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by Patricia Anthony
The ubiquitous sound comes to him through his open study window. He hears it in his sleep. It is the sound of nightmare, not the heart-racing, cold sweat kind, but the grueling sort, the sort from which you fear you'll never awaken. Chuck. The gritting of the metal trowel against the sand makes his teeth ache, and he wants to run to the window and scream to her to stop. But he is a quiet man who has always been generous to the people around him, so he goes back to his papers. In a little while a young lieutenant enters the room. "Governor," the lieutenant says with a snappy salute that makes the governor think the soldier has not yet understood their predicament. "Mrs. Leeds is out in the garden, and it's raining." Now the governor is sure the boy's comprehension is limited. Leeds nods as he scans the daily list of the dead. "It's against your direct orders, sir. We've told her to stop, but she won't listen." "I see," the governor says. At last he gets up, but only because it appears that the boy expects him to. His back is stiff from sitting. "I'll take care of it." He walks out to the porch where the young lieutenant hands him an umbrella. In the yard an embarrassed, officious sergeant with a Geiger counter stands over the bent form of the governor's wife, a colorful, striped golf umbrella held over the both of them. The umbrella is brighter than the day. The dark sheets of rain smell of oil. The low clouds are greasy. Holding his own umbrella up, the governor splashes across to where the sergeant is standing and can hear the slow, unsteady popcorn-maker excitement of the boxy counter. "I'll take over now, sergeant. Thank you." "Thank you, sir," the soldier says gratefully. They exchange umbrellas and the sergeant trots back to the house. Chuck. At his feet his wife digs diligently with the trowel. The yard is a dense pattern of holes, as if squirrels have been at war with tiny mortars. "It's raining, Mary," he says. "Come on into the house." Chuck. She does not look up. He has not expected her to. Across the yard the old holes she has so painfully dug are dissolving in the rain. Under the cover of the umbrella, she digs more, Penelope at her loom. "Come on," he says. He takes her arm. With his help, she rises, but she won't trust him enough to hand him the trowel. He doesn't insist. Her blank face gives no hint of emotion. Only her scarred hands do. No one but the governor knows that they speak of guilt, not grief. She never really loved the children. There were always too many quarrels, too many complaints. An entire card catalogue of "Can't yous." GODDAMN, CAN'T YOU TURN THAT MUSIC OFF? CAN'T YOU CLEAN UP AFTER YOURSELF? WOULD IT KILL YOU TO WASH A DISH? And then the "I can'ts": "I can't stand it much longer. I can't put up with them. Let's just take a few days to ourselves and go up to the mountain cabin." She jerks his arm as if she wants to go back and dig some more. Her protest comes six months too late. He pulls her, stumbling, along. "I left them behind, and they were my responsibility, too," he whispers. She doesn't speak, but her quick look says, Not like my responsibility. I was their goddamned mother. Your part was easy. As she turns away he wonders if cats who eat their young mourn for their kittens. No one should outlive her children. They walk up the porch steps and pass the young lieutenant. Leeds can see the bewilderment in the boy's face. He, in his limited understanding, thinks Mary digs because she has gone insane, but the governor knows the truth. Given time, given a trowel, he would dig, too. The governor leads his wife to the bathroom and draws a bath. He undresses her and puts her in the tub. They have a small tug-of-war with the trowel, and finally he has to put it within her reach so she won't be frantic. She sits passive as a child and lets him bathe her. He idly notices the loose skin on her arms, her thighs, the blue veins in her breasts. He cleans her as he might clean a kitchen, taking pains with the most important places: the exposed hands, the face, the hair. When he is finished he dresses her in a robe. She takes up the trowel again. When he walks her out of the room, he sees that Colonel Glick is waiting. Glick has tracked mud on the clean hardwood floor. Leeds hates him for that. Glick's face is a slick, mahogany-colored, human-shaped mask. Only the eyes move. He salutes wearily the way most of the guardsmen do. "Go to your room, Mary," Leeds