Dancing in Dreamtime (20 page)

“Twenty-seven cans,” Humphrey announced, pointing out the highlights in his cargo bin, “five rags, two zippers, a pair of boxer shorts, a melted joy stick, and volume three of
The Anarchist's Handbook
.”

“Don't we already have the first volume?”

“It's down there somewhere.” He thumped his foot on the roof of Mt. Texxon.

“Lord only knows where,” said Grace. “Look here at this hubcap and this perfectly good catcher's mitt.” She put on the mitt, which swallowed her tiny arm halfway to the elbow. “Chuck it in here, babe!” she sang, smacking a fist into the pocket.

Humphrey tossed her a doorknob, which she caught deftly. “Any spoons?” he asked. Because of his appetite, he coveted spoons above all other loot.

“No,” said Grace, “but here's a fork.”

“Ah, there's my sharp-eyed lass!” Humphrey kissed her full on the puckered lips. That was one of the fringe benefits of growing old—you could smooch whenever you liked and tell any busybody who objected to go take a flying leap.

“And would you believe four wigs?” said Grace.

“Isn't that a record for wigs?”

“I think it is. And they're good thick ones, too.”

The blue wig that Grace was wearing had been acquired in this manner, as had the videocap worn by Humphrey, as indeed had the better part of their wardrobe. Her calf-length boots, for example, had been salvaged from a trash can beside the wading pool in Marconi Plaza.

They did not scavenge as a way of making ends meet, but as a hobby, almost an art. Unlike Old Portland, whose streets in the latter days had swarmed with bums and beggars and dumpster-pickers, Oregon City fed and housed every last soul. Collecting junk was not easy in such a sanitary city. Along with the mountains, the streets and plazas were flushed daily, each quarter of the city at a different hour; and the recyclers down below gobbled everything. No space station gliding in orbit, no ship cruising to the stars could have been tidier than Oregon City afloat on the Pacific. By timing their rounds, however, Grace and Humphrey scoured the avenues just ahead of the detergents, and thus managed to find, on most days, a cartful of trash: items of clothing, broken heels, foam cups, ad flimsies, toys, depleted batteries, electronic gizmos, belt buckles, even spare body parts.

People sometimes left stale food or wounded furniture in their path, imagining these old geezers had somehow fallen through the welfare net into poverty. Most people, however, encountering the two scavengers, looked the other way. The Overseers regarded them as harmless eccentrics. What did it matter if they hoarded rubbish?

After the day's discoveries had been admired, Humphrey and Grace rolled aside one of the pumped-up boulders, disclosing a ventilator shaft, through which they dumped their junk into the hollow crown of Mt. Texxon. As they listened to these new prizes clattering onto the hoard of rubbish below, they exchanged the sly prankish looks they had been sharing since kindergarten.

Once the boulder was back in place, they sat for a while atop the mountain, basking in fake sunlight, gazing down at the city. The icy glitter of the streets reminded them of the winter when the
Columbia River froze hard and they skated from Old Portland to Vancouver and back. That ice had gleamed with the same sinister perfection. The freeze would have played havoc with the spawning of salmon, if those marvelous fish had not already vanished.

“Will you look at that yucky color,” said Grace.

Indigo vapor had begun spurting from vents on the nearby peak of Mt. Pepsicoke, forming imitation storm clouds that would never drop rain or snow but would merely hover beneath the dome like bruised angels.

“I don't like these sickly purples they're using on Tuesdays,” Humphrey agreed.

“The old clouds used to remind me of purple iris,” said Grace, “a color so thick you could spread it on toast.”

“Toast,” Humphrey repeated dreamily.

“Iris,” Grace said, trying to get him back on the track of the conversation. “A flower so sumptuous it made me envy the bees.”

“Marmalade on toast. Rhubarb preserves. Honey.” Humphrey's tongue slicked across his lips as if he were prospecting for these vanished foods. “Apple butter. Watermelon pickles.”

Once Humphrey began reminiscing about bygone foods, Grace had to let him run down. While he drooled through his epic of jams and jellies, she recalled her own vanished pleasures: the kiss of cotton on skin, the smell of dung from police horses, the raspy summer sound of locusts, the ooze of hot tar between her toes on a country road, the squirm of a kitten. So the two old people ambled on separate pathways back to the days before the Enclosure. They ended up gaping at one another, startled by the length of their memories, measuring how old they were by the remoteness of these things.

“All the same,” Grace declared, “I wouldn't go back to those days for love or money. If we were still living outside, we'd be dead.”

Humphrey nodded. “Killed thirteen different ways by poisons and radiation, starved to death, and shot full of holes in the bargain. Not to mention getting fried by ultraviolet rays and sizzled by microwaves and eaten up by acid rain.”

“One of those alphabet chemicals—DDT or PCBs—would have rotted our bones.”

“Druggies would have bonked us over the head.”

“Warlords and bankers.”

“Greenhouse effect.”

“Smog.”

They clicked their tongues in unison. At this point the first visitors of the day were gliding up the slopes on pedbelts or dawdling up on foot, toddlers tugging at leashes, kids wearing the masks of their favorite video stars, occasional elders as barefaced as Humphrey and Grace, all of them so fresh-looking they might have just been taken off a shelf and unwrapped.

“Here come the drones,” said Grace. She stood up, beating the dust from her jumpsuit, stamping her boots on the mountain's pliable skin. The nearby trees wobbled and boulders bounced.

