The Old Man and the Wasteland

by Nick Cole

  IT ONLY TAKES A BULLET TO SOLVE A PROBLEM LIKE NAPOLEON, HITLER, POL POT, STALIN, SADDAM HUSSEIN.

  PEOPLE DON’T HATE EACH OTHER. THEY HATE EACH OTHER’S IDEAS.

  BEWARE OF THE SELF LOATHING GOVERNMENT.

  And finally: VISIT THE LIBRARY AT FORT TUCSON.

  Nineteen

  On the other side of the manhole at the end of the hall of messages, The Old Man found a moonlit night. The air smelled of desert and sage. The cool wind that blew through the place had a faint tinge of char, though the fire that had happened here, happened long ago.

  Blackened wooden frames rose up on all four sides of the intersection. Desert sand had blown across the streets. He walked to a mailbox and sat down with his back against it. He hadn’t slept since the night under the bridge.

  How many days ago?

  Who cares.

  What about the wolves?

  The tunnel went for several miles. If they survived the fire I doubt they’ll come this far looking for me. Anyway I am too tired to care.

  He unrolled his blankets on the sidewalk and placed his items on them. He started a small fire from charwood he found inside the ruins of a building. For a moment, standing there, he wondered what the use of the building had once been.

  What was the story of this place? If I knew, there might be salvage and then I could head home.

  But the fire had made it unrecognizable and whatever had once gone on there, was lost.

  He opened an second MRE and ate Chicken ala King. He put hot sauce on it. He’d found a little bottle of Tabasco inside a packet that contained plastic-ware and a book of matches. He drank some more water and added wood to the fire. He rolled up in his own blanket and one of the wool ones.

  I wonder about Fort Tucson.

  What…

  He didn’t move the whole night. When he awoke, his side was numb and stiff. His shoulders ached with hot fire and his wrists throbbed. His chest felt heavy, and when he sat up, a morning cough turned into a prolonged hacking in which his vision narrowed to a tiny pinpoint. Each convulsion caused the needles in his shoulders to scream with anger.

  The fire had gone out long ago.

  It’s good the wolves didn’t find me. I might not have woken up for the feast.

  For a moment he was afraid he might be sick.

  Have I gone too far? Exhausted myself?

  But he sat up and then got to his feet. He drank water and walked up and down the sidewalk. He considered plundering the mailbox but he was too tired and sore.

  He banged on its side. It sounded hollow.

  He rolled up his things slowly and mixed a packet of cocoa in a water bottle with some water from the canteen. He ate a cookie.

  I feel better.

  It was silent in the stubbly remains of the burnt town.

  This must be the place I was thinking of.

  It burned to the ground. Long ago. Mirrored Sunglasses was right.

  How could he be right if he was blind?

  Maybe he wasn’t blind.

  The Old Man began heading south down the street. At the next intersection, a half-burned sign that had fallen down among the charred support beams of a building looked familiar.

  I know those letters.

  But those are just the middle or last ones.

  For a long moment he tried to remember what business they were associated with, but in the end he couldn’t.

  Coffee, maybe.

  How long has it been since you had coffee?

  Years. I remember the night I married my wife. Someone gave us a can. Something salvaged from an RV deep inside the great wreck. I can’t remember who.

  Floyd? Big Pedro?

  I can’t remember. But the next morning after the ceremony, I woke up early. She was still asleep. I made coffee and woke her up. I remember lying on our bed in the shack, late morning because I didn’t go out that day to salvage, the village said I couldn’t. I remember thinking: So this is life? This isn’t bad. Sitting with a woman who loves me. Having coffee.

  I think I got over the world ending that morning.

  You should tell your granddaughter about that memory.

  Yes. I should.

  The Old Man looked again at the sign amongst the burned ruins. Once it had sat atop the building. When the fire collapsed the roof it had come crashing down.

