The Borrowed World: A Novel of Post-Apocalyptic Collapse (24 page)

The rest of the ride down the mountain was surreal, riding the smooth pavement of the Parkway down into the town of Crawfish.  The road was empty, although there were a few abandoned vehicles sitting on the shoulder or pushed off into the ditch.  We passed no other people until the road flattened out into farmland and then we saw a few folks.  A farmer splitting wood with heavy maul stopped to watch us go by.  I started to raise my hand into a wave, but the pain from the dislocation curbed my gesture.  It wasn’t likely anyone would have waved back anyway.  Such was the consequence of being a stranger in a strange land.

As the land became more populated, dogs barked at us and children watched us from behind fenced-in yards.  Adults eyed us through screen doors and windows from deep within the shadowy interiors of powerless homes.  We drove on, slow enough to stop if we came upon a hazard, but fast enough to discourage anyone from stopping us to chat. 

In front of a ramshackle sharecropper’s house we drove by an old man in a t-shirt and a diaper standing by the road, bearing silent witness to our passage.  His mouth hung open, his eyes empty, and his hand wrapped around the neck of an old open-back banjo that he’d been dragging behind him.  The diaper appeared close to collapsing under its own weight.

The pain of my dislocated shoulder continued to wrack my body, made worse by the effort of steering the machine.  Several times, a sharp pain in my arm made me hug it to my mid-section, trying to alleviate the pain.  It did not work.  When we could stop, I would take the strongest pain medication I could find and pray that Lloyd had some kind of liquor put back for company.

Twenty-five minutes after our journey began, we passed a crooked green sign that welcomed us to Crawfish.  It was a railroad town that in its day had been the crossroads of this community.  It was where people arrived to and departed from.  It was where the community’s cabbage, beet, and tobacco crops had once left for markets.  It was where the local payroll for long-closed industries had shown up on the train for disbursement.  At its peak, it had held sprawling wooden hotels and spas with siding of local poplar clapboards.  There were mineral springs where the sick came to consume the limestone spring water and to purchase bottles to take home with them.  Now it was the sleepy bedroom community for larger nearby towns.  It was where college professors moved to restore Victorian homes and open bookstores that few ever visited.

I had never entered the town from this direction, always coming from the interstate.  When we reached the railroad tracks, the dead center of the town, I killed my engine and tried to orient myself.  Randi and Gary pulled alongside me, killing their engines also.

“Is this it?” Randi asked.

I nodded.  “Just trying to get my bearings,” I said, looking around.

From the corner of my eye I saw Gary cock his head.

“You hear something?” I asked.

“Sounds like music,” he said.

I smiled.  “That would be it,” I said.  “Follow that banjo.”

“You’re asking us to go toward the banjo music?” Randi asked.  “Didn’t you see
Deliverance
?”

I cranked up my ATV, pulling away from Gary and Randi as they exchanged glances.  I turned off Main Street and passed a restored railroad caboose donated by the railroad and sitting on a short section of rusty track that led nowhere in either direction.  I swung a right turn up a back street and in the distance could see a series of storefronts that were all part of a single, immense brick building.

That was it.

With Gary and Randi bringing up the rear, I headed in that direction.  The building was one of the oldest in town, dating to just after the Civil War.  A wide wooden porch connected all the storefronts and each one had its own awning overhanging the porch, just as it would have over a hundred and fifty years ago.  There was an electric barber pole mounted to the brick, stilled by the lack of power.  One of the wide plate glass windows had a painted sign that read Lloyd’s Barber Shop and beneath that a script read Haircuts, Shaves, Lies, Music.  Indeed, as I came to a stop and killed my engine, I could tell that the entire front of the building was practically vibrating from the sound of banjos, guitars, fiddles, and an upright bass playing traditional old-time music.

The music trickled to a stop, and an odd assortment of faces appeared in the expanse of the dirty window.  Some wore old-fashioned hats, others had unwashed hair that pointed from their head in violent shocks.  Finally, I recognized Lloyd’s face among his musical brethren and he broke out in a grin.  A moment later the door swung open and a man in the antiquated dress of a 1930s hillbilly musician burst onto the porch, a silver revolver protruding from a vest pocket.

