Читать книгу After the Flood - Kassandra montag - Страница 16

DANIEL CALCULATED OUR position and estimated that if we sailed southeast for four days we’d be close to Harjo. Daniel repaired the rudder while Pearl and I fished. After watching the birds and the water for hours, Pearl and I finally attached our net to the downrigger and began trawling for mackerel. We fished for two days before catching anything, our stomachs rumbling through the day and night, and when the rope finally went taut at the downrigger I swallowed sharply to stifle the gasp of relief that rose in my throat.

We spilled a full net of mackerel on the deck, the dark stripes on their backs glinting and shining in the sun. Each was at least eight pounds, and I savored the weight of meat in my hands. I gutted them, one after another, while Pearl set up the smoking tripod.

I still kept an eye on Daniel and tried to keep my defenses up. But I was growing more comfortable with him, as it felt as if he’d already been with us for a long while. We were quiet most of the time, just listening to the wind pull against the sail, or the distant splash of a fish or bird. Just sky and sea for miles and miles, the three of us, alone.

The closer we got to Harjo, the more we sailed over the old world, transitioning from the Pacific into water that now rippled over cities in California. I often sailed this way because I had to stick close to the new coasts, but it always haunted me to sail over cities, over the mass graves they’ve become. So many people died not just during the floods but during the migrations, from exposure and dehydration and starvation. Feet bloodied from trying to climb mountains and outrun the water. Possessions abandoned up the mountainside the way they were along the Oregon Trail.

Some of the cities were so deep below, no one would see them again. Others, which had been built at higher elevations, could be explored with goggles and a strong stomach. Their skyscrapers rose out of the water like metal islands.

I used to dive and spearfish in those underwater cities, but more recently I’d done it only when I was desperate. I didn’t like being in the water for long periods of time; didn’t really like being reminded of how it once was. Once, I was diving and swimming through an old city that’d been nestled on a mountainside in the Rockies. Fish made homes in the wreckage, hiding amid the sea grass and anemone. I dove down into an office building that was missing a roof. A few desks and filing cabinets floated in the room, items around them nearly unrecognizable. Barnacle shells grew on a mug with a photo of a child’s face, some birthday gift you once could get sent to you in the mail.

I swam deeper. A school of angelfish scattered and I speared one. As I turned to go up for air, the coiled rope I wore around my shoulder caught on the broken bottom handle of the file cabinet. I yanked at it, jimmying the cabinet loose from where it stood close to a wall. Out of the shadows, a skull tumbled along the floor toward me, settling a foot away. A flicker of movement from within the mouth. Something living inside it.

I yanked on my rope again to get free and the cabinet fell toward me. I shoved the cabinet to the side so it wouldn’t fall on me and my rope slid from the broken handle. In the space behind where the cabinet had stood, two skeletons lay on their sides, facing each other, as though in an embrace. Like falling asleep with a lover. One skeleton didn’t have a skull, but by the way it was positioned, turned toward the other body, I imagined its head had rested on the other’s chest. Positioned like they were waiting for their fate and chose to hold each other when the end came. Disintegrated clothing fluttered around them. Rocks lay on the floor all around their bodies. My oxygen-deprived brain recoiled before I realized they must have filled their pockets and stuffed their clothes with rocks so they could succumb to the water as it slowly inched upward around them, covering their arms that touched the floor first, a final whisper between them before it covered the arms that held each other. Otherwise the water would have separated them when it came, pulling them apart, floating their bodies before it sank them, miles apart.

I dropped the spear and swam for the surface. I traded for nets at the next post and from then on only dove when the nets came up empty.

I didn’t know how to talk to Pearl about what lay beneath us. Farms that fed the nation. Small houses built on quiet residential streets for the post–World War II baby boom. Moments of history between walls. The whole story of how we moved through time, marking the earth with our needs.

It felt like cruelty to bury the earth, to take it all away. I’d look at Pearl and think of all she wouldn’t know. Museums, fireworks on a summer night, bubble baths. These things were already almost gone by the time Row was born. I hadn’t realized how much I lived to give my child the things I valued. How my own enjoyment of them had grown dull with age.

But other times, when everything was so dark out on the sea that I felt already erased, it seemed like a kindness that life before the floods had gone on for as long as it did. Like a miracle without a name.

