The Rain (5 page)

            I know that if the face eaters left ten minutes after we did, and guess right about which mudslide we crawled up onto, they’ll be arriving any minute now. We’ll be easy prey inside the tent. We won’t even hear their footsteps. But our normal guard duty where we take turns on watch is out—it has been for the past few nights. And I don’t have the energy to watch the water right now. I can’t leave Russell. I hope they miss us, find the wrong island. I try to recall how many other islands are around this one, how many they’ll have to choose from. Two, three? Really only one though. One that’s big enough to set up a tent on. Maybe they’re dead. Drowned now for real this time, the last two. I don’t remember the bandits ever being this persistent, not even in South Dakota. Something’s different here in Wyoming.

Just to be safe, I take out my knife, and I accidentally hit Russell with it as I put it into my fist while trying to stay as nestled into him as possible. He doesn’t move, and he doesn’t moan. He just breathes, real soft like, which at least is better than how he sounded on the boat. Some people can get sick real fast, he’d told me. One minute they’re in top shape, and the next they’re near to a coma, and before the night is out, they die. That’s just the way it is in the rain, he says. But not him.

I start to wonder if maybe Russell is my soul mate. He says he’s my dad’s age, as if my dad is alive or something, and he never tells me I’m pretty. But I know he watches me. I see him watching. At least I used to. When I’m walking away, and I turn back, he’s there, not even smiling, just looking at me like an animal. But I’m not scared, and I know it’s something besides watching out for my safety. I started doing it on purpose, walking away and turning back, just to make sure he is watching. But he doesn’t act interested. It’s like I’m his kid. He doesn’t want to be my soul mate. And for some reason, he keeps taking care of me. I asked him once if he leaves me, would he get to Leadville faster. He didn’t even answer. I thought he couldn’t say it, because it was true, and what was the point in bringing it up. But that night, when we were cuddled together in the tent, and he still had the warmth, he told me that he’d die without me. I made a mistake then. I asked him if we’d be together forever. I know it was veneer. Pointless. Unhelpful of me to bring it up. “Will you always be with me?” I asked him after he admitted he needed my help to make it to Leadville. He said yes for some reason. I said “Forever?” He said yes. It sounded like he meant it. I squeezed him, wanting him so bad.  

I push my hands up along his back, into his stomach, wrapping tightly to him like some kind of cub. Then I reach up and feel his face again. I put my fingers against his lips, and wait for the breath. It rolls out slow. A small rush of warmth, and I know he’s still with me. Then I go up to his forehead, and feel it again, but I only feel the cold wet of his dripping hair. I can’t tell if he’s burning up. That’s when I hear something other than the rain. It sounds like someone’s splashing in the water outside. We didn’t pitch the tent very far from the water. It sounds very close. I shake Russell and ask him if he heard that. He doesn’t reply. I’m scared, and think for sure that it’s the face eaters. They have to have found us. But I don’t think I can fend off two of them with my knife. I take it into my hand. It’s only about six inches long. I don’t even know if I can hit one of them, and if I do, I don’t think I’ll kill him. I don’t want to go to the tent flap to look outside and check. I think I’d rather let them come kill us, end the rain forever. But that fear subsides as I continue to listen because I don’t hear any more sounds. And then I hear something again, a bigger splash. I know it’s them. They’ve found us, and they’re trying to land on the banks. Maybe they’ll just cut away our canoe and push on, head back north where there’re more peaks. But I know they won’t. They need to eat. We have hardtack, and our bodies. That’s what they’re after.

I crawl on my knees to the tent flap, ready to try one last struggle with Russell to wake him when I see my fears confirmed outside. The rain pelts the roof, drips cold on me as I get to the flap. I open it and see nothing but gray, then I recognize the difference between the sky and the mud. I see the long stretch of brown canvas water, but I don’t have a good enough angle to see down to where the rocks meet the water, where our canoe is. “Russell,” I whisper, but I know it’s useless now. I say it so softly that he probably doesn’t hear it even if he is awake and alert and not pretending to be sick anymore. I peel the flap back further and poke my head out.

Everything looks blank. Just dull sky and flat water, endless pattering on it as far as I can see. The rain hits. There’s not even any wind. The sky is getting darker, but I can’t see anything out there, and that gives me enough courage to step out of the tent. I rise on the mud, careful not to slip again.

