The Reapers are the Angels

by Alden Bell

  After a while a boy approaches her. He is a little taller than she is, and he’s wearing a plaid shirt tucked into his jeans and a belt of braided leather strips with a big silver buckle that has a horse on it.

  My name’s Dirk.

  Hello, Dirk.

  Are you going to tell me your name?

  Sarah M—Temple, I guess.

  You guess? You don’t know?

  It doesn’t come naturally to her, but she’s trying out the truth since this seems like such a trusting kind of place.

  It’s Temple, she says.

  Where are you from? he says.

  Lots of places.

  I mean, where did you grow up?

  Tennessee mostly.

  I know where that is. I’ve seen it on a map in school, I mean. I was born here, and I haven’t been anywhere else except for Dallas once on the train. It isn’t safe other places.

  Safe ain’t something I’m used to.

  Temple, you shouldn’t say ain’t.

  Why not?

  It’s poor grammar, he says as though he’s quoting something. It speaks to a lack of sophistication.

  Poor grammar’s the only kind of grammar I got.

  How old are you?

  I don’t know. What day is it?

  Dirk looks at his digital watch, which also shows the date.

  It’s August fourth.

  Reckon I’m sixteen now. My birthday was last week.

  She tries to remember what she must have been doing on the day itself, but being on the road swallows up the lines between days.

  Sixteen! he says happily. I’m sixteen too. Do you want to go with me on a date?

  A date?

  We can go to the diner and get a Coke.

  With ice?

  They always serve it with ice.

  Okay, let’s go on a date.

  They walk to the diner, and Dirk insists upon holding her hand. He is disappointed when Maury begins to follow silently behind them, but she refuses to leave him. The diner is a real diner, with a counter and stools and booths and everything, the kind she’s seen only in a state of dusty decay on empty roadsides. Dirk wants to sit in a booth, but Temple doesn’t want to pass up the opportunity to sit at the counter—so the three of them take stools next to one another and Dirk orders three Cokes and, having decided to play a more chivalrous role, unwraps Maury’s straw for him.

  Do you like music? Dirk asks.

  Yeah. Are there people who don’t?

  We got lucky, we have a whole music store in town. It’s right down the street. I bet I could name a hundred different musicians you’ve never even heard of.

  I’d call that a pretty safe bet.

  I like some rock and roll, but mostly I listen to classical composers. Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff and Smetana. That’s the music for people who are really civilized. Have you heard Dvoak’s Symphony Number Nine? It’s the most beautiful thing in the world, and it makes you feel like anything is possible.

  He continues to speak of things mostly foreign to Temple, but she sips her Coke and fishes ice cubes out of her glass with a spoon and crushes them between her teeth, and the world he tells her about seems like a very nice one, a very quaint one, but also one that doesn’t quite accord with the things she’s seen and the people she’s known. Still, she likes his big visions and his grand tomorrows, and she wouldn’t spoil them for anything.

  He describes how the administrators of the town have plans to expand, to move the blockades back and build the town out, block by block, until they’ve retaken the whole city. All they need are people to defend the borders, and new settlers are arriving all the time, strong people filled with skill and wit and vision.

  And once we have all of Longview back, he says, his gestures growing more expansive by the moment, then we grow even farther, east until we meet Dallas and south to Houston. We can do it. All it takes is people. And when we connect with those cities, we can march on the rest of Texas and take it all back and claim it for civilization, and we can play Dvoak from speakers as we go, because he wrote that music for a new world, and we’ll be building a new world, and pretty soon the gobblers won’t have anywhere to go but into the ocean.

  Gobblers? she says.

  You know, he says. Outside. What do you call them?

  It’s a funny name. I just never heard them called that before.

  Oh.

  He looks deflated, and she feels sorry she said anything—and then she feels irritated for having to feel sorry for this boy with the big silver belt buckle.

  But he gathers himself together again, tying himself into a bow tie of optimism and gladness, and takes her by the hand and walks her up and down all nine city blocks of Longview, Texas.

