by John Varley
TWO DAYS AFTER that a bridge was repaired to the mainland, and an unlikely visitor dropped by the Blast-Off. He introduced himself to Grandma as Alberto Juarez. He was Cuban-American, short and potbellied and brown-skinned, bald with a neat little mustache. He was dressed in a wrinkled lightweight suit, sweating profusely, and carried a briefcase. We were still suspicious of strangers, though we were no longer meeting them with guns, but this guy looked about as harmless as anyone could look.
He was an insurance man.
Grandma laughed when she heard that, and swept her arm around to indicate the chaos all around us. We were standing on the pool deck, which was mostly cleared; but there was plenty of devastation to see, in any direction you wanted to look.
“Well, Mr. Juarez, you look like you could use a drink. We’ve got a few beers and Cokes left, and we started up our ice machine yesterday, now that we’ve got some water. You want a cold one?”
“I’d kill for a cold beer,” he admitted.
We sat around on salvaged lawn furniture, a table and slightly askew umbrella and four mismatched chairs, none of which had originally belonged to the hotel, me and Grandma and Elizabeth and Mr. Juarez, and all had drinks.
Mr. Juarez savored his, smiled, and then set his briefcase on the table, opened it, and booted it up. His smile went away as he did that.
“I’m afraid I don’t have any good news for you, Mrs. . . .”
“Call me Betty,” Grandma said. “Go ahead, tell me how you’re getting out of this, Mr. Juarez. Some clause about acts of God? Not covered for floods? Did I miss a premium?”
“Nothing like that,” he said. He was uncomfortable. “You’re covered, the policy is clear on that. The problem is, you’re covered by a corporation that hardly exists anymore. The company is bankrupt, in receivership, technically owned now by a bank that may not even exist itself. That’s all up in the air.”
“Just about everything is,” Grandma said. “Go on.”
He sighed.
“The long and the short of it is, you have a legal contract, but good luck trying to enforce it. One day, when this is all straightened out, a court will probably award you five or six cents on the dollar. You will have legal recourse, I imagine . . . or, at least, when this martial law business is over and the courts get running again.”
“Save your breath, Mr. Juarez. No use trying to get blood out of a turnip. I found that out way back, when this was a dump and somebody stiffed me for the room with bad plastic. I understand the reality here. I would like to know something, though.”
“Anything I can tell you, I’d be happy to.”
“Where are you from?”
“I’m out of the Tampa office. I’d have been here sooner but . . . you know. It’s been difficult.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Excuse me?”
“Your company is dead. You don’t have a job anymore. There was no need to come all the way out here to tell me I ain’t got shit. I knew that.”
The little man drew himself up and looked Grandma in the eye.
“One does what one has to do. It’s true I’m out of a job, but I’ll find work. A bunch of us from the office came over and have been volunteering in the Red Zone. We’ve done this before, but not on this scale, of course. I’ve been to a hundred disaster sites, often we’re there before the ground has stopped shaking or the wind has stopped blowing. I don’t know what you think of me, or of my company, but I’ve been feeling deep shame. People are usually glad to see me. I enjoyed that, doing what I could do to help. I can’t do that now, but I feel I owe it to as many people as I can locate to tell them the bad news in person. I know it isn’t much, but maybe it helps, just a little, to get people to realize just what their situation is, with no false hopes.
“On the other hand, maybe it’s a mistake, perhaps it would be better to leave them with something to hang on to. I’ve been wondering about that.”
“No, Mr. Juarez,” Grandma said. “I’ve always believed that bad news should be delivered as quickly as possible. It ain’t going to get any better with time.”
Juarez shrugged.
“In any case, I feel it is my duty.”
Grandma sighed deeply.
“Mr. Juarez, I confess that my opinion of insurance men has not been the highest in the past. I put them just a cut above lawyers and state senators. But you have made my day, and raised my opinion of your profession greatly. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“I thank you, ma’am. As you can imagine, my reception has not always been a warm one. Or at least, not warm in the way I would like.”
