Richard Lange - Sweet Nothing

“It’s okay,” the girl says. “It’s okay.”

Her pimp bangs on the side of the van and opens the door. Time’s up.

I’VE SEEN ENOUGH that I could write my own bible. For example, here’s the parable of the brother who hung on and the one who fell: Two months later I’m walking home from my new job guarding a Mexican dollar store on Los Angeles. A bum steps out in front of me, shoves his dirty hand in my face, and asks for a buck. I don’t like when they’re pushy, and I’m about to tell him to step off, but then I realize it’s Leon.

He’s still wearing his suit, only now it’s filthy rags. His eyes are dull and dead-looking, his lips burned black from the pipe. All his charm is gone, all his kiss-my-ass cockiness. Nobody is following this boy anymore but the reaper.

“Leon?” I say. I’m not scared of him. One punch now would turn him back to dust.

“Who you?” he asks, warily.

“You don’t remember?”

He opens his eyes wide, then squints. A quiet laugh rattles his bones.

“Old McGruff,” he says. “Gimme a dollar, Crime Dog.”

I give him two.

“Be good to yourself,” I say as I walk away.

“You’re a lucky man,” he calls after me.

No, I’m not, but I am careful. Got a couple bricks stacked, a couple bucks put away, and one eye watching for the next wave. Forever and ever, amen.

THEIR SECOND DAY OF walking, Benny said to the Bear, When we gettin’ there? and the Bear said, Shit, this is nothin’. I once went a week for half a case a cream corn. Yeah, Benny said, but I told my ma only a few days, not a week. The Bear snorted. You get back with full pockets and yer ma won’t be cryin’ sad, he said, she’ll be cryin’ happy. Benny put that picture in his head and ignored the blister plaguing his toe. Good shoes were coming, and good food. He and the Bear wore masks against the dust and hoods against the sun, and they walked.

THEY WERE CHASING the Bear’s dream. Back before everything, his great-great-grandpa lived in a town that was swallowed up by a government lake. The old man couldn’t bring himself to leave, so when the water began to rise, he sat in the cellar of his house with a coffee can full of Krugerrands and waited to drown. What’s a Krugerrand? Benny wanted to know. A gold coin, the Bear said, and a hundred a them’s a treasure. The Bear’s dream was that the lake had dried up. I saw it clear, he said, and it gave me great joy, that old-time town risin’ forgotten out of the water. He didn’t ask the peddlers who passed by the lake or the soldiers on patrol what they’d seen for fear they’d wonder at his interest, and he only told Benny about it after swearing him in as his fifty-fifty partner. Benny could barely sleep that night, thinking of it. I mean, who besides the Bear used words like dream and joy and treasure ? Nobody, that’s who.

THEY FOLLOWED THE road but kept off the pavement. Nothing up there but trouble. The path they took through the brush had been stomped into existence by the feet of countless other cautious travelers, some of whom had carved their names into the trees: Beano and Wiseass and Clint. Go Home Fool! someone had written, and Fuck All. Benny didn’t know letters, so the Bear read the words out as they passed them. The map they were using was in the Bear’s memory, in case of desperadoes. Yer my boy if they ask, he said. And we heard rumor of payin’ work in Kernville.

THE BEAR TALKED like he’d forgotten he was Benny’s father, something Benny knew because his ma had told him, then tried to say no, not really, then said so again one night when she was drinking. Having no kin — or at least none he claimed — the Bear lived out in the scrub with the other loners. This was an old rule from right after, meant to protect the women, but it’d never worked — new bastards were born every week. Nobody was much moved to change anything, however, because everything had changed too much already. The first time Benny saw the Bear, both were in line for a free lunch some preacher was serving. The Bear gave Benny a butane lighter for his ma and half a hacksaw blade for himself. They never ever touched on the truth, understanding that it’s sometimes better to let things lie. As far as it went was Benny once mouthing Pop behind the Bear’s back and the Bear carrying Benny to the clinic after the boy broke his leg falling off a slag heap. He had to leave the room when the doc set the bone, the kid’s screams too much for him.

TOWARD NIGHT THEY quit the trail and stealth-camped wherever they found cover. Dinner was FEMA grub: protein bars and vitamin cookies. They never built fires — you didn’t want to announce yourself — but were warm just the same in their coats and bedrolls. Benny hadn’t slept out before, and the night sounds spooked him. Swallowing his fear, he said he wished they had some music. What do you know about music? the Bear asked. Benny said, One time a show come through, a man on a guitar, another on a pinano — piano, the Bear said — piano, Benny went on, drum, horn, every damn thing. I remember some of the songs. Sing one, the Bear said. Jesse James was a lad that killed many a man. He robbed the Danville train. And the dirty little coward that shot Mr. Howard laid poor Jesse in his grave. The Bear clapped softly when Benny finished. Later that night, snapping twigs and rustling brush woke them both. They clutched their knives and held their breath. The moon showed a doe and two fawns high-stepping across the clearing they were camped in. Well, I’ll be damned, the Bear whispered. Boo, you old ghosts, boo.

THE BEAR DID a little of everything to get by. Digging, hammering, hauling. What he mostly was, though, what he called himself, was a picker, one of those some said resourceful others said ghoulish men who ventured into blast zones to scrounge the ruins for trade goods. Pulling his cart behind him, he trekked deep into sectors that’ll still be toxic a hundred years from now and came out with tools, boots, scrap metal — whatever he could get at with his shovel and pry bar. His hauls set him up pretty well — he had a small trailer to bunk in, a bicycle, a nice woodstove — but he paid for every bit of it with lost sleep. Those who ain’t seen what I have can’t imagine, he said, thinking of the family of skeletons he found huddled together under a bedspread, the blasphemous farewell of a priest scrawled on the wall of a church, and the newborns at the hospital shrunk to totems of leather and bone and hair. He was burdened with the final moments of towns full of corpses, bore them like a curse of constant pain. For this reason his most closely guarded possession was a gun he’d unearthed on one of his forays and carried with him everywhere, hidden in the bottom of his ruck, a revolver so hot it set off Geigers if he wasn’t careful. Just one round rested in it, the bullet the Bear called his last meal, his ticket out when the dead babies and radioactive-dust storms finally broke his spirit.

THEY WATERED UP at a spring the next day, topped off their bottles and drank their fill. A clatter coming from the road flattened them in the dirt, then drew them up the embankment on their bellies to see what was what. A squad of soldiers, regular army, was passing by, twenty or so grunts and a couple wagons drawn by bony horses. A cuffed and hooded figure sat slumped in the bed of one of the wagons, head bobbing with every pothole. I’ma ask for some food, said Benny, who’d grown up begging off soldiers in town. The Bear, with a longer memory and a scar from a rifle butt on his forehead, held him back. Keep yer mind on what yer doin’, he growled. Benny scoffed at his wariness, pulled away, and scrambled out onto the pavement, where the grunts swung their guns his way and yelled for him to stop. Making no mention of the Bear, he told them the Kernville story and came away with a beef-stew MRE and a handful of Patriot hard candies, each wrapper printed with the picture and description of a wanted terrorist. The Bear wasn’t where he’d left him, nor down on the trail either. Benny couldn’t think of what to do but keep walking and hope to catch up to him. He didn’t get a hundred yards before someone charged out of the bushes and took him hard to the ground. You go against me again, and I’ll send you back to Bako, the Bear said. He wouldn’t eat any of the stew and told Benny the candy was for snitches.