H2O (2 page)

“But it’s
mostly water,” he said, and looked up to the sky. “That’s what you see when you
look down from the stars.”

I looked up to
the sky. “I know,” I said, and I did. He’d already taught me that there were
stars and planets out there. Galaxies and solar systems. Thousands of them.
He’d taught me that a vast majority of those planets didn’t have water. Earth
was special because it had water.

“Never stop
learning, Roy,” he said, then kissed the top of my head.

“I won’t,
Dad.”

We pulled up to Jimmy Hickemy’s
dilapidated ranch house. There were a few cars and a bunch of bicycles out
front.

I hurried into
the back yard and up the steps onto the porch. I squeezed between customers
picking out fillets and started to check out the fish. White, pink, and orange
fillets, neatly laid out over ice.

Jimmy saw me.
“What’ll it be?” he said. He always treated me like an adult and I liked it.

I looked at
the halibut. That’s what I wanted.

“Let’s see
what your dad says,” Jimmy said.

I expected my
dad to say ‘no.’ We hadn’t bought Halibut in a while. It was more expensive
than the other fillets.

My dad made it
up to the porch and saw that I was standing in front of the Halibut.

“Please, dad,”
I said.

He looked over
the fillets. “They look pretty good, don’t they?”

“Good enough
to eat,” I said.

He laughed,
and Jimmy laughed, too.

“Give us a
couple of good ones, Jimmy,” my dad said. “Good enough to eat.”

I laughed.

My dad and I sliced the potatoes.
I did it carefully, like he’d taught me. When we finished, he put the slices
into the pan and as soon as they hit the oil, the kitchen filled with sizzling.

He was quiet,
concentrating on the cooking. More so than usual. The silence made the popping
and crackling of the oil louder than I’d ever heard it.

He battered
the fish and began to fry it in the black iron skillet. He glanced at me a
couple of times and smiled.

I watched him
standing in front of the stove, cooking us dinner. I loved him.

I packed enough food for four
days and also packed a bottle of Curado. Curado was the rarest, most expensive
alcohol in the Territory. It’d been distilled in Nahcotta, a town up north in
what used to be Washington State. Nahcotta was the last town to have an
industrial distillery that worked. It’d stopped working thirty years ago.

Someone had
given my dad three bottles of the fabled liquor for a job he’d done. My dad had
slowly sipped through one bottle, but two remained. He wasn’t a drinker.

After I
finished packing a couple changes of clothes, I started to pick out a book for
the trip. If I ended up spending a few nights in the wilderness, I wanted to be
prepared. I always read before bed. My dad had read to me every night and I’d
kept the tradition up. The house was full of books. His books. And he’d always
taken a book on his trips.

I remembered watching him going
through the rows of books for his last trip. The fish and potatoes from dinner
were still warm in my stomach.

“Air?” he
asked.

“East,” I
said.

“Water?” he
said.

“West.”

“Fire?”

“South.”

“Earth?”

“North.”

I was nine
years old and my father had taught me the real elements and the periodic table,
but we still had fun with the original four. Ancient civilizations, the ones
that had believed in these elements, associated each of them with a direction
and with certain animals.

“Air is eagle
and falcon,” I said, “Water is dolphin and turtle. Earth is bull and bear. And
Fire is lion and—,” I paused before delivering the punch line, “—salamander.”

He laughed at
salamander. It was a running joke between us. In one of my dad’s books, we’d
read that one ancient civilization had grouped salamanders with Fire. But
salamanders were amphibians and we wondered why they hadn’t been grouped with
water. So I’d said, “Fire stole salamanders from Water and headed south.” (South
was Fire’s direction.)

My dad liked
that theory and we ended up building a whole mythology around it. All the
animals had originally flocked to Water because it was the most important
element. So the other elements became jealous and started stealing Water’s
animals. We’d spend hours weaving stories about the sneaky ways that Air, Fire,
and Earth stole animals from Water.