says, and watches as his wife obeys him. "Rain's surprisingly clean, sir," Glick tells him as Mary disappears down the hall. "Not enough rads to concern our-selves with." "Ah," says Leeds. "At least not for another twenty years of exposure, you mean." The colonel's eyes shift behind the dark lids. "Yes, sir. Of course, sir. I've been asked to inform you that a triage crisis has arisen. There are too many Stage 2 survivors for the med-ication we have, so that even some of our Stage 3s are dying. Any orders on this, sir?" "Tell the doctors to start treating by age, youngest first. Any Stage 2 over forty should be considered a Stage 1, understood?" "Understood, sir." "Just let them die." Leeds studies the colonel carefully, but there is no indication of criticism in Glick's face. "Any news from outside, Colonel?" "Sir?" "Maybe something about how the enemy is doing?" The colonel blinks rapidly. He looks like a robot whose program has just gone awry. "Enemy, sir?" Glick seems as if he's wrestling with a problem, an odd problem for a soldier. That is because, unlike his young lieutenant, Glick is perceptive. He knows he is the enemy. All the survivors are. "The Russians," Leeds explains patiently. The colonel's composure splinters for an instant so that, very briefly, Leeds can see the man behind it. "We have no information that it was the Russians. A lot of countries had nuclear arsenals, sir." "Well, I think it was the Russians. And I think they're afraid to invade. They should be. Nuclear war doesn't count on invasion. You never spoil your nest, Colonel Glick." They walk out the door together. Leeds passes the muddy footprints Glick has left. He is not so annoyed with the colonel now that he knows the mud is simply mud and not slow death. On the porch they pause. Across the lawn Leeds can see the small, empty graves his wife has dug. Mary, wanting so badly to bury her dead. "Will anyone come to help us, Colonel?" "It's doubtful, sir. Everyone has problems, and we're stuck with blasts on three sides. I have to assume they've given us up for lost, sir." In fact they are lost, Leeds thinks. Perhaps the graves his wife digs are not graves after the fact, but preparatory. "What were you before?" Leeds asks. The colonel turns to him, a smooth dimple of puzzlement between the eyebrows on the mask. "Sir?" "Part-time warrior and full-time what?" Leeds tags the colonel as a high-school biology teacher, an engineer, perhaps. Some job where his hands never got dirty. "Computer sales rep, sir." Leeds's lips turn up at one side and, for the first time in six months, he nearly laughs. But the humor isn't quite strong enough, and the slack muscles of his face are too heavy. "Sales," he says. "Yes, sir. Government contract stuff was a lot of it, sir. Component parts and things." Leeds nods. "Computers. The Russians should have had our computers. Maybe more of their rockets would have hit the targets. Wasteful that they fused two ten-mile patches of desert. A great coyote kill, I would imagine." "Yes, sir. If you insist on Russians, sir. But then Phoenix was hit." "Yes," Leeds says quietly. How could he forget Phoenix? "Whichever country struck us, that must have been an intended target, sir." "None of it makes any sense, does it, Colonel? I suppose we'll know who struck us and why when everything is back to normal." Back to normal. Glick looks at him so strangely that Leeds picks up on his mistake. Finally the colonel shrugs. "I suppose the worst part is not knowing. It was like walking to work, minding your own business, and suddenly being mugged from behind." Leeds watches as the colonel unfurls his umbrella and walks out into the gray, oily rain. But Glick has made a mistake, too. The worst part isn't the not knowing. No, the worst part is living through it. When the colonel drives away, Leeds goes back to his office. In emergencies, even long-term ones, there is always paperwork. With the overcast skies, the nights come faster now. In an hour he lights a candle and reads until he falls asleep in his leather chair, his head nodding to his chest. The ring of the phone awakens him. The candle has burnt down. He gropes out in the darkness of the desk and, on the second ring, finds the receiver. "Hello." He's greeted by an electronic howl and a burst of static, the call sign of the jury-rigged local service. "Hello," he says again. On the other side of the tempest of noise he hears a faint voice. . . . nor Leeds." "This is the governor. There is a squeal which makes him