Thirst (25 page)

He was able to get himself to his hands and knees and crawl toward where the sky was lightest. Rocks dug into his palms but there wasn’t any pain. They pressed into the soft spots around his kneecaps, too, but his knees were as numb as foam balls.

He was crawling through the ash again, close to where the stream had been. Where he disturbed it, small clouds rose near the ground. He could see the shock of tawny sand, the brownish orange streak through the streambed. The bank was a few feet away, and it was steep. He had no choice but to tumble down—ash in his face, sand in his eyes and mouth.

At the bottom, the sand was as dry as if nothing had ever flowed above it. He touched the brown streak. It wasn’t sandy but was like clay that had dried brittle in the sun.

He lay on his back and, without the trees obstructing, he could see the sky. It had the weight of thickening custard, as if the days were no longer repeating infinitely, but getting older—and that today was of a denser quality than the last.

Something snapped behind him.

Eddie lifted just his head, his chin touching his chest.

When he opened his eyes, something rose vertically in the corner of his vision. It was as murky as a smudge.

Then clarity. He saw it—a plastic bottle with a cap.

There was water in it.

He tried to cry out, but only grunted, flailing with his dead hands and slapping at the sand. With his elbows, he dragged himself forward on his stomach and bumped the bottle, knocking it on its side. He tried to upright it, but his fingers passed over the plastic like they were only nubs of rubber. He raked the bottle closer, trapping it between his forearm and his chest. Though he was shaking, he slowly levered it upward, so that he could press the top of the bottle against his stomach, and set it standing upright in the sand. He held his breath so that he wouldn’t send it tipping over again.

There was still the problem of the cap. It was screwed down tight, and his fingers wouldn’t work to grasp it. He squeezed the bottle’s base between his forearms and bent his face over top, clutching the cap between his teeth and twisting his head until the threading gave way. Pain reached from his teeth back into his neck. A crystalline pain! Eddie felt like he’d unearthed a gem from the sand. He bit down harder and the pain spiked in the top of his skull. If he could get the liquid down, everything was recoverable. It would take a little while, like Steve McCarthy said, but it would all come flooding back.

His arms were shaking so much that his knuckles hit against one another. With the bottle between his forearms, he lifted it to his lips, but as he did, the shaking worsened, and his grip was no longer tight. There was nothing to catch the bottle as it rotated away, out of his grasp, to fall on its side. In four spasms, the water drained into the sand.

His idiot body! The hope he’d felt was trapped inside him like a toxin. Where the water had spilled, the sand was dark, and he dug at it with his elbows and then with his face, sucking
up the grit between his teeth, feeling it pack inside his lips and nose.

He turned and lay on his back again, exhausted—too exhausted to brush the sand from his face. There was no sun, but the heat came from all around. If the sun were a yoke, it had broken and spread out over the great bowl of the sky—it had spilled into the outlines of the trees.

Why hadn’t they struck him harder? It was a game they must be playing. To dangle a man’s life in front of his eyes. They’d put the water next to him just to watch him flounder. His father-in-law was right. To kill was not an easy thing. But what kind of man would exact this kind of torture—to let him die slowly in the sand with this ringing idiot hope still pushing through his veins? He could taste it. His mouth was baked closed, but felt deliciously wet. Neither was more real. He pushed his imagination back. Something deep inside him insisted that he keep what was real real—to separate it from the rest.

When he tried his eyes again, he could see the cadaverous shore. There were rocks on the riverbank, and as the light reached them, thin streams ran down their sides.

He closed his eyes and opened them again.

He saw it there—the water, trickling.

“Oh,” Eddie said, turning on his back. His mouth hung open. “Oh.”

It would happen slowly at first, but then would come the rush. He focused his eyes, and looked again at the shore—silver streams dripping and reflecting in the sun.

There was a voice around him not his own.

“Here,” the voice said.

Eddie looked up. The burnt boy was a blur against the sky, and Eddie squeezed his eyes shut, waiting for another blow.

