Swarm (7 page)

After Marvin rowed
the boat into the bay at dawn, I went outside. A few of your footprints were on the far side of the garden fence. You wouldn't have been able to climb it and I ached for you, your hunger, your helplessness, but the plate was also gone from the porch. I hoped that was enough. Like the fish, beets are good for iron. Greens are plentiful in the fields. Dandelion leaves, although the flowers have gone to seed so they taste bitter. Still, they're better than nothing. If you don't know what to look for I will leave a little bit out and you can learn.

Mr.
Bobiwash came when I was peeling the thin skins off the Roma tomatoes and sterilizing the jars. Mid-morning. Marvin back home and in the shed. Thomson made a sound like a woman starting to sob but fell silent when the knock came. Red pulp smeared on my apron, I opened the door. Mr. Bobiwash and his eldest son, Samuel, stood with guns balanced on their shoulders like sticks. They looked like hobos seeking work during the long-ago Great Depression I'd read about in newspapers in the dark zone.

“The cranes are back,” Samuel told me, excited. They come every year, at the beginning and end of summer. Hundreds land by the stone foundation of an old barn up the road. They move on their stick-thin legs, their brown bodies hovering above the milkweed pods and rust-coloured grass. I'd already heard them. They were calling the day before when I was in the kitchen, cleaning last year's jars. Their strange, prehistoric warble. Thomson was too sick to walk up the road to see them so I laid down my barbecue tongs and went into the living room and opened the door.

“Listen.”

“The dinosaurs,” he said and closed his eyes. Gently, I wiped a bubble of spit from the corner of his mouth. He twisted away from me.

Have you heard them, Melissa? They are on their way to the Gulf of Mexico, a thousand miles south. Once upon a time we would have thought nothing of travelling such a distance. Now it's hard to imagine going such a long way away or even what it's like there, the mazes of salt marshes still tarry with oil from the spill that happened when I was just a girl, probably no bigger than you.

“How's Thomson?” Samuel asked. He put a hand on his father's arm and bent sideways to look around me. I stepped aside so he could see. The bald top of Thomson's head. Liver spots and wispy white hairs.

“Not so good.” I wiped the sweat from my face with a clean corner of my apron. “We're waiting for the ship.”

Mr. Bobiwash walked around the easy chair so he was facing Thomson.

“Jack,” said Thomson, lifting an arm, his fingers crooked.

Mr. Bobiwash squeezed Thomson's hand. “You're a lazy son of a bitch.”

Thomson laughed, a weak chortle. Samuel stood in the doorway, watching.

I heard the hiss of the water as it boiled over onto the hot top of the cook stove. My jars rattled violently against the sides of the aluminum pot. “Marvin's in the shed,” I told them, but they followed me into the kitchen. I held a spoonful of sugar out for Samuel although we didn't have much left. He grinned but shook his head and I realized how old he was getting. Almost sixteen, nearly a man. Mr. Bobiwash gestured to the kitchen door, the garden outside. “That's a big fence.”

“Deer,” I lied, scooping boiling tomatoes into the hot jars. Samuel screwed on the lids.

“Don't burn yourself.” I glanced at Mr. Bobiwash. “How is Shannon?” I wanted to change the subject. Only a few weeks ago, his wife had squatted between two poplars, her hands holding their narrow trunks, and delivered her baby. The small head crowned as blood gushed onto a carpet of pine needles. I helped Sarah, the midwife, by pulling the sharp knife from her leather satchel and boiling it clean so she could cut the cord. We talked about how hospitals used to be. All that shiny, functional steel. Clean green uniforms. Masks and disposable latex gloves. Babies died now. More than before.

Afterwards, with the tiny, purple infant in my arms, I thought about my mother. How she would have been proud. Not a flinch in me. Just this eager humming. The sound in your ears when you're running hard but happy. She was proud of me when I lived in the city. Proud that I worked for Parthenon. But that was before I was let go, before the dark zone and Walter and Phoenix. Before I irrevocably faded from their lives. I didn't even know if they were still alive. I tried not to think about that.

“The baby's got that red stain,” Mr. Bobiwash said, gesturing as if removing a mask.

“It's just a birthmark.”

