Contents

Author’s Note

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Epilogue

More books by Nick Cole

Intermezzo

About the Author

By Nick Cole

Copyright

About the Publisher

Author’s Note or Where We Find Ourselves

Before we get started with this new edition of The Old Man and the Wasteland I want to take a moment and talk with you. And by talk I mean write a few words to you. So just pretend we’re talking over a cup of tea, a few buttery shortbread cookies even. Just before a long, rainy afternoon of reading.

The Old Man and the Wasteland is the story of an old man living in the years after a nuclear war has destroyed most of the world. That’s the setting. The Old Man is part of a village of salvagers, living in a shed off to the side of lonely Highway 8 as it cuts through the Sonoran Desert of the southwestern United States. That’s our main character. He’s a salvager. He salvages what was lost during and before the war and brings it back to his village so they might use it to survive the harshness of their environment. Lately, as the book begins, the Old Man hasn’t been doing so well. He hasn’t found much of anything. The other villagers don’t want to salvage with him anymore. In their minds he is “curst.” He’s also old. That’s our conflict. One final note about the Old Man: He has one prized possession: a book he found while salvaging the wrecks and abandoned places of the deep desert. That book is The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway.

I first read Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea at a very dark time in my life. Things weren’t going my way and I wasn’t helping matters. It was sort of my own personal apocalypse. Those who loved me could only stand by and watch as I spiraled downward. Then I broke my arm. As I recovered that summer I decided to read one book every day, and sometimes two, as I sat by the side of a community pool. And in between the adventure fiction and detective novels I read, Hemingway’s book The Old Man and the Sea surfaced in a used-book store I’d been haunting. I felt like his Old Man. I felt beat. I felt abandoned. I felt salao. And here’s what Ernest had to say in his book about the struggle that is life. Sometimes you’ve got to go a little farther out into the gulf waters. Sometimes you’ve even got to go out alone. Sometimes, even though you win, even though you are victorious against the big fish, well, sometimes victory can be snatched away. Even as you do everything you can to save your prize. Ernest’s Old Man fought the two sharks with his knife, then his paddle, and finally the broken end of the paddle. In the end, he too watched helplessly as the sharks tore away at his hard-won prize.

Now here’s the truth. We’ve all been there. Or we will be there. We will all face a moment in which we will lose, but we must still play our best game. I think what Ernest was saying in his book is that “winning” and “losing” are often just matters of perception. Maybe that came from his experiences of carrying the bleeding and dying “winners” off the battlefields of Italy in World War I. Maybe.

No, The Old Man and the Sea is a book about defeat. What Hemingway wanted to say is that no one can defeat you. They might destroy you. But they cannot defeat you. In Hemingway’s view, defeat was worse than loss. If you lost a hundred battles, a hundred contests, a hundred bullfights, you weren’t defeated. You just hadn’t won, yet. No, I think Hemingway thought you were only truly defeated when you gave up. Hemingway’s Old Man didn’t give up, even though the whole village wanted him to. Even though the fish dove deep and refused to come up over the course of a night and a day as the Old Man was pulled farther and farther out into the gulf waters. Even though the sharks eventually came and finally took away his prize between their razor sharp teeth. Hemingway’s Old Man was not defeated. He would fish again. And this time the Boy would be with him. The Old Man had proven that he was still able to catch the Big Fish.

After I wrote this book I began to get messages and emails through my website at nickcolebooks.com and on Twitter @nickcolebooks. People told me their stories. There were elderly people who’d read The Old Man and the Wasteland and told me they felt just like the Old Man. They knew they were old, but they still felt they had something to contribute—like they had one last adventure in them. There were families who read the book together. One chapter at night. Together and reading. Making memories that might last forever. There was one guy who finished the book in the bus on his way home from work. He rushed up to his apartment to tell his wife about it as she was preparing dinner. As he told her about the ending, he began to cry. And there were the soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq who probably felt just like the Old Man: all alone in the desert. And there were the people who were having another tough year. And …

Life is tough. Despite our best efforts. Life is tough. But sometimes you’ve got to go a little farther out into the gulf. Sometimes you need some of that real courage, the kind Harrison Ford’s character talks about in The Mosquito Coast: “Three-A.M. courage.” And you might get beaten again today, or maybe, just maybe, you might get a chance. You might hook the big fish. You might just win one. Whatever happens in these tough times, winning and losing isn’t so important. Just don’t give up. Christ told his disciples to keep asking, keep seeking, keep knocking.

And so it’s three A.M.

Our Old Man has been turning, tossing. Trying to figure out a way to beat the day that will come with the rising sun. A way to take back something from “Before” to be used in the “Now” that is a burnt up and ash-covered world.

The only book he’s read for the last forty years is about another Old Man who was eighty-six days unlucky, and then in the dark of morning that other Old Man went farther out into the gulf waters in hopes that today might be the day he caught the big fish.

Our Old Man rolls over and hears the rusty springs in his bed. He is tired of sleep. He is tired of losing. He is tired of being “curst.” And so he puts his feet onto the dirt floor and considers going farther out into the Wasteland today.

I hope you enjoy what follows.

Nick Cole

October 2012

Chapter One

It was dark when he stepped outside into the cool air. Overhead the last crystals of night faded into a soft blue blanket that would precede the dawn. Through the thick pads of his calloused feet he could feel the rocky, cracked, cold earth. He would wear his huaraches after he left and was away from the sleeping village.