But the strike didn’t come. The boy moved around him and Eddie could see into his charcoal face—the eyes like glass, warped and made precious by fire. The sun broke around his body and pierced Eddie’s vision. He could hear the boy’s knees scraping in the sand. Something hard pressed against his mouth, and he recoiled, but the boy touched his face. Water broke against his lips, and Eddie lunged with his mouth to catch it, keeping his lips pressed against the plastic. It was a fresh bottle, and the boy kept it tipped. Eddie gulped and coughed, and the water spilled onto his shirt.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay.” He held his hand up and the boy’s knees scraped back in the sand, and he stood above him.

Eddie’s heart beat deeply in his chest. He could feel it in his ears. Soon, though, the pounding stopped.

The boy looked down on him with tight lips as if awaiting a command.

Eddie sat up and beckoned with his hand and the boy took a step closer and held the bottle out. He took it and drank deeply again. Then he gave the bottle back, and dropped his head between his knees.

It took a moment, but he remembered. The water in the rocks. It was just feet away from him, but he didn’t lift his head. Instead, he kept it between his knees; the water had hurt his stomach where it landed.

When he looked up, he saw that the boy hadn’t moved.

“Help me up,” Eddie said, and offered out his hand.

The boy set the bottle down in the sand so that it stood upright. He squeezed a hand on both sides of Eddie’s and
leaned back. Eddie reached behind himself and got to standing. The boy slumped back and sat in the sand. He wore a bored expression.

“I’m going to save you,” Eddie said.

The boy stood up, and Eddie spoke to him as if to himself.

“Come here,” he said. “Look.”

He reached a hand into the air and steadied himself.

“It’s this way,” he said. “I saw it.”

At the rocks, though, his chest tightened. He searched over the dark crevices. He got on his hands and knees.

“Help me find it!” he told the boy. “I saw it. There was water here!”

The boy got on his hands and knees next to him, and Eddie ran his fingers over the rocks. Some were pocked and some were smooth as eggshells.

Eddie began to dig. He forced his hands between the stones to feel for dampness, but felt only dry sand. The light overhead silvered a trickle of something to his left, and he sprung for it, releasing a noise from his chest that was high and false-sounding.

For a moment, he was able to believe that
everything
was false—not just the noise he’d made, but this spot where he was digging, that the flash of water he’d seen had come from somewhere else.

Then he saw it.

It was the pom-pom thread, unmoored and stuck at the base of a rock. Had it traveled this far from where he’d placed it? Or was he still this close to home?

It fell from his grasp and reflected the light in sharp slashes where it lay.

The boy stood close by, and when Eddie looked at him, it was like he was staring into the depths of an illusion—as if the boy’s ribs had disappeared, and his heart and lungs were fluttering beneath his shirt.

Eddie closed his eyes, and when he opened them, the boy’s shirt was still again.

If what he’d seen was false, then he’d lost the truth already. What was real was somewhere out in front of him, tangled in the air, the rocks, the ash. Laura. As if she, too, were only a reflection that the sun would soon illuminate. That she might appear up ahead, waiting for him to catch up—at the bridge already, making her way to her parents’ house.

“She left it here for us,” he said, and as the words emerged, he made himself believe them. He bent to pick up the silver thread, letting it fall again so that the boy could see him do it. “She wanted us to make it here. She’s leaving me signs to follow.”

He took the boy’s shoulder to hurry him up off the bank. The shirt tore away in Eddie’s hand, but the boy’s skin was fine beneath.

On the ridge, they crouched beside a stump, and the boy put the bottle of water on the ground, his hands on his knees like Eddie’s.

“I’m going to take care of you,” Eddie told him. “She wants me to.”

The boy continued his ghostly staring.

“You’ll come with me,” Eddie said. “I’ll take you away from here. Okay? My wife,” he continued, “you met her. Up at the house.” He looked back down the hill to the bank, searching out the other silver thread, but couldn’t see it anymore.

“Where did you get the water?” Eddie asked.

The boy pointed into the woods.

“Was it a jug? A big one?” Eddie stretched his arms out in front of his chest to show the size. The boy nodded.

“Show me,” Eddie said.

Next to them, some of the ash had been trampled, exposing the ground beneath. There were footprints all around them, he saw.

“People were here,” Eddie said. “Do you know who they are?”

