Adams ladder, p.7
Adam's Ladder, page 7
THE MYTHIC HERO MOST LIKELY TO SQEEZE A STONE
B.E. Scully
I
The Boy and the Woman Have Sex
On nights they didn’t sink the pump, they had sex. She’d have thought it would be the other way around—the fear-spiked cocktail of adrenaline and desire, of exhausted paranoia on the one hand and irresistible need on the other. But then she came to understand that on nights they stole water, the pump was the sex. After all, the water was more important—more necessary—and thus even more exciting. More risky, too. And unlike the sex, the pump lasted three hours.
That was the fault of his age, of course. In a few more years, the still tender, unformed landscape of youth would harden and solidify into the architecture of adulthood. But right now it was still summer, and the boy was still a boy.
A teenage boy, to be specific, but still a boy. The law, or what passed for it these days, still recognized him as such, but the woman wasn’t worried about getting arrested. Stealing the water would get her sent to one of the huge detention camps that dotted the outskirts of every town and city like some barbed-wire encircled human circus show, but not the sex. Nobody cared who you slept with these days. The woman had thought she’d still care, though, even if nobody else did. He was half her age, young enough to be her own child if she’d have been unlucky enough to have any. She wasn’t some kind of a pervert. But nothing about sex with the boy felt perverted. Maybe it was because nothing much felt that way anymore.
In a perverse world, wholesomeness becomes its own kind of perversion.
The woman reached over and ran her hand along a stretch of the boy’s flat stomach. The relentless sun had tanned his skin as brown as a hazelnut.
That was just one more lie they’d all believed—that sex was some sacred, special thing. They’d learned, though, what sacredness really was—food, shelter, water.
Never enough of any of those things these days, but still plenty of sex.
The boy’s stomach was smooth and clean, at least relative to the parts that never seemed to get clean. The woman looked down at her hands, cracked and scarred, nails caked with dirt.
Like an old lizard, she thought, and smiled.
The boy rolled away from her and sat up. “Do you think it’s going to rain soon?”
“Nope.”
“Not even a little? For like, ten minutes maybe?”
“Nope.”
“Remember when it used to rain all the time? Even in summer, it rained sometimes. Remember?”
The woman closed her eyes. “I remember.”
The boy stood up and began pacing around the room. She’d shut up most of the rooms by now—the bulk of her once prized possessions had been confiscated, sold, or repurposed long ago, and it helped save heat in winter, when the nights came on as early as two o’clock in the afternoon. Now the old porch and the kitchen were the only rooms left in use, plus the bathroom on those rare occasions they had enough water to plug up the old tub and soak, remembering the hot, dirt-and-bug free version that actually used to come right out of the rubbed bronze faucet, like magic.
One of the new national pastimes, remembering.
“If it’s not going to rain, we should have sunk the pump tonight,” the boy said.
“Too dangerous.”
The pump had actually been in position—the boy had been down at the water’s edge when they saw the flashes of light. He had frozen, Narcissus-like, in front of the rippling mirror of water, and the woman had crouched down in the weeds along the bank.
The boy’s hissed whisper floated up to her. “Patrol Walkers?”
She peered into the darkness, but the lights had vanished. “I don’t think so. Too far away.”
They squatted in the silence, waiting. She was just about ready to go start the cell pack when she heard them—pop-pop-pop, three small explosions of gunfire from across the canal, where the lights had been. Five times now they’d seen lights in the dark patch of forest some intrepid businessman had once purchased with the idea of turning it into a spa resort. The bulldozers had come in and cleared about half of the twenty acres, chewing up trees and shrubs and sending the wildlife fleeing for their lives—the crows had taken to the sky in droves, circling and cawing above the metal beasts as if plotting their own counter-attack.
