The Rain (2 page)

The waves are what really scare me. They used to be called avalanches, Russell says. They would come sliding down the mountain. Now, it’s the swells. They rise up, and the blank stretch of brown canvas gets rolly, like something is boiling down there. And then the white foam starts up, and the howling wind. And he calls it a gale. We both row, and I do my best. I’m sixteen years old and as strong as any boy I’ve ever seen. Stronger. He says we have to point into the waves, and I listen, although it doesn’t make sense to me with how much the swells seem to want to drive us under.

            Once there was a waterspout right next to us. It started in the sky, coiled down, touched the water, then disappeared like a sharp snarling tendril of storm cloud. Then it came back down, stuck, and started to draw up water. It threw us away from it. I was afraid it would drag us in, down, to the forgotten cities below us, the graveyard, as Russell calls it. It was beautiful though, clear, miraculous, powerful, like something apart from the rain, something that was fighting the rain. It kept up the fight for almost ten minutes. Then it fell away, just like everything else does.

I’m still stronger than any boy, but I’m a lot skinnier than I used to be. I can tell by looking at my legs, my arms. I’m glad we don’t carry the mirror anymore. That was when he shaved. I still try to. But the razors are lines of rust now, useless, dangerous. I should stop using them.  

            Russell thinks the antibiotics are no good from the rain. He thinks his leg infection might come back. And he worries about me. I’m not sure why, but he’s always worrying about me. He thinks that if I get sick now, the antibiotics won’t work. He doesn’t want me to use the razors anymore, so I do it at night. I use the rain. It helps keep me sane. If he’s noticed my legs are still bare, he hasn’t said anything.

I tried to get an age out of him twice, and from his replies, I gather he must be twice as old as me. Maybe older. I can’t tell. But all he said was, “Old enough to be your Dad.” And I told him that no he wasn’t. Then he said, “Close to it.”

            We don’t celebrate birthdays. But we used to celebrate food. Whenever we found a survivalist’s stash, we would celebrate. He would sing, I would try to. We tried dancing sometimes too. He’s no good. He thinks I’m pretty good, but I know he’s full of shit. But now that we’re out past the Great Plains, we don’t celebrate anymore. It’s like we’re too close now, too close to something that can save us.

It took Russell a long time to figure out we had to keep moving west. He thought we could stay in the cities. We did for a lot of years. But the soil stopped draining the water. And the rain kept going.

            We lost the contact we had with the radio. It’s hard to keep anything working in the rain. When we find a pack of batteries in an apartment, Russell goes nuts. Only thing is we have nothing to put them in, nothing to use them on. I kind of remember the electricity, when it was everywhere, like Russell says. He even goes on about the invisible internet, and how it connected everything with moving pictures and sounds. It sounds pretty made up, and I think he’s been sacrificing food on account of me for ten years, and it must be adding up. He has to be losing his mind a little bit. We need to find vitamins, he says.       

He thinks they’re dead, the bandits. We’ve had a couple close calls, and it seems like they come more and more since we passed into South Dakota. It’s the higher elevation, Russell says. Before we hit Rapid City, it was low country. But the water hadn’t risen so high then. There were more dead bodies. They were everywhere. We saw a raft of them once. A boy and his dog on the raft, floating somewhere. All tied together, the bodies. Some drift wood, probably a house. It looked pretty safe and sturdy. I wonder about how far he made it sometimes.

Our years in Rapid City were different. More people were alive there. We moved to Harney Peak before long, just over 7,000 feet. Then there were too many people alive. We were traveling on foot more again then, which was a change, but everyone came to the same spots. That’s the problem out west. There’s only these peaks, rising out of the brown canvas. They’re easy to see, and so everyone goes for them. The bandits come to feed.

When we passed the Great Lakes, coming up from Indianapolis, there was a giant steam powered ship. We lived on it for a long time. I thought we were never going to leave. It was home. The water was calm for such a long time, and we sailed from skyline to skyline. Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee. We had more food than we could ever want. There were no bandits, no face eaters. There didn’t have to be. Russell says society is a veneer, made up of all the human principles. The ship was building the veneer again, he’d said. But when it comes down it, people eat and drink. Anything they can. No veneer.

