Blood and Water and Other Tales (19 page)

I am, it is true, a mere boot, and no longer young. My leather is wrinkled now, soft to the touch, and circumstance has shaped me to its whims. My sole flaps; my grommets, those that remain, are rusty; and I no longer gleam in the sunshine as I did before the war. In those days I was a working boot, and no stranger to turf, and soil, and the gravel of suburban driveways; and though I am old and stiff now, I still dream of once more lacing tightly to a healthy ankle and treading the mulch of a green and fertile earth.

A mere boot. Nevertheless, I speak, that those of you who come after—if such there be—may profit in wisdom from what I am about to impart. My service was not elevated, but I worked diligently for the old order, and would see its return. I stand to gain nothing from distorting the truth.

There were four of them to begin with. Gerty Murgatroid was the matriarch, a pale, fat woman who sat out her days with a bowl of junk food in the valley between her thighs and an unending dirge of negativity on her thin gill-like lips. Her eyes were like a fish’s, fixed and glassy, squeezed between lardy wedges of white fat whence they gazed constant and unblinking at a television screen. Her little bulb of a head was tufted with a few wisps of dry, fluffy hair, and it wobbled continually atop its vast immobile housing of flesh. In a faded housedress and defeated slippers Gerty endured the empty days; and her husband, Herb, a small, neat, compulsive man with bitten fingernails and a pencil-thin mustache, tinkered away in the den with his “projects,” and when forced to interact with his wife was unable to control a tic that flickered violently at the corner of his left eye and contorted his expression into a hideous rictus to which strangers reacted with horror but which Gerty herself had long since accepted as a manifestation of Herb’s “nerves.”

To tread again the mulch of a green and fertile earth... There is no green and fertile earth, not now. Your earth is cold now, strewn with rubble and dead things, and upon it lies an unmelting blanket of black snow. For months there was only night, as the sunlight which shone once upon my buffed and vaulted toecap was blocked by a great grimy veil of smoke and lofted soot, and the snow that fell was black. I survived that terrible winter; I went into the shelter with the canned goods and the blankets and the paperbacks and the tranquilizers, and was tossed into a corner. In the weeks that followed I observed the decline and fall of an American family.

*   *   *

Herb and Gerty’s relationship could not be called a loving one; and yet they managed to develop a habit of coexistence that permitted each to function according to his or her bent, and in this way they were not unlike a pair of boots, as I often remarked to my own mate and colleague, a trusty bit of footwear boiled, alas, in a soup in the days of famine that followed the war.

There were two children: Ann, a silent and delicate girl who took after her father; and fat Peter, an endomorph like Gerty. Fat Peter was a smelly, freckled boy with dirty hair and a grimy T-shirt that strained vainly to contain the jellied bulk of his tummy. A merry lad, he liked to tear the wings off houseflies and pepper the eyes of dogs. He put frogs in bottles and gleefully hurled them skywards, and small creatures scattered at his approach. His schoolmates, whom he bullied, avoided him like the plague, for to fat Peter all of Nature was a victim to be terrorized and mutilated without mercy. And thus did he discharge the pain of parental neglect, for Herb and Gerty, devoid of emotion themselves, were oblivious to the needs of their children.

But not oblivious to the impending catastrophe of Western Civilization. A plumber by trade, and a paranoid by nature, Herb had been painstakingly converting the basement into a long-term fallout shelter; and as luck would have it, on the very day he finished the job—it was a Sunday afternoon in late September— the fateful announcement was made. Gerty heard it first, and her voice sliced through the house like a carving knife.

“Herb!” she screeched. “Get up here!”

I was on the back porch at the time, enjoying the unseasonable sunshine. I counted slowly to seven; this pause permitted Herb to murmur a string of unspeakable blasphemies under his breath, and the tic in his face to start twitching. The familiar patter up the basement stairs; then, “Yes, dear?”

“Turn it up! Turn it up!”

“... we repeat,” said the TV, “reports are coming in that the Eastern Seaboard has been devastated by a missile strike. The President has ordered massive retaliation, and urges the American people to go calmly to their shelters and remain there until further notice. This has been a recording. We repeat...”

“It’s war!” shrieked Gerty. “Do something!”

It often takes a crisis to bring out the best in a man, and when Herb Murgatroid spoke again, there was a note of authority in his voice I had never heard there before.

“Go downstairs, Gerty,” he said firmly. “Take Ann. I’ll fetch Peter.”

