The Shore (23 page)

“Ma,” Jackie cut in. “I spoke with Uncle Leo yesterday, while you were away. He might have work for me, later in the
year.” He grasped for a reason, a task that would logically call him away for the right time, at the right time. “The train brings his stock early in the morning or late at night, and he says he's getting too old to unload it at all hours. I didn't want to leave, but if Alice—I shouldn't pass up the opportunity.”

His mother cocked an eyebrow at him. “And why didn't he mention this to me?”

“He didn't think you'd want me away for so long, so often. But it doesn't sound like I have a choice now.” Jackie hated to lie to her, but he had to remove the worry lines from her face, to ensure that they would have food when winter came. If Father had been there, he would have agreed.

“Well. It seems you're both leaping out of my hands. Not that that is entirely a bad thing. You could be turning to rum running, to smuggling, to worse things entirely.”

The guilt that Jackie felt at his mother's words would not be the last in connection to his uncle's plan. It will return in flashes as he minds the fermenting apple pomace, as he leaves the house in the evenings to relieve one of the lighthouse keepers in tending the still, and will nearly overwhelm him in the days after a local smuggler is caught, when his uncle is certain that they will be next. Prohibition will continue until he is nearly twenty-five years old, and in that time, though he will work for fishermen, for oystermen, in the factory and in his uncle's shop, he will continue to throw in his lot with the bootleggers, saving the money while his mother refuses to leave Assateague, finally moving her to a cottage near Uncle Leo's shop when a stroke paralyzes the right side of her body. A few years after the end of Prohibition they will abandon their setup in favor of honest work, leaving any equipment that they cannot sell carefully
hidden on the island, in case the government changes its mind. Jackie will be an uncle by then, and his sister, after much labor and a quiet charge of breach of contract, will have changed her name to Fields.

But that is yet to come.

2037

T
ALISMANS

S
ome days it is hard to remember that she isn't the only one left, that no matter how long it has been since she's seen another soul, today could always be the day that someone comes wandering down the road, picking their way around the potholes and rogue stalks of corn, calling out to see if anyone is around. When she lies with her back cool against the slick green cement and looks up through the gaping hole in the rotting roof to watch the clouds roiling above as the pills that she's taken tilt and dip her she pretends that even she doesn't exist, that the world is devoid of life, that she's the ground and the grass and the trees and every growing thing.

She first found the little house when she was in middle school, two rooms upstairs and one room downstairs and a porch on both floors, long abandoned with the marsh encroaching up its front yard. Usually her school friends came exploring with her, but she was the only one that had been willing to trespass on the Lumsden farm. People said they did black magic, but Tamara laughed at that. Her grandpa was a Lumsden; if he could do magic then she was the true king of Scotland. You couldn't see the shack from the big house anyway. She'd used it as a private
place to smoke up when she had the good stuff and didn't want to share. It had never had electricity or septic, probably hadn't ever been much more than a farm office, but black magic aside there were weird stories about that corner of the world. People had been murdered there, been buried there; a girl went crazy and knifed her dad. Place had been empty since.

When the epidemic started looking serious she'd dragged Willie out to see the place. The door was solid enough still to be barred against predators of the two- and four-legged variety, and Willie had figured that no one would come looking this far out on the edge of solid land, but just to be safe they'd dragged boards from the nearest abandoned houses to reinforce the walls and cover up the broad window of the lower floor. The hole in the roof let in enough light, pouring down the stairwell and through the moss-rimmed hole in the upper floor. Now that Willie's gone she has the candles he squirreled away to get her through the sleepless nights.

It had happened quickly. They'd all been drinking and dancing and blazing up on the beach like every autumn night she could remember, then two weeks later half the people she knew were in the clinic, and by Thanksgiving most of them were dead. She'd gone to the clinic too, more out of caution since she felt OK, but they thought that it was sexually transmitted and that kind of thing didn't always give you a warning. The test had been uncomfortable, embarrassing, and she almost blushed when the nurse asked her how many partners she'd had in the past five years, not because of the number but because she'd had to ask how they defined “partners” and then tally them up on her fingers. The woman had tightened her mouth in disapproval when Tamara had finally told her to call it a round three hundred.
Which sounded like a lot, but if you divided it out it only meant that she got with one or two new people a week, on average. A lot of them were from the Shore, people she'd gone to school with, but when she was bored of the same old she'd drive over to the mainland and meet guys from Internet hookup sites for a one-off. Three hundred was probably a conservative estimate, but she wasn't going to call the prune-mouthed nurse back into the exam room to tell her it was more. She liked sex, it didn't matter so much who with, and unless you could afford to be on something all the time there was fuck all else to do on the Shore.

