“All right,” Annie said, “but only because I can’t stand, me, to see nobody freeze to death, or get tore apart by them damn stomps. But I don’t like it, me.”
Like anybody ever thought she did. I was careful, me, not to meet nobody’s eyes.
Annie gave Dr. Turner a few blankets off the stockpile along the west wall. We had everything there, us, crowding out the space: blankets and jacks and chairs and ribbons and rotting food and I don’t know what else. I wondered, me, if I should give Dr. Turner the sofa, but she spread her blankets in a nest on the floor, her, and I figured that she might be company but she was also thirty years younger than me. Or twenty, or fiprty — with donkeys you can’t never really tell.
We all got back to sleep, us, somehow, but the shouts outside went on a long time. And in the morning the State Representative Anita Clara Taguchi Hotel was wrecked. Still standing, because Dr. Turner was right and foamcast don’t burn, but the doors and windows were tore off the hinges, and the furniture was all broke up, and even the terminal was a twisted pile of junk in the street. Jack Sawicki looked serious, him, about that. Now all he had to talk to Albany on was the cafe terminal. Besides, them things are expensive. State Representative Taguchi was going to be mad as hell, her.
Snow blew in the hotel windows and drifted on the floor, and you’d of thought the place had been deserted for years, the way it looked. It kind of twisted my chest to see it. We were losing more and more, us.
That afternoon the plane didn’t come, it, and by dinner the next day the cafe was out of food.
There’s a place upriver, about a half mile from town, where deer go, them. When we had a warden ’bot, it put out pellets for the deer in the winter. The pellets had some kind of drug inside, so the deer couldn’t never breed, them, more than the woods can feed. The warden wasn’t never replaced, it, since before them rabid raccoons in the summer. But the deer still come to the clearing. They just do what they always did, them, because they don’t know no better.
Or maybe they do, them. Here the river flowed fast enough that it didn’t freeze completely through unless the temperature got down in the single numbers. The snow blew across the clearing, it, and piled up against the wooded hill beyond, so plants were easy to uncover. You could usually spot two or three deer without waiting very long.
When I went there, me, with Doug Kane’s old rifle, somebody else had already got there first. The snow was bloody and a mangled carcass laid by the creek. Most of the meat was spoiled, it, by somebody too lazy or too stupid to butcher it right. Bastards didn’t even bother to drag the carcass away from the water.
I walked, me, a little ways more. It was snowing, but not hard. The ground crunched under my feet and my breath smoked. My back-hurt and my knees ached and I didn’t even try, me, to walk without any noise. “Don’t go alone, you,” Annie’d said, but I didn’t want Annie to leave Lizzie by herself. And I sure as hell wasn’t going to take Dr. Turner. She’d moved in with us, her, and that was probably good because donkeys got all kinds of things you don’t never suspect until you need them, like medicine for Lizzie last summer. But Dr. Turner was a city woman, her, and she scared away the game, crashing through the brush like an elephant or dragon or one of them other old-time monsters. I needed to kill something today. We needed the meat, us.
In a week, all out stockpiled food had gotten eaten up. One lousy week.
No more came, by rail or air or gravsled, from Albany. People tore into the cafe, them, to the kitchen where Annie used to cook apple pudding for the foodbelt, but there wasn’t nothing left there.
I walked farther upstream. When I was a young boy, me, I used to love being in the woods in winter. But then I wasn’t scared out of my skull. Then I wasn’t an old fool with a back that hurts and who can’t see nothing in his mind but Lizzie’s big dark eyes looking hungry. I can’t stand that, me. Never.
Lizzie. Hungry…
When I left town, the rifle under my coat, people were hurrying to the cafe. Something was going on, I didn’t know what. I didn’t want to know. I just wanted, me, to keep Lizzie from going hungry.
I could only think, me, of two ways to do that. One was to hunt for food in the woods. The other was to take Lizzie and Annie to Eden. I’d found it, me, just before the gravrail quit this last time. I found that big-headed girl in the woods, and I followed her, me, and she let me follow her. I watched a door in the mountain open up, where there couldn’t be no door, and her go inside, and the door close up again like it was never there in the first place. But just before it closed, the Sleepless girl turned, her, right toward me. “Don’t bring anyone else here, Mr. Washington, unless you absolutely must. We’re not quite ready for you yet.”
Those were the scariest words, me, I ever heard.
Ready for us for what?
But I’d bring Lizzie and Annie there if I had to, me. If they got too hungry. If there wasn’t no other way for me to feed them.
I came to a place where dogtooth violets used to grow, them, back in June. I dropped to my knees. They sang out in pain, them, but I didn’t care. I dug up all the dogtooth violet bulbs I could find and stuffed them into my pockets. You can roast them. My jacks already held acorns, to pound into flour — wearying work, it — and some hickory twigs to boil for salt.
Then I settled down, me, on a rock, to wait. I held as quiet as I could. My knees hurt like hell. I waited, me.
A snowshoe rabbit came out of the brush, him, on the opposite bank, like he was right at home. Casual, easy. A rabbit ain’t much food to use up a bullet. But I was cold enough, me, so I knew I’d start shivering soon, and then I wouldn’t never be able to hit nothing.
Bullet or rabbit? Old fool, make up your mind.
I saw Lizzie’s hungry eyes.
Slowly, slowly, I raised the gun, me, and squeezed off the shot. The rabbit never heard it. He flew up in the air and come down again, clean. I waded across the creek and got him.
One good thing — he fit under my coat, him. A deer wouldn’t of fit. I didn’t want nobody hungry to see my rabbit, and I didn’t want to stay around, me, near where the gun fired. An old man is just too easy to take things away from.
But nobody tried, until Dr. Turner.
“You’re going to skin it?” she said, her voice going up at the end. I could of laughed, me, at the look on her face, if anything could of been funny.
“You want to eat it, you, with the skin on?”
She didn’t say nothing, her. Annie snorted. Lizzie put down her terminal and edged in close to watch.
Annie said, “How we going to cook it, Billy? The Y-unit don’t get hot enough for that.”
“I’ll cook it. Tonight, by the river. I can make an almost smokeless fire, me. And I’ll roast the violet bulbs in the coals.” It made me feel good to see how Annie looked at me then.
Lizzie said, “But if you — where are you going, Vicki?”
“To the cafe.”
I looked up. Blood smeared my hands. It felt good. “Why you going there, Doctor? It ain’t safe for you.” The stomps still gather at the cafe, them. The foodbelt’s empty but the HT works.
She laughed. “Oh, don’t worry about me, Billy. Nobody both-* ers me. But there’s something going on down there, and I want to know what.”
“Hunger’s what,” Annie said. “And it don’t look any different at the cafe than it does here. Can’t you leave those poor people alone, you?”
“I’m one of those ‘poor people,’ as you put it,” Dr. Turner said, still smiling without nothing being funny. “I’m just as hungry as they are, Annie. Or you are. And I’m going to the cafe.”
“Huh,” Annie snorted. She didn’t believe, her, that Dr. Turner wasn’t eating some donkey food somehow, and nobody could convince her any different. With Annie, you never can.