What Came After (4 page)

Carmichael had climbed out when he got to the shoulder, alongside the car and as happy as anyone had ever seen him. Standing there in the wind from a passing truck with Peter’s old Polaroid camera in his hand as if he’d won a prize. “We’d better commemorate this occasion,” he said. Handing the camera to Liz and showing her where to look into it and which button to press and then going around to the front of the car. Weller took Penny by the hand and followed, keeping himself between his daughter and the highway. Carmichael took up a stance with one hand on the high garish yellow hood and his son at his side, in the pose of a great hunter or somebody in a formal portrait. Seeing him there like that, the mechanic sat down on the bumper with Penny on his knee. Properly respectful for once. For the record at least.

Liz snapped a picture and jumped when it rolled out of the Polaroid. It dropped to the ground and she picked it up and watched the image begin to materialize. Taking a half step toward Carmichael. He raised a finger to her and said, “One more. One more for you people who’ve treated us so kindly.” Bending at the knees and shifting into a sitting position alongside Weller. Lifting his own child to his own knee, because you couldn’t set a bad precedent with somebody you’d never see again.

Everybody smiled. Liz pressed the shutter and handed him the picture and he held it out at arm’s length to let it develop. So everyone could watch. A weirdly satisfying miracle in slow motion. At a certain point the image on it had resolved just enough to look the way the whole world looked to Penny, but no one could say exactly when. Only her father and mother even wondered.

When the picture was done Carmichael signed it. Signed it big like it was something they’d want to tack up on the wall. Thought again and felt generous and wrote “IOU” on it in big letters while he was at it. Right up in the blue sky. He gave the picture to Weller and shook his hand and told him he could take that to the bank if he could find a bank. Ha ha. His signature was as good as cash money. Better than that. As good as that famous red white and blue AmeriBank scrip. Weller put the photograph in the pocket of his coveralls and then it was over. Father and son climbing in and slamming the doors and neither of them waving or at least not visibly through that smoked glass. Just Carmichael hitting the gas and opening the sunroof wide and Peter keeping an eye out for those helicopters that ought to be on their way any time now. Ready to wave them off. Victory snatched from defeat.
We did it, son.

TWO
The Shelter

The picture wouldn’t stop
eating at him. The picture and the memory of that SUV roaring up the interstate into a world he would never see. The only signifier of it this flimsy little square that Carmichael had left behind. Testimony to his escape. Weller tacked it up after all. He tacked it up on the pegboard over his workbench where he could keep an eye on it. Where it could serve as inspiration to question everything in sight. The junk that people brought in to be repaired and the junk that people brought in to sell and the work he did turning one into the other. Ashes to ashes. Junk to junk. He had the rearview mirror from the red Volkswagen hanging from a hook on the same pegboard, and he hated that mirror in particular. For what it reflected. His own stasis.

Everybody in the photograph was looking into the camera except his daughter.

That was the worst thing.

She wasn’t looking anywhere. Her eyes were vague and she wasn’t looking anywhere. Sitting there on his knee with her bright and freckled face held to the sun and no idea that she ought to be looking in the direction of her mother and the camera.

He let the picture work on him for two or three weeks, his mood disintegrating and his anxiety growing and an idea taking shape in his mind. Summer wasn’t going to last forever. Fall would come to the Zone and everything would lock down for the cold and the snow. The moment for travel was still with him and if he had any sense he would take advantage of it.

He wondered exactly how far was it from here to New York. Nobody went, so nobody knew. He would be a pioneer, like the old overland travelers who’d first made their way from Plymouth Rock to the Isle of the Manhattoes. Two or three days on foot from this point maybe. Three or four. Then again there might be a ride to be hitched along the way. Some kindhearted Management trucker not made entirely of stone.

The girl would be a help to him there. She’d slow him down as to foot travel, but when the time came to hitch a ride she would prove herself an asset. Who could resist that child? Who could be afraid of her father? On balance, she might shave a day or more off the trip. Cut their need for food and supplies. Not that he would dare go light on that account. And not that he would have gone without her anyway, even if she required a steamer trunk full of equipment and him to shoulder it. She was the whole reason.

Carmichael had said he owed him a favor, and Weller had decided to take him up on it. Get his daughter to New York and get her in front of a doctor. A specialist.

Get her eyes fixed if it was the last thing he did.

*

Liz didn’t approve, and the weeks he’d spent wrestling with himself had left him adamant, and as a result they fought. They fought although they usually didn’t disagree about much. But they fought over this. About Penny and her fate. About whether there even was such a thing as fate and whether or not it could be thwarted. About the odds and the risks. The odds and the risks of merely making the effort, never mind the dangerous procedure that might come afterwards if everything went according to plan and Carmichael was agreeable and some doctor was up to the task. They fought quietly and they fought cruelly, because they had no secrets from each other. Because they possessed a wide range of the subtlest weapons that time and love can provide. They fought for days, each of them privately fearing that they would never recover. That they had gone too far. That the only way to mend the damage that they were doing was to have it over and done one way or another. For him to bring the girl back healed. Or else not to come back at all.

And so they quit fighting. Reconciled themselves to what would be. Packed supplies and blankets and the tarp from over the Volkswagen into a couple of salvaged backpacks with a week’s worth of food. Half of what money they had folded in his pocket along with some other things. That Polaroid photograph. His pack was the size of a footlocker and hers was more like an underfed hatbox. Not even that big. His was made of threadbare canvas and hers was made of stiff plastic falling apart at the corners. Bright red and acid yellow, printed on the back with an outsized drawing of a white cat wearing a purple bow on one of its ears. To see her trudging around the house with that cat on her back made him think of a moth he’d seen pictured in an old magazine, a bug with the huge and startling eyes of some predatory bird etched on its wings to ward off predators.

