The Rain (20 page)

            Dusty lies down on the seat, puts his hands over his head. He doesn’t seem to care one way or the other about the storm. Like he isn’t one bit frightened of it. He looks like he’s just going to sleep. There with Voley right beside him. Every few minutes Voley whines with the rocking boat, or the clapping thunder, or the beating rain that flies sideways under our protection. The spray of metal salt. The endless canvas brown, now its own mountain, blasting us.

            I’m jealous of him. His ability to block everything out—the terrible sea and the wind and the water. Russell does it too. But I know why Dusty can. He’s battling something else entirely. And then Russell comes from the steering wheel and asks me to relieve him. He says he needs to sit down out of the rain for a minute. I tell him that’s a good idea without a suit on. You’re just getting better, I say. I feel guilty I didn’t ask sooner. He nods and sits down. Then he tells me to keep her heading the way she is, and keep the storm on the right of us. I head out into the rain. I’ll have to look.

I open my mouth to the cold water and let it run into my throat. I’ve forgotten how hungry I am. The boat is cruising up and down the swells but they don’t seem to be getting any bigger, and the thunder isn’t getting any louder. I’m even staring at the sky monster now, and the storm is as big as ever, covering the whole sky, but it’s way out there on our right. A lot of miles between the center mass and our small tub. And we’re passing it. I truly believe we are. I look to the edge of the tarp and see the two sacks of canvas. I walk over and grab one and come back to the steering wheel. Russell and Dusty both look like they’re sleeping. Voley is not. His tongue is hanging out and he’s staring out at the rollers that are lifting our boat. He doesn’t seem so nervous anymore about the weather, just terribly interested in it. He’s curious.

            I rummage through the bag for something I can shove right into my mouth. I find a plastic tube of crackers and open it. In about five minutes I eat them all. I hear something behind me, and I become alarmed, thinking maybe Dusty woke up and he’s going to try something. But he just appears out of nowhere right next to me, and sits down in the passenger’s seat.

“Did you plan it all along?” he asks me. I look at him. Then I look back at Russell. I really want to open up to him but I know I can’t. Russell looks like he’s passed out, his head against the rail. The swells seem to be dying off a little bit. The fear of dying in a rogue wave has started to recede, enough so that I take my eyes off the wheel and look at Dusty. His big dark eyes are staring right into me. I knew they would be. The only thing we had planned was going to Leadville. Nothing else. It was planned a long time before Blue City too, I tell him.

            So you’ll steal whatever you need to get there? he fires back. We’ll do what we have to do. And we have our reasons why. Do you know what the veneer is? I ask him. He looks at me dumbly. I tell him it’s what he’s still trapped in, and he’d better realize it’s gone, and sooner than later. But that does nothing to clear up his confusion. He’s still trying to find reasons. But I won’t tell him we killed his parents because they’re cannibals, and I won’t confront him about what he’s eaten himself. I decide he was probably fed people all along and never knew it anyway. That’s what I tell myself anyway because he can stay innocent that way. And I can’t bring myself to ask. I’m not answering his questions honestly, so I don’t expect he’d answer mine that way.

            We were going to go away on the barge, all of us together, he says. He says it to himself. Didn’t you feel like I felt? he asks. I don’t respond, but check that my pistol is still at my side. It is. And I think about what I felt, and how real it was for me. But I can’t tell him a word of it. Not when my attention is on the swells. I look at the gas gauge. The needle is still near full even though we’ve been on the water for a while. So do you have any idea where we’re going? he asks me. I tell him away from the storm. That’s all he’s getting from me. I feel too mixed up inside to tell him anything more than I already have. He’s asking dumb questions. He seems to get the point and he retreats back to the tarp. All I can think about is whether or not he’ll try something, try to kill us or throw us overboard and steal the boat back and go back home. I know I would if I was him.

Russell! I yell. It’s been long enough, and I feel like we’re past the worst edge of the storm. The thunder is barely audible any more. He slowly comes to life and relieves me again. You okay? I ask as he gets to the wheel. Yea, he grunts. Then I head back to cover under the tarp. He tells me we’ll rotate, and first chance we get, we’ll raise the sails. Conserve gas. I tell him okay, then I toss him the canvas bag so he can get something to eat. He starts to look through it when I get under the center of the boat again. I work the pump for ten minutes so the floor is drained again, and then I lie down sidelong on one of the seats. Dusty is across from me, his eyes closed. Voley is up on the seat with him, somehow bundled up in a ball small enough so that they both fit. I wonder if he’s thinking about me, dreaming about me. Or if he’s plotting to kill me. I close my eyes and slip into a dream, confident we’ll make it through the night.     

