Make beddah?
Fuck no. Make not give a shit.
He draped her sleeping bag across her. The burning car already guttering. The night windy but not cool.
I’m sorry about your spear.
The centaur shrugged. Jus piece a pipe, yeh? Make anudduh one t’morrah.
She squinted. I’m goddamned if I understand you.
Sokay. Affy res now.
Okay.
The centaur cleaned her bowie knife and oiled his sharpening stone with a small metal bottle of 3-in-One oil and sharpened the knife, pushing the angled edge across the stone in sure deft strokes, one just like the other. He wiped the blade again and cleaned the slurry from the stone and put the stone away. He held the blade up and turned it before him. A big knife even in his own big hand. He returned it to its sheath and set it beside the girl. She was breathing evenly. He watched her a moment and then turned away.
I’m looking for my mom and dad, she said.
Affy leef dem?
She did not reply and he began repacking his first aid kit.
I think they left me, she said. I think I mighta seen em die.
He shut the plastic tacklebox and returned it to his pannier and began sorting this night’s finds on his Shroud of Turin beach towel.
I need to find out. Alive or dead I need to know.
Know is beddah yeh.
Yeah.
Chay hep find. Now Affy res. Drink wadder too. Don be sick t’morrah.
Okey dokey.
He finished up his sorting and threw away half of it and threw out some of his previous kit to replace with the new and repacked the panniers and set them aside. He opened a bottled water and squeezed it into his gaping mouth.
I think you killed em, she said. Your people I mean. I think I saw it.
He threw the bloodsoaked handtowels and her shredded flannel and the waterbottle on the carfire. The fabrics flared pale blue and haloed and then began to smoke and pop as the waterbottle blackened and shriveled like some prehistoric insect carapace.
Only fair I guess. God knows I killed my share. Maybe someone’s kid saw me, huh.
He looked at her. She lay on her back with her eyes closed. The sheathed bowie alongside. The waning firelight upon her.
Mebbe, he said.
That Avy’s dead now though. I guess thass good but it don’t feel good.
She let out a long breath.
Don’t understand why you don’t wanna kill me like all the others do.
The centaur watched her breathing lengthen and he took up his watch and said no more. After he was sure she was asleep he opened up the two English phrasebooks she had given him and began to read them in the waning light.
Trumpeting awoke her and her first thought was that Chay had made another musical javelin and was trying it out. She sat up and then hissed between her teeth and put her hand to her chest and felt the bandages beneath her shirt. She remembered all of it at once and could not believe she was not dead.
She braced a hand behind her and glared back at the day and shaded her eyes. The morning well advanced. Chay stood in the back of the stakebed truck with forelegs on the cab and looked down at something off the freeway.
She pulled out the neck of her shirt and looked down at herself. She let go the collar and lay back and thought about throwing up. Hell with that. She stood and staggered backward and leaned against the car she’d slept beside. She breathed deep and waited for the pinprick blackness to subside. Let’s try that again. She straightened from the car and stood a moment and then took an experimental step. It didn’t kill her so she took another one. She retrieved her bowie from beside the sleeping bag and took off her belt and put it on again with the knife at her hip. She walked around the charred remains of the convertible. Chay was watching her now but did not move to help her. She nodded at him and he beckoned her on. When she got to the stakebed he pointed off at whatever he was looking at and she started to climb up but when she put a hand on the open tailgate and lifted her leg she felt her cuts grow tight in their bandages.
Loud wet sneezing sounds from the aqueduct now. Chay motioned for her to come around to the front instead and she did.
Three elephants stood bathing themselves in the aqueduct. Two adults and a child. They lifted trunks from the sludgy water and curled them back over their heads and sprayed themselves, dark wet patches spreading in the wrinkled gray. She stared at them in no more wonder than she had when she’d first seen a unicorn. And no less. Both equally belonging to the world she knew, neither more preposterous than the other.
I’ve heard of these, she whispered to Chay. Are they smart like us? Smot, he said. But not like us.