            I rotate all the way around, expecting to see something, a boat, men climbing the rocky banks to get to us, the greedy, deranged look in their faces like the one who drowned. But there’s no one. Just the gray and brown. Then I hear the splash again, and I look because I know exactly where it’s coming from now. I see a dark blue body moving in the water. It’s twenty times the size of our canoe. Water shoots into the sky, really high, and falls back down in a wide splashing arc. Then the body disappears again. An animal. It’s just an animal. I think about what Russell’s taught me about sea animals. Sharks, dolphins, squids. They’re all just magic to me. This one was too big though. Whale. It’s a whale.

I wait a long time, and it never comes back up. It’s strange for me, like the whale is some glimpse of hope, and I feel as if we aren’t totally alone anymore. I wonder if the whale minds the rain, or even notices it at all, and if all this that has happened to the human veneer matters one bit to it. No, it hasn’t even noticed we’re here. I have the compulsion to call to it, grab the oar and paddle out to it. Like it will know we need its help. And it will take us down into the rain sea and be a submarine for us. Carrying us south, straight to Leadville, no stops. It can probably have us there by the morning. I wait a long time for the whale to come back, until it’s almost dark. As tired as Russell seems all the time lately, I feel like I have more energy. Like now that everything is so close to death, I am constantly energized. He used to make fun of me because I sleep in. He says it’s like wasting your life, sleeping in. Sleep is for the dead, he says. But since Rapid City, I probably could have done without sleep altogether. And when I do sleep, it doesn’t do much for me. It usually brings me to some warm, dry place, like Philadelphia was, and Pittsburg, and for a time even Indianapolis. But those years are gone forever. And I always wake up, angry and depressed that we ever left there. But I have always trusted Russell’s judgment, more than my own or anyone else’s. He had said that there was a place where it wasn’t raining. Some people said, and he tended to believe them, that some countries are completely dry. But they can’t help anybody else. It used to be our country that helped everyone else he said. And when it came to the time after the rain, once people learned it wasn’t going to stop, and the veneer started to erode, and people started to starve, and lose power, and die, and get lost in mile long bodyjams that floated west, no one place that is dry can afford to do anything but help itself. That’s why we don’t hear about a rescue. But we can’t worry about the other countries, Russell says. The other places where it isn’t raining. Only Leadville.

            And once it became clear that Philadelphia was getting bad, and the east coast was all too low, and we had to start moving west, we would never be able to turn back. Just stay on the move, seeking elevation. When Russell said we couldn’t stay in Philadelphia anymore, I accepted it without question. Even though we could still walk most of the streets there. And then again, when it happened in Pittsburg, I knew he was right. But in Indianapolis I fought him. Things didn’t seem bad there yet, it seemed dumb to move, but he said we had to go. We’d only been there two years. The rain didn’t seem to be taking as much then. But he’d said he knew we’d be in trouble in another year if we stayed.

            And you never hear about how those places are doing after you leave them. They’re just gone, like they weren’t real, fading memories of a drier, warmer past, forsaken for the sake of faith, as Russell had called it. That’s what my dreams are. The memories of those decisions that I question now. The roofs over our head, the food in the cabinet, the streets to run through, the other normal people to talk to. The mistake of moving on when it isn’t that bad.

            The sky is telling me that it’s almost night now, as the sun smear dips to my left, making some of the gray endless mass of clouds glow red and pink. The whale has forsaken us too. He doesn’t need to help, for what connection does he have to the veneer? What favor does he owe people like us? Even still, I can’t force myself to go back in just yet. The sight of its body, now the memory of its body, eases my mind. The same ease it had moving through the death pool all around us. I need it to come back, just so I can see it again, be filled with its grace, its lack of concern, its playfulness. I strain my eyes looking for it over the canvas of brown, imagining it will come back. I think about Russell and his wife and his daughter. I wonder if this is how he feels about them. I wonder if because he said forever to them, and had meant it, if now he feels like I do about the whale not coming back. It doesn’t make any logical sense that it will return, but I cling to the idea anyway. I look out over the muddled horizon for the whale, but instead, I see a boat. I think it’s a boat. I move down to the water, and all at once it’s like the fear from before has jumped back into me, but twice as strong, because after I double check, and triple check, I realize it really is a boat. I tell myself it’s a different boat, but I know it’s not. It’s the same one. It’s the one I’ve seen for days now trailing us in the open water. And it’s moving toward our rock of mud. I almost run back up to the tent, but I know that if I go in the water again, I might not come back up. I slowly climb up the rocks, onto the mud, walking between the little streams leading down to the sea so they don’t send me flying down along with the rain into the brown.

