Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalipse

“I meant Lorraine Wilson.”

“I know what you meant. She’s got her boat?”

“And she’s got a mean set of fenders.” Deaver cupped his hands. “Just need a little polishing.”

“Why do you always talk dirty? Ever since you started driving salvage, Deaver, you got a gutter mouth. Besides, she’s built like a sack.”

“She’s near fifty, what do you expect?” It occurred to Deaver that Lehi seemed to be stalling. Which probably meant he botched up again as usual. “Can you get the diving stuff?”

“I already got it. You thought I’d screw up.” Lehi smirked again.

“You? Screw up? You can be trusted with anything.” Deaver started for the door. He could hear Lehi behind him, still shutting a few things off. They got to use a lot of electricity in here. Of course they had to, because they needed computers all the time, and salvage was the only way to get them. But when Deaver saw all that electricity getting used up at once, to him it looked like his own future. All the machines he could ever want, new ones, and all the power they needed. Clothes that nobody else ever wore, his own horse and wagon or even a car. Maybe he’d be the guy who started making cars again. He didn’t need stupid blob-smashing games from the past. “That stuff’s dead and gone, duck lips, dead and gone.”

“What’re you talking about?” asked Lehi. “Dead and gone. All your computer things.”

It was enough to set Lehi off, as it always did. Deaver grinned and felt wicked and strong as Lehi babbled along behind him. About how we use the computers more than they ever did in the old days, the computers kept everything going, on and on and on, it was cute, Deaver liked him, the boy was so intense. Like everything was the end of the world. Deaver knew better. The world was dead, it had already ended, so none of it mattered, you could sink all this stuff in the lake.

They came out of the Centre and walked along the retaining wall. Far below them was the harbour, a little circle of water in the bottom of a bowl, with Bingham City perched on the lip. They used to have an open-pit copper mine here, but when the water rose they cut a channel to it and now they had a nice harbour on Oquirrh Island in the middle of the Mormon Sea, where the factories could stink up the whole sky and no neighbours ever complained about it.

A lot of other people joined them on the steep dirt road that led down to the harbour. Nobody lived right in Bingham City itself, because it was just a working place, day and night. Shifts in, shifts out. Lehi was a shift boy, lived with his family across the Jordan Strait on Point-of-the-Mountain, which was as rotten a place to live as anybody ever devised, rode the ferry in every day at five in the morning and rode it back every afternoon at four. He was supposed to go to school after that for a couple of hours but Deaver thought that was stupid, he told Lehi that all the time, told him again now. School is too much time and too little of everything, a waste of time.

“I gotta go to school,” said Lehi.

“Tell me two plus two, you haven’t got two plus two yet?”

“You finished, didn’t you?”

“Nobody needs anything after fourth grade.” He shoved Lehi a little. Usually Lehi shoved back, but this time no.

“Just try getting a real job without a sixth-grade diploma, OK? And I’m pretty close now.” They were at the ferry ship. Lehi got out his pass.

“You with me tomorrow or not?”

Lehi made a face. “I don’t know, Deaver. You can get arrested for going around there. It’s a dumb thing to do. They say there’s real weird things in the old skyscrapers.”

“We aren’t going in the skyscrapers.”

“Even worse in there, Deaver. I don’t want to go there.”

“Yeah, the Angel Moroni’s probably waiting to jump out and say booga-booga-booga.”

“Don’t talk about it, Deaver.” Deaver was tickling him; Lehi laughed and tried to shy away. “Cut it out, chigger-head. Come on. Besides, the Moroni statue was moved to the Salt Lake Monument up on the mountain. And that has a guard all the time.”

“The statue’s just gold plate anyway. I’m tellin you those old Mormons hid tons of stuff down in the Temple, just waitin’ for somebody who isn’t scared of the ghost of Bigamy Young to—”

“Shut up, snotsucker, OK? People can hear! Look around, we’re not alone!”

It was true, of course. Some of the other people were glaring at them. But then, Deaver noticed that older people liked to glare at younger ones. It made the old farts feel better about kicking off. It was like they were saying, OK, I’m dying, but at least you’re stupid. So Deaver looked right at a woman who was staring at him and murmured, “OK, I’m stupid, but at least I won’t die.”

“Deaver, do you always have to say that where they can hear you?”

“It’s true.”

“In the first place, Deaver, they aren’t dying. And in the second place, you’re definitely stupid. And in the third place, the ferry’s here.” Lehi punched Deaver lightly in the stomach.

Deaver bent over in mock agony. “Ay, the laddie’s ungrateful, he is, I give him me last croost of bread and this be the thanks I gets.”

“Nobody has an accent like that, Deaver!” shouted Lehi. The boat began to pull away.

“Tomorrow at five-thirty!” shouted Deaver.

“You’ll never get up at four-thirty, don’t give me that, you never get up…” But the ferry and the noise of the factories and machine and trucks swallowed up the rest of his insults. Deaver knew them all, anyway. Lehi might be only sixteen, but he was OK. Someday Deaver’d get married but his wife would like Lehi, too. And Lehi’d even get married, and his wife would like Deaver. She’d better, or she’d have to swim home.

He took the trolley home to Fort Douglas and walked to the ancient barracks building where Rain let him stay. It was supposed to be a storage room, but she kept the mops and soap stuff in her place so that there’d be room for a cot.

Not much else, but it was on Oquirrh Island without being right there in the stink and the smoke and the noise. He could sleep and that was enough, since most of the time he was out on the truck.

Truth was, his room wasn’t home anyway. Home was pretty much Rain’s place, a drafty room at the end of the barracks with a dumpy frowzy lady who served him good food and plenty of it. That’s where he went now, walked right in and surprised her in the kitchen. She yelled at him for surprising her, yelled at him for being filthy and tracking all over her floor, and let him get a slice of apple before she yelled at him for snitching before supper.

He went around and changed light bulbs in five rooms before supper. The families there were all crammed into two rooms each at the most, and most of them had to share kitchens and eat in shifts. Some of the rooms were nasty places, family warfare held off only as long as it took him to change the light, and sometimes even that truce wasn’t observed. Others were doing fine, the place was small but they liked each other. Deaver was pretty sure his family must have been one of the nice ones, because if there’d been any yelling he would have remembered.

Rain and Deaver ate and then turned off all the lights while she played the old record player Deaver had wangled away from Lehi. They really weren’t supposed to have it, but they figured as long as they didn’t burn any lights it wasn’t wasting electricity, and they’d turn it in as soon as anybody asked for it.

In the meantime, Rain had some of the old records from when she was a girl. The songs had strong rhythms, and tonight, like she sometimes did, Rain got up and moved to the music, strange little dances that Deaver didn’t understand unless he imagined her as a lithe young girl, pictured her body as it must have been then. It wasn’t hard to imagine, it was there in her eyes and her smile all the time, and her movements gave away secrets that years of starchy eating and lack of exercise had disguised.

Then, as always, his thoughts went off to some of the girls he saw from his truck window, driving by the fields where they bent over, hard at work, until they heard the truck and then they stood and waved. Everybody waved at the salvage truck, sometimes it was the only thing with a motor that ever came by, their only contact with the old machines. All the tractors, all the electricity were reserved for the New Soil Lands; the old places were dying. And they turned and waved at the last memories. It made Deaver sad and he hated to be sad, all these people clinging to a past that never existed.