As I approached the small swell of hills just off the road, I unslung my rifle and threw it in the bike trailer and continued on. As I came around a bend, I saw him sitting calmly on the ground and facing me, with the fire just to his left. His back was propped up against something (I later discovered it was a massive hiking backpack). He had a shotgun laid over his knee like it was a bipod and pointed in my direction.
I stopped and put my hands out to my side. “Hey, there,” I said.
“Eve-ning?” He pronounced it as two words and framed it as a question, as if to say, “What do you want?”
“Uh, yeah. Well, I saw you on the road,” I offered as a lame answer.
“Yap. I seen you too.”
“Yes, well, I was just curious and thought I’d poke my head in. See what’s happening.” I was wracking my brain for something that sounded better but anything that I could have said that made sense was a little complex for the current situation. This was not going well.
“Curiosity can be a dangerous thing, these days.”
This was really not going well at all. Deciding to cut my losses, I said, “Okay, look. I’m not here to start anything or bushwhack you or any such thing. Just saw another human on the road and thought I’d see about… seeing about you, I guess. I’ll move along and leave you to it.” I turned to leave.
“You thirsty?” he asked.
I turned back. “Well, thanks but I have my own water. I’m not here to beg for supplies.”
“Water…” he scoffed. “I said ‘are you thirsty’?” He emphasized the last word and swirled a large glass bottle half filled with a rich, brown liquid.
“Ah,” I said.
“C’mon, Whitey,” he said. “It’s just chilly enough out here that we can pretend we’re drinkin’ this shit to stay warm.” He had a deep, hollow voice. It had an almost hooting quality, like he was speaking from inside the chambers of some massive, dead redwood. There was an accent that was nearly Hispanic in flavor, but he shaped his words differently, clipping the hard sounds off in ways that I was not used to.
He lifted the shotgun up off his knee and laid it on the ground beside his leg; gestured to a spot by the fire beside himself. I pulled the bike trailer a bit closer to the fire and then circled around it to sit down. I remembered the Glock just then and stopped before lowering myself to the ground.
“Hey, listen. I have a pistol in the back of my jeans, here. I don’t want to forget about it and have you see it later. Don’t want you to think I’m being shady.”
“I figure you’re probably okay,” he said with a grin. “And if you’re not, I’ll put money on my 870 versus your pistol. Sit down, Whitey. Don’t shoot your ass off.”
I was starting to like this man. I pulled the pistol from my back and laid it in my lap as I sat down. There was nothing to lean against, so I just sat cross-legged in the dirt. As I did, he reached over to a man-sized pile of dried brush (I’m pretty sure it was dead sagebrush) and pulled out what once must have been a complete plant. He tossed it onto the fire, where it flared up almost instantly.
“We won’t have a fire for very long tonight,” he said. “There’s not much good fuel out here. There’s plenty of this dead brush around if you’re willing to walk a bit for it, but it burns up fast. It’ll go down to ember pretty quick after we pass out.”
“It’ll be okay, I think,” I replied. “It wasn’t so bad last night, anyway.”
The man held out his hand to me, which I shook. “My name is William,” he said. “Everyone has always called me Billy.”
“Jacob. Jake,” I offered in return. He took back his hand and then sent the bottle my way. I wasn’t much for hard liquor, but I took a knock to be polite. There was a bit of a burn and a hint of charcoal to the flavor. I guessed it was whiskey.
“Well, Jake,” he began before taking a swig himself, “what brings you out this way? I can’t imagine it’s the Craps tables.”
“No. I have some family out this way, just North of Vegas. I want to see if they’re still there.”
“I see. Siblings? Cousins?” he asked.
“Parents.”
“Oh. Well then…” he muttered and handed me back the bottle.
I got a good look at him in the dying light as he passed the whiskey my way. I’d learn later that he was a pretty high-up tribal elder in one of the Mission Indian bands out of Southern California—Cahuilla (assuming I’m pronouncing that right). He didn’t look Indian at all to me, though. His skin was rather light in color, and he didn’t have what I had been conditioned by movies to think of as “Native American” features. He looked a lot more Spanish than anything else. He had several days’ growth of facial hair like all the rest of us, but I could tell that he had cultivated a mustache before things like daily grooming became a luxury. He was somewhere in his sixties, with hair almost entirely gray. Between his fair skin and white hair, the only color in his face was in his eyes, which were brown. His face itself was inviting and friendly.
He was not fat, but he had run to portliness in his old age. He carried his fat like most men; big barrel chest with the extra meat slapped around his gut and back. What could be seen of his legs through his pants was well-formed and muscular even for a man of thirty, never mind a man old enough to be a grandfather. His hands were massive, nearly enveloping mine when we shook—I judged from this, and his legs stretched out in front of him that he was rather tall.
I threw back a drink, coughed, and shivered a bit as I passed it back. Billy politely made no mention of this though I’m sure I could see his eyes twinkle as he took the bottle.
“How about yourself?” I asked. “I haven’t run into many people out here.”
“Ah, but you have run into people?” he responded (ducking the question a bit, I noticed).
“I have.”
“They’re not with you now, I see.”
“No.”
He scratched his chin; hesitated a bit. “Are they with us at all?”
I looked at him straight on. “You know how it is now,” I said, gesturing to his shotgun.
“Yeah, okay. I guess I do,” he said, nodding. “Fine. I’m making my way up to Wyoming. Have a patch of land up there with some supplies laid by. I think I can settle in up there and either wait for the rest of the world to pull its head out of its ass or at least live the rest of my days peacefully without being bothered. What?”
I must have telegraphed surprise on my face. “Wyoming is a pretty good distance from here. You plan to walk that whole way?”
“Naw,” he said, smiling. “I plan to walk into Vegas, spend some quality time shamelessly looting the place for anything I can find, and then throw what I do find into a vehicle and drive the rest of the way.”
“Oh. Well, that makes more sense, certainly,” I said.
“What about your plan? What comes after you look in on your people?”
I took another drink. Billy was right: it was warming me up rather well. “Hadn’t thought much about that, honestly. I don’t really know. I suppose I’ll solve that when it comes.”
“There’s always another problem to solve in this world,” he agreed and threw another brush on the fire, illustrating the point.
“That fuel isn’t going to last much longer at that rate,” I said, getting up. I was a little shocked at how I felt once on my feet. I didn’t think I had drunk so much. I could feel my teeth buzzing.