Mike Mullin - Ashfall

Lunch was part of a bottle of water, and I felt lucky to have that. At the rate it was disappearing, I wouldn’t even have water for lunch tomorrow.

I found it harder and harder to keep my skis moving, as though hunger were a companion riding behind me, weighing me down. I tried to think about something other than food-Laura, Spork, or my family-but my mind kept returning unbidden to waffles, DQ Blizzards, and the gyros at The Pita Pit.

About a year ago, Mom had brought a brochure for Action Against Hunger home from church. It was full of pictures-African kids with forlorn faces, swollen bellies, and skeletal limbs. St. John’s was planning a fundraiser: Everyone would fast for twenty-four hours and donate all the money we would have spent on food to ACF. (I didn’t understand why the brochure called the charity Action Against Hunger and abbreviated it ACF, but it did.)

So for a couple of days, Mom nagged me about doing it. I was in my no-religion phase, as Mom called it, and didn’t really want to get sucked back into St. John’s, but eventually I relented and said fine, I’ll fast for two days. Then Mom was all, fasting for two days isn’t safe, blah, blah, blah, and I pointed out that it took the kids in the brochure a lot more than two days without food to get the potbellies and Skeletor arms. Anyway, we had a huge fight about it, the upshot of which was that I didn’t eat for two days. The first day my whole family fasted. The second, I just refused to eat and shrugged off Mom’s threat to have me hooked up to an IV.

Going without food for two days was hard. I probably couldn’t have done it if Mom hadn’t been nagging me about the IV and constantly offering me stuff to eat. But not eating when there’s a full refrigerator downstairs is a totally different experience than not eating because you have no food and no idea where your next meal will come from. Hunger of choice is a painful luxury; hunger of necessity is terrifying torture.

Early that afternoon, I was losing my battle to stop daydreaming about food when I saw a little flicker of light off to the right, just at the edge of visibility. It wasn’t lightning-too orange and too persistent. But it was something different, something that might take my mind off food for a bit, so I skied toward it.

As I got closer, I saw another farmstead. The barn and both outbuildings were down, squashed flat, but there were two metal grain silos standing. The house was mostly intact, but some kind of porch or addition had been crushed. The mangled ends of a few rafters protruded from the wreckage.

There had been a stand of trees around the house, perhaps planted as a windbreak. Most of the trees were down, and the few still standing looked like ghost trees, coated with light gray ash. A campfire flickered, visible through the branches of a huge fallen tree. I glimpsed a figure silhouetted by the firelight. I skied up to the fallen tree and peered through its limbs.

A guy was sitting on a log between me and the fire. He was a big guy, that’s about all I could tell with him backlit by the fire. He appeared to be alone. A haunch of meat was roasting over the fire. My mouth juiced up instantly at the smell. Sweet and fatty-pork, maybe.

I skied around the fallen tree to get a better look, moving as slowly and quietly as I could. When I cleared the edge of the brush, the guy looked straight at me and said, “You there. Want to give me a hand?”

I should have turned and skied out of there as fast as I could. This guy was big. NFL linebacker big. None of his clothing fit-his jeans missed the top of his boots by at least four inches, and the cuffs of his flannel shirt wouldn’t button over his bulging forearms. His pasty white skin was tinged gray by a layer of ash. He had propped a broken mirror in front of him with a stick; it looked like a chunk of one of those big mirrors some people have in their closets. Beside him lay a wide leather belt, a bar of soap, and a hand-ax, its blade gleaming in the firelight. He had a bucket between his knees.

I stood there staring awhile. My brain and my stomach were arguing. Something rang warning bells in my head-his undersized clothing, outsized body, or maybe the hand-ax. I knew I should turn and ski away, but the smell of that meat made my stomach rumble in anticipation. The guy said, “It’s okay, I just need a hand shaving. I’ll pay you with some meat.”

That tore it. I’d had nothing but a handful of candy to eat since yesterday. The aroma wafting off the meat was intoxicating. My stomach declared victory, and I slid the ski pole into my belt and skied slowly toward him, staff ready.

“You here alone?” he asked.

“Um…” I said, trying to decide whether to lie.

“Guess so. It’s okay. I only need someone to hold this mirror.”

As I got closer, I saw a couple more chunks of broken mirror lying flat in the ash. The back half of the guy’s head was covered in half-inch stubble. The front half was shaved bald. A few drops of blood had run down the side of his head from a nick.

“Folks call me Target,” he said. “What’s your name?”

“Target?”

“Yeah, like the store.”

“Alex.”

“Pleased to meet you, Alex.”

“Same here… Target.” Now I was beside him.

He reached down and picked up the biggest shard of mirror from the ground. “I need you to hold this behind my head so I can see to shave back there, okay?”

“Sure.” I unclipped my boots from my skis and took the piece of mirror from him. I held it behind his head so he could see it in the mirror propped in front of him, like they used to do at Great Clips when they wanted to show me the back.

He stropped the edge of his hand-ax on the leather belt for a minute. Then he grabbed the bar of soap and dipped it in the bucket. The splash made me want to scream: perfectly good drinking water and you’re spoiling it with soap? He soaped up the back of his head and started shaving, using the blade on his ax.

He was scary-good with that ax. He held it up near the blade and ran it quickly and smoothly over his scalp. Soap and hair clung to the blade, and he cleared it off every now and then with a flick of his thumb.

Occasionally he directed me to move the mirror, a little to the right or tilted up a bit. He nicked his head twice. Both times he made no sound, just went on as if nothing had happened while the blood mixed with soap on his scalp. As he shaved, a design emerged from the stubble on the back of his head, a bull’s-eye. It was crudely inked there, like prison tattoos I’d seen on TV.

“Guess you know why they call me Target now.”

“Yeah.”

“Anyone coming for me, best they aim right there. ’Cause if I can see them coming, they ain’t going to take me down. No way.”

I couldn’t think of anything safe to say. The guy sounded seriously paranoid. Who would be “coming for him” and why? I hoped I could get some meat and move on soon.

Target finished shaving and rinsed his head, washing away the blood and soap. I set down the chunk of mirror. The aroma of the sizzling meat drew my attention. It was a big chunk of flesh, hacked crudely out of the haunch of some animal. I could see splintered ends of yellow-white bone sticking out both ends of it. I must have been staring at it, because Target finished rinsing his head and turned to me.

“I promised you some meat, didn’t I?” He rotated the spit and propped a stick against it to keep it from rolling back. The top edge was charred black. He cut a long strip off it with his hand-ax, set it on a smashed-flat tin can, and handed it to me.

I bit into it too soon and burned my mouth. It was charred on one side and bloody on the other, but nonetheless the most delicious cut of meat I could recall eating. It tasted like pork, but not quite. Maybe it was from a wild pig-I had never eaten one, so I wasn’t sure what that tasted like.