The Crossing

He looked around, scanning the open field of darkness surrounding us. Then he sighed. “You Embers are something else,” he said. Then he spat. “You’ve had your fun. Now, where is he?”

No sooner had the words left his mouth than the blow landed against the back of his head. A tremble went through his body and he slumped to his knees with a pained groan. Then Tommy was there, standing behind him, his fist trembling.

“Run,” Tommy said, as our foster father fell unconscious at his feet.

ELSEWHERE (#u1a514c9e-e573-5827-9d52-3a19530cf496)

The hardest thing was convincing herself not to be afraid of falling asleep. Each and every evening she watched the news and watched talk of The Disease. Her friend over in Alamance County had come down with it. Fell asleep on the sofa one night and then, when morning came, nobody heard from her until her children found her. And this was back near the beginning. Her friend was eighty-seven years old, but spry for her age. Still, spryness doesn’t do anything to repel the unexpected. But wasn’t that the way it had always been?

And now nearly ten years had passed and The Disease was creeping ever closer to people her age. So, like many people of a certain age in this world, she figured that the best thing she could do was to get herself away from everybody. She went down to the store and bought herself as much food as her dead husband’s pickup truck could carry and she came home and loaded up the house and then went back and filled the truck up again and, this time, she also picked up as many sheets of plastic as she could. And duct tape and disinfectant and even a gas mask—which were slowly becoming all the rage even though nobody knew whether or not they would do any good.

When all was said and done she had everything she needed to live for at least a year. Yeah, it might be a year of eating potted meat and crackers until she was blue in the face, but Lord knows there were worse things in this world.

She lived far enough outside of town that she could live the type of life she wanted. The farm was big and old and her dead husband’s pride right up until the day he dropped dead, still sitting atop the same tractor he’d bought when they first got the farm. He’d been dead for nearly twenty years and she was glad that he didn’t live to see the world get to where it was: the killing, the dying, the slow fading away of everything that the whole damn species had spent thousands of years building.

No. He was always too softhearted to be able to stand for such a thing. If that heart attack hadn’t done him the pitiful kindness of taking him when it did, he would have turned on the news in the world today and died from a plain old broken heart.

She thought about her husband a lot in those first few months of living alone, isolated from the rest of the world. Mostly she thought about him as a way to keep from thinking about everything else that was going on around her. She stopped turning on the news in the mornings because it did nothing but let in the worst parts of the world. Nobody said anything good anymore.

And so she would get up at the crack of dawn—always thankful and amazed and terrified to have woken up at all—and piddle about the house before time came to go out and tend to the garden and she would think about her husband and maybe she would hum some song that he used to love—he’d always been partial to Frank Sinatra—and, as the weeks stretched out into months, maybe she would even talk to her dead husband even though she knew good and hell well that he was dead and she wasn’t the type to believe that the dead could hear the breath of the living. But she did it anyway.

Some mornings she talked to him about the past. She told him about the children they’d never had and how she, finally, after all these years, could say that she was glad that they’d never come along. “I just couldn’t live with myself if I had to watch those pretty blue eyes worry over this world,” she said. The only answer the house gave back to her was the gentle clunk-clunk-clunk of the grandfather clock in the living room that never kept the right time but that she wound up anyway because, even if it wasn’t doing a good job, it was important for everything in this world to have a purpose.

That old clock made her think about her own purpose. What was it? Her purpose?

What was a woman without purpose?

What was anyone without purpose?

She asked her dead husband that one night when she woke up from a bad dream—a dream that she’d fallen asleep and been unable to wake up from it. Her palms were sweaty and her long hair matted to her brow and her cheeks were slick with tears, and the words trembled out of her lips like a newborn foal. “What’s my purpose?” she asked.

And her dead husband did not answer her back, even though she sat and waited to hear his heavy, soft voice for over an hour with the darkness and the clunking of that clock down below counting off its irregular and inconstant seconds.

That was the night that she made a promise never to go to sleep again. She’d stay up for as long as she had to, until The Disease came and went and burned away the rest of humanity and all that was left was her and then, by God, she’d know what her purpose was. She’d have the answer she’d been waiting for and she wouldn’t wake up at night sweating and calling out for her husband because, in the end, she couldn’t go on like this: afraid of sleep and afraid of life both at the same time.

She didn’t make it a full two days before falling asleep again.

She tried everything to stop it from happening. She drank coffee until it made her head hurt and her chest tight. She went back to watching the news, hoping that the fear the news gave would make her more able to sit up in the late hours and not fall asleep. The news told her about seventeen new cases of The Disease that had been found around the county and that did give her just the right amount of terror that she needed to stay awake for a little while longer.

