Robinson Crusoe 2244 (20 page)

“Aserra,” he said before pointing to himself. “Teach me.”

Her grim expression softened, but he didn’t like what had replaced it.

She stepped close—closer than they had ever been—and tapped him on the bicep and said, “Aserra.” She tapped him lightly on the head and said, “Aserra.” She tapped her own stomach and said, “Aserra.” Then she touched his and shook her head.

He didn’t need to speak her language to understand. She was saying he didn’t have the stomach for it. He didn’t have the heart. It was a blow that rivaled Tessa’s deception. It might have hurt even worse because this one wasn’t born of some petty cause or political strife, but of his own failings.

He wanted to run away. He wanted to hide. He felt an incredible sense of shame, but when his eyes fell down, she lifted his chin with her hand and then walked over, picked up a book, and handed it to him.

“
Nian
,” she said.

“You want me to read this?”

She nodded. “Read.”

Robinson read well into the night, his voice echoing lightly under the glass that bore a star-laden sky. They were separated by the breadth of the room, but that night, they felt closer. His words and her presence were a comfort to each other where nothing else would do.

How strange, he thought, that she could be so proficient at killing and yet feel so low because of it. She was like a beautiful flower whose stem was riddled with thorns. Robinson knew that nature often secured its greatest treasures in hardened shells, making sure any that valued them won their prize only with patience and considerable effort.

The next day he found out what the shovel was for. They returned to the field near the farmhouse and crossed over the low cliff where the bovine fed. The girl walked the circumference of a ravine, eventually settling on a section of narrows where she tossed Robinson the shovel and ordered him to dig. It was backbreaking work, but Robinson came to enjoy the strike of the blade, the weight of the earth, and the cadence of his swing. Resi watched from the lip of the trench as the girl hobbled off. He heard the crack of wood as she swung her axe. Only a few turns later when they broke for lunch did Robinson see that she had cut several small tree limbs and shaped the ends to a point. He knew then they were building a deadfall and if her plan worked—as they almost always did—they’d have beef that night. The idea made his mouth water.

After the spears were set, Robinson climbed from the hole as the girl dragged branches and leaves over the top until it was well disguised. She then drew up a plan of attack in which they would chase the bovine down the ravine, into the narrows, and toward the deadfall. When she was finished, she looked to him for confirmation and he shrugged. Mistake. The stick whistled. He howled. Resi’s yap sounded surprisingly like a laugh.

The plan did not go quite as expected. They managed to get behind the bovine and chase them into the ravine, but as they neared the narrows, they’d forgotten about Resi. The minute he saw the creatures, he charged. The bovines knotted up and quickly turned toward the pair. Robinson was lucky enough to scramble up the side of a hill to escape the stampede. The girl, unfortunately, dove into a pond full of mud. When she emerged sodden and simmering, Robinson bellowed. She immediately went after him. He ran down the ravine laughing. He was afraid the hobbled girl might skewer him with her spear when she yelled. Down the ravine, one bovine was returning with Resi hot on its tail. Together, Robinson and the girl waved their arms, driving the animal into the narrows. A few seconds later, they heard a crash and a cry. When they arrived at the trap, they looked down to see the bovine was dead.

Robinson let out a triumphant roar and hugged the girl. She hit him three times with the stick, but for the first time, she smiled.

Getting the meat back to the memorial would be no easy task. The girl indicated that Robinson should find two large branches on which they would drag the carcass, but he ran back to the farmhouse instead and returned with the molded canoe from the garage. She looked it over and gave a curt nod of approval.

“Aserra,” he said lightly. “Teach me.”

She grinned but shook her head again.

“No?” he asked.

“No,” she answered.

Robinson shrugged and started transferring the butchered meat.

The next two weeks went on the same. They rose early and hunted, fed the smoker in the afternoon, and he read after dinner.

After each meal he would ask, “Aserra?” And she would shake her head and say, “No.”

The snow finally came around the first week of December. The city was bathed in a pastoral white.

They had amassed enough meat to make it through the winter, but it was still bitterly cold in the memorial. Steadily, the girl’s leg got better until one day she took the boot off and tossed it into the river. She then constructed a pole to fish the river with, collecting only those that weren’t blighted.

With the weather came one welcomed dividend. The renders seemed to vanish from the city. Robinson soon learned they were only hibernating. When he and the girl stumbled upon a warren of sleeping renders while hunting for supplies, she prepared to kill them, but he reminded her of her own words: people should only kill what they eat.

With the rivers frozen over, the savages could not return. Robinson never asked the girl about them and she never volunteered anything, but several times, when she thought he was busy, he would catch her looking toward the monument with that forlorn look that said, like him, she had a whole other life waiting elsewhere.

His duties fell to collecting firewood and reading bedtime tales, but he also kept the roof clean of snow and patched the areas where rain seeped in. When the weather was really cruel, he repaired the pipes that led to the indoor privy. When he showed the girl how it worked, she made the sign of evil but eventually used it, albeit grudgingly.

