Frail (7 page)

“Ms. Acosta told us all what to do. How to organize ourselves, how to—concentrate on stuff. She was good at that.” A crashed car, an ashy gray shell with burnt bread crusts of bones in the driver’s seat, sat cheek by jowl with the warped, bent guardrail in a little pool of melted glass. I’d seen a sculpture like that once, at a museum in Chicago. “Dave, the janitor at our school, he used to hunt and fish a lot, zombies never scared him so he’d go wherever he wanted. He had a woodstove in his house. They broke in there too, sick ones, but he shot a lot of them. That made it better, this winter. His woodstove.”

Dave died. But before that, before his woodstove and hunting and mud-smeared fishing-line snares that saved us all, I ran to the school, that night my uncle woke me up. Dave and Ms. Acosta were already there and he almost shot me before he realized, I couldn’t be sick, the sick couldn’t run, and I was doubled over gasping and my feet felt like someone took a knife, Dave’s big hunting knife, and stripped all the skin off the soles. When he realized what he’d almost done he came running out to me, shoved me through the school doors so hard I smacked into Ms. Acosta and we clutched each other not to fall, and there were more sick people coming out of the lilacs near the schoolyard gate. One of them staggered in a circle, fell to his hands and knees with a thud and a cry and sprays of cascading gravel, but sick as they were they’d still grab anyone they could, kill them, eat them, if you let them close. Dave stood there in the doorway, still pushing us back with one arm, huge expanse of shoulders hunching up the cloth of his shirt like a drawstring pulling shut on a sack.

“I don’t wanna do this!” he shouted, at the ones approaching the yard. “I don’t wanna do it! Go away!”

He’d have done them a favor, if he shot them. Dying so drawn-out, starving, screaming in pain. Dave knew that. Even then he must’ve suspected how drawn out it’d be for him, diabetes, no insulin. The set of his shoulders, as I stood behind him, was rigid and unyielding but the slackness of his fingers on the rifle told me he still just couldn’t do it.

“I used to hate the idea of hunting,” I told Lisa. “Not vegetarian or anything. Just squeamish. But he taught me how to make snares.”

“How to look out for yourself,” she said. Reaching out a hand to the melted-glass car, like a little kid in a museum needing to touch the smudgy haystacks. “Not just rely on his own hunting, fishing. That was smart of him.”

“I was squeamish. But the first time I got a rabbit, from one of my own snares, I was really proud.”

Dave stood there in the doorway, that night, and the sick people kept coming. “Don’t make me do this!” he shouted.

“We’re hungry,” one of them shouted back, and it was nothing but truth, the only truth left for him and for all of us, but the rasping, gulping ruin of his voice gave me a revolted shiver. “We just need food, all we need is—”

“You’re always hungry.” Dave’s fingers tightened. He didn’t want to. But he would. “And you’re dying. And we’re not. There’s not enough food in the world for you. And we’re not dying—”

“Help us!” another one screamed. A woman, her face one huge, skin-sloughing bruise, nails dangling crazily loose from her fingertips and her teeth already tarnished and far too long. “You have to! You have to! Jesus Christ, help us—”

Dave fired a shot, then another, over their heads. They crawled off, sobbing, still human enough that there was hurt and loneliness in that sound along with the agony of famine. Dave grabbed us both and we were running again and when I almost fell he tossed the rifle to Ms. Acosta, grabbed me, hauled me like the light inconsequential thing I was into the school basement. There might be healthier ones on their heels, guns of their own, mouths to feed. You had to hide.

“He acted like I was his daughter,” I said to Lisa. “Like it was his responsibility to look after me. He didn’t have to. But he did.”

When they got into Dave’s house, the night before my uncle and the others came for me, they’d grabbed his daughter. Starving mouths, famished hands. He got a lot of them then, no warning shots that time, but he never got her back. His wife was already dead. I don’t have anything to whine about, knowing that.

“And the one with the baby?” Lisa asked.

She wouldn’t let up—fine, hear it. Hear everything, it might surprise you. “Kristin. Kristin was sick. She couldn’t help much.” Soft pale hair like the feathers of some helpless little bird. Dried blood on her scalp where she’d deliberately knocked it on the floor and a raw rictus of grieving, vindictive fury for a mouth, that was the beginning and end of Kristin in my mind. I slept two feet away from her for months on end, and that’s honestly all I remember. “She couldn’t do anything. She was useless. She knew she wouldn’t live. She kept saying so, over and over. And she was right.”