He had not slept for much of the night. Had not been sleeping for longer than he could remember. Had not slept as he did when he was young. The bones within ached, but he was old and that was to be expected.

He began to work long bony fingers into the area above his chest. The area that had made him feel old since he first felt the soreness that was there. The area where his satchel would push down as he walked.

He thought about tea, but the smoke from the mesquite would betray him as would the clatter of his old blue percolator and decided against it.

He stepped back inside the shed, looked around once, taking in the cot, patched and sagging, the desk and the stove. He went to the desk and considered its drawers. There was nothing there that should go in his satchel. He would need only his tools. His crowbar, his worn rawhide gloves, his rope, the can of pitch, the tin of grease and his pliers. Not the book.

But if I die. If I go too far or fall into a hole. If my leg is broken then I might want the book.

He dismissed those thoughts.

If you die then you can’t read. If you are dying then you should try to live. And if it is too much, that is what the gun is for. Besides, you’ve read the book already. Many times in fact.

He put the book back in its place.

He went to the shelf and opened the cigar box that contained the pistol. He loved the box more than the gun inside. The picture of the sea, the city and the waving palms on the front reminded him of places in the book. Inside the box, the gun, dull and waiting along with five loose shells, an evil number, rattled as his stiff fingers chased them across the bottom.

Moving quickly now he took the old blue percolator and rolled it into the thin blanket that lay on the cot. He stuffed them both inside the worn satchel, reminding him of the book’s description of the furled sail. ‘Patched with flour sacks… it looked the flag of permanent defeat.’ He shouldered the bag quickly and chased the line away telling himself he was thinking too much of the book and not the things he should be. He looked around the shed once more.

Come back with something. And if not, then goodbye.

He passed silently along the trail that led through the village. To the west, the field of broken glass began to glitter like fallen stars in the hard-packed red dirt as it always did in this time before the sun.

At the pantry he took cooked beans, tortillas, and a little bit of rice from the night before. The village would not miss these things. Still they would be angry with him. Angry he had gone. Even though they wished he would because he was unlucky.

Salao. In the book unlucky is Salao. The worst kind.

The villagers say you are ‘curst’.

He filled his water bottle from the spring, drank a bit and filled it again. The water was cold and tasted of iron. He drank again and filled it once more. Soon the day would be very hot.

At the top of the small rise east of the village he looked back.

Forty years maybe. If my count has been right.

It was an old processing plant by the side of the highway east of what was once Yuma. It was rusting in the desert before the bombs fell, now it was the market and pantry of the village. Its outlying sheds the houses of the villagers, his friends and family. He tried to see if smoke was rising yet from his son’s house. But his daughter-in-law would be tired from the new baby.

So maybe she is still sleeping.

If his granddaughter came running out, seeing him at the top of the rise against the dawn, he would have to send her back. He was going too deep into the wasteland today.

Too dangerous for her.

Even though she knows every trick of salvage?

I might need her. What if I find something big?

‘I may not be as strong as I think, but I know many tricks and I have resolution.’

My friend in the book would say that, yes.

He would send her back. It was too dangerous. He adjusted the strap wider on his shoulder to protect the area above his heart where the satchel always bit, then turned and walked down the slope away from the village and into the wasteland.

Chapter Two

He sang bits of a song he knew from before. Years hid most of the lyrics and now he wanted to remember when he first heard the song. As if the memory would bring back the lost words he’d skipped over.

Time keeps its secrets. Not like this desert. Not like the wasteland.

In the rising sun, his muscles began to loosen as his stride began to lengthen, and soon the ache was gone from his bones. His course was set between two peaks none of the village had ever bothered to name after the cataclysm. Maybe once someone had a name for them. Probably on charts and rail survey maps of the area once known as the Sonoran Desert. But such things had since crumbled or burned up.

And what are names? He once had a name. Now the villagers simply called him The Old Man. It seemed appropriate. Often he responded.

At noon he stopped for the cool water in the bottle, kept beneath the blanket in his satchel. Still mumbling the words of the song amongst the silent broken rocks, he drank slowly. He had reached the saddle between the two low hills.

Where had he first heard the song? He wondered.

Below, the bowl of the wasteland lay open and shimmering. On the far horizon, jagged peaks, beyond those the bones of cities.

For seventy-eight days The Old Man had gone west with the other salvagers, heading out at dawn with hot tea con leche and sweet fry bread. Walking and pulling their sleds and pallets. In teams and sometimes alone. For seventy-eight days The Old Man had gone out and brought back nothing.

My friend in the book went eighty-six days. Then he caught the big fish. So I have a few days to go. I am only seventy-eight days unlucky. Not eighty-six. That would be worse.

Every canyon silent, every shed searched, every wreck empty. It was just bad luck the others said. It would turn. But in the days that followed he found himself alone for most of the day. If he went down a road, keeping sight of the other teams, they would soon be lost from view. At noon he would eat alone in the shade of a large rock, and smell on a sudden breeze their cookfires. He missed those times, after the shared lunch, the talk and short nap before they would start anew at what one had found, pulling it from the earth, extracting it from a wreck, hauling it back to the village. Returning after nightfall as the women and children came out to see this great new thing they could have back. This thing that had been rescued from the time before and would be theirs in the time of now. Forty years of that, morning, noon, and night of salvage. It was good work. It was the only work.

Until he found the hot radio.