jerk his ear away from the receiver, but he has caught the worst of it. His ear canal hurts. "....wife, sir. Could you go check?" He doesn't need to hear the rest of the message. He understands all too well. Putting the phone down, he lights a candle and walks down the hall to his wife's room. The robe is on the bed, and the bed is empty. When he comes back he finds that the static is gone, disappeared as stealthily as his wife, and the phone connection is clear. "No. She's not here. Do you have her down there?" "Yes, sir. We think this is her. Sorry to disturb you, sir, but she just wouldn't answer our questions. She was very determined to get through the roadblock, governor." It would be so easy, he thinks, for him to give the order to let her go. No muss, no fuss, no body. She could walk down the highway into the grey limbo where the children wait. But Leeds is experienced enough to know that recriminations breed in uncertainty. Responsibility ends with a corpse. "Bring her back, please," he says to the boy with the unfamiliar voice. He has become used to giving orders to people he doesn't know; and he has become used to trusting them utterly. "Right away, sir," the boy says. The line goes dead. The one thing Leeds will never get used to is that emptiness. He holds the receiver cradled against his ear for a moment as if he can wish back into existence the old AT&T hum. When the driver arrives with Mary, Leeds takes her in and gives her another bath. When she is asleep, he pries the trowel from her hand and places it on the night table where she can find it in the morning. Then he goes to Jerry's room to sleep. Each night is a different vigil in each of the three rooms. The rooms have been left the same as when they vacationed there as a family. Jerry's room is quintessentially him: rock posters and a star map. Even though the night is cold, the governor stretches out on top of the cheap plaid comforter. He doesn't want to disturb anything, in case the boy, or the ghost of the boy, should come home. He doesn't expect to sleep, but he does. He dreams that he is making mud castles at the beach. And he dreams that Mary is smashing them. The chuck-chuck-chuck nudges him awake. He opens his eyes to stare at the pine ceiling. For a long time he lies there as if he were ten years old again on a school day, pretending to his mother that he is asleep. When his body becomes sore and stiff from the mattress, he gets up, showers, and goes out to his wife. She has already dug four square yards of shallow holes and her hands are bleeding. "Breakfast, Mary," he says. He leads her into the house and scrubs her hands and face. They eat fried Spam with slices of canned pineapple. Leeds thinks of toast. He remembers the smell of the hot bread, the greasy, salty taste of the butter. He remembers the crispness in his mouth. The Spam feels like mush. The pineapple feels like nothing. While they are eating, Colonel Glick knocks at the kitchen door. Leeds tells him to come in. "Some breakfast, colonel?" "Thank you, sir, no. A problem has come up." "What problem?" Glick stands just inside the door, in perspective a small man, like a man at the wrong end of a telescope. "Some people have broken into the contaminated food dump, sir." "Wasn't it guarded?" "They beat the guards. They were hungry." Leeds looks down at his plate. He wonders if Glick has eaten breakfast, or if he is simply refusing to eat. "How contaminated was the food, Colonel?" "Very, sir." The governor picks up his empty plate and takes it to the sink. There was not that much Spam, not that much pineapple. Mary is still playing with her food. Her hands are crimped from holding the trowel, and she moves them as if they hurt her. "Shoot them, Colonel." The colonel blinks. His eyes are the only part of him that has moved. "Sir?" "Firing squad, Colonel. It will teach a lesson to the others and be a blessing for the condemned. You've seen enough slow death, I think." "Yes, sir," Glick says doubtfully. "Well, I have, too." The colonel salutes and opens the door. "Colonel Glick?" He turns. "Yes?" "Will you ask Flagstaff to send us something?" "Yes," he says. "I already have." "What did they say?" "That they had their own problems." "Did you tell them we have people starving? Can't you beg them, Colonel?" There was the can't again, Leeds thinks. CAN'T YOU DO ANYTHING RIGHT? The colonel looks away. "I have, sir. Believe me." Leeds takes a deep breath. The colonel swivels on his heel and marches out into the grey day. When