The Meltdown, of course, had put an end to all that. One by one the bulldozers went silent and then vanished altogether. One of them was still over there, its rusted, hulking metal skeleton gleaming in the sun. But the goldenrod and blackberry vines and ivy were winning their slow, patient re-occupation. The crows returned to the tops of the pines that hadn’t been cleared and sat there as they’d always done, watching, waiting.
Just like the boy and the woman.
“Pull the pump,” the woman had hissed back down to the boy.
He obeyed immediately. Without another word, they dragged the pump up the embankment and back onto the safety of the woman’s property, where they hid it in the dead ivy vines. Afterward they went inside and had sex.
The forest was pitch black and silent now.
“We’ll drop the pump tomorrow,” the woman reassured the boy. “We’ll go an extra hour, to make up for tonight.”
The boy flopped back down on the bed. The woman had moved it from the bedroom into the porch by herself, before the boy arrived. She could have used the smaller, lighter one from the downstairs bedroom, but the bed had been her one stubborn concession to the past. It had taken her two days to tear the thing apart, haul it down the steep steps one piece at a time, and then reassemble it. She could no longer remember how she and her husband had gotten it upstairs in the first place. She still made the bed every morning, even when the sheets weren’t clean, which was most of the time.
The boy and the woman lay together on the big bed, listening to the night. Finally the boy asked, “What do you think’s going on? In the woods, I mean.”
When the woman didn’t answer, the boy said, “I’ll bet I know,” and then whispered, “Revolution.”
It was one of his most treasured words, taken out often to examine and consider, or stored away in secret to contemplate in the small, desperate hours before the light returned.
The boy reached out and ran his finger down the woman’s stomach in imitation of her gesture. She felt the damp heat pulse to life between her legs and travel outward across her skin—it had once been everything, that heat. Through the years it had dwindled, dimming and flickering through the long, hard years before the Meltdown, and then eventually guttering out altogether. Now it was back again, primed and ready, it seemed, for a re-takeover.
“Like the blackberry vines and ivy,” the woman said.
The boy raked his slender fingers through her pubic hair like a comb. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“Revolution,” he said again, louder this time, and sat up. “Revolution’s coming.”
The woman again said nothing.
“So what do you think’s going on?” the boy persisted. “What do you think’s happening?”
The woman shrugged. “Probably nothing—just people trying to stay alive a little longer.”
II
The Woman and the Boy Sink the Pump
It was almost time.
In another ten minutes, it would be dark enough.
The woman looked both ways down the canal, wishing she had a cigarette. She hadn’t had a cigarette in years, since long before the Meltdown—they’d given up their bad habits back then, swept up in the fervor of organic and gluten-free and longevity and yoga three times a week. They’d been convinced they might just live forever, funny as that seemed now.
“Sure wouldn’t have given up so many things, if we’d have known,” the woman said, echoing millions of people across the globe who wouldn’t be on the globe much longer. She’d taken to talking to herself even before the Meltdown. After her husband disappeared, she got used to being alone. Post-Meltdown, her social life consisted of confirming her statistics once a month at what used to be the local one-stop super store and was now the local Designated Rations and First Aid Site.
“Same residence, classification code, and allotment number?”
“Same.”
“Nothing’s changed?”
“Nothing’s changed.”
She’d pick up her vacuum-sealed packets of pre-cooked beans and rice or pasta or whatever protein patty was passing for chicken these days, then shuffle down the counter for her jug of sanitized water. Next counter was one bar of soap, as hard and square as a block of cement and reeking of antiseptic, and a four-ounce packet of all-purpose liquid cleaner. One more stop at medical if she needed anything in that department—and, of course, if they had anything to give in that department—and then the three mile trek home.
The boy had shown up one afternoon reeking of the wild. It was astonishing, the things he didn’t know. The only meal he could fix was sandwiches, and there hadn’t been bread or deli meat in years. He didn’t know how to start a fire or fix a fence. He didn’t know how to grow vegetables or catch a rabbit. He didn’t know how to use the shotgun or the handgun. Because he either didn’t have a claimed residence or wouldn’t give it up if he did, the boy did not qualify for a rations allotment. He only bothered to wash his clothes when a foul enough stain or smell demanded it, and the only reason his body got better treatment was because the woman wouldn’t have come near him otherwise.
