The last storm, p.5
The Last Storm, page 5
“Nothing like me,” she says, and my anger fades as quickly as it rose. “I shook it three years ago. An old guy called Maxwell helped me, hippy as fuck but he was the wisest man I ever met. Maybe the nicest. He helped more than anyone, ever, and he didn’t even try to get in my pants. He helped me start over again, and ever since then it’s been the best time of my life. But I’m still an addict at heart, and Maxwell said I always need to think that way. It keeps me sharp. Think you’re cured and the disease will come back because it’s insidious. But you…” She touches my scars again. “You’re not addicted to anything so banal as drugs.”
“Why do you say that?” I ask. She’s still touching my arm, where the needles from my old apparatus once connected me to my fate.
“Just a feeling,” she says. “Your story’s more interesting.” She takes another drink and this time doesn’t offer me the bottle. Perhaps she knows I’ve been faking.
“Pretty good,” I say. “I’m impressed. So what’s your story?”
“Boring,” Cee says. “I gotta piss.” She stands, swaying a little before walking to the rear of the trailer and jumping down. It’s almost dusk. While she’s away I take a handful of candles from my pack and place them around the sleeping bag, ensuring they’re a safe distance away before lighting them. The need to stay here with Cee for the night isn’t only because of the draw I feel towards her bracelet, which remains strong. It’s also her company I crave. It’s been a while since I spent the night sleeping beside someone.
“Romantic,” Cee says, climbing back into the trailer. She’s rubbing her butt. “Fucking devil grass. You’d think I’d have learnt by now, huh?” She laughs, slumps down beside me, and picks up the bottle again. “So sing me a song.”
“What, me?”
“Come on, Ash-not-Leigh. You’ve heard my voice. I need music, and I don’t want to offend the fucking night.”
“Okay. A song.”
We sit in silence for a while. Maybe she assumes I’m thinking of a song to sing, but in reality I’m wondering how I can get her bracelet. I could ask for it, but if she says no then I’m stuck, and she’ll become defensive. She already feels like a friend. It’s a strange thought and something I don’t want to ruin. The alternative is to steal it, and that’s worse.
Her eyes are already drooping. She feels safe with me. I start singing an old pop song my father used to sing when I was a little girl, and it feels sort of nice. The candles barely flicker in the still air, and through the torn canvas roof of the trailer I can see the first stars starting to emerge.
As I sing, Cee leans her head against my shoulder. She still clasps the bottle in one hand, and she draws her legs up and rests her other hand on my knee. My song pauses, but only for a second. It’s been a while since I’ve been close to anyone like this, and I like the intimacy. It’s unforced and innocent.
Her hair smells good. Dusty, honest. I feel the heat of her hand through my jeans. She’s breathing softly, and as I segue from one song into the next, her breathing lengthens and she starts twitching in her sleep.
I stop singing. I wonder if I can do this. I wish I could leave her a note, a way to apologise. Carefully, still humming, I reach down and unclip the bracelet from her wrist.
That’s it, my inner voice says, and I imagine the interior workings of the bracelet affixed to the plinth.
“Sorry,” I whisper, as quietly as I can. As I ease her hand from my leg and gently lower her down, I say, “Gotta pee,” just in case a small part of her is still conscious and listening.
Bracelet clasped in my right hand, I swing my backpack onto my shoulder, pick up the guitar case, and creep to the rear of the trailer.
I glance back. Cee is still asleep on top of the sleeping bag, candles placed around her and bathing her in a gentle warm glow. I blow them out.
I’ll see her again, I think. I drop down from the trailer and run. There are no sounds of pursuit. For the first time ever in the eye, I wish the tumult would fall around me and carry away this guilt.
I’ll see her again.
* * *
“So you’re a troubadour?” the driver of the car asks.
“Huh?”
He nods at the guitar case. “Troubadour. Minstrel. Travelling musician.”
“Oh, no,” I say. “There’s no guitar inside.”
