cool breeze wipes the day.
He shook his head at that last part. Weather poems, he thought, are never as good as the weather. That bit about a red whale, though, that’s nice.
He remembered last night’s sunset. The clouds broke and bands of color flowed from the west, first yellow, then orange and red, then indigo and violet. What a spectacle! As he hiked, he found himself thinking about dust in the atmosphere. The dawn and evening displays this year reminded him of the first few years after… plague, when the sun rose and set in sullen glory, which he attributed to ashes from fires in cities filled with the dead.
By midmorning, Eric’s legs that he’d been so proud of burned with fatigue. He bit his lip and struggled not to limp. He envied the boys’ energy to run back and forth across the road in front of him, showing each other things they had found: a length of PVC pipe, a glass telephone line insulator, a rusted hammer head without a handle. They’re as fresh as the first day, he thought.
Pain rose for another half hour, each step driving spears into his hips and calves. Small fires embered behind his knee caps. Head down, he watched his foot placement. A flat step hurt less, but any roll to either side flared new pains. I’m just plain old, he thought. Old and out of gas. The phrase made him smile. Dodge used it occasionally, so did Troy. Neither knew what it meant. Several expressions came to him: “Run it up the flag pole and see who salutes.” “Give me a ring.” “Drop me a line.” “That does not compute.” He said aloud, “Put the pedal to the metal boys.” Dodge looked back at him. Eric shook his head. “Nothing, son. just a thought.”
He concentrated on walking. Heat radiated off the buckled and fractured asphalt, and the weeds that grew with such enthusiasm a few miles earlier, looked dispirited. Everything about the landscape now seemed beaten down and tired. By the road, large parcels of caked and cracked ground were free of grasses altogether. He imagined how the dust must kick up here on windy days. Only bushes, laurels and what his dad used to call greasewood, thrived. He struggled with why the look of the land would change so drastically in just a couple of hours of walking, but his legs’ pains messed up his concentration. Step, step, step, he thought; even the sky has lost its color. It pressed down like a slab of gray slate, and the sun pulsed in its midst, its edges fuzzy. He kept his eyes down, watching his feet. Dust covered the road. Little puffs marked each footfall. Dodge’s small sneakers left perfect imprints and made Eric think of black and white photographs from the moon, where he supposed the astronauts’ footprints still existed around the pile of unrusting equipment they’d left behind.
He bumped into Dodge, who had stopped. I’ll never get momentum again, he thought, and almost snapped at the boy until he looked up and saw what was in their way. Three wooden poles jutted from the asphalt, and impaled on their tops at eye height, animal skulls. Suddenly grateful for the rest, Eric fingered one, a cow skull, bleached and toothless. A fringe of bone pieces dangled on short strings threaded through holes bored in the back of the skull. He stuck a finger through an eye socket and wiggled it for Dodge mid Rabbit to see. The bone fragments clattered against each other.
“Don’t,” said Rabbit. “It belongs to somebody.”
Eric wiped his hand on his shirt. Totems, he thought. Every hundred yards in both directions, other poles held their bones to the sky. An uninterrupted line stretched east across the plain into the city, and to the west the line vanished into the pines. “We have to go this way,” he said, and shivered when he stepped across the boundary the totems drew across the road.
Somber now, Dodge stayed close to Eric, whose leg pains had been replaced by a loose, empty feeling. Eric feared he might fall any moment. Rabbit quit whistling and walked next to the side of the road like a coyote ready to bolt. The grasses, what few patches there were, hissed in a hot breeze that didn’t dry the sweat on Eric’s forehead, and he caught himself weaving as he walked.
The bones, he thought, mean something to someone. Something primitive. He imagined how wind must moan through the bone holes in the bone heads, how lonely it would be to walk upon them if he’d been by himself. He looked back. Heat waves shimmered off the road, and the skulls in the distance wavered and danced. Eric stumbled.
A hand grasped Eric’s wrist, steadying him. Dodge’s eyes met his, and Eric could see the worry. “I’m okay,” said Eric, but Dodge held firmly, and Eric let him support some of his weight. Dodge’s fine-boned fingers reminded Eric of Troy at two, walking along the river. Troy loved to throw rocks in the water, and they’d spent hours making splashes. Dodge’s clasp on his wrist brought the memory back like it was all new again, and Eric’s eyes’ watered.
“Maybe we should camp early today, Grandfather,” said Dodge. Rabbit looked back at them and nodded.
Eric didn’t argue, and let himself be led to a shaded spot part way up a hill above the road. Cottonwoods will keep the sun off my head, he thought, and after a lunch that seemed bland and a little nauseating, he laid back, enduring his legs’ throbbing. Dodge gathered leaves to spread under their sleeping bags. Eric pressed the heels of his hands into the tops of his thighs, rolling the muscle down to his knees. He bit back a cry. How can so little muscle hurt so much?
Closing his eyes and pushing hard, he started the massage. again. Then he felt hands on his. Rabbit bent over him, his long hair obscuring his scars, and rubbed Eric’s legs. His strong hand kneaded the calf muscles, pressing them against the bones hard enough to hurt. He winced, and Rabbit let up a bit. Such a strange boy, Eric thought. So quiet, so distant, and he does this for me. Eric rested his hand on Rabbit’s shoulder. The boy didn’t look up, but he didn’t shrug the hand away either. After a few minutes Eric relaxed; the pain subsided to waves of comfort, and not soon after, he fell asleep. Something punched him, and Eric roused himself from a dream of a cop car appearing at the crests of hills, then disappearing until it was just a dot that blended into the burning town at the end of the road.
“We’re not alone,” whispered Dodge.
Blue-gray predawn shadows colored the bushes and cotton-woods. Dodge huddled against him. “I’m scared,” he said.
“What is it?” Eric said as he groped in his backpack for the slingshot. He sat up and looked around. Only the faintest blush of light of the horizon told him it was other than night. The trees stood starkly in their shadows. The grasses were a wash of gray.
Dodge pointed. “Can’t you see them?”
A gust rustled the cottonwoods. Eric shivered. At the edge of where a cooking fire would cast light if it were lit, sitting or crouching in the grasses, a dozen still figures surrounded their camp site.
“Are they men?” asked Dodge.
Eric squinted, tried to use the dim light to discern more of the watchers’ features. “Yes,” he said. “Who are you?” Eric called. Leaves brushed together, muttering in the wind. The figures didn’t answer. After a moment Eric said, “Go away. You’re frightening the boy.”
One figure stood. He carried a staff or a long, unstrung bow. Darkness hid his face and the kind of clothes he wore, but Eric saw a flicker of light in his eyes when he turned and walked into the shadows. The other watchers faded into the landscape. Eric blinked. The visitors had made no sounds.
“Where’s Rabbit?” Eric asked. A flat sleeping bag marked where the boy had slept. Eric scrambled from his bag, ignoring the stiffness in his legs, over to Rabbit’s spot. Where is he? He dashed a few steps away from camp. As far as he could see, black, blue and gray shapes formed the landscape. To the west, the foothills and mountains behind them loomed like tidal waves on the horizon. Below their camp, the two-lane highway cut through hip-high weeds. “Where’d he go?”