“It's dry. I think it's itchy.”

“The salve isn't helping?” I wiped spilled tomatoes off the counter.

He shook his head. He stared at the jars that filled the counter, which would sit until their lids popped. “She isn't feeding either.”

“Can Sarah help with that?”

Mr. Bobiwash wobbled his head, staring down at the ground. I didn't want to pry so I stopped asking questions. I knew Shannon—her suspicions, how she called Sarah “the witch doctor.” She'd tried to get the doctor from the supply ship to do a Caesarean rather than rely on Sarah's help. “Too dangerous,” he'd said. “Inadequate facilities.” The hospital in town operated with no power, all those bulky machines heaped up in a kind of scrapyard that overtook the parking lot.

Marvin came out of his shed. Through the window we watched as he clicked the padlock closed. I put the pot in the sink and we went outside, wandering over to the garden where the last of the lettuce had gone to seed. I picked at bits of tomato skin stuck to my fingers. Thomson's blood-stained handkerchiefs flapped on the line like prayer flags.

“I'm going into town,” Mr. Bobiwash said as Marvin approached.

“No wagon?”

He shook his head. “Walking. We'll see more.”

Town was five miles away. A community of about two hundred. A church we never went to, sticking instead to the market, the occasional dance. For years we'd hidden on its edges, but as things unravelled we grew braver, not so afraid of being caught.

“I'm going to meet the boat. Find the doctor.”

“It's here?” I asked, eager.

“Every day,” said Mr. Bobiwash. “I go every day.”

“It's been late before,” said Marvin. Mr. Bobiwash picked up the gun, balanced the stock on his shoulder. Marvin was right, but those times we had known where it was, could follow its progress. The only shortwave radio on the island had melted in a fire during a cold snap last January.

Samuel walked up one side of the garden, dragging his foot in the dirt, making a line. The chickens crowded behind him, pecking at the exposed bugs.

Mr. Bobiwash turned to me. “Eric picked a load of bulrushes yesterday,” he said, referring to his middle son. “There's lots.”

I knew this was Mr. Bobiwash's way of asking me to stop by his house, to check on Shannon. He closed his free hand around the fencepost and turned to Marvin. “I'm stopping at the Sharmas' place.” His hand pulled on the wooden stock of the gun so the barrel gazed up at the sky. “Something's been eating out of their garden.”

A crow called, landing on the peaked tin roof of Marvin's shed. “It's just deer,” I said, but Mr. Bobiwash ignored me.

“Carrots pulled out. Eggs gone. The Sharmas shot a mess of ducks and offered me one.”

Marvin was already nodding as he spoke. “To look for whatever it is.”

“It's a deer,” I repeated, as if Mr. Bobiwash would believe me. I pushed Marvin's arm, trying to get him to agree with me, to tell Mr. Bobiwash the same thing.

“They've set traps.”

“Traps?” said Marvin.

“Box traps.”

None of us spoke. The wind moved around us. A blue jay scolded from its perch on a jack pine.

“The Sharmas are old people,” said Mr. Bobiwash. “They don't have a lot. Their son probably needs most of their food. He works hard.”

“You can't kill it,” I blurted.

Mr. Bobiwash settled his brown eyes on mine but didn't say anything.

“All right,” Marvin said. “I'll go.”

“I'll come with you,” I told them.

Marvin turned to me. “You have to stay with Thomson.”

“He's sleeping.”

“Sandy . . .”

I walked away, opened the plastic ice cream pail of corn and crushed clam shells and saw that it was almost empty. The crow cawed into the heavy air. It was humid, rain hanging in the sky. Another bird answered. Waking you from your daytime sleep in the dark rock hollows, telling you to watch out.

In
our bedroom, I sat on the mattress while Marvin changed from shorts to a pair of corduroy pants.
Stop him from hunting her
, I wanted to say, but he glanced at me and said, “Don't.”

“What?”

“You signed up for this.”

“Who would sign up for this?” Our rumpled bed, the hardwood floor rotting where it meets the walls.

“All I'm doing is trying to protect what's mine. I'm a man. It's what men do.”

“And what will you do if you find her?”

“She's a thief.”

“And we were terrorists.”

His jaw went hard.

