“You know it’s thirty miles?”
“Yes, ma’am. That’s why I was thinking if I’m going to go, it better be soon. If I left in the next hour, I could be back by tomorrow night.”
“You also could be dead by tomorrow night, if you get caught out in another downpour.”
I scratched my neck. “Well. I’d keep a close watch on the sky and head for cover if it darkened up any.”
Ursula clenched the handle of her rake and thought for a bit, frowning to herself.
“I’m not your mother,” she said at last. “So I can’t forbid you to go. But I want you to text me regularly to keep me up to date on your progress. And when you get back, you’re going to come straight here and show Templeton you’re all right, so he won’t worry about you.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I wish I had a gun to give you.”
“Why?” I said, genuinely surprised.
“Because law will be stretched thin, and there’s a whole city of terrified people out there. Folks woke up today to a poisoned world, and some of them won’t see any reason to hold back on doing the awful things they’ve always dreamed of.” She thought some more and then lifted her eyebrows. “I have a big rusty machete you could take. I keep it around for hacking the brush.”
“No, ma’am,” I said. “If I got into a fight, I’d be just as likely to miss and whack it into my own knee as hit someone. You better hold on to it. I’ll keep to the main roads. I don’t think in the bright of day there’ll be much to worry about.”
I turned and went back into the garage. Templeton was all typed out and said he was ready to be a bat. I caught him around the waist and lifted him and hung him upside down from the bicycle rack. He dangled above the filthy stained mattress that was there to catch him if he slipped.
“Hey, kiddo,” I began.
“I heard it all,” he said. “I heard you talking.”
“I don’t want you to worry about me any. If it rains, I’ll get under cover. I’ll be fine. You stay in the house or the garage while I’m gone.”
“Mom wouldn’t let me out anyway.”
“No, and good for her. Your days of flying around as a bat are over. Come to think of it, I might have to drop in on the FAA while I’m in Denver and tell them what you’ve been up to. Let them know you’ve been flapping around at night without a license. See if they won’t clip your wings once and for all.”
“You better not,” he said.
“Try and stop me.”
He hissed like a snake and showed me his plastic fangs. I tousled his hair and told him I’d see him soon.
“Don’t worry about Yolanda and her mother,” he said to me solemnly. “If you don’t come back, my mom will figure out what to do with them. She’ll probably plant them in the garden.”
“Good. I hope she grows something nice out of them. Yolanda would probably enjoy the idea of coming back as a batch of tomatoes.”
“Mom doesn’t like to hug people,” Templeton said, still dangling upside down, his cape hanging almost to the floor. “Will you hug me?”
“You bet,” I said, and I did.
ALL I HAD TO DO was stroll across the street to get a sense for just how hard hiking down to Denver might be. The road was covered in a carpet of steely needles, a half inch deep. One came through the soft rubber sole of my sneaker and jabbed me in the arch of my right foot. I sat down on the curb to tug it out and yelped and jumped back up with three more nails sticking out of my stupid butt.
I climbed the exterior staircase to my crib on the second floor. Below me Andropov’s apartment was full of racket. He had a music player going, blaring operatic Russian music. Toward the rear of the building, there was a TV on, blasting just as loud. I could hear Hugh Grant saying witty things in a sly voice about as loud as God’s. Remember, the electric was out all over Boulder; all his equipment had to be running off batteries.
I had swept and mopped the entire apartment in preparation for Yolanda’s arrival. I had opened a bottle of sandalwood-and-sage oil, and the whole space had been kissed with the sweet fragrance of the high country.
We had only four rooms. The living room flowed into a small kitchen. There were a bedroom and a small office in the rear. The floor was old pine, the long-ago varnish yellowing to a shade of amber. We had hardly any furniture, aside from the bed and a cheap futon below a poster of Eric Church. It didn’t look like much. But we had cuddled on that futon, had watched TV there, and sometimes kissed and held each other. Yolanda had kept her favorite pillow in my apartment, and when I looked in the bedroom, I could see it, long and flat in a faded purple pillowcase, neatly lined up at the top of the bed. At the sight of it, just about all the energy for expeditioning went right out of me, and I started feeling heartbroke all over again.
