by Sandy Nathan
“What on earth is that?” They were having a breakfast of K rations and bottled water when Veronica pointed to something in the sky. Sam and Jeremy looked up.
“It looks like junk,” Jeremy said. “Intergalactic junk.” He explained to Sam, “Before Earth blew up, we made so much shit—garbage—that some places got rid of it by shooting it out into space. Not to mention us putting up tons of satellites and space stations. Junk’s all over out there. On Ellie’s world, they did big sweeps to clean it up.” He whistled, looking at the approaching object. “It looks like a mountain of crap heading straight at us.”
The thing veered toward them, moving fast and aiming at the space between the containers and the ancient structures. It jerked a few times and sat down in the empty space. Dust and debris flew around; they had to turn their backs to avoid getting it in their eyes.
Once the mess settled, they approached the heap cautiously.
“Man! That’s more junk than I’ve ever seen,” Jeremy chortled. “Maybe it’s a present to go with the container. The only thing that kept me sane on Ellie’s world was the garbage. You can find lots of interesting things in it. I made some good …”
“Jeremy? Jeremy?” A high-pitched voice came out of the top.
“Ellie? Are you up there?” He craned his neck and stood on tiptoe, trying to see her.
She flew off the mound with one of her prodigious leaps and ran toward him. “Jeremy.” He leapt toward her, hugging her to his chest. He held her for the longest time, rocking from side to side, his face buried in her hair.
“Oh, baby. Let me look at you.” He held her at arm’s length and joyfully examined her. She was as lovely and sprightly as ever. Her silver curls bounced and her eyes gleamed. “You look great! They let you go!”
She nodded vigorously, clinging and wide-eyed. “I here.” But she didn’t look happy. “Jeremy. Bad happen,” she whispered.
“Don’t be scared, baby. You’re here now.”
Her eyes filled with moisture. “Jeremy. They take you away.”
“But we’re together now, Ellie. You’re safe.” He held her closely, stroking her tenderly. “I missed you so much. I love you.”
He bent down to kiss her, but she continued to clutch him, making the little chittering noise as she did when very upset. “Jeremy. Bad happen. Mother say bad thing.”
“What did Belarian say?” Jeremy was ready to fight. He hated that bitch.
Ellie looked at the mound of junk. They could hear noises of people moving on top. “No here, Jeremy. Is bad.” Her shoulders were hunched and her head bowed.
“OK. Let’s go over here behind the storage bin.” He led her behind the first container. “What did she say, Ellie?”
Her eyes brimmed with tears. “Mother say I stupid.”
“You’re not stupid, Ellie. You’re as smart as anyone and braver, too.”
“No. I stupid. Mother say I no speak lots and no write many words. I stupid. She say I only good for making babies.”
“What! That is not true. You’re wonderful. You’re sweet and kind and you understand people’s feelings. You dance and you’re musical. You’re beautiful. And you love me. More than anyone, ever. How could she say that?”
Ellie clung to his hands. “She say you no there, I have to make babies with …” She looked in the direction of the pile of junk.
“What! Did she make you do it with the other guys? Which one?” He spun toward the junk pile, fists clenched.
“No make me. I say no. She go to Henry and Mel and James. They say no and get mad and see elders. They send us here. Oh, Jeremy, no go away. No leave me. Please.”
“Baby, I didn’t leave you, they kicked me out. I promise that I will never let them get you. I will never let anything hurt you again. And I’ll never leave you.”
They clung to each other, painfully aware that such promises sometimes can’t be kept. He held her, petting and kissing her until she calmed down. “I’ll always love you, Ellie.”
“I love Jeremy, too. So much.”
He could hear the others and wanted to check out what she’d said with them. “Let’s go see what’s going on.” She clung to him like his soul.
“Hello, down there,” Henry’s baritone boomed out. “How the hell are we supposed to get down?”
“We’ll help you.” Veronica headed for the mountain of refuse. She couldn’t see him over the top of the garbage. “Why did they send you like this? They moved our containers very nicely.”
