Mindy McGinnis - In a Handful of Dust

“Don’t mean anything by it,” she assured him, taking another yucca shoot from her pocket. She scratched Spatter’s nose absently while he crunched on the yucca, her gaze drawn over his back to where Fletcher and Lynn were making camp. They moved in circles around each other, his slow and sure as he went about making food, hers erratic and nervous as she attempted to set their beds up while simultaneously keeping an eye on him.

Lucy smiled to herself and rested her head against Spatter, the warmth of his coat soaking into her skin. She knew Lynn didn’t want to believe in Fletcher’s talk of karma. While he might be doing good for strangers in the hope fate would be kind to his lost wife, Lynn’s own past was littered with bodies. And she was always on the lookout for whoever was coming to collect the debt.

“I wasn’t much older than Lucy here when the Shortage came about,” Fletcher said, the moonlight bouncing off the whiteness of his teeth as he spoke. “I was set up nice in Montana with my brothers and our parents until cholera wiped them out. I couldn’t trust our water source anymore, so I moved on, got it in my head that going south was the answer. No winters, right?”

Lynn and Lucy nodded their heads in unison. “We thought the same,” Lucy said as she picked stray bits of jerky from her teeth. “Getting away from the snows meant not having to cut wood.”

“But leaving somewhere familiar means walking blind for water,” Fletcher finished. “And water is the coin of the realm.”

“How’d you do it?” Lynn asked. “Did you even have a gun?”

“Started out with one. I’ve had a lot of things on this journey of mine that are lost now. A gun, some maps. My wife.”

“You were married when you were my age?”

“No, that came later. The gun and the maps were with me at the beginning though. Lost the first to a bunch of ruffians, and the second shortly thereafter. I was left for dead and the rains turned my maps into pulp before I came around. My coat grew some mold after that too.” He added the second fact as if it had just occurred to him.

“What’d you do?” Lucy asked.

“Found a new coat.”

Lynn snorted, and Lucy tossed a handful of dirt in her direction, before continuing. “I mean after that, Fletcher.”

“My options were to lie there and die, or keep going.” He locked eyes with Lucy, all traces of humor gone. “I kept going.”

“And ended up where?” Lynn asked.

“I never ended anywhere. I have yet to stop.”

“You mean you’ve been on the road since then?”

“Roads, fields, mountains. You name it, I’ve traveled it.”

Lucy bounced a rock from hand to hand while she spoke. “So you’re saying in all that time you never found a place to settle?”

Fletcher said, “There have been plenty with access to water and decent shelter. I even discovered a cellar stocked with canned food, but I took what I needed for a few days’ journey and left it behind.”

“Why would you do that?” Lucy asked.

“Because I’ve learned a lesson, and more than once. If you have something, someone will take it from you, and with the loss comes suffering. It’s best to be beholden to nothing.”

“What about your wife?” Lynn asked, her voice seeming to slice through the air after Fletcher’s slow, rolling tone.

Another smile from Fletcher, this one so sad that Lucy felt tears prickling her eyes. “She was the exception.”

“You’ve been looking for her all this time?” The question bubbled up on a wave of emotion, and Lucy’s voice trembled to stay under control.

“My best estimate is fifteen years,” Fletcher said evenly.

“That is so wonderful,” she said. The tears brimmed on Lucy’s eyelashes, and she hoped if they fell, Lynn wouldn’t notice.

“And stupid,” Lynn countered, though her voice didn’t carry the same bite as the words. “It’s a long shot, walking around hoping to cross paths with her.”

Fletcher gave a lazy shrug. “I have nothing better to do.”

Lynn looked up to the stars and rolled her eyes, but Lucy thought she detected the faintest hint of tears reflected there.

“So that’s why you live on your feet? So you don’t get used to having anything?” Lucy asked.

“I find enough to eat for the day, I stay near water when I see it, and I walk. And I rather like my hat,” he added. “It’s useful.”

“We had a place in Ohio, a pond, a house…” Lucy’s voice trailed off as she remembered her bedspread, Red Dog lying alone in the middle of it the night she’d left.

“Why’d you leave?” Fletcher encouraged her.

“Polio,” she said simply, her throat closing entirely over the word and summoning images of Maddy’s contorted body, the haunted look in Carter’s eyes.

“Escaping a sickness, that’s a common story. You leave any behind?”

“Her grandmother and an older man,” Lynn answered. “They had been on vacation from it.”

Lucy’s felt a laugh chasing the tears, and she quickly explained to Fletcher. “Vaccination, she means. Vera and Stebbs were vaccinated against polio.”

Fletcher nodded. “Well, that’s very similar to being on vacation from it, I suppose,” he said, and Lucy giggled, which forced a tear to drop.

Lynn’s eyebrows came together. “What’d I say?”

Fletcher skipped her question to ask another of his own. “Why did you come so far? You’re a long way from home.”

Lynn nodded to Lucy. Whether her reservations about Fletcher were disappearing or she assumed he would finagle the truth out of them eventually, she didn’t know. “We decided to head for California,” she said, the word tripping off her tongue as if the speaking of it could bring it closer.

“California’s a big place. Can you be any more specific?”

“We heard it’s normal there, the kind of normal from before.”

Fletcher shook his head. “Sorry, ladies, but there’s nothing normal about California.”

Panic flared through Lucy’s system and she looked to Lynn, who had fixed Fletcher with a cold stare. “We heard there were some places where they had desalinization plants.” She pronounced the word carefully. “Seems you can get the salt out of seawater if you got the right tools.”

“How determined are you to find such a place?” Fletcher’s tone was suddenly as careful as Lynn’s.

“Very,” Lynn said.

“Enough to leave behind a good site in Nebraska,” Lucy added. “Enough to come this far.”

Fletcher was silent a long while. Lucy was very aware of the horses nickering to one another, the sound of the water tripping over the rocks. When he raised his eyes, he looked to Lynn. “Do you trust me?”

“Not yet.”

“And if I said I knew of someplace for you to go, a safe location with water and good people, what would you say?”

“I’d say I need to sleep on it.”

Hope chased the panic through her body, making Lucy dizzy. “What do you mean?”

Fletcher looked at both of them before answering, studying their faces. “There’s a place similar to what you mentioned—desal plants, safety, a variation of normal.”

“This place, it in California?” Lynn asked.

Fletcher leaned in closer to the two of them and dropped his voice. “It’s called Sand City. They had a desal plant way before the Shortage and a small enough population to take care of themselves. You have to understand the majority of people didn’t think the water situation would prove to be as dire as the predictions, but those with foresight moved to places like Sand City. Out here in the west, water isn’t as easy to come across as it might’ve been for you in Ohio. The few decent people who are left tend to band together for protection.”