I lay down for a while and had a good snuggle with her pillow squeezed against me. I could smell her on it. When I closed my eyes, I could almost make myself believe she was there in bed with me, that we had only just taken a pause in one of the long, sleepy conversations we often had first thing in the morning. We could make a happy argument out of just about anything: which of us looked better in a cowboy hat, if it was too late for us to learn to be ninjas, if horses had souls.
But I couldn’t make my lonesome feelbad last. It was too goddamn noisy downstairs. I didn’t know how they could do it—listen to a Russian aria in one room and Hugh Grant in another, all of it turned up to a medium-size roar. They had to be fighting, I thought, trying to drive each other mad. It wouldn’t be the first time the downstairs was full of furious clatter: crashing pans, slamming doors.
I leapt out of bed and stomped on the floor to tell them to shut up, and right away one of them replied by kicking the wall. He kicked so long and so hard it shook the whole house. I stomped even more furiously, to let him know I wasn’t scared of him, and Andropov kicked back harder still, and suddenly I realized I was getting pulled into their childish game and quit.
I threw some water bottles into a backpack, some cheese and bread, my phone charger in case I found a place to use it, a multitool, and some other junk I thought I might want. I kicked off my Top-Siders and yanked on my cowboy boots, black with silver stitching and steel toes. When I went out, I left the place unlocked behind me. Didn’t see the point. The rain had smashed in the windows on the exterior landing. The cops were no doubt too busy to worry about a little looting here and there. If someone came along and wanted my stuff, they could have it.
The noise from Andropov’s shook my fillings and buzzed in my head and was more than any reasonable person ought to have to stand. On a last irritable impulse, I turned on my heel and clomped onto the porch and hammered on the door, meaning to ask him what was the big idea. But no one answered, even though I stood there pounding until my fist was sore. It was loud, but it wasn’t that loud. I was sure they could hear me.
It nettled me, the both of them in there ignoring me. I went to one window, then the other, but both were boarded over on the inside. The glass wasn’t even broken, not there in the shelter of the front porch.
I went back down the front steps and circled to the eastern face of the house. The nails had come in at a slant from the west, so the windows were intact on that side of the building as well. Andropov had nailed planks across the inside of the glass here, too. The first had been completely blocked up, but when I reached the second, there was an uneven space, about an inch wide, between two planks. When I stood on my tiptoes, I could just peer through the gap.
I saw a dark hallway and an open door looking into a dingy bathroom. Plastic tubing curled up out of the tub and into the sink. A glass beaker sat on the toilet, next to a gallon jug of some kind of fluid, what might’ve been water but which seemed more likely to be ammonia or some other clear chemical.
I rose a little higher on my toes, trying to see what was on the floor of the bathroom. My forehead bumped the glass. An instant later Andropov’s eyes appeared in the crack, bulging and bloodshot and w
ild with fury or terror. The thickets of his eyebrows were black and overgrown. I could see the pores in his bulging nose. He belted something out in raging, sputtering Russian, and pulled a black curtain over the glass.
I WAS TRAMPING ACROSS THE campus of the University of Colorado Boulder when I saw a guy in a tree, forty feet off the ground: a man in a dark Windbreaker and a red tie, tilted almost upside down, with a branch going through his stomach. I walked right under him. He was reaching out with both arms, and his eyes were open wide, like he was about to ask for help getting down. I couldn’t figure out for the life of me how he’d gotten up there.
It was a cool, shady morning under the big, leafy oaks on the Norlin Quad, but you couldn’t fool yourself it was just any Sunday morning. A girl ran by me in a blood-soaked Josh Ritter T-shirt, sobbing her guts out. Who knew where she was coming from or where she was going? What might be the cause of her grief. What source of comfort she sought and if she ever found it.