His first years of salvage were of the things that had built the village. On early nights when the salvagers returned and light still hung in the sky, he could walk through the village and see the things he had hauled from the desert. The door on his son’s house that had once been part of a refrigerator from a trailer he and Big Pedro had found south of The Great Wreck. The trailer someone had been living in after the bombs. There were opened cans, beer and food inside the trailer. Cigarette butts in piles. That had been fifteen years after the war. But when they opened the door it was silent and still. An afternoon wind had picked up and the trailer rocked in the brief gusts that seem to come and go as if by their own choosing. Big Pedro did not like such places. The Old Man never asked the why of how someone salvaged. He accepted this of Pedro and together they’d worked for a time.

Outside he heard Pedro asking if there was anything. The Old Man knew he would find a dead body. There were always dead bodies. Salvage and dead bodies go hand in hand.

The trailer rocked for a moment, and as The Old Man adjusted his eyes to the dim light within, he waited for salvage to be revealed. This was how one salvaged. Just waiting and watching a thing. A wreck, someone’s home or a railway shed. In the desert it paid to wait. A quick choice owned you. A wrench, a hammer, and one might not see the saw. Too often the wealth of the past could distract one from what was really there. He had seen piles of money, gold, jewelry, pornography. What good were such things now?

But in the trailer there was a story. There was always a story of salvage. In a wreck, one could see the skeletons crushed under the weight of their possessions as the vehicle left the highway. Rolling over and over in the dirt and down a culvert. To lie trapped for years. Waiting for ambulances that would not come. Rescue that could not rescue itself while mushroom clouds broke the unbroken horizon. On that day when everything changed.

On that long ago hot afternoon when Big Pedro waited outside in the sighing wind, all was quiet inside. He stepped in, closing the door behind him. There was no life here. Just dry dust and the shed skins of the rattlers that seemed everywhere at times and then at others could not be found.

All the cans were crushed, all the cigarettes that lay in neat piles had been smoked down to the filter. Whoever had lived here had brought these cans and cigarettes from the cities. Beer and cigarettes, possibly a gun. Cans of food. But it had been too little. Whatever one brought for the destruction was always too little. The Old Man had seen it, would see it a thousand different ways. In the wrecks and the sheds and the boxcars and the fortified gas stations how long can any supplies last? Could anyone during those two weeks, when a new bomb fell on a new city each new day, could anyone have known that the terror would never end? That life as one knew it would never return.

No, even I did not know it.

Next week the government will come, things will return to normal. Next year. In two years time. One day you stop waiting and you begin to salvage.

What your crowbar can bring up from the desert is the only thing you can expect.

Whoever once lived in that trailer had refused to believe things would never be the same. It was a tale of smoked cigarettes near a smashed radio in the corner. Alcohol through the long night as angry winds struck at the sides of the trailer like some giant moving in the outer dark. Tomorrow became next year and next year became too much to bear. Eventually, whoever it was left, and that was all the story that remained and could be told truthfully of the trailer. What happened after, a gunshot at the end of a broken leg, sunstroke, exposure, insanity; those also were stories The Old Man had seen in the desert. But who could connect one to the other? One learned after the bombs, to stop needing answers or the ends of stories.

There was little salvage in the trailer. What remained was obvious. The refrigerator. Who could take that where they were going? Unless there was power of a sort where the journey, or the flight as it felt, ended. But in The Old Man’s village there was power, sometimes.

Soon he and Big Pedro, sweating, had the refrigerator out on the cracked and broken highway, east of the Great Wreck. It took the better part of three days to get it back to the village. Word spread among the villagers that something big had been found. The Old Man and Pedro were bringing something back. On the last day, two hours after dawn the villagers began to arrive in pairs and groups along the broken highway, their curiosity unrestrained, uncontainable. The haul back became a carnival. By nightfall, remembered The Old Man, a pig had been killed; precious few of them then. All through the night Jason the Fixer worked, cursing coils and elements. At midnight the thing began to hum and two hours later there was ice.

In the hours leading up to dawn, in the main hall of the old factory, The Old Man was the first to stand in front of the open door and feel the cold. How many years had it been since he stood in front of an open refrigerator door in the middle of the night, feeling that precious cold caress the dust caked lines of his face? He didn’t remember, he didn’t care. The cold was enough.

‘We would have that for all of our lives’.

That’s what my friend in the book said when he and the boy talked of taking the great baseball player fishing. He understood.

‘We would have that for all of our lives’.

Now The Old Man took another drink from his water bottle. That night of the refrigerator, the days ending in a carnivale of roast pig meat and ice seemed long ago. Something that happened to a hero who was not him, did not look like the old face in the pieces of mirror on the few days he chose to shave each week.

He looked at the bowl of the wasteland. It seemed empty and void. A place of nothing.

I must go into it. I am cursed by that hot radio.

They never said you could not salvage with them again.

They didn’t need to.

From the Great Wreck to the village and as far east as The Gas Station he would no longer salvage, though no one salvaged in the east anyway as it was considered evil. Even the gas station which lay on the far side of a small town that burned to the ground for no reason anyone could remember in the days of the bombs, held little salvage. Further east the bombs had fallen. Anything from there was as bad as the hot radio. The village would allow no salvage from there.

So he could not go east, and west and south was for the village. He must go north. North lay the wasteland.

He rolled his water bottle back into his thin blanket placing it back in the patched leather satchel. He placed the wide brimmed hat he always wore back atop the stubble of his scalp. There was nothing in the wasteland. No salvage ever came of it. Treks into it returned with nothing or never returned.

