Reapers Are the Angels (29 page)

Gobblers? she says.

You know, he says. Outside. What do you call them?

It’s a funny name. I just never heard them called that before.

Oh.

He looks deflated, and she feels sorry she said anything—and then she feels irritated for having to feel sorry for this boy with the big silver belt buckle.

But he gathers himself together again, tying himself into a
bow tie of optimism and gladness, and takes her by the hand and walks her up and down all nine city blocks of Longview, Texas.

Her palm is getting sweaty, and she tries to squirm it out of his hand, but he won’t let go. He smiles as he talks to her and looks straight ahead, as though confident that once they are married he will have a whole lifetime to gaze upon her.

What do you like to do? he asks her.

What do you mean?

Temple, it’s frustrating the way you always ask what I mean.

He sighs and smiles at her, bolstering his patience.

For example, he explains, I like to listen to music. And I like to read books, and I like to write stories, and we have a guitar I like to play sometimes. What do you like to do?

Most of the things she likes to do are related to the project of staying alive in the world, and those things don’t seem to be on the same level as playing a guitar. She tries to conjure up a fitting answer to his question, but she can’t.

Those same things, she says. I like those same things.

We have a lot in common, he says.

Right. Look, I gotta go.

All right.

Still holding her hand, he positions himself directly in front of her.

I enjoyed our date, he says.

Sure. Me too. Thanks for the Coke.

I would enjoy doing it again sometime.

That’s fine, but I ain’t stayin in Longview. I mean, it’s a nice place and everything, but Maury and me, we got somewhere else to be.

He girds himself, taking the news like a man.

I won’t forget you, he says.

Yeah, okay.

He kisses her, and it feels strange, like kissing a child on the lips. His mouth fails to connect to hers the way it should, and when he pulls away she has to wipe the spit off her lower lip. She
thinks of James Grierson. His kisses tasted like whiskey, and they landed right and true.

She says goodbye to Dirk and leads Maury back to the train, where she finds Lee waiting for her.

Where you been? he asks.

I been on a date.

A date? He begins to laugh heartily. So the warrior princess of the wastes inspires a young man’s fancy.

It ain’t funny.

But it is funny, and she laughs along with him, the two holding their bellies and rioting against the dying daylight.

W
ILSON INTRODUCES
Temple to a man named Joe, who, on Wilson’s word, agrees to loan Temple a car as long as she returns it on her way back north. He tells her Point Comfort is south of Houston a little ways, about a day’s drive depending on the roads. He gives her directions, unfolding a big map on a table and tracing the route with his finger. She pays close attention to the numbers of the freeways. The 259 to Nacogdoches, where she’ll pick up the 59, and that’ll take her almost all the way there. In a place called Edna, she’ll take the 111 to the 1593.

Aren’t you going to write any of this down? Joe asks.

It’s okay. I got a good memory. 259, 59, 111, 1593.

Well, here, take the map at least.

He traces the route with a yellow marker and folds the map into a neat rectangle and gives it to her along with some sandwiches made by the woman who operates the diner and some clothes gathered up by the town’s welcoming committee.

Later that night, Lee finds her sitting on a sidewalk bench near one of the barricades where two men sit in lawnchairs with big floodlights illuminating some meager distance of the night.

He sits down next to her.

When’re you headin out? he says.

In the morning. Joe says if the roads are good I could be there by nightfall.

Uh-huh. And these people you’re taking Maury to, what if they’re not there?

I don’t know. I reckon I’ll bring him back here or take him to Dallas. Plenty of people’ll take him in.

Then what?

She shrugs.

I figure I’ll look around a little. See some things.

Listen, he says, turning to her. I suppose you won’t let me come down south with you?

You suppose correctly.

How come?

You die, and that’s one more thing I gotta carry around with me.

Temple, I’ve been livin off the land for years. I ain’t gonna die.

Sooner or later you are. I just don’t want you to be standin next to me when you do it.

You’re hard as nails, girl.

Not really.

I know.

She can feel his gaze on her, and she doesn’t want to meet it. She looks at the street. There’s something in the asphalt that makes it glisten under the streetlamps.

How about this, he says. How about you forget Point Comfort? Come with me to California instead. We’ll take the train to Dallas—and we’ll ride west from there, all three of us. What I hear, they got whole cities under protection. You could walk in a straight line for an hour and never come to a blockade. Like civilization restored.