“Right.” He frowns but smiles as well. He seems friendly, and I’ve become a fair judge of character. “So where’re you headed?”
“Anywhere down the road.” It sounds so aimless that I worry it’ll scare him off and he’ll leave me in the dust. Either that, or he’ll give me a condescending grow-up lecture. I’ve had both.
“Hop in. Some company’d be welcome about now.” He looks over my shoulder, then around at the desolate surroundings—truck graveyard, dusty road, a few scattered buildings in the distance marked with gently turning wind turbines. I like him more because he doesn’t ask me what I’m doing here.
His name’s Mick, and he’s a sustainable energy engineer, spending most of his days on the road servicing small community wind farms. He has a wife and two kids back home in Boston. He could make a living doing his job around New England and up and down the East Coast, but he’s come to the Desert because he feels driven to help. He’s paid, sure, but he also knows that he’s providing a service. And the drought affects everyone, Desert-dweller or not.
“There are still good people,” I say after he tells me his story. Maybe he’s waiting for mine.
“Sure there are. Plenty. The world’s got big again, ’specially with towns closing in and trying their best to look after themselves. And the famine’s causin’ that a lot more and a lot quicker over the past few years.”
“I’ve seen it.”
“But there’s still good folks, and hope. Wanna know how I know that? I ain’t religious at all, but I’ve seen things on my travels. Saw a field of red birds once, hundreds of thousands of them, and they took off as one and their undersides were as white as Heaven against the sky.” He glances at me. “You’ve got to take hope from that, right?”
I nod and smile. It’s nice that he can see the good in things.
Mick drives, the electric car purring along the road, and I can feel his questions backing up like water behind a dam. I feel something else, too, and it doesn’t take me long to realise why. It’s a large plastic head on his dashboard—an actor whose name I’ve never known—but it’s not the head that sings to me, but the delicate metal spring that allows him to nod and bobble along to the car’s movements.
“Can I buy him from you?”
“Casey? You can have him. Never did like that motherfucker.” Mick laughs, and it’s so free and unselfconscious that I can’t help but join in.
I ask him to drop me in a small town called Merran Falls. It’s a weird name for a strange place, with one street running perpendicular to the highway for a mile out into the Desert. Maybe when the Desert was grassland and the river wasn’t dried up, Merran Falls was a name with meaning.
“You’re sure?” Mick asks.
“Thanks for the ride, Mick.” I smile and shut the door, and his car whispers away. I’ve enjoyed his company. He made my day lighter.
I grasp the nodding head of Casey the actor, rip it apart, and examine the spring against the dipping sun.
* * *
In Merran Falls I find an old radio set in a motel room, and it sings to me with a song very different from the one being broadcast. I pluck out the circuit board—I don’t yet know if I’ll use the whole board or just one of the components—and hide the dismantled radio under the bed when I leave.
From there I head out to the plains, where a small aircraft crashed a couple of years before. I heard about the accident in Merran Falls’s solitary bar, and from that moment the site called to me. It’s a hike from town, and I have to camp out overnight at the crash site, sleeping beneath half a wing that’s propped against a rock. I wake in the night to find a snake curled beside me and sharing my warmth. I kill it and cook it for breakfast.
Once the sun rises red and angry on the dust-smeared horizon, I examine the remains of the light aircraft. It’s been picked over, yet a lot of its mechanics remain, and I soon find what I seek. I draws me in, zeroing my attention, and I feel the shudder of distant thunder inside as I touch the dial’s cracked face. I wonder if the lightning shows in my eyes.
I work the dial free with my knife, saving as much of the wiring and its connecting plugs as I can. Adding it to the growing contents of my guitar case, I sit back on my haunches for a while, the open case shaded in my shadow. If I look from the corner of my eye, I can almost make out how the apparatus will look. It’s as if I am catching it unawares.
This feels like something I have been waiting to do forever. The nine years I’ve spent in the Desert, drifting and living on my own, quite possibly mad, has been a prelude to this time. I’m beginning to sense a true destiny forming in and around me.