In some ways, the sex had been the easiest thing she had taught him. Their first night together, after a few fumbling attempts to figure out exactly how to get where he needed to go, the old primal knowledge had kicked in. After she’d taken hold and guided him in, the boy had known exactly what to do, thrusting faster and deeper until his still-adolescent hormones cut the newfound ancient instinct short.
The boy didn’t have much practical use, but he was a male, and any male on the property was better than none. His age put him higher on the rape list than an adult male, but still lower than any female other than the very young or the very old. The mere presence of a penis seemed to send some kind of signal to other penises, like a lighthouse silently beaming “Stay Away” to passing ships.
Sitting beneath the pines on a cut tree stump wishing for a cigarette, the woman considered that male humans weren’t so different from male dogs, sending off signals and marking their territories in a strange, secret ritual known only to themselves.
She looked up at the patch of squid-ink framed by two pine branches bent like frames around the square of stars and sky. As usual, dusk had crept in slow and steady to steal the last traces of light. The natural kind was the only choice left—no porch lights, no streetlights, nothing but the occasional Patrol Walker headlamp careening out of the darkness like a luminescent bat blindly seeking a target, any target.
The last of her illegal flashlight batteries had gone down months ago. They always sank the pump at dusk, when there was still light in the sky, but they pulled it up in utter darkness. In a flash of inspiration, the woman had unearthed a pack of glow sticks in a box of old Halloween decorations, the kind that crack open to produce a chemical light reaction. But they were down to their last pack. After that, they’d only be able to sink the pump on moonlit nights.
“Yellow-orange,” the woman said. “Soft yellow-orange.” That was the color of night-rooms, the way they used to glow. The woman could still picture it, driving or walking down a dark country road and all of a sudden there it was, some warmly glowing living room or kitchen flooded with the electricity necessary to cook dinner and watch television and hold together the snug miracle of modern domestic life.
Warm glowing living rooms, another lost pleasure.
The night was turning black and mean. An ill-smelling wind scuttled in from the east, where the fires still burned.
The boy had been coming and going, disappearing and reappearing, all day. It wasn’t illegal for a person to leave his or her recorded place of residence, but it was risky. Almost everything was against the law now, and if the military or local enforcement patrols didn’t get you, the vigilante gangs and just plain crazies would. But teenage boys didn’t need organic vegetables and yoga to think they would live forever—it came with the packaging.
The woman was about ready to go down and sink the pump herself when the boy burst out from behind the patch of fly-bitten laurel bushes that screened the canal edge of the property. Most of the shrubs had died, but for now, anyway, the laurels were still going strong.
“Not much longer if it doesn’t rain, though,” the woman said, rubbing at a dirt spot on her leg that only smeared it into an even bigger dirt spot.
People stayed inside most of the time now, popping out of their sealed-up houses only to have a look around before digging back in again, like moles. But the tension was building. The woman could feel the restlessness race up and down the canal, from one house to another, like a downed live wire.
“I was about ready to go without you,” she told the lanky form loping into view.
He shrugged. “It’s your rule.”
“And it’s a good one: never go down alone, not to put the pump in or to get it out.”
The boy shrugged again. “Okay, so I’m here.”
Usually, he sank the pump while she stood watch. The woman was taller, but the boy was stronger. She was slow and cautious, he was swift and nimble. But the main reason the boy handled the pump was because he was young and had no fear—not of slipping and falling into the canal; not of being spotted by an unexpected Patrol Walker; not of their crazy neighbor, who on the day after the Meltdown had wrapped his property in barbed wire and could only be seen since patrolling the perimeter with an alarmingly long-barreled shotgun.