There had been no traffic on the drive back to the clinic to get her results, but she'd had to yield to two funeral processions. The news articles she'd skimmed when people she knew started getting sick had assumed that the disease would wipe out the less desirable elements of society, the young and promiscuous and those too poor to afford care. By the time the deaths began it was already too late: just as many bored housewives and middle-aged husbands were packed away in urns and pine boxes as irresponsible teenagers and neo-hippies with vague opinions about free love.

Tamara had resigned herself to the diagnosis she knew was coming: they didn't make you come in person to tell you that you're clean, and she'd screwed more people than anyone she knew. So when the nurse took her in the back room and told her that her reproductive organs were not going to rot painfully out of her body, poison her blood, and kill her quickly, she had to ask the woman to repeat herself. She wasn't clean by any stretch of the imagination, but she wasn't among the doomed: she was an asymptomatic carrier, possibly one of the first vectors
of the disease, and she was going to be contained and tested in the hopes of developing a cure. The nurse had gone to get the forms, and Tamara had walked out as quickly as she could, head down: there was no way in hell she was being anyone's guinea pig, no matter what kind of disease she had.

At first it had been like all the zombie movies she'd ever watched: fewer and fewer people walking the streets, until Onancock looked like the set of a ghost town for something ridiculously low-budget:
Attack of the Killer Ovaries from Space.
They'd moved to the shack by then; Willie had wanted to go to ground before things got too bad, but they still went out during the day, looked around. This was before Christmas. She'd waited for the day that even the gray-uniformed worker failed to open the post office, then went over to the alley behind Runninger's pharmacy and smashed a back window. No alarm went off, no one came to stop her. There wasn't anyone left to care. She loaded up three of the backpacks from the back-to-school aisle with uppers and downers and weight-loss pills and prenatal vitamins and everything she could imagine wanting, chucking in bottles of things she didn't know the use of, but figured she could find out. Willie had shook his head at her, but helped line the pill bottles up alphabetically, and look them up by shape and color on the Internet—while there still was Internet.

Willie didn't know that his older brother Scott had been Tamara's boyfriend before him. Kind-of boyfriend. Scott was a wild one. Had been a wild one. She'd wanted him since they were in middle school, but she'd never expected him to notice her, anticipated his on-again, off-again attention. When she'd gotten pregnant they'd been off again, and she hadn't had the guts to tell him. For three months she'd nursed the idea of the
baby growing inside her, its teeny face and fingers—even if it had been legal anymore to get rid of it, she couldn't bear the idea of ousting such a little person from her womb. It had devastated her when she started bleeding. She'd decided immediately she wanted another, got Scott to go parking with her by promising him head, and was doubly devastated to find the bruise-colored mottling on his skin when she unbuttoned his Levi's. He hadn't lasted much longer than that, and when she had cried at the funeral it had been just as much for the baby she wouldn't have to remember him by as for the loss of him.

Willie hadn't known that, but he probably would have still gone with her if he had. He was the quiet middle brother, the plotter, who didn't care if he got the scraps so long as he wound up with more scraps than everyone else. He liked living in the little shack with her on the edge of the marsh, when everything was going crazy everywhere else. He was the one who stole the backhoe and dug the well; he knew that the freshwater recharge spine, the strip of underground river that lay between Route 13 and the railroad tracks, was the only groundwater that wouldn't poison them with salt seep, and he knew how to find it. He was the one who had jerry-rigged the stolen generator, gotten them Internet when no one else had it, Internet that they'd used together to look up the pills she'd stolen, even as he was shaking his head over her lack of method. Sure, morphine and MDMA were fun, but when they weren't feeling well they'd be wanting the boxes and boxes of ibuprofen and decongestant she'd left behind.

He'd gone back to Runninger's after dark, plundered the painkillers, fever-reducers, first-aid kits and spray bandages,
and the entire case of condoms. Ribbed, nubbed, extra-thin, lambskin, he'd nabbed them all before someone else got them.

They always made love in the light, and it hadn't escaped Tamara how he watched her, deciding whether he was seeing her natural skin color or something trending more sinister before he progressed. Willie didn't expect fidelity any more than he expected honesty from her, but she hadn't been running around on him. There wasn't anyone left to run around with.

