The Second Intelligent Species: The Cyclical Earth (23 page)

The two of us set enough traps to assure raccoon for supper tomorrow night.

Marcos filled his pockets with clams. We were getting very efficient at providing for ourselves. Every stream held something, every pond, every swamp. If there was an animal living nearby, we could catch it.

Pete and Jorge had brought down enough wood to last a week if needed. Supper was on the table. Well, we didn’t have a table, but we did have bowls and spoons. Forks and plates weren’t necessary because anything we ate either had a bone we could hold on to, or was made into stew. Plates would just be that much extra weight to carry when we were traveling around the swamps. No napkins, just our sleeves; those of us who had them.

Possum stew and freshwater clams made up the entrée. At one time I never would have eaten freshwater clams. They were too full of heavy metals to make them safe to eat, but now it was a short term goal to survive, not a long term one.

We all had full bellies and plenty of water.

The children were able to play around the wall on the dry slope of the riverbank. We could see them from a distance due to the size of the fire. It lit up the whole area and beyond. We loved the light, and there were plenty of railroad ties. There was sign up stream and we hadn’t even checked down stream. All was good.

Marcos, Tara, and Eve were throwing stones into the water at the other end of the trestle. Beth was watching them like a hawk—no an owl. They see better in the dark.

Sarah and Pete were talking alone up by the entrance to the trestle.

Maria and Jorge were devoting all their attention to the new baby. When Maria wasn’t nursing the baby she was busy making him a wrap made out of muskrat fur, it was the softest fur we had. The snows had ceased, but the nights were still cold, especially for an infant.

Beth and I were left alone for the first time since we found the other nurses and the children. The crying had stopped long ago and laughter took its place.

“Do you want to go wash up at that pond upstream you told us about?” Beth asked with a subtle tone in her voice that I thought had gone extinct with most everything else.

“We’ve got some traps set up there. Wanna explore downstream? I’ll rig up a torch.” I didn’t want to disturb the area and ruin the trapping where Marcos had worked so hard. I wanted him to find something in the morning.

Pete and Sarah returned.

I liked to pick on Pete. He was so quiet for such a big man. “Where have you two been?” I asked, just to get a rise out of him.

“Sarah was just telling me about the trains that used to travel on the tracks.” Pete looked down at Sarah and smiled. “She was telling me about the…”

Beth interrupted. “Sarah, can you watch the kids while we go look for more tracks?”

“Yea, we’ll watch ’em,” Sarah said with her usual snotty tone of voice. She only talked to Beth that way. She was slowly becoming tolerant of everyone else.

We walked away holding hands, until Beth turned and said, “Don’t let them out of your sight!”

“Let’s go, Beth!” I yanked her by the hand before she could ruin the moment with a confrontation. “Thanks, Sarah. We won’t be gone long.”

“We better be.” She jumped up to whisper in my ear. When she came back down she grabbed my ass—the first time since her grandbabies died.

We walked along the riverbank until the light from the tunnel could no longer be seen. That’s
when Beth took the torch from my hand and stuck it in the stream, drowning its light.

“Guess, it’s going to be harder to find tracks now, isn’t it?” In the second after the words were out of my mouth, Beth’s tongue was in it.

All the emotions suppressed due to the conditions of the past ten months surfaced on that sandy bank.

The last time I’d been with Beth, she was a third heavier. I was seeing Beth as she was twenty years ago. This was the first I noticed.

The aches and pains that accompanied both of us disappeared briefly as adrenalin substituted for Oxycodone.

This was the therapy we both needed.

“Well nurse… I think…I’m cured!” Breathlessly, I looked up at her. There wasn’t enough light to make out the color of her hair. I knew it was grey, but in the dark, it was red again. It had grown back.

“You’re the patient…I’m the nurse… I’ll tell you…when you’re cured…. You need some more… sessions,” she said as she collapsed and lay on the sand.

The love we made that night had more passion than the first night we spent in the camper, or any time in-between, and this time she was sober.

Once we both caught our breath, we shook the sand out of our clothes and went back to the others. Our torch was out.

Beth found it romantic that we walked arm in arm back to the others, but it was due to my weakened legs that the trip back took longer. I’ll never tell her that.

“Where did you guys go?” Marcos said. Our arrival distracted him from a drawing he was scratching on the concrete walls of the trestle.

“We just went down stream to look for more signs of wildlife. Uh… then our torch went out,” I said.

“Did you find any? Are there more coon tracks? You told me that I was going to help you do more scouting. You’re going to take me tomorrow, aren’t you, Nick?”

“You bet. I know you’ll have something,” I said in an attempt to stymie his curiosity of our whereabouts.

“What are you drawing?” Beth asked, having the same goal.

“It’s Mommy.” He had never talked about his mother when we asked what happened to her.

Beth placed the torch into the fire to ignite the oil-soaked fibers and held it closer to the drawing. Only when the wind blew steadily, carrying away the smoke, could the full image be seen all at once.

He had scratched a picture of a woman with her clothes and hair on fire. The picture was within a circle, except for the arms. The arms extended out of the circle as if hanging down. The mouth of the woman was open wide as if screaming out in pain.

“Was that the last time you saw your mom, Marcos?” I asked.

“This is when she put me under the road, in that hole that they were working in. She put me in and then dropped me. I fell to the bottom and couldn’t get back up to Mommy to help her. Fire, and sparks, and smoke was coming in the hole, then she was gone. After that I had to run down into the dark, it was burning me. There was two other guys down there. They had white hardhats. I think they died when it was so hard to breath.” His demeanor had turned quite somber.