On the steamer, the
Sea Queen Marie
, I thought we were done moving. The daily struggle, finding the next meal, higher ground, avoiding suspect wanderers, was over. No one talked about a place where it didn’t rain because we didn’t need to—the ship had a hundred rooms and a giant galley, and a roof. We had a few attacks after we reached capacity, but nothing much. They couldn’t scale the gunwales. They never even made it halfway up. We were a unit. But it wasn’t the face eaters or the rain that destroyed the
Sea Queen
. It was a gale, Russell says. All I could tell that day was that the sky had blackened to charcoal, and behind me the sun was out and shining. Two different worlds. It was the first time I’d seen night come during the day. The waves started, and being in deep water like I never had been before, and old enough to be aware of it, I felt scared of dying for really what must have been the first time. I can take a lot, and I can row all day. But I can’t take the waves.

            They started out small at first, swells everyone was calling them. And then the wind came. A lot of arguing happened. Russell had the ear of one of the guy’s who controlled everyone else. His name was Wallace. Everyone called him Cap’n though. Cap’n was arguing with Russell, I remember that. Something about changing course.

            But old Cap’n told Russell there was no more fuel for any kind of moving, and the ship would have to hope that the storm turned, because the ship wouldn’t. Then Cap’n started talking about the direction of the wind a whole lot. He started to say that it was changing, hitting us at first from the east, and then, when the black took over the sky, from the north. I didn’t quite take the meaning of that, but he sure seemed to think it was a big deal. Russell did too, eventually. They called it a hurricane.

            It took the bow of the ship right down into the swells, snapped it off. The only skyline in sight was Chicago. The tower was there. It still stood way above the water. But I thought we might knock right into it, that’s how bad the waves were pushing us. And when the bow went in and snapped off that way, I knew we were going to die. I made peace with it. I thanked Russell for taking care of me. Sometimes, I feel like death would just mean leaving the rain. And then it’s not such a bad thing, death.

            But he wasn’t ready yet. And I guess I wasn’t either, because when the fights over the boats started, I helped him. That was the only time I think I really hurt somebody. Maybe I killed him, I don’t know. Russell won’t talk to me about it, because he said I shouldn’t think about it. We do what we have to and move on, to higher ground, to where we can get warm and dry.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been warm or dry. And I think I’m dying now, too, but just really slowly this time. But maybe not, because I can still row, and I can still run. But I know we don’t have much food left. And Russell’s been acting too serious, and we have a week on the water till the next land, and I know we won’t make it.

            And I don’t for one minute think those face eaters drowned. We haven’t had a gun that works since Rapid City. Now it’s knives. That’s it. And that’s what they’ll have to, if they’re not dead.

The ridges of Bighorns poke up in about a thousand places, puncturing the brown canvas. We’re on one of the lower parts of the Hesse. Some of the islands drop into the water real steep, and that’s how we messed up the canoe. Sometimes you can’t see when the ground comes back to you, up out of the brown. Then it jumps up on you, smacking the boat. We almost drowned six times I’d guess since we hit Wyoming. At least Russell says it’s Wyoming, and the Hesse mountain, and the Bighorns. I couldn’t tell you if we were in the Himalayas or not. But I trust Russell.

            The canoe smacked into a sharp rock when we tried to land it, and it cut a long line along the side. The cut is near the top, so it doesn’t draw water. But the line is getting deeper, even though Russell won’t mention it. I feel like it’s splitting the whole thing in half real slow, and that it will finally happen when we’re out somewhere on the water, somewhere where we can’t swim back. Then we’ll just go under. And we’ll go right down, I know.

            I see the thin little layers of frost that Russell doesn’t, clear blue, like purity is trying to conceal the canvas of pattering sea. It’s cold enough up here. I can barely keep my hands from freezing. If we go into that water, I’m out. It’s not that I can’t swim half decent, but I’ve stuck my finger in along the way, all the way since Rapid City I’ve been touching. I tried to tell him it’s getting colder, and too cold, and that we need to go south, or back west. But he said no, we have to push on. There’s nothing else to go back to, and the water is running too fast through the Great Plains in the south.