*

They set out before dawn, everybody in tears.

Rain had come overnight and passed on over but the highway was still wet and the trucks kicked up water. He took off his Red Sox cap and cinched it as tight as it would go and put it on Penny’s head, but it was soaked through to begin with so it didn’t help much. He asked her what she thought they could do. Did they have anything they could use for a raincoat. Thinking of the tarp. He was a little bit reluctant to cut a hole in it for their heads to poke out but what could you do. You had to make sacrifices.

She thought and thought. The two of them walking along getting wet. Ruminating. Finally she turned that face up and looked at him from underneath the brim of his ball cap and said, “Maybe we should just get away from these trucks.” Pointing off into the fields. A gray access road cutting in among the green. Why not.

The fields came right up to the highway here and right up to the edges of the access road too. Cultivated fields fenced in high, sixteen feet of chain link and barbed wire, with PharmAgra tags clipped onto them every so often. Fields of green beans and sweet corn mainly, but here and there tobacco as well. Tobacco the state’s oldest crop, from back before there’d even been a state of Connecticut, and persisting now that the state existed mainly in memory. The way things of the world will persist.

He hadn’t wanted to take these access roads for fear of meeting his neighbors on their way to the fields and having to explain himself. This ridiculous dream of getting Penny in front of a doctor. A specialist no less. The chances they were taking, and the waste of time if nothing else, in a world where every productive minute mattered. It was absurd. Liz had been right. Anybody they might meet would see that and say it. But they’d gotten such an early start that the roads were empty. Empty and quiet and damp from the rain so the dust hadn’t risen yet. They walked side by side. Dirt roads covered this part of the state in a rough grid. Old pavement here and there where it endured somehow, but mostly plain dirt. They’d walk west a few hours he figured, and then turn south and that way they wouldn’t lose too much time. Cut into Ninety-Five just a hair later than if they’d stuck to Ninety-One. That was where the truck traffic would be anyhow. The real truck traffic. Loads heading all the way to the Mason-Dixon in a straight line except for that boomerang around New York where the two of them could bail out and see what their future held. If they managed to get a ride to begin with. As long as his breath held out, they’d walk. Then they’d keep on walking.

Penny marched along like a trooper. That little white cat bouncing up and down and looking backwards but the girl herself looking everywhere all at once or trying to. Craning her neck to capture the whole vague world any way she could. The westbound road and the fencelines along it and her own stretched shadow marching ahead. A landscape that rose and fell after they’d turned south onto a track where the sounds of the nearby highway died out and they were back in the cultivated wilderness.

Men emerged from high gates into the fields, tools over their shoulders and a weariness to their gait. A line of long shacks stood on a rise parallel to the road, low buildings painted red a long long time ago but gone to gray now. With strips of vertical siding that wasn’t just siding but opened itself up to the wind and the weather here and there. Long hanging slats, hinged at the top and free at the bottom. Banging in the breeze. She tilted her face toward the sound to study the buildings with the sun shining down on them at a pretty good angle right now and asked what it was that people kept in them. Being at that age where your father still knows everything.

“Tobacco,” he said. “Or they did in the old days.” These were tobacco barns. Drying sheds. Nobody used them anymore. The tobacco that grew around here got processed down along the Mason Dixon, so these barns were empty. Not even worth tearing down. He picked her up on his shoulders and she used his big backpack for a seat and they walked on. “Once upon a time,” he said, “there would have been barns everywhere on land like this. All kinds of barns. All over. Filled up with hay and corn and horses and cows. Filled up with machinery like I keep in the quonset hut, but even better.”

“Even better?”

“Even better.” And more of it, he said. Tractors and cultivators and harvesters. Machines with blades and harrows and cutters that did the work of a hundred men and never got tired. “Machines almost as big as our house.”

She laughed to imagine it. She said she thought he was kidding.

“I’m not. Farming wasn’t always hand labor. People had equipment exactly that big and even bigger. Machines with rubber tires taller than a man. I’ve seen those tires in the dump. Sometimes they catch fire, and when they do they burn for days. On and on. That black smoke you see sometimes, that’s what it is.”

If the machines did the work of a hundred men, she wondered, then where did all the food go when they got finished growing it? There must have been too much. A hundred times too much.

Her father laughed. He described the world his own father had known first-hand. Told her there were more people then, but once everything got automated not that many of them had to be farmers. Not actual farmers. Not farmers who got their hands dirty. Just businessmen running factory farms from a distance. Agribusiness.

She asked if he meant like PharmAgra. She was one smart girl.

He said that was right. That was it exactly. PharmAgra was the only agribusiness left these days, though. They owned it all. She knew that because she saw their labels everywhere. She knew who her friends’ fathers worked for. What she didn’t know was that PharmAgra was the last of a breed that had once thrived everywhere. The last one standing, the sole relic of a system that had started small and gotten big and then gotten so big that it had to get small again. The small taking care of the big just the way things always went in the end. Farmers on their hands and knees pulling poisoned carrots they couldn’t even eat.

They stopped to rest by the side of the road and watched a line of men carrying hoes slip into a fenced-in field and space themselves along a planted row at regular intervals and fall to working. Industrious as bugs. He put the backpack down in the dirt and opened it up and fished around for a canteen of water and some homemade granola in a paper sack. Homemade out of oats from eastern Pennsylvania and raisins and nuts from what used to be California, stuck together with something factory-made that tasted like honey but wasn’t, since you couldn’t have honey without bees and the last of the bees had passed on a long time ago. Not entirely unmourned, but that was then. All of the ingredients hauled in trucks and processed in factories and hauled in trucks again, but the granola homemade nonetheless. That’s what you called it.