Still, though. Nevertheless. Now she’s gone again, and the fear grows in my gut like illness, the knowledge that she is dead somewhere or dying, and I have to remind myself that always, always she has been okay. Not a scratch on her. She’s somewhere. She’s fine.
Only one road leads from the police station down into the town proper, and, this being the heart of the American Midwest, that road is called Police Station Road: a pastoral quarter mile of gentle downhill pavement, snaking past horse fencing and a country-red barn. A windmill is off to the right, back from the road a ways, listing rightward as if someone tried to push it over and then got bored. Houdini lies coughing in the basket on the handlebars. The empty wagon rattles along behind us, waiting for its load.
It’s sunrise, drizzling still, and with the muted rain-wet golds and scarlets of the trees, with the crickets calling to one another, the crows doing their plaintive cawing, I find myself imagining for a minute what a peaceful world this’ll be when the people are gone, when the paved expanses are reclaimed by wildflowers and the birds have the full use of the sky.
I know, of course, that this is just another dream, another piece of widely held wishful thinking: the virginal and pastoral postapocalyptic world, wiped free of mankind’s dirty cities and loud machines. Because these auburn Midwestern trees are going to burst into flames in the first burning moments. Trees around the world will go up like dry tinder. In a short time the clouds of ash will block the sun, put a hard stop to photosynthesis, snuff out all lushness. The squirrels will burn up, the butterflies and the flowers, the ladybugs crawling in the tall grass. Possums will drown in their holes. What is about to happen is not the reclaiming of Earth by a triumphant Mother Nature, a karmic repudiation of humanity’s arrogant ill stewardship.
Nothing we ever did mattered one way or another. This event has always been in the cards for man’s planet, for the whole scope of our history, coming regardless of what we did or didn’t do.
“Rats,” I say, spiraling down the exit ramp, as the massive parking lot comes into view below me. “Rats, rats, rats.”
The SuperTarget has been taken. I see people with machine guns wandering around on the roof of the store and I instinctively start counting them—one, two, three, four,…—although even one person with a machine gun on the roof of a big-box store is plenty. Five metal staircases, those wheeled stair sets that move up and down the aisles to help customers access high shelves, have been rolled out of the store and pushed to the parking lot entrances, stationed like guard towers. There’s someone at the top of each staircase. Closest to me is a trim middle-aged woman in a red softball jersey, a red bandana holding back a tumble of black hair, a machine gun of her own.
I get off the bike and raise my hand to the lady with the gun and she raises a hand back and then she shouts, “hey-yuh,” and from the far side of the parking lot someone on one of the other moving staircases—also in a red jersey, though I can’t tell from here if it’s a man or a woman, young or old—calls back in kind, “hey-yuh,” and then there’s another call and then another, the syllables carried around in a ring, and at last a white Dodge pickup roars around from the back of the store, belching vegetable-oil exhaust and kicking up gravel off the pavement. The truck screeches to a halt a few feet from me, and I step backward and raise both hands.
“Good morning,” I call out.
There is a squeal of feedback from a bullhorn mounted on the roof above the driver’s seat. I wince. The woman in the guard tower winces. Then someone starts talking through the bullhorn from inside the truck.
“Is this your—” The voice is swallowed in a new burst of feedback, and then there’s a muttered “oh, hell” and an adjustment of the volume. “Is this your place?”
“No.” I shake my head. He means the parking lot—the store—did I, or did I and some band of compatriots, maybe all dressed in sensible blue pants and tan blazers to keep track of each other, like these guys are all in softball jerseys, did we already call shotgun on this SuperTarget? Did we declare it to be our base, our temporary encampment, or were we intending to pick the bones of the shelves for food or entertainment for the last week before impact?
“No,” I say again. “I’m passing through.” The woman on the moving staircase is watching with mild interest. I’m keeping my hands in the air, just in case.
“Oh, okay,” says the voice through the bullhorn. “Yeah, us too.”
The people on the roof of the building have clustered at the edge, watching me. Machine guns, red jerseys. From the corner of my eye I can see around the corner to the backside of the SuperTarget, where there’s a blur of figures busy at the loading dock. They’re cleaning it out. Box loads, full pallets wrapped in clear plastic sheeting. There wasn’t much left in the store when we were there, but what there was is coming out. I feel a flash of desperation. All I need is that sledgehammer.
“There’s an item in there,” I say. “Something I really need.”
“Well—” Another squealing tide of feedback. “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” the man says, and the sound stops abruptly as he shuts off the bullhorn and opens the driver’s side door and leans out. Glasses, mild expression. Red jersey also, with the name ETHAN stitched above the breast pocket. A soft paunch on an athletic build. He looks like somebody’s middle-school basketball coach.
“Sorry. Stupid thing. What is it that you need?”
“A sledgehammer. There’s one in there. A Wilton with a fiberglass handle.” I step forward to him, make eye contact, smile and raise a hand, like we’re meeting at a barbecue. “I really need it bad.”
“Well, huh. Okay, hold on.” He scratches his cheek, uncertain, raises one finger, and leans back into the truck. I hear him talking on a CB or a walkie-talkie. Then he leans back out and peers at me smiling while he waits for an answer from whoever decides. He’d say yes, I can see it. Were it up to just Ethan I’d be good to go. It’s still raining; endless steady mild rain. I run my hands over Houdini’s fur. I take a look at the woman on the moving staircase, and she’s looking off into space, bored, letting her mind wander. A year and a half ago she would have been checking e-mail on her phone.
The walkie-talkie blares from within the truck, and Ethan leans back in and listens for a moment, nodding. I watch his face through the windshield until he pokes his head back out.
“Listen, bud. You got anything to trade?”
I make a rapid internal inventory of my possessions: Jacket and pants, shoes and shirt. Notebook and pen. A loaded SIG Sauer P229 and a box of .40-caliber shells. A tattered high-school yearbook photo of a missing girl.
“Not really,” I say. “Unfortunately. But that sledgehammer. The truth is, it’s mine.”
“What do you mean, it’s yours?”
I don’t know what to say. I saw it first? I need it real bad?
“One thing,” I say, hearing my voice travel into a pleading, desperate upper register. “It’s just the one thing.”
Ethan rubs his chin. He feels bad. Everybody feels bad. “What about the wagon?” He looks up at our friend in the guard tower, who looks skeptical. “Maybe you could trade us that wagon.”
I look down at the battered Red Ryder. We brought it from Concord. The wheels are bent.
“The thing is, if I give you the wagon, I can’t get the hammer back to where I need it.”
“Well, heck, then.” The man sighs. “You got a, uh—what do you call those again?”
“Catch-22?” says the woman on the staircase.
Before I can say something else, someone shouts “hey-yuh” from the loading dock, and then someone else yells it from the roof, and then the man at the next staircase over yells it, too, and Ethan’s gotta run: he pops back into the truck and pulls the door closed and does a rapid three-point turn in the parking lot and heads back the way he came. The woman with the bandana looks at me, tight-lipped, and shrugs, what can ya do?
“Shit,” I say softly.
Houdini barks his rattling phlegmy bark, and I bend to scratch his ears.