Beth placed her arm around his shoulder. “Hey, Marcos, Nick says you’re pretty good at setting traps and should have us a coon for supper tomorrow.”

Instantaneously his expression changed from one that was about to develop tears, into a full-blown smile. The only other smile I have seen bigger was that of Jorge when Maria’s baby was born.

Chapter 34

The Wall

The whole side of the wall of the trestle was covered with artwork, but only up to about four feet. Most of it was indistinguishable scribbles. Marcos’ drawings could be identified. There was the one of his mom. There was one of a campfire surrounded by the exact number of people in our group. My favorite was one of him with his first coon. He spent a great deal of time insuring the coon was as close to the real thing as he could. He did a good job.

Beth and I were looking at the newest renaissance when she inquired, “What would you draw?”

I thought for a while, then I said, “A deer, I guess. I don’t know.”

“You can’t draw a deer.”

Of course I couldn’t. “Why not? I’m the artist. I can draw anything I want.”

“It would be like drawing a dinosaur. They don’t exist in our world. This wall could be a message to other survivors. If we draw deer, they might think we found some. We should draw pictures of animals that still exist, the ones that we are living
on, and instructions on how to catch them. Let’s make this place a library of the most important facts of our time, so others might have a better chance.”

Before we left, that shelter was covered on both sides with drawings, tips on how to survive, and lots of examples of how it used to be.

The remaining space belonged to the adults. Extra torches were put about until the whole trestle was lit up. We became obsessed with the project. We eventually erected scaffolding made from piled up railroad ties to extend our reach higher.

I illustrated how to make deadfalls, and snares for those who didn’t have leg traps like we did. I went into detail about the process of skinning and butchering. I contributed survival tips.

Beth, Sarah, and Maria worked together on first aid tips, and basic life saving techniques.

Maria wrote down recipes for all the things we have been eating. She scratched several prayers into the area surrounding a very life like portrait of Emanuel and herself.

The portrait was Jorge’s contribution. “I like it, but I wish I had a way to add color. Your beautiful brown hair and eyes look black. I want to show what you look like in the sunshine.”

Sarah sat up bumping Pete’s big nose as she rose. “We can get you some paint, Jorge.” She stood up and headed for the stream. Unsure of her footing
on the rocky riverbed, she carefully looked at the rocks, torch to the ground. She would pick one up, look at it, and either toss it back in the river or put it in one of her pockets.

When she returned she took some of the raccoon fat that we used to grease our boots to make them more waterproof, and put it in a pot to render it down. The smell gagged any of us who were unfortunate enough to be down wind. While the fat was slowly heating, Sarah began crushing white, brown, red and black pebbles between two flat stones. She kept each type of rock in a separate pile consisting of now, only dust. She took the fat, rendered down to liquid, and mixed it with the powered stones, a little at a time until the dust took the appearance of four separate colors of paint on an artist pallet.

“Here you go Jorge, here’s your paint.” Sarah handed the flat stone to Jorge. “You’ll have to find something for a brush.”

Jorge accepted the gift. His smile said thank you for him.

“Come here girls.” Both toddlers ran up to Sarah. “Put your hands up to the wall and I’ll paint you.”

The children and Marcos put their hands up against the wall as if they were being frisked. Sarah held one hand from each while she blew the remaining dust from the stones against their little
fingers. After each pulled away, the silhouette of a hand remained on the side of the wall.

“How did you know how to do that?” Beth asked.

“I had other aspirations in college, but as you know, nursing paid the bills.” This was the first cordial answer Beth had ever received from Sarah.

Pete added nothing to the wall. He forfeited his share to Sarah and spent his time building scaffolding, then tearing it down to rebuild it again.

The apparent truce between Beth and Sarah was short-lived. Sarah started using more than her share of space to write down the history of the world up to the point that things went to hell.

This caused things to go to hell here. Beth could take no more. “You don’t have to write so big. You’ve taken up enough of the wall as it is.”

Sarah stopped writing and turned to give Beth one hell of a glare. “This is important historical information. There may be no records left. This might be a last chance to preserve history. That’s more important than the planets or that junk you’re writing about anyways. Nobody cares about that shit.”

This was a blatant frontal attack on Beth’s religion. She retaliated. “Just what is so important about the history of the human species? That he existed?”

“We need to study history so we won’t repeat the same mistakes,” Sarah argued.

“We had the chance to study history and learn from it but we didn’t,” Beth responded.

“What do mean?” Sarah asked, with a more reserved tone, she was trying to think what part of human history Beth was talking about.

“We knew what happened to the dinosaurs, but we had a, ‘That will never happen to us,’ attitude. Our arrogance, and faith in our technology, caused us to neglect the possibility that this could happen. We learned from our history, but not the planet’s. If more people would have concentrated on science, this may have been prevented.” She was trying her best to defend her need to put down her passion on the wall too. “Plus, that’s all your writing is about, the human history. If there isn’t something left about science, then any other people finding it …” reasoning temporarily escaped her. “They still need to know….” Tears streamed down her face. “Maybe it doesn’t matter.” She was growing tired of arguing with Sarah. This wasn’t the Beth I used to know. She would never have given up her faith this quickly before.

“Okay, okay. We’ll split Pete’s share.” Sarah mellowed knowing her victory was bittersweet. A half of Pete’s share was her way of saying sorry.

Beth was happy with the extra space to record her science. They both started writing smaller,
just to fit as much material on the wall as possible. This might be one of our last chances to rerecord history. We had to let somebody know what had been.

Nobody suspected that Sarah was so knowledgeable when it came to history. She had been a history major before she had taken up nursing. Her addition to the wall seemed more important to me than some of the science stuff that Beth contributed, but I would never say that out loud.