New Birds

Salmon With Lemon Part 14

Keitin's car was ugly but comfortable. It had beaten and cracked leather seats and triple-filtered AC that filled the car with a pleasant, nostril-tingling freshness. It was a fallow smell that brought up endless possibilities to sweeten it with, while keeping the smell of the lowlands, which was a cross somewhere between sulphur and ammonia, outside the car.

The vehicle once belonged to his maternal grandmother's estate. An estate that consisted of a crumbling ransacked mansion and two buried shipping containers in the hillside behind her house. It was his grandmother's diary, full of her large loopy handwriting, which gave him the location of the containers almost ten years after her death. He found three vehicles in the containers. Two Judy Chicago paintings were stored in the trunk of one vehicle. An Andy Warhol in the back seat of another. Keitin sold the paintings and the small electric cars but kept the gas-powered Lincoln even though gas was more difficult to obtain than electricity. Regardless, he deemed it a wonderful fine and took great care of this vehicle because manufacturing never did return. At least at any scale. But there were plenty of small enterprises that made use of the world's leftovers by repairing and rebuilding things. Body shops that piecemealed everything from vehicles to appliances together. And solar generated power agents that kept the lights on in most places. And gas and water agents that still delivered to the foothills. Whatever remained on the roads, there was much labour involved keeping them there, including labours of love. This was true too for Keitin and his boat of a vehicle.

She hadn't slept a wink at the gated lodge because of the many headache-producing smells that surrounded the place. She wanted to return to the car to sleep, but Keitin insisted they remain in the room. Said it was safer.

She slipped off her good boots and brought her feet up underneath her on the sagging seat, hoping for a better view out the passenger side window, but the lifeless landscape continued. "So many ruins down here. Endless stretches of them," she said.

"Ruins make good markers," Keitin said.

A roadrunner, with very few feathers and a thick crust of scab around its neck, darted across the road in front of them. Keitin not only failed to brake, he may have accelerated, and the bird escaped narrowly, running off across a landscape of cracked earth and bare hills.

"Damn, Keitin, slow down before you annihilate another species," she said.

"That would have been better off as roadkill," he said, as he swerved hard to avoid a deep hole in the road. Tilly hit the door. "For goodness' sakes, I said slow down." She rubbed at her shoulder.

"I want to get on the road up to the facility while there is some resemblance of daylight. Unless you prefer driving in circles all night and attracting undesirables." He slammed on the brakes, barely avoiding sliding into a three-foot gash. Tilly got her hands up in time to keep her face from hitting the dash.

"That's new. I wouldn't have noticed that in the dark." He backed the car up and drove slowly around the crevice. It must have scared him as much as it had her, because he drove with extra caution after that.

Soon they came to a high bridge so red with rust it flared. The river below was a scant trail of muddy water. Tilly closed her eyes as they crossed, not wanting to witness the infrastructure's fragility. On the other side, she relaxed some and turned to watch the bridge recede from the back window. Once again, they were gaining altitude, leaving the plains and its heart-breaking desolation behind.

She sent another small mental apology to Louis for the start Marshall would surely give him. He'll believe she finally threw a century's worth of caution to the wind, leaving their precious trees and animals in a stranger's care. And he may just be right for her unfounded trust for this boy had overridden all other logic.