Authors: Thomas Christopher
Back inside the rooming house, Eve was gone, but the hairy landlord was standing there with a scowl on his face.
“This place is locked up for the night. There’s a blackout coming.” He paused and rummaged in his vest pocket and pulled out his mobicom.
“But I only went out once,” Joe said.
“Don’t get smart with me.”
“Is there any food we can have?”
“What’s with all the questions? You only paid for a room.”
“How much is food?”
“How much do you have left?”
“Just give me a price,” Joe said.
“Twenty-five.”
“I don’t have that.”
“Not my problem.”
“What if I just buy a little bit, enough for tonight?”
“Room and board for a week is fifty, no exceptions. This isn’t a charity.”
“But my girl is hungry.”
“Open your ears. Not my problem. Either pay up or scram.”
“How do we get food, then?”
“Like all the rest of the mooches and riffraff.”
“Where’s that?”
“Figure it out for yourself!”
“Why are you being this way?” Joe fumed. “Would it kill you to help us? Forget it.”
Joe stomped up the stairs and down the hall to their room. He inserted the key, pushed the door open, and locked it behind him. Mary was still curled up on the bed. He hoped she was asleep and not waiting for something to eat. When he sat on the bed, she stretched out and pushed herself up on her elbows. He was glad to see that because it meant she wasn’t retreating back into her shell, but it also meant she was probably expecting some food.
“Our stuff was stolen,” he said. “So we don’t have anything to eat. I’m sorry. It’s my fault. We should’ve brought it in with us, so we would have it. And that stupid landlord won’t help us.”
Mary didn’t make a move at first. Then she sunk back into the bed. She drew her legs up against her belly as tight as she could and curved the rest of her body around her stomach and huddled close beside him. Joe couldn’t stand to see her disappointed.
“I can go out tonight and find some. I won’t be long.”
“No,” she said. “Stay here.”
“Honest, I won’t be long. I know just where to go,” he lied.
“Please,” she said, “stay.”
“Okay. If that’s what you want.”
“Play for me,” she said.
Joe stood up. The bed creaked as the mattress rose, rocking Mary’s coiled body. Joe walked to the dresser, picked up his recorder, and returned to the bed. Before they left on their journey, he never imagined how important his recorder would be. He’d brought it for his own pleasure, never thinking he could share that pleasure with Mary too.
He got out his recorder and played it quietly, like a whisper, next to her ear. He sang the lullaby that he told her was just for her.
“Sleep my child and stars attend thee,
All through the night . . .
I my loved ones’ vigil keeping,
All through the night.”
But before he could finish singing, there was a soft snapping sound, and then all the lights went out.
Chapter 31
The next morning, in Joe’s haste to sell the diesel and get out of the city as fast as possible, he convinced himself to forego getting any food until after the sale. He didn’t think it would take much time. He considered what was worse, being a little hungry or staying in the city any longer than they had to? Aside from that, Mary slept through the whole night and seemed to be in better spirits that morning. He thought everything was okay for now.
He took her along to search for the Industrial District and to find the steel mill where Frank had worked. It was where his older brother had told him he could find a buyer for the diesel. “Look for the fat man,” Frank
had said. “His name’s Templeton.” Frank knew because he had spent six months shoveling ore, limestone, and coke for a blast furnace. That was until he severed three fingers in a slag wagon that might’ve killed him if not for the heroics of the fat man named Templeton. When Frank returned to the farm, he was plagued with nightmares about living in the city. He said he’d never go back, but he had a pocketful of money that kept the family going. While he was there, he learned about the black market in illegal fuel. It was a dangerous game. The consequences were violent death. “Take whatever he’ll give you and get out of there,” Frank said.
Eventually they reached the shore of Lake Mashenomak, which really wasn’t a shore at all, but a concrete cliff. It dropped down to black waves tipped with white flecks of spume that lapped against the foam along the wall below. Joe stood on the edge with Mary and looked out across the black lake to a long string of windmills stretching in both directions, and then he looked even farther to where the lake disappeared over the horizon. The amount of water, the sheer size of Lake Mashenomak, was incredible to Joe. The most water he had ever seen at one time was at the waterfall. Other than that he knew water only in terms of rivers and streams. How far did the lake go? How deep did it get? What could possibly be on the other side? Who lived there?
What was even better was to finally see the clear blue sky spreading out over the water. Seeing it reminded Joe of home and how long it had been since he’d seen an unadulterated sky. In the city, all the buildings and lights seemed to cram out the sky, so you didn’t even notice it. It was something far in the background and not something that wrapped around you at every moment.
Back home, he was always aware of the sky, especially at night. He wondered how people survived without seeing the stars and the moon. Joe couldn’t imagine how, but obviously people did. One of his favorite things was to lie on his back in the pasture and look up at all the stars in the night. Gazing at the stars always filled him with a sense of wonder, both big and small. He felt part of something greater than just himself—after all, somewhere up there was the paradise of Welkenglebe, where Virid lived—but at the same time, all that greatness made him feel small. Yet somehow he didn’t feel insignificant. Far from it. He felt like he expanded, like he grew larger because those millions of stars glowing out there in the endless dark were also a part of him too.
“Back home the sky is endless,” Joe mused. “But the land is small. While here the sky is small, but the city seems endless. You know what I mean? I guess what I’m trying to say is I prefer lots of sky.”
“Me too
,” Mary said.
“We’re sky people, you and me. We’re people who need skies. Day skies, night skies. Skies all the time. Frank would say that’s a bunch of nonsense, but that’s what I think. You can’t help how you think, right?”
“Right. We’re sky people.”
