The Unit (3 page)

The weight of my pack makes my shoulders burn. I bear it. I’ve borne worse. The underbrush is thin but riddled with poison oak. I point it out to the children. I whisper, “Leaves of three, let it be.” They roll their eyes. It’s long been their most common response to my words, and I’m glad they can still do it.

We skirt the poison oak as best we can. The trees are gray-green and I remember how I used to love walking beneath California pines at dusk, flying at low altitude, hushed and safe, and the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. I try to keep my eyes on the trail, but my neck aches from turning and looking back at Melanie and Scott. Their faces are tight and their eyes have a bulging look. It’s very slight, and maybe no one else would notice it, but I do.

I make eye contact with Melanie. She looks away, but then she looks back. I think she’s trying to share her horror about our
now
, and thereby dilute it. I’m grateful that she’s reaching out, and I return her gaze with the full strength and power of motherhood, and just for an instant I’m no longer pretending to be strong.

Scott sees that I’m not watching where I’m going. He says
Mom
in that serious way of his and he points to a branch in my path. I’m about to walk straight into one of nature’s impersonal ambushes. I push it aside with the barrel of my shotgun. I whisper a thank-you, and it’s for my son and my daughter and any supreme being within earshot, in gratitude for everything that hasn’t been taken from me. I tell myself to be thankful for what I have, even though the molecules of my childhood home are probably circling the globe as fallout, and my own children are on foot in a place where people get shot and robbed, but nobody gets buried.

But still I try to appreciate the Northern California forest, with its half-serious cover and dry, open places. It’s nothing like the land of my upbringing, western Oregon, where Douglas firs reach into the clouds and nurse the devil’s own blackness below. The underbrush in Oregon will take your skin off—blackberry patches and sword ferns and tangles of vine maple and stinging nettles and God knows what else, nature’s barbed wire.

Here, there’s some underbrush and a bit of poison oak, but it’s only for decoration. It’s as if someone prepared the way for us, and provided places of cover and concealment stretched out before us like stepping stones, and I can’t help but think that
He
did it, in
His
infinite wisdom, as part of
His
perfect plan.

We walk for two hours before I decide to say something. I catch up with Jerry. He’s walking fast again, but I was a race walker and I can catch him, even though he was a Marine. I pull alongside. I nod back at Melanie and Scott.

“They need a break.”

“Don’t we all.”

He winces as soon as he says it. Maybe he wasn’t trying to sound bitter, but it’s too late.

“Am I annoying you?”

“No. Sorry.”

He stops. He wipes his face on his coat sleeve. I can smell the tobacco on his breath and the alcohol evaporating from his pores. He reaches for my shoulder, but I slip away.

“Okay,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

I know what liquor does to him. When he’s first had a drink, he’s the sweetest man on earth. It’s as if he wants to share the pleasure he receives from intoxication with all the world, but it’s all downhill from there. Either he drinks himself wild, or he stops drinking and grows sullen and resentful. I know the highs and lows of it, because for many years we were a perfect match, drinking-wise.

We move into a field of low boulders and slip out of our packs. Melanie and Scott sit down. They’re both in good shape, but they’re not sure we’re doing the right thing, walking out. They think we might be better off holing up and waiting for the government to save us. But Jerry and I both know better. We’ve seen enough failed federal disaster responses to know that we’re better off walking into a future of our own choosing.

Our children, in their new adulthood, don’t know whether they should trust us. They’ve passed beyond the automatic rebellion of adolescence, but they move with reluctance, each step a dragging doubt. I don’t want to make things harder for them, so I fight down my urge to quarrel with Jerry. I keep my back to him. I make a show of taking out MRE crackers and a packet of pasteurized cheese spread.

We chew and wash down the thick, military nourishment with drinks from our canteens. A red-tailed hawk circles above. A breeze gives the pines a steady sigh. A large tree branch cracks and falls to the ground. It hits with the sound of a falling body. We reach for our guns. We stand ready, our canines gleaming, our nostrils flared, until we’re sure we’re not under attack. We put down our guns and sit until the fringes of our sweaty clothes take on a hint of ice glitter, then we resume our march.