There were shiny nails of finest crystal on the paths, broken windows in all the dorms, and dead pigeons littering the grass. The air should’ve been perfumed with the smells of late summer: roasted grass and blue spruce. Instead, though, there was a stink of jet fuel.
I didn’t see the helicopter until I came down a gloomy alley between buildings and had a glimpse through a stone arch into the outdoor theater they have there for Shakespeare and the like. There was a TV news copter that had gone straight down into the flagstones. The cockpit was a bashed-in nest of steel and shattered glass and blood. The whole craft looked shot up, holes and dents and dings all over it. So that was where the guy in the tree had come from. He had tried to jump when he saw he was going down. Maybe he’d imagined that the oak would break his fall. It had.
I came out onto Broadway, which is four lanes wide and cuts a straight line through that part of Boulder. When I emerged streetside, I saw for the first time how bad everything really was. There were abandoned cars as far as you could see, windshields busted in, all of them beat up, pocked with hundreds of dents, shot through with holes. Cars had swerved off the road and up onto the curbs. I spotted a ragtop that was just rags and a pickup that had parked in the lobby of a real-estate office, driving right through the plate-glass window to escape the storm. Someone else had run their Lincoln Continental into a bus stop, plowed it right into the long Plexiglas booth where people had crowded together to take shelter from the rain. There was blood splashed up onto the Plexiglas, but the bodies at least had been cleared away.
Two blocks down the road, there was a stopped Greyhound riddled with holes. The door was cranked open, and a guy sat on the bottom step, feet in the road. Rangy Latin dude in a blue denim shirt buttoned at the throat but the rest flapped open to show his bare chest. He held a fist to his mouth as if to stifle a cough. I thought he was mewling to himself, but that was the cat.
A horrid, skinny hairless cat was in the street, one of those things that is all wrinkles and big, batlike ears. This thing was dragging itself around by its front legs, turning itself in a slow circle, trying to find a way to get more comfortable. It had a nail through its haunches and another in its throat.
The big guy, his face framed by long, greasy hanks of hair, was crying almost silently. Silently and bitterly. His nose had been broken more than once, and the corners of his eyes were wrinkled with scar tissue. He looked like he’d been in a hundred bar fights and lost ninety of them. From his dark hair and deep reddish hue—a color like polished teak—he had more than a little vaquero in him.
I slowed, crouched down by the cat in the road. It gave me a bewildered, helpless stare with very green eyes. I am no fan of the hairless breed of felines, but you couldn’t help but feel dreadful for the sad thing.
“Poor little guy,” I said.
“S’my cat,” the big man told me.
“Oh, Lord. I am so sorry. What’s his name?”
“Roswell,” he choked out. “I was lookin’ for him all mornin’. Callin’ for him. He was under the bus. I half wish I hadn’t found him at all.”
“You don’t mean that,” I said. “You’ve been blessed with a chance to say good-bye. That’s more than most got with those they love. He is glad to see you, no matter how much pain he might be in.”
He glared. “You got a twisted fuckin’ idea of what’s a blessing.”
“I’m not a fan of that kind of language,” I said, “but I’ll give you a pass since you’re upset. What’s your name?”
“Marc DeSpot.”
“That isn’t a real name.”
“It’s my fightin’ name,” he said, and opened his shirt slightly to show the Gothic black X inked across his pectorals and abdomen, the crux right over his breastbone. “I am a professional MMA fighter. Right now I’m five and seven, but I been undefeated in my last four scraps. Who are you?”
“I’m Honeysuckle Speck.”
“Kind of name is that?”
“That’d be my fightin’ name.”
He stared at me in bewilderment for a moment over the fist he still held close to his mouth. Then misery overtook him, and his shoulders heaved with another sob, blowing snot and spit in the process. When movie stars grieve in the tragic third act of a love story, they always make mourning look a lot more beautiful than it really is.
Roswell peered from Marc to me and mewled in a weak, shivery voice. He was trembling. I stroked one hand along his smooth, downy flank. You never saw a creature asking for relief any more clearly.
“I don’t know what to do for him,” Marc said.
