“Nana, we do get there. Tomorrow we’ll be there.” Serena had the white, burnished phone with a cracked screen in her lap. Nana noticed a black SUV approaching fast behind them. There was a rumble in the sky, the sound of fighter planes flashing past, the supersonic boom of one breaking the speed of sound. Had the country’s Dear Leader started another war to divert attention from the chaos everywhere? She couldn’t keep up anymore.
“We need gas,” Nana said. The gauge was close to empty.
“Won’t we get there tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow when you say “tomorrow,” you won’t mean the same day that you mean right now when you say that word. Get it? We can’t step in the same river twice because the water in it isn’t the same water that was there the first time we got our toes wet.” Nana found her mind perambulating from where she was and into the kind of trance that lets a driver go for miles lost in the thunk-a-thunk of tires kalunk-ing over seams in the asphalt. The gas gauge was in the red zone. The last three stations had been closed. For good. One had been ransacked, the attached convenience store’s picture window shattered and shelves emptied. She could feel tears well up and fought them back. It wouldn’t do to weep. Not in front of Serena.
The black SUV had tinted windows and was riding their back fender. Nana snapped her fingers. It was a sign. Serena stopped talking and reached to open the glove compartment. The muscles in her wrists straining, she took out the heavy pistol, keeping the barrel pointed away from them both, unclicked the safety, and passed it to Nana, who placed it snug in her lap.
The tension in the car didn’t break until the SUV swung into the passing lane and held steady beside them, a passenger with aviator glasses staring at her with such intensity that she showed him the gun. Nana saw white teeth before the passenger turned to the driver and the SUV roared past. She slowed to increase the distance between them. Soon enough it had disappeared into the horizon they never reached.
She handed the gun, safety engaged again, to Serena, who put it back into its compartment and played with her phone. “I found a site where they say the horizon is a question of perspective.”
It took Nana more than a moment to come back. “That’s right. Things look smaller when they’re far away. That’s perspective.” Though she kept the thought to herself, she was surprised the AI voice on the phone still functioned as normally as it did. Parts of the world still worked. The cell towers and relays, some of them, were still up. The Police protected technology more than people. Fargo might be safer than the road.
“Hmm. Sometimes they’re not that much bigger when you get close,” Serena said. Nana could hear dread in her voice. A panic attack—something new this week, but frequent in their picaresque life—itched to get loose. “Why can’t we ever get there?”
Uh-oh. She could tell that Serena might whine, then complain, which could become a tantrum, or worse. It could get so bad that it might crash the system until there was nothing to do but stop the car and wait it out. “We’re getting closer. It doesn’t seem like it because the landscape looks the same on both sides of the road as far ahead as we can see, all that dirty snow, the swirl of the wind on the road, but trust me.” Trust me, she thought, almost desperate. She could smell her stale stink, the funk of dread and fear. She needed a shower. “Soon enough we’ll be there, even though it feels like we never get any closer to where we want to be.” And where the hell exactly was that?
That was the question. To be or not to be?
To be, to be, to be, she thought.
A great sadness clouded her vision, like a mystic’s dream of peace destroyed by a false idol. “Your mother will find us, or we’ll find her.” She could see Ava, her daughter, as brave or braver than Serena, until the dope sickness took hold and congealed her life into tilting desire for the next fix.
It didn’t really matter anymore what Nana said to Serena. It was all BS.
It was past time to leave the Dakotas for good, just like so many others had done. Get down to Tulsa, the land of tornadoes, where it was supposed to be safe, where civilization was still intact, where people were welcome, more than welcome, or so she had heard, but that would be one long, white-knuckled drive, and she found herself hoping that Ava would find them first. Otherwise, they needed to join a convoy; Nana didn’t have the resources or skills to turn the tables and go find Ava, not up in the Boundary Waters.
They waited for the phone to ring but it never did, at least not with Ava’s voice.
“We’re not getting closer, Nana!” It sounded like a shriek; Serena had one hand tight around the phone. “It’s farther away! Nana! I want to be there! Stop the car!” There was panic in her voice. “Where are we?”
“I want to be there too,” Nana said, perversely stomping on the accelerator to tend to her own anxiety, glancing at the gas gauge, feeling her throat tighten, her own small hairball of panic finding purchase. She opened the window to clear the air and saw the exit for Goat Hollow, which was on a promontory, not in a hollow, and didn’t have any goats. It overlooked a lake with vacation houses around it, now mostly abandoned. “Goat Hollow will never lose its charm,” she remembered a friend, a historian of the region, telling her once. He was dead now. The Marauders had come through like a sky filled with locusts and left death and devastation behind. They had beaten him to death when he told them to get the hell out of town; he had always been a man who had no filters. That was what she had heard, anyway, that he was dead and gone, like an old blues song. He had been buried in a field of flowers. It gave her comfort to imagine blossoms growing out of his skull.
The gas station had survived, maybe bought safety with fuel. She hoped it was still open. We aren’t helpless, she told herself, and repeated the sentence like a mantra. Resist. Fight back. Prevail.
Snow swirled on the blacktop and made driving difficult. Serena’s phone pinged, a message from somebody better placed in the world, and she started thumb texting. She was very good at it. She had text pals all over the world, but not in the Dakotas. They gave her hope that something better was ahead, over the horizon.
The panic that had been with them in the car like a crow keening over carrion took a break. She rolled the window back up. Thank God for attention deficit, Nana thought. Her own mind went traveling, far away from the narrow, deserted road with loose snow swirling across it. She remembered a picnic in a state park where the land was so desolate that it was beautiful, awe-inspiring. The weather dropped almost 30 degrees in a matter of hours; feeling it happen was life-altering. Her mother had been there, her father, her sister, her daughter, and an infant: Serena.
