She strides across the yard, all motherhood and righteous fury. A skinny dark-haired guy holds up his hands, palms out, no harm, ma’am.
“It’s okay, Mom,” Franny says.
The guy is smiling. “We’re just talking,” he says. He’s wearing a red plaid flannel shirt and T-shirt and shorts. He’s scraggly, but who isn’t.
“Who the hell are you,” she says.
“My name’s Nate. I’m just heading north. Was looking for a place to camp.”
“He was just hanging with me until you got back,” Franny says.
Nate takes them to his camp—also behind a house. He gets a little fire going, enough to heat the soup. He talks about Alabama, which was where he’s coming from, although he doesn’t have a Southern accent. He makes some excuse about being an army brat. Jane tries to size him up. He tells some story about when two guys stumbled on his camp north of Huntsville, when he was first on the road. About how it scared the shit out of him but about how he’d bluffed them about a buddy of his who was hunting for their dinner but would have heard the racket they made and could be drawing a bead on them right now from the trees, and about how something moved in the trees, some animal, rustling in the leaf litter and they got spooked. He was looking at her, trying to impress her, but being polite, which was good with Franny listening. Franny was taken with him, hanging on his every word, flirting a little the way she did. In a year or two, Franny was going to be guy crazy, Jane knew.
“They didn’t know anything about the woods, just two guys up from Biloxi or something, kind of guys who, you know, manage a copy store or a fast food joint or something thinking that now that civilization is falling apart they can be like the hero in one of their video games.” He laughs. “I didn’t know what was in the woods, neither. I admit I was kind of scared it was someone who was going to shoot all of us although it was probably just a sparrow or a squirrel or something. I’m saying stuff over my shoulder to my ‘buddy’ like, Don’t shoot them or nothing. Just let them go back the way they came.”
She’s sure he’s bullshitting. But she likes that he makes it funny instead of pretending he’s some sort of Rambo. He doesn’t offer any of his own food, she notices. But he does offer to go with them to get their stuff. Fair trade, she thinks.
He’s not bad looking in a kind of skinny way. She likes them skinny. She’s tired of doing it all herself.
The streetlights come on, at least some of them. Nate goes with them when they go back to get their sleeping bags and stuff. He’s got a board with a bunch of nails sticking out of one end. He calls it his mace.
They are quiet but they don’t try to hide. It’s hard to find the stuff in the dark, but luckily, Jane hadn’t really unpacked. She and Franny, who is breathing hard, get their sleeping bags and packs. It’s hard to see. The backyard is a dark tangle of shadows. She assumes it’s as hard to see them from inside the house—maybe harder.
Nothing happens. She hears nothing from the house, sees nothing, although it seems as if they are all unreasonably loud gathering things up. They leave through the side gate, coming nervously to the front of the house, Nate carrying his mace and ready to strike, she and Franny with their arms full of sleeping bags. They go down the cracked driveway and out into the middle of the street, a few gutted cars still parked on either side. Then they are around the corner and it feels safe. They are all grinning and happy and soon putting the sleeping bags in Nate’s little backyard camp made domestic, no civilized, by the charred ash of the little fire.
In the morning, she leaves Nate’s bedroll and gets back to sleep next to Franny before Franny wakes up.
They are walking on the freeway the next day, the three of them. They are together now although they haven’t discussed it, and Jane is relieved. People are just that much less likely to mess with a man. Overhead, three jets pass going south, visible only by their contrails. At least there are jets. American jets, she hopes.
They stop for a moment while Nate goes around a bridge abutment to pee.
“Mom,” Franny says. “Do you think that someone has wrecked Pete’s place?”
“I don’t know,” Jane says.
“What do you think happened to Pete?”
Jane is caught off guard. They left without ever explicitly discussing Pete and Jane just thought that Franny, like her, assumed Pete was dead.
“I mean,” Franny continues, “if they didn’t have gas, maybe he got stuck somewhere. Or he might have gotten hurt and ended up in the hospital. Even if the hospital wasn’t taking regular people, like, they’d take cops. Because they think of cops as one of their own.” Franny is in her adult to adult mode, explaining the world to her mother. “They stick together. Cops and firemen and nurses.”
Jane isn’t sure she knows what Franny is talking about. Normally she’d tell Franny as much. But this isn’t a conversation she knows how to have. Nate comes around the abutment, adjusting himself a bit, and it is understood that the subject is closed.
“Okay,” he says. “How far to Wallyworld?” Franny giggles.
Water is their biggest problem. It’s hard to find, and when they do find it, either from a pond, or very rarely, from a place where it hasn’t all been looted, it’s heavy. Thank God Nate is pretty good at making a fire. He has six disposable lighters that he got from a gas station, and when they find a pond, they boil it. Somewhere Jane thinks she heard that they should boil it for eighteen minutes. Basically they just boil the heck out of it. Pond water tastes terrible, but they are always thirsty. Franny whines. Jane is afraid that Nate will get tired of it and leave, but apparently as long as she crawls over to his bed roll every night, he’s not going to.
Jane waits until she can tell Franny is asleep. It’s a difficult wait. They are usually so tired it is all she can do to keep from nodding off. But she is afraid to lose Nate.
At first she liked that at night he never made a move on her. She always initiates. It made things easier all around. But now he does this thing where she crawls over and he’s pretending to be asleep. Or is asleep, the bastard, because he doesn’t have to stay awake. She puts her hand on his chest, and then down his pants, getting him hard and ready. She unzips his shorts and still he doesn’t do anything. She grinds on him for awhile, and only then does he pull his shorts and underwear down and let her ride him until he comes. Then she climbs off him. Sometimes he might say, ‘Thanks, Babe.’ Mostly he says nothing and she crawls back next to Franny feeling as if she just paid the rent. She has never given anyone sex for money. She keeps telling herself that this night she won’t do it. See what he does. Hell, if he leaves them, he leaves them. But then she lays there, waiting for Franny to go to sleep.
Sometimes she knows Franny is awake when she crawls back. Franny never says anything and unless the moon is up, it is usually too dark to see if her eyes are open. It is just one more weird thing, no weirder than walking up the highway, or getting off the highway in some small town and bartering with some old guy to take what is probably useless U.S. currency for well water. No weirder than no school. No weirder than no baths, no clothes, no nothing.
Jane decides she’s not going to do it the next night. But she knows she will lie there, anxious, and probably crawl over to Nate.
They are walking, one morning, while the sky is still blue and darkening near the horizon. By midday the sky will be white and the heat will be flattening. Franny asks Nate, “Have you ever been in love?”
“God, Franny,” Jane says.
Nate laughs. “Maybe. Have you?”
Franny looks irritable. “I’m in eighth grade,” she says. “And I’m not one of those girls with boobs, so I’m thinking, no.”
Jane wants her to shut up, but Nate says, “What kind of guy would you fall in love with?”
Franny looks a little sideways at him and then looks straight ahead. She has the most perfect skin, even after all this time in the sun. Skin like that is wasted on kids. Her look says, ‘Someone like you, stupid.’ “I don’t know,” Franny says. “Someone who knows how to do things. You know, when you need them.”
“What kind of things?” Nate asks. He’s really interested. Well, fuck, there’s not a lot interesting on a freeway except other people walking and abandoned cars. They are passing a Sienna with a flat tire and all its doors open.
Franny gestures towards it. “Like fix a car. And I’d like him to be cute, too.” Matter of fact. Serious as a church.
Nate laughs. “Competent and cute.”