“Well, you’re prettier than we are, Veronica. I take our mode of transportation as a statement of their feelings. They are peeved at us, but not as peeved as we are with them.” He looked over the top, trying to find a way down. “I think we can climb down that satellite and slide down the jet wing. Yes, here I come.” He slid down and turned back to help Lena. “Take my hand, Mother.”
Mel and James stood up. James was wearing his Dog Master outfit from Earth’s last day. He’d made quite a stir when he had arrived posing as the famous dog trainer. The rest of them wore nothing except for extravagant hairstyles. “Hey you guys, we bought our way out of heaven!”
Veronica looked at the newly arrived group, flabbergasted by their appearances. “Henry, you don’t look a day over thirty. And Lena, you look like a girl. Mel, James, you look fabulous. All of you look thin, but fabulous. What did they do to you? And what’s with your hair?”
“The hair part’s the easiest. They loved James’s styling abilities. He kept us at the height of fashion, along with half the pets on the planet.” Henry patted his huge ‘fro. “The first thing I want to do is shave this thing. For the other part, they were working us into their breeding program. We had to be young to do that. Then they intended to exploit us, just like they did Eliana.”
Jeremy and Eliana came out from behind the storage container and walked toward the group. Ellie held back a little, clinging to Jeremy’s hand and pulling behind him.
“Mom, I’d like you to meet Eliana, my wife.” Jeremy scowled, as though he thought his mother wouldn’t like his choice. “Ellie, this is my mom.”
Veronica stood, transfixed by her daughter-in-law. Eliana was exquisite. She had a dancer’s long-legged, perfect proportions. Beautiful features. Entrancing silver eyes, silver ringlets spilling down her forehead. The way she stood and moved couldn’t be more graceful.
Veronica’s eyes widened when she saw Eliana’s hooves. “Oh.” She hadn’t noticed Eliana’s hooves in the video. Jeremy hadn’t said anything about them. When the girl clattered down the pile of junk, the noise they made had caught her attention. Seeing them up close was a shock. If your daughter-in-law had hooves, was it rude to comment on them? She decided not to.
“Oh, darling. You’re breathtaking.” She opened her arms to Ellie, who slowly let go of Jeremy and accepted a small hug. “Jeremy, what you said about Eliana didn’t come close to capturing her beauty.”
Sam stepped forward, looking composed behind his sunglasses.
“Sam Baahuhd, you rascal” Henry cried. “I never thought I’d see you again. Come over her and give your fishing buddy a hug.” Henry embraced Sam, who stood stiffly, looking like he might shatter into pieces.
“He just got out of the underground shelter, Henry. He’s a little shook up. He’s Sam’s five millionth grandson,” Jeremy said.
“From the line of Emily. And I have Arthur, too.”
“As I live and breathe, you could be your grandfather. Lord have mercy.” He kept pumping Sam’s hand. “Oh, we had some times. I’ll tell you all about them, bit by bit.”
“Let’s get you settled in and fed, and then we can talk,” Veronica said.
Jeremy looked over the valley below. “Mom! Look at that—those are horses. A whole herd of them.”
A bunch of horses, perhaps fifty, galloped to the river and waded in. They squealed and kicked, enjoying the water. They came in every color. Little ones trotted by their mothers. A few rolled on the sandy bank.
“Mom
, you’re a great rider. All you need to do is catch them and train them.”
“Jeremy, I can ride, but I’ve never saddled a horse in my life. Sam Baahuhd did that. And I don’t have the faintest idea how to train one, much less catch them.”
“Lena knows how to train horses,” Henry said. They turned and looked at her. “She can shoot, too.”
“What are you talking about, Henry?” Lena exclaimed.
“You are always telling me about your life on the farm and how you and your granddad trained horses. And how you had to shoot if you wanted meat.”
“I was raised on a farm, that’s true. And I can shoot. We had to know how to handle guns to feed and protect ourselves. But I didn’t train horses.” She looked at the quizzical expressions on the faces around her. “After my daddy disappeared, my mama took me back home to the farm where she was raised. I grew up there with my grandpa and grandma and her. I didn’t move back to New York City until after I finished high school.”
