Never Too Far

by Christopher, Thomas

  “Slow down, dear,” Ina said. “We’re not interrogating you.”

  Eve looked at him for a lingering moment, as if she were trying to figure him out, before she said something that alarmed Joe.

  “Who told you to say that?”

  “No one,” he said quickly. “That’s the truth.”

  “Well, it didn’t sound like the truth. It sounded like you were repeating what somebody told you. You need to learn how to lie better.”

  “Leave him alone,” Ina said. “They’re just a couple of dirt-eaters. He’s probably scared. Never been to the city before.”

  “Being a good liar is the only way to survive,” Eve continued. “And if he doesn’t want to find himself in a labor prison or his girl’s baby given to some fat cats in the Green Zone, then he better learn to lie better.”

  “Don’t be so hard.”

  “I’m only trying to help. How is that being hard?”

  “I’m just saying you see the bad in everything and you aren’t open to anything else.”

  “No, I see reality. I see things for what they are.”

  Ina shook her head.

  “Give me another drag on that,” she said, and reached out for Eve’s cigarette. She took a smoke and handed it back to Eve.

  “They’re still looking at us,” Eve said, “like we’re the weird ones.”

  They both laughed.

  “It’s okay, sugar,” Ina said. “You go on up to your room.”

  “You going to tuck them in too?” Eve asked.

  “Maybe I will.”

  “Mama’s going to make them feel good.”

  “Now why do you have to say something like that?”

  “Mama gives good love.”

  “You are nasty. You have to dirty up anything innocent, don’t you?”

  “That’s the truth.”

  “You can’t stand anything nice.”

  “Only if it’s nice for me.”

  “Where’s your heart?”

  “In the same place as the truth.”

  They both laughed again.

  Eve said, “They’re still looking at us.”

  “Shoo, now,” Ina said. “Or Mama won’t bring you milk and cookies.”

  They laughed yet again, but Joe didn’t get the joke, or any of the jokes they were laughing about. It seemed like they were speaking a different language. And he didn’t like that. Maybe nothing was making sense on account of how exhausted he felt. Maybe his mind was all hazy from stress and fatigue. All the same, he got the distinct feeling they were making fun of him. He felt foolish now for being drawn in by these women and standing there, just like a typical bumpkiny dirt-eater, listening to them prattle on about nonsense. He only wanted to rest now, to let the day fade away, and to wake up to a new day that felt better for both of them. They didn’t belong here, that was for sure.

  Chapter 30

  Inside the room, Mary immediately crawled onto the bed. She turned on her side and brought her knees up against her big belly and tucked her head in against her breast.

  “From here on out,” Joe said, “I think everything is going to be fine. There’s just one thing left to do and that won’t be hard because Frank told me who to talk to. We just have to say we know Frank, and the rest should be easy. I know we’re in a crazy place and none of it makes any sense to you, but we’ll be gone soon. We’ll be back home before you know it.”

  Mary didn’t move a muscle. She stayed curled up like a hard little ball. Then her body flinched with a spasm, and she wriggled her hips as if in discomfort.

  “You okay?” Joe said. “Was it the baby? Is it moving, kicking?”

  He didn’t like how she was all balled up and non-responsive, like a scared centipede. He was afraid she was reverting back to her old self. If she went back there, she might not ever come out again.

  He had to help her somehow, but he didn’t have a clue as to what to do. Maybe she was hungry. She had to be. They hadn’t eaten since they got to the city. Maybe the baby inside was hungry and upset about it. Maybe she’d feel better if she got some food. They had half a jar of vegetable chowder and some pinole left in the wagon.

  “I’m going to get some food out of the wagon,” he said. He pulled the recorder out of his back pocket and set it on the table. “Once you eat something, your spirits will lift. I’ll be right back.”

  He hated to leave her, but he didn’t have any choice.

  Downstairs he saw Eve still sitting on the couch. She had her head back as she stared at the ceiling. She wasn’t smoking anymore. The flames in the fireplace had died down. Joe didn’t know if he should say hello. He thought he should at least be friendly since she talked to him earlier, even though she wasn’t particularly nice after that. But she didn’t seem to notice him and he didn’t want to disturb her, so he continued on to the front door. Besides, he was more interested in getting food for Mary.

  “Where are you sneaking off to?”

  Joe stopped and turned. It was Eve.

  “I’m going out to our wagon.”

  “For what?”

  “I forgot something.”

  “You don’t know what it is?” she said.

  “Just something I forgot.”

  “So you can’t tell me?”

  “If I did I wouldn’t be following what you said earlier.”

  She smiled. “About lying, you mean.”

  “Yes.”

  “That wasn’t lying.”

  “What was it, then?

  “Hiding, which only makes you look suspicious.”

  “So I should’ve said I was going to get my recorder.”

  “Only if that’s a lie.”

  “If I said yes, it wouldn’t be a lie anymore.”

  “You’re catching on.”

  Eve leaned her head back again and looked at the ceiling. Joe was about to leave when he couldn’t resist asking her something.

  “What were you thinking before?” he said.

  “Before what?”

  “Before you called out to me. I saw you looking up like you were thinking.”

