The Unit (34 page)

The reunion goes as well as it possibly can.

The snow starts to soften in mid-July. Our tracks grow as big as dinner plates during the day and then freeze hard at night. Jerry sits up in bed, then he can walk far enough to do his business, then he can walk downstairs for meals. His goal is to walk outside to visit Melanie. He’ll be able to do it, soon.

I’ve been visiting Melanie every day. The ground was frozen when she died, and God’s temple spoils when it’s empty, so Donnie burned it. He picked a good spot, a hillside under a spreading oak, with a view of Mount Shasta and Broken Top and the dry lakebed.

He didn’t tell me the details, so I make them up myself. He wrapped her in white bedsheets taken from a rich man’s summer house. He sewed her into a shroud, then he built a tall, foursquare woodpile and soaked it with gasoline siphoned from one of the useless cars on the road. He put her on top, the only girl in the world who treated him like a human being. He lit the match and the fire put its arms around her and it wasn’t only the smoke that made him cry.

It’s only ashes and black bits of charcoal in the snow now. The fire was hot enough to scorch the oak. When it cooled, Donnie carved her name into it. He didn’t know the exact date, but he carved her name on the blackened bark. He carved a heart beneath her name. It’s the most pathetic heart I’ve ever seen.

In August, the thaw achieves a more complete victory. The icy stream moans and leaks at the edges of its banks and then its water breaks. The icicles fall from the eaves of the cabin and shatter when they hit the porch. The world is dripping and soggy. The underbrush here is thin, but it’s made up of the same kinds of plants as the underbrush in Oregon. I watch it try to reassert itself—vine maple and nettles and wild blackberries—and I hate it. Tender buds unfurl and push blossoms into the sky and I want to pinch them tight and shove them back into their rough branches. But the new climate does it for me. Random freezes take place all summer, and the trees are dying. Even the hardy grasses lose their grip, and the slightest breezes blow dust into the house and into our lungs and eyes and dreams.

More days pass. We’ve almost exhausted our supplies. God no longer allows grasses to grow and leaves to open, so I don’t talk to Him anymore. I’m helping Donnie change Jerry’s dressing when another kind of change comes into our lives. I hear a familiar sound. A small airplane is approaching. I walk outside and a little plane comes into view above us, circling the flattened mushroom of our chimney smoke. Scott is standing in the yard. His scarred face is twisted into a scowl. He’s aiming his scoped rifle at the pilot and his finger is on the trigger.

A hand emerges from the airplane’s open window and makes a peace sign. Scott lowers his rifle, but doesn’t put it on safe. The pilot waggles his wings, and then throws something out. Sheets of paper flutter in the sky and float down to litter the forest. I walk into a swirl and pluck a flyer from the air. The front side announces the locations of regional federal aid centers. On the back is a census form, with a notice that martial law is in effect, as if that makes us safer.

I’m not exactly overburdened by my trust of strangers, but we’re hungry, so I set out to walk fifteen miles to the nearest aid center. It’s an overnight trip, at best. Donnie stays home to watch over Jerry and Melanie. Scotty follows me, and I let him.

We’re wearing empty packs in hopes of filling them. We’re dragging sleds we made from the metal of an old garbage can. There’s no snow and the sleds rattle over rocks and keep getting caught on shrubs and low branches.

I’m carrying Donnie’s pistol at the small of my back, and I’m sure that Scott is carrying a concealed weapon, too. I’m walking armed again in open country, and I can’t quite believe there was a time when we rode fast and warm and whole in a big American SUV.

We walk the fifteen miles. We’re not spoiled people anymore, so we don’t complain. There aren’t any clouds, but the sky is gray. I try to enjoy the fact that I’m walking with my son. I’m sure he’ll be leaving us soon. He’s been talking about joining the army or the air force. He’s a pilot, after all, and a young man, and I can’t expect him to stay in the middle of nowhere with us.

Jerry and I expected him to go to college, but I can’t imagine it now. There’s much work to do in America and in the world, and now isn’t the time for passive learning and beer parties and flirting. I watch him pull his sled through clumps of dying grass, and I hardly recognize the boy he once was, last year.

When we near the town, groups of people are converging on the aid center. It makes me nervous to be near them, and they don’t look happy to see us, either. On the main street of the town there’s a sign welcoming us to the Shasta County Federal Aid Center. There’s a sandbagged position manned by National Guard troops. A machine-gun barrel tracks our progress.

We stand in a line. I have no idea what it’s for. The other people in line crowd us, and we glare at them and they glare back. A thin guy with tattoos cruises to the front of the line and takes cuts in a place that opens up in front of a woman in her fifties. The guy says something to the woman and her face goes dark. Scotty pulls his pistol and points it at the tattooed man. I draw my pistol and back him up. The guardsmen at the checkpoint aim their machine gun, and the line-cutter smiles as if someone has made a mistake. We keep our guns on him. He tries to say something, but his voice is small and raspy and I can’t hear his words. When he goes to the end of the line, Scotty puts away his pistol and gives him a small round of applause, and the tension seems to recede below the temperature required for killing.

But then something else happens. The woman in her fifties is shouting at her linemates, asking them how they could be so selfish, so cowardly. She’s thin in her ragged jeans and middle age. Her coat is much too big for her. She pushes up her sleeves and waves her pale hands and shouts at her immediate neighbors, then she turns and shouts at Scott.