Humphrey laughed. “That's my Gracie, more powerful than an earthquake!”

“You'd better believe it,” said Grace.

Day after day, the old scavengers wheeled through Oregon City, filling their zip-carts with refuse, castoffs, and lost articles.
Then at midnight they buzzed up the slopes to dump their haul. Eventually they decided it was time to see how much more rubbish the mountain would hold.

As the son of a Kentucky coal miner, Humphrey insisted that he should be the one to climb down the ventilator shaft. Grace protested, but he said, “No, no, ducky. Your flexy joints might give out. You stay up here and keep an eye peeled for the fuzz.”

“Don't get your belly stuck down there,” she warned.

He sniffed indignantly. “I am as svelte as an otter.”

She snorted. “And don't go snapping your brittle old bones.”

“And don't you be such a worrywart.”

Fortunately, there was a ladder, or Humphrey would never have managed the descent. After some noisy reconnoitering, he surfaced again to declare, between labored puffs, “I figure we've got space for about another month's worth of junk.”

“Only a month, and then no more scavenging?” Grace lamented. They had been working toward this moment for years, but now, having nearly reached it, she felt glum. Her face, pale and wrinkled, had the look of a snowy field crisscrossed by animal trails.

Humphrey, who loved every one of those wrinkles, was old enough to remember snowy fields. “Give or take a week,” he said.

“When I was a girl, I never dreamed I'd grow up to be a bag lady!” She broke into a fit of laughter. “Remember how the scruffy old crones lugged their bags from one dumpster to another, picking up leftover pizzas and moth-eaten sweaters?”

Flowing easily into his wife's memories, Humphrey said, “And the winos near the Lighthouse Mission browsed in the gutters for cigarette butts, their eyes like holes in rusty pails.”

“At night they'd wrap themselves in newspapers and sleep on benches.”

“Or in cardboard boxes.”

“Thank goodness nobody has to live on the street these days,” Grace said. “You could, though, in a pinch. It's a regular cornucopia out there. Seems like the more stuff people have the more they throw away.” She drew up her sleeve to peruse the gadgets strapped to her arm. A few of them kept time, although no two kept the same time. Out of old habit, she put one of them against her ear. But there was only silence—the vibration of crystals, the lunge of electrons. It was an overly tidy world, she thought, where time could slide by without ticking.

“What I'll never understand is the lost socks.” Hoisting his trouser legs, Humphrey displayed two plump ankles, each one sausaged into multiple layers of socks. “How do people lose them, just riding around all day or sitting on their tails?”

“You've got me,” said Grace. She gave a bewildered shake of her nearly hairless old head, which was adorned at the moment with a blond wig. “A body could fill up a closet after one day on the streets.”

“Shoes I understand,” he said. “You can slip out of them without thinking. Your hat could fall off in a crowd. I've seen people lose false teeth. I've seen tires fall off wheelies. No mystery there. But socks?”

“Remember when that lady at the lunch counter dropped her nose in the soup?”

“And she fished it out, snapped it on, and kept right on eating!” Humphrey's brown bag of a face crumpled with disgust. “I don't know what the world's coming to, Gracie. First we all move inside these bubble cities to get away from bugs and sunburn and poison rain and radiation. Live without threats from nature! And now everybody's redoing their faces, rewiring their nerves, replumbing
their organs, replacing their joints. Where's it going to stop? With brains quivering in jars?”

“Who are we to talk?” said Grace, rubbing her knees. “I'm thankful for my new joints. And if you didn't have that ticker,” tapping him on the chest, “your blood would turn to sludge and they'd make fertilizer out of you for the farmpods.”

“You've got a point there.” Humphrey lowered his eyes—his electronic eyes, he could not help remembering—and laced the fingers of his prosthetic hand into those of his natural one.

They lapsed into silence, feeling the full weight of their ninety-odd years. Entropy, they knew, was gaining on them.

On the following nights, after dumping their debris, Grace kept watch atop Mt. Texxon while Humphrey drudged below in the caverns, laying out wires and relays and fuses. They had left passages through the rubbish for just this purpose. Over the years, they had pilfered the materials from demolition sites, including charges of plasty, which would go in last of all.

Here and there in the grottoes the shoring had collapsed, barricades of cardboard had given way, towers of cans had tumbled down, and so Humphrey had to proceed cautiously. As he crawled along, trailing wires behind him, he often found his way blocked by a rubbish-slide and had to backtrack. Twice the walls caved in on his very heels, and he was forced to grope his way out by side-tunnels.

After the second of these escapes, he slumped beside Grace on the mountain crest, gulping air. “If I don't make it out one of
these days,” pant, “I want you to go ahead,” pant, “and throw the switch.”

“With you inside? And me out here all by my lonesome getting grilled by the Overseers? Not on your sweet life.”

“Forget I said it,” he added quickly.

Her lips puckered and her face darkened under the blond wig. “I don't plan to go on living without you, Hump. So you stick around.”

“All right, sweetums. Simmer down.” He stroked her trembling hand.

“I can't stand the thought of staying on alone. You know that. With you gone, I'd be the only sane person left alive.”

“Never you worry. We've got a lifetime hitch, you and me.” He pecked her on the cheek.

Their minds running in parallel grooves, the two ancient scavengers thought of death.

“You know,” said Grace after a spell, “when we lose our wits or our spunk, we ought to hold hands and jump down a recycle chute.”