I open the tent flap. Russell’s still sleeping, but he’s rolled over onto his other side, facing the tent flap now. It sounds like he’s not even breathing, and the double fear of that and the face eaters launches me across to him. I grab him violently on his arm. He wakes up right away, like he isn’t even sick one bit.

            “What’s up Tan?” he says. Hearing my name makes me feel like I’m suddenly awake again, like the whale never happened, the trip I took down into the sea with it. I try to choke out the words, but I can’t. I feel paralyzed, like I’m going to fall down and start crying. It’s a combination of the fact that he’s okay and the fact that we’re going to die anyway. He sits upright, concern gripping his gaunt face.

            “Tanner!” he says, angry, desperate to know what’s happening. He’s awake, and he seems fine. I point outside the tent and finally mutter, “They’re coming.”

            But he’s not fine. He goes to stand on his knees, like he’s always done at the first sign of danger when we stay in the tent, but he grunts and sits back down.

            “What is it?” I say, panicked.

            “I’m just dizzy, give me a second,” he moans. Then he reaches into his pocket, and it takes him forever but he finally takes out his knife and tries to stand on his knees again. He falls a little bit but I grab him, hold him upright until he can find his strength. It seems like he won’t find it though, and I know the boat is getting closer. It’s not so dark that they won’t see where our canoe is tied up on the bank.

            “How close?” he says, weathered, but ready to move. I tell him a couple hundred feet. He starts to walk on his knees to the tent flap, and as always, I get behind him, waiting for his direction. I’ve never had to take charge, and I don’t want to start now. He’ll tell me what to do—either we run, or we stand our ground. But I don’t know how we can stand our ground, and I don’t know where we can row to. We’ll be on dark water if we row out there now. And we’ll have to backtrack north to find a patch of land to escape onto. And before all that we’ll have to flip the canoe because it’s half sunken.  

Russell opens the flap and peers out, and then he steps out and stands up. I follow after him, locking my eyes right onto the sea. The boat is a lot closer now, or maybe I didn’t call it right, and it hadn’t been hundreds of feet away. I can see the blue plastic of their body suits. One of the men is limp, the other rowing. That must be what we looked like, with me at the oar.

            “They’re low,” Russell says. I see what he means—the edge of their boat is perilously close to the water line, because the limp guy isn’t bailing. They’re moving slow, taking on rain, and it looks like they might sink before they reach us.

            “What should we do?” I say, because it’s taking way too long for Russell to decide. He’s thinking slower than usual. He usually has a plan by now. He has them ahead of time. But he just looks out there, judging something silently to himself. I push into his chest, out of fright, out of having no words to express my need for him to make the call—to tell me to break the tent down again and tip our canoe over to empty out the water. But he always tips the canoe at the first sight of danger, because I usually can’t handle the weight by myself. But he isn’t moving yet. I squeeze him.

            “Russell, I’m scared,” I say. The storm had hit us so fast in the
Sea Queen Marie
that I hadn’t had time to register my fright. It was just one minute we were okay, and the next, we were fighting for the rafts, and then we were knocked around for two hours in swells that rose as tall as houses. But ever since we’ve been in Wyoming, and the face eaters started showing up everywhere, I notice my fear more. Maybe it’s related to the sinking feeling I get in my stomach now, that we are forever beyond all the warm and dry places in the world, forever beyond the veneer. And in the total dreariness of the place, I start more and more to fixate upon ideas. Like the idea of Russell and me being together forever. Maybe even in the idea, now separated from everything else, that I love him. And he might never know it. Love, the word, hasn’t passed his lips since Philadelphia. I think it stopped after his family died. He’s never told me he loves me. But the love is in me now, and alive, and it drives the fear of death to a pulsing and horrible swelling inside my chest—I don’t want to lose him, and I don’t want to die. Even if the rain doesn’t ever stop, I don’t want us to end. I tell him I need him again. “Russell, what are we gonna do?” I say.