped. She drew back. ‘What do you want? Warts?’

  He brought his face closer to Vida, inspected her minutely: belly, shoulders, thighs. ‘But you have nothing. Have you even had chicken pox?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘You would remember.’ Dyce certainly did. Him and Garrett, both. The crawling itch, the scabs and pus. And the scars – tiny hillocks that flattened over time but never truly went away. Just another thing that used to kill people until they understood how it worked – and understanding how it worked often meant taking the demon inside you in a different form. Maybe that’s all that evolution really was: coming to terms with the things that could kill you; finding ways to dodge the bullet and its damage.

  Vida shrugged. ‘I’m real careful and also lucky, I guess. And Mama’s a nurse, remember: she knows all kinds of stuff. Plus we kept ourselves to ourselves for a long time, even before the viruses.’

  Dyce shook his head. ‘She survived too; not that many old folk around. It’s weird. I’m not buying.’

  Vida sighed. ‘Al-right. Jeez! Enough.’

  Dyce settled back, his long, pale limbs haloed by the weak sun that was filtering through the windows as the sun rose.

  Vida relented. ‘Well, what do you think it is?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe you have a really robust immune system or something. We’ve been camping out for a week in a lazaretto and you don’t have a cough, even. And you carried me, for Chrissakes! You’re really strong for a girl. A woman. You hardly ever look tired. Like now – we were up half the night and you look like you just got eight hours.’

  ‘Oh, I get tired.’

  ‘Not the way I do.’

  ‘All I can tell you, baby, is that black don’t crack.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Allerdyce. Look at me. I’m an African. I was born here but my blood belongs on the continent. My hair is different to yours. My legs are stronger. My teeth are twice as hard.’

  ‘Bullshit. That’s—’

  ‘What? Racist?’

  ‘No – what Hitler was doing, what the slave masters did when they were breeding humans for better traits. What’s it called?’

  ‘Eugenics. But it’s not. You’re not getting what I’m saying.’

  It would have got worse between them if there had not been footsteps outside the front door of the museum.

  Dyce pulled a face. ‘Tourists?’

  Vida held up a finger. ‘Not funny. Shh!’

  She replayed the moment she’d closed the door behind them, trying to recall the twist of a key or the thunk of a deadbolt – but the details had been lost to her in the tingling feeling of being alone in a room with Dyce for the first time, the dark, warm possibilities of him. She bet that even if the door did have a lock on it, she hadn’t latched it – and that meant that whoever was sniffing outside now could walk right in.

  Vida got up and began to dress quickly, still high enough to feel the pleasant ache between her legs. She looked down when she felt the slow trickle along her thigh.

  Blood.

  Was she getting her period again? Jesus! It had been years! The only upside of wartime stress: your body went into emergency mode. It turned you into a man. Had Dyce seen? She looked over at him but he was busy pulling on his clothes, his skin flashing white as birch branches before it was covered. He was still wearing Sam’s blood on his pants from the day before. Her blood spots weren’t that bad in comparison. She would deal with them later.

  Vida tiptoed out to the foyer and went to crouch at the hinges of the door – and there came a voice in the thin morning, calling out in a rough whisper.

  ‘Pavlov!’

  The caller gave up trying to be quiet, and began shouting in earnest; hoarse and wet and desperate.

  ‘Pavlov? Pavlov! Come home, baby dog! Mama’s waiting! Oh where are you!’

  Christ. Dog Lady! Didn’t she ever give up? Vida shook her head in disbelief.

  ‘It’s okay,’ she called back to Dyce, keeping her voice low.

  ‘Who is it?’

  Vida kept away from the windows and made her way back to him. They sat down again and she explained how she’d first seen Dog Lady the same day she’d come upon Dyce and Garrett.

  ‘She’s lost her dog. Or she thinks she has, anyway. I never saw it myself.’

  ‘Not just her dog, it sounds like.’

  ‘Yup. Brainworm, for sure. I don’t think she’s dangerous, exactly, but I’m laying low until she passes by. One day she’s going to take it into her head that I’ve got the dog with me or something.’

  From what she could tell, Pavlov was a Jack Russell. Vida had felt sorry for the Dog Lady, let her tag along behind. But after an hour or so of listening to her calling and weeping and cursing her dog, Vida had los
t patience. She had tried to lose her in a thicket, but the woman had stuck as fast to her as a thistle and then collared her, panting.

  ‘Saw you take off like that. Did you see my dog?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you chase him off?’

  ‘No, like I told you, I haven’t seen your dog.’

  ‘His name’s Pavlov. Escaped this morning through the chicken wire, chasing after a motor bike.’

  ‘I know. You said.’

  ‘You seen him?’

  Jeez, lady, enough.

  Vida had eventually come to understand that the woman would not leave her alone until she offered some plausible explanation. So many people didn’t want the truth; they just wanted someone to say something that would make it seem better. She hated to do it, not because of some moral code, but because it just seemed disrespectful. Her mama had always said that sick people were still people.

  But this is self-preservation, Lord, Vida told the sky. It’s her or me.

  ‘His name Pavlov? Think I saw him, yes.’

  ‘Oh, praise Jesus! Where?’

  ‘That way, over that rise.’ Vida had pointed off back the way they’d come and the woman turned and hurried through the trees, calling out as loud as she could. That’s how Vida had come to find the weather box, how she’d found herself in unusual terrain: she had not been paying the right kind of attention. But it had brought her Dyce, hadn’t it? Dyce and this feeling of using her body properly, for something good and right. That had to count for something.

  It was a miracle that Dog Lady was still around. She must have been searching day and night for her missing hound, but she had the sense to eat and sleep someplace safe.

  And so should the two of them. The locomotive museum wasn’t good enough if a nut like Dog Lady could find it without even trying.

  ‘We need to get going,’ Vida said.

  ‘No flapjacks? You call yourself a girlfriend?’

  Vida smiled. She wanted to laugh – to try to, anyway – but her throat was dry. Dyce was unnerved too, and the joke fell flat.

  ‘You can ask for your money back at the next town.’

  She made a show of bustling about, readying her small bag for traveling.