Journal (3 page)

About
three hours before daylight, Mr. Ponytail switched places with the guy in the
baseball cap, who hurried inside.  As the sun began to show itself, I woke
Gabriel, and we repositioned ourselves a little to provide a bit more concealment.

With
the sun in full bloom, I
could tellwotMr. Ponytail got down from his perch, peed on the ground,
and walked to the barn.  Just before entering, I heard him yell, “Wake up you
little turd.”  A minute or so passed before he emerged looking madder than a Reno drunk who wakes up to find his pockets turned inside out.  He stepped to the corner
of the barn and looked all around before he finally spotted the knit cap lying
on the ground.  He picked it up, examined it, and looked in the direction of
our escape.  He had to see our path because I could see it, even from where I
was.  He took a couple of steps in that direction but stopped, reversed himself,
and hustled back to the house.  As he mounted the porch, he yelled, “The
fucking kid ran off!”  Once he was inside, I could hear more yelling but couldn’t
clearly hear the words.

About
ten minutes later, the man in the baseball cap, who was still carrying the
shotgun, Mr. Ponytail, and a woman with a butt the size of Nebraska, exited the
house and followed the trail we’d left for them.  I gave it an hour and told
the kid, “go ahead.”

Gabriel
circled around, just in case anyone was looking, went into the yard, and stood
next to the barn.  Once I gave him the high sign he yelled out, “Hey, where is
everybody?”

It
took about two seconds before the man with the limp ran out the door yelling,
“You little shit, where you been?  There’s going to be hell to pay now.”  He
walked his way to the barn and grabbed Gabriel by the arm.

At
the same time all this was happening, I worked my way to the corner of the
house with my rifle in hand and pointed it in the man’s direction.  I hadn’t
ever done anything like that before, so I have to admit I was scared, scared
enough that I could feel my heart pounding in my chest like somebody was
smacking me with a framing hammer.  When I yelled at him to get his attention,
I sounded as if I were going through puberty all over again.

For
a guy with a bum leg he spun around pretty quick, bringing up a pistol as he
did.  So there we stood, me pointing my rifle at him and he pointing his pistol
at me.  At least I was somewhat protected by the house.  He, on the other hand,
was completely exposed, that is until he pulled Gabriel in front of him.  I
didn’t have a plan for that one.  In fact, I once again began that familiar
argument with myself about the wisdom of doing this in the first place.

That’s
about the time I saw this crazy woman, her dark brown hair flying all over the
place, arms outstretched, run from the house right at the pair of them, screaming
Gabriel’s name.  It was a sight to see, I’ll tell you that.

As
soon as he saw her, Gabriel spun, pulled away from the man, and ran toward his mother. 
It was all happening fast now, faster than I could almost even process.  I next
saw the man point his pistol right at them.

I’d
like to say that at that point some calm, rational thinking process took place
where I weighed my alternatives and considered the gravity of our situation and
all the
attendant m
oral implications, but I
can’t.  I just fired, simple as that.  I didn’t think about it or give him one
more chance to put his gun down; none of that.  I just took the shot.  I don’t
even know where I was aiming when I pu the “safe place”an whateverlled the trigger, or even if I was aiming
at all.  And he fell down.  Just like that, he crumbled to the ground, his
throat a mass of torn, bloody tissue.

I’ve
never killed anyone before.  You know, now that I’ve just written those five words,
“I’ve never killed anyone before,
”
and I look at them on this page, they
seem such an odd thing to say.  They almost make it sound as if I’m deficient
somehow, behind the curve.  Meaning that by now, by my age, I should have
killed at least three or four people; just laid them right out there, one, two,
three, four.  Maybe, given the times in which I live, where if you’re not predator,
you’re prey, that may be true.  But if so, well I guess I’m good with that
because I gotta tell you that when I was standing there, looking down at my
bloody damn work, I felt like the lowest, most despicable person on the face of
the planet.  What the hell did I do?