She wanted to push on but Chay would have none of it. He opened one of the phrasebooks and deftly turned the pages and pointed at lines.
That doesn’t look good.
You need to rest.
This needs to be mended.
Please lie down.
I would like to see some dresses.
She turned from the phrasebook to look up at him. You’d like to see some dresses?
He pointed at her shirt. Affy cloze. Burn big one lass night, dis one no good now. Yeh?
We’ll have to leave the freeway for that.
Sokay. Affy need res.
Would it do any good to argue?
They left the elephants to their bath.
It hurt to walk and he carried her. Across the southbound side, a short leap over the divider wall and across the northbound swath, then up what had been the northbound onramp from Los Feliz. They crossed the river above long concrete baffles in the sluggish water and she saw that half were clotted with accumulated trash and dead branches. A mushy shoreline of rotted leaves. Ahead another iteration of decaying cars, broken sidewalks, overgrowth, dead greenery, stripped billboards, angled telephone poles, drooping power lines, broken storefronts, sagging structures. Fire had not touched this area but earthquake had. Fallen awnings and collapsed apartment buildings in what had been mixed residential off the main thoroughfare. A tree growing in the middle of the weedy street, radiating rootcracks giving it the look of something that had punched through suddenly from below. Up ahead a shop door banged in the wind as it had for nearly thirty years. A gaunt coyote stepped out from a doorway and stopped in the road looking at them with its tongue dangling. As if it had run a long way to be here in time see them. They walked on past curbed cars rusting beside parking meters sprouting from the grass. Torn flaps curled from a billboard up ahead. coming soon discernible in the ragged strips remaining. Car wash, service station, fast food, repair shop. A garbage truck. Wind and crickets and that banging door.
They found an RV on a concrete pad alongside a house beneath a tubeframe plastic-sheeted structure that had collapsed on top of it. They pulled the covering partway back as if turning down bedding. The RV weathered but in good shape. The door was locked and Avy pried it open with a prybar and went inside. Must and cobwebs, a brittle dry feel. As if some untenanted sarcophagus beneath the desert floor had been exhumed and opened to admit air and light withheld for centuries. Kitchen, dual sink, two popouts, draw curtains, recliner, sofabed, queensize bed. Pots and pans and utensils. Maps. No food. She could not imagine this thing moving on the roads she traveled.
She leaned out the door. Chay stood in the grassy driveway studying the ruined neighborhood.
Okay, I’ll sleep here tonight. But we head downtown tomorrow. Got it?
Yeh.
She took the prybar with her and they scavenged the neighborhood but found nothing useful. A shrunken skeleton wrapped in thin stretched mottled leather sagging on an 80d nail driven into a front door. One side of the head bashed in down to the zygomatic arch. Eyesockets ever regarding the wooden shingle hanging from its knobbed neck, the faded word looter scribbled on it with a Sharpie. It did not look like the remains of a human being at all but like some kind of scarecrow patched together out of the hides of other animals and it hung there telling all th
e story it had left to tell.
They went back to the boulevard and started in on the stores. There were signs that people had lived in some but not in many years. More coyote and raccoon prints than shoeprints traced out in the dust and filled in again, outlines softened. Rat droppings everywhere and a few dark shops become pigeon roosts.
Chay took a ten-foot length of one-and-a-half-inch copper pipe from a plumbing supply. In a small dark room in back of a Mexican grocery Avy found a stand of lockers. Nothing in the unlocked ones and padlocks on the other two. She ran the prybar through the hasps and twisted and the lockers’ metal tabs gave way after being wrenched back and forth a few times. Sneakers far too large for her, desiccated antiperspirants, a large tee shirt and an extra large sweatshirt. She flapped the shirts and stirred up dust that made her sneeze. She rolled them up and put them in her backpack left on the register conveyor belt and picked up the backpack by a strap and left the store through its smashed-in window.