The sun was high above now. Adjusting the strap, he set off down the rocky slope, dodging lone black volcanic rocks that had dotted the landscape long before the bombs, before the Spanish, before the Anasazi.

Chapter Three

In the desert, alone, I must look far and near at once. Things that are far seem very near and I must remember that.

Jagged pink peaks to the east seemed a day’s walk. But The Old Man knew they were well beyond that.

Maybe there is another reason for my curse and not the hot radio. Maybe I have become lazy. Too used to finding easy salvage on the ground at my feet. Or others finding it for me.

Heading down the slope into the white sandy bowl of the wasteland, the thought of his failure as a salvager gave The Old Man a new comfort. Maybe it was not a curse. He needed better technique, he had grown lazy. He would return to everything he knew about salvage; he would forget to be lazy and instead remind himself to be vigilant. To leave no stone unturned. This was better than being cursed.

On a far ridgeline, he saw movement and wondered if it were goats moving amongst the clipped rocks. For a long time he kept checking the ridge, hoping to see them again, but in time he gave up and cursed himself for not sticking to his new promise. Later, after the sun’s heat had reached its apex then sank to the horizon behind him, the details of the landscape ahead came into focus.

The heavy sunlight and the sandstorms that seemed to come and go throughout the day had revealed nothing more than a hazy diffusion across his vision. Now as the last light of day shown directly into the heart of the wasteland, he could make out details. Purple scrub and gentle orange hills rising up along the edge he would make by tomorrow. Off to the east he saw a vehicle.

He’d heard of this vehicle. The few who had tried the wasteland had never gone more than a day or two into its depths. All told of the vehicle. It lay to the east and it was always bad to head east. The villagers would often mutter ‘What good could come from the east?’

Stopping for a sip of water, he considered the vehicle, a splotch of red rust in the afternoon haze.

It seems harmless and there may be something to salvage. But it is east.

This is why you are here. Do you believe in the curse or in your own laziness? If it is the curse, then anything east can only make the curse worse. But if it is because you have lost the gift you once had for salvage because you look for what is obvious and easy, then there is no curse and the vehicle is the first rule of salvage. Some always leads to more.

The Old Man replaced the water bottle and shouldered his satchel. Thinking of when he might rest, he turned toward the east and the rusty car.

Night fell, but the sky remained blue for a long time. He lost sight of the car as he descended in and out of dry stream beds. For the last hour he hunted for it in the dark and just when he had begun to curse himself that he was indeed useless and had lost it altogether, he found it.

It was a sedan, half sunk in the dirt that became mud every monsoon season and frozen clay in the winter that followed. Forty cycles of monsoon, chill, and withering summer.

The Old Man dropped his satchel and gathered brush and mesquite. It was early fall and the nights would be cold. It was important to get a fire going.

Once the fire was in bloom with sparks rising into the night, The Old Man retrieved his crowbar and the tin of grease. He searched the wreck, finding a pile of bones on the floor beneath the steering column. The seats had turned to springs and nothing remained of the foam or material that had once covered them. The backseat held nothing, and in the trunk someone had once lit a fire, probably camping under the roof of the car. The fire in the trunk had kept them warm.

The Old Man returned to the fire and removed the cold beans from his satchel. Unrolling his blanket, he found the tortillas but decided to save them for morning. He placed the tin of beans in the fire and waited.

Above, dashing comets and stars restlessly winked at one another. Was there some sort of communication amongst them? How far away were they? Once The Old Man had seen, on a night far from the village, a satellite moving up there. Long after the bombs. It crossed the sky steadily, almost slowly, still flashing its lights. Its power still on. The Old Man looked for it again tonight.

The beans tasted good.

That was how hungry I was. A hard day’s work and food tastes good.

Putting the beans down The Old Man returned to the car once more.

Why here?

He looked at the front of the car.

The driver either crashed into something, or ran out of fuel. But for some reason the driver stopped here. Were you dying?

In the days of the bombs, The Old Man who had been a young man, remembered the chaos and disorder. Remembered the authorities shooting people. Fleeing Los Angeles, he had been stopped at a checkpoint just south of San Clemente. For hours he had been stopped as military helicopters crossed the sky above the reactor close to the ocean. It had made him nervous being that close to a primary target, the big reactors. A man arguing with the guards in a car ahead of him began to scream. Then the man left his car and began running for the mountains on the far side of the road. The guards shot him. His family, his wife screaming, a wide-eyed child in the back of the car watching.

I have not thought of that for years.

Why would you?

The fire popped noisily for a moment and then the deep silence of the wasteland in night settled back upon him.

But you stopped the car here. Why?

The windshield still held most of its dirty glass. It had spider-webbed into a blanket of crystals. But on the passenger side the windshield held a hole.

Something was on the passenger seat and when you hit the rock that stopped you, whatever it was came out and left the hole.

It was impossible to see what was underneath the car, but The Old Man suspected a big rock, low and jagged, had snagged the axle and stopped the vehicle dead.

The Old Man returned to his satchel and retrieved the can of pitch. Taking a stick, he covered the end with pitch and lit it in the fire. He returned to the front of the car that lay at the top of a small hill. He turned away from the car and faced outward into the dark.

