Stories From the Plague Years (34 page)

The later opening of our jackets was motivated by the same stupid and hunger-driven desire. In twilight the color of boiling sap, Allen and I, our hands too raw and swollen for us to work the next day, fumbled with hook-eyes and let the sick breeze out of the west make wings of our coats, and so made the wind our accomplice. We had to give our hands a day to scab. This was our unspoken motive for what we committed. The young man pulled a child’s wagon, the carboy of telltale orange in the wagon visible from tens of yards away. In light narrow as an old woman’s breath, the silver wedding ring he wore, un-scuffed and still bright, sponged up the yellow dusk. That he was desperate enough to take to the road alone, was stupid enough to travel with such a precious thing on his finger, and didn’t put a tarp over the carboy told Allen and me more about him than we should have known. I often think of his wedding ring, and the young woman who wore . . . or still wears . . . the ring’s mate. I’ve prayed that he—just a few summers older than I—returned to her a victim of no greater crime than what Allen and I inflicted on him. I’ve prayed that the wedding ring didn’t find its way, black with grease, tossed among the buckets of wedding rings saved so that their inscriptions could identify the cremated dead who’d owned them. I have prayed he went home after meeting us, and that brigands didn’t cut his ring from the cooling body that would feed the whelps of foxes in their winter lairs.

We stopped him, letting him see our guns, letting him see that we could take what we wanted, even though he had the hands of a farrier and was broad-shouldered as a miner. The fear on him was like a thing seen in deep winter morning—a rock or tree that is as much shadow as substance. We “bought” the carboy of treated nitric acid from him for far less than it was worth, as the one thing on his wagon full of cheaply made tools that could find him any work. Whether Allen and I would have taken the carboy if he had not “sold” it to us is a thing I’ll never consider. Had we not been starved and filthy, had we not been cold and afraid of being unfit to work because of our savaged hands, had we been the decent boys we’d been before that moment . . . we would have shared our heavy-duty wood borer in exchange for use of the acid and sought work
with
him, this fool who had no borer, only a chrome-forged pick that would bend against frozen soil.

I’ve stood on the porches of houses in fields when summer storms have arced like waves over the horizon. I’ve felt the air drawn out of those houses as thunder crashed nearby; it has touched my shoulders like a cloak before moving past me and away. Something that had been part of me flowed over my shoulders and away from me in the same way . . . my decency? Or my perception of a decency I never truly had? The shame, I knew, came from within and without, as if draped on me by one who was saddened by my apostasy, but who didn’t understand it well enough to judge.

In another house, heated by the fire of newspapers bundled for recycling the year I was born, Allen and I peeled off the linings of our soft woollen gloves, gaping apart cuts that had scabbed to the fabric. Our lacerated canvas work gloves stood blood-hardened near the fire . . . like mandrake roots made into Hands of Glory in the witches’ shops that linger in the rotted neighbourhoods of university towns. Allen’s whimper as skin came off with his glove lining was like the cry I’ve heard a mute girl make while she dreamed.

“Guess this was a cool thing we did, huh?” I said.

Together, we let out sounds at once like grunts and laughs, as we waited for the sweet cicely root and aspen bark we’d use as poultices to boil in our rusty electric pot. In silence, we avoided adding to our guilt by making excuses for our crime.

Shame of what we’d done roared like the noise of water in my thoughts the next day, as we came upon one long-term squatter after another clearing what had been suburban yards for planting. The long-termers were easy to mark along the roadway, given away by the unseasoned cordwood of newly felled trees piled so the long-termers could cart it away to sell.

Two clever boys we seemed, to be able to drill deep into new stumps that would take horses and tractors hours to clear, and to pour nitric acid infused with accelerants into the borings, so the partly dissolved wood itself became the explosive that would blast the stumps out of the ground. We’d detonate the stumps with wires strung to an old tractor battery, or we’d make a punk out of rags sopped with clay dug from under bramble that had been hedges. What punishment we saved our hands fell on our backs, as splinters hit us like small hatchets; our coats were no protection, for we had to take them off to run from the stumps while the punks burned more quickly than we’d have liked.

