Two towns over in Carlsbad, deer ticks and wood ticks freckled the white beaches, but that wasn’t why Cahill and Afet left. It was as if the ticks had declared war on beachgoers, squadrons marching across boardwalks, spies creeping up palm trees like little brown stars. But it wasn’t a war. The ticks invaded because there were too many deer, because there were too few predators, because there were warmer winters, because of everything.
Here in their new town, Cahill is grumpy but does his best to hide it. His niece Afet seems even grumpier – because they’re leaving this place too. She made friends here, a teenage gang that spends every free moment digging a pit by a shuttered junkbone house. Cahill isn’t sure he likes those kids, but the water runs clean and the neighbors are peaceful. They pile in the truck and rumble away.
Two towns over in Carlsbad, ticks big as guitar picks made blades of grass twang in front lawns. Thirsty milk duds wobbled up white socks. Lyme disease ran through families like the common cold, but that wasn’t why Cahill and Afet left. Cahill and Afet drove away during an aerial spray and watched a wet blue blanket unfurl from planes. The truck wiped insecticide back and forth across the windshield. Cahill swerved around dead frogs in the road.
As they leave their new town, Afet faces away from him with arms crossed and legs folded up on the seat, her dark hair contributing to the sulk. “So why are we picking up grandpa exactly? Can we go back to Carlsbad? Can we see my mom?”
“We can’t go back into the city yet. We should get farther away from those chemicals if anything. Grandpa needs help taking care of himself. He’s going to be living with us in the truck.”
This is why Cahill is grumpy. He hasn’t seen his father in over a decade. Is a beehive excited to see a bear? When they roll up to Senior’s ivory stucco house, the old man teeters out in sunglasses and a trim narrow suitcase. Senior still has a voluminous flourish of white hair and a bulldoggish face. He makes it to the backseat and hauls himself inside.
“Well,” he says. He keeps his sunglasses on. “Been a few years, Junior. Hello to you too, darling. Where to?”
Better shut your hole, Cahill hears. Better sit still and not cry. Better not show your teacher or you know what’ll happen.
“Just a bit farther,” Afet says in a faux-baritone. “Just a bit farther from the beach. To escape the chemicals. One more town away. Just one more. Isn’t that right, Uncle Cahill?”
Cahill doesn’t reply, concedes silently that Afet’s gotten better at impressions. They scream down the highway. The truck is electric, and Cahill installed solar panels along the sides on hinges. He also backfilled the flatbed with compost and highly productive plants. He’ll give Afet everything. Afet’s mom, Cahill’s sister Dilara, keeps two jobs in Carlsbad all for her daughter.
The sun winks off salt deposits gummed onto the green hood. Cahill used to watch the news in a green recliner. He saw what happened to a dry Phoenix, refugees surging out, others sinking into vacant cavities left behind. So he drained his bank and sold his house. He nailed snares to the bumpers, drilled aluminum frames for the panels, trussed chains on the tires and stocked the backseat with bug-out bags.
He expected drought and sea rise. He didn’t expect guests.
Afet glances over to apologize without losing any surly credibility. Senior snores in the back. Cahill squints at the rearview, where his corn bends in the wind. Another pickup, a bigger red one, has followed their every turn for an hour. Barbed wire bounces on its hood. Dilara would give everything to save the child. They should put three towns between themselves and Carlsbad this time. He glides off-road, tunneling through brambles, leaving familiarity behind for bright new country.
Three towns over in Carlsbad, the insecticide settled into the soil, washed into the bay, and caused a fish kill. Silver bodies turned the water to chain mail, but that wasn’t why Cahill and Afet left. There was a storm coming. In the frenzy to buy milk and gasoline, someone T-boned Dilara while she idled at a red light. She called Cahill afterwards and asked him to take Afet out of the city.
Here in their new town, Cahill parks alongside rows of trailers. It’s a harsh land filled with gullies and nettle and wild hogs. Men come to study the truck as it charges. They eye the thick black coils inverting the solar array’s DC current to the AC power of the truck battery. Cahill doesn’t answer questions, tries to communicate in yeps and grunts without seeming rude. There’s an intimacy in his truck and he won’t share its secrets with just anyone. Senior grins at all the attention in his gleaming tints.
“Hey, kid,” Cahill says to Afet, sliding fishing rods out from under the front seat. “Ready to earn your keep? There’s a pond in the quarry.”
“Later,” Afet says, already waving at a moppy blonde boy wearing jorts. Copper dust has stained his arms and legs orange. She flicks her trim mullet back behind her ears and bounds away, elsewhere in her eyes.
Cahill watches her go, feeling like a magnet turned the wrong way, repellant. Senior drags along two folding chairs. “Stuck with the river monster,” he chortles. “Careful around that kid. She’ll turn on you quick as a snake tapped on the tail.”
Better not cry, Cahill hears. Better catch a fish or you ain’t coming back. Better figure it out yourself. Better know this is the last time I let you use my worms.
Sighing loudly, he follows Senior down to the pond. They sit, cast, wait, reel, and repeat. Sapphire birds wing over the water. “You saw that truck tailing us?” Senior asks, bracing his jowls. When Cahill nods, the old man spits. “They show again; we leave. They may be interested in the girl.”
