Mark Falkin - The Late Bloomer

“I’ve been thinking,” I said to Nate.

“Uh huh.” His response came out more circumspect than I thought possible for a ten-year-old. He pushed the too-big hunting cap up his forehead.

“I think we should stay here. For the winter.”

“Really?” His brimming excitement let show through the old world.

“Yep. It’s the best thing, I think.”

“And after that?”

“After what?”

“Winter.”

“Let’s get there when we get there.”

He nodded knowingly, brow furrowed— yes, of course, when we get there .

“You like coffee?”

Nate shook his head, his tongue jumping from his mouth in a grimace.

“I’ll make a fire. Cold cereal is all we got right now. We’re going to need to spend the morning collecting firewood. Then we can get eggs from the coop.”

“Okay.”

“But first, let me feed the dogs. We lose them, and the winter here isn’t as attractive.”

Nate turned on his heel and dashed inside. He stood at the tall single-paned glass door and watched me at an angle as I fed the dogs. The noises I made did indeed make them come, about thirty of them. “Can you feed her in here?” Nate yelled from the cracked door. Maggie sitting next to him, waiting, knowing.

The cereal we ate had held its crunch and the fire I’d conjured filled the room with hope and warmth. Out the window, the sun was a white coin pinned above the ridge. I showed Nate the empty wood rack and said we’d need to go out and collect a bunch of deadfall. The dusty-webby storage room contained all manner of axes and saws, chained and toothed. Nate found clothes that fit better in the closet up in the loft above the great room he’d annexed. He’d claimed the loft with blunt territoriality, running up and down the flight of steps, fleet and noiseless on the jute carpet.

We set out to collect wood with a green wheelbarrow. Plenty of it in the immediate area but the real stuff we could see was beyond the tall industrial barbwire fence. An aluminum ranch ladder straddling the fence didn’t help us wood-gathering-wise. I considered snapping the wire with one of the million sharp objects in the medieval oubliette of a storage room, but a part of me thought it best not to.

Then we saw why. Buffalo. Only twenty-five yards away on the other side of the fence, lying so still I had to blink to make sure. Two of them lying on the slanted meadow in the sun between cedar copses.

“A whole herd of them out there,” Nate said. “Forgot to tell you that.”

“Huh. Buffalo.” I’d heard stories of people out in the boonies having panthers and ocelots and zebras. Never heard of buffalo out here. I muttered, “Well, should the fecal matter really strike against the rotating blades, we could hunt down one of these and eat for a month.”

“What?”

“Oh, nothing. Just postulating.”

“I don’t know what that means either.”

“That’s a good thing.”

The only animal I’d hunted was quail. A few times in high school, Johnny coming with us the second time just last winter, we’d driven out to a hunting lease in Hill Country, near Burnet. Martin and his real estate bud, Frank somebody. We’d go out in the blue dawn and drive many miles just to shoot quail. Sitting in the bed of a beater pickup, Frank’s brown Labrador, Bevo, would flush them out from the brush under mesquites, coming back with pear cactus quills on his muzzle, then go retrieve them once they plummeted from the sky. I’m not a bad shot, truth be known, but I took no pride in it. I wasn’t into hunting, not with Martin at least, not for, uh, sport. Starving to death? Totally could do it.

We decided to stay inside the fence wire for now and succeeded in finding enough wood in the immediate area to keep us warm for a while, thanks mostly to a keeled hackberry which I hacked at until noon. Nate got proficient with wheeling the wood to the porch though slowed by his need to look over his shoulders every few yards. When he dumped his loads at the entrance to the carport, he’d run back to be near me with that wheelbarrow swerving. I wondered how long his acute fear would last.

“This will do us for today, with some left for tomorrow, but we’ve got to make this a daily thing to keep up with so we can hopefully get ahead of the weather. Maybe tomorrow, we’ll take that Bobcat farther away.”

Nate nodded. We loaded the last of what I’d chopped into the wheelbarrow and made our way back to the house. Nate strode apace and close enough for us to bump. Halfway there, he hooked fingers into the pocket of my peacoat.

I know I looked like Rocky Balboa, hunched over, chasing those chickens. Nate laughing at me. I finally grabbed one and held it to my body as it squawked and flapped. I petted it and it calmed. “Just seeing if I could do it,” I said to the brown hen. “You keep laying eggs and it’ll just be for sport.”

Nate and I made our way around the coop, ducking under the corrugated roofs, filling our baskets with eggs.

We lined the eggs in rows on a towel on the kitchen counter. They needed to stay cool and I didn’t want to get in and out of the fridge too much for fear of losing what little cold remained. The immediate need for warmth solved, the need to keep food cool and fresh now presented itself. Coolers tied with bungee or rope outside would work, though raccoons would solve those riddles.

The carport storage room with all the torture implements could act as a large fridge. I’d inventory and transfer salvageable fridge food into the storage room, including the daily eggs.

Somehow the water still ran and the toilet flushed. I guess the water came from a well. No idea how long that would last or what was involved in making sure it did. What did I know of such things? How many different ways could I make things substantially worse by monkeying with it?

Would this be my life? Was it just a matter of time until I boxed myself into a deathly situation? Maybe, but I felt we had the winter and the dogs, enough of a buffer. Maybe I could make contact with others, if they were out there, and maybe, just maybe, the kids would change.

Look at Nate. My presence has had a major impact on him. Couldn’t the same be achieved with other kids? Occam’s Razor says: of course. True or False SAT answer: True.

Let a long cold winter chill us all out. I smiled at that thought as I watched my fire dance upon the wood I’d collected. All I needed to do was keep things fresh, keep water available, and feed the dogs and chickens. At some point we’d need to drive into Medina to get more food and feed. Inherent risks there.

What I needed to do was be resourceful and live for today. Maybe that’s all there is. This whole world of ours got too crowded and busy and mother nature just decided to hit the kill switch.

Did she use Jespers’s Gene to do it? Were those old guys nuts? As time goes by, it seems so farfetched. But, then, look what’s happened. Farfetched.

I don’t know. Philosophy is so old world.

It took three days for something resembling normality to set in. A rhythm, a beat structured the hours for the first time since the morning of. I sensed my shoulders relaxing from their residence near my ears in constant defensive mode. My hummings and whistlings flowed while I worked, and not just to quell fear. These songs I hum-whistled were original tunes from my subconscious which didn’t want to recall and revamp old-world melodies and arrangements. I collected these tunes in my mind like eggs, like firewood, put them on a shelf for later. Then, in the evening by candlelight, I wrote them down in a notebook [17] This notebook of songs is on view at Records. Songbook rehearsal copies are available for checkout from Custodian. I found in the office.