“Promise me you won't tell him. Just for a few days.”

He didn't say anything as he walked away. I heard his boots pound down the stairs and Thomson speaking to him in the living room. Marvin responded, but I couldn't make out what they said. The words were quiet enough that I could imagine whatever I wanted. Thomson asking him to protect her and Marvin simply agreeing, out loud. A scenario that would never be. The front door slammed. Through the window, I watched them go. The two men and the boy, ambling up the driveway like a family, like they were all related. Far above, three turkey vultures circled, tipping toward the west.

I woke on
a cold mattress, not knowing where I was. Slowly the strange puzzle of the walls came clear. The windows on either side of the fireplace sparkled with frost and I shivered from the chill. Marvin's shoulder blades pressed against my breasts and that was the only part of me that was warm. Still, I pulled back, unlooping my arm from around his chest as I remembered the night before. I hadn't slept with him. I'd chickened out. After we'd climbed into bed and taken each other's clothes off, I'd stopped him, alarmed by how quickly things were moving. We'd gotten dressed and gone silently to sleep, gradually embracing each other in order to stay warm.

Marvin rolled over. “Morning,” he said, his eyes still shut. He sounded friendly when I'd expected him to be brusque, to get up quickly, dismiss me or lead me back to the fence and point me toward the greater city and my home with Margo. I thought the night was its own island that I would swim away from, ashamed, and never look back. “Morning,” I repeated, lying on my back with my arms crossed over my stomach. He snaked his arm around my waist.

“Last night,” I said, starting to explain. I wanted to tell him about the kind of girl I was, although it seemed I didn't really know her, except that she wasn't Margo.

His hand slid under the hem of my shirt. The tips of his fingers ran over my skin and I realized he wasn't listening, that it might not even matter. I stopped talking, closed my eyes. Above us, on the second storey, pigeons warbled, their feet scattering around on the floor. I heard them as his hand moved to my breast and slipped under the left cup of my bra, stroking the hardened nipple. I groaned, giving in to my body's ache. I curved into him. As close as we could get. And that was how it happened. Our first time.

Afterwards, we pulled our clothes back on and Marvin lit a cigarette as we lay in bed. “Do you want coffee?”

“Coffee?”

“Yeah.”

“Fake?”

“Real,” he said. Surprised, I pushed myself up on one elbow and stared down into his face. “I have a friend who works security in a boutique food shop,” he said. “It's swept off the floor, but it's the real thing.” Coffee was so expensive, I hadn't had it in months.

He threw the covers off. He wore a suit of black long underwear. “Can you start a fire?” he asked, dragging the heap of his shirt toward him.

“Okay.”

“Stuff's in there.” He gestured at a box containing a few paperback novels and kindling chopped from abandoned items of furniture. A yellow lighter lay on the floor,
SECURE YOUR FUTURE
and a phone number printed in red text on its side. Trailing cigarette smoke, he left the room. I watched his body move away, the long, hard muscles in his legs, and felt suddenly ravenous, like I could never get enough to eat.

The books were swollen from being soaked and dried, dropped in a bath or left out in the elements. I pulled out one called
Pirate Nights
, an old library code still stuck to the spine. The pages smelled musty as I crumpled them and lay them in the hearth. When I had enough paper I put a couple pieces of kindling on top but I couldn't keep it burning. The pages blackened and went out, over and over again, their edges curling into ineffective ash. Frustrated, I looked toward the door that Marvin had gone through and then at the wall where the map was posted, the one I'd noticed before Marvin had kissed me the night before. The stars had stopped glittering. I gave up on the fire and went to look at it, arms wrapped tightly around me to try to keep warm. One star was stuck to the place we'd been the night before, where Marvin had broken the window of the travel agency. When he came back in the room, carrying two mugs, I pointed at the map and asked, “What is this?”

“What happened with the fire?”

“I couldn't get it going.”

From the way he looked, I could tell he was judging me, that I hadn't lived up to his expectations. He set the coffee down on the mantle and pulled his jeans, the knees torn and patched, over his long underwear. “Let me show you,” he said, and I walked over. I reached for the coffee. “Not yet,” Marvin said, from his crouch on the ground. “Watch.”