BY THE THIRD day Pearl pulled Daniel into her games: hopscotch on deck with a piece of charcoal, naming games for each cloud or strange wave. The next day it rained for most of the afternoon and we sat under the deck cover, telling each other stories. Pearl got Daniel to tell her stories about places he’d been that we’d never heard of. I didn’t know whether any of his stories were true, they seemed so tall, and Pearl never asked if they were true or not.

One morning while I was caulking a crack in the gunnel with hemp, Daniel and Pearl played shuffleboard with caps from plastic bottles. They’d drawn squares on the deck with charcoal and took turns knocking their caps into the squares with sticks.

“Why do you like snakes so much?” he asked Pearl.

“They can eat things bigger than them,” Pearl said.

Daniel’s cap skidded outside the square and Pearl cackled with laughter.

“I’d like to see you do better,” Daniel said.

“You will,” Pearl said, biting her lower lip as she concentrated.

Pearl knocked her cap into the square and cheered, hands raised in the air, jumping in a little circle.

Watching them gave me an unexpected good feeling, a warmth spreading slowly through me. It was like I was seeing a puzzle put back together after it had broken apart.

“Where will you go once we’re in Harjo?” I asked Daniel.

He shrugged. “Maybe stay in Harjo, work for a bit.”

We needed a navigator, I kept thinking. Ever since I’d found out he could navigate I considered asking him to stay with us, to help us get to the Valley. I felt like I could trust him—or was it just that I wanted to trust him because I needed him? Daniel was clearly hiding something. I could tell by the way his expression changed when I asked him questions, like a curtain falling over his face, shutting me out.

Pearl and I had never sailed with anyone else, and I liked being alone. Alone was simple and familiar. I felt sore from this division, one part of me wanting him to stay with us and the other part wanting to part ways with him.

The next morning, Harjo loomed in the distance, the sharp mountain peaks piercing the clouds. Sapling pines and shrubs grew near the water and tents and shacks climbed up the mountainside.

Daniel packed up his navigating instruments, hunched under the deck cover, his compass, plotter, divider, and charts spread out in front of him. I turned from Harjo and as I watched him put each instrument carefully in his bag, my chest grew constricted. Do you actually want to reach Row in time? I asked myself. Even if he taught me to navigate, I couldn’t afford to buy the instruments I needed.

Only a few hours later we reached the coast. Seagulls fed on half-rotted fish on the shore. Pearl ran out among the seagulls, squawking and flapping her arms like wings. They rose up around her like a white cloud and she spun, her feet kicking up sand, the red handkerchief waving out of her pocket. I thought of Row watching the cranes, thought of my father’s feet hanging suspended. I couldn’t just do what I wanted anymore. I turned to Daniel, my chest tight.

“Will you stay with us?” I asked Daniel.

Daniel paused from stacking the tripod wood against the gunwale and looked at me.

“We’re going to a place called the Valley,” I rushed on. “It’s supposed to be a safe place, a new community.” Inwardly, I winced at the lie. I hoped he didn’t already know the Valley was a Lost Abbot colony.

His face softened. “I can’t,” he said gently. “I’m sorry. I don’t travel with other people anymore.”

I tried to hide my disappointment. “Why is that?”

Daniel shook his head and thumbed a piece of charred wood in front of him, the ash snowing on the deck. “It’s complicated.”

“Could you just think about it?”

He shook his head again. “Look, I’m grateful for what you did, but … trust me. You don’t want me with you much longer.”

I turned from him and began loading the smoked mackerel into a bucket.

“I’m going to trade this at the post. We can meet after if you want your share,” I said, my last attempt to be appealing, hoping he’d reconsider.

“That mackerel is all yours. I owe you much more than that,” he said.

Damn right, I thought.

“I’ll carry it to the post for you and be on my way,” he said.

I called to Pearl to follow us into town. We climbed rock steps leading up the mountain slope to where the town lay, wedged between a cluster of mountains.

Harjo hummed with motion and voices. A small river cut down a mountain and fell in a waterfall into the sea. Twice as many buildings had been built in the year since I’d been this far south, with a flour mill half constructed up one side of a mountain and a new log cabin next to it with the word HOTEL in bold letters across the façade. Last year, the town was just beginning to farm basic crops like corn, potatoes, and wheat, and I hoped there’d be grain for a decent price at the trading post.

