The Unit (25 page)

The RV creaks on its springs when we climb aboard. It’s dark and cold inside, but we’re sealed from the weather. I pull the flowered curtains and rummage around for something heavier to hang over the windows, but the interior of the place has been looted, and it’s no mystery who looted it.

I grope my way to the galley. I pull the wool socks from my hands, and it’s like my fingers are made of wood. I turn on one of the burners and I hear a propane hiss, but the igniter doesn’t work and I don’t have any matches. I turn off the gas and feel into every nook and cranny of the cupboards with my frozen hands. I can’t find any matches. I go to the cab and check the glove box and storage bins. I’m beat to hell and freezing and tired and sick to my stomach and I haven’t cried since forever but tears start to come. It’s very strange because I don’t feel much of anything inside. The pressure releases itself from my tear ducts and I’m about to curl up and pick the place where we’ll freeze to death, when Melanie taps me on the shoulder. She hands me a smooth plastic shape that turns out to be a Bic lighter.

It takes me almost a full minute to get the propane burners lit, but I finally manage to do it. The despair is gone for the time being as we warm our hands over sweet blue flames. The pain of thawing sets in and it crosses my mind that our shadows must be huge on the wall behind us, but I don’t turn to look. I get my hands to work again and then I open the oven and I light it, too. I put my arm around Melanie’s shoulder and she doesn’t rebuff me.

“You don’t have any marshmallows on you, do you?” I say.

I look into her half-lit face. She tries to smile but she doesn’t quite pull it off. I’m trying to think of something to say, something light and confident, but then something goes wrong inside me. My stomach clenches up, and there’s no willpower on earth strong enough to stop what’s coming. I open the door just in time, puking so hard that the plates of my skull move.

The sickness doesn’t pass, but my stomach is empty, so I go back inside. I try to keep my dry heaves to myself, but it isn’t an easy thing to do. The heaves make me feel as if I’m passing my soul from my body. I’m about to pass out on my feet, so I lie down on the RV’s couch and curl up. I hear Melanie getting sick in the RV’s little bathroom, and my tears start to come again, but then God has mercy, and He takes my pain away.

When I wake up, the pain and nausea make me want to pass out again, so that’s just what I do. I get a series of little flashes between the time my eyes open and my circuit breaker pops. I don’t know how many times I try to swim back to the surface, but after a while I manage to climb back into the world.

I’m in a warm place. The wind has picked up and the RV rocks on its springs. Melanie is on the floor beside me. I reach out to check her vitals. The pain of moving takes my breath away, but I put my hand to her throat. She’s warm and her heartbeat is strong. I thank God.

It’s warm enough inside that our breath isn’t condensing the air, and then it gets warm enough for us to start to sweat. I take off my coat. I wake Melanie and tell her to take off her coat. If we get soaked with sweat, we won’t live long if we have to go outside. I hang our coats over the windows that face the camp of our enemies.

“Are we dying?” Melanie asks. “Because if we’re dying, shouldn’t we be saying stuff like ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘I love you’ and things like that?”

“I’m sorry. I love you. But I don’t think we’re dying.”

“How do you know?”

“We’d be sicker if we were.”

“Tell me the truth. You learned about radiation by watching movies, didn’t you?”

“No. I was trained to fight in an NBC environment. NBC stands for nuclear, biological, and chemical.”

“Great. Good for you. What about cancer?”

“Let’s not worry about that now, okay?”

“Remember when I went through my hypochondriac phase?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I think it’s coming back.”

It’s getting a bit too warm. I turn down the burners and the stove, and then I give the RV a more careful search. Hand-sewn curtains and cabinetry refinished by clumsy hands and a puked-in crapper and a mattress with two sunken ovals where its owners once slept. The vehicle is registered in the state of Arizona to a Mr. and Mrs. Weiner. I tell Melanie, pronouncing it “Weener,” and she says their family name makes perfect sense, and that maybe it sums up the whole human race.