“There is only one thing left you can do for him.”
“I can’t!” he said, and another sob burst out of him. “Ain’t no way. We have been friends for ten years.”
“Ten years is a good life for a cat.”
“He has been with me from Tucumcari to Spokane. I had him when I didn’t have nothing else except the shirt on my back. I just can’t do that.”
“No. Of course you can’t,” I said. “Go on and pet him. He’s looking for comfort.”
He reached out one big, gnarly hand and rubbed at Roswell’s head, as tenderly as a man stroking the face of a newborn. Roswell shut his eyes and pressed his skull up into Marc’s palm and gave a soft, rattling purr. He was stretched out in a sticky puddle of blood, but he had the bright sun on his flank and his companion’s hand on his brow.
“Oh, Roswell,” he said. “A man never had a better pal.”
He drew his hand back to his mouth, heaving with fresh tears, and shut his eyes. I supposed that was as good a time as any, so I reached out and took Roswell’s head in one hand and his neck in the other and gave a good, firm twist, same as I would’ve done with a chicken on my father’s old farm.
Marc DeSpot’s eyes flew open. He stiffened, went rigid with shock.
“What’d you do?” he asked, like he didn’t know.
“It’s over,” I said. “He was suffering.”
“No!” he shouted, but I didn’t think he was shouting at me or shouting about what I’d done. He was shouting at God for taking away his cat. He was shouting at his own unhappy heart. “Aw, shit! Aw, shit, Roswell.”
He slid off the bottom step of the bus and onto his knees. Roswell was curled up on his side in a red splash of blood. Marc DeSpot took his limp body in both hands, pulling him close, lifting him up, hugging him.
I touched DeSpot’s arm, and he knocked my hand aside with his elbow.
“Get the fuck away from me!” he cried. “I didn’t ask you to do that! You didn’t have any right!”
“I’m sorry. But it was for the best. That cat was in agony.”
“So who asked you? Did I ask you?”
“There was nothing that could’ve saved Roswell.”
“You don’t get moving, you filthy lez,” he said, “there’s nothing gonna be able to save you.”
I didn’t pay any mind to that. He was hurting. The whole world was.
I dug in my bag and offered Marc DeSpot a bottle of wate
r. He didn’t look at it and he didn’t look at me, so I put it down in the road next to his hip. Close up I could see he was younger than I’d thought at first. He might’ve been no older than me. I felt sympathy for him, in spite of his nasty mouth and childish ways. I was all alone in the world, too.
I got up and went on, but when I’d covered another three blocks, I happened to glance back and discovered that Marc DeSpot was following me. He staggered like a drunk, about a hundred feet behind, and when I looked at him, he quickly turned away and pretended to be staring through a smashed plate-glass window into the darkened interior of a secondhand-electronics store. He had produced a white straw cowboy hat from somewhere, and with that on his head and a red bandanna around his throat he looked more like a youthful vaquero than ever.
The sight of him trailing along behind me made me ill at ease. In our brief encounter, he had struck me as the kind of person who is a victim of his own emotions, impulsive and immature. It occurred to me now that he might have made up his mind I was a sadistic breaker of hearts and slayer of felines and that he was cruising to express his displeasure with a closed fist. Or maybe he was looking to improve his fighting record to six wins by hauling off and belting a lonely lesbian with an unfortunate resemblance to Squiggy.
I went on, though, and in another block was able to take a deep breath. If he’d been hoping to jump me, he’d lost his chance. As Broadway descended south into Lower Chautauqua, it became steadily more crowded. I heard a noisy rumble, and an enormous dump truck with chains on its tires turned onto the street in front of me. Shiny nails of crystal imploded under its wheels. A big dude in a filthy yellow jumpsuit and elbow-length rubber gloves rode on the back end. Behind him the flatbed was stacked three deep with corpses.
The truck wove around abandoned cars, and when there wasn’t room to go around, it went through, bashing wrecks out of its way. It joined a slow-moving caravan of other dump trucks. They were lined up to turn into a football field behind the high school.