She thought what the nurse had said about her being an asymptomatic carrier was bullshit. You either had a sickness, or you didn't. The way meat was either rotten or it wasn't. She was perfectly fine, and it annoyed her how careful Willie was with the condoms, with the checking, with her. He looked a lot like Scott, in the face and coloring, even if he was narrower in the shoulders, more rangy. He'd give her a pretty baby.

This time she did it smart. She broke into one of the upscale houses, came back with six bottles of wine. After he'd half-finished the first, she handed him one of the special condoms to use, one that felt warm or tingled or something like that. The extra-fine needle she'd stolen from the upscale house too, and he hadn't even noticed the tiny holes as he ripped the foil packet open.

The morning sickness started the same day Willie noticed the purpling on his cock. He was convinced she'd given it to him, and she'd screamed that he'd been bringing his whores to her house while she was out. He'd punched, and she'd bit, and in the end he'd run out of the house, leaving her clutching her middle, where he'd kicked her. The bleeding had started almost immediately, and two weeks later she'd found him lying on his
back in one of the fallow potato fields, staring at the sky with empty eye sockets, stomach ripped open and guts trailing away where the feral dogs had taken chunks out of him. She'd cried then, mostly from frustration and disgust—she was still angry that he'd killed her baby. The flies and the smell were too awful, and she left him for the sun and the dogs to take care of. It was better than burying him anyway.

So here she is, alone and babyless, walled into the cottage while the world outside goes crazy. Maybe there is something to being a carrier. But if she has a baby, then it will be a carrier too, like she has blue eyes because her mother has blue eyes. But every time she thinks “baby” she sees Scott, the pictures of him when he was still tiny that his mother had shown her one afternoon when she'd knocked on the door of his parents' trailer and only the older woman had been home. She wants his baby, but Willie's would have been close enough. And that asshole Willie had kept her from even having that.

There is a third brother, but if she remembers right he's barely thirteen. Yeah, boys are all horny at that age, but the idea makes her sick, even though her dad had been ten years older than her mom.

She lets the cold of the cement soak into her back as she lies still, head lolling from side to side to make the sound of the birds outside strobe in and out, like the Dopplering of passing ambulance sirens that she remembers from when she was a kid. It isn't a bad place to live, even with the hole rotted through the roof that lets the rain drip in, turning the edges of the
hole in the floor above a soft, mossy green and crumbling the gypsum-board ceiling.

It had been pretty easy to steal anything she wanted that first winter, after so many had died but so few of the living had figured out how to respond. Houses were empty, stores were empty, people left each other alone. She'd stocked up on canned food and bottled water and beef jerky, hoarding it the way she'd hid cans of SpaghettiOs under her bed every time she found spare change when she was a kid, planning ahead for the days her mom stayed on the couch with the lights off instead of going to work and she and her little brother had to feed themselves. She felt bad for her mom now, just a little. It hadn't been hard to leave. Her mom and her brother had been sitting on the couch, dazed and vacant with television; Tamara had said that she was running out to pick up a pack of cigarettes and had taken her clothes with her, headed to the shack and never returned home. Part of her wants to go back to their trailer outside Belle Haven, but she doesn't want to find the woman dead in the living room almost as much as she doesn't want to find her alive, whining and pathetic, prematurely wrinkled and yellowed by nicotine.

When she first started plundering the abandoned buildings she'd been careful, sidling into places expecting to be stopped, but as more and more people died and the survivors fled to the mainland by the busload she'd grown more confident, until she was smashing the lower windows of the nicer houses in the middle of the day and taking a turn around to see if anything caught her eye. But no matter how brash she'd gotten, it had taken Dutch courage to break into the Lumsden farmhouse.

She didn't believe the bullshit about magic, but the house unnerved
her. Grandpa Pierce had grown up there, and one of his favorite things to bitch about, drunk or sober, was how it should have been his. He was the eldest, he should have inherited the farm, he would have been smart and turned it into a shopping center so people would have something to do of a Friday night. When he was really in a mood he added an X-rated multiplex and topless bar to the fantasy, a casino to put Accomack Island on the map, and even she had been able to see how ridiculous that was. But his whore of a sister had gotten everything, and contesting the will had burned through what money he had inherited. He'd decided that if he couldn't have it, no one would, but when he'd gone to torch the farmhouse he'd used vodka as an accelerant. There had been prison for that, followed by a restraining order, and while she couldn't blame her great-aunt for that she couldn't shake the image her grandfather had put in her head, of a violent, grasping, witchlike old crone, bitter because she'd never gotten a man, holed away distilling poisons and collecting rent from her tenants.