The boy shook his head.

Eddie tried to think.

“It’s not safe,” he said. “We’ll get the water when it’s dark.” He touched the top of the bottle. “We can refill this then.”

There were still some bushes there, and they took cover crouching next to them. The boy looked down at the streambed without speaking.

After a while, a noise pulsed through the silence. Eddie turned and saw men breaking through the brush.

He got down low and pulled the boy close in next to him. The boy’s breathing swelled and receded against Eddie’s side.

“Stay still,” he whispered, and the boy’s breathing stopped. “You’re okay. Easy. Easy now.”

The men cut down beneath them, passing so close that Eddie could see where the ash had left marks on the backs of their legs. There were no voices, only footsteps, but the sound of them rushed through Eddie’s ears like traffic.

The one in the rear carried a water jug on his shoulder like a tribesman who’d killed a translucent hog. Eddie squeezed the earth in his fists to keep from crying out.

When they were gone, he said, “Do they know where you are? Do they know you took some?”

The boy was silent.

“Where are they taking it?” Eddie said.

The boy looked down and studied the way an odd shape of stone broke from the ground in front of him.

Eddie allowed his hands to unclench. “What’s your name?” he said.

“Dylan.”

“Like
Bob
Dylan.”

The boy continued staring at the rock. It looked like a nose protruding from the ground—like a face all but buried. Eddie waved his hand across the boy’s field of vision.

“We’re going to go to my wife’s parents’ house,” he said. “They’re on well water. Do you have any idea what that means? What I’m telling you?”

Dylan shook his head.

“I think we should sleep now. It’s better to walk at night. Those are bad men, so we’ll stay away from them. It won’t be hard. We’ve got the whole woods here. Are you tired? Can you sleep?”

Eddie pulled the boy up by his wrist. With the other hand, the boy clutched the bottle of water to his chest.

“We’ll get in the leaves,” Eddie said.

There were trees up there, and the leaves were ankle deep. He mounded them between a boulder and a slope of stone. The lichen on the stone was now as crisp as insect skin.

“Get in there,” Eddie pointed, and Dylan put one leg after another into the leaf pile. “Sit down. Let me cover you up.”

He sat down and Eddie pushed the leaves up to the boy’s neck. Only his head stuck out above the pile and he looked at Eddie, blinking as if having just emerged from darkness.

“Take a sip before you go to sleep,” Eddie said.

Dylan’s arms broke through the leaves and unscrewed the cap. He tilted the bottle to his lips, and the water rolled slowly down the plastic. As it touched his mouth, he tipped the bottle back. It looked like he hadn’t swallowed any. He handed the bottle to Eddie.

“I’m good,” Eddie said, and then, “Okay. A little.” He took the bottle and gulped from it, then pulled himself away. He capped it and gave it back to Dylan. There was still a quarter of the bottle left.

“Close your eyes,” he said. “You probably don’t like to sleep when it’s still light, but try, okay? We’ve got a long way to go. I don’t want to have to carry you.”

“You won’t carry me.”

Eddie looked down to where the men had come through and saw the faintest impression of their path.

“I’ll stay up and watch. Don’t worry about them. They’re going in the other direction.”

If anyone passed, they would pass downhill from him, where the walking was easier, and Eddie would be able to see them come. He leaned his back into the rock and felt comfortable. It was strange, he thought, that the stone at his back was a comfort. He didn’t notice it, really—that was why. He picked up a handful of leaves that were light as air.

The sky overhead was a perfect blue, and his heart leapt. He swiveled in his chair and looked at the time in the corner of his computer screen. Maybe he’d be able to leave early. If he left early, he could grill up those chicken thighs, and he and Laura could have a picnic on the porch. If he stayed even another hour, he’d be too tired for that. There would be plenty of light, but that wouldn’t matter. The traffic would do him in.

When he opened his eyes, it was dark and his breath adhered to his throat as though it were lined with tape. He gasped and squeezed his lungs and sucked at the air around his face. Then he remembered the boy.

Shadows had pooled between the rocks, and he leaned over to ruffle the leaves there. He patted with his hand and felt Dylan’s bony head.