After All

Part 3: You Old Ghosts

Toward night they quit the trail and stealth-camped wherever they found cover. Dinner was FEMA grub: protein bars and vitamin cookies. They never built fires—you didn’t want to announce yourself—but were warm just the same in their coats and bedrolls. Benny hadn’t slept out before, and the night sounds spooked him. Swallowing his fear, he said he wished they had some music. What do you know about music? the Bear asked. Benny said, One time a show come through, a man on a guitar, another on a pinano—piano, the Bear said—piano, Benny went on, drum, horn, every damn thing. I remember some of the songs. Sing one, the Bear said. Jesse James was a lad that killed many a man. He robbed the Danville train. And the dirty little coward that shot Mr. Howard laid poor Jesse in his grave. The Bear clapped softly when Benny finished. Later that night, snapping twigs and rustling brush woke them both. They clutched their knives and held their breath. The moon showed a doe and two fawns high-stepping across the clearing they were camped in. Well, I’ll be damned, the Bear whispered. Boo, you old ghosts, boo.

* * *

The Bear did a little of everything to get by. Digging, hammering, hauling. What he mostly was, though, what he called himself, was a picker, one of those some said resourceful others said ghoulish men who ventured into blast zones to scrounge the ruins for trade goods. Pulling his cart behind him, he trekked deep into sectors that’ll still be toxic a hundred years from now and came out with tools, boots, scrap metal—whatever he could get at with his shovel and pry bar. His hauls set him up pretty well—he had a small trailer to bunk in, a bicycle, a nice woodstove—but he paid for every bit of it with lost sleep. Those who ain’t seen what I have can’t imagine, he said, thinking of the family of skeletons he found huddled together under a bedspread, the blasphemous farewell of a priest scrawled on the wall of a church, and the newborns at the hospital shrunk to totems of leather and bone and hair. He was burdened with the final moments of towns full of corpses, bore them like a curse of constant pain. For this reason his most closely guarded possession was a gun he’d unearthed on one of his forays and carried with him everywhere, hidden in the bottom of his ruck, a revolver so hot it set off Geigers if he wasn’t careful. Just one round rested in it, the bullet the Bear called his last meal, his ticket out when the dead babies and radioactive dust storms finally broke his spirit.