Walking back across the parched dead farmland towards the faint echo Merran Falls has become, I feel the eye moving on, and the storms I keep inside rise to smother me once more.
* * *
When the eye settles over me again I am in the suburbs of a city, and my case is heavier with parts, and even though I estimate I have been taken by the tumult for only two days or so, I understand that I have been collecting components even in that state. I’m hungry but not thirsty, unkempt but not dirty, and the brief flashes of memory suggest that someone tried to look after me for a while.
I usually avoid the cities, but as I surface from the deluge and rise above the waves I take a moment to look around. I am sitting in a park surrounded on all sides by busy streets and tall buildings. The park is large, and I’m one of many passing time seated on a bench, wandering the paths, or lying down. Some appear to be asleep, and a little way from me beneath a sparse tree canopy there’s a spread of tatty tents. Even in places where a good proportion of the population has moved on in search of better times, there is homelessness.
A passer-by pauses close to me, eyeing me up and down. It’s a man, short and slight and dressed in a smart business suit, even in this heat. He’s young and quite handsome, his face speckled with dark patches of old sunburn. He catches my eye and smiles, and I lift my hat a little and smile back. He seems to take that safe contact as a signal, and he closes the distance between us, places a large coffee on the bench beside me, then digs inside a paper bag he carries in his other hand. He takes out something wrapped in paper. I smell hot toast and butter, and it sets my stomach rumbling.
“Have a good day,” he says, and his voice is quiet, almost shy. He’s already walking away by the time I call out my thanks.
This small act of kindness makes me feel good, especially in a place displaying obvious signs of the catastrophe plaguing this nation. There are water standpipes in the street with people waiting in long lines to fill large containers. Many shops are closed and boarded up, and I see a couple of grocers with queues leading out the door. Past the far corner of the park I see three Soaker wagons parked in a side street, their loads of fresh water destined for those who can afford it. I wonder if they’re part of the Soaker group I came across days or weeks before.
The park itself is marked by drought. Grass is dead. A large pond contains a mere puddle of muddy water, and a few scruffy ducks pad across its oily surface. Hardy trees persist here and there, but planting beds are home only to cacti and a few swathes of invasive devil grass. Even in the city, people are fighting against the painful truth of change. They don’t even call it the climate crisis anymore, or global warming, or any other name that might once have been used to urge positive action. Now, this is the norm.
I take a sip of coffee and it’s good and strong. I bite into the salty, buttery toast, and close my eyes as I chew and swallow. When I open them again there’s a ragged, wild dog standing a dozen steps away. It’s lost an ear in a fight, and its fur is patchy and knotted with dirt and dried blood. I wonder what name it once had, called by an owner as it chased a ball, muttered by a child as he or she cuddled the mutt late into the evening.
“Hey dog,” I say. It pricks up its one good ear and whines. I throw it the remains of my toast. It snatches the food from the air, swallows without chewing, then wanders over and sniffs around my feet. It pays close attention to the guitar case beside me, then crawls beneath the bench and stretches out in the shade. Its doggy smell hits me. A wistful nostalgia thumps me with surprise, tears coming to my eyes, as I remember Teddy. My father always said a kid should grow up with a dog.
“Let’s see what we’ve got then, eh, Teddy?” I say. The mutt pays no attention as I open the guitar case and take a look inside. After just a couple of minutes examining the contents, I come to a conclusion that is felt in every part of me—I am almost ready to build.
I close the case and look around the park. I’ll need to get out of this city, back into the parched Desert, and find somewhere quiet, private and still. I’ve been collecting components even while far away from the eye, and perhaps it’s an act of self-preservation. Maybe if I can’t find a way to release the storms locked inside me, they will one day swallow me up, and the eye will pass me by forever.
JESSE
Nowadays, most people wished for rain. Sometimes Jesse did too, in the same abstract way that he wished for his old life back, or that he’d been born normal, or for world peace. But the coming storm was far from normal. He could feel it in his bones. His limbs ached, his shoulders were sore when he moved, and every time he walked uphill his left hip shouted at him to turn around and go the hell back down.