It makes me happy to hear her old tone of voice. She riffs on it, talking about weener-mobiles and weener-controlled houses of government and little weeners who like to blow things up. When she decides to give the Weiner thing a break, I go back to searching the RV. I imagine the RV people were a retired couple, taking a trip to see what they could of the world before their time was up. Maybe they were driving their house on wheels over the river and through the woods to visit their grandkids.

The vinyl of the driver’s seat is cracked. It smells like old people who believed in saving water, and I almost get sick again. When I regain some control of my gullet, I reach beneath the driver’s seat, afraid that I’ll find the leavings of a picked nose or the last gray hairs from a bald head, but what I find is a homemade compartment. It’s open and empty. I guess Mr. Weiner might’ve had a gun in there. I check beneath the passenger seat and find that Mrs. Weiner also had a compartment. Equal-opportunity kind of people, they were. What’s good for him is good for her, share and share alike.

Mrs. Weiner’s compartment is smaller and I almost don’t find it, but it’s there and it’s still closed. Its plywood door isn’t locked. I pull it open and put my hand on a snub-nosed Chief’s Special Airweight revolver. I open the cylinder and I thank God that it’s carrying a full load of five hollowpoints. I reach in again and find a box of Hydra-Shoks, twenty rounds of extra determination and wherewithal and individuality, and I think Mr. Weiner was a good and caring person who wanted the best of everything for his wife. I think he must’ve been a serious, loving man to give his wife such a fine gift, and I say a prayer for both of them.

The boys were sloppy in their looting, and I have no idea why the Weiners left the gun, but I take it as a sign. I’d been thinking about staying in the RV until the boys found us. They live to hunt, but by staying, I’d take the thrill of the hunt away from them. I wouldn’t have to hear their bullets snapping at my daughter’s life force and I wouldn’t have to lead them away from her and I wouldn’t have to die this soon in life’s journey. But the small revolver gives me enough hope to dare, and enough courage to believe, so I put all thoughts of surrender out of my head.

I show the revolver to Melanie and she shakes her head.

“What good is that? I’d trade it for Dramamine or some Pepto-Bismol right now.”

“Me, too,” I say, but we both know it’s a lie.

We fall into the bus and I give a prayer of thanks. We try to push the door closed but we bent something in the folding mechanism. We’re dead if we can’t close it. Scott pushes with all his strength but it’s not enough, so he takes off his coat and jams it into the gap. The wind blasts above us and snow drifts over the coat until only a gray light falls into our shelter, then snow drifts over the glass of the door until there’s barely enough light to see. Scotty peels the wrapper from a chemical snaplight and cracks it and shakes it until we’re swimming in its green glow. I don’t know where he got it. He’s like his father that way, always coming up with something unlikely and unexpected, but completely necessary.

We search the interior of the bus. We were in a car and an airplane and now we’re in a school bus that’s made its last stop. It’s not a full-size school bus. It’s one of the short buses used to transport special kids, and one of them is still here, dead in her wheelchair, frozen solid in her wrecked yellow tomb. Scott holds the light close to her face. She’s maybe ten years old, with long black hair and a white shirt and a plaid skirt.

She was a quadriplegic. Her body is still strapped to its chair, but her spirit is running free through grassy fields. I’d like to say that her mortal remains look composed and peaceful, but I can’t. She must’ve been killed when the bus crashed onto its side, but I can’t tell what killed her and it doesn’t matter now.

If I were Catholic I’d have something to say. I’d have the comfort of a memorized prayer to guide her to heaven, but my people didn’t believe in a God who could be satisfied with memorized prayers. At least that’s what they believed when they were alive. But maybe the Catholics have it right, so I start to say a little prayer over the dead girl, but I don’t know the proper ritualistic words, and my free-verse praying doesn’t sound very convincing. It sounds pathetic and insufficient, so I stop.

Scott turns away and makes himself busy. He has a pocketknife out and he’s cutting sheets of vinyl from the seats. He gets quite a bushel and he makes a sour nest for us on the floor. It’s a rat’s nest, but maybe it will be enough. I take off my coat and drape it over the nest. Our breath condenses and makes a fog that causes the glow of the chemical light to look as if it’s coming from another dimension. We get down into the nest and pull the vinyl and the coat over us. It’s sticky and sour with the smell of hard-luck kids, and it’s very cold at first, but then our small heat rises beneath it, and I’m grateful for even so much as this.