My dad finally
pulled a book down from one of the shelves and I saw the title.
The Old Man
and the Sea
. (It’d be years before I realized that he meant for me to see
that title and to understand that it was connected to the secret.)

The next
morning, before he left for Merryville, he drove me to school. He told me that
after school I was to go home with Rick Levingworth. I’d spend the night there
and he’d pick me up from school the next afternoon.

I went to
school, spent the night at the Levingworth’s, but the next day, after school,
my dad didn’t pick me up. I waited until everyone was gone before I accepted
Mrs. Levingworth’s offer to drive me home. We got to my house, but my dad
wasn’t there either. So Mrs. Levingworth said I’d go home with her and wait
there, and we’d check back later.

But I didn’t
want to go and she caved in. We stayed.

Rick and I
played a game on a computer that my dad had rebuilt. In the game, alien ships
attacked us and we tried to shoot them down. Very few families in town had
computers that worked, and almost none had computer games, so Rick was happy to
hang out at my house.

I started
getting worried when I noticed Mrs. Levingworth hovering near the phone. It
looked like she wanted to make a phone call. But my dad didn’t work with
anyone, so I wasn’t sure who she was planning to call. Maybe the police.
Clearview had two policemen.

When evening
fell, Mrs. Levingworth’s worry was palpable. She told me it was time to go to
her house. I’d spend the night there. She said that my dad was spending the
night in Merryville. But she hadn’t made any phone calls so I wondered how
she’d found that out. She couldn’t know that.

I wanted to
wait for my dad and I stationed myself at the front window.

She tried to
coax me into going home with her and Rick. It was dinnertime and she wanted to
cook us dinner.

I said I
wanted to stay and wait. I wouldn’t leave. So she finally went ahead and made
some calls. I didn’t know it at the time, but she asked the police to check in
with the Fibs. The Fibs were in charge of policing the Territory. When there
was a serious problem, towns would call them in.

Then Mrs.
Levingworth made dinner, and I ate my dinner in front of the window.

Mrs.
Levingworth told me everything would be okay. She repeated that my dad was
spending the night in Merryville.

I didn’t go to bed that night. I
stared out the window. Rick and Mrs. Levingworth spent the night at my house.

I watched the
night get darker.

I watched the
dawn rise. A haunting purple sky.

I waited for
my dad.

Mrs.
Levingworth made breakfast.

I didn’t eat.

Then it was
time to go to school, but I didn’t want to go to school.

Mrs.
Levingworth called Mrs. Simmons and had her swing by and take Rick to school.
Mrs. Levingworth stayed with me, but we didn’t talk.

I waited.

Sometime
around noon, a car pulled up to the house and Mr. Kadish stepped out. I saw him
hesitate before approaching the house.

He came to the
door and I don’t know if Mrs. Levingworth heard his car, but she opened the
door before he knocked. He stepped inside and saw me by the window. He smiled,
but it wasn’t a smile. It was something sad that looked like a smile.

He and Mrs.
Levingworth headed into the kitchen without talking.

I moved
quietly toward the kitchen door to listen. They spoke in somber tones and I
couldn’t make out the words, but I could tell they were sad words.

I went back to
the window and stared outside.

Mrs. Levingworth
walked out of the kitchen. Mr. Kadish followed. He headed to the front door and
left.

Mrs.
Levingworth stepped up to me and said we needed to talk.

I said, “Let’s
wait until my dad comes home.”

Another hour
passed before she was ready to talk and I was ready to listen.

She told me
that my dad had died. She didn’t tell me how or why and I didn’t ask. That
would come later.

I saw tears
roll down her face and I saw her lips quiver.

She hugged me
tight and I felt her body trembling.

I was alone.

I drove the Corolaqua van to Troy
Street. I wanted to say good-bye to Benny before heading out.

All that made
Clearview a town, except for its most important asset, Corolaqua, was on Troy
Street. The shops that sold food, clothes, and Remnants, and the few repair and
trade shops that weren’t run out of people’s houses. The Town Hall was also
here. Like every other town in the Territory, a Town Council ran Clearview and
six days a week, the Councilmen showed up at the Town Hall and did their best to
keep Clearview functional. The Town Hall also housed the Line, which was how
all the towns communicated with each other. The Line held the Territory
together. Barely.