“Brother Jim!” Lloyd said.  “You look like hell.”

I smiled a weary smile back at him.  “I feel like hell.  What’s going on in there?”

“I had folks over playing when all this shit went down,” Lloyd said.  “They just stayed.  I don’t even know how long we’ve been playing – or drinking, but it’s been days.”

“Got room for more?” I asked.  “We need a place to stay for a day or so while we regroup and try to get some supplies.  We’ve come all the way from Richmond and we’re trying to get home.”

Lloyd, always host to an inappropriate sense of humor, locked eyes on Randi.  “That’s no problem.  We’ve got plenty of room, and I see you brought a woman to trade.”

Lloyd winked at Randi about the time her hand was creeping toward her pistol. 

“Careful, Lloyd,” I warned.  “Our humor is a little low at the moment.  It’s been a hard trip.  The world has pretty much gone to shit.”

Lloyd gave a little laugh.  “The world has always been shit,” he said.  “You’re just now noticing.  I noticed a long time ago.  Why do you think I live in the past?”

“Got a place we can hide these machines?”

“Garage is open,” he said.  “You’ll have to make a place for them.  Then come on inside.  You’ll know a few of these boys.”

I stood on the sidewalk outside of Lloyd’s Barber Shop watching the sun settle over the horizon, casting an orange glow over the pastures surrounding Crawfish and over the white clapboard walls of the old Victorians that filled the town.  I sipped moonshine from a plastic cup and listened to the thump of Old Time music.  I couldn’t remember the name of the song.  Maybe something about an Indian in a pumpkin patch.  As we’d hiked these last few days, my grandfather had been on my mind a lot, providing a well of strength and hardening my resolve.  As day faded on the town, I was remembering the end of his life.

He’d had a massive stroke and had spent several days in ICU.  When they’d finally moved him to a room of his own, my dad and I made the four-hour drive to visit him.  My mom and uncle had been with him since they’d first gotten the news of his stroke, but they’d been the only visitors allowed.  It had looked like my grandfather might survive, barring any further strokes, but he would not be the same man.  He was paralyzed on one side of his body.  His speech had also been affected.  All of these things were relayed to me by my dad on the trip over.  He didn’t want me to be shocked by what I found. 

Shock was inevitable, though, when we reached the hospital in Williamson, West Virginia.  The vital, powerful man I’d known my whole life – the man who’d been indestructible in my eyes – was decimated by the stroke, I saw as soon as I walked into the room.  My mom sat at his bedside holding his tanned, rough hand.  He did not turn to face me.  I wasn’t even sure if he was awake.  My dad prodded me in the back and I moved closer.  As I approached his bed, my mom turned and smiled painfully, reaching out to me with her other hand and squeezing my arm.  I was seventeen at the time but I had felt instantly a child again.  From where I was standing, I could see that my grandfather’s eyes were open but he did not turn to face me. 

I walked around the bed until I was directly in front of him.  It took everything in me to do that.  His face was slack and saliva ran from the corner of his mouth and down his chin.  I had never been so close to this kind of personal devastation.  I felt paralyzed, too, completely without control of my body and mind.  I raised my hand slowly and put it down on my grandfather’s shoulder.  He was not a person who touched a lot and it was an alien gesture in our relationship.  However, it was all I knew to do.  He twisted his head violently into his pillow, startling me.  I jumped.  I could see tears in his eyes.  I knew that he felt ashamed – in pain that I was seeing him that way.  We stood that way for what felt like hours, all of us locked into this painful moment from which there seemed no escape.

It was broken when my grandfather twisted his head back in my mother’s direction, catching my eyes briefly as his glance passed over me.  He raised his left hand, the one my mother had been holding, pointing at her and my father, then pointing at the door.  He made a sound, a soft grunt, that sounded like “ro”.

“You want us to go?” my mom asked.

My grandfather pointed again at her and my dad.

“You want to be alone with Jim?” she asked.

My grandfather bobbed his head in an awkward jerking nod.

My mom looked at my dad and rose slowly, the two of them leaving the room.  I had no idea what was going on.  My grandfather turned his head slowly back to me and caught my eye.  I was frozen, shaken to my core by the depth of pain and anguish that I saw there.  His glance did not leave me for a long time.  I felt as if he were transmitting a steady stream of regrets, goodbyes, and things left unsaid.  I heard it all, watching until his eyes drowned in the tears that began pouring from them.