There was a moment of silence; then Gerty assented, and could be heard heaving ponderously up out of her armchair, and shouting for her daughter. A few seconds later I was on Herb’s foot and running toward the playground where fat Peter was whiling away his afternoon. All down the street doors were opening and troubled citizens emerging to gather in small knots and gaze at the sky. We found fat Peter surrounded by a gang of little children, to whom he was demonstrating the correct method of eviscerating a bat. Herb laid a hand on his son’s plump shoulder.

“Come home now, Peter,” he said. “There’s an emergency.”

“Not now, Pop,” grinned the obese child, his fingers dripping with bat entrails, “I wanna—”

“Now, Peter!” barked Herb. The small children fell back, startled. Other parents breathlessly arrived to drag off their offspring. Whining all the way, fat Peter was marched home under the uncharacteristically firm hand of his father, and down into the family fallout shelter. And so it began.

Herb, being a plumber, had seen to all the life-support systems necessary to maintain the family underground for the duration. Odd, then, that he had not factored in the psychic strains that were bound to arise—for the nuclear family is very much like a hydraulic machine, and unless it’s adequately equipped with safety valves, pressure within the closed system may rise to dangerous levels. After a couple of weeks fat Peter, who had victimized the weak for most of his young life, found himself the target of collective family tension. Not only was he the youngest, he was also now the loudest; for his mother suffered a profound shock when the television networks closed down, and lapsed into a quasicatatonic stupor from which she would never be aroused. So fat Peter was unconsciously selected to absorb the psychological toxins generated in the desperate confines of the Murgatroid bunker, and his wheezy laughter was soon replaced by a dark and brooding sullenness.

Herb’s assertiveness, meanwhile, increased in inverse proportion to Gerty’s collapse: he waxed as she waned, and thus was homeostasis preserved. However, he was pretty shaken when he learned that the heavy pall of radiation drifting overhead was a good deal more dense and slow-moving than he’d been led to expect. And with the realization that the family would have to spend a considerable period of time underground, Herb decided that rationing must be immediately introduced.

He made his announcement at the next family meal. Gerty, her mind now rarely active and her body increasingly inert, did not heed the message. Ann looked anxiously at her father, but said nothing. Fat Peter began to whine.

“Hey, Pop, I’m sick of eating stuff out of cans. Ain’t there any real food, Pop; ain’t there any
meat?”
“No meat,” snapped Herb. “Only canned food now, and less of it. It may be months before we can leave.”

“Months? Hey, Pop, it ain’t so bad up there; can’t we try it for a while? I wanna go to the store.”

“Shut up, Peter,” said Ann. “Daddy knows what he’s talking about. He’s got instruments.”

Peter rounded furiously on his sister. “Blow it out your ass, shitface!” he yelled. “I want some meat!”

“Peter!” bellowed Herb, rising to his feet and pointing to the back of the shelter. “Go to your room. Now!”

“I want some meat,” whimpered the fat, unhappy boy. “I hate this canned garbage.”

“Go to your room, Peter,” repeated Herb, his pointing finger aquiver with mounting anger.

“Yes, Peter,” said Ann. “Go to your room like Daddy says.”

Fat Peter started up, the tears cutting wide channels down his plump and dirty cheeks. The cold eyes of his father and sister gazed at him with implacable distaste.

Gerty had already returned to her armchair, and slumped into the sleep that claimed her now for twenty hours out of the twenty-four. The weeping boy ran to his mother, and threw himself upon her gently heaving bosom; then he fumbled at her housecoat buttons, glancing furtively over his shoulder at the others. Suddenly he parted his mother’s garment and bared a vast milkwhite breast. Ann’s hands flew to her mouth and she turned wide-eyed to her father. Herb was still on his feet, still pointing, and speechless with rage. Fat Peter had meanwhile buried his face in his mother’s breast and was sucking lustily at a large purplish nipple. Herb strode across the room and, pulling his belt out of his trousers, lashed his son’s back. A muffled scream issued from deep within the wobbling lake of flesh that was Gerty Murgatroid’s breast, but the great mother did not awaken, nor did fat Peter loosen his grip upon her. Herb, livid with fury, lashed again, and this time the boy’s head came up. Herb grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and dragged him off his wife. “Go to your room,” he commanded. “Now!”

Fat Peter was squirming on the floor of the bomb shelter, shielding his face from his father’s belt. “I’m hungry,” he wailed in his distress. “I’m hungry.”

“To—your—room,” ordered his father again, and blinded by his own tears, the boy crawled off on his hands and knees, Herb following right behind. Ann had by this time recovered from her shock, and darted across the room to cover her mother’s bosom and rebutton the housedress. Then she returned to the table; and Gerty slept on, oblivious.