“She didn’t kill herself, though,” Lisa said softly.

“What if she did? Why would you care?” I clutched my cart harder, pain shooting up to my wrists. “She’s gone. Dave’s gone. My uncle’s gone. He tried to kill me, there were a whole lot of sick ones with him wanting to kill me, but he died.” My voice was shaky and skittering, a shopping cart hurtling down an empty road in a blast of freezing wind. “I promised Kristin over and over I’d keep her baby with me and it didn’t make any difference, baby’s gone, Ms. Acosta’s gone, my aunt’s gone, my uncle, my mother—”

“Music!”

She stuck a foot right under my cart wheels, trying to block my path, and I shoved the cart over it without thinking and she let out a shout of pain. She grabbed my cart two-handed, watched impassively as the wheels spun in place on the asphalt; when I gave up and let go she reached into her own cart, pulled out the CD player, skipped several tracks ahead and pressed play.

I blinked in surprise. I couldn’t help it. “You like The Good Terrorist?”

“I guess so.” She turned it up. “I never heard of them before, I just grabbed a bunch of CDs from someone’s house. I like this song, though. Are they popular?”

“No.” Whose house? Nobody in Lepingville would know about a band like The Good Terrorist, or care. “They’re good. That’s what they are.”

She shut up and we stood there, listening. “One Door Closes.” Track five from
Songs for Children Behind Chicken Wire
, my favorite. I practiced the chords from this one until my fingers went raw. Lisa glanced at me, quick little eye dart like she feared I might try to break her foot in earnest, then listened until the last embittered little crash of drums at the end.

“Play it again?” I asked.

She pressed the repeat button and rested the player in the folds of her torn-up jacket, down in the cart, and we got going. Nick Hawley’s voice was thin and anemic against the wind, spiraling up lost into the air around us from cheap tinny speakers, but there it was, for as long as there were batteries. Things would get so much worse once the batteries ran out, the canned chili and chocolate and cool ranch chips were all eaten up, the last aspirin bottle went empty, the last bar of soap—“The Last Transit,” track six. The live version could make you cry. “Over and Out.” Track seven. The weakest on the album, Stefanie Scholl phoning in the bass line, but it was them and that was enough.

“I could play it from the start,” Lisa said.

I nodded and she cycled back to “Screams from Somewhere Else.” The cars were thinning out again, the clusters of phantom traffic jams fewer with every mile.

“So who else do you like?” she asked. “I don’t know anything about music, I never did, Jessie used to make fun of me for it—”

“Dirty Little Whirlwind. Do you know them?” She shook her head. She’d probably heard their one sort-of hit, the one that became a margarine commercial, two hundred times and didn’t even know it. “Tortoise D. Hare? The Medium Soft?” I’d have been amazed if she’d heard of the Medium Soft, nobody had. “Anyway. That’s who I liked.”

Sometimes when I was practicing my guitar or blasting The Good Terrorist or Tortoise D. or Pleasure To Serve my mother would come in and sit on my bed, just listening; it never felt intrusive or like she was trying to prove something by liking what I liked, she just plain wanted to hear it and I didn’t mind sharing. Nobody at school gave a shit about real music.

“My mom didn’t know anything about it either,” I said. “She said once you turn thirty it’s like a switch gets thrown in your brain and you don’t even know where to begin? Like you’re condemned to listen to whatever you liked when you were fifteen over and over again, forever? That’s bullshit. It’s never too late. I mean, look at Stefanie Scholl, right? She never even picked up a bass guitar until she was twenty-three.”

It was actually getting hotter as the sunlight weakened; the wind had died, the air felt thick and heavy. I stripped off the gloves and blew on my sore, sweaty hands. Lisa rooted around in her cart, tossed me another tube of Neosporin. I’d slather my dog bite in it once we stopped for the night.

“Don’t talk to me about your friends and family unless you really want to,” she said. “It’s just I haven’t had human company in so long, I like hearing about them and I forget—I’m sorry.” She pulled her cap off, combing fingers through her ponytail. “But I’d like it if you talked about music some more. Just, any time. Whenever you want.”