  Her palm is getting sweaty, and she tries to squirm it out of his hand, but he won’t let go. He smiles as he talks to her and looks straight ahead, as though confident that once they are married he will have a whole lifetime to gaze upon her.

  What do you like to do? he asks her.

  What do you mean?

  Temple, it’s frustrating the way you always ask what I mean.

  He sighs and smiles at her, bolstering his patience.

  For example, he explains, I like to listen to music. And I like to read books, and I like to write stories, and we have a guitar I like to play sometimes. What do you like to do?

  Most of the things she likes to do are related to the project of staying alive in the world, and those things don’t seem to be on the same level as playing a guitar. She tries to conjure up a fitting answer to his question, but she can’t.

  Those same things, she says. I like those same things.

  We have a lot in common, he says.

  Right. Look, I gotta go.

  All right.

  Still holding her hand, he positions himself directly in front of her.

  I enjoyed our date, he says.

  Sure. Me too. Thanks for the Coke.

  I would enjoy doing it again sometime.

  That’s fine, but I ain’t stayin in Longview. I mean, it’s a nice place and everything, but Maury and me, we got somewhere else to be.

  He girds himself, taking the news like a man.

  I won’t forget you, he says.

  Yeah, okay.

  He kisses her, and it feels strange, like kissing a child on the lips. His mouth fails to connect to hers the way it should, and when he pulls away she has to wipe the spit off her lower lip. She thinks of James Grierson. His kisses tasted like whiskey, and they landed right and true.

  She says goodbye to Dirk and leads Maury back to the train, where she finds Lee waiting for her.

  Where you been? he asks.

  I been on a date.

  A date? He begins to laugh heartily. So the warrior princess of the wastes inspires a young man’s fancy.

  It ain’t funny.

  But it is funny, and she laughs along with him, the two holding their bellies and rioting against the dying daylight.

  WILSON INTRODUCES Temple to a man named Joe, who, on Wilson’s word, agrees to loan Temple a car as long as she returns it on her way back north. He tells her Point Comfort is south of Houston a little ways, about a day’s drive depending on the roads. He gives her directions, unfolding a big map on a table and tracing the route with his finger. She pays close attention to the numbers of the freeways. The 259 to Nacogdoches, where she’ll pick up the 59, and that’ll take her almost all the way there. In a place called Edna, she’ll take the 111 to the 1593.

  Aren’t you going to write any of this down? Joe asks.

  It’s okay. I got a good memory. 259, 59, 111, 1593.

  Well, here, take the map at least.

  He traces the route with a yellow marker and folds the map into a neat rectangle and gives it to her along with some sandwiches made by the woman who operates the diner and some clothes gathered up by the town’s welcoming committee.

  Later that night, Lee finds her sitting on a sidewalk bench near one of the barricad
es where two men sit in lawnchairs with big floodlights illuminating some meager distance of the night.

  He sits down next to her.

  When’re you headin out? he says.

  In the morning. Joe says if the roads are good I could be there by nightfall.

  Uh-huh. And these people you’re taking Maury to, what if they’re not there?

  I don’t know. I reckon I’ll bring him back here or take him to Dallas. Plenty of people’ll take him in.

  Then what?

  She shrugs.

  I figure I’ll look around a little. See some things.

  Listen, he says, turning to her. I suppose you won’t let me come down south with you?

  You suppose correctly.

  How come?

  You die, and that’s one more thing I gotta carry around with me.

  Temple, I’ve been livin off the land for years. I ain’t gonna die.

  Sooner or later you are. I just don’t want you to be standin next to me when you do it.

  You’re hard as nails, girl.

  Not really.

  I know.

  She can feel his gaze on her, and she doesn’t want to meet it. She looks at the street. There’s something in the asphalt that makes it glisten under the streetlamps.

  How about this, he says. How about you forget Point Comfort? Come with me to California instead. We’ll take the train to Dallas—and we’ll ride west from there, all three of us. What I hear, they got whole cities under protection. You could walk in a straight line for an hour and never come to a blockade. Like civilization restored.

  What about Niagara Falls? Is that inside the blockade?

  He sits back against the bench, defeated.