The trading post was a stone building with two floors. We stood outside of it and Daniel handed me the bucket of mackerel.

“Where will you go?” I asked.

“First? The saloon. Have a drink. Ask the locals about work.” He paused and rubbed his jaw. “I know I owe you my life. I’m sorry I can’t go with you.”

“You could,” I said. “You won’t.”

Daniel gave me a look I couldn’t read—one that seemed both regretful and admonishing. He bent down in front of Pearl and tugged on the handkerchief hanging out of the pocket of her pants.

“Don’t you lose that lucky handkerchief,” he said.

She slapped his hand. “Don’t you steal it!” she said playfully.

His face flinched almost imperceptibly, a slight tightening of the muscles.

“You take care,” he said softly.

Several people exited the post and I stepped out of their way.

“We have to go,” I said.

Daniel nodded and turned away.

He was a stranger. I didn’t know why I felt a twinge of grief while I watched him walk away.

THE CREDIT I had in Harjo would buy me less than I thought. I stood at the counter, biting back irritation, shifting my weight from one leg to another.

A middle-aged woman with deep wrinkles and a pair of eyeglasses with only one lens hobbled around the counter to look into my bucket.

“Last time I was here I was told my credit was equal to about two trees,” I told her.

“Costs have changed, my dear. Fish has gone down, wood has gone up.”

She pointed to a chart on a wall which detailed equations: twenty yards of linen equaled two pounds of grain. It ran down to things as small as buttons and big as ships. She clucked her tongue when she saw the mackerel. “Oh, lovely. You must be an excellent fisher. Not easy to catch this much mackerel ’round these parts. And you were the one last year with the sailfish, right?”

“I want to talk to you about wood—”

“You don’t want to buy or build here, dear. We’re growing by leaps and bounds. The mayor just put a limit on cutting lumber. We hardly have any saplings and there haven’t been any shipments in three weeks. I’d go farther south if I were you.”

My stomach dropped. How much time was it going to take to find wood, much less build a boat? Would Row still be in the Valley by then?

“Do you have a salvage yard?”

“Small one, up past Clarence’s Rookery. Where you sailing, if you don’t mind me asking?” The woman began weighing the mackerel and tossing it in a bin beside the scale, the meat landing with a thud.

“Up north. What was Greenland.” I glanced around the shop and saw Pearl looking at an advertisement pinned to the wall by the front door.

The woman clicked her tongue again. “You won’t get up there in a salvage boat. Sea’s too rough. If you ask me, stick around here. Richards told me they found a half-sunk oil tanker off the coast down south a few miles. Going to try and excavate it and renovate it. You know that’s what I’d love—a nice spacious tanker to spend my last days on.”

I used my credit on linen for a new sail. The woman and I negotiated back and forth over the mackerel, finally settling on trading it for an eight-foot rope, a chicken, two bags of flour, and three jars of sauerkraut and a few Harjo coins. Pearl and I had tried to avoid scurvy by trading fish for fresh fruit in the south, but sometimes a whole bucket of fish would only get us three oranges. Sauerkraut lasted longer and was much cheaper, but you had to find a place where cabbage grew to get it.

I handed Pearl the box of sauerkraut to carry and she said, “You got it.”

“My one bright spot,” I muttered. The little bell attached to the door rang as another customer stepped inside. I smelled stone fruit and my mouth began to water and I turned around to see a man carrying a box of peaches to the counter. The scent clouded my mind with longing.

“We need to tell Daniel about the advertiser.”

I glanced down at her in surprise. I’d been trying to teach her to read in the evenings with the two books we owned—an instruction manual for hair dryers and Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth—but didn’t know if my lessons had really stuck.

The advertisement asked for a surveyor, displaying pictures of a compass, divider, and plotter, with the words EARN MONEY, QUICK!

“You read that?” I asked.

She glared at me. “Of course. Where’s the saloon?”

“It’s pretty far. Besides, I’m sure he’ll run across the advertisement on his own.”

“You’re only pretending like you don’t want to see him again, too!” Pearl said. She jiggled the box, the jars clinking against one another.

I smiled despite my disappointment. She always could disarm me. I never could read her half as well as she read me.