Epitaph Road (5 page)

My dad, Charlie Winters — Mr. Lucky, he called himself sometimes — dodged the near-holocaust when he was just a baby, and then survived Elisha when he was about my age. Later, he passed his trials, and he and Mom, once they got together, received authorization to have a baby. Dad, like most men who hadn't been outright sterilized, was surgically implanted with a hormone-excreting gadget to drastically reduce the chances of him producing a male infant, but he managed to do it anyway. I showed up nine months later — an instant marvel, I'd been told.

But Dad didn't stay around for long.

When I was five, he decided he was tired of living under the government's constraints. And he no longer wanted to be in Seattle, the city where Elisha had sucked the breath out of his own dad — my grandfather Joshua.

Dad had tasted life before the restrictions. And now that marine life had returned to the Olympic Peninsula waters, he yearned to be there. He moved to a place called Afterlight, a mostly male commune.

Throwback
was the term used for people living in the small loosely organized collectives scattered around the world who preferred living their lives closer to the way lives were lived PE. Dad, though, wasn't under an illusion that things had been better in the old days. He mostly just wanted to be let alone. To be what some people called a
loner.
He restored an old commercial fishing boat and rechristened it — what else? —
Mr. Lucky
and began fishing the Strait of Juan de Fuca for salmon, halibut, and cod. The boat became his home.

Sometimes I got to spend time with him when he came to the city to sell his fish. He'd call me, and I'd bike to the dock and meet him for lunch. Afterward we'd take a walk or he'd give me a ride on
Mr. Lucky.
He'd always let me drive from high on her flying bridge, and when the cool, salted wind hit my face, I'd dream about having my own boat someday, being my own boss, and not being under someone's — nearly
everyone's
— thumb.

I wondered — when Mom finally let me go see him and he took me out on the water again — would he still let me skipper
Mr. Lucky
? Or was that part of my life gone?

If I had a son — or daughter — and I decided to leave the city, I'd take him or her with me. If I absolutely couldn't take the crap, I'd try my hardest to take the kid.

Mom seemed to have conveniently forgotten her promise that I could visit Dad for the first time this summer, but I wasn't going to stop riding her about it. A promise was a promise. And I wanted to go soon, before I had to begin cramming for my trials. I'd have to travel with babysitters —
Minders
was what the government called them — but I was used to that, kind of.

A soft buzzer sounded, marking the end of class, and I gazed across the room toward the windows as everyone began packing up. With the addition of Sunday and Tia, there were now two males and thirty-seven females in the history class, a close reflection of the population at large. The Council had done an efficient job of maintaining the nineteen-to-one ratio, even as the world's population continued to shrink toward a goal of two billion. A smattering of the throwbacks and loners out in the hinterlands and the few fertile women they attracted had babies, including boy babies, but there weren't enough fringe people to make a difference, especially with recurrences of Elisha keeping them in check.

Anderson transmitted the next day's take-home assignment — excerpts from a PE watchdog Web site — to our e-sponds, and we headed for the door. Sunday and Tia were surrounded by other girls, their newly formed fan club. Dawn hurried out by herself. In a classroom where it was cool to be smart, she'd made a curious choice.

Ernie, in the center of his own group of girls, caught up to me at the elevator. “Good question, Ern,” I said, and he smiled a little. But he looked especially nervous. When we'd first gotten into Anderson's history class together I tried to get him to hang out with me some, but he had way more excuses — the trials, his mother's health, and, I was almost sure, my mother's PAC connection — than he had time for me.

“You, too, Kellen.”

The girls in his group milled around, casually brushing up against us with their shoulders, elbows, hips. They didn't look at us. They pretended it was accidental. The contact, not just at school but everywhere, bothered me at first, but I'd gotten older, and accustomed to the uncomfortable yet comforting feeling that girls were so close to me, that they wanted to be.

Aunt Paige said not to get a big head over it, that girls were curious about anyone with different body parts, and getting close kind of satisfied that curiosity. I knew she was right. Ernie, with his sad face and unsociable ways, was proof of that.

When we passed through the lobby on the way out, I got a little too near The Groundskeeper and Petey. Somehow, in the midst of all the smells surrounding her, she picked out mine. Or maybe she just assumed I was somewhere in the pack of departing kids. Maybe she was showing off for the new girls. “Safe journeys, Kellen,” she sang out to me in her gravelly, sexy voice. She inhaled, big, and held it in as I walked by. She smiled. I couldn't see her eyes, but I knew they were twinkling with mischief.

“You, too, Petey,” I said.

“That's disgusting,” Tia said as we approached the door, but she was trying to hide a grin.

“This ain't Nebraska,” Sunday said. “It ain't 2066.”

We got on our bikes and headed for home. I told them to lead the way, see if they could avoid getting lost, pass the Seattle geography test, and I was sure they could, but they were content to cruise along beside me.

