Strikers (25 page)

I’m about to ask what a tender boat is but Jovan beats me to it. Maddix says, “They’re just small boats used to tend the barges or take small deliveries from the big grain barges.”

I’m completely out of my element. I have nothing more to offer on the subject and the truth is, I’m so tired that I’m not sure I’d give any reasonable input anyway. It all sounds good to me because it means an end to being chased.

In the morning, I just try to focus on the fact that our journey is coming to an end instead of how disgusting I feel. My clothes have been damp for so long that I’m pretty sure I’m going to start growing mold. Our breakfast of a few sips of water is a joke, but it’s what we have. All of us still refuse to eat any of the fish jerky. We’re not that hungry yet.

I smell the river before I hear it, and I hear it long before I see it. It reminds me of the way the Red River advertised its location but far more intense. I doubt something as small as the Red would even attract any notice now that I’ve seen so much more. It’s amazing how quickly I’ve become adapted to so much water, even after a lifetime without any to spare.

The smell is wild and a little fetid. The sound is a low rush, a second bloodstream I can feel through the soles of my feet, deep and thrumming and very powerful. The river is clearly bigger than my imagination allowed for, and I find myself thinking back to the way Maddix looked at me when I questioned how big it could be. I’m starting to understand that look for what it was. It was a “you’ll see” look without the slightest hint of doubt in it.

The city lying between us and the river is abandoned, so we decide to go through rather than around it. The river has either flooded many times in the past or changed course more than once.

There are flows of old mud, dried as hard as concrete, piled in what used to be streets and up against the sides of ragged buildings. In some places, the flows stand as tall as my hips against glass that remains mysteriously unbroken, while doors are forever braced open by knee-deep flows that came in sometime in the past.

Inside those open doors, where the rain can’t reach, the dried mud has maintained all the marks of its flow, waves and rivulets clearly showing on the surface. It’s beautiful in a terrible and destructive way.

I’ve seen cars many times during our journey, but nothing like what I see here. They absolutely litter the streets, either pushed up against buildings or in jumbled piles. They’re big and roomy-looking, some even larger than the prairie jumper, and I can’t help but look inside a few with open doors. Rodents have made nests in the seats and I hear the cry of a bird of prey from somewhere high in the buildings. This may have once been a place inhabited by people, but it has been re-made since to suit a whole different web of life.

Near the edge of the city the buildings grow squat and wide, with fewer windows and more old fences. Eventually, we reach a vast wall that is more collapsed than upright. Whole sections of it lie in piles while short expanses remain defiantly upright.

As we reach one of those standing sections and squat in its shade for a rest, I tap the concrete and ask, “Is this the border?”

Maddix swigs some water, a loud sigh following as his thirst is quenched. He shakes his head and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, leaving a smear of dirt across the faint yellow bruises on his face.

“No, Jordan told me this was put up to try to keep the river out a long time ago, but it didn’t work. That’s why there’s no one here. We still have to get across the river to reach the border wall.” He waves at the top far above our heads. “This is nothing. Wait till you see.”

He seems to have a thought, shoving the water carrier at me and walking down the wall toward the nearest pile of rubble. That one apparently doesn’t suit him, because he rushes past us going the other way and I hear him give a satisfied grunt at the next pile. His leg has healed up well, but it’s not a good idea for him to climb, yet that’s exactly what he does.

It looks like he’s climbing the wall itself, so we hustle over to join him.

“Be careful!” Jovan says harshly. “Someone will see you, and then what will we do?”

Maddix looks down and grins. “No one’s going to see through the trees. Just a minute.”

Then he’s off again. Where the wall has crumbled, there are gaps in the concrete that make for handy footholds. Thin white plastic pipes run along the interior of the wall and leave almost perfect circles of empty space for the entire height. I can also see that the wall is tapered at the top. They must have tried to use less concrete in building the wall, either to do it faster or to decrease the weight at the top. I look at the piles of rubble that were once wall and decide that probably wasn’t the right decision.

