A Secret of Men (Part 2 of 3)

    They were heading up the slabstone path in Mr. Gregor’s backyard when the sputtering began again.  He remembered Ivan spinning and, pulling his mask forward, asking, “Fuck they doing it again for?”

    “There were only about twelve earlier.  Maybe it’s the rest of them coming back?”  he remembered saying.  

    Ivan increased his speed.  “Fuckers!”

    “Guess we can expect the rest of them sometime around midnight.”  

The young man could hear him growl as he refastened his mask.  They filled the rectangles in and, after the young man telephoned his mother,  ate a hastily-made dinner of boiled potatoes, peas, and carrots in the cellar with Mr. Greggor.  They watched the last of the smoke continue to dissipate through the cellar’s window.  When the sputtering had lowered to a whisper, he was able to convince the two to let him brave the short forest path home.  When he was heading up the stairs, Ivan said “Saorise’s been hiding our cash in our Bible.  They never get taken.”  

Mr. Greggor snickered.  “I told her that.”

The young man said he’d keep that in mind.  He had the door halfway open, and as he raised his foot to step out, everywhere briefly went white, before an invisible force reached him that slammed the door shut and sent him tumbling to the bottom of the stairs.  

When he awoke, everything hurt and he was alone.  He had no way of knowing how long he was out for, but the doors had already been opened and with the gray square of the sky he’d thought he had slept through the night.  He used his arms more than his legs when making his way up and when he reached his hand over the door frame he quickly drew it back.  The ground was hot to the touch.  He rubbed the tender areas of his legs before forcing himself to stand.  Ash falling everywhere like giant ugly snowflakes.  Everything not metal or stone, burnt or on fire.  He walked out to the main road and began to walk in the direction of his home, his boots making subtle prints in the concrete.  The black husks of small animals were like sprinkled everywhere.  Dogs ran up and down the streets barking and howling at the commotion and to each other.  People draped in the ash and soot of their belongings stood in their front yards in their masks as their houses burned.  As the ringing in his ears desisted, different cries slithered into his ears.  Some indistinguishable through their coughing.  Some the names of kin.  Cries that would stay there forever.  Trees and telephone poles were blown all over the road, sinking into it until they reached the soil that was there before everything else.  

His home was at the end of the street and one of the few left standing, asides from the straw roof which burned up soon after the initial blast, along with the windows that shattered.  His mother was sitting with Heinrich on a conjoined set of deckchairs on the front lawn with her mask in her lap, smoking one of the cigarettes her father had rolled when he lived with them.  When she noticed him, she got up, fastened his mask over his mouth and nose, hugged him tight, and then sat back down.  He wanted to say something, but couldn’t think of what.  Heinrich would have been about fourteen then.  He tried to recall what Heinrich looked like when he was young, but couldn’t.  

He had said something to Heinrich before Ivan hove into view, his mask dangling from his belt like a viking’s trophy, a jagged tear where the canister should have been.  The front of his body was peppered with little shards of glass from the cellar window and his clothes and the ash stuck to the front of him.  He told him to “Come on,” to which he obliged.  His mother tried to get him to take her full-face mask, but he refused. 

When they were out of view of his mother and Heinrich, he removed his mask and asked: “Where are we going?”

“Bijou’s house.”

Karl Bijou.  An amateur mechanic who was infamous to the Constabulary for the homemade explosives he unleashed upon their vehicles and heavy armaments, who had been turned in last month by a farm laborer who supplied him with some scrap metal.  “Why?”
    “He’s dead.  He got loose this morning, but they got him.”  He waived his right hand around them.  “But that’s what all this shit is about!”

The young man briefly stopped.  “Jesus.”  He took a few steps forward, hurled, and kept going.  Ivan hadn’t noticed. Without losing his pace, he kicked a half-buried gnome out of the ground and jumped around on one foot, cursing freely and hitting the air. Ivan didn’t notice that either.

Bijou’s home was five miles away in Sardriq, but they plundered two bicycles by the roadside and rode until they had to abandon them upon reaching the edge of its neighboring town, Ventson, where the black front yards were replaced with thin and coagulated cement sidewalks.  Beyond Sardriq was Winton, the industrial heart of Kurn which had been flown over twice, with stronger ammunition than what had been dropped over the young man’s hamlet, in planes without propellers, their own planes.  

They could smell the multitude before they could see them.  Their skin and faces black as coal, coughing freely into the air, only the odd child wearing a mask.  The cropdusters had avoided the area so most hadn’t the time to retrieve their masks before their homes were engulfed.  Most of the multitude were from the row houses for the kinship of the factory workers, wearing only their nightwear and without shoes.  They went in all available directions, but most of them to no place in particular.  Ivan removed his mask and, for the first time, looked back to the young man.  “We’re almost there.  You good?”  The young man nodded and they waded forward.  When Ivan removed his mask and let it go to the first person to reach for it, the young man did the same.  Their path only became increasingly dense as those living further within the city made their way through, most of them with parts of their hair and clothing still singed. Countless tendrils of smoke coming off them and slithering around them in all directions.  Like marionettes with their strings tangled.  They passed only a few corpses belonging to those who had tried to flee after the first wave, their leathered surfaces like air bubbles in the road, some without the skin on their faces, peeled away when their masks were removed. 