We worked, it seemed, as quickly as the punks burned, lest the blasts lure other traveling workers, who’d try to rob us of the carboy that we had ourselves robbed.

We stayed that night in a house the yard of which we’d cleared. By the warmth of the electric heater we ran off the grid, we salved our hands with cheap amber disinfectant we’d gotten from a long-termer and dared count our bills for the first time. Some bills were near worthless as bavin-coins, and would have to be exchanged at the bank or through black marketeers for fresh currency. Others were printed in the blue ink that marked them as worth exactly their dollar amount in gold on any given day in any district on the continent. Yet others were so mulchy and porous, they sponged the orange tinctures from our fingertips. We’d each earned enough to pay rent on a large house for three months. We divided the bills, and, knowing what anguish cheap gun oil full of impurities would leak into our hands, we cleaned our weapons anyway, to make sure our three rounds would truly matter, should they need to.

The next day, we found a truck on the road, the rusted contents of which, if we had found them in the ground, would have prompted us to dig deeper for the bones of dragons. No scrap hunters had gutted the swords, fit to kill ogres in fables, and the suits of mail, fit for exiled princes, that rotted in the truck. Maybe scavengers—finding a cache like those mentioned by the old professors and teachers who wandered to people’s homes in these parts and told a night’s worth of stories in exchange for a meal and a bath—felt they shouldn’t loot a tomb that might have a curse protecting it.

The swords were of good steel, not like the lightweight swords I’d helped prop-masters make. The chain mail, grimed with blood-smelling corrosion, was as heavy as five of the coats of costume mail I’d worn that were made of thick yarn hardened with grey paint. Lances and what had been saddles of fine leather were now mold-eaten as the boots we still found on unburied corpses.

“It’s for a play,” Allen said. And as I
felt
more than knew that he was wrong, I was sickened by something. In my hollow guts, the sickness had a weight. The time I knew as “Before” had a Before. I could see that while a wise boy like Allen couldn’t. I remembered when I was small, banners advertising fairs that recreated the past without the un-pleasantries of war, famine, plague . . . the hardships that made the art of the past passionate and enduring. Though it seemed that plague had risen up to brigand this fair, so that the owners of this truck would abandon it and hide until a burnthrough could occur. That they never reclaimed the truck told me the past had claimed its due from them.

I lifted a sword the way Arthur would lift it from the Stone and Before burned my palm, as the damp leather braided at the pommel seeped rot into my wounded hand. I—newly born a thief whom those of Before might see as a highwayman of the romantic past, and who walked the tomorrow they thought would be a holiday—couldn’t stand holding the weapon they’d have me bear. I dropped the sword. “No. It’s just another thing that was supposed to be cool,” I said, pleased to say something dramatic and final, to eclipse the wise boy Allen could be while he faced the past. Allen was quiet. I felt as if what I’d said had been heard by someone who wished to speak, but couldn’t. We left the past’s dream of the further past to corrode in the snow.

That night, in the final house we’d squat, I saw my face for the first time in days. There was no connection to the grid to link our heater. We didn’t light a fire, so the smoke wouldn’t attract the desperate fools who took to the road to find work and food only now, weeks into the famine. We’d be prime victims to rob and kill, with the small fortune we carried. Our foot-and-sled tracks in the snow leading to the front door were betrayal enough, without smoke to promise our killers a warm night’s sleep by our looted bodies. I shuffled to the first floor bathroom of the house, to piss in the sink rather than face the cold outside. The bathroom had the unique stink of raccoon shit, but no shaggy forms ducked from the beam of my flashlight. Even in a room rank with the dung of scavengers, the stink of my own crotch was offensive to me . . . as was the spoiled beef smell of my steaming piss, rich with the proteins my body had taken from itself and now sluiced as waste. With my flashlight set in a mounted toothbrush holder, I saw myself lit from below in what my old acting mentor Frank had called “Shylock lighting” . . . transformed into a caricature of the Dirty Jew. I looked like a villain in the illustrations of the misspelled tracts that hayseeds leave stacked in train stations to extend their ministries while they traveled.

