White gravy with pepper.
Sweet tea.
The Kern River.
There was a song about the Kern River. My father always sang it when he thought of home. When he found himself in places far away, places where the big jets he flew had taken him. Places not home.
“Poppa?”
The Old Man felt the heat of those long-gone kitchens and early Saturday evenings when the Sacramento Delta breeze came up through the screen doors. Evenings that promised such things would always remain so.
How did they promise?
The Old Man thought.
Because when you are young and in that moment of food and family and time, you cannot imagine things might ever be different.
Or even gone someday.
“Poppa!”
That’s me. I’m Poppa now.
“Yes. What is it?”
“Just practicing. You need to practice too if you’re going to be Poppa now.”
“Okay. I’ll be ready next time.”
“Okay, Grandp—I mean… okay, Poppa.”
Fried chicken.
Saturday dinners.
The heat of the oven.
The Kern River.
Poppa.
THE DAY WAS at its brutal zenith when they saw the Boy crawling out of the cracked, parched hardpan toward the road. Their road. Dragging himself forward. Dragging himself through the wide stretch of dust and heat that swallowed the horizon.
“Poppa, what do we do?”
She has taken to Poppa. She’s smarter and faster than anyone I ever knew.
“Poppa!”
I don’t want to stop and help this roadside killer.
He thought of the drawings inside the warehouses.
He thought of what the world had become.
He thought of the Horde.
The Roadside Killer.
But you told her, ‘The world has got to become a better place.’
“We’ll stop and see what this person needs.”
The Old Man grabbed his crowbar from its place inside the tank.
They stopped the tank and climbed down onto the hot road, feeling its heat melt through the soles of their shoes, new shoes from long ago that they had taken from the supplies Sergeant Major Preston had stocked.
The Boy was young. Just a few years older than his granddaughter.
One side of him was rippled by thick, long muscles.
The other is thin, almost withered, like that other boy who chased me across the wasteland.
The Boy was mumbling to himself through lips that bled and peeled. His skin, though dark, was horribly burned, even blistering. On his back was an old and faded rucksack. He wore tired, beaten boots that must have once been maroon colored but were now little more than worn-through leather. He wore dusty torn pants and a faded and soft red flannel shirt. At his hip, a steel-forged tomahawk hung from an old belt. And in the Boy’s long hair, attached to a leather thong, a gray-and-white feather, broken and bent along its spine, lay as if waiting for the merest wind to come and catch it up.
He is like that other boy who tried to murder me.
The Old Man looked down and saw his granddaughter’s big dark eyes watching him. Watching to see what he would do next.
Inside them he saw worry.
And…
Inside them he saw mercy.
They knelt down beside the Boy.
The Old Man let the crowbar fall onto the road.
“Who is he, Poppa?”
“I don’t know. But he needs our help. He’s been out here far too long.”
“I’ll get some water, Poppa.”
The Boy began to cry.
Shaking, he convulsed.
Crying, he wheezed, begging the world not to be made of stone, begging the world to give back what it had taken from him.
“Who am I?” sobbed the Boy.
“I think he’s asking, who is he, Poppa!” said his granddaughter as though it were all a game of guessing and she had just won.
The Old Man held the shaking, sobbing Boy and poured water onto his cracked and sunburned lips in the shadow of the rumbling tank.
“He doesn’t know who he is, Poppa. Who is he?”
“He’s just a boy,” said the Old Man, his voice trembling.
“Who am I now?” sobbed the Boy.
The Old Man held the Boy close, willing life, precious life, back into the thin body.
“You’re just a boy, that’s all. Just a boy,” soothed the Old Man, almost in tears.
The Old Man held the Boy tightly.
“You’re just a boy,” he repeated.
“Just a boy.”
Chapter 17
The Boy lay on the floor of the tank atop the Old Man’s sleeping bag.
When they’d lowered him through the wide hatch after helping him up from the hot crumble of the road, he’d mumbled, “M-One Abrams,” and after that he had said nothing.
Now the Boy lay on the cool floor of the tank as the Old Man ran the air-conditioning system at full power. The Old Man wondered about fluids and their replacement and how much farther the tank could go without such vital substance.
They crossed broken landscapes and high rocky hills where the thin remains of fading white observatories still waited for someone to come and look at the stars.
The Old Man could feel unseen eyes watching them as they passed such forlorn places.
They drove through an intersection where large slabs of metal and iron, long ago fused into uselessness, lay behind a crumpled fence alongside the road.
There were once many power transformers here. During those hot days near the end, when the systems began to collapse as unchecked energy surged toward its maximum output, wild power must have flooded through the lines, overloading overridden breakers, and suddenly everything began to melt in volumes of hot white heat. That is the story of this place.
Its story of salvage.