  You get old, Temple. The wide world is a pretty adventure for a long time, it’s true. But then one day you wake up and you just want to drink a cup of coffee without thinking about livin or dyin.

  Yeah, well, I ain’t there yet.

  Goddamnit, girl, what happened to you? You got things to tell. You could tell me.

  Maybe so, she says. But I ain’t there yet either.

  ON THE road south, Maury is silent. He plays with his fingers and looks out the window, his eyes focusing on nothing in particular. In the morning, a light rain grays out the sky and falls in speckles on the windshield—but an hour out of Longview, the rain clears and the sky breaks apart into clouds that look like rag piles against the brilliant blue.

  All around is flatland—desert waste dotted with tufts of pricking weeds and dry grass. Along the road, cars are pulled off to the shoulder or half rolled over in ditches. She peers into each as she goes by, looking for sheltered survivors and being relieved to find none. At the wheels of some of the cars are corpses, most of them skeletal, the skin and flesh eaten away, the bone ground clean and white by sandstorms. Others, undiscovered by slugs or locked away behind doors that slugs can’t open, are untouched, their skin leathery, burned brown, shrunk taut over the bones of the fingers and the face.

  Otherwise nothing. She stops the car and shuts down the engine, she rolls down the windows to listen. Barren and empty, the landscape speaks nothing to her. This is a world of deafness.

  Her thoughts go to sorry places. She thinks of God and of the angels who will decide whether or not she enters heaven. She thinks of all her crimes—of all the blood she has spilled on the earth. She thinks of the Todd brothers, one of whom she stole the very breath from, her hands as good as throttling his windpipe, and the other of whom she let die by the hands of others when she could have saved him. She thinks of Ruby and her pretty dresses and the pink nail polish that is completely chipped away—and the Griersons, who had pretty things too, like record players and pianos and model ships and grandfather clocks and polished marble tabletops and iced tea with leaves in it. But thinking of the Griersons also makes her think of the lonesome men trapped in that big house, sorrowful James Grierson, and Richard Grierson, whose horizons were always beyond fences he wouldn’t dare climb, and the clear-eyed patriarch caged in the basement confused about what he was. Him too she stole the life from.

  It’s true she must have hands of death for so much of life to get extinguished by their touch.

  And she thinks about an iron giant of a man, and a boy called Malcolm who may have been her actual blooden brother, and the shape of his body, so loose in her arms and so light like he was made of thread.

  SHE KNOWS she’s outside of Nacogdoches when she begins to see signs for the 59. There, framed against the ruins of a derelict carnival, she discovers an old woman gathering the flowering buds from a cactus.

  She gets out of the car and approaches the woman, who doesn’t seem to notice her.

  Are you all right, ma’am?

  Mis hijos tendrán hambre.

  The old woman continues to pick the cactus flowers, gathering them in an apron wrapped around her waist.

  I don’t speak nothin but English. Do you speak English?

  Mis hijos necesitarán comida para cuando regresen.

  Do you live around here?

  The old woman seems to notice Temple for the first time.

  Venga. Usted también come . . .

  She gestures for Temple to follow. Temple fetches Maury from the car, and the two follow the old woman to the high sturdy fence surrounding the old carnival. They follow the length of the fence until they come to a gate closed with a chain and a lock. The old woman pulls a key from a fold in her skirt and unlocks the gate and ushers them inside and guides them through the strange colorful machines, broken-down things with long necks and lines of colored bulbs and torn vinyl seats and twisting tracks.

  She would like to study the machines, and she imagines them in action, grinding away with grease and glitter like gaudy dinosaurs.

  The old woman leads them to a sheltered place where a large wooden awning provides shade over the top of a number of picnic tables. In the center of the area, there is a fire pit with a makeshift hob built over the top of it and a blackened pot.

  Siéntese, the woman says. Siéntese.

  Do you live here? Temple asks. Nearby is a trailer with its door ajar. Is that where you sleep?

  Temple waits for a response. When she gets none, she shrugs.

  It’s safe enough, I guess, Temple says. You been doin all right so far, haven’t you?