The first terrorist bombs were detonated two weeks ago in Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and New York. Back before people became so untrustworthy, we heard news reports on a survivalist’s radio. The survivalist’s name was Roger Romain. Nobody thought he was paranoid, under the circumstances. His eyes were blue and sometimes they sparkled. He carried a pistol in plain sight and shifty people came to him for advice about guns and tactics and food storage techniques and improvised explosives, and he must’ve been in survivalist heaven.

Every morning Roger Romain used his old Underwood manual typewriter to print out what he’d heard on his radio. The government claimed its investigation had uncovered all the answers. Al Qaeda terrorists had manufactured the bombs with enriched uranium from North Korea. The bombs were thermonuclear devices of Pakistani design. They were smuggled into the country in the holds of oil tankers. They were loaded onto trucks and detonated at ground level. All the facts were so quickly and clearly laid out that nobody believed them. But we believed the government reports about its overwhelming counterstrikes overseas, because the clouds steadily grew thicker and swollen with death.

The cycle continued. We hit them. They threatened us. One day, Roger Romain nailed this note to a tree:

Seattle, Portland, San Francisco? Scratch them off the list.

And then people went all to pieces. There were plenty of guns and not enough food, and so here we are.

But just after the cars stopped, I thought that everything would be okay. Jerry would retire, as we’d planned, and we’d take cruises to Alaska and Mexico and the Caribbean, dancing and dining and walking alone to private cabins that held no kids but plenty of time. The sky was clean and sweetly blue before everything circled back around. I couldn’t believe anything bad had happened. There weren’t any mushroom clouds and the trees were picture-postcard green, but Jerry was adamant.

“Only one thing could’ve caused this.”

“There’s only one thing that can make cars break down?”

“All of them? All at once? Yeah, pretty much.”

Melanie said she’d watched a show on the History Channel about mega-disasters. She said we could’ve been hit by a small gamma-ray burst, flying at us from outer space, but her eyes wouldn’t settle on anything when she said it.

“I don’t think so,” Jerry said. “And listen, what we need to do now is watch the people around us. We need to be ready to defend ourselves when they start going bad.”

“You’re
such
an asshole,” Melanie whispered, and I was thinking it, too. Jerry winced, but he didn’t respond. We sat without talking, nursing our glares, and I didn’t want to believe that people couldn’t be trusted.

In the beginning, the people were fine. It was as if we’d all arrived at a party that didn’t have enough parking places. We pulled our coasting machines onto the shoulders of the freeway and we set about helping one another, families emerging from minivans and SUVs, mothers handing out snacks, fathers helping their sons and daughters into their Christmas coats. So many little girls in red and green. Boys in jeans and holiday sweaters. Mothers with freshened lipstick. We were all somehow formal, even the truckers, who slicked back their hair and tucked in their shirttails and offered to help people with their luggage.

All the voices and introductions and smiles. It felt as if we were waiting for something, a church service or a wedding. It caused me to remember scenes of my youth, my mother dressing for a Christmas service. The rustle of her dress. The smell of her perfume and her industrial hair products and the hasty precision of her walk. Our clear, formal purpose. It was then and now and all those times together, but we were all so worried that our politeness seemed like a sweet act of bravery.

I told myself I wasn’t worried in the least. The walk to Yreka was long but cheerful. Our numbers grew as we neared town. People streamed into that freeway-elongated town from north and south. Melanie and Scott were perfectly well-behaved. They were no longer merely pretending to be adults. They joked with small children and took turns helping burdened mothers carry suitcases, blankets, boxes of formula and juice packets, and even the silly things that didn’t work anymore, worthless digital cameras and iPods and video game players. Christmas presents were opened on the road to placate the children, and the freeway was littered with ribbons and bright wrapping paper. We joked about our early Christmas. We didn’t have to merely make the best of it, because it was a lovely day and we didn’t believe otherwise.