*   *   *

Four days later Gerty was again sleeping and Herb was at his instruments when fat Peter and Ann heard a scraping noise at the top of the basement steps. The two children looked at each other. “I’m going to tell Daddy,” said Ann.

“Wait,” said fat Peter. In silent suspense they waited; and then came the scrape again. Fat Peter motioned to Ann to come with him, and the pair ascended the stairs till their ears were pressed against the thick, bolted, insulated door.

“Who is it?” said fat Peter.

“Let us in,” came a feeble voice. “We’re starving... we’re freezing... let us in.”

Now, fat Peter and Ann were too young to know it, but they were in fact caught in one of the knottier ethical dilemmas of the postapocalyptic era. It was the nuclear lifeboat question: does one hoard resources for one’s own family and turn away the needy stranger, to almost certain death; or does one share with the needy stranger, thereby reducing one’s own stocks and jeopardizing the family? It’s a meaty question, but fat Peter unfortunately did not have the moral equipment to do it justice.

“Fuck off!” he shouted, and began to giggle for the first time in weeks. His mirth was contagious.

“Fuck off!” shouted Ann. “There’s only enough for the Murgatroids!”

“Only enough for the Murgatroids!” screamed fat Peter, dissolving into fresh gales of laughter and helplessly wetting his pants.

“Let us in,” came the voice, fainter still. “We’re starving.”

“Only enough for the Murgatroids! Only enough for the Murgatroids!”

When Herb at last appeared, and asked what all the noise was about, Ann brought herself under control and told him. He frowned a moment, his tic flicked once, and then he said, “That’s right, only enough for the Murgatroids”—and returned to his instruments.

Gerty passed away about a month later. She suddenly sat bolt upright in her armchair, her eyes wide open; up came a thick string of bloody sputum, and then she fell back stone dead on the cushions. No one was particularly distraught, and she was laid out on the floor, under a sheet, while Herb figured out what to do with the corpse. Next day he had his answer.

It was breakfast time, and the two children were silently pushing baked beans about their plates. Herb appeared at the head of the table and gazed sternly at them.

“Answer me truthfully,” he said in a very grave voice. “Who took one of Mommy’s fingers during the night?”

Ann emitted a small scream and covered her mouth with her hands. Fat Peter turned a deep scarlet and started to bluster.

“I don’t know, Pop. Finger, what finger? Who, me?”

“Don’t lie to me, Peter,” roared his father. “Bring me the remains!”

Fat Peter, without another word, left the breakfast table and padded off to his bedroom. A moment later he reappeared and, flinching slightly, held out to his father a well-gnawed fingerbone. “I was hungry,” he said weakly.

“Peter!” breathed Ann.

Herb looked strangely at his son. “Didn’t you,” he finally said, “even try to
cook
it?”

Fat Peter shrugged, and stared at his shoes—a friendly pair of cheap Korean runners who bore the immense strain of the boy’s extremities with uncomplaining stoicism. Then he looked up again, clearly puzzled—as were we all—that Herb had not flown into a rage. His tic wasn’t even flickering. Instead, he was still gazing curiously at fat Peter who, it was now clear, had bloodstains on the front of his T-shirt. “Come with me, Ann,” he said; “I have something to explain to you. You stay here, Peter.”

Half-an-hour later Herb and fat Peter had laid a plastic sheet on the floor of the bomb shelter and stretched dead Gerty out on it, stark naked and face down. Then Herb took up his carving knife and sliced a few good rashers off one of his wife’s great buttocks, and set them carefully on a sheet of greaseproof paper. Fat Peter grinned at his dad and licked his lips.

“Not yet, Peter,” said Herb. “We have work to do.”

In the hours that followed I was forced to make serious adjustments to the high opinion I had thus far formed of your people. Of course I understood Herb Murgatroid’s thinking: the family was running out of food and Gerty had to be disposed of; these were apocalyptic times and conventional moral norms had lost all relevance; the family was cut off and therefore unlikely to infect the social body by its transgression; and so on. But even so, something galled me about the haste and ease with which the venerable taboo was violated. There was no sense of awe, no mystery, nothing of the sublime, and this I regretted. It seems to me that if you’re going to eat each other, there should at least be ritual, for anthropophagy, when all is said and done, is still a rather grand and dignified sin. It
matters.
I’m only a boot, of course, but Herb and fat Peter went about it as if—as if they were working in a fast-food joint. And most of the footwear in the fallout shelter were with me on this: it was a crude and vulgar display, and we all agreed that a European family would have handled things much more tastefully.