Mike Mullin - Ashen Winter

“Ralph? Who’s Ralph?”

“You said your name is Ralph.”

“I did? When?”

“Last night.”

“Don’t remember that. No, I’m Ed. My dog’s name was Ralph.”

“Huh, wonder why you told me your name was Ralph?”

He twisted his head and stared at the ceiling.

“I need to know where you got that shotgun,” I said. “Blue Betsy, remember?”

“Why am I here?”

“Because I need to know where the shotgun came from.” This was getting old. “Trust me, I’d have preferred to leave you where you were. You’d have bled out or frozen to death.”

“Might’ve been better if you had.”

“Yeah. But-”

“You want to know where we got that shotgun. You going to kill me after I tell you?”

“What? No.”

“You’re just going to let me go. Tell me another one, kid. How do they do it here? Hanging? Or a bullet in the brain?”

“Neither. You’ve just got to move on and never come back.”

“Huh.” Ed folded his arms and closed his eyes.

“Where’d that shotgun come from?”

Ed was silent.

I leaned forward and breathed out heavily, staring at him. I had to convince him to trust me, at least a little. “You hungry?”

“Yeah, but you ain’t gonna feed me. Nobody’s got enough food to waste it on half-dead strangers.”

“Wait here.”

He laughed a wheezy, halfhearted cackle. “I can’t even sit up by myself.”

He had a point. I returned to the room Darla and I shared. She was still loudly asleep. I dug through our supplies, pulling out packages of food. I thought about what would impress Ed, but while we had plenty of food, there wasn’t much variety. I settled on a sandwich-two cornmeal pancakes for the bread with a slice of ham and a slab of goat cheese for the filling. Ice crystals shattered off the ham as I cut it, and the slice was hard as a board. We had no way to keep it warm. The cheese crumbled. As a finishing touch I peeled an icy kale leaf off the stack and added that to the sandwich.

Ed was staring at the door when I returned to his room. I put the sandwich in his hands.

“That’s. . for me?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I replied, “Don’t eat too fast. You’ll barf.”

“I know.”

I sat him up, propped against the wall. He took a bite, chewing slowly. He held the sandwich in front of him as he ate, staring at it like a kid with a new iPhone on Christmas morning. Well, like a kid would have stared at an iPhone before the volcano. Now that kid would just toss the useless chunk of metal and glass aside and look for the good stuff: food, clothing, matches, or weapons.

I refilled his water cup.

Ed set the water beside him and said, “So this is corn, lettuce-”

“Kale,” I said.

“Kale, okay. Cheese and a slab of?”

“Ham.” I was quiet for a while as Ed ate. “Why’d your buddy leave you in that house, anyway?”

“I was slowing him down. I think he was going to put me out of my misery, but I got him to leave me there the same way I got you to back off. Pure D bluff. Told him I had one bullet left for the MAC-10. He didn’t want to find out the hard way whether I was telling the truth or not.”

“Took balls-so what did you do before the eruption?”

“Before the eruption?”

“Yeah, like, I went to high school. Cedar Falls High.”

“I. .” Ed lifted the sandwich, staring at it, not eating it. “Mandy used to love ham sandwiches.”

“Mandy?”

“I haven’t thought about her in months. She was my life-how could I forget?”

“What about-”

“I guess you just go along, don’t you-”

“I don’t-”

“Every day you do what it takes to survive. And every day what you’re willing to do gets a little worse. Until you’re-Jesus, we were shooting kids.”

I tried to break in to ask about the shotgun again, but his voice dropped to a whisper and he kept talking. “Dear God, what have I done? What have I become?”

He buried his face in his hands and started crying huge, racking sobs that traveled in lurching waves down his belly. I was afraid he’d tear his wounds open, he was crying so hard. Tears leaked from between his fingers. I watched him, torn between disgust and an irrational desire to comfort the bandit who had attacked our farm, who would have killed Max and kidnapped Rebecca and Anna if he could have.

It took a while for Ed’s sobbing to subside to sniffles. “I was a bookkeeper,” he said at last. “I ran Peachtree for a machine shop in Ely. What happened to us? What happened to me?”

“What did happen to you?” I must have let some of the scorn I felt color my voice. He pulled his hands from his face and stared at me with an expression of such naked torment that I forgot to ask him again about the shotgun.

“It started with Ralph,” Ed said. “He was our dog. We were starving to death, Mandy and me.”

“I need-”

“Then a couple weeks later Mandy died anyway. Flu bug or maybe just the diarrhea. I should have just lain down to die next to her instead of burying her. A lot of people did, you know? I’d find them all over Ely, frozen together in their beds. The guys I ran with later laughed at them. But they did the right thing-instead of doing something just a little worse every day, all in the name of survival, shaving yourself away until the last sliver of who you were is gone.”

I raised my voice, trying to break in. “Would you let me-”

“I still dream about him. Ralph. He was a good dog.” Ed looked at me, his eyes stripped of color by the low light and his tears. “They say you are what you eat, you know? Sometimes in my dreams I’m Ralph, my tail thumping the floor, just happy to see Ed come home. Sometimes in my dreams I’m a pile of bones. Endless bones, burnt and cracked, feeding a greasy fire.” He turned his head and started crying again, softly this time.

I watched him cry for a moment. “I need to know where that shotgun came from,” I said for the eight millionth time.

“How did I-”

“Goddamn it, Ed! Tell me where my parents are!” Without thinking about it I’d taken a step toward him and raised my fists to my chin, planting my feet at a forty-five-degree angle: a fighting stance.

“I want to stay. In Warren. Rejoin civilization. And I want a pardon.”

“No freaking way am I letting a guy who tried to kidnap my sister and cousin stay within a hundred miles of Warren. The mayor was ready to throw you out while you were unconscious. Dr. McCarthy saved your ass. You tell me about that shotgun, and I’ll try to convince them to let you stay until you’re healthy enough to leave. Then you’ll get the hell out. In fact, you’ll get out of the whole state of Illinois.”

“I’m not saying anything then.”

“I could beat it out of you.” I raised my fists again.

“Go ahead,” Ed’s voice sounded hollow. “I don’t want to rejoin the gang, and if I leave on my own, I’m dead anyway. You may as well beat me to death. Wouldn’t take much right now.”

Ed’s eyes were brimming with tears again. I let out the breath I’d been holding, and with it my whole body deflated. I couldn’t beat on a defenseless man, no matter what he’d done. “You have to buy your way into Warren,” I said. “They aren’t taking just anybody-they don’t have enough food to do that. You’ve got to bring skills or supplies they need. You’ve got nothing to offer-the only thing Warren needs even less than bookkeepers are lawyers.”

“So you buy me a spot. Or convince your mayor to give me one.”

“They don’t want a bandit hanging around.”

“That’s your problem-if you still want to know about that shotgun.”

Gah! It was frustrating to admit it to myself, but he was right-he was half-dead, but he still had the upper hand. And I didn’t want to argue with him all night. I reached into my coat pocket and extracted an envelope. “There are 200 kale seeds in here. More than enough to buy you admission to Warren-if you can buy it at all. I’m not going to hang around here and try to convince the mayor and sheriff that you’re an okay guy. I’m not even sure you are. So here’s the deal-you tell me everything you know, and I give you the seeds. Trading them for admission to Warren is your problem, not mine.”