  “It’s best to stay out of other people’s business unless you want something from them.”

  “I was only being friendly. That’s all I wanted.”

  “Don’t make that mistake again.”

  She turned away and grabbed the poker beside the couch and stoked the flames. Joe couldn’t figure her out. One minute it seemed like she might be nice, then the next minute she seemed mean and cold.

  He left her alone. Why was he even bothering with her, anyway, when his chief concern was Mary?

  He unlocked the front door and walked outside onto the porch. The night smelled like it was burning, like burning ash in a fire pit. The darkness was thick and hazy. He heard the clomp-clomp of hooves and the squeak of wheels as a horse and wagon drove past.

  When he reached the stable, he lifted the wood latch, peeled open one panel of the double doors, and slipped inside the darkness. He felt for the lantern he saw earlier hanging from a nail beside the door. Then he fumbled for a wood match from a tin can hanging from another nail. He set the lantern on the ground, pumped the valve, and lit the mantle.

  At the wagon, he lifted the lantern over the side of the bed and peered in, but all he saw were crumpled blankets. He panicked. He set the lantern down in the bed and scrambled over the side. He grabbed the blankets and flung them out of the way. There was nothing beneath. All the water, the pinole, and the half jar of vegetable chowder were gone. All of it. Joe snatched the lantern and jumped out of the bed. Inside the cab, he tore up the floorboards, expecting the worst. When he saw that the bundled-up diesel was still there, he breathed a little easier.

  Back inside the rooming house, Eve was gone, but the hairy landlord was standing there with a scowl on his face.

  “This place is locked up for the night. There’s a blackout coming.” He paused and rummaged in his vest pocket and pulled out his mobicom.

  “But I only we
nt out once,” Joe said.

  “Don’t get smart with me.”

  “Is there any food we can have?”

  “What’s with all the questions? You only paid for a room.”

  “How much is food?”

  “How much do you have left?”

  “Just give me a price,” Joe said.

  “Twenty-five.”

  “I don’t have that.”

  “Not my problem.”

  “What if I just buy a little bit, enough for tonight?”

  “Room and board for a week is fifty, no exceptions. This isn’t a charity.”

  “But my girl is hungry.”

  “Open your ears. Not my problem. Either pay up or scram.”

  “How do we get food, then?”

  “Like all the rest of the mooches and riffraff.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Figure it out for yourself!”

  “Why are you being this way?” Joe fumed. “Would it kill you to help us? Forget it.”

  Joe stomped up the stairs and down the hall to their room. He inserted the key, pushed the door open, and locked it behind him. Mary was still curled up on the bed. He hoped she was asleep and not waiting for something to eat. When he sat on the bed, she stretched out and pushed herself up on her elbows. He was glad to see that because it meant she wasn’t retreating back into her shell, but it also meant she was probably expecting some food.

  “Our stuff was stolen,” he said. “So we don’t have anything to eat. I’m sorry. It’s my fault. We should’ve brought it in with us, so we would have it. And that stupid landlord won’t help us.”

  Mary didn’t make a move at first. Then she sunk back into the bed. She drew her legs up against her belly as tight as she could and curved the rest of her body around her stomach and huddled close beside him. Joe couldn’t stand to see her disappointed.

  “I can go out tonight and find some. I won’t be long.”

  “No,” she said. “Stay here.”

  “Honest, I won’t be long. I know just where to go,” he lied.

  “Please,” she said, “stay.”

  “Okay. If that’s what you want.”

  “Play for me,” she said.

  Joe stood up. The bed creaked as the mattress rose, rocking Mary’s coiled body. Joe walked to the dresser, picked up his recorder, and returned to the bed. Before they left on their journey, he never imagined how important his recorder would be. He’d brought it for his own pleasure, never thinking he could share that pleasure with Mary too.

  He got out his recorder and played it quietly, like a whisper, next to her ear. He sang the lullaby that he told her was just for her.

  “Sleep my child and stars attend thee,

  All through the night . . .

  I my loved ones’ vigil keeping,

  All through the night.”

  But before he could finish singing, there was a soft snapping sound, and then all the lights went out.

  Chapter 31

  The next morning, in Joe’s haste to sell the diesel and get out of the city as fast as possible, he convinced himself to forego getting any food until after the sale. He didn’t think it would take much time. He considered what was worse, being a little hungry or staying in the city any longer than they had to? Aside from that, Mary slept through the whole night and seemed to be in better spirits that morning. He thought everything was okay for now.

  He took her along to search for the Industrial District and to find the steel mill where Frank had worked. It was where his older brother had told him he could find a buyer for the diesel. “Look for the fat man,” Frank had said. “His name’s Templeton.” Frank knew because he had spent six months shoveling ore, limestone, and coke for a blast furnace. That was until he severed three fingers in a slag wagon that might’ve killed him if not for the heroics of the fat man named Templeton. When Frank returned to the farm, he was plagued with nightmares about living in the city. He said he’d never go back, but he had a pocketful of money that kept the family going. While he was there, he learned about the black market in illegal fuel. It was a dangerous game. The consequences were violent death. “Take whatever he’ll give you and get out of there,” Frank said.