breakfast is over, Mary goes back to the garden. Leeds cleans the kitchen and returns to his office. At noon he goes out to get Mary for lunch and finds that Glick has been waiting for him. "Completed, sir," he says in a soft voice, as if he is afraid that God might hear. There is a strange tension in his motionless face. "How many?" Leeds asks. "Forty-two." The governor closes his eyes. Chuck. Chuck. Some sounds humans get used to, repetitive sounds, some single-note tones. Hear a sound enough and it becomes, in effect, silence. But the noise that the trowel makes in the earth is one Leeds knows he will always notice. "See that the bodies are buried." "Not burned, sir?" "No," he says harshly. Enough have gone that way. ''Not . . ." He stops cold, his mouth still ajar. Behind the colonel's back a spot in the western sky is catching flame. The glow brightens until Leeds can no longer look straight at it. The colonel, his face creased in bewilderment, slowly turns. The soldiers on the road freeze in place. "The sun," Glick says with soft wonder. Only the sun. It has pierced the clouds and laid a brassy benediction on the far mountains. Leeds's body unkinks. His knees go soft. In a moment he sits down on the steps. Next to him Glick stand transfixed. The soldiers at their jeep burst into cheers. And in the yard, the sunlight turning her hair aflame, the burning woman still digs. "Glick." The colonel hastily wipes tears from his eyes. "I've been going over the supplies." The sun has shattered Glick's mask and Leeds can read the colonel's face easily now. There is awe there, but over that are annoyance and incomprehension. He looks like a man who, upon finding the stone rolled away and Jesus's grave empty, has been asked about the time. "If we stay here without airdrops, we'll all die eventually. I want you to get the wounded into the trucks. The uninjured can walk. I want you to take the people off the mountain Take them north to Flagstaff. They'll have to share once the problem's in their laps. I know they're getting supplies from Utah." "Sir?" "Get it together now, Colonel. I want you to leave in two days. No later. It'll be a long haul, but there's water on the way. And get me a jeep. You don't need to put much gas in it. A quarter-tank will do. Mary and I will be going back to Phoenix." Glick sits down heavily on the steps as if an invisible stranger has knocked him off his feet. He stares out where Mary still digs, her back to the glory of the light. Above the governor's head the clouds are breaking up and scudding east, leaving the sky the deep, clear, unbelievable color of blue enamel. Glick is still staring hard at Mary. He looks frightened. "It would be illegal for me to evacuate, sir. You're the governor." Leeds doesn't quite manage a laugh, but he gets out a dry chuckle. The colonel turns his head sharply toward him, a look of hurt on his face. The governor lays a hand on the colonel's arm. He has never before touched him. Leeds remembers being at a governors' conference a long, long time ago, and he remembers what the governor of Arkansas told him about military coups. Never happen in the States, the squat governor had said. First time they want appropriations, they're going to want to go to Congress, and the coup will be over. American military officers, Leeds knows, need civilian demands. "This is an order, Colonel. Get the people to Flagstaff and surrender to the mayor there." Glick gets to his feet without saluting and wanders away, his hands in his pockets. The next morning there is a jeep waiting in front of the cabin. Glick has loaded it with supplies. "I gave you a half-tank," the colonel says. "That will get you into the worst part of Phoenix and get you most of the way out, if you wish. There are clothes packed in plastic. If you want to leave, drive out of the area as far as the gas will take you, then ditch the jeep. You can walk the rest of the way." Leeds looks at the flashlight, the cartons of food, the water. Glick has given them too much. The supplies are an excess, so much so that he feels the peculiar guilt of the wealthy. He goes into the house without saying a word and wakes Mary up. He helps her dress. When she is dressed, she is frantic. The trowel is not on the nightstand. She pulls the blankets off and looks under the bed. He follows her as she darts from one room to another, hummingbird-quick. A small noise, a sort of whine, is coming from her throat. Leeds tries to stop her, but she flutters and spins out of his