Chapter 22
The Old Man awoke after noon. He raised a hand, shielding his eyes from the glare of the blinding sun.
He lay in the thin shadow of an ancient building.
He was alone.
He drank warm water and listened to the silence.
Far away, in the building above him he could hear his granddaughter’s voice. She was talking to someone.
The Boy.
He listened to them as they explored the ruin.
In time they returned to him.
“Poppa!” She dropped a sack of treasures onto the pavement of the courtyard where he had been resting since they’d awoken that morning. “We found salvage.”
The Boy appeared and the Old Man was comforted by the tomahawk the Boy kept at his belt and the dead snake in his hands.
I should have known better than to bring her. If the Boy had not been with her she might have gotten hurt.
I must be more careful.
But I was so tired.
On the ground lay a corkscrew, a feather duster that looked in good shape, and a bowling ball.
“What’s this?” she asked holding up the corkscrew. “A weapon?”
He must have killed the snake with his tomahawk. The young are always impressed by the accomplishments of weapons.
“No.” The Old Man picked up the corkscrew and inspected it. A wooden handle from which the thin spiral of the metal corkscrew rose up. He spit on it and polished it. “But it could be if you needed it to be.” He put the handle in his fist and let the corkscrew erupt through his middle and ring fingers. “You could punch with it like this.” He showed her.
Eyes wide, she watched, and when he had given the corkscrew back to her she also made a weapon of it.
Should I have done that? Should I have shown her how to make a weapon out of something that isn’t one?
The world is a dangerous place now, my friend.
A moment later she grabbed the feather duster.
“This, Poppa? What is it? What was it for?”
The Boy set to gathering thin strips of the darkish deadwood that lay scattered about. The Old Man’s mouth watered at the thought of the cooked snake.
I like snake.
“That’s…” But the Old Man could not think of what a feather duster was once called. He knew what it did. But its label remained lost and no matter how hard he tried, he could not dig out a name for the feather duster within the cemetery of his mind.
My mind is like a burial place for the forgotten dead.
He remembered the ancient tombstones he and Big Pedro had come across out in the southern reaches of the desert, far out beyond the village. Far out beyond any salvage spots anyone could remember, they’d found the little cemetery resisting the desert. Surrounded by sinking ironwork, the nameless graves waited, their markers shifting in the sand throughout the years.
“No good,” Big Pedro had said all those years ago.
When I’d turned to face him he had seen a look in my eye.
I’d wanted to open those graves and search them.
I’d shamed him.
The Old Man picked up the feather duster.
“You cleaned things with it?” Then, “It made dust go away.”
For a moment, the name leapt out of the bushes clustering at the edge of his thoughts and then ran off down the road.
Later they finished the snake, which there was a surprising amount of.
It was a big snake.
As they sat waiting out the heat of the day, the Old Man thought of Big Pedro.
He was a good man.
I was wrong to have even thought about disturbing those graves.
What could we have found?
That was not the point.
I had grown calloused. I had gotten used to searching the things of dead people because we needed to survive. Taking their things and making them mine. Ours.
It was survival.
It was wrong.
Like the corkscrew.
Yes, that felt wrong even in the moment I was showing her how to make it a weapon.
He waited.
Waited for the answer he must give himself.
But what lies ahead is very dangerous.
To think that everything will be as easy as it has been up to this point is childish. She might need a weapon.
Now she has one.
I wish the world were different.
The world is what it is, my friend. The world is what it always has been. A very dangerous place.
Feather duster.
Chapter 23
It was late in the day, after they’d eaten the snake seasoned with some pepper that had survived the Old Man’s charity, when they began the climb up and out of the valley. The grade was gentle and the climb little more than a final sweep up onto the eastern desert plain.
There are maybe eight miles between here and the secret testing area.
You are trying to think of other things.
Yes.
The Old Man watched the Boy as he rode atop the turret, eyes constantly scanning the far horizon.
Yes, I am trying to think of other things than the right tread of this tank.
“What shall we call the valley now that we have seen it?” he asked his granddaughter over the intercom.
There was a pause and he knew she was thinking. He knew her face when it thought. The pressed lips, the eyes searching the sky. Thinking.
“It wasn’t scary, Poppa.”
“No, not so much.”
Remember the fall to the bottom. That was scary to me when we drove in the dark and I could not tell
