“Where’d they come from? What do they eat? Can they do other tricks? Was that the biggest one you’ve ever seen? You know, Poppa, tell us everything.”
Chewing quickly, shoveling another bite into his still-moving mouth, he looked at the Boy.
The Boy nodded.
And so the Old Man told them all about elephants. All about Africa. All about lions and things he’d read in books and been taught in school when he was young.
Later, when the fire was low and he could hear them both sleeping, he lay still and watched the stars above.
I did not think I knew so much about elephants.
Chapter 35
The road wound higher and higher into the forests that surrounded Flagstaff. For a while the going was slow as the tank maneuvered around lone eruptions of pine that shot through the lanes of the old highway.
In time, the crumbling remains of buildings poked through the unchecked growth, and when the Old Man went to consult the map as to how much farther they might go that day, he could not find it.
When did I…
When the Fool shook your hand.
The Old Man replayed the moment in the miles to come, as his granddaughter called out her intentions each time they needed to maneuver off-road.
“Okay, Poppa, we’re going around this crazy tree.”
I was pretty out of it yesterday. I could have dropped it in the dust perhaps.
“Poppa, we’ll go to the right of this collapsed bridge, okay?”
Or anyone in the circus or the town could have snatched it from me.
“Poppa, how do you think that truck managed to flip itself across all the lanes? What a bad driver he must’ve been!”
Or it is somewhere here with us and I have simply misplaced it.
They passed the fire-blackened remains of a vehicle, the likes of which the Old Man had never seen before. Three blackened skeletons lay next to its massive wheels, still twisting in agony.
Or laughing.
In the end, when we are all skeletons, who will be able to tell if we were crying or laughing at what has happened to us?
No one, my friend.
And…
It won’t be important anymore.
“What kind of car was that, Poppa?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen its like before and maybe the fire made it unrecognizable.”
“Why do you think they just sat there and let it burn, Poppa?”
He didn’t answer.
“Why, Poppa?”
“Because there was nothing they could do about it.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
No, it doesn’t.
THE STOCKADE AT Flagstaff was a collection of fallen pine logs that had once formed a wall for defense and since had been dragged away from a hotel that overlooked the old highway.
The Old Man let the tank idle outside in the parking lot of the hotel. They watched, waiting for somebody to come out and greet them.
The Boy’s strong hand rested against the tomahawk.
There are leaves and debris here. No one has been here in quite a while.
Yes. No one.
The Old Man turned off the tank and listened. He could hear a crow calling out stridently.
I have a very bad feeling about this place.
What kind of bad feeling?
The kind that says I do not want to know what I might find in there. That kind of feeling. The feeling of knowing that whatever you find, you won’t like it.
The Old Man dismounted and the Boy followed.
As his granddaughter began to climb out of the driver’s hatch, he motioned for her to stay. Her look of displeasure was instantaneous.
“It’s your turn to guard the tank,” he called back to her.
She sat down, dangling her feet over the side.
The Old Man heard the crunch of gravel beneath his boots as he and the Boy crossed the tired parking lot.
In the lobby they found nothing. No one.
The old furniture was gone. Instead there were desks.
As though someone had set up some kind of headquarters here.
And where are they now?
And where will we find fuel?
“What do you think happened here?” asked the Boy.
There is a story of salvage here. But what it is, I don’t know.
“I can’t tell. They had walls. They had shelter. If they were attacked, there should at least be bodies.”
The Boy limped through the dusty light to the back of the lobby.
He’s heading to the bar. There was always a bar back that way in these kinds of places. How does he know that?
Maybe he knows more of these places alongside the road than I do. Maybe he was born and raised in these places. Maybe they are as familiar to him as my shed would be to me.
You don’t live there anymore, my friend.
It’s hard to think that I live or lived in any other place, ever. My shed will always be home for me.
After a moment, when he could see only the dim outline of the Boy, he called out, “Did you find anything back there?”
The Boy returned, holding a coffee mug.
He held it out to the Old Man.
Inside, the remains of a punch-red syrup had dried into a shell at the bottom of the mug.
The Old Man smelled it. He smelled the heat and the straw and the sugar and the Fool.
The Circus had come to town.
THEY HAD DRIVEN through the remains of the town and now the heat faded as the summer day bled away. In the afternoon, a cool pine breeze came up and dried the sweat on the Old Man’s back.
North of town, a massive rock the size of a small mountain loomed high into the darkening sky. Flagstaff, falling into disrepair, surrendering to time, settled as night birds and small animals began their first forays into the early evening.
Above him, the pines that were reclaiming the town, growing up through roads and sidewalks and buildings, whispered together making a soft white noise.
They parked the tank underneath an overpass, and as they began to make the night’s meal, the Old Man wandered through the remains of a nearby gas station.
There is nothing left here.
How could there be after forty years?