“No, plenty of folks still like to kill the messenger. Listen, you look real tired. Why don’t you stay for supper? We don’t have much, but it’s well prepared.”
He stood and stretched to his full height, which wasn’t much, and squared his shoulders to the extent they were squareable.
“I thank you very much, but I have a lot of work to do and must be on my way. I thank you for the beer.”
“Looks like you’ve got enough work for the next few years, Mr. Juarez. It’ll wait, and it won’t be any worse after a good meal.”
He wouldn’t be persuaded, but he did accept another can of beer.
“Are you armed, Mr. Juarez?” Grandma asked.
He gave us a wry smile.
“No, I am not, ma’am. I’ve already been relieved of my stereo and an old watch that was of some sentimental value and which I was foolish to wear. Nobody wanted this obsolete briefcase. And who would bother to shoot an insurance man?”
He bid us good-bye, and I shook his hand before he left. We watched him pick his way along the partially cleared side street, consulting a crumpled paper list.
“Ray, Elizabeth . . . that’s why we’re going to get through this, in spite of the idiots running the show, in spite of the damn Rapturists. Because there’s good men and women out there still doing their jobs.”
I could only agree with her. You could say he was on a fool’s errand, and if you did, I’d prefer not to meet you. Dad once told me that it wasn’t laws that kept the world running, such as it was. It was things like honor, duty, perseverance, and keeping your word. Before long the whole devastated East Coast would be crawling with bureaucrats with papers to fill out, most of them not doing any more practical good than Mr. Juarez, and with considerably less dedication. But one day, it would all be sorted out. You had to believe that.
“So what are you going to do, Grandma?” Elizabeth asked.
“You mean now that I’m busted?” She leaned back in her chair and looked at the sky, and when she looked back she seemed happier than I’d seen her since we got there.
“Kids, number one, I’m not busted. At least, not from losing the hotel. The bank owned a big part of it, and I’ll let them try to collect on their insurance. It’s not important to me. Number two, as soon as the wave hit, I knew I was out of the hotel business. I was getting tired of it, anyway. I only stayed on because of your aunt Maria, and when she died . . . well, then I was even more sure.” She tossed her empty beer can. “Oops! Littering’s illegal.” She wiped her hands.
“I’m out of here. The injured are in hospitals, there’s only twenty or so still living on the top and they’re welcome to stay or leave as it suits them. Authority has been reestablished, more or less. There’s nothing else left for me to do here. Ray, go find your Dad and Mom and tell them that old stick-in-the-mud Grandma is ready to go, and ask them if they’ve got a closet or something I can stay in until I figure out what to do with the rest of my life. I always wondered about golf. Do you have golf up there?”
When we realized she meant she was going to Mars with us, Elizabeth and I both dragged her out of her chair and hugged and kissed her. Then we ran off to find everybody and tell them the news.
ONCE IT WAS decided, it didn’t take long to get going.
Grandma had managed to take a few minutes to stuff a few boxes of personal items from her residen
ce down on the bottom floor into the elevators full of food and supplies that were headed for the top floor, “just in case we lived.” It didn’t take long to load that stuff up.
There were six people who asked to hitch a ride with us, people who had been guests at the time of the wave. Since we weren’t going to go by water, Travis said okay, but they could only take one suitcase each. One woman changed her mind rather than abandon her vacation wardrobe; everybody else was done packing in fifteen minutes after Grandma said to meet us by Scrooge in thirty.
We all piled in, and it was tight, but a few of us rode out on the hood. I was out there, scouting for tire hazards, but by retracing our route we soon found the cleared path leading to the repaired bridge, and in no time we were back on the mainland.