It’s still the middle of the night when I wake up. The first thing I see is the empty seat across from me. Dusty’s gone, and so is Voley. Slowly I come to, rubbing my eyes. I get the weird feeling that Russell has let me sleep for too long. I look to the wheel and the first thing I notice is the tarp. Russell must have extended it somehow because less of it is covering the center, but the driver’s seat is partially covered by a sliver of it. And the sails are raised. I don’t even hear the motor. I realize just how quiet it is out here on the open brown sea. Just the old rain. And we aren’t rocking anymore. I sit upright and my feet go into the water in the center of the boat. Going to have to pump again. I look back to the front of the boat because something isn’t right—there’s Dusty standing up behind Russell. Then I realize what’s happening. Dusty’s got one of our guns. His arm is outstretched and pointed at the back of Russell’s head.

            No! I shout instinctively, and then I lunge forward. Voley, hanging near the stern, sees me jolt and follows me to the front with excitement, sloshing water as he follows. Then it’s like Russell wakes up, as if he’d fallen asleep at the wheel, and he turns to see the gun in his face. Dusty doesn’t react, but he’s shaking. Like he can’t decide whether or not to pull the trigger. Don’t do it! I yell as I almost reach him, heading to dive into him and throw him to the ground. Over the rail. Anything to stop him. Take me home, Dusty says limply, still shaking. But he can’t ever fire the gun because Russell slams him one deep in his gut. Then Russell gets up and slaps the gun out of his hand. I stop before I reach them to watch. The space at the wheel is too cramped. The gun clanks loudly and skids across the rain on the floor of the boat. Russell bends to pick it up and then he shoves Dusty back. Dusty’s so off-balance from the first gut punch that he rocks backward and right over the rail into the water. Water splashes me. Voley bounds up on top of the passenger seat and puts his paws on the edge of the rail, whining and watching Dusty drift past us. He starts flailing. Ice daggers stabbing him in that freezing water.

            I don’t know what to say. I don’t know whether or not I should keep trying to save him now. He was about to shoot Russell. And it hurts because some part of me understands why, and thinks I’d be doing the same thing if the circumstances were reversed. But the words don’t come out of my mouth one way or the other. Part of me wants to watch him die. I go to Voley and tug him backwards so he doesn’t spill in too.

“Son of a bitch,” Russell says. Then he scares me, not because of how angered he is at Dusty’s attempt, but because he can barely get the words out before he coughs loudly. Then it’s like a chain reaction and he’s in another coughing fit. He can’t stop. Finally he calms down after I walk up to him. I see Dusty behind the boat now, and I hear him calling for help. He’s slipping out of sight and I know he’s freezing to death. Are you okay? I ask Russell. I hope that we accidentally threw more antibiotics in the canvas bags we stole. What are the chances though that Russell packed them? He’d never throw them in. But maybe he would, for me he would. How long does a course of antibiotics need to go for? I ask him. He tells me he’s fine and not to worry about it. Five days or something, isn’t it? I ask, knowing we were only in Blue City for a couple days. And there’s no way he completed all the medicine he was supposed to.

            I start to think about him getting sick again, and even though our motor boat is a little bit more seaworthy, I don’t care for the thought of bailing alone, getting caught in high seas alone. Are you sure you’re okay? I urgently ask him. It’s not like him to fall asleep at the wheel—not when he’s
okay
again. It only makes sense if he’s still sick. He tells me he’s fine, and from his confident tone I decide whether or not to plea for Dusty’s life. But it’s not me who turns the boat around. I don’t even prompt it. Russell just sits down in the driver’s seat and does it all himself. Like he knows something and he’s not telling me. The boat glides in a wide arc, riding a few gentle humps, repelling the rain with her roof and sails, moving under soft wind, and Dusty’s calls for help suddenly grow louder again. He sees that we’re returning and he tries to swim toward us.