There is always a story. To find it I need to know what happened. You are wounded. You are fleeing the cities and have become wounded. You have no plan, few supplies, and as the day progresses, as you flee burning Phoenix or forbidden Tucson, you drive off the road. The roads are a mess, refugees and Army fleeing to Yuma which will be nuked in a day or two because of its base and refugee camps. You drive off the road. You are not thinking clearly; driving too fast you are wounded and sick or hungry and you have begun to believe you will find something out here. Something that will save you. But the vehicle is running out of gas, so you keep driving to the top of ridges and small hills, racing up the sandy shale to avoid getting stuck, then looking to see if there is any refuge in sight. On this hill you race up fast. The ground on the far side was soft. Yes I felt that as I walked up. Suddenly as you gun the accelerator, you slam into the rock and out goes the one thing you managed to grab before the destruction. The car is hopelessly stuck and soon you die. Maybe you kill yourself with a pistol. But one of the countless salvagers who has wandered here has found that since, along with whatever supplies were in the trunk or back seat. Ah, a pistol and blankets and food, thinks my fellow salvager, what luck I have found good things. And he ignores the hole in the windshield. He has ignored the second rule of salvage. Be still and understand the story of what happened in this place. Quick action blinds.

How fast were you going when you hit the rock? Fast enough that it came upon you and took you by surprise? But not so fast, since you were nearing the top. Maybe you blacked out?

The Old Man walked outwards from the front of the car. He thought of the size of the hole and the weight of the object as he walked down the other side of the hill scanning the ground.

Someone may have found it?

That does not matter. You are thinking as you once thought. Telling the story first. If you find the resting place of the thing and it is gone then you have won because you thought the way you are supposed to think. Some will always lead to more. That is the first rule.

I could wait until morning?

Why? You will sleep badly and all night think about where to look in the morning.

At the bottom of the hill was a dry river bed. Holding his torch down near the ground he checked the bed for ash.

In the years after the destruction, flash floods of ash had filled the old stream beds as the snowpack of that long winter had finally come to an end.

If the thing had fallen into the streambed then it is lost. Carried off by rivers of ash in the years since. Also most travelers use stream beds to move. They are shady, there might be water, and the rains may have collected salvage.

So if it landed in the stream then it is as good as gone.

Looking back to align himself with the car, he climbed up the rocky slope to the far side of the dry streambed. A few feet away he found a battered aluminum ice chest, half sunk in the mud and hidden by a mesquite tree that had grown up around its base. It was empty. Someone else had found it. Had followed the clues and found the thing in the dried mud with the broken cover.

The chest was too light to have made the journey from passenger seat through the window down the hill and across the stream bed to land where it did. Whatever had once been inside had been heavy enough to propel it that far.

In front of the fire, The Old Man sat cross legged and treated himself to one of the tortillas. He congratulated himself on finding the ice chest and thought little that it contained nothing. Instead he was happy that he had found it. Maybe the curse was a lie. It was he who had been lazy, easily accepting the blame of the curse. He was to blame. If so, then things were changing.

He finished the tortilla, put more mesquite on the fire and took only a small drink of water so he did not have to pee in the night. He rolled himself in his thin blanket and was soon deep asleep. In the night when the fire was low, he awoke thinking ‘I am sleeping really well tonight’, as though he had accomplished a great thing which had eluded him for some time. Pleased, he fell asleep once more.

Chapter Four

The next day he crossed into the dunes of the wasteland. The scrub and hard rock gave way to smooth sand pink with the rising sun. By noon the landscape faded and the pink of morning turned a blinding white.

It was still early fall. It wasn’t as hot as it had been earlier in the year. The Old Man sipped the bottle of water, only half full now, and felt the heat more than he had expected to.

I need to look for water. Soon I will go too far and if I don’t find anything, then even making it back to the village might be impossible.

Maybe they are looking for me.

In the night, toward dawn he had dreamt of the child in the backseat of the car of the screaming man the guards had shot. She was the same age of forty years ago but The Old Man was still old, even though he had been younger that long ago day than her father.

In the dream he was back in the village. The child, who was a girl most surely, had knocked on his door. After letting her in The Old Man gave her cold water and she sat down at his desk, looking out the one window he had salvaged from an over-turned semi.

‘Have you been walking all night to get here?’ he remembered asking her. As if a night’s journey accounted for all the years in between that day and the dream.

But the child remained staring out the window, lost in thought and when she turned back to The Old Man she looked at him smiling. Then she said ‘It never happened, y’know.’ In the way a child who is young can affect a certain seriousness.

But The Old Man wasn’t sure if she meant her father being shot by the side of the freeway under the shadow of the reactors. Or something else.

He woke with a start, and already a desert breeze was blowing across the soft blue of first morning. He rose quickly, promised himself some breakfast later and was soon away from the wreck. The dream had bothered him. And he wondered if the dream of the child and the wreck of the car weren’t the cause of it.

Later, he felt better as he walked through a line of dunes. He was away from what was known to him of wrecks and the worst kind of luck. The wasteland was new. It was unknown. In a few hours, by nightfall, he would be farther than anyone had tell of in the depths of the wasteland. If anything, that was something.

So why did the dream bother you? It’s noon, so speak it now and be done with it so the child does not return tonight.

Ahead, the wasteland fell deeper into a series of white dunes, and The Old man entered them, weaving about the floor of them rather than climbing to the top of each.

I’ll do my best to keep a rough bearing north and maybe a little east. I’ll need water soon.

East is curst.

