by Kitty Beer
"They're circling the house."
Looking out the back window, she can just make them out in the dusk. Leon, stirring the stew, drops the spoon and comes to stand behind her.
"I had thought they were just passing by," Tati says, trying to calm the pitch of her voice.
Ten of them, so young, with their wild hair and costumes yellow and black, their colors, loping along in their furtive feral way.
"They're just babies, younger than our children," he says into her hair. "Fourteen, sixteen, tops."
"They see us. They're glad we're watching. What do they want?"
Leon doesn't need to answer. They both know what the gang wants. Food and water, and a little blood fun perhaps.
It's been six months since he came to her door, Leon. Unbathed, distraught, he'd had to abandon his car twenty miles earlier. The severe April sun had caked his lips and he croaked when he greeted her. "Used to know your brother Ned," he stated, as if she should believe him, a crazy looking stranger, and she a woman all alone except for her delirious ancient father upstairs dying and Fox, just a pint-sized dog.
She came out on the porch, blocking the door, Fox barking gratifyingly in the background.
"I brought you some honey cakes, your favorite."
She looked at the battered package, up at his gray stubble, earnest exhausted dark eyes hopeful. Who else but Ned could have told him about her craving for honey cakes? Avoiding his acrid smell, she stepped well away, gestured him in. Sat him down at her kitchen table, where he gulped water, bread and cheese. Wrapped herself anew in the grief of Ned's death along with their mother's in the malaria epidemic of the 2030s, the shared pain a comfort in this lonely dangerous zone where she existed, day to deadening day.
Later, Leon emerged from a bath glowing and almost cheerful, thin hair slicked back, freshly dressed in one of her father's shirts. Face worn and weather beaten and groove lined as a walnut shell, shoulders stooped, an old goat. But she noticed his broad expressive hands, weaving gestures, gripping his cup, and found herself thinking vaguely of caresses. Tati was no stranger to desire. But it had been so long...years...she was startled to recognize the signs.
His own passion was all directed at getting back on the road. Finding his family-two sons, a grandchild. He was on his way north from Pennsylvania to Canada, ran out of gas just outside Dedham. She couldn't help him with that, of course, gasoline was nowhere to be found. But she thought she might know a group leaving soon, in a solar powered camper. Everyone was leaving, pouring north to escape the implacable heat and the drought and disease that come with it. Tati's own daughter Crea had settled near Montreal three years before, and Tati would be with her today if it were not for Ray, who just kept on dying and never would get it over with.
"This is my father Ray." She introduced him to Leon as if it were a social occasion, as if the old man were not lying there in the shadows smelling like rotting flesh, breathing as if each breath were his last, staring wildly at them both as if they were phantoms. "Daddy, this is Leon, an old friend of Ned's."
Leon stepped to the bedside and grasped her father's limp hand in greeting.
"Ned? Ned, win the soccer game, Ned." Ray's papery voice was urgent. "Good boy."
Tati gently lifted his head to adjust the pillow. Standing there beside Leon she felt a surging transfer of energy. All the life her father had been draining from her was replenished and she felt full, gorged, absurdly, rebelliously alive. Death became an aphrodisiac, or no, this lust had already been leaping inside her before Leon even came, lust created and fed by decay. Death and decay everywhere...the poisoned soil, suffocating air, putrid rivers.
"Sure, Dad," said Leon tiredly but with kindness. "I'll win the soccer game. I'll win it for you."
But if she thought that Leon would rescue her from despond, it was not to be. At first she was lonelier than ever, as he immersed himself in his obsession with collecting and assembling the fuel cells he needed for his car, or just guarded himself with little repair tasks about the house. Even after they found each other's bodies, and it became clear that he wanted to linger here in her embrace, he was often off in a dream place, and he hated it when she talked about her sadness. She learned to hide behind smiles and kisses, to only obliquely try to reach his heart.
Now by the window watching the dangerous children in the dusk, Tati closes her eyes for a second, leans back into him, the comfort of his always warmth, to better feel his groin against her, escaping just for a moment into their own blind sensual place where nothing else can touch them.
Leon puts his arms around her, says, "Come on, let's forget about them."
Dropping the curtain, she turns into his embrace. She's tallish, still with an angular mould in spite of the weight gains of recent decades that have thickened her waist, puffed her belly, fleshed out her face so that her small nose and mouth now look too small. Grey hair long enough to be clipped up at her neck, often with the amber clasp that Crea gave her one birthday, long ago.
Crea standing in the kitchen laughing the way they used to be able to--freely, fully--lifting Tati's then autumn gold hair in her hands. As Tati felt the scoop of her daughter's touch on her neck, her heart tightened. Is it her memory or the truth that even in that sweet lost time her rush of love whispered a warning chill? Back then they still had no idea what was to come, though why didn't they? The signs in the 20s were everywhere.
