The Park Service: Book One of The Park Service Trilogy (10 page)

CHAPTER 19
There’s Nowhere to Go

Jimmy limps.

The crutch helps some, but not much.

“I dun’ wanna go,” he says, breaking his sullen silence.

“Me either,” I say, “but we can’t stay in the cove.”

I lead us north up the coast, retracing our journey.

We stop often to rest Jimmy’s swollen leg, nibbling on the little bit of dried fish we stuffed in our pockets before leaving the cove. I carry bedding bundled in Jimmy’s netted bag; he carries the canteen around his neck. We have our packs stuffed with furs but little else. I bring two melons, hoping to continue culturing mold, but they quickly dry out in the sun and I leave them lying baked and useless on the ground behind us.

We pass through the quiet redwood forest, somehow less impressive to me now. Reaching the boulder-strewn riverbed where I first joined the men and ate meat around their fire, we stop and make camp. We have no energy to build a fire tonight, and nothing to cook even if we did, so we lie huddled together beneath the furs and sleep beneath the cold, clear stars.

Late the next morning we come to the caldera where I met Jimmy and where we netted pigeons. His leg is too injured still for him to descend, so I leave him at the caldera lip and head down alone. I see no pigeons this time, and I have nothing to bait them with even if I did. I climb back out an hour later with only the canteen filled from the lake.

Another cold and hungry night beneath the stars, another day of Jimmy limping beside me on his crutch, and we arrive again at the cliffside caves where Jimmy’s mother nursed me.

It takes us several hours to shimmy down the path, the ledge being too narrow for Jimmy’s crutch, and him crying out in pain every time his weight hits his wounded leg. The cave is exactly as I left it, seemingly a lifetime ago. I make a bed inside the inner room and lay Jimmy on it just as I once lay.

I set about caring for him and the days bleed together until I lose track of them entirely. I spend mornings hunting food, or carving spears and catching fish. I collect water from streams and boil it, cleaning Jimmy’s wound. I find another gourd and make a second canteen. I drop my threadbare jumpsuit shorts, fashioning a kilt from skins. I tie a strip of leather into a thong and I hang my father’s pipe around my neck.

In the evenings, I squat in the cave doorway and watch the sun slide down into the ocean, the horizon burning itself into night. I can see the curve of the Earth, and I imagine our planet hurling through the deep void of space, a lucky accident circling a dying star, nothing but the net effect of some random chaos set in motion by chance, before even space or time began to expand. I used to believe in science, maybe even some cosmic wisdom behind it. I used to stare out my bedroom window in Holocene II, looking down on that Level 3 Valley, and I would tell myself that something out there, something above, knew of my existence and would not deny me.

Now I believe in nothing.

At night, I sit in the dark humming to Jimmy his mother’s song, sometimes holding him the way she held me.

One morning walking, a rabbit stops to consider me and to my surprise, it sits there looking confused while I snatch it up and break its neck. Must have never seen a human. Hanging it from a branch, I clean it with Uncle John’s knife. There isn’t much to it once the fur is off. We cook it that night over our fire, and the next day I dry the skin and cut it into thin strips and braid the strips into a thick thread that I use together with a worn leather pouch to make Jimmy and I shoes.

Jimmy’s leg heals.

He sleeps less and eats more.

He even starts telling me which herbs and spices to hunt for, making the food I cook taste better, and that’s how I know he’s better even though he says he isn’t. That, and he refuses to let me see his leg anymore when I come to empty his bedpan.

He’s physically healed but emotionally wrecked. As long as he stays tucked away in the dark, he seems able to blot out the memory of all that happened in the cove. We never talk about it. He grows weak from inactivity, turns pale from a lack of sun, and I stop bringing him food, making him eat instead with me in the outer cave just to get a spot of sunshine on his skin.

One night, after watching the sun sink beneath the waves, and after watching the sky burn red long after, I crawl into the inner cave with Jimmy and tell him what I’ve decided.

“I’m leaving in the morning.”

“Why would ya leave?” he asks.

“It’s just time to go.”

“Go where?”

“I don’t know.”

“You dun’ know ’cause there’s nowhere to go.”

“Maybe I’ll go back to where that train crashed,” I tell him. “Back to where I first climbed out into all this mess.”

“And what then?”

“Then I’m gonna follow it wherever it was headed and get some questions answered.”

“Follow the train?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Find out who’s responsible for all this.”

“For all what?”

“You know for all what—the Park Service.”