  It was a newer business. Toward the end of civilization. A chain. This town was old, so I must be on the outskirts of it. They built these new ones on the outskirts. Maybe there’ll be some salvage further on.

  He walked deeper into the ruins. He passed old cars sitting on rusty rims that had burned in the fire. There were no skeletons in them. In one he found a pair of dice that had melted to a dashboard.

  When Phoenix and Tucson went, people must have run away, fearing the radiation.

  At noon after wandering down a long street of burnt wood and sand, he came to an open square. He sat down and ate some peanut butter from the MRE. It was dry.

  There’s nothing here.

  In his mind he tried to picture the town. The highway that ran back to the village would be on the south side of it. It was here that the two major highways once met and continued on south.

  I’ve come a long way and I haven’t found anything. I am still curst.

  By now the village must think you’re dead.

  He wondered if that were true.

  What is the story of these places? I used to be so good at finding their stories. I could find a shed or trailer or a wreck and know where the salvage was hidden. I was good at it then. What happened to me? I should have gone through that mailbox.

  You’re not cursed, you’re lazy.

  What about the writing in the tunnel?

  Maybe it was done before the bombs.

  The boxes?

  Maybe they don’t go together.

  Here is what I think. Ready? Someone lived here. Lives here maybe even now. Or nearby. They wrote the words down in the tunnel as a warning to whomever comes next.

  Whomever?

  Not us. We are finished. We are just the survivors. But someday a society will happen. He left them a message. Telling them where we went wrong.

  As he saw it?

  Yes.

  So what?

  Down one of the streets he spied a building more intact than the rest. It had walls. He stood up and adjusted his bandolier of blankets and moved off toward the building, the sound of his huaraches the only noise in the desert air.

  So what? I will tell you. Whatever he made those carvings with was a piece of equipment the village could use. It was some sort of industrial blow torch. The village could make things with a tool like that.

  Those use gas.

  He must have lots of it. He’s out wasting it writing on walls. He must have loads of it. The boxes of supplies he left behind? That’s not a man who is worried about tomorrow’s rice.

  He came to the building at the end of the street. It was made of cinderblocks. He turned the corner and came upon more buildings made of the same material.

  The fire had destroyed everything inside. But the shade was nice.

  These walls are still good. A roof and I could live here.

  Broken bottles and glass littered the ground.

  This must have been a liquor store. The bottles exploded in the fire.

  Once he guessed it was a liquor store he found the debris where the counter must have been. A melted plastic register at the bottom of it. He saw a few coins encased within the hardened plastic.

  Whoever the writer is, he must have supplies. Maybe the village could trade with him. Or maybe he is lonely and might like to come live with us.

  He walked down the row of burnt out concrete buildings.

  This was some sort of market he said at one, a small one. Maybe that one was a clothing store. Further on he found a barber shop. He could tell because the big iron chairs had survived the fire. He combed the store and found a pair of blackened scissors. He tucked them in his bl
anket and moved on. The last building was large. It was on the corner of the block .

  This was an old movie theatre. Built before I was a child. This must have been the center of town back in the old days. Not a megaplex like near the end. This was a theatre with only one screen.

  He walked in and found the auditorium. The seats had all burnt and the screen was gone. All that remained of the projectionist booth were the two square windows through which the projector had shown. The floor had collapsed onto the concession stand.

  For a long while The Old Man stood in the quiet, listening to the ticks the debris made as the heat of the day began to fade.

  I think I will rest here today and tonight. It’s probably best to find the highway in the morning and head west back to the village. There isn’t any salvage between here and there.

  He set up his camp and gathered wood. He spent the rest of the day resting in the shade. He went to bed early and awoke after midnight. The night air was cool and he smelled rain coming.

  In the morning I will find where the two highways meet and head back along the ‘Eight’ to the village.

  Late in the morning he found the ‘Y’ where the two ruined highways merged into one heading south to Tucson. He also found the remains of six bodies stretched out on charred wooden boards, each in the shape of an ‘X’. Their skin leathery and mummified by the desert heat. Their socket-less eyes and open-mouthed rictus made The Old Man step back.

