Nick Cole - The Wasteland Saga

“It’s your turn to drive,” says the Old Man.

“Okay, Poppa!” she explodes.

“You can have mine,” he mumbles to himself as she grabs him by the hand.

She is dragging him back to the tank, pulling him forward in fact.

“Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you, Poppa!”

He feels claws pulling at his other arm and he shakes it stiffly as though controlling it from very far away. The Fool cartwheels in the dirt and an instant later is up in a wide-legged stance. His too-long arms hang down and low, the claws opening and closing.

He is growling.

The Old Man closes his eyes at the foot of the embankment as his granddaughter scrambles up and away toward the tank at the top.

The tank she gets to drive again.

“C’mon, Poppa!” She beckons, leaving him behind.

“What about yer fuel, mister?” Reynolds’s face looms comically into the Old Man’s narrow field of red dirt and rock and sudden blue sky.

The Old Man is grabbed heavily from behind.

The Boy is dragging him, one-armed, up the hill with little effort and much force.

The Fool at the foot of the hill seems no longer friendly. In fact, he seems given completely over to a purple anger none of the other revelers notice. The Fool stares hatefully upward at the retreating Old Man and the Boy.

Teeth gritted.

Jaw clenched.

A fire burns in the darkness behind his too-large puppet face and coal-black eyes.

The tank’s engine whispers into its roar.

The Old Man is dragged upward across the hot armor and rests, catching his breath and holding on to the turret, while the Boy pours water over his burning old head.

Thank you, he thinks he says aloud but is not sure if he has.

The circus before the Stockade races away behind them and even though the Old Man can only see the colors and pennants in the distance, he can feel those hateful eyes of the Fool still on him.

Watching them.

Following them.

Chasing after them.

The Old Man is sleeping on the deck of the tank, inside the turret. When he awakes, he feels the rumbling engine and the grinding treads shuddering through the frame all about him. He looks up and sees the Boy in the hatch. It is still daylight in the hints of sky he can see beyond the Boy.

I feel like I’ve been drinking.

You were.

Yes, but more than I actually did.

The Old Man rubs his face, feeling saliva along his cheek.

I was really sleeping.

He sits up and feels dull and faraway and thirsty. The Boy sees that the Old Man is awake and climbs out onto the turret and the Old Man rises into the hatch. They are headed north. It is late afternoon.

I’ve been asleep most of the day.

The old highway winds through a ponderosa of wide dry fields and clusters of stunted oak. Stubby fortresses of rock erupt suddenly throughout the landscape.

It feels quieter here. I can tell, even above all the noise of the tank. It feels like we are climbing upward now. Climbing to the top of the world.

Later when they shut down the tank alongside the road and the noise of the engine has faded, the Old Man hears the quiet he’d suspected might be there and it envelops their resting place for the night.

We are heading up onto the high plateau now.

There is no sound of bird or beast. The smell of dust and grass are heavy in the early evening. His granddaughter sits on her haunches, watching the fire the Boy had built, the two of them waiting for the beans and rice to heat.

They would be just fine without me.

The Old Man watches the dry slope of the land and red rock and the stubby trees packed tightly together.

It feels like no one has been here for some time.

So where did the circus come from?

The thought of the Fool sends a cold shiver through his thin muscles and chest.

The whole thing felt wrong.

Maybe you just overreacted, my friend?

No. No, I don’t think I did. There was something wrong about the whole…

When you were young, you noticed that older people were always afraid. Afraid of kidnappers and telemarketers. Afraid of the new. Afraid of the unknown. Maybe you are old now and afraid of new things, my friend?

Maybe the old of my youth were just cautious. And I am old.

He walked back to their small fire, smelling the smoke and the food and the heavy scent of sagebrush thick in the first of the evening cool.

“Poppa, tell me all about elephants,” she said.

The Old Man looked at the Boy. The Boy watched him.

Is he nodding? Does he want to know about elephants also?

Remember he too is young. To the young the world is exciting and not frightening. The world is elephants and not… fools or clowns?

Psychopaths.

Evil.

“What do you want to know about them?” he asked as she handed him his plate. In the first bite he knew he was starving.

I am hungry like I was when I was young. So maybe I am not old.

You are old, my friend. Like me.

“Where’d they come from? What do they eat? Can they do other tricks? Was that the biggest one you’ve ever seen? You know, Poppa, tell us everything.”

Chewing quickly, shoveling another bite into his still-moving mouth, he looked at the Boy.

The Boy nodded.

And so the Old Man told them all about elephants. All about Africa. All about lions and things he’d read in books and been taught in school when he was young.

Later, when the fire was low and he could hear them both sleeping, he lay still and watched the stars above.

I did not think I knew so much about elephants.

The road wound higher and higher into the forests that surrounded Flagstaff. For a while the going was slow as the tank maneuvered around lone eruptions of pine that shot through the lanes of the old highway.

In time, the crumbling remains of buildings poked through the unchecked growth, and when the Old Man went to consult the map as to how much farther they might go that day, he could not find it.

When did I…

When the Fool shook your hand.

The Old Man replayed the moment in the miles to come, as his granddaughter called out her intentions each time they needed to maneuver off-road.

“Okay, Poppa, we’re going around this crazy tree.”

I was pretty out of it yesterday. I could have dropped it in the dust perhaps.

“Poppa, we’ll go to the right of this collapsed bridge, okay?”

Or anyone in the circus or the town could have snatched it from me.

“Poppa, how do you think that truck managed to flip itself across all the lanes? What a bad driver he must’ve been!”

Or it is somewhere here with us and I have simply misplaced it.

They passed the fire-blackened remains of a vehicle, the likes of which the Old Man had never seen before. Three blackened skeletons lay next to its massive wheels, still twisting in agony.

Or laughing.

In the end, when we are all skeletons, who will be able to tell if we were crying or laughing at what has happened to us?

No one, my friend.

And…

It won’t be important anymore.

“What kind of car was that, Poppa?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never seen its like before and maybe the fire made it unrecognizable.”

“Why do you think they just sat there and let it burn, Poppa?”

He didn’t answer.

“Why, Poppa?”

“Because there was nothing they could do about it.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

No, it doesn’t.

THE STOCKADE AT Flagstaff was a collection of fallen pine logs that had once formed a wall for defense and since had been dragged away from a hotel that overlooked the old highway.

The Old Man let the tank idle outside in the parking lot of the hotel. They watched, waiting for somebody to come out and greet them.