He drops his head. “Who’s gonna take care of me?”

“Aren’t you coming?”

“No, I ain’t comin’.”

“Why not?”

“’Cause it’s stupid.”

“Stupid?”

“Yeah, way stupid.”

“Fine. You’re on your own,” I say, heading for the flap to the outer cave. “I’m out of here.”

“What’ll ya do if ya find ’em?”

“Uh, well ...,” I stammer, pausing to turn back and wondering the same thing myself. “I’m not sure.”

“Sounds like a great plan.”

“Anything beats rotting in here with you.”

“Suit yerself,” he says, flopping back on his bed.

“I’m leaving at sunrise,” I say. “And not one minute after.”

“Good luck,” I hear him reply as I shut the flap.

I storm into the outer cave and sit in the doorway to watch the stars and wait for morning.

Part Three
 

CHAPTER 20
Just Passing Through

Jimmy nudges me awake with his foot.

“Sun rose an hour ago,” he says, looking down at me, the hint of a smile playing on his face. I scramble up from the cave floor where I fell asleep and brush myself off.

With everything we own strapped to our backs, we set off together north toward the delta where I first saw him squatting on that rock and sending the sun to bed. We have the crude kilts we’re wearing, our fur-stuffed packs, the shoes I fashioned together, and two full water gourds. Jimmy has his knife, I have Uncle John’s, and we each have a spear carved from red alder.

Even though Jimmy’s leg is fully healed, he walks with a limp, and we use our spears as walking sticks to lighten the load. The days have grown shorter, the morning air crisp with the coming fall. When we reach the delta and turn east to follow the river, the trees have already turned and their orange leaves catch the setting sun and cast the hills in a painter’s light.

We walk until dark and we make a fireless camp on a sandy shoal beside the river. We lie there beneath the clear night sky and listen to the soft ripple of water rolling over stones.

“Aubrey?” Jimmy says softly, just before we drift off.

“Yeah, Jimmy.”

“Thanks.”

“Thanks for what?”

“Thanks for ever-thin’.”

“Even for making us leave?”

“Yeah,” he says. “That too.”

In the morning we bath in the river, wading in the cold water, spearing trout. I gut them while Jimmy builds a fire. The fish make a light breakfast and we’re both still hungry, but we lick our fingers, kick sand over the fire, fill our canteens, and set off following the river up.

The river runs lower than before, and when we reach the falls, they look like no big deal so I don’t even bother bragging about climbing down them myself. Above the falls, the fields of wheat have been trampled and eaten down to the nubs by some grazing beasts, leaving the river fully exposed, its banks littered with the gray carcasses of rotting fish everywhere. Nothing left but bony heads with hooked snouts and hollow-picked eyes. I poke one with my spear and a cloud of flies rises into the air, revealing the inner framework of a fish, the intricate woven basket of tiny translucent bones, and then the flies settle again. The whole river reeks with a rotten odor that reminds me of the cove, and we leave our canteens unfilled and move into the quiet alpine forest, heading higher.

By late afternoon, we come to the edge of the treeline and stand looking up the canyon at the trestle where I stood and watched the sunrise on my first day in the world.

“So that’s it, eh?” Jimmy asks.

“That’s it.”

It’s much slower going up loaded with our packs than it was coming down running for my life. We work our way up the canyon in long switchbacks, using our spears for balance and keeping the trestle above us in sight. When we reach the foot of the trestle, Jimmy looks up and sighs.

“No way I’m climbin’ that,” he says.

“Wait here, I’ll go check it out.”

I’ve grown much stronger, and this time I climb the trestle with little effort and not once do I fear I might fall.

Scrambling over the edge, I stand and look at the tunnels. They’re closed. Iron doors sealed shut on either side. The track glints in the sunlight, its electromagnetic plates smooth as glass. No rocks, no wreckage, everything has been put right again.

I look out over the landscape. The treeline, the rolling hills, the river running through the valley. The late sun is orange on the horizon and it lights the world below me in soft pastels so that if I didn’t know the evil that happens here, I’d think it a paradise still. But I know what horrors lurk beneath the beauty, and I almost wish I’d never seen it at all.

I climb down and rejoin Jimmy.

“No going that way anyway,” I say. “It’s all sealed up.”

He nods. “What now?”

“Well, at least we know what direction it was headed.”

“Where’s that?”

“Northeast there,” I say, pointing toward the jagged peaks now dark and distant in the setting sun.

“Oh, great,” Jimmy says, shaking his head. “It would be over the damn mountains.”