My eyes in the mirror were un-living as a doll’s and underneath had the blotches that, as make-up, I’d applied to play characters who were aged, dying or dead. My beard, such as a boy could raise, looked like mange on cheeks so hollow they made my jaw seem long as a wolf’s. My hair hung lank as the bloody locks I wore while playing Banquo’s ghost in the days when a foodstuff like corn syrup could be wasted as stage blood. I raised disinfectant-stained fingers to my face, touched whiskers that had the same frayed tips that a sickly girl’s hair takes when it grows too long. I twisted a few. They snapped like the strands of spun sugar that clung to Aunt Louise’s wooden spoon when she made sea foam candy.

I looked at the monster I was. Then lifted the flashlight and lit myself from above and the side, changing my image to one like the portrait of a sixteenth-century saint, giving humanity to myself through the airy nothing that made me seem a lunatic, a lover and poet as I moved the light like a will-o’-wisp around my face. I left the dung-thick room and soaked rags with bleach I found in the kitchen, then stepped on the rags, cleaning my boots of any trace of the pathogen in raccoon shit that rots the brain of a healthy man to dementia in a matter of days.

I wished to go home, but I knew I never could again. Not truly. Not as the thief I’d become.
Home
would never accept me, because I, reborn a thug, could never again fully accept it. Yet Justine needed me to return, whatever was left of me that was worth her love. The bills I carried were her sliver of hope, and I’d never cheat her of hope, or make her hope in vain.

“We need to go back,” I told Allen as we “ate” cold, snot-like marshmallow root we’d boiled that afternoon.

In a dream-state of hunger that I could feel in the stoop of his shoulders, Allen lurched around the living room where we camped, scraping his spoon against the tin plate as he paced, as if trying to summon true and plentiful food through the sound of it being casually eaten. He stopped in the lantern light dim enough not to be noticeable from the road, looking at once-white carpets, at the tracks left by the distinct boot-prints of the containment suits that CDC teams used to wear as Before fevered into the Dying. The leaking bodies dragged out by those crews had left smears on the carpets like the brush strokes of an abstract artist.

“We need to go back,” I said again.

“We strong enough?”

“There’s going to be even less food on the road. The farmers’ll hoard what they got. More people are looking for work. I think we’re too weak to do more work. What we got left, we need to get back.”

“See how we feel in the morning.”

“Could you work a whole fucking day tomorrow?”

“We got to eat before we go back.”

“Nothing’s out here.”

“We might be too weak to make it home.”

I was stiff with the poisons leaked by my body’s feeding on itself; when I blinked, it felt like my eyelids scraped sand. Tomorrow, we’d have the final burst of energy that famine brings, or we’d begin the half-senile walk toward organ failure. Either way, I didn’t have the strength to talk further with Allen. I fell asleep to the scrape of his spoon across an empty plate, the noise of a conjurer without even a lump of lead to transform.

I dreamt of the smoke that bore my mother to the sky, of the colors I saw paint the sunset of the day she bride-stepped to the clouds. So near to death, I dreamt that my mind rose as did smoke, straining the silver thread that joins it to my body. In the dream, I heard my father’s tread behind me, and waited for him to say, as he had said in fact, how the colors of that twilight suited my mother. His silence startled me. I turned and saw my mother, wearing the colors of her own mourning, gold and vermilion, looking at the sunset that would be her only grave.

I began to hate Allen then, as he woke me before my mother could speak, sitting up and gasping . . . the way I’d once woken gasping when Crispin had pressed against my nose and mouth for the warmth of my breath. A third being stood in the room with us, a person-shaped collage of shadow and dust that unwound as does a small whirlwind in a cross-current. Afraid that I was so unafraid, I looked to Allen, who, still sitting up, breathed as does a mouse dying in a trap. The cataract of moonlight that dropped from the windows painted his breath, which misted in an almost still cloud near his lips, as if his newly lost soul lingered on the step of what had been its home.

“We’ve got to go back,” he said in sudden dawn-light. How dawn came in a turn of heartbeats, I can’t know. Logic would say that I fell back asleep, and Allen woke me. Yet there can be no logic when your mind is gutted by hunger, and I have known logic to sow ugly lies. Dawn came, and she came boldly, from behind the tattered curtains. My senses burned in her lavender-grey fire.