What about Niagara Falls? Is that inside the blockade?

He sits back against the bench, defeated.

You get old, Temple. The wide world is a pretty adventure for a long time, it’s true. But then one day you wake up and you just want to drink a cup of coffee without thinking about livin or dyin.

Yeah, well, I ain’t there yet.

Goddamnit, girl, what happened to you? You got things to tell. You could tell me.

Maybe so, she says. But I ain’t there yet either.

O
N THE
road south, Maury is silent. He plays with his fingers and looks out the window, his eyes focusing on nothing in particular. In the morning, a light rain grays out the sky and falls in speckles on the windshield—but an hour out of Longview, the rain clears and the sky breaks apart into clouds that look like rag piles against the brilliant blue.

All around is flatland—desert waste dotted with tufts of pricking weeds and dry grass. Along the road, cars are pulled off to the shoulder or half rolled over in ditches. She peers into each as she goes by, looking for sheltered survivors and being relieved to find none. At the wheels of some of the cars are corpses, most of them skeletal, the skin and flesh eaten away, the bone ground clean and white by sandstorms. Others, undiscovered by slugs or locked away behind doors that slugs can’t open, are untouched, their skin leathery, burned brown, shrunk taut over the bones of the fingers and the face.

Otherwise nothing. She stops the car and shuts down the engine, she rolls down the windows to listen. Barren and empty, the landscape speaks nothing to her. This is a world of deafness.

Her thoughts go to sorry places. She thinks of God and of the angels who will decide whether or not she enters heaven. She thinks of all her crimes—of all the blood she has spilled on the earth. She thinks of the Todd brothers, one of whom she stole the very breath from, her hands as good as throttling his windpipe, and the other of whom she let die by the hands of others when she could have saved him. She thinks of Ruby and her pretty dresses and the pink nail polish that is completely chipped away—and the Griersons, who had pretty things too, like record players and pianos and model ships and grandfather clocks and polished marble tabletops and iced tea with leaves in it. But thinking of the Griersons also makes her think of the
lonesome men trapped in that big house, sorrowful James Grierson, and Richard Grierson, whose horizons were always beyond fences he wouldn’t dare climb, and the clear-eyed patriarch caged in the basement confused about what he was. Him too she stole the life from.

It’s true she must have hands of death for so much of life to get extinguished by their touch.

And she thinks about an iron giant of a man, and a boy called Malcolm who may have been her actual blooden brother, and the shape of his body, so loose in her arms and so light like he was made of thread.

S
HE KNOWS
she’s outside of Nacogdoches when she begins to see signs for the 59. There, framed against the ruins of a derelict carnival, she discovers an old woman gathering the flowering buds from a cactus.

She gets out of the car and approaches the woman, who doesn’t seem to notice her.

Are you all right, ma’am?

Mis hijos tendrán hambre.

The old woman continues to pick the cactus flowers, gathering them in an apron wrapped around her waist.

I don’t speak nothin but English. Do you speak English?

Mis hijos necesitarán comida para cuando regresen.

Do you live around here?

The old woman seems to notice Temple for the first time.

Venga. Usted también come . . .

She gestures for Temple to follow. Temple fetches Maury from the car, and the two follow the old woman to the high sturdy fence surrounding the old carnival. They follow the length of the fence until they come to a gate closed with a chain and a lock. The old woman pulls a key from a fold in her skirt and unlocks the gate and ushers them inside and guides them through the strange colorful machines, broken-down things with long necks and lines of colored bulbs and torn vinyl seats and twisting tracks.

She would like to study the machines, and she imagines them in action, grinding away with grease and glitter like gaudy dinosaurs.

The old woman leads them to a sheltered place where a large wooden awning provides shade over the top of a number of picnic tables. In the center of the area, there is a fire pit with a makeshift hob built over the top of it and a blackened pot.

Siéntese, the woman says. Siéntese.

Do you live here? Temple asks. Nearby is a trailer with its door ajar. Is that where you sleep?

Temple waits for a response. When she gets none, she shrugs.

It’s safe enough, I guess, Temple says. You been doin all right so far, haven’t you?

The old woman does something with the cactus flowers and puts some of them in the pot, which is already steaming with other ingredients, and she stirs it with a wooden spoon. A short distance from the fire Temple finds two grave markers—just wooden crosses with photographs of two young men nailed to them.