“I’m not happy about it either.”

Neither of us says another word—we just poke around the base of the trestle inspecting the steel joints.

Jimmy whistles; I throw stones.

The sun sets the rim of the world afire, and we drift to the trestle and sit together on a beam looking down the canyon, watching it burn out. The heat drains away with the color, the stars blink on one by one, and cold creeps into the canyon.

We lie down and cover ourselves with our furs, tossing and turning on the hard ground, and finally falling asleep.

I dream I’m underground again, standing at the train platform and a thousand blank faces stand beside me, their features melted away or not yet cast, and the train slides in from the tunnel and the doors slide open and we file into the cars and sit facing the movie screen ahead. The train glides off, and the screen blinks on and shows us a movie—the slaughter in the cove. Screaming men diving from boats, cannons tearing them to shreds, bodies drifting in bloody tides. All the faceless people begin to laugh, as if it were all some great joke, and I scream at them from my seat to be quiet, to turn the horror show off, but they only turn their heads and laugh at me, every one of them with my father’s face.

Something wakes me in the cold blackness of night.

I sit up and see Jimmy’s sleeping silhouette, and all around us is quiet and dark. Even the stars seem far away and only half lit now. I lay back and search for sleep again.

Just as I’m drifting off, I hear a metallic knocking echoing softly through the trestle beams, as if some deep and sleepless machine were bent already to its mindless work.

The next day, the mountains seem farther away.

We climb higher and higher, cresting ridges and dropping into low saddles between them, up again, over again, and the mountains in the distance never seem to grow any closer at all.

The few animals we drive out ahead of us are skittish and we never get within spear’s reach of anything. Jimmy spends an afternoon whittling a pine bow while we walk, but the wood is too soft for shooting arrows, and we have nothing to string it with besides. As our smoked fish reserves run low, I realize just how dependent we were on the sea for our protein. The river streams we cross are shallow; the tiny trout are impossible to spear and hardly worth the energy to catch.

On the third day, we crest a high ridge and get a good look at the mountains we’re headed for. They run north and south, rising before us like a jagged snow-covered wall, piercing clouds that gather and form around their summits.

I shiver with cold just to look at them.

“Maybe we’re going in the wrong direction?”

“Nah,” Jimmy says. “The flyin’ drones always come over the mountains. Had an uncle set out to find ’em once.”

“Did he make it?”

“No.”

We make camp on level ground near the top of a ridge and the wind comes howling up from below, whistling through the canyons all night so we hardly sleep at all. Moving on in the gray light of dawn, we crest the ridge and stand looking down on a swath of charred spires poking out of a thick fog.

We descend into the fog and make our way over the rocky, charcoal ground in near zero visibility. The burnt trees seem to grow out of the fog itself as we pass, materializing like eerie ghosts holding their black, skeletal arms aloft. We come upon a single green tree in that fog, a tree untouched by the fire, and on a low limb sits a large white owl, an owl as pure as snow in all that black. Its red eyes glow with some inner fire, or perhaps still reflecting the fire that passed, and it looks as if it’s been perched there forever and will be forever perched, waiting for the forest to regrow and then burn again. I lift my spear to take a try at him, but Jimmy grabs my arm and shakes his head. The owl follows our crossing with the slow turn of its head and then its red eyes blink and disappear into the fog again.

Hours later, we pass through the fog and stand looking down a V-shaped valley at a raging river in our path. We walk several kilometers north to find a shallow crossing where we strip naked and stuff our clothing in our packs and hold our packs up over our heads and wade into the freezing current. Jimmy slips once and nearly sets off downriver, but I catch his arm until he finds his footing and we both climb onto the far bank, shivering with steam rising of our naked backs.

The bluff above the river is steep, only one narrow path made by some migratory animal crossing, or maybe just carved by chance of nature. Halfway up it, we see two figures coming down the path toward us.

“Maybe we should go back,” I say.

“They’s already seen us.”

“All the more reason to turn around.”

“Makes us look chicken,” Jimmy says, pulling his shoulders back and walking on with stiff strides to hide his limp.

The sun has risen behind the approaching figures and we can’t make them out until they stop, a meter ahead and slightly above us, no room on either side to go around them.

