Other Living Things
by Alexander Fredman
Gerald knew the gun was somewhere around here. He liked the crunch beneath his feet as he searched for it. Summer had settled uncertainly on this part of the country. Rain hadn’t come and the lowland was crusted, shot through with brown blades of grass. A coyote hung rotting on a fence. The interstate rose in the distance.
As the sun got high he roved further into the expanse of starving earth. He found bottles, bald tires, rocks he thought could be arrowheads. He spit on his finger and rubbed a triangular rock clean. The faceted black gleamed in the sun. He slid it into his pocket.
Every so often a truck slowed on the road, but he waved them on. He knew enough to be patient. It was stupid to loop back for what he had tossed. He’d hoped the rains would have begun already. That the gun would have sunk in the mud. When the rains didn’t come he got spooked and lost four days.
The town he reached was empty. A street marked with graffiti. Squat homes welcomed him through empty windows. He found little of use in them. No food, no cash. Beneath his feet the asphalt was cracking, green veins crawled around the gray.
He had read about this place. Toxic metals in mine tails. People left and all of them for good. Trains still slowed as they passed, but they no longer stopped here. The station took the shape of a house, its roof missing shingles.
He liked when he arrived at a place that looked like a place he remembered and the person behind the counter smiled. He didn’t even care to think if they knew him. That stack of blueberry pancakes, that knob of yellow butter, that round-lipped mug of coffee, cinched in on its middle. The waitress’s hair was prairie grass. He couldn’t account for the last two hours. How’d he even find this diner? He scanned his seat to be sure his things were all there. The suitcase, the backpack, the jacket he wore for the sun. He spent a summer once working for the park service, cutting trails through desolate land. Dark forms would move on the edge of his vision. He hoped to reach the sea.
Sitting in the diner booth he cataloged animals in a little notebook. He added red-winged blackbird, pronghorn, ferruginous hawk, gray fox. He finished eating, walked out and onto the street, his suitcase stumbling behind, plastic wheels splitting and worn.
Later he watched a man walking three tall and sloping hounds, dogs like sentries. The man lacked a face. His dogs walked with long, careful steps, unleashed.
It was hot when he woke. He wandered out of the hospital, onto the shoulder of a replaced road. It wasn’t far to the tracks.
After an hour of waiting, he got on a new train. He was done with meandering routes. He was headed west. The freight trains took old routes through old towns. Coal shifted beneath his body. He passed lone figures standing in the bone-white of midday’s textureless light, in the center of empty streets, watching the sky.
The sun was low and smoldering straight ahead, the first peaks higher than he’d thought. Orange slipped pink. The purple sky chilled as the train climbed. He slept. He dreamt of the blue he’d see at the end.
He woke at dawn at a new altitude, snow surviving in the dark spots of this landscape, snow on the north sides of boulders and trees. They were trees like he’d never seen. Forests that hadn’t had to regrow. Next stop he’d hop out and look for food.
At the diner he ordered eggs, toast, coffee. Finished it all, unballed the paper. So they were still running stories. They’d drained the reservoir and no body was found. Just the car left there above, still running, the driver’s open door, footsteps in the mud. The note in an envelope held in place by a stone on top of the dam. The car was green, a hatchback, a little old. A CD was still playing.
The next train hardly slowed. He crouched behind a stand of spruce, burst forth. He caught a grip with his left hand but couldn’t get his feet on something flat. He felt the strain of the bend as the tracks turned towards a rise. He knew enough to push off as he fell. Fucked his knee on the stumble down. He couldn’t stop before the ledge. He fell a dozen feet to a depression with a few inches of water streaming at its base. The tracks were up and behind him. Looking forward, the trees were frosted blue. Cold light, the sun already beneath the opposite range. Nothing human could be seen from where he lay. He ran a finger along the gash on his leg and around his head. He didn’t dare stand. His gray shirt absorbed the wet. He tried to focus on the water drawn up and all over his shirt. A dark mass claiming territory. Swirls of crimson in the brown water surrounded him. He pulled the arrowhead from his pocket but all he saw was a shard of black plastic.
A fighter jet split white between an impossible blue. Then another, and another. Gerald knew the academy was near here. He could name the planes he saw. F-16, F-35. An A-10, slow, bulbous, loping the air above him. He could still picture himself in the cockpit, watching the small world below. Cities disappeared in an instant. There was nothing but sky where he was headed.
It got hard to lift his head. He could feel the earth move as another train passed. A small rock tumbled down. Water splashed. He saw the ripples get smaller. Tried to find the last one, the flatness that replaced it. His reflection stretched and disfigured. The water got black. For a while he roamed that blackness. New little fishes circling. Pine needles. Dropped leaves, spilt oil curling. Finally he found a figure on its own, glimpsed from three hundred feet above, a face winking in the black, daring him to leap to meet it.