Chay could not fit inside the RV so Avy sat on the tailgate of a junkfilled Toyota shortbed beside the all but invisible curb near the house, dangling her sneakers and kicking at weeds as Chay removed his first aid kit from his pannier and opened it. She took a deep breath and started to take off her shirt but blood had seeped through the bandages and stuck to it and she stopped and poured water on it and rubbed the fabric and then slowly peeled the shirt off and threw it into the truck bed. She looked down at the gauze strips. Russet blotches like some kind of mold. She felt behind her and pulled at the curling ends of surgical tape banding her. The odd sensation as her skin lifted up and the tape peeled from her. Dried blood cemented the gauze to her skin. She poured more water and rubbed gently and paid no attention to the pale red flowing down her belly to darken the waistband of her shorts. Then she pulled at the taped gauze strips and they sloughed off redbellied and dripping like interrupted leeches. The sudden air cold against the puckered cuts. A wisp of cotton stuck to one crusting edge and made a faint ripping sound as she pulled it free.
Most of the wounds were superficial cuts that would scab and itch and heal. The left claw had found more purchase in her right breast and cut deep. The wound was wet and felt hot to the touch, and the skin on either side was plumcolored and swollen. Her father had taught her about germs but she didn’t understand it completely and wasn’t sure she believed what she did. But she knew to bathe the wound with alcohol and keep it clean and covered.
She looked up. Chay stood before her with the bottle of Stoli and an unused shop rag taken from a plastic bag.
Yeah, okay, she said.
He poured vodka on the folded rag and bent to her. She looked at his alien face and clutched the edge of the tailgate and did not make a sound throughout. He set the vodka bottle down and re-dressed her wounds as before. It occurred to her as he worked that she had inflicted just this kind of injury and much worse among his kind without restraint or remorse and yet here she bore such wounds and he treated them. She shook her head. The symmetry of it too perfect. You would be a fool not to learn what lesson this is trying to teach you.
She wiped herself dry and put on her new sweatshirt and bunched the sleeves and rolled the wrists. Thanks, she said. She slid off the tailgate and eyed the bottle as he repacked his kit.
Are you gonna make another spear tonight?
Spear yeh.
Not gonna hunt?
He retrieved a phrasebook and quickly guided her through several pages. Thank you, but I am not hungry now.
I will rest now.
Tomorrow will be another beautiful day.
She gave him back the phrasebook and grinned. Every bit as beautiful as today I’m sure, she said.
They did not light a fire but sat outside on the concrete pad before the RV. She had found a webbed folding chair and she sat spooning cold cheese tortellini from an MRE pouch and watching Chay organize tools on a sheet spread out before him, the nearer edge weighted down by the length of copper pipe. He picked up a hacksaw and cut two feet off the length at a sharp angle without a vice or any kind of clamp apart from his hand. He sawed a wedge into this angle cut to make two points one above the other like a gaping shark and then began to sharpen the whole of that end with rattail and barrel files.
Avy asked him the words for file and for copper and for saw. Then she asked if he would let her have the bottle of Stoli. He stopped filing and looked at her.
Affy need fuh wounds?
She tapped her forehead. For wounds. Definitely.
He turned the copper pipe before him and then set it down. He got out his bait box and handed her the Stoli pint. The bottle a third full. She thanked him and did not open it but set it aside.
Chay ran a long thumb along a tapering edge and took a file to the edge again.
Avy nodded at the forming spear. The spear’s alive, right? You breathe life into it.
Breeve yeh.
But you throw em away and make new ones like they’re waterbottles.
Yeh. Easy make.
But how can it be both? I mean, it’s either a piece of pipe and you throw it away like it’s nothing or it’s alive and you take care of it and hate to see it get broken.
He patted his flat chest. Liff from heeyah, yeh? Breeve inta here. He patted the shaping weapon. Chay liff. Chay liff in heeyah. Yeh?
You put part of your life into the spear. Oh—that’s why you play em, yeh? You’re breathing life into them.
