CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The morning sky is a clean, almost electric bright and burning blue. The desert is wide, stretching toward the east and the north. Small rocky hills loom alongside the road.

They have finished their breakfast and make ready to leave.

The Old Man starts the auxiliary power unit and a moment later, the tank. He watches the needles and gauges.

What could I do if there was a problem with any one of them?

Natalie might know something.

We should get as close to Death Valley as we can today. Then cross it tomorrow.

He watches his granddaughter lower herself into the driver’s seat. She smiles and waves from underneath the oversize helmet and a moment later her high soprano voice is in his ear.

“Can I drive today, Grandpa?”

“Stay on the road and when we come to an obstacle, like a burned-up car or a truck that has flipped across the lanes, stop and I’ll tell you which way to go around, okay?”

“Okay, Grandpa.”

They cross onto the highway and she pivots the tank left and toward the north. She overcorrects and for a moment they are off-road.

“Sorry, Grandpa!”

“Don’t worry. You’re doing fine.”

She gets them back on the road and the tank bumps forward with a sudden burst of acceleration as she adjusts her grip.

“Slow and steady,” he reminds her.

“I know, Grandpa.”

They drive for a while, crossing through a high desert town whose wounded windows gape dully out on the dry, brown landscape and prickly stunted yuccas as peeling paint seems to fall away in the sudden morning breeze of the passing tank.

“Are you excited about finding a new name for the valley we’ll cross tomorrow?”

She doesn’t reply for a moment as the tank skirts around a twisted tractor trailer flipped across the road long ago. Inside, the Old Man can see bleached and cracked bones within the driver’s cab.

“Yes, I am.”

The dull hum of the communications system fills the space between their words. Each time they speak, they sound suddenly close to each other.

“If you were going to give me a new name, what would it be?”

The dull hum.

Wheels turning.

“Why would I do that, Grandpa?”

Why would you indeed?

Because I am frightened that I might die and leave you abandoned out here, all alone.

Because a nightmare torments me and calls me by the same name you do.

Because I am trying to change the rules of the game.

And.

Because I love you.

“Oh, I don’t know,” says the Old Man. “Sometimes ‘Grandpa’ makes me feels old.”

“But that’s who you are. You’re Grandpa!”

Silence.

If we can change the name of a valley, can we change my name?

“I don’t know,” he hears her say. “You’re not so old, Grandpa.”

“I know.”

“But I guess … I guess if you wanted to be something else, I could call you … Poppa, maybe?”

I like that.

If I were Poppa, then when I was stuck in the nightmare, I could remember my new name.

And then I would remember it is just a nightmare, and that all I need to do is wake up.

I don’t ever want to be anything else but Poppa.

“I like Poppa. It sounds young. Like I’m full of beans.”

Silence.

They start up the grade that climbs into rocky wastes beyond the fallen buildings of the little town that once was and is now no more.

Where did all the people go? To our west is the Central Valley, Bakersfield, and the Grapevine. I remember passing by those fields on long highways. Long drives are some of my first memories. We had family in Northern California.

Fried chicken.

Summer corn.

White gravy with pepper.

Sweet tea.

The Kern River.

There was a song about the Kern River. My father always sang it when he thought of home. When he found himself in places far away, places where the big jets he flew had taken him. Places not home.

“Poppa?”

The Old Man felt the heat of those long-gone kitchens and early Saturday evenings when the Sacramento Delta breeze came up through the screen doors. Evenings that promised such things would always remain so.

How did they promise?

The Old Man thought.

Because when you are young and in that moment of food and family and time, you cannot imagine things might ever be different.

Or even gone someday.

“Poppa!”

That’s me. I’m Poppa now.

“Yes. What is it?”

“Just practicing. You need to practice too if you’re going to be Poppa now.”

“Okay. I’ll be ready next time.”

“Okay, Grandp—I mean … okay, Poppa.”

Fried chicken.

Saturday dinners.

The heat of the oven.

The Kern River.

Poppa.

The day was at its brutal zenith when they saw the Boy crawling out of the cracked, parched hardpan toward the road. Their road. Dragging himself forward. Dragging himself through the wide stretch of dust and heat that swallowed the horizon.

“Poppa, what do we do?”

She has taken to Poppa. She’s smarter and faster than anyone I ever knew.

“Poppa!”

I don’t want to stop and help this roadside killer.

He thought of the drawings inside the warehouses.

He thought of what the world had become.

He thought of the Horde.

The Roadside Killer.

But you told her, ‘The world has got to become a better place.’

“We’ll stop and see what this person needs.”

The Old Man grabbed his crowbar from its place inside the tank.

They stopped the tank and climbed down onto the hot road, feeling its heat melt through the soles of their shoes, new shoes from long ago that they had taken from the supplies Sergeant Major Preston had stocked.

The Boy was young. Just a few years older than his granddaughter.

One side of him was rippled by thick, long muscles.

The other is thin, almost withered, like that other boy who chased me across the wasteland.

The Boy was mumbling to himself through lips that bled and peeled. His skin, though dark, was horribly burned, even blistering. On his back was an old and faded rucksack. He wore tired, beaten boots that must have once been maroon colored but were now little more than worn-through leather. He wore dusty torn pants and a faded and soft red flannel shirt. At his hip, a steel-forged tomahawk hung from an old belt. And in the Boy’s long hair, attached to a leather thong, a gray-and-white feather, broken and bent along its spine, lay as if waiting for the merest wind to come and catch it up.

He is like that other boy who tried to murder me.

The Old Man looked down and saw his granddaughter’s big dark eyes watching him. Watching to see what he would do next.

Inside them he saw worry.

And …

Inside them he saw mercy.

They knelt down beside the Boy.

The Old Man let the crowbar fall onto the road.

“Who is he, Poppa?”

“I don’t know. But he needs our help. He’s been out here far too long.”

“I’ll get some water, Poppa.”

The Boy began to cry.

Shaking, he convulsed.

Crying, he wheezed, begging the world not to be made of stone, begging the world to give back what it had taken from him.

“Who am I?” sobbed the Boy.

“I think he’s asking, who is he, Poppa!” said his granddaughter as though it were all a game of guessing and she had just won.

The Old Man held the shaking, sobbing Boy and poured water onto his cracked and sunburned lips in the shadow of the rumbling tank.

“He doesn’t know who he is, Poppa. Who is he?”

“He’s just a boy,” said the Old Man, his voice trembling.

“Who am I now?” sobbed the Boy.

The Old Man held the Boy close, willing life, precious life, back into the thin body.

“You’re just a boy, that’s all. Just a boy,” soothed the Old Man, almost in tears.

The Old Man held the Boy tightly.

“You’re just a boy,” he repeated.

“Just a boy.”