  The old woman does something with the cactus flowers and puts some of them in the pot, which is already steaming with other ingredients, and she stirs it with a wooden spoon. A short distance from the fire Temple finds two grave markers—just wooden crosses with photographs of two young men nailed to them.

  La guerra se llevó muchos hombres buenos. La luz del día dura demasiado tiempo.

  I don’t understand what you’re sayin, Temple says. She points to her own ear and shakes her head. I can’t understand it.

  The old woman breathes in the steam rising from the pot then ladles some of the soup into a plastic bowl and hands it to Temple with an old metal spoon. Temple tastes it, and it tastes good, it tastes like what the desert would taste like if places had flavors, and they do—and she eats it up and most of Maury’s too since he is reluctant to do anything but explore the textures of the place with his fingers, paint peeling from fiberglass clown faces, splintered wooden platforms, rust caked on gears and wheels, colorful plastic flags whip-snapping in the hot wind.

  She thanks the old woman, though the woman pays her no mind and collects the bowls into a pile and puts them aside and sits with her legs crossed on the ground and starts to chant something that sounds like a prayer or an incantation.

  Soy una sepultura—

  doy a luz a los muertos.

  Acojo a los muertos—

  Soy una sepultura.

  The old woman repeats the words over and over, her voice never deviating, ceaseless and monotone, and the sharp edge of shade cast by the overhang creeps farther away—as though evening were something that grew larger in patches, seeded by the shade spots of day. Then the voice terminates
suddenly, cut off as though by the removal of a plug from a socket, and the woman takes an impossibly long scarf from a wooden chest and begins knitting with two needles at one end of it. The scarf snakes away, dusty from being dragged along the ground, patchy with a harlequin assortment of yarns, its tail end buried somewhere in that trunk behind her.

  Temple waits, but the woman says nothing more, and the shadow crawls farther away.

  Maury is in the distance, looking into the eyes of a painted dragon.

  Temple speaks. She explains to the woman that she has traveled a long way, and that for knowing all the names of the places she has been she still feels lost even though she knows that’s impossible because God is a slick god and wherever you are is where He wants you to be. She tells the woman that she has done bad things—things God would not like—and that sometimes she wonders if God could be angry at her, and if she would know the difference between a blessing and a punishment because the world is wondrous even when your stomach is empty and there is dried blood in your hair.

  She tells the woman that she has been traveling all her life that’s worth remembering, and that her mind feels almost filled up already, with people and sights and words and sins and redemptions.

  She tells of how you have a special amazement for all the beauty in the world when you are evil like she is—probably because beauty and evil are on the opposite sides of a wall like lovers who can never really touch.

  She tells of the people she has killed, she lists the names for the ones she knows and describes the others, but she can’t remember them all, and she knows she shouldn’t forget things like that and she would write them down except that she can’t read or write because when she was supposed to be learning her letters she was busy hiding in a drainage ditch because her foster home got eaten up by meatskins.

  And she tells of her biggest sin of all, the thing that turned her from one thing to another, from a human into an abomination. She tells of a boy named Malcolm, whom she killed—and how it happened at the feet of an iron giant because God wanted to remind her of her smallness. How she got itchy to explore the factory warehouse behind the iron giant because of what marvels might be hidden there and how she told the boy Malcolm to wait in case there was a nest of meatskins inside. How she only intended to pop in and pop back out when she saw it was safe, but she found a little office up an iron stairway overlooking the warehouse, and in the office there were blueprints on the walls, covering all the walls, that blue not quite like any other blue she had ever seen. She tells of how magical they were, those white lines like chalk fibers against that blue, the figures and numbers and arrows like the very nomenclature of man’s grandeur, the objects they described like artifacts lost and gone and hinted at in undecipherable etchings for future races smarter than herself to puzzle over. And they were a wonder, those mortal imaginations splayed wide on paper, testaments to vision far beyond her own weary head, testimonials to the faith in the power of human ingenuity to shape something out of nothing and to stand back and behold it and to nod and to say, Yes, this is what I have made, this is a thing that did not exist before in the history of the world.