  Had they been alive when they’d been left here?

  All the bodies faced south and east toward Tucson.

  On the ground, thousands of rust-colored handprints were stamped into the old pavement of the highway.

  Beyond the bodies, melted into the road in the same blackened writing from the tunnel, was the word ‘SAFETY’. A large arrow pointed down along the center of the highway toward Tucson.

  Twenty

  The stretch between the ‘Y’ and Tucson was a long road. It was interrupted by only one landmark he could remember. Of all the names of the past he’d forgotten, he remembered the name Picacho Peak. It was a tall, rocky outcrop that rose straight up out of the desert floor. A lone mountain in an expanse of flatland alongside the highway. It lay between The Old Man and Tucson.

  The Old Man stood at the ‘Y’ considering the messages and their conflict.

  The bodies are old, maybe a few years. The carving in the road, who knew.

  But the bodies are newer than the carving.

  He started down the onramp leading to Tucson.

  ‘Safety’ means salvage.

  Unless whoever left the bodies went there also.

  I must go and see. I know already, this will give me no peace unless I have an answer to it.

  Yes, but you could go back to the village. Do you need the answer bad enough to lose your life?

  He didn’t answer himself, and instead walked for a long time that morning and into the afternoon. He passed road signs that had not blown down, but had been scoured clean by violent sandstorms. The remains of a gas station were his home for the night. It had been looted, and when he checked the tanks they were bone dry. This caused him to wonder.

  Gasoline has other uses than just to run cars.

  At twilight he ate a packet of spaghetti and meatballs from the third MRE. He ate pound cake for dessert.

  You are making a pig of yourself. You won’t be used to having less.

  In the night, after the fire died, he heard something in the bushes outside the station. He lay still and after a few moments it was gone.

  In the morning he ate a light breakfast and drank some instant cocoa from the MRE. The morning air smelled like rain, though there were only a few clouds to the south.

  The blue desert sky was wide and the land a flat brown. He could see for thirty to fifty miles at a time. On the far horizon, dark mountain ranges cut jagged borders against the sky. He knew it was time for the monsoons and that when they came it would be very dangerous on the desert floor. A flash flood could come upon him from out of nowhere.

  I should stay out of gullies and ravines. Also, don’t sleep in dry riverbeds.

  At noon he caught two more rattlesnakes on the road and carried them along for another few hours. He would roast them over the fire at dusk.

  By now he could see Picacho Peak in the distance. Between lay the burned remains of another small gas station city off to the left-hand side of the highway and a wild pecan orchard on the right.

  Twenty One

  Himbradda led his small band down through the Sonoran desert plains, skirting its eastern edge. They were many days ahead of the main body of The People. The People were returning to Picacho Peak to start their ceremonies again. The Professor had ordered The People to return to their most sacred place. Picacho Peak. So Himbradda had been sent ahead. To see if The Dragon still lived there.

  Himbradda was very afraid, had always been afraid. The woman that delivered him into the world didn’t even know she was pregnant until he appeared nine months after she had been raped one morning, as The People grazed on wild beans and desert peyote. She lay under the hot morning sun, being raped in the rough yellow grass as she had been many times before and many times after.

  When Himbradda arrived she carried him with her. Because of his withered left arm, he was accepted as part of The People and followed in the wake of their wanderings. He was fed on wild beans, pecans, uncooked coyote and sometimes the warriors’ peyote. He even tasted the meat of other children, perfect unblemished children. Children not of The People. Once those children reached the bottom of the drop below Picacho Peak, then all of The People could take what could be grabbed and torn away.

  Himbradda had been raped and he had raped. He had been hit and he had hit. He had been beaten and he had beaten. If he had known how to count, the number twenty would have represented the number of children he had begotten, the number thirty-two for the amount of people he had killed, and the number fifteen for how old he was.