Yeh. Affy unnastan good yeh. Be like Chay peepah soon.
Did you just make a joke?
Choke yeh.
She laughed and then put a hand to her chest. Then she picked up the Stoli bottle and opened it and drank. It tasted as bad as it had the first time. She drank again.
He filed and tested edges and filed more. He put his lipless mouth to the blunt end and blew and the copper weapon thrummed. He puffed and the weapon tooted. He brought his mouth away and looked at it and patted it. Then he laid it on the sheet and opened up his paint box. Identical to his first aid box but for the color. He withdrew several yellow-labeled pint cans. 1 Shot lettering enamel. Brushes. A small flatbladed screwdriver. A pair of wooden chopsticks in a finegrained wooden slide-lid case patterned with darker woods. A particolored rag. A fitness magazine with half the pages torn out.
He pried off a can lid with the screwdriver and began stirring with a chopstick. He tore a page from the magazine and folded it and poured a circle of white paint on it and dipped his brush there and picked up the spear with the point near his face.
Avy took one more swallow from the Stoli bottle and recapped it and set it down near Chay. Then she picked up her bowie and her food wrappers and went down the street and threw the wrappers in a car and stood looking at it. Drunk and unaccountably disquieted.
When she got back Chay held up the spear for her to see the eyes he’d painted just before the main point taper.
That so it can see where it’s going?
He nodded. See? he said. Affy unnastan.
Something woke her in the night. She lay listening and heard nothing that did not fit the night. She sat up and put a hand to her chest and felt the bandages and breathed a moment. The pale squares of shaded windows. The large soft bed. Sheets and a bedspread and pillows. Walls and roof. Comfortable and warm and so mistrusted by her.
She drew down the sheets and their rustle seemed loud. She eased out of bed and into her shoes. Socks already on. She picked up the bowie from where it leaned against the nightstand. The houselike vehicle creaking as she went to the door and opened it.
Chay was waiting there and he nodded at the moonlit road where wolves were nosing in the bed of the Toyota truck. They were northern gray wolves come down from the nearby hills to hunt and they had smelled her blood and vodka-soaked shirt from half a mile away. Their numbers flourished and their species no longer fragmented. These were quiet and curious and not at all tentative. They did not even look at Chay who stood armed ten yards from them. There were three of them and one picked up
the shirt in its mouth and shook it from side to side as if breaking the neck of a rat and let it go to drape the side of the truck bed and another wolf picked it up and stood there holding it while the other two sniffed at it. One of them backed away and lifted a leg and pissed against the truck.
Avy stepped out into the night. The wolves stilled instantly and their fur went flat and they stood looking at her from the small and junkfilled bed of the truck. She stepped away from the RV and lowered her bowie to the ground and stood up without it. Chay looked at her but said nothing nor made move to stop her.
The gaunt wolves bathed in moonlight watched the girl approach. The leader’s head lowered close to his paws. They smelled the blood on her. The same as on the shirt they’d found. She held her empty hands out wide and came on. The leader bristled but gave no other warning or motion.
She stopped in the sparse grass growing from the broken sidewalk. Not two yards from them wild and innate as they had been since before there were men to fear them or fires by which to tell stories of their prowess real or fanciful and their muzzles filled with the smell of her own blood. Yet not crazed. The night air cool and all around ensilvered by the moon’s pale monochrome above the overhanging trees.
One of them gave a small yip and the leader turned and jumped from the tailgate like some kind of flowing liquid. The soft sure tap of its pads. It stood looking at her with ears high and muzzle raised and nape fur smoothing. The other two watching from the truck. Then it moved toward her in a kind of crouch as if easing under some low barrier. Avy turned to meet the soft approach. Held out an outspread hand and made no other motion. The wolf went still and stayed crouched low but not as if to pounce. The muzzle coming up to sniff. And then it batted her palm wetly and turned away and the others flowed from the truck to join it and trot away surefooted along the withering neighborhood and into their replevined world.