Then my curse and the curse of the east will cancel each other out.

He couldn’t remember what that was called; it was a law or something, something he had once learned in school.

How strange, he thought in the silence between the dunes. School. To think, once I attended a school. An elementary school, a school after that and then even a high school. College. I couldn’t even begin to explain school to the young of the village.

I am thinking too much. That is why I had the dream of the child. Too many things are coming up from the past and it is making my mind race. The silence of the wasteland is good for thinking.

You must think about water and salvage. You can’t just think about the past. If you don’t find water you won’t be able to find something out here and bring it back to the village.

The shadows began to lengthen and soon the shade of the dunes became cool. Gathering stray brush he set up his camp in the lee of a long dune and soon had a fire going.

There had not been the least sign of any salvage, anything man had made, or even the presence of man. The Old Man sat chewing a tortilla and thinking about this. Usually back near the village, even though it was the desert, there seemed to be nothing but the things of man’s past. All the collected salvage. The wrecks, the dead towns and settlements. Bones.

But how long since anyone had been through the wasteland? It had been forty years since the bombs. The years since, reasoned The Old Man, had been too hard. Too close to the bone for anything that didn’t yield enough profit to allow survival to the next day.

Maybe that was why there was no salvage in the wasteland.

Staring into the fire, he thought of the child.

Did she survive that day?

Not if she remained on the West Coast, especially from Los Angeles to San Diego.

But if she had survived would her life have been good?

She would have less memories of what was lost. That is a kind of ‘good’.

Those who survived those weeks of bombing, each one struggled with a question which determined whether they would keep salvaging or give up and die.

What was the question?

Can you let go of what is gone?

I think at first I felt that I could not go on. The things I lost were too painful and I could not imagine a life without them. I remember feeling awful. All the time. But I cannot remember when I changed. When I thought of salvage. When I thought of what was today, and not of what had been or what was lost.

For a long time he sat hugging his knees, watching the crystal of the sky turn and revolve, and when the fire had burnt down to red ash, he moved his blanket close to it and sat for a little while more, listing to it pop. Soon the sky began to grow dark. In a few nights, he thought, his last thought before sleeping, we’ll have the moon. Funny saying ‘we’ he wondered, sleeping.

Chapter Five

There were no dreams that night and when he awoke, the sun was already well up and the heat a part of the day that could not be separated from it.

His face was heavy from the night as though the sleep had been more fight than rest. Instantly he wanted water and knew that any drink would be his last.

Then it will be my last.

Draining the bottle he decided he would find the water he would need to continue the journey or that would be the end of it.

I have in me what remains. So I have to be smart. If I dig and find no water, I will have sweated for nothing. I must find water.

He continued on now, bearing more east than north.

East is evil and that is why things are not going well. You should have continued north. Why are you going east?

The dunes continued in their sandy smothering brilliance and before long he began to think of the ocean and the book.

How would it be to have such a skiff as that in the book? To have ropes and a hand-forged hook. To catch the tuna and eat it raw with a bit of salt and lime.

He did not have salt and limes in the book. He wanted them but he did not have them. He ate the tuna raw.

He caught himself, sweating, almost sleeping as he walked, thinking that this was just a day at the beach, as if, in any experience that was his, he’d ever had a day at the beach.

But I did. I remember the sting of saltwater on burned skin. I remember hot dogs and mustard and blown sand in the buns.

It was the thought of the watermelon that jerked him back to the present. Sweet, cool watermelon on a windy afternoon at the beach. School buses idling to take the children back to school during the last week of the school year. No more books, no more teachers’ dirty looks. He saw his father’s handwriting as he thought of those words. Summer would never end.

Everything ends, he croaked to the dry silence between two monolithic dunes, as he trudged upslope through the clutching sand.

It is so hot that even the scorpions won’t come out.

In the distance, the sun sank lower in the sunburned sky, as dunes began to grow long cool shadows pointing thin fingers to the east.

Without making camp he lay down in the cradle of a shady dune and fell to snoring.

When he awoke, the sun had fallen behind the highest dune and a stiff breeze lifted sand, sending it skirting across the smooth surfaces of the dunes. The body of a dead bee lay in the foreground of his skewed vision. His head pounded and he knew he was beyond any point of thirst he had ever experienced. Already his hand was half buried.

I have been asleep but a few minutes. The sand doesn’t waste time.

Not ready to move his aching head, he remained staring at the dead bee in the canted landscape. He wasn’t sure, but the sun seemed in the wrong position. If that was the case then it was not a few minutes but maybe the next day, and if that was the case then things were even worse than he had first thought. A new day of heat amongst the dunes.

There is little hope.

So at least, you have some hope.

It’s just a saying. I actually have no hope.

No, you said you have little hope. Why?

Why what?

Why a little? A little hope would have gone a long way for that dead bee. But for you maybe it is too little.

The bee.

The Old Man shook himself upright. His face sandy, he stared wildly about, then closed his eyes as his head began to throb.

Bees always fly straight to water. Big Pedro had taught him that. And he had seen it. Many times.

The bee is dead. How can a dead bee lead you too water?

He was an ambitious bee. Like me.

Or he was cursed. Like you also.

Then this brother is a bee to me, he declared in confusion. I will find more bees. His brothers are my brothers. Some always leads to more and where there are more bees they will lead me to water.

It is morning so it will be cool for awhile, but not long. Bees like the heat.

Bending low he gently picked up the dead bee.