The wood stove burned well enough, but it proved too small to heat the entire room, so Robinson went back to the library and began reading up on various energy sources. He was shocked how many there were and by their complexity. He was surprised that the previous civilization could engineer such things as thermal, chemical, radiant, nuclear, and electric power. Most were beyond his understanding. But he did understand that at the height of the previous civilization, petroleum was one of the chief sources of energy and that it was the same stygian oil he had gathered from the park to fend off the renders.

Processing it would be no easy task. Theoretically, it all came down to boiling. By using superheated steam, he was able to run the oil through a distillation chamber that, at different temperatures, separated the hydrocarbons into various groupings: petroleum gas, naphtha, liquid gasoline, kerosene, diesel, lubricating oil, fuel oil, and some residuals. He collected these in old bottles, most often slender and colored white, green or brown with names like Coca-Cola and Budweiser stenciled across them. He scavenged tubing where he could find it and polyester sheeting for filters. Lastly, he boiled moldy rubber tires for seals.

Again, it was trial and error learning to collect the individual hydrocarbons, which was why he built his small refinery downwind and only ran it during the day. On the third day, while he was out retrieving tubing, he heard an explosion and knew the distillery had blown. Thankfully, he had built the refinery in the rubble of a burned building, so nothing else could be destroyed. He was not deterred by this failure, no matter how often the girl made her gestures to ward off evil.

The following week, he succeeded at gathering a healthy sum of liquid gasoline, kerosene, and oil. The oil he used for lubrication. The liquid gasoline, he discovered, was incredibly volatile, and although he did not want to lose it, he decided to store it in barrels near the river, far enough from the memorial to stay safe, but close enough that, should the need arise, he could get to them. He chose the kerosene as his method of every day fuel since it burned cleanly and seemed the easiest to store. He then fashioned a small boiler from an old steel sink, which he connected to the building’s old furnace. Although it smelled terrible for several days, it did keep their home quite toasty.

Resi also seemed to thrive, although he spent more and more time with the girl despite the fact that Robinson fed him and let him out when nature called. One day, the girl invented a game by which they chased Resi with curved sticks and the one who could grasp his collar and bring him down into the snow was the winner. The girl almost always won, but Robinson thought it was mostly due to Resi feeling sorry for her.

The fiercest storm came at the end of December and for two long weeks, they remained confined inside. Robinson was reading through the latest collection of books for the second time when he noticed something hanging from the wall. It was a calendar turned oddly enough to December.

He looked to the girl and said, “You know, I still don’t know your name.” The girl looked at him strangely. “I mean we are living together. And will be at least until spring. Don’t you think we should be on a first name basis by now?”

Her eyes narrowed the way they always seemed to when he’d overstepped himself.

“Fine, I’ll start,” he said, pointing to himself. “I am
Robinson. Robinson Crusoe.
And you are?”

When he pointed to her, she looked very self-conscious.

“Me,
Robinson Crusoe
,” he said again. “You …?”

“
Yolareinai-esa-tu-shin-zhi-ma-coctera-wal-pan-bayamasay-fri
.”

He shook his head and then asked her to repeat it. She did.

“That’s quite a mouthful. Honestly, I was hoping for something a bit shorter. See, me,
Robinson Crusoe
. Short and sweet.” He held his hands together. “You, Yobo-sata-singa-whatever.” He held his hands far part. “Do you have a nickname?”

“Cru-soe,” she said.

“Yes! Like Crusoe. I am
Crusoe
. And you?”

“Bayamasay-fri?”

“Closer, but still …” And then he noticed some words scribbled on the calendar. The ink was faded but he could just make out, “Thank God it’s Friday!”

“Fri-day. How about ‘Friday’?”

She considered it and shrugged.

“Great. Friday, I am Crusoe. It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

He held out his hand for her to shake, but she slapped it away.

“Okay. Baby steps,” he said. “But I’ll make a civilized girl out of you yet.”

He was about to sit back down when she stopped and pointed to the water spigot and asked a question.

“Sorry, I missed the first part. And the middle and the end.”

She spoke again, this time pointing to the spigot, then to the pipes that led to the furnace, and then to the privy.

“Are you asking me
how
I built these things?”

She nodded. He turned and grabbed a book, holding it out for her.

“The wealth of the world is inside, milady. All you have to do is open one.”

She took the book and paged through several sections.

“Teach me,” she said.

Robinson smiled. “And in return, you teach me to fight.”

She paused, and then nodded. “Friday teach Cru-soe …
fight
.” But then she raised a finger and shook her head. “No Aserra.”

“Deal.”

He held out his hand and this time she took it.

And so began the days of fire and ice, of a boy broken and a man reborn. They rose each morning at the crack of dawn and struck out into the city. The first lessons were of balance and speed and the two were always in motion. They ran along paths slick with ice and atop the rims of the tallest buildings. They scaled stairs and bridges, danced over the rocks on the edge of high falls. They leaped, they crawled, and they climbed and never stopped.

At night, Robinson read aloud to her, enunciating words and ideas while his body soaked in secret salves. He explained the basics of English and math. Whenever some subject frustrated her, she scolded him for not explaining it better. When the light lit her eyes with some new wisdom, he felt his heart beam with pride.