“It might be warm enough to save us.”

“Yeah.”

“Can’t light a fire in here.”

“Nope.”

“Lucky to have found this place.”

“We’ll see.”

I’m not sure who said what—who was the optimist and who was the pessimist. I squeeze Scott’s shoulder and he half turns and nods. He doesn’t have much meat on his bones. He’s shivering, but gradually our nest does its job and I start to drift off into sleep. I wake up, wanting to tell Jerry something, but he’s not here and I don’t remember what I wanted to say. God knows I miss that man. I don’t know if I would’ve stayed with him through his retirement and into the valley of the shadow of old farthood, with all its indignities and bodily assaults and demands and regrets. I’m still not sure I won’t make a final decision about us, someday. I can’t quite bring myself to admit that my last big decision is behind me, and all that’s left for me is to ride out the choices I’ve already made.

But I don’t want to end things like this, disappearing without so much as a nod goodbye. I can’t let go of Scott. And I can’t let our Melanie go. Not like this. Not any other way, either. I miss her so badly that I can’t help but cry.

I send every mote and beam of energy I can spare to Jerry and Melanie. I try to send them hugs, real hugs, and I’m not sure if it’s prayer or an attempt at telekinesis. I can’t stop shivering. I hover above real sleep, remembering the final slumber that tempted me outside in the storm, but this new sleep is probably the ordinary kind, and I let myself fall back down into it. I sleep as if it’s my duty to set an example for Scott. I’m not sure that I’ll wake up, but I’ll admit that it feels fine to drift away to a better place.

When I get deep enough to have some control over things, I visit Portland. The wind is howling and it’s an east wind coming straight and cold down the Columbia River Gorge. I’m a little girl wearing red rubber boots and jumping in mud puddles, but the puddles are frozen hard as stone. I’m wearing a thrift-store coat that’s made of fake fur that turned into dingle-balls after too many cycles in a hot clothes dryer. My cheeks are hot but my hands are cold, so I go home.

Mom is listening to KPDQ-FM on her old Grundig radio. The show she’s listening to is
Through the Bible, with J. Vernon McGee.
He’s a Southern preacher, and he sounds more sure of himself than anyone I’ve ever met in real life. He’s going on about how we should set good examples for others. He says we can never be as good as Jesus was, but we should never stop trying. Mom is listening to a man she never met tell her that she’ll certainly fail, but it doesn’t seem to bother her. She’s dreamy-looking and she takes a sheet of Toll House cookies from the oven.

The kitchen fills itself with the perfect smells of butter and flour and sugar and chocolate. The windows are steamed against the cold. Mom gives me a peck on the cheek and pours me a glass of milk. I want to grab a cookie, but I know the chocolate chips are hot enough to burn my tongue silly, so I wait. I’m not really hungry, but you don’t have to be hungry to long for a fresh cookie. Anyway, it feels fine to wait in that warm kitchen. Mom asks me how my day went, and I say it was okay. I say it was a hard day, with long division and a spelling test, but I knew most of the answers.

Mom says, Good for you. Good for you, my smart girl. Hard days are the ones we remember, because of the way we have to fight to get through them, and I say, Yeah, I guess so.

J. Vernon McGee finishes his sermon and a choir starts in on a sad hymn about how things will be better when we’re dead and in heaven. I like the idea of heaven but I don’t want to think about how people get there. I reach for a Toll House cookie, but when I touch it, when I pick it up and feel its warmth in my hand, it turns into an ear, a burned human ear.

Scott shakes me awake and my entire body flinches.

“You okay?”

“Yes.”

In truth, my stomach is so upset that I can barely talk.

“You were thrashing around,” he says.

“It wasn’t a nightmare. It was a good dream. I was in your grandmother’s kitchen.”

“Okay. Sorry.”