He paid no attention, because he had spent so much time and effort making this place his own, and it was too precious to lose. Yet he had always known that rain would be his downfall.
“What do you reckon, Rocky?” he asked. “Can’t see the thunderheads yet, but look at the colour of that sky above the mountains. Pale and fucking angry.” He leaned on the heavy timber fence surrounding his vegetable garden, and Rocky cocked her head at him, eyes wide and ears raised. That always reminded him of Ash. She’d loved their dog Teddy, and used to make clicking noises so he tilted his head because it made him look cute. Jesse had berated her for teasing him, telling her that Teddy did that because he was trying to understand. Maybe he’d been projecting himself onto the dog, because he had never really understood Ash. If he had, he wouldn’t have killed her.
“Good girl,” he whispered, and the dog cocked her head at him again. She whined softly, then trotted away searching for interesting smells.
Jesse stared to the north, his aches and pains settled deep. Karina had been confused that he’d named a female dog Rocky. He hadn’t done it to piss her off. Or maybe he had. Fuck it, he didn’t regret it, and Rocky didn’t give a shit.
It was still only seven in the morning. Usually at this time of day he was cooking breakfast and brewing coffee so strong it required a new symbol on the periodic table. Sometimes, on a Friday, Jenny made the thirty-minute drive from the little town of Blueton to join him for breakfast, bringing groceries if he’d run out. Every now and then she made a joke and said, “I brought you your mail,” throwing him nothing, which he always did his best to duck. But today wasn’t Friday, and the only company he could expect was the storm forming over the mountains.
Groaning as pain bit his complaining hip, Jesse set to work battening down the hatches. He’d call Jenny later to check she’d done the same, though she lived in a second-floor apartment in town, and she didn’t have as much to lose as him. She was almost seventy, had some money from a dead husband and a decent enough teacher’s pension, and most of what she treasured was experience. If the storm washed away something she valued, she’d find worth in something else.
Jesse stopped, frozen to the spot. It’s me, he thought. Me and my damn life up here, that’s what she’s most likely to lose. He laughed out loud at the realisation. Rocky glanced back at him from where she was sniffing around a tree. She was used to him talking to himself. The times when she became twitchy and whiny were those long periods when he sat in silence, staring into space.
That was pretty often.
“Fetch me some tarpaulin from the barn, Rocky?” he called. She made a noise back at him which he translated as, Get it yourself. He had to do everything around here.
Somewhere in the distance he heard a low, long rumble of thunder, so quiet that it was almost sub-audible. His skin prickled and a hot knot dropped in his stomach. It was a sound that played background to his nightmares.
Jesse felt protective of the home he’d made. The nearest paved road was three miles east, and the dirt track leading to his place was negotiable only in his rattling four-wheel drive. He’d sought such isolation, but that didn’t mean he felt cut off from the world, nor did it lessen the comfort and beauty he’d been eager to create here. Jenny had once called it his little oasis, and he remained proud of her assessment.
There had been three buildings already here when he’d bought the plot for a song—a log cabin, a timber garage, and a sizeable storage barn, all of them tired and run-down. It had once been a hunting cabin, then for a few years it was rented out as a vacation retreat for more adventurous travellers, before falling empty and into disrepair fifteen years before. In just a few short years left untended, extremes of weather had subjected the place Jesse had named Hillside to various assaults of blazing sun, occasional deluges of heavy rain, and even one freak winter when four feet of snow had buried the mountains and hills all around for weeks. Abandonment and the elements had done their work, wearing down Hillside year on year, fading and fracturing the wooden walls and shingle roof, cracking the glass windows, rusting metal hinges, and washing away parts of the cabin’s foundations in flash-floods that troubled the region more and more. When Jesse came to buy the place with the few bucks he had left, it was in a poor state of repair, not quite condemned to demolition but slumping to the ground, close to defeat like an old man bearing a heavy weight.