The woman, however, was not young, and had plenty of fear.
Tonight, though, the woman decided to sink the pump herself.
She grabbed it in both hands, stepped over the fallen telephone pole she’d dragged into place to discourage looters, and made her way down the steep embankment. By now it was nothing but dust and round little pebbles desperate to ball-bearing her downhill, arms pin-wheeling, the boy laughing at her the whole time.
At the bottom of the embankment, one last chance for breathing easy on the flat pathway separating her property from the canal, and then the descent.
The first part wasn’t too bad. Years ago, before she’d owned the house, someone had placed a huge flat rock right at the edge of the canal and hacked a narrow, hidden pathway through the blackberry vines and sweet peas down to the water. The water had reached all the way up to the edge of the pathway then—in fact, the flat rock had probably been put there so that some long ago boy or girl could sit and dip a bucket or a pair of hot, dirty feet into the cool water. Now the canal was less than six feet deep, and the only way to the water was down a worn cliff side revealed by the vanished water. The cliff was lined with jagged gray teeth ready to pull loose and send her tumbling, plus more pebble ball-bearings happy to help out. Even though it was half as deep as it used to be, the canal waters were still swift enough to carry a careless body off.
The blackberries and sweat peas that were somehow outlasting the weather formed a tunnel at the top of the pathway, screening her on both sides. But at the water’s edge, she was exposed.
The woman lowered herself onto the flat rock and started down the cliff. The middle part was the real killer. A huge grey rock was embedded deep within the hard-packed earth, its smooth top emerging like the back of a humpback whale. But that whale-back was as smooth and slippery as ice, and the woman crab-walked first one, then the other foot down the slope until she hit the shelf of square rocks the boy had gathered and placed there for solid footing. But it was only semi-solid, the rocks constantly slipping loose and careening into the canal water, clackety-clack, one giant stone square knocking against another all the way down to the splash that, when the boy had the pump, would cause the woman to hold her breath until she saw that the slide hadn’t taken him with it into the dark, swirling water.
After she cleared the whale rock, the woman picked her way across the relatively flat expanse that led to the water’s edge.
She glanced up nervously. Dropping the pump at dusk meant that they saved on light, but it also meant that it was still light enough to see the outlines of a woman positioning an illegal water pump into a formerly public but currently very un-public waterway.
So tantalizingly close; so entirely forbidden.
Just as the woman was ready to place the pump, flashes of light in the forest caused her to freeze. It was illegal to congregate in groups larger than four, but the woman counted seven distinct beams of light criss-crossing through the trees before vanishing all at once.
She hesitated. To pull the pump again tonight meant they’d be down two days.
The woman peered into the dark forest as if the pines could tell her what to do. Receiving no word, however, she lowered the pump just below the water line and hissed “It’s ready” into the darkness. Somewhere at the top of the ridge the boy loped off to plug the pump into the cell pack. Unlike the pump, the cell pack never got anywhere near the water. In fact, it never left a barricaded back room of the house from which they strung a power chord through a hole in the screen window to run across the yard to the pump. The pump was valuable, but the cell pack was gold—too important to risk losing.
The pump was an old gadget leftover from one of her husband’s long-ago projects—a pond, if she remembers correctly, that never got past a two-foot hole in the ground. She hadn’t turned the pump in during the first official Handover. It had been optional then, back when optional still existed. But like most people, the woman knew where to hide things when the trucks emblazoned with the New Government logo and the soldiers in back arrived. Even so, the pump didn’t mean much after the electricity went from ration days only to no days at all. But then the boy had turned up, and even though it had taken him awhile to trust her enough, he’d brought more with him than his youth. The woman hadn’t even known the rechargeable solar-hybrid cells existed—when the military tested the first prototype, there were rumors it ran on more than just sun and technology. Some claimed an organic compound too classified to release to the public was needed; some even claimed the mysterious substance might be human.