Like his own, Bijou’s house, built by stonemasons at the turn of the prior century, remained predominantly intact.  As did the Constabulary’s barricades which had been installed over the front and back doors the month before.  Ivan squatted and felt around under the wilted black blades of grass until he found a rock and tossed it through the front windowpane.  As he was clearing the sill of the remaining shards with his boot, he said: “Chances are they already took anything cash or jewelry, so don’t bother with looking through any of those boxes until you find the essentials.  And take off those fucking goggles if you wanna see anything.”

The young man obliged and entered after him.  The light from outside only reached so far through the windows, so the young man felt around blindly for anything of ostensible importance, before taking them back to the light to determine if they were so.  An old rain slicker and a pair of boots.  A thin bedroll for a cot pushed to the back of a broom closet.  An empty lighter from above the fireplace.  When he was sure enough he’d felt every bit of the living room, he placed everything in the lighted foreground of the window sill.  He heard Ivan ask: “That it?” before he could see him.

“Yeah.”

Ivan was carrying a canvas sack over one shoulder and an ax over the other when he entered the light.  He mindlessly threw the ax on Bijou’s imported dinner table and took a jar filled with pieces of pork fat out of the sack and waved it proudly.  “This was at the very back of his icebox.”  He then took out two bottles of the Occiental whiskey Bijou always brought to social gatherings and placed them on the table with the ax and jar.  He emptied the rest of the bag into the light.  A silver wedding bracelet and a broken pocket-watch with all the dried-meats and foreign cheeses the constables knowingly neglected to take.  He had met Bijou less than a dozen times and didn’t know he was ever married.  When he remarked this to Ivan, who had never met him, he retorted, “What does it matter now?”  As Ivan began to pile everything back into the sack, he tossed him his box of matches.  “There’s a bookshelf in the bedroom. Tear out the pages and put ‘em in every nook and cranny that looks like it’ll catch.”  The young man didn’t acknowledge what he said and inspected the box thoughtfully, until Ivan began snapping his fingers at him, “Fuckin’ go!” that he obliged.  

He felt his way to Bijou’s bedroom and to the bookshelf.  He grasped the thickest book on the shelf and began to tear away the pages and throw them blindly into the dark.  He did laps around the room until he heard paper crumple under him with every step, and then he did the hallway.  He began to do the living room until Ivan told him to deal with the attic and roof, which had put itself out.  

The attic was only accessible through a small opening in the roof of the broom closet and Ivan had to assist him on getting up, throwing a dozen or so books in after him.  Through the margins of orange light seeping through the straw roof, he quickly made his way around, throwing the pages anywhere he thought it would help.  He ripped out the long sticks from the backyard that Bijou had used for support beams after the original ones finally gave way, bringing him to all-fours.  With his collar over his nose, he took two of the six matches from the box and lit them and held them under a sheaf of pages in the corner furthest from the entrance, before rushing back down as the flames began to grow and spread around the independent pages and climb the lowered ceiling.  Ivan was hacking away at Bijou’s kitchen table while he was up there, ceasing when it was in about three dozen pieces and nobody would have guessed it was ever a table.  As Ivan placed the wood around, the young man tore away the last of the pages of the single book he had left on him and threw them in spots he thought were less flammable than more.  When Ivan was through with the wood, he unscrewed the lid from the jar of pork fat and, walking backwards, tossed a piece after every few steps, then he did the same with a bottle-and-a-half of the Occiental stuff.  He pointed to the empty windowsill, “Go on.”  

The young man stepped out and walked backwards in tandem with Ivan, who had his thumb over the bottles’ spout and was sprinkling it behind himself.  He had taken a rag from somewhere in the house and wetted it with the whiskey.  Then, he stuck the rag through the bottleneck, lit it with the last four matches, and threw it through the window sill.  It crashed somewhere in the middle of the room.  They waited until they heard the crackling become louder and more frequent, then went on their way.  The bicycles were gone when they returned to the edge of Ventson. 

It was approaching dawn when they stepped upon Mr. Greggor’s front yard, and the fires were beginning to die down.  Orange sunlight shining upon them through the naked black trees.  They could hear firemen’s sirens in the distance, which the young man pointed out just for the sake of speaking, wiping the sweat from his reddened face. 

“What’s it matter?”  

Saorise had been sitting on a stone bench when they crossed the house.  She stood up and limped to them silently, her forearms outstretched and palms open.  Her arctic blonde hair streaked with ash and soot and gone in some places.  She tried to say something, but couldn’t; then she dropped to her knees and sobbed.  When Ivan reached her, she threw her arms around him and sobbed into his chest.  She told them Mr. Greggor was dead.  When the young man asked how, she said “Struck by a fallin’ tree!”  The young man exhaled.  He took off the goggles which he’d put back on and wiped his bloodshot eyes with the back of his wrist.  

Ivan, his head pointed upward, studied the sky as if somewhere it contained an answer to all this and cursed to himself.  He held the sack aloft in the general direction of the young man behind him.  “You gotta find a new place for this.  Alright, c’mon let’s get up now.” 

The young man said he would call their home when it was done and left them there.