“Absolutely. Hey, when we
get back home, we can lie out under the stars together. Just stretch out, side by side, and stare at all the stars. I love doing that. You can even pick a star out to be your very own, and then whenever you look into the night you will see your star. It will be your star forever. I’ll pick one too. We can both have stars. And the baby. What do you say to that?”
Mary didn’t reply, so Joe thought maybe she figured he was foolish. But that couldn’t be true. She agreed with him about being “sky people.” So maybe she was only longing for home like him.
In the distance to his right was a platform standing above the water with blinking lights on its towers. And along a pier sat an idling ship with huge smokestacks. Up and down the wharf, carts and wagons and men bustled about. Small motorized trucks emblazoned with the Guardian symbol puttered and zipped among the traffic under the shadow of countless more towers and smokestacks. Joe drove the wagon in that direction. It limped as the tire rim scraped on the ground.
They passed a huge white cooling tower for a nuclear reactor. White steam rose out the top. They rode across a bridge spanning a viaduct of streaming water that flowed out into the lake where a cloud of fog churned. Further on, they went by a long row of green algae tubes nearly a hundred meters tall. Behind them were solar collectors to fuel lights in the center of the tubes in order to keep heating the algae during the night.
Before long they came to a fenced lot with a heaping mound of black tires within it. Joe stopped in front of a small office that looked more like a shanty. Inside, a young man greeted Joe with a hearty hello. He had a bulging cheek and wore a dented derby hat with a frayed brim.
“What brings you here?” The bulge in his cheek moved.
“I need a tire,” Joe said.
“You don’t say. What a coincidence. I’m up to my ass in tires.” He smiled, showing teeth coated in something like brown shellac. He spit a thick jet of brown saliva that splatted into a tin bucket.
“Let’s take a look-see at your situation.”
Outside, the young man inspected the rim and kicked and squeezed the other tires.
“What you need is all four replaced. But I can see you aren’t a man of means. What kind of means do you have?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Joe said.
The young man laughed. “That’s funny. I’m talking money here.”
“I don’t have much.” Then Joe wished he hadn’t said that.
“That’s not good. How much do you have?”
“How much are the tires?”
“For all four?”
“For one.”
“You’re going to need two at least.”
“Okay. Two.”
“Forty shekels.”
Joe knew he didn’t have that, but he didn’t want the young man to know. Then he remembered what was in his pocket. “I got rifle shells.”
“Rifle shells? No kidding? Let me see them.”
Joe fished the five shells he had left out of his pocket and showed them to the young man.
“That’s serious.”
“How about ten shekels and two shells?”
The young man thought a moment. He spit a brown wad on the ground. “That sounds fair enough.”
Half an hour later they were running smoothly on a new tire with a spare sitting in the back. Even though he was down to three bullets, he was glad he didn’t have to give up his recorder or pocketknife. If it came down to it, he would’ve given up his pocketknife before the recorder, although the pocketknife would’ve certainly been more useful.
But the more Joe thought about it, the more he realized those extra bullets would’ve been valuable for hunting and protection on their way back home. That is if they even made it out of the city alive to get home in the first place.
Chapter 32
They passed an area that had giant boilers attached to a series of tubes. Spiky towers shot blue and orange flames into the sky. Beyond that, not far from the idling ship, he steered the wagon down a dark cinder-covered path. The path ran between a
line of railroad cars full of coal and the grimy black walls of the steel mill. Up ahead, bursts of red and orange light shot out of a doorway like gun blasts. And up above, through the open slits of darkened windows, more bursts of orange and red light.
This was the place where Frank lost his fingers, where flying sparks singed his clothes and burned scars on
to his skin, where the heat made him sweat in torrents and made his muscles ache at the end of the day, where the smoke clogged his lungs and made him spit black globs like being caught in a choking dust storm. This was the place that Frank never wanted to go back to.
“You stay here,” Joe said to Mary. “If you see anybody, duck down. If that doesn’t work, tell them you’re waiting for your dad inside the mill, okay?
“Okay,” she said.
“I won’t be long. I promise. We’ll be headed home tonight. Don’t worry.”
Although Frank had told Joe about the steel mill, nothing really prepared him for seeing the real thing. The noise inside was thunderous. A clash of lights and spraying sparks. Massive steel beams, catwalks, dangling chains, and enormous swinging hooks. Buckets bubbled over, dripping with fiery red liquid. Filthy half-clothed men clung to it all like glowing ants. In the middle of all the chaos was a giant round blast furnace that was as big as a barn. It blazed with bright orange and yellow light. At the top, bare-chested men, shining with greasy sweat, heaved wagons of raw ingredients into the smoldering charge hole. Near the bottom, snakes of molten iron flowed like lava out of holes and into buckets, which were hoisted by chains as big as a man’s leg and then poured into the volcanic top of another furnace.
At first, Joe was too overwhelmed to move. No wonder Frank had nightmares. He took a deep breath and looked around for the fat man, but he didn’t see anyone who appeared to be particularly
fat. Then he spotted a large muscular man wearing black bib overalls. He didn’t wear a shirt underneath. His greasy skin glistened from the flashes of light. Strapped around his head were strange goggles that completely encased his eyes with two cones. He looked more like a creature than a man.
Joe felt as if he were walking up to a giant. When he stood next to the side of the goggled man, he noticed little cinder burns and scars all up and down his slick arm. Joe hesitated before he reached out and tugged on the overalls at the man’s hip. He didn’t know what to expect, so he braced himself. The man lifted his head as if catching a scent on the breeze. He looked over his shoulder and then down. The lenses in his goggles blazed with bursting red light before they turned black and Joe saw himself shrunken small in the dark lenses.