hands. "Mary," he says. "Mary." She's not listening. With a bang she is out of the door, sprinting past a startled Glick. In the sun-dried mud of the yard she finds the trowel. She snatches it up and holds it to her breast, curling her body around it. "Come on, Mary," Leeds says gently. She is breathing hard with fright. Her eyes are round and animal-blank. "Come on," he whispers. He takes her to the jeep. Glick holds out his hand. "Good luck, Governor." "Good luck," Leeds replies. There should be more to say. Glick closes the door for him and steps back. Leeds starts the engine and, at a sudden urge, puts his hand out to the colonel again. Instead of taking it, the colonel salutes. It is a good, snappy salute, managed the way salutes used to be. Ten miles down the mountain at the checkpoint, the soldiers wave them through. Forty miles after that they drive past the first of the abandoned, undamaged houses. The radiation buzzer goes off with a hysterical, electronic whoop, startling Leeds so much he nearly runs off the road. Quickly he reaches down and jerks the wire from the unit. He looks furtively at Mary. His wife is sitting against her door, the trowel still cradled in her arms. Her gaze is riveted forward, and he wonders how much of this she understands. "Twelve forty-three, Mary," he says. "They'd have been in school. That's where we'll check." Ten miles later they get into the first of the damage, the first of the stench. Hell, Leeds decides, must smell of burnt insulation. It's more difficult finding his way than he had imagined. Into the worst of it, he can't find the road at all. He realizes he has gone too far when he sees their bank building rising unaccountably from the rubble. In an hour or so, he believes, by the scattering of red bricks and the charred floor of what might have been a gymnasium, he has found Carolyn's middle school. From that landmark, he drives, in fits and starts, southwest. The east wing of the high school is in ruins, but, miraculously, the west wing still stands, its windows like mouths of splintered teeth. Nothing, not even birds, moves there. He shuts off the engine. It is very quiet. The sun catches the sparkles of mica in the dusty, dun stone. Except for the limitless blue of the sky, the world is the color of disaster. Carolyn never had a chance, but Jerry and Jimmy might have. Leeds is not sure where their classrooms were. He hopes they were in the east wing where it would have been quick, and not in the west where they might have lingered. When children are afraid, fathers should always be there. Grief hits like the incapacitating ache of angina. It is only much later that he realizes that Mary is weeping. The trowel has dropped, forgotten, to her lap. "Should we go see?" she asks. Leeds is surprised by her voice. It is almost, but not quite, the way he remembers it. He looks at the stark skeleton of the school and shudders. After all this time he doesn't have the courage to go further. He doesn't want to know what secrets lurk for him behind the quiet, blasted stone. "I don't think it would be a good idea." "Can we go home now?" Leeds watches the wind weave mists of dust across the ruins. ''No." He starts up the engine. Turning the jeep in a difficult three-corner turn, he heads back the way they came. "They're dead," she says. "Yes." He sees the tightness leave her as abruptly as his grief had come on. Her back unhinges. She slumps. The trowel drops to the floor and she doesn't pick it up. He stops for the night in one of the undamaged houses in a high-rad zone. They eat a silent dinner. Mary goes in and lies down on the strange bed. They'll die here, surrounded by someone else's things. When night falls he comes in and sits beside her, holding her hand in the night. She is sleeping soundly for the first time in months. As he keeps watch he notices a pale glow coating the sill. It is the returning moon. He pictures the silvered blanket it is casting over the graves of their children. He should be brave enough and able enough to find their bodies, but everyone has his limitations. He simply can't. Their entire lives have been structures of can't. JIMMY, CAN'T YOU CLEAN THAT ROOM? DADDY, CAN'T YOU LOAN ME...? CAN'T YOU BUY ME...? CAN'T YOU TAKE ME...? CAN'T YOU GIVE ME...? He had come at last to look, too late to be of use. Now he clutches his inconclusive answers. Of all the can'ts that ever were, he realizes, only one has meaning. Can't you forgive us? he asks.
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