She rested in the memory. The panic passed. So many no longer alive upon the Earth. But isn’t that the way it always is—generations flipping like decks of playing cards in the hands of a gambler? Everything was broken, but nothing had changed. The first rule of life is that everything dies. Maybe not so fast, though, maybe not so quick.
She drove along two-lane blacktop. Goat Hollow was twelve miles away. One section of road with shelter belts of bare-limbed trees on either side had mounds of snow rising up and tilting toward them. Somebody was keeping the road open with a plow. The invisible hand of civilization still had its story to tell.
“Nana?”
The word took her by surprise. “Yes, Serena?”
“Are you crying?”
“Crying? No, I—yes, yes, I guess I am. Funny how that can happen.”
“Why are you crying?”
“Why? About something that happened in somebody else’s life that I can’t do anything to make better.”
“Really? There’s no medicine?”
“No, there isn’t.” She thought about it and slowed when she felt the tires slide into roadside gravel. The truck with its bare tires could be a boat, she thought, sailing across a great sea of white foam. “Well, there might be medicine, but it doesn’t work.” Not anymore, she thought. Too many quacks and con men. She waited for her own phone in her pocket to ping. Somebody would contact her. There had to be someplace in the Dakotas that was still safe, where “solitary” was a catchword and not a nightmare. She could remember not so long ago driving over a cattle guard to spend three nights with a family of farmers she had met in better times. They had made their money from oil. The land was spoiled, but they had built a sanctuary. They grew food in greenhouses even in winter.
Two cowboys had stood on either side of the cattle guard and given the stink eye to her and the child. “Hey, honey,” one said. She had showed him the gun. He had raised his hands like a marionette in an exaggerated shrug to show there would be no trouble. “Crazy bitch,” he muttered.
The farm family was alarmed to hear about it, because they didn’t know the cowboys. But at least they were just aimless drifters, not Marauders, and the family had fed the girl and the woman well; shared what they knew about conditions, particularly on the coast, where the waters were so high that some cities had built walls that didn’t do much good; and packaged up some food for them. They even tried—half-heartedly—to convince them to stay. “Thanks, many thanks,” she said. They headed back to the interstate and drove some days, stayed put on others, but never traveled, if they could help it, after dark.
“Medicine won’t help? It’s not that kind of predicament?” Serena asked. Nana was surprised she knew the word. Maybe it was something she had heard on one of the podcasts she subscribed to. Nana thought of the podcasts as little DNA packets of mediated information that might or might not be true about everything under the sun. “How about hugs and kisses, Nana? That always helps, doesn’t it? Mamá always told me that.”
“That almost always helps, doesn’t it?” she said, half listening, preoccupied. “But in this case I don’t think it can do much good.” She scanned the roadside for temporary shelter, someplace they could hide if the need arose. There were farm roads, driveways, places to stop and hole up and sleep if need be in the shelter of the truck’s camper shell. Even a grove of trees might do the trick if they could get to it from the blacktop in the snow. She had rope and cowbells she placed around the truck to tip them off if somebody with ill intentions entered their private space. Sometimes just the wind made a racket.
“Why not?” Serena laid the phone between her legs and turned toward her, now all ears. My granddaughter is well-made, Nana thought, a notion that threatened more tears. Minutes ago, she was close to panic. Now she’s taking a considered view of things.
“I’m sorry to say this, Serena, but it’s hard to explain to you.” What’s the right amount of information to share with a ten-year-old in such times?
“Will it make you cry again?”
Nana raised an eyebrow. What a clever thing to say. She considered the question. “It might. Even thinking about it makes me cry. But it’s also something that ’will be easier to tell you about when you get a little bit older.”
“When I reach the horizon, you mean?”
“It’s about missing people and knowing what you would do if it was you inside their skin. And you love them, so much, but maybe they try to do what they think you want them to do instead of what they want to do themselves, or maybe they just don’t know what they want. Things break, is what I’m trying to say. Things break inside people all over the world, and the world itself breaks, real bad, but I’m also making a mountain of a molehill because she’s alive, I think, just not happy or able to make her life move ahead. As long as you’re alive, there’s hope.”
“Who’s her? And how do you know she’s alive?”
“Let’s not get into it.”
“Somebody who might not come back? Somebody who doesn’t give”—Serena made sure to emphasize, like a headmistress, each of the next four words—”a good god damn?” The car became quiet. Nana almost turned on the radio to break the tension. “I think I know.”
“Okey dokey; maybe you do, but let’s not get into it.”
“Nana, you’re crying again.”
“Am I? That’s okay. It’s okay to cry.” It’s not, she thought, not now. “Just give me a minute.” The clouds cleared ahead, on the horizon. Flakes of snow, portending worse weather, followed behind. It would be close to a full moon. Even with the sparse white flakes, both grandmother and granddaughter could see sun and moon like low-hanging fruit. A welcome oddity, but neither said a thing.
They reached Goat Hollow. It was a town that had seen better days. She could see the gas station down the road past a pawnshop with heavy bars across its front window and an antiques store with plywood instead of glass. Still, whatever the Marauders had wrecked, if that story was true, the town had cleaned up some.
Without being told, Serena retrieved the gun but didn’t pass it to Nana, who could puncture an empty tin can smack dab in its middle from a distance of fifteen feet. She oiled it, kept it clean. Her father had liked guns and taught her what he could. Nana had done the same for Serena, but glanced at her in annoyance. “Let me have it,” she said.
“No,” Serena said. “I’ve got this.” She sounded to Nana like a stone-cold killer.
