for his life that day. No signs of fire now, not even a burned whiff in the air. What remained of the trees after the fire had long since been chopped down for fuel. Grasses and sage covered the area that had once been the housing developments of Bow Mar South, Columbine, Columbine Hills and Columbine Knolls.
The mile walk to the river would have taken him less than two minutes in a car in the Gone Times. He remembered driving with his parents sixty years ago, and the thought weighed him down even more.
“Come on, Grandpa,” yelled Dodge over his shoulder. “If you walk any slower, we’ll be going backwards.”
When they reached the river’s bank, they followed a well-worn trail to the Treasury. Two men sat on the porch and nodded as Eric and the boys went in.
Sunlight streamed through high windows, revealing rows and rows of boxes piled on top one another. Many contained liquor. Old Crow, Seagrams, Kentucky Bourbon, the town’s chief trading goods. But there were also cases of nails, screws and irreplaceable hardware; hammers, saws, rasps, clamps and other tools, and then boxes filled with completely useless things like TVs, food processors, computers, flashlights, video games, and stereo components. The town council stored these last items, even though almost none of them had ever seen them in operation.
A man bent over an open box, counting bottles, straightened as they came in. “Father,” said Dodge’s dad. A deeply tanned, wiry man of forty, he nodded curtly in Eric’s direction.
“Good to see you, Troy,” said Eric. “Dodge tells me that Susan Pao died.”
“You get right to it, don’t you.”
“So, it’s true.”
“This morning. Her daughter found her. Never woke up, I guess.
She was eighty-two.”
“That’s the end of the sixties,” said Eric. He sat on a large box marked MICROWAVE OVEN—FRAGILE. “The Beatles were still a group and man hadn’t been to the moon yet when she was born, and now she’s gone.”
Troy said, “Uh huh,” unencouragingly.
“She used to tell me about television shows she saw. God, that woman had a memory, I’ll tell you. Knew ’em all.
“We’ve got business to attend to here, Dad.”
Eric looked down at his hands resting on his legs. They were liver spotted, and a couple of the knuckles were swollen with arthritis. He thought about Susan Pao telling him about a concert she had been to at Red Rocks Auditorium, a blues concert, and how everybody showed up early in the day with blankets and coolers filled with beer, and how they tossed frisbees and beach balls up and down the stadium seats until the music started. People smoked pot, and if you got there after 6:00, there’d be no place to sit. He’d hiked to Red Rocks thirty years ago. Most of the stage was torn up for the metal, but the auditorium itself, carved out of stone, huge and empty, looked like it was still waiting for rock and roll. He’d left a broken cassette player on the stage, electrical tape holding the head phones together. That was after he had spent three years looking for batteries, and there were none left with any juice in them. He’d never gone back.
Troy said, “Dad, the business?”
“Sorry.”
“As the oldest member of the community, and the last person who actually remembers anything of the Gone Times, you got a vote now on the council. A lot of people depend on you making good decisions. They can’t be based on wild theories or old fears. You’ve got to keep your head.” Blood rushed into Eric’s face. He felt his cheeks flushing. “School’s not a wild theory. Our kids have got to be able to read, or we’re going straight into barbarism.”
The contempt showed on Troy’s expression. “That’s just what I mean. You get going on the school thing, or the library idea, and people won’t listen. We’ve got important community projects, and it’s hard enough to convince people to pull together on them without you distracting the committee with these pet ideas of yours. The crops have to come in, we’ve got to widen our search for tradable goods, and you just make everyone angry by hanging on to old ways.”
Eric slapped his knee. “Look at this stuff in here. I’m not the one hanging on. America used to be a great place. We built cities. We flew around the world, and now you’re scrounging through garbage dumps, hoping to find things we can’t make anymore. I tell you, if we don’t teach the kids, the next generation will be nothing more than nomads following deer herds, or subsistence farmers barely surviving from summer to summer.”
Troy shook his head. “Hogwash, Dad. We do fine. There’s no reason to think we won’t keep on this way. People are happy until you go telling them they’re doomed.” He closed the box lid with a snap.
“This is the world, now, but you hang on to a past that no one knows. Your people died. Mine are alive. You’ve got nothing to say to the living.”
“What about the sicknesses in the last couple of years? And I don’t see anyone dancing for joy about their stillbirths.” Eric, breathing hard, turned from his son. “Something’s changing. Ignorance doesn’t help.” Troy walked back and forth behind him. He started to speak several times—Eric heard his lips part. Finally he said, “I hate this. Every time we talk you make me say bad things.” Troy gripped his shoulder.
“What are we going to do?”
Through the open door, Eric could see the river. Heat waves shimmered the ground and the water flowed silently through the old bridge’s broken pilings. Across the shallow expanse, jumbles of brick marked the remains of downtown Littleton. “I think I should leave for a while,” he said. Troy wiped his sleeve across his mouth. Eric shivered. For a second, he saw in Troy his own father. Troy was now about the same age as when Eric’s father had died.
Troy said, “Don’t be childish, Dad. You’re hiking days are long past.” He laughed, suddenly jovial. Eric cringed. He heard the patronizing behind the tone. He’s humoring me, Eric thought. Troy continued, “Besides, we need you here. As the oldest person, people are going to want your opinions on all kinds of things. We’ll probably have to move you into town to save everybody the walk.” Eric remembered the steady stream of visitors to Susan Pao’s house. Some brought old ’lectronics, radios or TVs, as if by laying on the hands she could heal them. Some came to her when they were ill, carrying with them boxes filled with medicines, most bad with age, hoping that she would identify the Gone Time cure that would save them. Lately there’d been a lot of sickness. She presided at weddings and christenings, funerals and festivals. Every day people dropped off baked goods or fresh-caught fish, like she was some sort of icon, which, of course, she was.
He pictured himself sitting in a house, people lined up to see him, like Susan Pao, his eyes glazed with age.
He shook the image away. Whatever else happened, he couldn’t see himself as a symbol for these people, not the ignorant children of the Gone Time. One more time before he died, he needed to wander in the world.
“I’m serious, Dad. You don’t know what’s out there anymore.”
Eric almost laughed out loud. He’d seen superstitions and fears develop in the community over the years. The latest one was that bad spirits, some said “ghosts,” protected the countryside. The ruins of the city were safe, or as safe as ruins could be, haunted by nothing more than rusted metal and unstable foundations that collapsed on the unwary, and expeditions as far north as downtown Denver weren’t uncommon, but no one went past the fields to the east, south or west. When he’d proposed an exploration to Colorado Springs two years ago, Troy reminded the council of the seventy miles of country to travel and that ended the discussion.
Eric once talked to one man who claimed to have heard something at night when he’d gone after stray cattle. “I’m not saying I was scared,” he said. “But after that, I figured cows weren’t worth it and I came home.” He’d never said exactly what it was he heard.
“Maybe because we don’t know what’s out there, someone ought to go,” said Eric.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Dad. You’re old.”
At home, Eric packed. As he’d walked the dusty two miles to his house, the idea of a long trip made more sense. He’d been half joking with the boys about scavenging with them, but only half. Lately his muscles ached all the time. Not the good ache of a hard workday, but a queasy throbbing ache, like they wanted to be put to rest, and that frightened him. So he packed. Maybe a voyage would set my mind to ease, he thought. Maybe if I wandered north I could find other communities, places where they weren’t giving up on the spirit of the old America. But