  Regardless of his withered left arm and crooked teeth, he was almost beautiful. He had a strong build and a taut hulking physique. Long hair hung over one of his green eyes. His good arm rippled with muscles at the bicep, tricep and forearm. In his good hand he carried, dragging mostly by the long iron bar, a parking meter that had been taken from the hot ruins of Phoenix. Most of the thirty-two dead had met the parking meter.

  Nu-ah who dragged himself everywhere because of the missing legs he’d never known, eased down from his watch-place atop the tall sign that still read GASOLINE. He crawled quickly across the parking lot to Himbradda who sat in the shady petals of an exploded propane tank. Himbradda felt absently at the running sore underneath the hair of his scalp, while Nu-ah made whispers that indicated a lone man came toward them on the road from Phoenix.

  The People had known Phoenix. It was the northern extent of their ranging, and some winters found them rooting around its slag heaps and twisted metal, finding bits of glass for their weapons. It was then that the sores appeared along with the sickness. They had stayed too long and now it was time to head south, all the way into Mexico.

  A lone man was prey but seldom encountered. If he continued down this road, thought Himbradda, then the man would reach Picacho Peak and The Dragon. That would make Himbradda’s work easier. To see if the man brought out The Dragon.

  He grunted that Nu-ah should return to his hiding place and watch the man. This was the last thing Nu-ah expected. He’d hoped, because of his sharp eyes, he might get a piece of the man’s liver when the small band took the loner. A reward for finding him amongst the burning brilliance of the desert floor.

  Nu-ah hesitated. Was he being left out of the kill?

  Himbradda swiveled the head of his parking meter, grinding it in the faded asphalt for Nu-ah to understand.

  Once Nu-Ah was back in his place Himbradda stood up shouldering his club. He tucked his withered left hand into his torn overalls. The overalls had been pulled off the body of a man in Mexico, after The Peopl
e had overrun and destroyed a small settlement of salvagers. Himbradda grunted for the others to follow.

  Eating the man and then having their woman in the dust of the highway afterward would have been a pleasant afternoon. But The Professor said that Himbradda must know if The Dragon still lives.

  Gutch and Ha rose to their feet as Himbradda loped off into the desert behind the sign, looking for a crevice they might hide in.

  Gutch pulled on the rope he wore about his waist, dragging their girl to her feet. It had been good of The Professor to give them a woman for the journey; otherwise Himbradda would have attacked them all. It was good that they could have her whenever they wanted. Even if she was blind and had to be led with the rope everywhere. He pulled savagely on the old tow rope wound about her neck. Fresh blood ran down her naked sun burnt body. But she gave no cry, showed no intelligence and only followed them into the desert waste beyond the remains of the station.

  The Old Man reached the wild orchard of pecans at nightfall. He didn’t like the place. But even more so he didn’t like the violence of the old gas station on the other side of the highway.

  Looks like a war took place there.

  But the orchard was not much better. The sky turned a burnt orange as the sun disappeared, and the silhouettes of the trees looked like fingers clutching at the last of the day. Large crows roosted in the trees and The Old Man was not comforted by them.

  He built a small fire and roasted the two snakes he’d found on the highway, eating a little and saving the rest for the next day.

  You will run out of water soon if you don’t find some.

  It was dark now, and still he could see the fingers of the trees clutching at the night sky. He thought about moving on, but then remembered the wolves and thought he might get up into the trees if they returned.

  He lay down but it took him a long time to get to sleep and when he did he woke often. Toward the deepest part of the night, the crows burst out in terror and The Old Man heard them ‘caw’ ‘caw’ ‘cawing’ angrily. They sounded like a woman who was angry or crying out in pain.

  He lay in the dark for a long time after the crows had stopped. In the silence, the memory of the crows’ anger came back to him, and he thought he faintly heard a woman’s cry, but only once and so little of it, that upon reflection he wondered if he’d heard it at all.