"That's odd," Crea commented one May morning. "The robins haven't come this year."
As he kisses her, Leon lifts Tati's dress and takes deft fingers to her thighs. Her mind numbs willingly. Their little moans are a chorus of defiance.
After nightfall it rains. It rains the way it usually does these days, desperately, piteously, slanting hard, pummeling the dirt but never soaking it, mud rivulets evaporating. The next morning, even though they go out not long after dawn, everything is dry again. Fox hysterically finds the heads and bones of squirrels, freshly strewn. No evidence of fire, what would they burn anyway? "Suppose they have a solar cooker?" "Doubt it." That the children probably ate the animals raw goes unsaid.
Leon also finds a straw bracelet, woven and worn. Between aversion and sorrow, Tati says, "It's so terribly small."
Today they have to go out for food. They admonish Fox to keep guard, and stride out along the street past the mostly deserted houses wearing their backpacks and wide-brimmed hats.
"You don't have to stay."
Tati starts tentatively, ready for his terse response.
"We've been through this."
"You could've been there by now. The families with that camper are there now."
As she pursues this argument more earnestly than she has for some time, she becomes aware that her purpose now is not so much to draw assurance of his affection as to combat despair.
"You've got the car back now, and the cells to run it--at least until Burlington. If it weren't for my father..."
"Of course we'll wait."
"I could join you later."
"That's it, Tatyana. Shut up, my sweet. You're not getting rid of me."
He squeezes the nape of her neck with a quick assertive caress. His eyes are shadowed under the hat, his smile tight. He hasn't wanted to understand that she is losing hope.
They come out on the highway that leads to 98 North, climb down to a path to avoid the traffic all streaming in one direction, a bizarre assortment of vehicles, from the strange camel humped "cooking oil campers" to wagons pulled by horses or bicycles. Here and there a vintage car from the old days, gaped at by the others. Or at least by those whose heads are not bowed, exhausted and uncaring. Except for the occasional clank or whine of a makeshift engine, there's a chilling quiet, just the shuffling of feet. Even now, well before noon, the clouded sky gives no respite from the boiling sun. Along the path lie people already overcome, sprawled in what meager shade they can find. If their water has run out, they'll have none until they reach the fetid swamp of Walden Pond.
Leon and Tati pass through a swath of trees that still look healthy, crowns intact. In here, where for a moment even the air is different, ghosts of the lost green world arise.
The summer she graduated from college she was living at home, in the shabby grandiose house she loved and hated, with her silly mother who was dating yet another unemployed genius. Ned was off visiting their father in Montauk. She herself was having a fling with an old boyfriend from high school throwing himself into their imaginative lovemaking in offbeat places with regressive abandon. A favorite nook was in the grass behind her old playhouse shielded by lush lilacs and shaded by a giant oak. One morning when she was sleeping even later than usual, she woke to the high-pitched whirr of chainsaws. At first she thought it must be the next-door neighbor obsessing over his bushes, but the noise was too loud for that. Finally she dragged on her robe and went outside to the back deck. Just on the other side of the fence where towered the oak, at least a hundred years old, two men straddled the broadest branches. The crown was already gone, all the lea! ves and the lesser branches. They were savaging the tree with the bravado of cowboys killing buffaloes. She ran out screaming at them, but of course it was too late. Even if they had stopped, the tree could never survive without its crown. And anyway, the neighbor owned the tree and had a perfect right, in those days, to get rid of it.
"Do you remember," she says dreamily, "how the trees used to be?"
Leon doesn't answer. He's keeping an eye on the path ahead as it comes to an abrupt end at the scarred asphalt of the abandoned mall.
So she murmurs to herself, "Crea says there are still plenty of trees in Terrebonne."
The long expanse of concrete is pocked with fissures sprouting yellowed grass and vines. The M of a McDonald's tips on its side to form a Greekish E. Some of the windows in some of the stores are broken, but there is no sense of violation, just a blank, a deletion. At the end of the old parking lot they have to climb back up to cross the highway to another road. On their way across they watch a pickup truck being pulled by a motorcycle. In the back of the truck nestled in a pile of furniture under a makeshift canopy squat three grimy children, who wave at them.
After passing the fish farm-miles of oblong, sluiced ponds in a grid-they reach the market place. Besides fish they load up with greens, radishes, apples, potatoes, goat cheese, canned milk.
"Looks to be a late winter," croaks ancient Andrew pleasantly, trussing up the groceries in the backpacks.
"At least we won't need as much fuel," Leon obliges in the same conversational tone.
No room for despair here, no voice for it.
"Be thankful for small blessings," Andrew chuckles, as always.
Tati smiles at him warmly, meaning it.