“But you rode horses and helped train them?” Veronica asked.
“Well, yes, we had to ride if we wanted to go anywhere. It was that or walk. We didn’t have hover cars out there, not even regular cars. Everyone was poor, but we could feed ourselves and didn’t have to worry about the feds so much.”
“But you know how to ride?” Veronica said.
“Yes, I do. I also helped my grandpa train horses and mules.”
“Really?” they all said.
“Well, I wasn’t so much training them as acting as ballast. My grandpa couldn’t be the first to get on. He said he was so old that he’d go ‘splat’ if he fell off, plus he had a bad knee. He put me on the first few times a horse was ridden because ‘I was young and would bounce.’”
“You’ve broken horses?” Jeremy was wide-eyed.
“More mules than horses, and they broke me more often than not. I’ve been tossed so many times I can’t count. My grandpa did most of the work, but yeah, I helped break horses about a million years ago. I haven’t been on one since I left for the city.”
“Well, Veronica,” Henry said, “I think this situation calls for us to expand our job descriptions. Lena is the horse trainer and you and I are the assistants. Is that what they call them? Wranglers? We could be cowpokes, if we had cows.”
Henry walked over to the edge of the cliff and studied the topography below. Then he looked back at the ancient adobe dwellings. “This looks like the Wild West. All we need is Indians.” He put the palm of his hand to his mouth and made a few war whoops.
“Fat chance of that, Henry,” Jeremy smirked.
14
Sam listened to the lady and Jeremy bickering. At first, he didn’t understand what Jeremy was doing, but then it became horribly clear.
“Dear, you don’t have to do all that work. I’ve got fire starters,” Veronica said.
“I want to, Mom. This is fun. We’ll have a bonfire tonight.” The adobe dwellings’ ceilings had fallen in. Jeremy had pulled some of the old beams out on the ledge and piled them up. He focused a lens he’d found in the junk heap on one of them.
A thin white stream arose. Sam stiffened. He smelled something acrid. Was that smoke? More of it rose. Its color changed from pale gray to black as Jeremy kept adding fuel. “We’ve got a fire!” Jeremy shouted as shoots of orange and yellow burst from the wood.
Sam restrained a gasp and pulled away. Jeremy kept at it until the flames danced and popped. Sam stared, transfixed. Fire was absolutely forbidden in the world underground. In all 105 generations that the village had occupied the shelter, no one had built a fire. It would consume the air supply.
Sam moved away from the dancing tongues of light. The day had been a nightmare. He couldn’t imagine a space as vast as that around them. He couldn’t comprehend the brilliant sunlight and overwhelming colors of the sky and trees. The river and its gurgling sound. The wind beating on him. The sun burning his face. And now Jeremy had made fire, the deadliest menace.
“Campfire tonight! Bring your marshmallows and hot dogs,” Jeremy yelled. “Get your chow and sit around the fire!”
Dinner consisted of the usual army rations, colored glops of stuff in a segmented tray with a peel-off top. Ellie looked at her meal with something close to horror.
“Everybody, Ellie’s a vegetarian,” Jeremy called. “I think the green stuff in the trays is supposed to be vegetables. Do you think some of you could trade her for her meat stuff?” When they’d traded, he asked, “Is that OK, babe?”
She nodded, but ate almost nothing.
The others gathered around the fire with their packets. Sam tried to escape toward the back of the cave and greater darkness, but Henry called for him.
“Come on, Sam. We need to get to know each other,” Henry said. So he joined them sitting around the bonfire. Everyone talked, except him.
Jeremy scowled and spoke loudly to the other men. “Before we talk about anything, I’ve got to find out about what Ellie said. She told me that Belarian …”
“We’ll talk about that in a while, Jeremy,” Henry nodded at Ellie. Her eyes were impossibly wide and she was practically sitting in Jeremy’s lap. She’d been that way since they landed. “We’ll talk to you about that later.”
“But is it true?”
“Oh, yes. It got us off our butts. No way we’d go along with that. We got mad enough to make them an offer they couldn’t refuse.” Henry grinned.