We see the seat of Maddix’s filthy jeans as he settles himself onto the top of the wall. He scoots further down, making room, then looks down at us with a wide grin and waves us up. Cassi and Connor go next. There are low exclamations as they see whatever it is Maddix wants to show us, but Cassi’s face shows trepidation in it when she peers over the side at me.

Jovan motions for me to go next and gives me a boost to get me started. The rusty rebar sticking out of the concrete makes for great hand and footholds, but touching anything rusty makes me nervous. I wipe my hands on my jeans before touching the first one. I’m so concerned with not letting any part of me get cut by the rebar—I have a fear of tetanus that is far beyond normal for such an uncommon disease—that I don’t see what they are looking at until my butt makes safe contact with the top of the wall.

But then I do see it and I am amazed. There are enough trees between us and the river so that we don’t stand out, but not so many that we can’t see through to what lies beyond. It’s almost beyond description. The slope toward the river is mild and the banks of it are wide and red-brown with silt and mud.

It’s incredibly wide, the far bank perhaps a quarter of a mile from the near bank. The waters seem placid enough on its gray surface until I spot a floating branch racing along. The current must be immensely strong.

I don’t know much about rivers, but I know I won’t be swimming across that. Or using a pole to guide a raft, for that matter. If we’re going to get across it, we’ll need a bridge or a sturdy boat. Better yet, a boat with someone who knows what they are doing at the helm.

Jovan scrambles up next to me but there’s little room left, so he squeezes in. We’re pressed so tightly together that we can’t even put our arms to our sides, so we awkwardly rest our hands on our knees. I try not to turn my head toward him because we’re so close, but it seems rude, so I do it anyway.

He’s smiling at me, of course. He looks like a kid just told he’s getting a bonus day off school or something. He’s close enough that I can see the grime ground into his skin and the clean spot on his upper lip where he’s been licking them. His eyes are that hypnotizing golden color they take on when he’s in sunlight.

Basically, he takes my breath away and I’d like nothing more than to move that hand on his knee over to mine, but I don’t and I won’t. Whatever it is between us, I won’t know if it’s real until there’s no pressure on us and we have time. Time for what specifically, I don’t know.

I just hope that time eventually comes and we get the chance to figure it out.

I look away, back toward the river, and finally see what Maddix really meant to show us. Across the river, behind an obscuring screen of trees, there’s a gap where the trees have been cleared, though I can only see that by the absence of their green crowns.

Beyond that is a wall unlike anything I’ve ever seen. It makes this one look like a neighborhood fence. While the trees are shorter here close to the river, they are still a good thirty or forty feet high. Yet, I can see the top of the wall above the tops.

I think it’s concrete, like this one, but not consistently so. There are notches and holes in it at staggered points along its length. From here they look small, almost like little mouse holes in baseboards, but it’s an illusion made by the distance.

“How do we get across that?” I ask.

Maddix leans forward enough that it makes me nervous. He looks up and down the river, uncertainty stamped on his features. He shrugs a little and says, “When I went across, I asked at places along the way and wound up at a crossing. When I came back with Jordan, we took an elevated crossing, a sort of carriage that goes across one of the broken bridges. It’s hard to explain. But I don’t think we’re anywhere close to that.”

We all peer both ways down the river, hoping against hope to see something that might save the day. There’s nothing and I really didn’t expect there to be. Jovan leans forward and then finally scares me half to death by getting up to stand on the wall, exposing his full profile to anyone who might be looking. His eyes shielded by his hand, he looks downstream for a long moment.

“What?” Maddix asks finally.

“You said a bridge? Was it a huge bridge, like really tall? Tall like those buildings in the city?” he asks without taking his eyes from whatever it is he’s looking at.

Maddix gets to his feet as well and looks in that direction. He bursts out laughing and says, “It’s a bridge alright! I can’t be sure it’s the same one, but it’s big enough that it must have good crossings. Which means boats. Lots and lots of boats.”