But she was an old woman and, try as she might, she could feel the sleep walking her down, as steady as that old clock in the living room and, just before she finally fell asleep—a sleep that she would never wake from, something she knew in the pit of her stomach—she thought she heard her husband’s voice one more time. He said a single word: “Love.”

And her final thought before she fell into the deep, timeless slumber of The Disease was that her question had finally been answered.

TWO (#u1a514c9e-e573-5827-9d52-3a19530cf496)

For what felt like an eternity, I was unable to breathe. Seeing Jim Gannon at Tommy’s feet, I realized I hadn’t really expected for it to work. Gannon was six-foot-two and built like a bad dream. All angles and muscle. More animal than man. And that was before you took into account the police uniform that filled him out with cold authority and made you nervous about crimes you hadn’t committed.

When I finally did breathe again the air rushed into my lungs, air so thick you could drink it, choke on it if you weren’t careful. I felt light-headed and gritted my teeth until the feeling went away.

Standing there in the cold darkness with our foster father lying at Tommy’s feet, I thought of all the ways it could have gone wrong:

Tommy could have stumbled on the uneven earth as he climbed up out of the darkness along the edge of the road, stumbled just loud enough for Gannon to hear him and turn and draw his pistol and squeeze the trigger and put an end to everything. It wouldn’t have been anything other than a reflex action for Gannon. Law enforcement training taking over. But it still would have ended Tommy’s life. Just a sudden flash like a lightbulb bursting, then the long darkness.

Or he could have gotten caught in the headlights of Gannon’s car long before he noticed them. It had been my idea that Tommy follow along at a distance, away from the road, buried in the outer dark, orbiting like some phantom planet. “It won’t be long before he catches up,” I had said. “Do what I tell you and we’ll be okay.” And so he did.

Only now that Gannon was unconscious on the cold, deserted road did Tommy and I laugh.

The laughter was fleeting, but wonderful, like a meteor slashing across the night sky.

“We’ve got to get him out of the road,” I said.

Tommy flinched. He looked up to see me still standing there in front of the car. “I told you to run,” Tommy said, his voice steady and even.

“We’ve got to get him off the road,” I repeated. I was already jogging around and opening the rear door of the police car.

Tommy reached down and took the pistol from Gannon’s holster.

“Take the bullets out of it and throw that away,” I said.

He placed the gun on the highway. He fumbled through the pockets on Gannon’s belt. “Hold these,” he said, handing me the man’s handcuffs. “Hurry up,” he barked.

I took the cuffs. “You don’t need these,” I said.

Tommy rolled Gannon over and, after a few awkward moments, managed to pull him up off the ground and lift him over his back in a fireman’s carry. He’d wrestled off and on growing up. Most of the schools in most of the foster homes he and I had been shuffled through over the years had wrestling programs in some form or other. He’d actually managed to get pretty good at it. The physical side of it—all of the strength and muscles required—were just a matter of deciding to do it. The mental aspect required a lot of thought and Tommy wasn’t much of a thinker, but he had gotten pretty good at that too. He could always tell what his opponent was planning. He always knew, milliseconds before it happened, when someone was going to shoot their hips forward or try to spin out or go for an underhook. And his mind reacted to it all on its own. He didn’t have to think about it. It was one of the few things in his life, maybe even the only thing, that had come naturally to him. If he’d ever stayed in a single school for more than a season, maybe he would have gotten recruited by some college. Maybe in one of those places where wrestling was a pastime and boys like him could be someone people admired.

But he never did stay anywhere longer than a season and so he never had gotten really good and there were no college recruiters looking for him. The only person looking for him was the unconscious foster father he carried on his back.

Just as Tommy got Gannon to the car, I opened the door and there, sitting in the back seat and as quiet as a corpse, was the Old Man, Jim Gannon’s father himself. He’d had a stroke years ago and been confined to his body ever since. The doctors said that he was aware, but paralyzed and unable to speak. The most he ever did was blink, and even that came only on rare occasions.

Gannon had dressed him in khaki work pants and a flannel shirt and a pair of soft-soled nurse’s shoes. The Old Man didn’t seem to register me as I opened the door and took a moment to stare at him.

“What is it?” Tommy asked.

“It’s the Old Man.”

“What?” Tommy looked past me. “Is he sick?” Tommy asked. “The Disease?”

“No,” I said.

Gannon groaned a little, in the early stages of coming around.

“Give me the handcuffs,” Tommy said.

“You don’t need to handcuff him,” I replied. “Just shut the door. It can only be opened from the outside. He won’t be able to get out.”

“Give me the handcuffs, Virginia!”

“You. Don’t. Need. Them,” I said, laying each word out like a brick. Then I turned and tossed the handcuffs out into the darkness. “Don’t be so simple.”