All Fall Down (3 page)

Well, one thing led to another, and Maxine
was born right around the time of the second great depression in
these parts. Things were tight, but folks where I come from, we've
learned a trick or two about surviving, even in a desert. I made
sure my little family got by. Maxine grew up, and because she had
part of me in her makeup, she grew up with a bit of a stubborn
streak and more than a bit rebellious. She struck out on her own
when she was just seventeen. I figured that was the last we'd see
of her. I kept talking to my wrist every now and then, and her
momma kept sleeping next to me right up until she got sick and
died, and then I was alone again in a place where I didn't
belong.

Or I was, right up until Maxine showed up at
my trailer one day on that big old Harley motorcycle. Maxine's
belly was huge, and although she didn't show it, I could tell she
was scared. Folks back then, they'd worked themselves into a state
about women having babies without a man around to call husband, and
here Maxine had nearly skewered the closest thing she'd ever had to
a husband of her own. Some folks might have tried to take little
Harley away from Maxine and throw her in jail without her having no
say-so about the matter.

I wouldn't have none of that, of course. I
guess people understood that because once Maxine moved in with me,
they left her alone, but that meant I was the only one around to
bring little Harley into the world.

I did my best, but my baby didn't live long
after she brought her own little baby into the world. Maxine told
me what she wanted her daughter to be called, told me I was to tell
her daughter all about her momma when I thought she was old enough
to understand, and then my baby was gone.

Let me tell you, if it hadn't been for that
squalling bundle of granddaughter in my arms, I might have decided
to join my wife and daughter in whatever awaits us all on the other
side. I'm not a religious man—anyone with any sense of history,
like a man who volunteers to document that history first-hand so
scholars back in the time I come from can study things as they
actually happened, he don't take much stock in religion given
everything that's gone on in this good world—but I would have
thought right then and there that God was punishing me for trying
to start things over again when such a thing just wasn't part of
His plan.

I sat out on the steps of my little trailer
in the middle of that hot, dry, desert night, little Harley in my
arms, and stared up at the moon. The air's pretty clear out here
when the wind's not blowing the dirt around, and there's not a
whole lot of lights so far away from anything that could remotely
be called civilization. I looked up at all those stars that filled
the night sky as far as I could see. Even in my day, we're not sure
anyone's out there, though I imagine there'd have to be. I thought
about talking into my wrist one last time, but I let that go. I
might be an alien, but my granddaughter wasn't, and somehow life
had decided that the two of us were supposed to be the only family
each other had left in this world.

"I'll make you a deal, little girl," I said
to her that night. "I'll stick around long enough to make sure you
can take care of yourself, just like your momma did, but you have
to promise me you'll stick around, too. No up and dying on me,
understand?" I'd had enough of dying to last me to the end of my
unnatural life.

She couldn't answer me except to cry. I
understood her, of course. We'd both been plopped into a world we
were unprepared for and left to fend for ourselves. I would have
bawled my eyes out, too, if I'd have thought it would have done any
good. I'd already used up all my tears saying goodbye to Harley's
momma.

Well, let me tell you, the first few years
were rocky. I'd never been meant to stay so long. Times were more
than rough—they were deadly. We wouldn't have survived, Harley and
me, if we'd lived in a city. Nothing's more vicious than people
starving while the people who're supposed to take care of them get
richer and richer. Even the book smart people from my time don't
know how people in general survived those years. A lot of
governments didn't. Ours barely scraped by.

I kept Harley safe in my little trailer, did
a bit of fishing in the desert lake named after them big monuments
in Egypt, and generally stayed out of everyone's way. I knew what
was coming, you see, which is why I stayed in the desert to begin
with. There's mines out here. When the war I knew was coming
started, I took Harley and all the supplies I'd been storing up,
and we went down into the mine at the back of my great, great,
great grandpappy's land.

Harley was a big girl of ten by then, all
gangly legs and arms and big, round, solemn eyes. I told her
stories at night about her momma when she was Harley's age, and I
told her the real story about how her momma won her daddy's
motorcycle.

"Was momma a soldier?" she asked me one
night.

We'd gone down to the lake for water, our
way lit by a quarter moon and all those bright stars, and now we
were back in our mine, sitting in the light of our single lantern.
I didn't worry about wasting lantern light. Where I come from, we
know how to make batteries last a lifetime, just one of a few
skills I know that've come in handy in this time zone.

"Now, why you think that?" I said.

Harley shrugged. "You told me she fought
daddy to win her motorcycle. That's what soldiers do, right?
Fight?"

"True," I said. "But people fight, too."

She looked at me oddly. "We don't."

I raised an eyebrow. "What about when you
don't want to do your chores?"

She made a dismissive gesture with one hand,
and for a minute my heart just about stopped beating, she looked so
much like her momma.

"That's just disagreeing," she said. "We
don't fight."

"Well," I said after I got my voice back, "I
guess if you look at it like that, we don't fight."

Harley dug the toe of her shoe in the dirt
on the floor of the mine shaft. Over the years, I'd hauled the
cinder blocks that used to be around the bottom of my trailer down
into the mine to create walls, and I bought hard plastic sheeting
to create a ceiling, but I never could figure out anything better
for a floor than the dirt that was already there.

"So, momma wasn't a soldier?"

I thought about Maxine and the tattoos she'd
covered herself in. She'd gotten herself into what some people
might call a gang and what other people, those of a more generous
nature, might call a club. Just like every other association of
people, they had disagreements with other people who weren't in the
gang, which was pretty much a nutshell version of what was going on
in the world, and why Harley and I were living in a mine instead of
my trailer.

But did that make Maxine a soldier? I didn't
think so, not the way Harley meant it.

"I don't believe your momma ever killed
anyone," I said. "So, no. She wasn't a soldier."