I wish I could see it, but I’m not about to stand up like they are. Twenty feet is a long way to fall and this wall has to be at least that, given the slope of the ground below. Maddix teeters a little and sits down in a hurry, so I tug on Jovan’s pant leg—which I notice is just as filthy as mine—to get him to do the same.

He does, practically landing in my lap, but he apologizes at my grunt and slides off onto the wall again.

“What about people over there?” I ask, nodding toward the wall. I’ve figured out that the holes and dark smudges are probably sentry posts, which means sentries.

“Don’t worry about them. They aren’t interested in people here unless they try to bring their problems to the border. That’s the place people are trying to get
to
. Once you show them your pendant and tell them who you are, they’ll let you through. I’m already registered so Connor and I are good, too.”

He doesn’t seem to register the looks on Cassi and Jovan’s faces or the fact that he’s left them out of the equation.

“What about me? Or Jovan?” Cassi asks before I get a chance to.

Maddix starts at that and then looks at me. “Aren’t you going to sponsor them? You’re a land-owner,” he says. The way he says it makes it seem like I should know this and that irritates me.

“And how exactly am I that?” I ask sharply.

He nods toward the pendant and then his face clears as he realizes I have no idea what he’s talking about.

“Dang. I thought Jordan would have had a chance to tell you, to explain,” he says.

“Explain?”

“You’re his daughter. That makes you and his other kid land-owners along with him. Now, well, you’re his heirs. That makes you a land-owner in your own right. Or, it will until you figure out how things will go with you and the kid,” he says.

It’s all very matter of fact, like there’s no missing father and no boy who will never see his father again in the equation. It hurts to hear it said like that. I’ve been doing my best not to think about Jordan because all that will do is slow me down. But when it comes up, like right now when I can’t avoid it, it feels like my chest hollows out just a little. Like my heart is shrinking.

Everyone looks uncomfortable. While that’s almost as effective as sympathy at making me want to cry, we’ve got no time for it.

“So, you’re saying that I can sponsor them in? How?” I ask.

“Well, it isn’t quite that easy. They kept me hanging around for days while they waited for an answer from Jordan when I told them where I was from. But you’ve got the pendant and I was with him when he left. He left a message before we went through the border,” Maddix says.

“And this is that border crossing? You’re sure?” Jovan asks. He looks as confused as I am. I clearly didn’t ask the right questions when I had the chance.

Cassi breaks in with a frustrated sigh and says, “Can we get down first before someone falls and breaks something? I’m just about over this view.”

Getting down turns out to be considerably more difficult than getting up, but no one breaks anything so I figure we’re good. There’s no possibility of a fire or anything like that so we get as comfortable as we can leaning against the cool concrete wall. The shade on this side makes it even cooler, but we’ve sweated enough during today’s trek to make it feel nice.

“Maddix, just tell me everything you know. We’ll go from there,” I say.

He looks uncomfortable for a moment, perhaps because he knows more about my father than I do. It’s not like we didn’t talk, because we did. But when we spoke it wasn’t about official things. He wanted to know things about me, mundane things, like how I liked rosemary the best of all the plants in the garden and how it made me feel like I could fly when I ran across the rooftops in my neighborhood.

And when I asked him things, I asked about Quinton and what it was like where he lived and what he did with his days. The questions I had for him were the ones that helped me form pictures of his life in my mind.

The things we didn’t say were almost as important as the things we did. I thought I would have time with him, time to get comfortable with each other and talk about all the things we wanted to. I’d built up a future with him in my mind and now, there will be none. Now I have to find out what I need to know from someone else.

I prompt him with a wave of my hand and a smile that feels false on my face, but it seems to work.

“As to your question, Jovan, no. I have no idea if that’s the same one. I wouldn’t know till I got close since the stations are numbered. But it doesn’t matter. What one station knows, they can all find out. They have phones,” he says.

I’ve never used a phone but I know what they are. We have them in the Courthouse, the school and any other place where officials talk to each other. I’ve seen one used while I waited to have my strike tattooed onto my neck.