When we got to the house, a strange car was parked in the driveway. I peered through its windows, looking for clues to its ownership. Two briefcases sat on the backseat; one of them looked familiar.

Tia and Sunday didn't care about the car or its contents. They were already on the front porch, opening the door. Just on the other side stood two women. One of them, old but tall and unbent, I didn't recognize. The other one was a surprise.

A few days,
Mom had told me when she left, and for once she'd been accurate. Her trip didn't stretch out to a week or two or three. She spotted me, pushed past Tia and Sunday, and hurried down the steps. I met her halfway, and we tried to out-crush each other. It was a draw, but I was sure I'd get her next time. I was getting bigger and stronger; she was getting skinnier and older.

She kissed me on the tip of the nose and both cheeks, something she'd learned on her travels to some foreign land, no doubt, a remnant of the Russian or French cultures. I half expected her to kiss my hand next. “I'm so happy to see you, Kellen,” she said, not letting go of my arm but allowing me to start for the house. “I missed you.”

“Me, too,” I said, even though I hadn't been that thrilled with her the last time we “visited.” And I hadn't really had time to miss her. Three or four days or whatever it had been was a short absence for my globe-trotting mother. She said she was happy to see me, but her eyes didn't look happy. They still looked tired. Once more, I wondered what was going on.

We reached the front door, where Tia, Sunday, and the old woman were hanging out. I should have been embarrassed at Mom's public display of missing me, but I wasn't. I'd been under the microscope for so long, I'd quit caring.

“Septiembre and Sunday, this is my mom, Dr. Heather Dent,” I said. The majority of kids — and I was in the majority — shared their mothers' last names. Marriages, on the rare occasions they occurred, tended not to last. A lot of married men, even though they'd passed their trials and maybe had a kid, succumbed to the multiple temptations to wander, in every meaning of that word. Single dads were even less likely to stick around. Moms were the constants in kids' lives.

“Tia,”
Tia said.

“I love your names,” Mom said. “Sunday and Septiembre. How beautiful.”

“Tia,”
Tia repeated.

“And this is Dr. Rebecca Mack,” Mom said, nodding toward the old woman, and I found myself instantly zeroing in on her. Up close her crumpled tissue-papery skin made her look older, but her eyes reminded me of the fierce, watchful eyes of an owl I once did a face-to-face with at wilderness camp.

“Sunday,” she said, shaking Sunday's hand warmly. “Septiembre.” Another friendly handshake, even though I was sure Rebecca Mack caught Tia's eye roll at the use of her full name.

“Rebecca, this is my son, Kellen,” Mom said, and it was my turn for a handshake.

This one was even warmer. And for an old woman, she had a grip. She hung on tight while she smiled and said, “I've heard so much about you, Kellen. Your mother thinks you walk on water.”

“Nice to meet you,” I lied. Besides being Mom's demanding boss, Rebecca Mack was the chairwoman of PAC, the organization dedicated to
keeping me
from walking on water. Closing in on eighty years old, she was still running the worldwide show.

What was
she
doing here? I wondered, but I didn't ask. I knew what was okay by now, and asking about Mom's work definitely wasn't.

I remembered Anderson once referring to the old lady as “Mack the Knife,” which prodded me to do a Net search. I'd discovered that “Mack the Knife” was a once-popular song originally written for a 1920s play called
The Threepenny Opera.
That was about as far as my curiosity took me. I chalked up the nickname to the good doctor maybe having a background as a surgeon before moving into her current line of work. It was as good a guess as any.

We went inside, where the air felt heavy and lifeless, the colors looked murky. Mom and Rebecca Mack headed to the study, talking in low voices. The girls invited me to do homework with them at the kitchen table, but I was ready for breathing space. I carried my backpack to my room, turned on some music, and hit the button on my e-spond to load the assignment onto my desk display. In an instant the words
HISTORY LESSONS
,
COURTESY OF PAC ARCHIVES
,
EXCERPTED FROM JUNKYARDDOG
.
BITES
, showed up on the big screen. But the vision of San Francisco evaporating was still stuck in my brain, replaying itself again and again. It shoved everything else to the fuzzy edges of my mind.

I touched the
PRINT
command on the screen and my printer began spitting out the information while I sat and started spooling slowly through the stuff on the display. I noticed the heading again.

Now I was focused enough to wonder what PAC had to do with Anderson's assignment. I puzzled over the question for a moment, but then I dove in. It looked like a big batch of heavyweight facts, and I didn't have all day to devote to studying. I wasn't going to obsess over this. I wasn't Ernie.

True once, but when I was ten, Mom and I took the flash train to Montana. A new glacier was forming on a high peak at the park. People had come from all over the country to admire it, as if it were a newborn baby with the cutest nose ever. Mom cried when she saw it. Tears of elation, she said.

Hood Canal.
I thought about my dad, the fisherman. Mr. Lucky. What would he have done if the fish hadn't made a comeback?