Cahill glares. “Don’t pretend you care,” he says. “It won’t make me forgive you.”
Senior frowns but doesn’t push it. A big bluegill bites, their third catch of the day, and Senior reels him in, smooths the spines down almost fondly. “Not much, but something to nibble,” he says happily. “What the earth offers, you accept as a gift.”
Cahill checks the truck behind them. Afet sits cross-legged with the boy, already grubby, engaged in a thumb-war. She won’t notice. Cahill peers at his fishbowl reflection in Senior’s aviators. “Show me,” he says.
With unsteady hands, Senior slides the sunglasses down the bridge of his nose. The left eye has been sewn shut with purple stitches, the tie-offs same as Senior’s fishing line. The captive eye underneath rolls as if it senses a visitor. “If it wasn’t dried out it was weeping. Had to keep it closed somehow.”
“That’s what they say to do,” Cahill agreed. “Bells palsy?”
“Yessir. Lyme disease turned rottener. Didn’t want to scare the girl.”
Cahill flicks his eyes up the hill again. “Don’t speak to her,” he whispers. “Stick to yourself, keep the secret and we might just get along.”
Senior sneezes.
Better forget about mommy, Cahill hears. Better grow up fast. Better get ready for mommy issues; I can’t do a thing about that.
“In fact,” Cahill growls in his most threatening voice. “Better not tell Afet, or I’ll throw your evil one-eyed ass in this pond and give the bluegills a chance to dig the worms out of your brain.”
“No one says bless you when I sneeze,” Senior complains.
Here in their new town, they settle in. They pick meat from the toothpick bones of small fish and pluck cherry tomatoes from the flatbed. Afet spends her days with the lichen-dusted boy. Senior keeps his sunglasses on and beams at everyone. Afet doodles poorly in a journal. Her turtles look like flying saucers, a vulnerable detail that inspires in Cahill a strange awe and affection. At night, the shrieks of foxes reach into their dreams. They twist in their sleeping bags until the night takes them again.
A place starts to feel like home when the animals recognize you. The biggest catfish in the pond teases Cahill and Senior, a slash of shadow, whiskering and nuzzling but never biting. Jackrabbits hop up on the wheels to gnaw the squash greens. Cahill looks for Afet but settles for Senior when recruiting help to set the wire traps hanging from his bumper. But a red raccoon plucks the peanut butter from the traps each night by reaching through the bars, rendering them ineffective.
That’s the week the big red truck with a slinky of concertina-wire around its hood heaves itself over the pitted road into camp.
Senior holds still when it does, sucking the thighbone of a hare. The vehicle slows. A thick pink tongue dangling over a black jaw hangs out the window. Not many people keep dogs on the road, and this must be the biggest hound Cahill’s ever seen. Hiding in its eye is dumb joy and hunger. After pausing, the vehicle sidles down a goat path out of sight from the other campers. Cahill looks at his father. “Tonight,” he says. They begin dressing last night’s snared squirrel for salting. Cahill laces a trap with fish to lure the red raccoon.
Senior and Afet snore softly in their bags when a crack in the brambles wakes Cahill. In the dim, he watches Afet’s silhouette breathe in perfect thrusts like an animatronic doll. The feeling is not guilt, not love, not pity; it’s a single thing made whole by all those. It makes him do something he wouldn’t normally dare. He slithers out of his sleeping bag like a molting fly and snips two bars off a snare cage with shears. Creeping along the tree line, he follows the goat path until he sees the spoked loops of wire on the truck. The dog is going to bark. The dog is going to bark. The dog is going to bark, he knows it.
But the quiet holds. Cahill digs, careful as an archaeologist, until both steel spines are stuffed neck deep in a tire. They will bleed air slowly. Songbirds carol their first songs of the day as he shimmies back to camp, and it’s good they do, because it covers up his gasp when he spots the arch of the great hound trotting away from his family, coloring in the gaps between the trees.
Cahill finds a note tucked in the wipers. It is titled THE DEAL. Senior and Afet sleep soundly. He crumples it into his breast pocket without reading. The wily red raccoon, trapped at last by fish, uses the gap made by Cahill’s wire cutting to pry itself free and haul away into the thickets. He watches the tawny ribbon of it part the bushes. If the earth didn’t offer it up, back it goes. “Let’s go,” he says to everyone. He lays down as if he too just woke up.
Four towns over in Carlsbad, the responders told Cahill ‘We’re sorry – nobody wants to see this.’ So why did Cahill drive to the intersection where Dilara sat in her car seat still? The ants were beginning to notice. He couldn’t leave her. The storm would hit soon, the sky the same green as an engorged tick, and planes swept low spilling blue poison like a gender reveal, everything will be male, but that wasn’t why Cahill picked up Afet. He told her about the city’s dangers, but that wasn’t what he was protecting her from.