“What the hell do
you
know?” she says. “What gives you the right?” Then she starts in on me, saying, “What kind of monster did you raise?”

It’s too much and I take a grip on my pistol and pull it into plain view. The woman doesn’t appear to be armed, but her face is twisted with rage.

“Oh sure,” she says. “Shoot me, why don’t you. But that man you kicked out of line? He wasn’t trying to take cuts. He was here a long time before you even showed up. He went to check on his sick little boy. The boy didn’t make it. I was saving his place, lady, if you must know.”

The others in line are looking at me. All of them. I safe the pistol and put it back into the small of my back.

“You’re no different than the ambushers, lady,” she says. “Can you tell me what makes you different?”

I try to apologize but she turns her back and doesn’t say another word.

The first line allows us to register for aid. There’s a second line to determine how much aid we need, and another line to receive it. We finally enter a small warehouse. Its shelves are stocked with MREs and a few cans of chili and stew. A girl wearing camouflage gives us a single shopping cart. The girl is Melanie’s age. I have the cart half filled with vegetarian items before I remember that Melanie is gone.

We make the trek back to the others. Our little sleds are heavy with canned food, and they raise dust and wipe away our tracks behind us. We’re in the middle of nowhere, and that suits me fine. In the past, driving cross-country, I’d see the damnedest places. Not cities or towns, but places where people isolated themselves, living in hollows and stands of timber and in the middle of deserts. Standoffish people, and I never understood why they chose to live in such places. “Must be hiding something,” I’d think. Drug dealers or perverts or crazy people with bad secrets. But now we’re living in this isolated place, and I know one of the stories that cause people to live alone. We have nothing to hide. We just don’t trust anyone. We’ll live here with the ashes of our daughter, and the boy who cremated her.

Jerry has no intention of leaving, and neither do I.

*     *     *

When Jerry gains enough strength to walk cross-country, he walks directly to Melanie’s final resting place. He needs to be close to her because the Ignoring Game doesn’t work if its players are too far apart to acknowledge each other’s existence. Melanie’s ashes are melting into a hillside beneath a spreading oak, but she’s still with us. She’s taken control of her father’s actions. She lives through him, his every move weighed against what she might say about it. He talks to her sometimes, but mostly they play the game. Sometimes he winks at me, as if to say that our girl is getting really good at it.

And who’s to say that she isn’t actually communicating with him from the great by-and-by? Maybe later I’ll try to help him stomach the truth, but for now I let him believe that our daughter’s silence is only a perfected form of the Ignoring Game, and that humor and love and forgiveness and redemption still exist in the world.

I tally up the government food in our cupboards, then I sit in a rocking chair on the cabin’s porch. I watch the world dry into a weak parody of summer. I’m knitting a pair of socks for Scotty. He’ll be leaving soon to join the military, what Jerry calls “signing his life away.”

I’m mostly trying to concentrate on the knitting, trying to let the work crowd against the black weight in my heart. My shotgun is propped against the wall beside me. Every day I place it a quarter inch farther away from my chair. Someday I might leave it inside, but not today. We have to be smart and hardworking and careful, so we won’t be caught flat-footed when winter returns.

I’ll stay here with Jerry, and maybe I’ll even love him. I know he won’t drink anymore. Never, never, never, he says, and I believe him. And he’s trying to be a good father to our daughter, even as my own grief threatens to take away all hope for the future. If it weren’t for Jerry and Scott and Donnie, our needy new addition, I might commit a great sin against myself. But I’ll stay alive for them. I’ll try to join them in the Ignoring Game, looking for rays of love at the crazy edges of it. Maybe Jerry will expand the game to include me, and maybe someday when we’re riding together on the porch through a long sunset, he’ll turn to me and smile, and I’ll remember how to find enough trust to smile back.

I wish to thank Dr. Alan Robock (Rutgers University) for information provided in his “Climatic Consequences of Regional Nuclear Conflicts” (
Atmos. Chem. Phys
., 7, 2003–2012, 2007,
http://www.atmos-chem-phys.org/7/2003/2007/acp-7-2003-2007.pdf)
and the fine volunteers who run the Calflora Database. This book could not have been written without the love and forbearance of my wife, Sabra, and our daughters, Terra, Brenna, and Riley. I owe an impossible debt of gratitude to the Loney family, who put up with the lot of us, and to Jack and Jan DeHart and my brother, Tom, and sister, Tammy, for never doubting. This book was brought into the wider world by the ceaseless efforts of Jill Marsal, my agent, and my editor, DongWon Song. Thank you. Thanks also to my inimitable Oregon friends and to Francis Ford Coppola’s
Zoetrope
online writing community for the encouragement and support that allowed me to suspend my own disbelief.

Credit: Sabra Loney-DeHart

T
ERRY
D
E
H
ART
is a former U.S. Marine and NASA security analyst. Three of his stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His short stories have appeared in
The Barcelona Review
,
Zoetrope All-Story Extra
,
Night Train Magazine
,
In Posse Review/Web del Sol
,
Paumanok Review
,
Smokelong Quarterly
,
Vestal Review
, and
Opium
, among others. Terry lives with his wife and daughters in the San Francisco Bay Area.