It’s amazing what a little time and a lot of hard workers can do. It was difficult to believe that only a few days ago we’d had to blaze our own trail. Now there was a road cleared wide enough for traffic in two directions. Not that there was a lot of it, and what there was was all business: big trucks, bulldozers, cranes on flatbeds. It would be a long time before private vehicles were allowed back into the Red Zone. To each side all was still chaos. The road we drove on was cracked and rutted from the force of the wave, and ten miles per hour was a pretty bouncy pace, but other than getting out of the way of official traffic there was nothing to stop us.
We were at the Wal-Mart by early afternoon. It was a tent city now.
They had bulldozed the big parking lot and turned it into a soup kitchen and hospital, and in the back, big diesel generators powered half a dozen refrigerator trucks. Some of them contained frozen food for the kitchens, and others were full of bodies. The rooftop air conditioners were humming on the big box of the retail store, one of the most welcome sounds I know of in Florida, better by far than pounding surf.
“Good,” Travis said. “We’ll have a cool place to go to, maybe something cold to drink, while we wait for Jim and Evangeline.”
We had made radio contact with them on the first two days at noon, and they’d had no news. On the third day they hadn’t answered our calls, and we hadn’t heard from them since. But Travis had promised them that we’d be here at noon one day, and it was about 2 P.M. now, so we were facing a twenty-two-hour wait.
They were probably okay. At least that’s what I kept telling myself.
As Travis pulled into the lot, looking for a place to park, we drew a lot of stares. It’s not every day you see a World War II amphibious DUKW on the streets, even in watery Florida. Maybe we were a comical sight. A lot of people smiled and whistled, gave us the thumbs-up. Scrooge, long, low, and waddling, was a vehicle you just sort of liked the minute you saw it.
I was the first one to notice a small boy running behind us. He put on a burst of speed and came alongside.
“Hey, mister, are you Travis Broussard?”
I whistled for Travis, told him to stop. He did, and the kid stopped and looked up at us, breathing hard. He was wearing a ragged Disney World T-shirt and new-looking sneakers. Just a tousle-headed Florida boy in the ruins.
“What is it?” I asked him.
“This guy gave me some money and told me to look out for a bunch of people in a duck. Is this piece-of-crap ride a duck?”
“It sure is,” Travis said. “Scrooge McDuck, by name, even if it don’t quack. Where is this guy?”
“Got any money?”
Travis cocked an eye at him, but Dak reached into his pocket and tossed a shiny gold ten-euro piece into the air. The kid snagged it.
“Highway robbery, dude. Now, you gonna tell us where they are, or do I have to come down there and lay one upside your head?”
“They in the hospital. C’mon, I’ll show y’all.”
NATURALLY WE WERE worried, but it wasn’t bad. Jim Redmond had cut his hand pulling apart pieces of his uncle’s house, looking for bodies. It had become infected and was swollen, but the doctors had it under control.
There were hugs all around. Evangeline’s hug lasted longer than her dad’s, and I didn’t mind. Not at all.
We were introduced to Mr. Redmond’s father, who was in a hospital bed with a broken leg and arm and various deep cuts. He was pretty deeply drugged, but managed a smile. We met a cousin, Frank, and an aunt, Billie Mae, who had a five-year-old with her. The child wasn’t her own, just a stray she had picked up cowering in an overturned car beside the corpse of his mother. Now he wouldn’t leave her.
I never did get all the names and relationships straight, we weren’t there long enough to really talk to them all. The Redmond clan was large and complicated, and the news was not all good, not by any means. Of the nine people Jim and Evangeline knew to have been in the wave zone, these were the only ones he’d found, and counted himself lucky to have done so well . . . if you can call three out of nine good news. Of the others, four were on the confirmed dead list, and two were still missing.
What do you do? Rejoice over the living? Weep for the dead? You do both, and it isn’t easy, it tears you apart. They all kept breaking down, thinking of those four bodies in reefer trucks somewhere. Then they’d embrace, happy to be alive and happy that not everyone had died. We were all included, we were all family now.
Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore, broke away from the group, and wandered out of the hospital tent. The little guy who’d led us to the hospital was hanging around outside, playing with a yo-yo. I reached into my pocket and grabbed all the change I had in there and dumped it into his hand.