I thought I’d already been pushing it, wanting to hear the whole CD. Even though she did ask. “What for?”

“It’s never too late, right? Didn’t you just say that? So I can learn something about it now, even if I’m thirty-four. I like this band, I learned that.” She folded her hat into a puffy, furzy square, shoved it in her pocket. “And because your face, when you heard them? I think that’s the first time I’ve seen
you
since we met. Your eyes lit up. Your whole face. I liked seeing it.” She shrugged. “I told you I was selfish.”

The first time she saw me. Like the first I saw her, standing there by the town hall, letting me see how badly she wanted those red boots. A fair trade.

“Nobody’s ever heard of the Medium Soft,” I said. “Outside Germany, anyway.” I wished more than anything I could’ve been to Berlin, before everything happened. All those clubs. “But without them there wouldn’t be any Good Terrorist. I don’t see the point of talking about music, seriously, when the batteries run out on that thing then—”

“Batteries? That’s seriously what you’re worried about? I’ve got batteries to burn. The great thing is you can’t eat batteries, can’t even get a good bite in. Break your teeth. There’ll be plenty left.” She gave me a sidelong look. “Also, there’s this thing called live music? They used to play it at something called ‘concerts’? Last I checked, guitars don’t need batteries at all.”

“
Electric
guitars,” I explained, all slow and patient, “need to be plugged in. That’s why they call them—”

“I told you I don’t know shit about music,” she said, ramming the wheels right through the remains of a squirrel. “Don’t get all technical on me.”

I craned my neck away and pretended to contemplate the treetops, so she couldn’t see me smile.

 

 

We passed clusters of houses every few miles, long-abandoned half-built subdivisions, office parks and industrial parks yawning and empty, but we wheeled straight past them in favor of an open scrubby field, a shallow bowl of gray dirt circled by a little windbreak of birches. The bark was nearly intact, no bare patches from grabbing starving hands stripping it clean, and something superstitious in me decided that augured well and I sat straight down in the dirt without waiting for Lisa to agree. I ignored the expressway signs and pulled out my road atlas instead: about ten miles from Lake Station. Decent mileage, for one day.

Decent mileage, and no more unwanted company. It’d be all right now, as long as I didn’t talk too much about the wrong things. I could even risk sleeping outside, maybe. A tollbooth on a night like this would feel suffocating.

“You want me to sit up and keep watch?” Lisa asked.

“You said you’ve been going for days without a break. You’re not gonna sleep?”

“I’ll be fine. I don’t need as much sleep as I did, before.”

That was a lie, I could tell just by looking at the shadowy mess of her face, the way her arms shook with exhaustion as she tossed me a blanket from her cart. I folded up my LCS jacket for a pillow and rested my hurt arm on my backpack, wrapping the other one around the straps; if she tried to take it from me as I slept I’d wake up, she’d have to fight me for it. Even though we both knew how that’d go, even with my knife. She sat down beside me, arms wrapped tight around her knees. Somewhere down the road her talk had all dried up.

“It’s amazing how big the sky looks,” I said, “without any other lights.” I was still used to a close little sky glowing like sulfur, the harsh sterile yellow of the roadside safety lamps making everything look jaundiced, but now there were no lights, almost no clouds, nothing but a deep wash of darkness with pale splatters of stars. “Just don’t ask me about constellations, okay? I hated science.”

No answer. She rested her cheek on a kneecap, rubbed it vigorously against the dirty cloth of her jeans.

“Karen would’ve been ten, yesterday.” She picked at a loose thread, yanking with the fixed look of a cat stalking a moth. “April third. Way too big for those boots.”

In June I’d be eighteen. My mother would’ve been, would be . . . thirty-eight? Thirty-nine? She had me young. We shared a birthday. I used to get such a charge out of that when I was little. Of course when you’re little enough you get a charge out of managing not to piss yourself, so it hardly matters.

“I’m sorry,” I said. The thing is, for a second I wasn’t even sure I was sorry, who’d want their child to live through—I couldn’t think that way. I knew how that went. That was the last thing I should be thinking.

“There’s nothing for you to be sorry about.” She pulled hard on the thread, letting it snag on her fingernails. “You didn’t fuck up her leukocyte count, you didn’t try to deny her insurance claim when—”