And
that’s what I did right after, stood there staring down at what used to be a
breathing, walking, talking human being and tried to make sense of it.  I
didn’t want to kill that guy.  I swear I didn’t.  At that moment, I truly wished
I’d followed my first instinct and just left the kid behind to solve his own
problems. 
Why didn’t you just mind your own business Alan? 
Was it
pride?  Did I kill that guy because I needed to prove to myself I wasn’t that mouse? 
Where’s my humanity now, Claire Huston, huh?

As
I was thinking those things and others, too, I became vaguely aware of someone
yanking on my sleeve, but I didn’t respond, so deep were my thoughts.  Not to
be ignored, she stepped in front of me and gave me a good, hard, one handed
shove on my chest and said, “Hey, don’t just stand there.  He’s dead.”  She next
bent over and picked-up the dead guy’s pistol before running into the house.

After
she was gone, Gabriel yanked on my sleeve again and said, “Come on mister, we
gotta get out of here.  The others will have heard the shot.  They’ll be coming
back.”  He said it quiet like, as if he understood what I was feeling.  He next
pushed me gently in the direction of our hiding place where my pack and food bag
were stashed.

At
that point, I have to say that I didn’t want to have anything more to do with
these people.  I just wanted to be out of there and away from them.  I’d done
what I’d set out to do.  The boy wanted help, and I helped him.  I did my good
deed and then some.  I was done with them.  But I also knew that the dead guy’s
friends, companions, whatever, were probably on their way back.  We had to get
out of there.  We had to get as far away from them as possible, in the shortest
amount of time.  That meant going in the opposite direction, north, which also
meant the three of us were going to be together for a while.

Gabriel’s
mother caught up with us while I was throwing on my pack.  Her name is Anna,
Sanchez I presume, and she is Mexican without an accent, so maybe second
generation at least.  I have to say she’s an attractive woman, around thirty
years old, with very dark brown, almond shaped eyes, and a mouth that seems
just a little too wide for her face.  Her dark hair has those little, squiggly
curls in it, like a sheet of paper balled up and then flattened out.  She’s
also maybe five foot five or six inches tall, and weighs in at about a hundred
and twenty pounds, if she’s lucky.  But for emotional connection soed and a small woman, she definitely has a
pushy way about her.  That’s probably her most salient characteristic.

The
first thing she said to me was, “Hurry it up or we’ll go without you.”  I was
thinking a thank you would have been nice.  Wisecracks aside, it did kind of
irritate me that she didn’t acknowledge the extent of my sacrifice.  And that
makes me recall something else Claire Huston had written in her journal.

It
was in January, 2050 and she and her husband had encountered a man of
“most
miserable appearance,”
as she put it, sitting on a curb near her house. 
Her assessment of him was that he was starving and close to collapse.  Over her
husband’s objection, she gave the man a plastic bag of cooked rice.  It was
their meal for the day, all they had with them.  The man grabbed it from her
hand and ran off without so much as a grunting acknowledgement.  Later, in her
journal, she wrote of the man’s apparent ungratefulness.  She simply explained
that,
“giving is receiving because the very act of charity opens your mind
to the suffering of others and that in itself is a most precious gift.”

Now
I suppose I get that.  The act of giving is its own reward because it makes you
a better person, just as expecting something in return, like a thank you, makes
it not a gift at all.  In this case, though, I just killed a man so Gabriel and
his mom could escape.  That’s my burden now.  Some acknowledgement of that
would have been the right thing to do, and it would have made me feel a heck of
a lot better about doing it.  I wanted to believe I’d done the right thing.  I
don’t know, maybe I’ll never be the person that Claire Huston was.

Back to what happened. Without waiting,
Anna started off going the wrong
direction, southeast, but Gabriel stopped her.  He told her that we couldn’t go
that way because we might run into the dead guy’s friends.  That’s when Gabriel
gave the dead guy a name.  I wish he hadn’t done that.  It was Harvey.