When they get home, Fox dashes down the stairs from Ray's room, his overlarge feathery tawny ears sailing behind him, effervescence signaling an uneventful watch. Tati follows him back up to find her father in a peaceful sleep. She adjusts the sheets, dabs away sweat from his forehead and neck. If only he would die, so they could leave, so she and Leon could go north to find their children and something like a normal life. She is angry with her heart because it is so full of love for this crumpled wreck clinging absurdly to a remnant of life, blocking her escape.
While Leon tries to fix some damaged solar panels, Tati bleeds the rainwater barrel, boils and filters water, scrubs potatoes. After lunch they lie down in bed together, intertwined, exhausted from the heat and the laborious trip.
"Do you suppose they'll come back tonight?"
"They'd just be passing through," Leon assures her. "Why would they stay?"
As she falls asleep, Tati thinks he must be right, and knows he is not.
A prolonged gurgling shriek shocks them awake. The unearthly sounds from Ray are joined by primeval howls from Fox. They race up the stairs to find Ray on the floor, vomiting blood.
Tati cries out, kneels in the red pool.
"No, no," orders Leon. "Let me lift him back up. Let go of him."
But she keeps her father's head in her arms as he struggles to breathe in blood, coughs it out, breathes it in. She watches his contorted face freeze, wildly searches his staring eyes for recognition, for some return on her love.
With sunset comes a fiercely beautiful rose light. Leon is doing all the packing while Tati sits on their bed, sapped by roiling tears. In the next room Ray lies washed, wrapped, ready to be buried in the morning. Now they can leave, she thinks, tries to exult. He's dead so now they can go, at last. And it's getting more and more dangerous here. She didn't like the looks of that band last night, the most daring and menacing group yet. Hornets, they call themselves, like the children they are, all got up in their team colors yellow and black, macabre Halloween. Waves of them on their way north, now sometimes as many as twenty to a gang. The gun is propped against a wall in the basement. It's not loaded, but the bullets are there in a box. Ray's old rifle. When did he last clean it? Would she or Leon be capable of firing it at human beings, even if only to scare them? She gets up and goes downstairs to the back door.
The yard is cooling in the purpling light. The old maple is toughing it out, still mostly green, casting long shadows. Bunches of orange marigolds bloom valiantly in its shade. Of course the vegetable garden is long stripped bare, by the first Hornets who found it in the spring. Tati is a good shot. Ray taught her and Ned the summer she was fourteen, targeting empty beer cans in the pond. Her father was proud. She won stuffed animals at fairs.
It was the last summer they were together as a family. Ray left right after Christmas, Tati never really understood why. Her mother was flighty, dreamy, prone to hysterics, but pretty and sweet. He'd begun to make tons of money in one of those new internet companies that were springing up in the 90s. But still, why not keep his charming and affectionate wife? Now, of course, Tati will never be able to ask him.
So there they all were that August, renting a cottage on a pond near Eastham, Cape Cod. At fourteen, Tati was undergoing turbulence of her own. She wanted Tommy Tolman to kiss her. This eventually happened, when she least expected it, in the back of the car driving home from a movie. Something glistened on her shoulder--Tommy's watch. Before she quite realized this meant his arm was around her, his lips were on her cheek. In slow magical motion she turned her face to meet his mouth. She felt the heat of his tongue down to her belly. That was it; she was sold on love.
"C'mon, Ned," Ray said, "you've got to learn about guns, son."
Piqued, Tati pouted, "I want to learn too, Dad," although she certainly didn't.
But the feel of the long cold metal was somehow satisfying, and watching her father's deft hands loading and unloading, admiring her capable own, and aiming out over the tranquil pond, the ping of hitting the target, the thrill of his praise.
She had gone back to that pond once since, when Crea was about twelve. They had to go by boat, of course, with half the Cape under water by then. Her husband had refused to come-he was always too depressed for adventures. The pond was dead, salinated by the encroaching sea. She crouched on the shore and wept. So the sweet memories of that last innocent summer became distorted, overlaid with the pitiful sight of the encrusted pond.
Tati goes out into the yard, barefoot in the dusty grass. On the trunk of the old tree is a snail the size of a walnut. Its gray oozy body just visible beneath its spiral home and its long rubbery antennae look vulnerable as skinless flesh. The antennae have little knobs at the end that tremble and vibrate. This morning the snail had been clinging a few inches from the bottom of the tree, now its daylong journey has brought it to the height of her chest. It has a purpose, pursues it. Tati thinks, how does my life make any more sense than this one? What's the use?
She hears Fox start to bark from inside the house, turns and is face to face with a Cheshire grin under a forest of mangy hair knotted with feathers.
"We wants the dawg."