On the drive to their new town, the houses grow smaller, the dogs more coyote, and the air full of baked brick and iron. Cahill finds a group of refugees from an island eaten by the sea. “Welcome to our river town,” they say. Afet looks up at a pitched ceiling and Cahill admires a kitchenette beside cots. It’s a place beautiful in its vagueness. Trees hook into the sky. A riverbed tilts the world toward its canyon depths, though the water has run low.
“How do our crops work?” Afet asks. Cahill blinks, tries not to smile. He explains how the three sisters – corn, beans, and squash – grow together. Corn shoots up with shallow roots, providing a stalk for bean vines to climb. The beans in turn provide nitrogen and stabilize the corn. Squash shades the soil, helping the flatbed retain water. He draws deep pleasure from Afet’s shining eyes. There’s a fourth sister he leaves out of the story, she who is rot, who gives her body to the earth as a gift.
“I’d like to help take care of them,” Afet says. She hoists herself up to stand in the crisscrossing stalks bursting from the truck. “You could hide in here!” Cahill smiles. Dilara would be happy. They stand in the shade and watch Senior shoulder down the hill after a few scrawny kids playing manhunt. “Why do we keep running?” she asks. “I know the truck takes a few days of good sun to charge, but I settle in just for us to leave.”
“I’m sorry,” Cahill manages. “The tick spray, the storm—”
But Afet has turned into his shoulder to cry. Her small shoulders stab into his chest. She knows. Cahill lets tears of his own fall and clamps her to him. The old fucker said something. Dilara gave everything for Afet right until the car crushed her. Cahill never forgave Senior for his childhood and he will never forgive him for this.
Better learn you ain’t a hero. Better figure out nobody’s special. Better get it in your damn head that anybody can die. Better accept it because nobody else cares.
“I should rip off his sunglasses. Damned cyclops! Afet, hop in. Let’s go home.”
Her head pops up, dark eyes turned pink. A mix of grief and confusion marks her brow. “Go home? We need to find home. Do you think grandpa told me? Cause he didn’t. What did you mean about the glasses?”
“You just guessed…?”
“Uncle Cahill. She would have called by now.”
A small uproar interrupts them from the riverbank. Parents poke their heads out of A-frames. “Is it happening?” they ask, hints of smiles pulling on their faces. Cahill and Afet frown; they have no idea. They follow a procession down to the riverbank, where a huddle of children and Senior perch on rocks in the mud. The water has dwindled to a needle and one child has spotted the end, as if the river were a serpent with a tail.
“It’s the end of the river!” the children cry. Parents scramble back up the embankment to fetch beers. It seems to Cahill a strange thing to celebrate, the death of a river, but he doesn’t decline the cool can pressed into his palm. He sits beside Afet and notices how the children make a ring around Senior, waiting.
“They used to give you free water at restaurants,” Senior tells them. “Back then, we could’ve gone out to eat, gotten glasses of free water, and brought it back to pour in the river.”
The children ruffle on their stepping stones, excited by the idea. Senior roars like a lion, and they shriek with delight, a few toppling into the mud. They gasp at his tales of chilly inside-air and squeal EW when he confesses he’s fond to death of cottage cheese. Cahill finds himself entranced. He needn’t forgive so many selfish crimes. The children can do it for him. Senior might deserve a chance with them, if not him.
Afet leans against her uncle and a crinkle sounds from his shirt. The letter. Furtively, so as not to disturb Afet, Cahill slides the rumpled paper from his pocket and smooths it over his knee. THE DEAL. He skims. I’ve followed you. I am the girl with the big dog. I do not approach strangers in daytime. The culture on your truck is impressive and I would like to offer you my guard dog, if you will teach me to become a mobile farm. I can trade a worm bin.
Cahill feels a pang, knowing her tires are husks by now. He’ll bring a spare to this poor girl. He needs a worm bin. The flatbed has started to smell because of the secret not even Senior knows. The children cheer. The river has shrunk to a black snake rounding the corner toward them, leaving a thread of mud in its wake. It slips through stones and fattens with rivets in the earth. The end passes them by and nobody tries to stop it. Senior talks of riding rapids down canyons in this river long ago.
“He’s not so bad as mom said, is he?” Afet says.
Cahill pats her shoulder. “Senior? Did your mom say much about him?”
Afet shrugs.
Her uncle laughs. “Well, maybe he’s not. Not anymore.”
Five towns over. Six towns over. Twelve towns over. Too many towns over to count, in Carlsbad, the waters recede, having looted the land for all it had. Chairs, roofs, and memories in boxes sink into the bay. The soil won’t grow new plants for a time, salted by the sea and poisoned from the sky. All except for eighty cubic feet shoveled up and hauled far away. The fruits borne from that soil draw too from a woman who could not be left behind to soak up tick-killer or sea salt. She gives Afet everything still. Breathe deep in the culture of that flatbed, and you’ll detect a thing turned into another thing, the smell of earth’s gifts, the smell of a mother.
James Cato is an environmental organizer and lives in Pittsburgh with his gecko, Bocci. Look for him in Reckoning, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Daily Science Fiction, among others. He tweets humbly @the_sour_potato and his work lives on jamescatoauthor.com/fiction. His first collection, Becoming Roadkill, is forthcoming soon from Red Bird Chapbooks.