            I don’t know how he knows all this. I think he learned it in Rapid City, and maybe even as far back as the
Sea Queen Marie
. People were always trading rumors, as if they were news, something that just happened. But it was always the same tired legends. A place where there’s no rain. A place where a city is entirely above the waterline. Leadville.

            When I first noticed the crystals on the water, as we drew close to the Bighorns, Russell started to put his own finger in the water. I yelled at him, “Told you so!” I meant it to be playful, to cheer him up, because I could tell he’s been getting sicker. When I was little, he had chubby red cheeks. Hell, he was fat. He was a smiling fat person though. I guess I was 8 or 9 when I realized he wasn’t fat anymore. It was like I hadn’t noticed. But then, when he kept getting skinnier, and I didn’t, I thought he was dying. I thought he had cancer, or a parasite. But he didn’t. He kept on just fine. But he was skinny. Now, he looks skeletal. And paler than I’ve ever seen him. He has dark olive skin—he used to anyway. Now, he looks like some of the bodies I’ve seen floating past the canoe.

            There was a bodyjam outside of Sioux Falls. We’d just come over a rise, and there it was, a million bodies all clumped together, blocking the whole sea. We had to turn around, head south for a bit, but not into Nebraska, he’d said—never into Nebraska. There are a thousand waterspouts there, spinning up to the sky all the time. Waterspout alley was what he calls it. Everyone knew that. It was the talk of the
Sea Queen Marie.
Waterspout alley, from Nebraska all the way down to Oklahoma, rushing water and waterspouts all the time. Nobody survives that way anymore.

            He lifted his finger out of the water though, and he just scowled at me. But now that I’m sitting here, and we actually made it to the Bighorns, I don’t think he was scowling at me because I said he was wrong. It was the turn of fate. We didn’t need any ice. We had enough other things to deal with. But there it was, and here it is. If we fall in now, we die. It’s that simple. There are no more life vests. Just the crack in the canoe, and the mounds of rock that spring out of the canvas. At least it’s daytime.

We finally decide to start moving again, before Russell even has the sleep he needs. I stare at his face, the long shaggy, brown mane, the emaciated, sunken eyes that when he’d been just a little bit plump were pretty and mesmerizing, even attractive. I try not to think about the fact that I’m attracted to him—that I was. Now, it’s hard to be. But every once in awhile, when he’s asleep like this, I can still feel that way. Like I want to cuddle against him like I normally do, but find something more there. Of course I could never say anything to him. He could be my Dad, he says. It’s clear he’s not interested in me. And those kinds of thoughts are artifacts anyway, part of the veneer. It’s been eroding. Despite the fact that we’re still going, that he still has hope we’ll make it across the water, all the way down through Wyoming, past Denver, and to Leadville, and find the city above the waterline, I can’t help but acknowledge that it’s all part of the veneer. That’s Russell’s source of strength, it seems. The veneer. He talks about it like it’s an artificial piece of shit, and like we’re animals, and that everything is random, and we’re fucked and all—but at the same time he still makes the veneer sound like something romantic. Like it amounts to humanity, and all that we are, and that if we can get to Leadville, we can be a part of it again.

            The way he talks about it sometimes, I don’t know why he wants to keep it going so bad. The veneer is stripped away when nature takes over, he says. It’s really like a thin surface we’ve built up over millions of years on top of our primitive minds. And the rain has washed it down to nothing. Yet we move on, and he keeps worrying about me.

It’s not that I don’t think I’m attractive either. I’ve had a lot of offers for sex, and the food that goes along with giving it out. But Russell hasn’t let me do it. At first I never wanted to anyway, from everything he told me. Sex is part of the veneer. A layer that’s gone. Meaningless now.  

            But part of me wanted it, to at least try it. I felt ashamed about it after awhile, when I got into an argument with him that we needed the food, and that we could get medicine for it this time. The offer had come from a young man in Rapid City who didn’t look deranged, or creepy like all the others. I had wanted it so bad. But Russell said no. And since then, I haven’t bothered to think much about it.