This time the radio went out and stayed out; I could hear the release of frequency as their transmitter was turned off, giving the air back to static.
I sat stunned. I hadn’t even noticed that I had sunk into a chair as the broadcast had gone on, so immersed had I been in it. Now the chair held me, mesmerized.
Jimmy Rogers! As if his name didn’t mean anything. The worst they had ever called him was the Chuck Yeager of the eighties, test pilot, space shuttle pilot, the only genuine American hero that everybody agreed on.
Here was Jimmy Rogers, giving me back hope, telling me that he and his boys out at Kramer Air Force Base, a mere 150 miles to the west, were not only holding the wolves off but had a way to beat them!
That was good enough for me.
More than good—it was the only game in town.
CHAPTER 9
Silence
I ate breakfast and then packed. There were cans of food and a canteen of water; whatever dried goods—crackers, the remains of the bag of dried fruit, a partial loaf of moldering bread, a couple of boxes of single-serving cereal, corn flakes and raisin bran (Can’t forget your fiber! I thought with grim humor). Whatever food I could pack into my son’s scout backpack, which was larger than my own hiking pack, I put in. I could discard anything I didn’t need (no littering laws anymore), and the rest, water and food and anything else I might need, I would have to scavenge there.
Then I collected weapons. I took my army knife, a flashlight, and the ax. I checked the shotgun in the living room, but the barrel had been wrenched out of line. I also took waterproof matches, a screwdriver, and a pair of pliers.
I decided not to bring a sleeping bag, reasoning that any house along the way would serve the purpose. If things were as bad as Jimmy Rogers claimed, I would have little trouble finding empty beds in empty houses.
At nine o’clock exactly, I pulled open the front door.
It felt immensely strange to perform this simple task. This house had been my prison and fortress—my womb—for two days, and agoraphobia assaulted me. It was safe here, my instinct told me; this is where I had survived. The fact that I had very little chance of continuing to do so meant nothing. My foot froze, not carrying out my commands to step outside.
But I thought of Richie out there somewhere, and the chance I had of saving not only myself but him as well (couldn’t they be working on something at Kramer—something listed under national security—that would turn my son back from beast to man?).
My foot moved; I stepped outside.
Daylight blinded me; I felt like Mole in the Wind in the Willows, meeting sunlight for the first time in spring. It was a beautiful day. It was for days like this that Emily and I had moved here. There was no humidity; the sun would prove hot later, but a step into the shade would banish the heat. The sky was blue, with a depth no city in the United States knows any longer. I had written a poem called “High Blue” that described it like this: Deep pail of sky, the blue bottom of atmosphere.
That was the way that sky looked. This was the kind of day that I always worked well on. I used to plant myself in a chair in the orchard on the other side of the house, and smell the flowers that would soon burst sweet fruit from their middles, and in the ripeness of that atmosphere I would bear poems. I had written all of my book Lone Beginnings there; that had been my first book of poems in my Southwest series, which had been well received and which I loved more than any of my other work.
I had done well here; I thought of why we had moved from the East—the oppression of the cities, the wants and needs and the sheer weight of all those people on the sensibilities were overloading me. I felt that if I did not get away from them they would smother me and, finally, snuff out my will to work. I had colleagues who thrived on the dynamism of New York and Boston; the art and culture did not overwhelm but rather stimulated them to a passion I could not feel. I felt suffocated, and my poems were cramped, stifled things.
But here I had learned to breathe, and as I had breathed so had my work. As the horizon had widened here, so had my own horizon.
But that had been before. I thought of the poem I left on my desk upstairs, which meant so little to me now, and, as numbed and grieved as I felt, I wondered if I would ever write again.
Hiking up my pack, I stepped off the porch.
I checked the car first, knowing what I would find. The distributor cap had been yanked off; it lay in the driveway crushed. For good measure they had ripped the spark plug wires out, along with the battery cables and radiator hoses. All of the windows had been smashed.
Still, fool and romantic that I am, I thought I would try the key in the ignition.
As I reached to open the door on the passenger side I noticed a strange object in the driveway. It was a pile of bones, stark white, which had been shaped into a rough pyramid.
A shiver bolted through me, and I drew back, retrieving my pack, not wanting to think about the pile of bones, giving up my idiotic notion about magically starting the wrecked car.
Now that I knew I would have to walk, I wondered how active the wolves were during the day.
There was a stand of cottonwood trees at the bottom of the driveway. I stayed close to it until I reached the road. An eerie sight met me. There was nothing but dusty emptiness and silence. My mailbox stood knocked at an angle, stuffed with the mail of its final delivery. Some of the contents had spilled to the ground. I stood over them, seeing a familiar creamy envelope. I picked it up and slit it open—and there was an acceptance letter from one of the better poetry journals.
“Thanks, Bill,” I said quietly, looking at the editor’s familiar signature, dropping the letter to the road.
I looked up.
Dust and silence. Our road was the kind you saw in movies where the bus stops in the middle of nowhere to let a single passenger off. The nearest house was nearly a mile away; beyond, there were more houses, and fewer stands of Cottonwood. We lived on the cusp of a changing environment. When I was stationed in Texas in the army I saw the same thing. In Arlington, the trees are plentiful and healthy; by the time you pass Fort Worth the desert is already claiming the foliage. Free of Fort Worth, the desert takes over.
I hitched my pack and headed into the desert.
CHAPTER 10
Death Piece
A quarter mile along Route 20 I saw the first signs of desolation. A tractor-trailer had slammed a brown station wagon from the rear. The semi had tilted and lay like a felled dinosaur, its trailer groaning toward the road but the huge wheels not quite making it.
The station wagon was empty; so was the trailer cab, but the back doors of the trailer were open wide to the sky.
I hoisted myself up onto the bumper and looked down into the gray cavern of the trailer. The most powerful feeling I had ever had in my life washed over me.
I smelled death.
Nausea filled me; I closed my eyes and nearly fell from the bumper, gagging. But I held on, steadied myself and looked into the trailer again. It was empty. There was nothing in there, no puddles of blood, no bodies, to indicate the feeling of carnage I felt.
But, now that I examined the interior more closely, I saw clues that told me that I was right in my feelings.
There were spots around the plywood-lined perimeter of the cabin that had been clawed through. Distinct scratch marks were noticeable; at one point, the metal exterior of the trailer had been reached. And the faint odor of blood was persistent. On closer examination I saw the same sort of pale, dry bloodstains I had seen in my living room.