“We got here by giving them extremely generous amounts of our genetic material,” Henry explained their escape from the golden planet. “They have enough essence de Henry to populate their planet twice.”
“Not to mention our input,” Mel said. He had his arm around James, who hadn’t made the trip too well. “We’re good for a few more planets.”
“They told me they left me enough eggs for me to raise another family. I hope so.” Lena rubbed her tummy. “The whole thing was so degrading. And then sending us off on a garbage heap. We failed to adapt to their ways, but a garbage heap …”
Sam listened. He understood what the goldies had planned for Ellie, but didn’t know what the others were talking about. Maybe he’d figure it out if he listened carefully.
“At least they didn’t dump you next to a shelter full of maniacs with nothing,” Jeremy said. “If I hadn’t found Flossie that night, the wolves would have gotten me.”
“Well, we’re here now,” Veronica added. “Now we have to make a new world. That’s what we started out to do.”
“That’s what you and Jeremy started out to do,” said Henry. “Mother and I didn’t want to get fried by atomic bombs.
“Now, Sam,” Henry turned toward him, “I’m interested in how my old friend Sam Baahuhd made out after the conflagration. Do you have any stories about him?”
“Yes, sir,” Sam bowed his head as he would for one of the Bigs.
“Don’t you be calling me sir, Sam. I’ve done enough shuffling and jiving for a lifetime, and my people have done it way longer than that. I’m Henry. Henry Henderson, if you want to be formal. I don’t want anyone bowing to anyone here.”
Sam had never met so many new people. The new arrivals weren’t just people, they were legendary. Eliana, the golden Angel. Henry Who Could Drink the Leg Off an Ox. His wife, Lena, Who Got so Pissed at Him, He Almost Didn’t Get to Come Back to the Village. But Henry made talking easy.
“Well, young man, are you going to tell me about my friend, Sam Baahuhd?”
“Yes, Henry.” The word came thickly off his tongue. The wrong form of address down below could see a man flogged. That would mean death, because the rot would set in, or the flour disease would eat the skin.
“Sam Baahuhd lived to be a very old man and had many children,” Sam took up the rhythmic cadence used by the singers of songs when speaking of their history.
“I’m glad that he lived a long time,” Henry replied. “And of course he had many children. I’ve seldom seen a man who could attract the ladies like Sam.” He looked a
t the others and smiled knowingly. “What did his wives think of the underground? And how did he do with the hooch? The only thing he liked more than the ladies was that homemade whisky.”
Sam inhaled sharply and straightened up. “Sam Baahuhd lived by the Commands. ‘One man, one wife, fidelity.’ He was faithful to his only wife, Emily. He never touched the hooch from the moment he went underground.”
“He couldn’t have any of his old wives, anyway,” Jeremy cut in. “They were all his first cousins. I dissolved those marriages. Who was Emily? I don’t remember any Emily in the village.”
Sam’s eyes darted to the side before he spoke. “Emily was not of the village. Sam Baahuhd found her in the meadow and brought her to the shelter before the explosions. She was naked, except for boots made in Jamayuh. No one ever knew who Emily was.” Sam shut his mouth tightly, not intending to say a word more than the official explanation.
“Sam showed up in the underground with a naked stranger before the nukes went off? That doesn’t make any sense.” Jeremy scowled. “She had to be a fed. The only people in the Hamptons in those days were villagers and federal agents.” His mouth opened as he realized what had happened. “Sam dragged a federal agent into the shelter so he could have a wife who wasn’t his first cousin!” Jeremy grinned. “That’s right, isn’t it, Sam?”
Sam choked. No one of Emily’s lineage talked about their matriarch’s origins outside the family. The villagers would have killed Emily if they knew for sure what she had been. Sam didn’t like Jeremy’s knowing smile.
“Yeah. She was a fed. She loved Sam Baahuhd mor’n any ever had, an’ he loved her th’ same way.” Sam wanted to get up and leave. He wouldn’t let a stranger mock a love like Sam and Emily’s, even if the stranger was the Great Tek.