Benny ran the
Line in Clearview.

I met Benny Spokane in
kindergarten. Back then, I had other friends, too, because kids didn’t resent
me yet. They liked that I knew things, and they asked me questions about those
things and I answered them.

Benny was one
of the kids who asked me questions. His family, like all families, didn’t
encourage him to learn more than what he was taught in school. So when Benny
found out that there was a lot more to learn, he turned to me. Before the
Virus, schools taught all sorts of subjects, but now they stuck to the basics.
Enough to communicate and survive in a world of rudimentary living. And parents
could stop sending their kids to school whenever they wanted to. It was more
important for your kid to help grow food or sew shirts or fish or chop wood or
keep an old car or bicycle going. Or to work one of the necessary jobs in town.

In third
grade, after my dad was murdered, kids stopped asking me questions. They were
scared of me, like I was tainted by my dad’s death. Benny stopped asking me
questions, too. But he didn’t have that same look in his eyes that the other kids
had. When I’d catch other kids staring at me, their eyes were full of fear.
Benny’s eyes were full of questions.

Finally, after
a couple of months, he was so desperate to learn new things that he couldn’t
hold out any longer. He started asking me questions again. I answered the ones
I could and if I didn’t know the answer, I was so happy to have someone ask
questions again, that I’d go home and look it up.

I was living
with the Levingworths. They took me in after my dad was murdered. But every
weekend, they’d let me go back to my house for a few hours and I took advantage
of that. I’d look through my dad’s books and find answers to Benny’s questions,
and that led me back to my dad. I was keeping my promise to him. That I’d
always keep learning. And this sealed my friendship with Benny.

By fifth
grade, Benny didn’t have to ask me questions anymore. I’d voluntarily tell him
what I was learning. And by seventh grade, Benny was returning the favor. He
was learning things on his own and teaching them to me. He didn’t have the
resources I had, my father’s books, CDs, DVDs, old flash drives crammed with
information, etc. Instead, he’d sneak into Clearview’s abandoned buildings and
dig up old books and magazines. He’d even sneak into the school’s old warehouse
on Edgerton and spend hours there, reading study guides the teachers had long
ago abandoned.

By eighth
grade, most of the other kids were ostracizing us. And in ninth grade, they
began to kick the crap out of us. Benny was small so he was an easy target. Kids
would beat him up anywhere, anytime. But he got used to it and did a good job
of hiding the purple bruises the punches left. He knew that snitching would
make things worse.

I was a big
kid, so kids had to plan their attacks on me and make sure they outnumbered me.
They’d ambush me with overwhelming force and even though I’d fight back, I’d
take a pounding. I could fight one or two kids, but three or more was too much.
Still, sometimes I’d get in some good punches. Like Benny, I hid the bruises,
but Mrs. Levingworth still figured it out and talked to the parents of the
guilty kids. She was protective of me because I had no one but her, but it made
things worse and I had to tell her to stop.

There were two
other smart kids in our school, Rick Levingworth (who got stuck with me as his
‘foster’ brother, more on that later) and Ellen Sanchez, and maybe you could
say they were smarter than me because they chose to play dumb and fit in. (Only
later, did they feel it was okay to exercise some of their smarts.) No one in
town was sympathetic to smart kids or to smart adults. And it wasn’t really
being ‘smart’ that was the problem. It was that no one believed learning facts,
concepts, theories, or subjects which had long been forgotten could help their
town survive.

At that age, I
thought that this was just the way it was. But as I grew older, I began to
wonder
why
it was this way. It’d be years before I learned the answer.
First, I’d have to discover that secret my dad had wanted to tell me.

I stepped into the Town Hall and
the building was quiet. No one was in this early, except for Benny. Benny’s
‘office’ was in the basement and that was fine with him. The Councilmen were
too lazy to head down there, so they didn’t bother him much.