I will find us some water my brother.

He placed the bee in the tin of grease and snapped the ancient lid shut.

That way seems familiar but dunes are all alike.

Heading into the sun now he climbed the first dune, and far to the east he saw blue ridges shadowed in the rising sun.

East is evil and curst.

Ah but there are two of us now. I have my brother the bee and he has his brothers.

Soon the sun was hot, as first he climbed a dune, then descended only to start the process once more. It is the only way, he told the bee. It is the only way I can be sure I am heading to the ridge.

At the top of each sandy dune he scanned for swarms, or movement of any kind. His eyes were still good and yet he saw no bees.

Maybe in the rocks, brother. Maybe that is where we will find your home.

At the full blaze of noon The Old Man descended the last dune into a short sandy scrub of low bushes. A few miles away lay the now red rock ridge.

For a moment The Old Man considered digging amongst the scrub for water but the plants were papery and did little to convince him of the chance of appreciable water.

Opening the tin of grease he looked at the dead bee.

I can only go so far bee. So which way, huh? He held the bee up hoping to catch a breeze and saw himself from afar.

This is insane. Look at yourself. An Old Man holding a dead bee in the desert. If he comes back to life you are really crazy. The Old Man realized it was his young self talking to him. The self he had once been and had been thinking of too much since the dream of the child.

Be quiet. This is not so crazy. One of his brothers might smell him and come for a look. Then maybe I can follow him back to water.

The Old Man lurched forward into the scrub holding out the bee for any passing stray bee to smell. I can’t trust my ears he said. They have been buzzing. So I will look for a black shape moving, hopping between the bushes of low scrub. That will be a bee.

When he had reached the limit of the little strength he had left, the ridge was still far off and on fire with the red of a late afternoon sun in decline.

The Old Man sat down knowing he would not rise. The wings of the bee still held gently between thumb and forefinger.

Well, we tried.

He could no longer swallow. His mouth felt coarse and thick. His throat a ragged burning trench and his body ached. Mostly in his throbbing head.

If I can lay here until dark, then the light won’t hurt my eyes so much and then maybe I can make it to the ridge.

But it was a lie as soon as he told it. By nightfall he would be beyond standing.

Then I must stand a little more and maybe a few steps will take me to the rocks of the ridge. And that also is a lie.

Standing, a dull bomb went off with a solid crack in the back of his skull as stars raced forward toward the rocks.

But it is my lie.

He continued forward. Moments later he saw a bee which came diving at him, and then quickly tore away off toward the rocks. The Old Man shambled forward, trailing the bee which hopped from shrub to shrub, sometimes methodical at other times racing off toward the horizon. Just when The Old Man thought he had lost the bee forever, again the bee would leap up and head off along the same bearing.

Ahead, The Old Man could see a spur jutting out from the ridge, and following the spur back to the crook it left in the ridge, he saw a splotch of green.

But it is too far.

He continued after the bee, still holding the dead bee between his thumb and forefinger. The line from where he had met the bee and the splotch of green was true and straight.

Falling forward, he tripped on an exposed root and fell into the sandy chalk that rose up in plumes around him.

I have never been so comfortable in all my life.

If you don’t get up, the bee who is flying will be gone and you will never find the water, never find salvage, and you will die curst.

I am curst. I don’t care. I want to sleep now.

He closed his eyes and when he did, he thought of his granddaughter who was just thirteen. It was she who had stayed faithful to him after the other villagers had cursed him and refused to salvage with him. She had begun to salvage with him. He had enjoyed that. The salvage had become more enjoyable and less desperate on those long mornings he spent with her as they walked and talked. Talked of all manner of things from the way the world had been to the way it is and sometimes of the way it might be. That had been enjoyable.

I am sorry my brother bee.

Arms of sleep beckoned him a little farther down the well of darkness.

I must use your help for a moment little bee. I am sorry. I have to wake up for a while. Long enough to see what lies in the crook of the ridge.

He squeezed his palm hard shut and felt the stinger of the dead bee enter the flesh of his palm. An electric jolt coursed through his body and instantly the palm was alive with fire.

The Old Man kept his fist shut as he pushed away from the sand and began once more to the ridge.

Desert scrub, sandy and brown, gave way to large sunburnt rocks. Reaching the crook in the ridge, he entered a stand of palo verdes. The Green Sticks the villagers called them. Back amongst the rocks a quiet stream, barely more than a trickle, came out of the rocks feeding the little stand of palo verdes. The Old Man dropped his satchel and lay down to drink. The water was cool.

Chapter Six

Noon turned to afternoon and soon a stiff breeze picked up amongst the feathery branches of the palo verdes. For a long time The Old Man returned to the stream to drink and drink again. All the while he gathered dead branches, piling them high for the night’s fire.

There were just a few beans and one tortilla left. He had not felt hungry during the thirsty hours of torment amid the dunes, but now as his body began to soak up the water, his appetite returned. The few beans and tortilla were a coming feast to his hungry mind.

He went out beyond the perimeter of the palo verdes once more, into the scrub that bordered the wasteland. The dunes through which he had passed were now falling to pink and orange. Thin ribbons of snakelike shade slithered onto the desert floor while the graceful arcs of the dunes told the lie that he did not exist, had never existed among them.

He returned to his camp and started a small fire. In the twilight he finished the remaining beans and reluctantly saved the tortilla for morning. Tomorrow he would look for animal tracks and make the appropriate traps. Once he had enough food and water he could either return across the wasteland to the village or he might continue on.