  Eventually they reached the shore of Lake Mashenomak, which really wasn’t a shore at all, but a concrete cliff. It dropped down to black waves tipped with white flecks of spume that lapped against the foam along the wall below. Joe stood on the edge with Mary and looked out across the black lake to a long string of windmills stretching in both directions, and then he looked even farther to where the lake disappeared over the horizon. The amount of water, the sheer size of Lake Mashenomak, was incredible to Joe. The most water he had ever seen at one time was at the waterfall. Other than that he knew water only in terms of rivers and streams. How far did the lake go? How deep did it get? What could possibly be on the other side? Who lived there?

  What was even better was to finally see the clear blue sky spreading out over the water. Seeing it reminded Joe of home and how long it had been since he’d seen an unadulterated sky. In the city, all the buildings and lights seemed to cram out the sky, so you didn’t even notice it. It was something far in the background and not something that wrapped around you at every moment.

  Back home, he was always aware of the sky, especially at night. He wondered how people survived without seeing the stars and the moon. Joe couldn’t imagine how, but obviously people did. One of his favorite things was to lie on his back in the pasture and look up at all the stars in the night. Gazing at the stars always filled him with a sense of wonder, both big and small. He felt part of something greater than just himself—after all, somewhere up there was the paradise of Welkenglebe, where Virid lived—but at the same time, all that greatness made him feel small. Yet somehow he didn’t feel insignificant. Far from it. He felt like he expanded, like he grew larger because those millions of stars glowing out there in the endless dark were also a part of him too.

  “Back home the sky is endless,” Joe mused. “But the land is small. While here the sky is small, but the city seems endless. You know what I mean? I guess what I’m trying to say is I prefer lots of sky.”

  “Me too,” Mary said.

  “We’re sky people, you and me. We’re people who need skies. Day skies, night skies. Skies all the time. Frank would say that’s a bunch of nonsense, but that’s what I think. You can’t help how you think, right?”

  “Right. We’re sky people.”

  “Absolutely. Hey, when we get back home, we can lie out under the stars together. Just stretch out, side by side, and stare at all the stars. I love doing that. You can even pick a star out to be your very own, and then whenever you look into the night you will see your star. It will be your star forever. I’ll pick one too. We can both have stars. And the baby. What do you say to that?”

  Mary didn’t reply, so Joe thought maybe she figured he was foolish. But that couldn’t be true. She agreed with him about being “sky people.” So maybe she was only longing for home like him.

  In the distance to his right was a platform standing above the water with blinking lights on its towers. And along a pier sat an idling ship with huge smokestacks. Up and down the wharf, carts and wagons and men bustled about. Small motorized trucks emblazoned with the Guardian symbol puttered and zipped among the traffic under the shadow of countless more towers and smokestacks. Joe drove the wagon in that direction. It limped as the tire rim scraped on the ground.

  They passed a huge white cooling tower for a nuclear reactor. White steam rose out the top. They rode across a bridge spanning a viaduct of streaming water that flowed out into the lake where a cloud of fog churned. Further on, they went by a long row of green algae tubes nearly a hundred meters tall. Behind them were solar collectors to fuel lights in the center of the tubes in order to keep heating the algae during the night. Before long they came to a fenced lot with a heaping mound of black tires within it. Joe stopped in front of a small office that looked
more like a shanty. Inside, a young man greeted Joe with a hearty hello. He had a bulging cheek and wore a dented derby hat with a frayed brim.

  “What brings you here?” The bulge in his cheek moved.

  “I need a tire,” Joe said.

  “You don’t say. What a coincidence. I’m up to my ass in tires.” He smiled, showing teeth coated in something like brown shellac. He spit a thick jet of brown saliva that splatted into a tin bucket.

  “Let’s take a look-see at your situation.”

  Outside, the young man inspected the rim and kicked and squeezed the other tires.

  “What you need is all four replaced. But I can see you aren’t a man of means. What kind of means do you have?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Joe said.

  The young man laughed. “That’s funny. I’m talking money here.”

  “I don’t have much.” Then Joe wished he hadn’t said that.

  “That’s not good. How much do you have?”

  “How much are the tires?”

  “For all four?”

  “For one.”

  “You’re going to need two at least.”

  “Okay. Two.”

  “Forty shekels.”

  Joe knew he didn’t have that, but he didn’t want the young man to know. Then he remembered what was in his pocket. “I got rifle shells.”

  “Rifle shells? No kidding? Let me see them.”

  Joe fished the five shells he had left out of his pocket and showed them to the young man.

  “That’s serious.”

  “How about ten shekels and two shells?”

  The young man thought a moment. He spit a brown wad on the ground. “That sounds fair enough.”

  Half an hour later they were running smoothly on a new tire with a spare sitting in the back. Even though he was down to three bullets, he was glad he didn’t have to give up his recorder or pocketknife. If it came down to it, he would’ve given up his pocketknife before the recorder, although the pocketknife would’ve certainly been more useful. But the more Joe thought about it, the more he realized those extra bullets would’ve been valuable for hunting and protection on their way back home. That is if they even made it out of the city alive to get home in the first place.