They
both glanced at me and waited.  I just pointed north.  Anna gave me a look that
could only be described as annoyed and stomped off in that direction with a
blanket fashioned into a sling tied across her back.  I just ignored her
attitude, though.  I killed Harvey.  He had a name.  A name somehow made it
worse.  That’s what I was thinking.

As
we walked and occasionally trotted, I kept my rifle in my hand in case they
caught up with us.  It’s an old lever action my grandfather gave me, and it
shoots the same bullets my pistol uses, .357 magnum.  As I moved along, I was
making a loose plan in my head on how to avoid the people from the farm.  I figured
we’d first walk north for a couple of days.  It would be tough going, no roads
and mountainous but so much the better.  They weren’t as likely to follow us in
that case.

After
that, Gabriel and Anna could go wherever they wanted.  But me, I would turn east
and pick up either Highway 153 or 97 and turn south again.  I might even go as
far east as Highway 155 because that would put me well away from the farm.  I’d
play that part by ear.  I had an old roadmap I’d found taped to the window of a
Spokane charging station.  It showed enough detail it would help keep me
oriented along the way.  My goal was still to find family or one way or the otherged and a community where
I’d be safe.  Being by myself is a depressingly lonely existence.

As
we traveled, there wasn’t much conversation between us.  Well let me rephrase
that.  There wasn’t any talk between Anna and me, and only a little between
Gabriel and me, which was OK as far as I was concerned.  I didn’t feel much
like talking anyway.  On the other hand, I was aware of Anna and her son
talking quietly on several occasions, keeping their voices low so I couldn’t
hear.  If I had to guess, I’d say they weren’t in total agreement on whatever it
was they were discussing, either.

One
thing I did get from Gabriel, though, was that Mr. Ponytail’s name was Eric,
and he had been in prison.  When it came to killing, he was the one who did
most of it.  The guy wearing the ball cap was Sid, but Gabriel didn’t know much
about him.  He kept to himself and didn’t say much.  The woman now, her name
was Nora.  He thought there was something mentally wrong with her because, for
no reason and at random, she would hit him or throw something at him and then
laugh.  It was nice to know their names I suppose, but I just hope I don’t have
any reason to speak about them again.

We
walked all that first day until nightfall, through what used to be a national
forest, rich green and silent, except for our footsteps; a place that under
different circumstances would have caused me to linger and enjoy my
surroundings.
 There was no time to appreciate
such things, though.  We were walking with our thoughts on the people behind
us.  It was tough going, too, considering that the rain never stopped, and the
terrain was steep.  We were wet, cold, and tired.

When
we did finally halt, I don’t think we had gone much more than fifteen miles,
the walking had been that hard.  We set up in a flat spot, which was an
exception to the area, where a tree had uprooted and lay in such a manner that
a lean-to was easily constructed using branches and a ground cloth I carried. 
It wasn’t perfect, but it would keep us dry through the night.

Anna
continued to be unsociable toward me.  She seldom looked in my direction, kept
her distance in little ways, and was generally uncommunicative.  All the
questions
you would expect one stranger to ask
another in similar circumstances, “Where are you from?  Where are you going?  What
did you do before things went bad?” were left
unasked.  Earlier, I
attempted to engage her in conversation, but it was cold shouldered, so
following that I just didn’t try anymore.

After
eating a small meal in relative silence, I told them that we’d take turns
keeping watch throughout the night.  Anna would take the first watch, my turn
would be next, and Gabriel would take the last couple of hours.  I was worried
that Eric and his crew were behind us and might try to sneak up in the
darkness.  I was so exhausted, I went right to sleep.

____________

In
the early morning of April third, when it was my time to stand watch, she woke
me up with a stick.  Yeah that’s right, she jabbed me in the ribs with the end
of a four-foot stick without even saying anything.  Now I can only imagine what
I looked like after several battery
operated radio with t days wearing the same clothes, unshaven, and wet.  
God knows how bad I smelled, too.  But to jab me with a stick like I was a
snake in her path, come on.  I’ll just be glad when I’m on my own again.  They
can keep their secrets and she her bad attitude.