He had failed to find salvage in the wasteland. The known parts of the wasteland were behind him and he could only guess where he might be now. If he had to say, he would say west of what was once Phoenix and north of what was Tucson.

In the days of the bombs, he thought while the first stars began to peak through the drifting branches of the palo verde, there had been a large town in that area. The name was lost to him, but the memory of once having known it was not.

If he could find the town he might find salvage. Might find others too and that would present a whole different set of problems.

There is the gun. Yes, he mumbled his throat still raw. There is that.

He was glad his granddaughter was not with him. People, strangers who came to the village, made him think of this. After the bomb these people, had not found villages, had not banded together to survive. They had wandered, and in their eyes he saw that they had done things. Things they found it hard to live with, but things they had done nonetheless. Too many years of ‘done’ things, too many years of desert. Too many years in the cold and heat and condemnation. They didn’t seem human anymore. So, if he had to meet strangers, then it was good he didn’t have his granddaughter.

It is good then, he laughed, that I am cursed.

But what if you stay out here too long? What if you do too many ‘done’ things?

‘Too long out there’ is what the villagers would say whenever those strangers who had no village of their own would show up to trade, to beg, to die. Too long out there.

Now the sky was speckled with the stars above, as the blue light of the west seemed to draw away. He returned his eyes to the fire and tried to think about traps.

He thought of the traps he had been taught by Big Pedro in the days after the bombs when the village was not a village but just a small refugee camp. Traps for varmints, as Pedro had called them. Traps for serpente. Snake would be good. He had enjoyed snake.

I’ll go as far as the town whose name I cannot remember. If there is no salvage then I’ll come back. Then the other villagers will know that I am cursed and it won’t be expected of me to go out. I can help the women. Watch the children if they’ll let me. Make things. I have always wanted to make a guitar.

You don’t even know how to play.

Yes, but that has never stopped me from wanting to.

The fire burned the logs to ash amongst the orange and black glow of its heart. The stars above. The gently moving palo verdes in the night’s breeze. The Old Man wrapped himself within his blanket and slept.

Chapter Seven

He returned to the stream at first light. He had been lying wrapped in his blanket, and for the first time the morning was not so bitterly cold.

At the stream he waited, watching as the light came up. He was thirsty, had been thirsty through the night. But he did not drink from the stream and would not until the light was good enough to see the tracks. Then he would know what made a home of these palo verdes beneath the rocky slope.

At first light he saw the tracks. Different pairs, one behind the other, four toes and a claw. Near the water’s edge in the wet mud he could see the impression left by the fur. It made sense, muttered The Old Man and he knelt to drink the cool water of the stream.

Finished, he looked up to survey the rocky hill that rose above the little oasis of palo verdes. The hill was more a small mountain. Like other small mountains it was more a collection of boulders; large, broken, shattered rock turning a soft hue in the rising sun of the morning.

He looked at the tracks once more. They had definitely come down from the rocks for a drink, and to hunt. The single file nature of the prints told him they were foxes. He knew these animals. Often times they would come near the village, but never to scavenge at garbage. Once he had seen one pass him on the highway as he returned from salvage. He was in the southbound lanes walking back to the village; the fox, in the northbound lanes carried a large dead rattlesnake in its mouth. The fox barely regarded him and continued its bouncing little trot toward the west. His son, then a little boy, had loved that story when he had told it, often asking him to tell it again.

He returned to his camp, hung his blanket in a tree and began to search for an area under the palo verdes; an area of clearing but near enough to the trees. When he spotted a den of mice he knew he had a good area.

In the center of it he dug a small two-foot hole. The bottom was deep and wide while the top was narrow. He dug two more exactly like it and then began to gather deadfall back at the camp. He thought he might like a nice fire that night even though there would be no food. When the firewood was gathered he selected six sticks and returned to the clearing. He placed two sticks on two sides of each hole and then returned to the stream to drink.

From the bottom of the rocky slope he retrieved three flat stones. He placed these atop the sticks surrounding each of the holes. Now there was a nice roof. Also there was a tiny entrance on each side of the hole underneath the rocks

Feeling tired he returned to his camp and lay down for awhile. His strength was fading and he began to sweat thick salty tears. He was starving and the thought of the foxes made him hungrier. He would prefer rattlesnake, but there probably were none. Foxes also liked snake and had most likely hunted the area clean.

They are good salvagers.

After some rest and another long drink at the stream he returned to the clearing. He watched the dens at the base of the palo verdes. He would need to catch the mice before the fox. He leaned against the thin green trunk of the tree he was standing near and closed his eyes. Then he opened them just enough.

Mice will think I am asleep. That will make them bold.

He waited. The sun turned to late afternoon.

Much longer and I won’t have enough time to build a trap for the fox.

The day isn’t done yet.

Moments later he was asleep.

As a young man, passing through Yuma on that last day. That last civilized day. He remembered thinking ‘I have just three hours to go. Three hours and I’ll make Tucson’.

Above, the sky was filled with fighter planes attempting to refuel from the big airborne tankers. People camped out along the road while the state police barred any entrance into Yuma. Surely, it was too small of a target for the bombs. They would hit the major cities first, as they had been doing. Each day another city exploded. First it had been New York. Everyone watched on the news. The next day Chicago. Had it been Chicago, The Old Man wondered in his dream? Had that been the next city?

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