Nick Cole - The Wasteland Saga

High up on the rock burned a small campfire, and above it the stars wheeled like broken glass moving in time to some unheard waltz.

The Boy sat by the fire sharpening his tomahawk.

“What’re you going to do?” asked the Old Man.

“I will go up there. Near there, and see who it is. Maybe they know where we can find the fuel that’s supposed to be here.”

The Old Man started the tank and backed it out from under the overpass. When he came back to the fire he said, “We can watch you through the night vision. If you get in trouble maybe you can signal us from up there. We could try to come up and help you.”

The Boy nodded as he finished lacing up his old boots. He stood, stretching the weak part of himself, twisting back and forth. The Old Man watched his granddaughter watch the Boy.

What does she see?

What do you think she sees, my friend? She is young and so is he.

When the Boy was ready to go he turned and said, “I’ll try to be back before dawn.”

Then he was gone into the darkness. For a moment they heard his steps and then nothing. As if he had been swallowed by the night.

The Old Man sat down next to the fire.

His granddaughter watched the dark shape of the massive rock. It blocked out its section of the night like a piece of black velvet hung to blot out the stars. Or an empty place in the universe.

“Will he be okay, Poppa?”

The Old Man wanted to think about that question, but he knew he mustn’t. He knew he must give her an answer quickly. And when he responded, he knew he should’ve been faster. He knew when he saw the worry and doubt in her eyes.

“I think he will. He seems to know the ways one needs to survive. I think he has been alone for much of his life.”

“Na-ah, Poppa. He was raised by a soldier.”

How does she know that? When have they talked about it?

“He was?” asked the Old Man.

“Yes, Poppa. I had to ask him what a soldier was and he told me. Do you know what a soldier is, Poppa?”

I do.

But maybe his meaning is different from the one I know. I must listen more than I speak.

Yes.

“What did he say a soldier was?”

“He said it was someone who never gives up, Poppa.”

The Old Man thought of Sergeant Major Preston. The tank and all that the soldier had prepared for the Old Man’s village to come and find one day.

I think cancer got me…. God bless America .

Yes. That is what he wrote in the journal I found. I had not said that word “America” in a very long time before I read it in his journal.

And if I’m completely honest with myself, I had forgotten it.

What good was a word in the years of sun and sand and salvage that followed the winter that came after the day of the bombs? What good was “America” now?

It only reminded me of all that was gone.

The Old Man watched the fire.

But Sergeant Major Preston of the Black Horse Cavalry hadn’t forgotten about America.

And neither had the soldier who’d raised the Boy. Whoever he was.

They didn’t forget.

They didn’t give up.

“Yes,” he said to his granddaughter. “That is what a soldier is.”

She was silent. She pressed her lips together, which was her way when she had more to say or was very excited about something she wanted to do but had to be patient until she could do it.

Young girls are hungry for all the good they think life holds. That is their innocence.

“Poppa?”

“Yes.”

“He also had a wife.”

“Oh.”

“She’s dead but he didn’t tell me how.”

“He seems young for that.”

She was silent. And then, “Does he, Poppa?”

“Maybe not to you, but to me he is very young.”

“Well, that’s because you’re old now, Poppa.” She laughed and snorted.

The Old Man nodded.

“It’s true. But it means I did something right, doesn’t it? It means I was good at living. That’s what getting old means. It means you’re successful at living.”

She laughed.

I love her laugh.

I wish I knew all the secret words that would make her laugh anytime I wanted to hear it. Anytime I needed to hear it. If there is anyone in control of this crazy life, that is my bargain I’ll make with you. You can have anything you want. Just give me her laugh. Let me take it wherever I have to go after this.

Deal?

Silence.

And…

Please?

“He was in battles, Poppa. And he’s crossed the whole country. The whole United States, Poppa.”

Her eyes shine when she talks about him.

Her eyes remind me of my wife’s, her grandmother. When she was young.

She is always young to me.

“He has done a lot for such a young man,” said the Old Man.

“What is that, Poppa?”

“What is what?”

“The United States?”

I guess we never talked about that. We talked of salvage and ice cream and jet airplanes like my dad once flew across the world. Many things. But not the United States.

“It was our country.”

She said nothing. Thinking.

Then…

“Is it still our country?”

IN THE NIGHT, when the moon was falling to the far horizon, long after the Old Man had tried to explain the concept of “States” and then tried to remember as many of their names as he could, which was not many, he flipped the switch on the optics. He scanned the giant rock. He could not see the Boy.

She’d only wanted to talk about him. Even though I was telling her all about California and the other states I had been to, she only really wanted to talk about him.

Yes, my friend. That is the way of the young when they discover something. They are like Christopher Columbus discovering the “new” world.

Yes. Sergeant Major Preston wrote that in the sewer.

They think everything is new and they are the first and they ignore us Indians who’ve been here all along.

In the past, if I taught her everything I knew about how a small engine once worked or what telephones were, she couldn’t get enough of such things. The questions about those lost things would follow me for days. But not today. She only looked as though she were listening to me as I told her about states.

But she wasn’t.

No.

That is the way of the young, my friend. You cannot help who you fall in love with the first time. You just do. When you get up in the morning you don’t say to yourself, Today I am going to fall in love . You just do.

He is very handsome. Strong too. That is a good thing for these days. But she is still young.

But there must always be a first time for love.

He looked down into the tank and saw her face. She was deep in sleep, still wrapped in her bomber jacket.

I will take just her laugh with me to wherever I must go next. Please? Is it a deal? Just the memory of her laugh. Can I have that?

Silence.

In the night, the Old Man thought he heard a horse galloping down the highway above his head.

I am dreaming.

Maybe the horse is on the bridge.

Maybe the horse is part of the dream.

The Old Man fell back to sleep.

The Old Man woke with a start.

I was falling.

Yes.

She was calling for me?

No, Poppa. I need you .

I think so.

I smell bacon.

He opened the hatch. The Boy and a Stranger watched the campfire and a cast-iron skillet between them in which the Old Man could see splattering grease leaping in the waves of heat that came up from the flames.

The Stranger wore clothing made of tanned hide. A necklace of bones. His hair fell in curls around a circle of baldness that had consumed the back of the top of his head. Large sad brown eyes turned to the Old Man and gazed upon him.