Jerry was carrying something wrapped in our traveling blanket. I learned later that he was carrying three guns: the shotgun, his Beretta pistol, and Scott’s .22 rifle. The long guns were disassembled and rolled into the blanket we’d brought to keep our children’s legs warm. The pistol was loaded, and Jerry carried it at the small of his back. All that sunlight. All those jokes and smiles. All that solidarity and politeness and kindness. Jerry knew it wouldn’t last, but he chose not to rain on our parade. He smiled and pitched in with the carrying and sharing and encouragement. He tousled Scott’s hair and said we were some pretty fine-looking refugees. We laughed because we didn’t believe we
were
refugees. But Jerry was watching everything and everyone. He’s not a naturally trusting man. Not since his time in Beirut. He was armed and ready during that entire walk, and I don’t hate him for it.

He’s hell-bent to get us to a safe place. I can see the fight in his brown-black eyes. He holds his rifle in a natural way that I can never quite match. He walks very quietly, just as he must’ve walked on the training patrols of his youth. This must be a nightmare for him now, to be older and softer and walking here with us. And for the first time ever, I’m glad he served in the Marines and went through the trials and tribulations of Beirut. It’s one of the reasons he’s suspicious and quick to anger and prone to binge drinking, even in the best of times, but everything has a purpose, and I’m a fool if I don’t believe it.

The road climbs again and cuts deeply into the mountains. A rock wall rises on one side, and a cliff falls on the other. Jerry has no choice but to take us onto the road. It feels fine to have hard asphalt under my boots, and we make good time until we come to a tunnel. It’s a hole of darkness set in an impassable ridge. A few scrubby pines grow at uncertain angles around it.

It’s bad enough to walk the road, but it’s quite another thing entirely to march our children into a mountain’s dark gullet. But life is still a matter of faith and probabilities, and the demands upon us are great, and it’s no accident that we don’t have a choice.

I pray for us. Two weeks ago I was agnostic, and the taste of prayer is like an astringent on my lips. Jerry gives one sharp nod. He’s not exactly exuding confidence, but our fate stands before us. We walk inside and leave the daylight behind.

I let the children pass, and I take up position behind them. The kids are stumbling beneath their packs and I catch glimpses of the whites of their eyes. I’m sure they’re desperate to see only stationary things, nothing but the continuation of rock and road and the corrugated lining of the tunnel. I want to cry that it’s come to this, my children walking into a place where even a blind idiot could kill them, but there’s no time for crying.

The tunnel is unlit and it makes a shallow uphill turn. We come to a place of thick darkness. We walk blinded through the mountain’s guts and there are only our amplified footsteps and breathing and the clinking of our packs and a dripping sound to remind us of the relentless power of erosion. And then after walking through the shadow of forever, we see the tunnel exit. It seems to remain at arm’s length for a very long time, but finally we straggle back into the overcast day.

Scotty kneels and kisses the road. Our laughter is weak but true as we put the tunnel behind us. The road winds down from the hills into a small valley. I’m numbed by the rote of walking, but the kids are steady on their feet. There’s a lake filled with cattails and tule and thick, exotic-looking grasses. I imagine its mirrored surface was once ruffled by white birds perched on stick legs, feeding. Then we’re briefly in oak country. Squirrels’ nests decorate bare branches, and bunches of an oily plant stand against the dark sky. It takes me a few seconds to recognize it, but then I do. The plant is mistletoe. I try to resist it, but an image of a long-ago party rises from memory, Jerry as a young man, giving me whiskey kisses as if kissing were an improved way of talking, and me kissing him back, yes, yes, and yes to all his kiss-sent questions, a holiday fireplace warming our backs and all the world in our arms.

I shake my head until my vision blurs. I walk until my vision grows sharp again. Only idiots can sustain that wild kind of love, and even then, after a few years it’s false. I miss it sometimes, but what comes up must come down.