He pointed to a notepad and pen sitting on the rolling tray table by the bed.  I got it and he gestured that he wanted to write something.  I lay the pad in his lap and placed the pen in his good hand.  With great concentration, he scrawled in large shaky letters:  BRING GUN.

My eyes widened and I looked at him.

“No,” I said, my voice a mixture of fear and anger.  I was completely appalled that he would ask that of me, that he would consider doing such a thing to himself.

When he looked up at me again, what I saw was not anger at my refusal but desperation.  Those eyes told me that I was the only person he could ask.  I felt a crushing mantle of responsibility drop on my shoulders.  I felt sickened from his request, but imagined myself in that bed, unable to carry out my final wish and unable to convince anyone to help me.  Would it be love to condemn him to rot in this bed, never walking the woods, never seeing the river flow behind his house again?  Is that how I would repay the man who helped shape me? 

I would have to do it.  I would have to be the man he was asking me to be, knowing that I could never, ever speak of it to anyone.  I would help kill my grandfather.

“Where can I get one?” I asked slowly, my voice low in case anyone was listening.

He placed the pen to paper again, scratching slowly, writing:  RED TOOLBOX BASEMENT LOADED.

“In the red toolbox in your basement,” I repeated.  “And it’s already loaded?”

He nodded at me.

“When?” I asked.  “I don’t want anyone to know I brought it to you.”

TOMORROW, he wrote.

I frowned.  “We’re leaving tomorrow,” I said.  “We’re going to go back home for a couple of days.”

He stared at me, desperate, his thinking not clear enough to help me solve this problem, but his will was clear.  I knew in my heart that what he was asking me was truly what he wanted.  This was not the delusion of a sick man.  It was not shock from the suddenness of his plight.  He would never get better.  He would never be the same.  He would never be happy again.  In everything I knew about the man, I knew all of that to be true.

I thought about the situation.

“We’re staying at your house tonight,” I told him.  “I will get the gun and take it back home with me.  I’ll come back in a few days.  Instead of driving to school, I’ll drive here.  No one will ever know I was here.”

This was in the days before video surveillance was in common use.  There would be no record of my visit.  I could walk in and out, slip him the gun, and leave unseen.

“Can you hold a gun?” I asked.

He awkwardly raised his hand, turned it to his head, and curled his index finger as if he were pulling a trigger.  His eyes met mine.  He could do it.  My heart broke.  We had made a bargain.

The following Friday, I left for school as if it were any other day.  My parents had plans to return to West Virginia that night after they got off work.  I had eight hours to get to his bedside and back without raising any concerns.  It would be tight.  Under my seat, wrapped in a red bandana, was a Colt .38 revolver.  I had wondered why he stored the gun in the basement in a toolbox instead of upstairs with his other guns.  The question was partially answered when I removed the gun from the oily rag in the basement and found that the serial number was ground off.  Perhaps this gun had already killed a man before.

Back in Williamson, West Virginia, I parked in a half-full lot outside of the hospital.  The gun was tucked in my jacket pocket, still wrapped in the bandana.  I pushed through a glass door and took the elevator to the third floor.  I knew where I was going and exited the elevator confidently.  I looked up and down the hall.  It was empty.  I walked to my grandfather’s room.  The door was closed halfway and I pushed it open.  He appeared to be asleep, the light from the window illuminating him in a way that made him appear very peaceful.  His features were relaxed in a way that they had not been a few days earlier.  I shut the door behind me and walked to his bedside. 

I considered turning around and leaving.  He would probably never know I’d even been there.  I could not live with the guilt, though.  The knowledge that his final feelings toward me were not love, but disappointment and betrayal.  I leaned over him and whispered in his ear.  His eyes opened slowly, taking a moment to focus on me, to understand who I was and why I was here.  I was the grim reaper.  I was death come to take him.

He smiled with half his mouth and his eyes teared up again.   He mumbled and I knew he was thanking me.

“Do you still want to do this?” I asked.

He looked me in the eye and nodded.