The lead man is a massive bundle of filthy furs, his knotted dreadlocks hanging like tentacles from his greasy head, thick as rope and nearly dragging on the ground behind him. He has a long wooden bow and a quiver of red-feather fletched arrows hanging around his chest, a gnarled staff in one hand, and the end of a leash in the other. At the other end of his leash dances a strange little man collared at the neck. He might be fifteen, he might be fifty. He’s naked save for a filthy cloth at his groin, his ribs showing beneath gray skin, his bare feet as big and flat as seal flippers. A hideous pink tumor grows from the side of his neck like a second aborted head, and he leans his ear into it as if listening to something it might be whispering to him as he hops from flat foot to flat foot and sucks his few remaining teeth.

The big man holds his leash and takes us in with squinted eyes but says nothing. After several moments standing off like this, he slides the looped end of the leash over his staff, gathers up his mop of dreadlocks with his freed hand, sweeps the hair around, sits down on a rock, and lays the hair across his lap. A bone knife handle shows from his belt and he sits with his hand just inches from it, twisting the nappy locks of his hair between his filthy fat fingers. He opens a hole in his beard and spits a mouthful of brown juice into the path and says:

“Where ye boys headed?”

“We prefer keepin’ to us own selves,” Jimmy says.

“Wise more times than not,” the man says, spitting again. “But I’s jest askin’ where you’s all headed.”

“We’s headed yonder to the ocean,” Jimmy says, a layer of sarcasm in his voice. “Goin’ for a swim.”

The man nods the way we came up. “Ocean’s thataway.”

“Maybe we’s headed to the other one,” Jimmy says.

The man laughs, his huge belly shaking, the freak dancing faster on his leash. Then his laugh cuts off abruptly and he spits another mouthful of juice on the ground.

“Ye got any women with ya?”

“Where would they be,” Jimmy says, “in our packs?”

“Yer friend’s got his self a smart mouth to go with that limp of his,” the man says, turning to search my face.

Right away I recognize the look of a bully in him. I know he’s testing me for weakness, calculating my resolve, so I lean on my spear and tilt it just enough in his direction that it could be taken as either natural adjustment or a threat. He’s above us on the trail, and that gives him an advantage, but coming down against two grounded spears gives us an edge. He eyes my spear and taps his finger on the bone handle of his knife. He smiles; his leashed man-boy hops from foot to foot.

I nod to the path beyond.

“We don’t want to hold you two up any longer. We’re just passing through.”

“Passin’ through, eh?”

“That’s right, passing through.”

“Ain’t ever last one of us?” he says.

Then he looks past us to where we came up, as if to see if any others are following.

“Jest curious if y’all travelin’ with any women,” he says. “You’s pretty young yet, the both of ye is, and I’d bet my son here ya didn’t nurse one another takin’ turns at the other’s dry little tits. Or did ya now, boy?” He spits again.

“No women,” I say. “Just us two crossing the mountains.”

“Shit. Over there? You know what’s over there, boy?”

“No. What’s over there?”

“Ain’t nobody know ’cause ain’t nobody never crossed them mountains,” he says, looking back and shaking his head.

“Well, you’s musta come over ’em,” Jimmy says.

“Nah,” he replies. “I was trackin’ something sure, but had to quit the trail or we’d all be dead on the mountain by dusk.”

“Well, whatever you’s trackin’ seemed to prefer its odds up there better’n down here with you,” Jimmy says, spitting on top of the man’s brown stain.

“As she oughta,” the man says, tagging the spot again and grinning as if enjoying the contest. “As she oughta. But evens if ye could cross, there’s evil over there, boy. Evil for sure.”

“We’ll take our chances,” Jimmy says.

“Isn’t there a pass?” I ask.

The dreads slide across his lap as he turns to look up at the mountain, as if searching it for a pass he might have missed.

“Nope,” he says, simply. “Not for a hundred miles either way. Only way over’s straight across the summit itself.”

“Ain’t no mountain cain’t be climbed,” Jimmy says.

“You’s way wrong there, young fella,” he says. “Ain’t no mountain that can be climbed. Mountain decides whether she’ll let ye pass or not. She either lifts ye over or she swallows ye up. This’n here’s hungry.” His shifty eyes train again on me. “How about coffee?” he says. “Ye got any coffee?”

“Ain’t never drank no coffee,” Jimmy says, spitting.

The man nods, as if he’d expected not. He spits again on top of where Jimmy spat. “Got any tobacca?”

“Ain’t no settlin’ nowheres long enough to grow none,” Jimmy says, “And besides, we dun’ smoke.”

“Then how come he’s got a pipe hangin’ round his neck?”

My hand jumps to my neck and my father’s pipe.