“Thanks, mister.”
“What can you buy with that around here?”
“Not much,” he conceded. “But I’m saving up, for later.”
“How old are you?”
“Ten. Are you really a Marsman?”
“We prefer to call ourselves Martians, Earthling.”
He laughed. “Cool. I’ve never met a Martian before.”
“Where is . . . I mean, who’s taking care of you?”
“They got me in the orphan cage until my mama shows up. But I busted out.”
I wasn’t going to touch that. The kid, whose name turned out to be Dustin, took me to the “orphan cage.” It was a large area of the lot surrounded by a chain-link fence. Inside was a lot of brightly colored plastic play equipment, castles and play-houses and the like, and the fence had been painted gay colors with childish artwork pinned to it; but it still looked like what it was: a cage for children. A few children were on swings, and some others sat around a teacher who was reading them a story, but there was not the activity you expect from kids who ranged from toddlers to a bit older than Dustin. Mostly they sat listlessly or stood at the fence watching for their parents.
“You’re leaving here soon, aren’t you, Mr. Martian?”
“I’m Ray. Yeah, I’ll be going soon.”
“You see my mama, tell her I’m here, okay?”
“You got it.” We exchanged numbers, he writing my info on a forearm already covered with notes like that. Then I shook his hand and got out of there before I lost it.
EVANGELINE AND HER father joined us at Scrooge as we prepared to shove off again. They were going back with us. Jim Redmond had a job, and Evangeline had school. The rest of his family were taken care of now, and would be staying to see to the remains of dead family members and await news on the missing. Jim’s cousin Frank tried to prevail on him to stick around for the funerals, but Jim shook his head.
“I don’t do funerals,” he said. “Stopped going when I was in the Army. We’ll remember them in our own way, Frank.” That seemed to end it, and they all embraced, and we got on board. Travis livened it up a little by playing a tune on Scrooge’s horn, which, believe it or not, sounded a lot like what I imagined a duck’s fart would sound. Everybody laughed through the tears. Mourning would go on, but recovery had begun.
As we waddled slowly down the road nobody was talking very much, and I had a lot of time to think about what we’d just done. One thing came to mind immediately. What good h
ad we done? Did we really have to come here?
The short answer: Yes, we did.
Not for any practical, justifiable reason. It was easy to prove that we hadn’t made much of a difference to anybody.
A month ago, I would have asked Dad to explain it to me, why I felt so good having done so little, when you got right down to it. We’d risked our lives, after all, the whole family. Was that smart?
Maybe it wasn’t smart, but that’s what human beings do. If there’s a chance, ever so small, that you can do some good for your family, you do it. If there’s even the smallest chance that, by not doing something, your family will suffer, then you don’t allow that chance to pass.
It may be bad logic; but if you aren’t prepared to drop everything and charge into danger when your loved ones are threatened, there’s something missing in you. If you don’t have anybody you’d do that for, or who would do that for you, I feel sorry for you and advise you to find more friends.
IT WAS ONLY a short trip down the road before we saw the tiger.
He was strapped to the hood of somebody’s pickup truck with a lot of bullet holes in him, his rough pink tongue lolling out of his huge mouth. Flies were swarming around his eyes. Half a dozen people were gathered around him, laughing and talking. Two children were rubbing his orange-and-black fur.
“Sucker just came walking by, calm as you please,” one of the men was saying to the others. “Hardly even looked at me. Scared the hell out of me, though, I don’t mind telling you.”
Travis had pulled over, and I jumped down from the hood. I wasn’t really aware of what I was doing. My feet seemed to be leading a life of their own.
“No zoos around here I know of,” another man said. “Probably somebody’s pet. You ask me, people shouldn’t be allowed to keep animals like that.”
I was at the tiger now. I touched its head. The men fell silent.
I have no idea where it came from, or why there or why then, but I felt it rising up in me and it was unstoppable. Everything, just everything. I began to cry.