His voice is a soft drawl. In a paralyzed second she stares at him realizing, then turns and runs, so fast that she has locked the door before she feels her feet racing. Palm on the window she sees him still standing there under the tree, laughing. Leon and Fox tear into the kitchen-was she screaming? Others now are loping towards the tree and he's telling them the joke, the shit-scared lady joke, and they all are laughing and leering back at the house. Tati is trembling so hard she would fall if Leon were not holding her. Fox is wailing hysterically. The Hornets bunch into a kind of parade and saunter around the side of the house towards the front.
"Did he hurt you?"
She shakes her head, buries herself in Leon's embrace. She drinks the water he gives her, leans down to pick up Fox.
"The car," Leon says.
Outside the front window the sky keeps only a slash of mauve light just behind the dark houses across the street. The car is parked in the driveway. It's a reddish color, maybe ten years old, with the dolphin shape peculiar to 2030 models. A carrier wagon is hitched to the back for a few pieces of furniture as well as bedding, dishes, clothes. Leon has already stacked it with a table and some chairs, a rug. The Hornets dance around it, gesticulating.
"Leon, they'll take it!"
"No. Fuel cells not in yet."
"But what if they destroy it? We can't leave without the car. We can't leave."
Tati's panic tastes bitter, like nausea rising. She is clutching her elegant rose colored drapes in both hands as if to squeeze life from them. The Cheshire man does a gazelle leap ending in an obscene gesture, then leads the parade on around the house towards the back again. They are chanting something. As they disappear, the words float back.
"We wants dawg blood, dawg blood, dawg blood."
The Hornets continue circling the house, doing little dances that imitate dogs, hanging their hands like paws and cantering. Leon lights lamps and starts up the stove. Cradling Fox, Tati watches him. He's going to start cooking, he's going to pretend this is normal.
Fox follows her down into the basement. She finds the rifle easily, but has to scramble around to find the ammunition. She loads awkwardly but without hesitation. Fox sits very quietly. He knows something is wrong. She smoothes his silky head and meets his eyes.
"Don't worry," she tells him. "I'll kill them first."
When she appears with the rifle, Leon chuckles anxiously.
"Annie Oakley."
But she strides past him to the window.
"You're not, Tatyana, you're not serious..."
The Hornets are not in the back yard. As Tati heads for the front of the house, Leon following in alarm, they hear a crash. In the driveway the gang has formed a half circle near the car, piles of rocks at the ready. The car's rear window is splintered. Seeing them watching, Cheshire man waves, all the wild creatures wave, pick up rocks and dance with them, chanting.
"Give us the dawg, give us the dawg."
Tati opens the window and fires over their heads. Stunned, they freeze. In their wild clothing, in their various poses, in their amazed, angry faces, for a split second they appear disembodied, a work of art in progress. Then a rock comes through the window of the house, slamming into the wall just beyond Leon. Tati fires again, and again. Now the Hornets are scattering like leaves. The street is suddenly deserted. There is absolute silence in the darkness.
When a little later Tati and Leon venture outside to check on the car, they find the girl. She is unconscious, bleeding from a wound in her leg. A slip of a girl not more than fifteen, with an ashen baby face, her tangled hay colored hair shrouded around. Her suit of loose black is swathed at the waist with sharp yellow. Leon has the presence of mind to seek out a plank to lay her on. They carry her into the living room, drape a blanket over the couch. They work off the girl's trousers. The wound doesn't look bad, but how would they know? Leon learned CPR as a teenager and that's the medical training between them. The girl's underpants are worn but clean. They have little sheep designs on them, faded pink and blue.
"Won't they come back for her?"
"I don't know." Leon shakes his head sadly. "Look at how thin she is."
"I hope to God the bullet's not inside. Let's hope it just grazed her. Oh God, I didn't mean to hit anybody!"
The girl grimaces and opens her eyes, starts to cry.
"It hurts, it hurts," she whimpers, twisting in pain.
They give her aspirin and whiskey, that's all they have. They know enough not to try to scare up help this time of night.
"We'll have to take her with us," Tati whispers.
"Of course."
They spend the night packing. Dawn is grandiose, mocking in its glorious announcement. In the lavender glimmer they bury Ray.
The girl takes some water, then some juice, then is persuaded to chew a little bread. Her eyes are hard, meeting theirs in a cold stare. But she tells them her name.
"Trewth."
"Truth," replies Tati. "What a lovely name."
They bed Truth down in the back of the car nested in pillows and blankets with an uneasy Fox. She seems much better and they are hopeful.
At the highway they merge with the incessant parade northward.
Tati turns to smile at Leon. "So, six months later..."
"Six months with you. What a gift."
"Remember how desperate you were to get back on the road?"
"That didn't last long. You mesmerized me."
Tati looks out at the surrounding faces grim and wan.
"I wonder if," she says, "even though we didn't know it wishing so hard all the time to leave, I wonder if that was the last joy."