I could see Harley chewing that one over.
"Are you a soldier, Grandpa George?" she finally said.

My heart just about stopped beating again,
but for a different reason this time. "Why would you ask that?"

She shrugged, but she wouldn't look at
me.

"Harley?" I said.

I didn't use her name much when I talked to
her. With just the two of us, if one of us is talking, the other
one's pretty much who we're talking to. Using names means we're
serious.

"It's just..." She sighed and finally looked
up at me. "You know stuff. Like how to catch fish when no one else
can, and how you never have to put a new battery in the lantern,
and how to make this place for us to come live in just when we
needed it." She shrugged again. "I figure soldiers know stuff like
that, besides just hurting people and fighting, and I thought if
you were a soldier, you probably taught Momma some of that stuff,
too, so she could fight daddy and win and take care of me, just
like you take care of me."

I was pretty sure I got it, then. Looking
back, I'm amazed it took Harley that long to find a way to ask me
if she could count on me to take care of her. Here she was, a
little girl whose daddy didn't even know she was in the world and
whose momma had died giving birth to her. All she had to depend on
was an old man who seemed to know a little too much about a very
dangerous world.

I had no idea how long I'd be around to
protect this child. For all I knew, the government in my day might
figure out how to make this blasted thing in my wrist work and yank
me back where I belonged, whether I wanted to go or not. Would
Harley survive on her own? Probably not.

Not unless I taught her what she'd need to
know to survive.

I looked into those big, round eyes of hers,
and decided to tell her a truth I'd never breathed a word of to
anyone else in this world, not even her grandmother.

"I'm gonna tell you a story," I said. "I'm
gonna tell you where I came from, and how I know what I know, and
then I'm gonna teach you what I know so you can pass it on to your
own little girl someday."

* * *

There's a special kind of magic a
grandfather has with his granddaughter. It's called Belief.

I pretty much used up a lifetime's allotment
of Belief that night I told Harley about where I came from.

In the end, what tipped the scales in my
favor was me showing her the whatsamajig beneath the skin of my
left wrist. No, I didn't cut it out, I didn't have to. It's
designed to look like a freckle, but if you hold a flashlight up to
it just right—which I did—you can see wires and things sparkle
beneath the skin since it's not in there very deep.

I told her how I got picked to be a guinea
pig on this grand experiment to travel into the past to see
first-hand how people survived the roughest patch of time modern
man's lived through since most written and recorded history of that
time had been lost. There's a lot of history that's been lost over
the years, thanks to all the ways people have seen fit to try to
destroy each other. People like me, we try to fill in the
blanks.

See, Harley was right, I was a soldier. A
grunt, they would have called me had I enlisted in Harley's time,
or even Maxine's. I had a gift for fitting in—blending, they called
it—and too easy-going a manner to be a true soldier. Oh sure, I got
taught how to fight and kill, because even in my time, when the
world's rebuilt itself into a kinder and gentler place, people
still fight over the same things they always have. Land. Power.
Whose God is better than someone else's. Only with a whole lot less
people in the world in my day, things don't escalate the way they
used to.

Once Harley truly believed her grandpappy
was from her future, she set about learning everything I could
teach her. I taught her how to fight and how to make a battery last
darn near forever. I taught her how I could find water in the
desert in places no one in this time ever thought to look, and how
I managed to catch more fish than anybody had a right to. I taught
her about the history of the future and how things worked in my
day, and what I knew of her past and why things had turned out in
her world the way they had.

It took a while, but we had a lot of time to
ourselves. Things were getting worse in the world outside. We went
out less and less, and sometimes when fighters screamed by
overhead, their engines so powerful they made the ground tremble
and dirt sifted down from between the sheets of plastic that
covered the ceiling of the mine shaft we called home, Harley looked
at me with frightened eyes and asked me to promise her we'd get
through this.

I wasn't so worried about the fighters. I
picked my great, great, great grandpappy's land because I knew the
real fighting, the kind that left the land barren and people for a
hundred miles in every direction dead, those battles would happen
far away from my ancestor's little piece of land. What I did worry
about were gangs, the ones not all that different from the kind
Harley's momma had gotten herself involved in. While governments
were off killing each other on a large scale, gangs were pretty
much waging war on each other in the land the government forgot all
about.

One morning when Harley wasn't awake yet, I
thought I heard the rumble of a big motorcycle, like the one Maxine
had come riding home on. I'd gotten rid of her motorcycle years
ago, just couldn't handle looking at it no more, but I remembered
the way that monster sounded.

That sound meant only one thing—someone had
found my little trailer. As long as they stuck to the trailer, I'd
be happy. There wasn't much left inside anymore. We'd moved it all
to the mine, and the trailer looked exactly like what it
was—abandoned.

The explosion woke Harley up. It startled
me, I admit it. I didn't think I'd left anything inside the trailer
that would explode. Burn, yes, but not explode.

I put my finger to my lips and shook my
head. Harley understood. I turned off the lantern. We still had
enough light coming in the mouth of the mine to see by, but anyone
looking into the gloom wouldn't see us.

I never did improve the entrance to the
mine. From a distance, it looked just like what it had been before
Harley and I made it a home. Some stranger would have to go a
goodly way into the mine before he'd come across my
improvements—the cinderblock walls and the plastic sheeting, and
the extra supports I'd put up to reinforce the old timbers.

I wasn't too worried about a stranger
finding us before we spotted him. But that explosion made me worry
about a stranger who'd blow up the entrance to our mine out of
sheer cussedness. I couldn't figure out any other reason they'd
blow up my trailer.

I crept toward the front of the mine,
hugging the wall. My knees creaked these days, and I worried that
unless the strangers' ears were ringing from the explosion, they'd
hear my old knees popping and snapping from a mile away.