“I can’t let you do it while I’m here,” I said.  “No one can know I was here.”

He nodded again. 

“If I slide it up under your hip and cover it with the blanket, can you get to it after I leave?”

He nodded.

“I will miss you,” I said, my eyes beginning to pour.  A sob wracked my body.

“No,” he hissed at me, clearer than anything he’d said since his stroke.

I knew what he was saying.  He was telling me to harden up.  And I did.  I dried up the tears and controlled my breathing.

“I love you,” I whispered.  “I’ve got to go.”

His eyes stayed glued to mine. 

“Love you, too,” he said, slightly garbled but understandable.  I knew he meant it.  Hard as he was, he loved me.

I pulled the hood of my gray sweatshirt over my head and strode out of the room without looking back.  Passing no one in the hall, I opted for the stairs to avoid standing around in the hallway waiting for the elevator.  I left the building, drove back to Virginia, and as far as I know my visit there is a secret that only I hold.

I got home around the normal time, but my parents were already home.  When I walked in the house, I heard my mother’s sobbing and knew that he had done it already.   I was surprised to feel relief along with my grief.  I was happy that he was released.  Happy that he had left on his own terms.  Our mission was a success.

They never learned how he got the gun.  My mother was certain that one of his old buddies had slipped it to him.  My dad never voiced his theory but he looked at me differently.  I wondered if he suspected, but he never asked.

*

In Russell County, as darkness settled on Ellen and her family, they gathered for dinner around a battery-operated lantern and ate their meal while Ellen shared her plan for the next day.  Jim’s parents were not thrilled with the idea, despite Ellen’s assurances.  Pete and Ariel were so excited that she suspected they would have a very difficult time going to sleep.  Moving to Jim’s cave would be a lot of work, but it was the safest option she could imagine.

*

One mile up the road from Ellen and Jim’s home, a grim cabal shared a meager dinner around a campfire in the yard of an older mobile home.  A few folks had left over the past two days, hoping to find shelters or relatives that would take them in.  A little more than twenty folks remained, including their children.  They would not leave.  For one thing, revenge burned in the hearts of some for the missing men who had not come home.  For another, it seemed that the family up the road had plenty of supplies.  At one point, they had heard a generator running up there and they suspected there might be stored food.  All they needed was a plan and it could all be theirs.

*

Outside the town of Crawfish, an ancient man stood in a kitchen prying the lid from a mason jar.  He poured the home-canned tomatoes from the jar overtop of the green beans he’d poured from another jar already.  He set the pot of beans and tomatoes on the eye of the old wood-fired cook stove that had been in this kitchen since before he was born. 

While he stood waiting for the pot to heat, he heard heavy steps on the porch.  He knew that the thuds that accompanied each step were the sound of his son’s banjo bouncing off each rotting step as he climbed them.  This was confirmed when he heard the sound of the banjo dragging across the porch.  There was a creak as the screen door behind the old man opened.  There were more steps and the scrape of the dragging banjo coming across the floor.

“Mommy,” moaned the man with the banjo.  His voice was too loud and his word as ill-formed as he himself was.

The older man turned and faced his son.  “Mommy didn’t come home, Lawrence,” he said.  “Nobody did.  I don’t know what the hell happened to them.”

Lawrence, himself ancient and diaper-clad, the product of a genetic abnormality, considered his father’s words, his mouth agape, eyes slow to register his slower thoughts.  A social worker had once tried to get them to send Lawrence to an institution, assuring them he’d get excellent care and would be happy, but his parents had not allowed it.  Lawrence was their son and his place was at home.  The man and his wife were both in their eighties now, and they had started to consider that they might have to make other arrangements for Lawrence.  Now the man was afraid that it might be too late for that.

Lawrence raised the dirty hand holding the banjo and pointed it toward town.  “Bubby…four-wheeler…go town,” he said, his pronunciation staggered and awkward.  The words were long, drawling, and atonal. 

The old man set down the wooden spoon with which he was stirring the tomatoes and green beans.  He turned to his son.

“You saw your brother Bubby go into town on his four-wheeler?” the man asked, knowing this could not be the case because he’d seen Bubby leave with Lawrence’s mother and the rest of the family this morning.  They’d gone up their parkway searching for their other missing son.