            Part of me wants to ask him why, but I don’t because I’m scared it has to do with him lying about his health. Maybe he thinks I’ll need Dusty. The thought of losing Russell passes through me, like it did before when he was very sick, and I tremble. Then I think that maybe it’s some part of the veneer—to prevent unnecessary loss of life. Russell said once that humanity learned over time to harm less and less. It still did it, harmed all kinds of things. Groups of people, animals, the environment. But there was a momentum, an evolution. Empathy, he’d called it. And we were somewhere on the arc of that evolution, working all the time to increase our empathy. He had told me that the ancients used to watch humans get eaten alive and fight to death in arenas, all real and live and everything. After a long time, humanity learned it was less harmful to do the same thing through movies. Moving pictures. And people learned that the harm could be less harmful, but humanity wasn’t past needing it. Intimacy with violence.

            Of course all of that was before the rain. And who’s to say if the evolution would ever start up again? The idea of not creating harm, being as least harmful as possible. In fact, that increasing empathy was a luxury of the veneer, he’d said. Without it, there’s nothing but survival of the fittest. The same as the hawks and the deer. But as I remember this all, he’s turning the boat around. And something about it makes me think Russell is clinging to more of the veneer than he lets on. Because we pull up to Dusty, and it’s Russell whose hands extend, haul him out of a watery grave. Dusty just lies on the floor of the boat, stunned that he’s alive, and that the man he planned to kill saved him.

I help Dusty get under the center of the boat. Marvolo comes over. I pump the water dry and let him recuperate for a minute. Russell is back at the wheel and I hear him coughing again. He hasn’t said a word since picking his assassin out of the water. The sky is changing a little bit, and I can’t help but feel like this long darkness might be lifted before long. Smear sunrise. The thought of another surprise land sighting crosses my mind. A place like the one we just left, except where they won’t resort to eating people to survive. Wishful thinking. Like believing in whales.

            Are you okay? I finally ask Dusty. He says yea, he’s fine. Russell tells me he needs me to take over so he can get some sleep. He walks over, stepping right over Dusty’s stretched out body.

            “You know how to work the primer stove?” asks Russell. I realize he’s talking to Dusty. Dusty is as startled as me to realize it. We’ve all forgotten how cold we are, completely numb and nearing frostbite. The thought that we have a stove floors me and Russell pulls out the equipment from one of the canvas bags. There’s a canister of fuel and more in the boat, he says. Dusty finally sits up and says yea, he can work it. And he gets to work. I walk up to keep the boat in line.

            “Which way are we headed?” I yell back to Russell, wondering if he really knows without any landmarks. See the sunset? he calls back to me. Yea, I tell him. It’s starting to lighten a few bands of the gray. Keep it on our back. Just a little to your left, but mostly on our back. All the way to Colorado. A straight line. The Rockies, you hear me Tan? he says. It’s like some new spirit of life has come into Russell. He sounds happy about Leadville for the first time in a week. It’s the old familiar hope. The belief. A city above the waterline. And we’ve traded a broken canoe for a motor boat with sails. And a tarp. A stove. Food. And there’s three of us. Four I mean.

            There’ll be a fire for you when your shift’s up, Russell tells me. I steer us in a line, and it feels like the wind is hitting just right. I wonder how far we are from Leadville, what our speed is. Somewhere there’s an invisible number counting down. The rain is glancing away from me, off the narrow band of tarp Russell’s draped above the driver’s seat. I glance back and see the glow of the primer stove. It’s right in the center of the boat. And a nylon blanket has found its way across from one rail of the boat to the other. The sides drape down and I realize they’ve build a fort. A fort of warmth. And I’m out here freezing. I want to end my shift right now. It’s not fair. But Russell needs the sleep. I wonder if we could trust Dusty enough to take a turn at the wheel. That would end my shift right now. I steer us on in a line, keeping the smear of the sun in the proper place at our backs, happy that the skies are as clear as they’ll ever be. No more signs of the storm.

After I’m ready to ask for relief myself, because my fingers are starting to freeze in place, Dusty emerges from the blanket. He walks up to me and tells me to go get warm. You know which direction to steer? I say. He nods and I get up. I head off to the makeshift tent, watching with great anticipation the line of smoke rising from its center, the sign of burning fuel, heat, and life.