Joshua Gayou - Commune - The Complete Series - A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Box Set (Books 1-4)

At one point, the man said, “Don’t swaller, now. Spit it out when yer done an’ rinse with that water.”

The kid felt like telling him there was no danger at all of him “ swallering ” but ultimately said nothing.

After they were done, the big man took him down the hall to a bedroom with a selection of clothes laid out on a chair. He gestured at them with a hand and said, “Rustled up some duds for you. Go ’head an’ try ’em on; find out h’what fits. I’ll be on the porch.”

Later, he padded out through the front door on bare feet, wearing a pair of long blue pants and a long sleeved shirt with buttons running down the middle. He found the big man sitting back out on the step brushing his boots off.

When the man looked up at him, he cocked his hat back with a thumb and smiled. “Well, that’s lookin’ mighty fine, now. How you like ’em?”

“The pants are stiff.”

“Yip. Good pair-uh Wranglers wanna be stiff. Don’t fret, though, they’ll soften up directly.”

He shifted on the step so he could lean his back against the column and look straight at the boy.

“I cain’t keep callin’ you ‘Kid.’ Just ain’t goan do. Ah’mo call you Cuate.”

“ Cuate .”

“That’s right.”

“What’s a Cuate ?”

“Not a damned clue. They had this hand that come work around the ranch when I was a boy; he was a Mexican feller come around seasonal-like. Tough kid. Whooped my ass, at least. Anyway, we fell to bein’ pals, an’ after a while we was thick as thieves. My daddy use to laugh over it on account of I couldn’t speak a lick of Spanish, and he kindly couldn’t speak a lick of English, but it didn’t matter none. We figured how to talk with our hands after a spell. His name was Cuate. ’Bout the closest thing I ever had to a brother.”

“Cuate.”

He smiled. He held out a giant, ruddy freckled fist with red knuckles and fine, reddish hair and said, “Pleased to meet’cha, Cuate. I’m Pap.”

The boy smiled unexpectedly; a beautiful sight. He recognized the gesture. He thrust his hand out and did his best to take the man’s hand, but he only managed to grasp the rocky knuckle of the index finger. His hand was swallowed completely a moment after.

Pap shook once, let his hand go, and pointed at a large pile of shoes laying out by the door. He said, “You’ll have to go through those. Don’t know yer size.”

Cuate understood what to do as soon as he saw them; had done this very thing on more than one occasion when trading up on the road. He sat down at the pile, selected one of the shoes, and held its sole up against the bottom of his foot. He took note of the size and lay it and its mate aside. He continued on in the same fashion with the others, soon producing an array of footwear arranged in order of size, with three hopeful sets positioned closest to him. He pulled on the first pair, wiggled his feet around a moment, grunted, yanked them off, and set them aside. He pulled on the second pair and seemed to pause. He stood and took a few steps over the sun-bleached deck and smiled. He squatted down to his haunches like a baby and began to tie up the laces.

He looked so small to Pap; incongruous as his little fingers manipulated the laces, cinching them up effortlessly as though he’d been doing such for years.

“How old’re you?” he tried again.

Cuate stared blankly.

“Yer age. Years? How many years?”

Cuate only shook his head and shrugged. Pap shook his head as well and shrugged back. Then they both smiled, each surprising the other.

“Okay, Hoss. Let’s get you up to Manny’s an’ clean up that mess I made.”

“Cuate!”

“Huh? Oh, no son, hoss means… eh, ferget it. Cuate, sure. C’mon, Cuate.”

The wood merchants had set up operations the day after they’d arrived in Jackson, taking advantage of the area’s abundant supply. There was a fair amount of deadfall along the foot of the mountains, requiring only minor processing with bow saws and axes, and this was what they started on, either consciously or unconsciously putting off the harvest of live growth for as long as they could.

The wood carts rolled through every morning just before dawn, making stops for those people who had standing accounts. It wasn’t a large number of stops; there were few people who’d yet become prosperous enough to run their own Woody and fewer still that ran them every day. Most of the supply went to the power plants for community charging and the like or to Elton’s and Pap’s crews to keep the vehicles running. One of the exceptions to this was Manny, who had done enough wheeling and dealing in his time to have secured for himself both a gasoline generator and one of the later Woody prototypes; the last version Ned’s folk were building before they went to a double hopper rig. It was fine for what he required; he didn’t need to make any more than ten horsepower at a time.

He’d taken up residence in the old barbershop in Upper Jackson; an old-fashioned place with wood-paneled walls and a barber pole set outside the door that would still spin when you turned it on. Enough material and trappings of the profession had been left behind for him to take up his old life, allowing him to execute with far greater precision that which he’d been forced to perpetrate with dull scissors and ratty combs back in Colorado. The joint even had an old Wurlitzer jukebox that still worked, and half the time it seemed as though people came around to listen to it play instead of having Manny tune them up. He didn’t mind at all. It was a good place that brought back good old feelings; memories of heading out on a Saturday morning to relax in the chair, listen to the game scores, and chat with the good old boys, background sounds of buzzing clippers shot through with the close, tentative zip of scissors doing what scissors do, so close to the ear that the cold metal brushed across the lobe. Feel of hot foam at the neck, the tug of the razor, and a splash of ice-cold alcohol; Elvis or The Beatles or maybe CCR churning away on the juke.

There had been a sign over the door that said “Teton Barbers” once upon a time, but it had been covered over with whitewash and stenciled with the simple word: “Manny’s.”

Pap held the door for Cuate when they arrived, and the boy stepped through carefully, large solemn eyes fluttering like hummingbirds over the faces of those already gathered in the shop. Manny was just finishing up on his current customer when they came in, as luck would have it; he nodded to a Mini-Johnny in a state of repose in the barber chair at the far end of the shop, and the lady he’d just finished brushing off went to go see about her bill.

Manny was a small, round man with a well-trimmed mustache, a soft chin, and ruler-straight black hair that he wore parted at the side. The softness of his neck lay over on his shoulders and the tops of his collarbones, and when he turned his head, Cuate could see a little colony of dark skin tags peek out from underneath. He felt incredibly uneasy at the sight of them, but then Manny looked back down at him again, and they all disappeared. He smiled, lips pulling back from tiny, even teeth, and his entire face softened even more, as though he were some sort of character in a child’s TV show. He threw a green booster into the seat and slapped the top of it happily, and Cuate instantly liked him for it.

Pap lifted him without warning, and he found himself floating up into the seat, small tickle in the pit of his stomach causing him to clench and smile. A few of the others sitting along the outside walls of the shop cleared their throats and shifted about, perhaps annoyed at the boy cutting ahead in line, but said nothing.