She wanted to push on but Chay would have none of it. He opened one of the phrasebooks and deftly turned the pages and pointed at lines.
That doesn’t look good.
You need to rest.
This needs to be mended.
Please lie down.
I would like to see some dresses.
She turned from the phrasebook to look up at him. You’d like to see some dresses?
He pointed at her shirt. Affy cloze. Burn big one lass night, dis one no good now. Yeh?
We’ll have to leave the freeway for that.
Sokay. Affy need res.
Would it do any good to argue?
They left the elephants to their bath.
It hurt to walk and he carried her. Across the southbound side, a short leap over the divider wall and across the northbound swath, then up what had been the northbound onramp from Los Feliz. They crossed the river above long concrete baffles in the sluggish water and she saw that half were clotted with accumulated trash and dead branches. A mushy shoreline of rotted leaves. Ahead another iteration of decaying cars, broken sidewalks, overgrowth, dead greenery, stripped billboards, angled telephone poles, drooping power lines, broken storefronts, sagging structures. Fire had not touched this area but earthquake had. Fallen awnings and collapsed apartment buildings in what had been mixed residential off the main thoroughfare. A tree growing in the middle of the weedy street, radiating rootcracks giving it the look of something that had punched through suddenly from below. Up ahead a shop door banged in the wind as it had for nearly thirty years. A gaunt coyote stepped out from a doorway and stopped in the road looking at them with its tongue dangling. As if it had run a long way to be here in time see them. They walked on past curbed cars rusting beside parking meters sprouting from the grass. Torn flaps curled from a billboard up ahead. coming soon discernible in the ragged strips remaining. Car wash, service station, fast food, repair shop. A garbage truck. Wind and crickets and that banging door.
They found an RV on a concrete pad alongside a house beneath a tubeframe plastic-sheeted structure that had collapsed on top of it. They pulled the covering partway back as if turning down bedding. The RV weathered but in good shape. The door was locked and Avy pried it open with a prybar and went inside. Must and cobwebs, a brittle dry feel. As if some untenanted sarcophagus beneath the desert floor had been exhumed and opened to admit air and light withheld for centuries. Kitchen, dual sink, two popouts, draw curtains, recliner, sofabed, queensize bed. Pots and pans and utensils. Maps. No food. She could not imagine this thing moving on the roads she traveled.
She leaned out the door. Chay stood in the grassy driveway studying the ruined neighborhood.
Okay, I’ll sleep here tonight. But we head downtown tomorrow. Got it?
Yeh.
She took the prybar with her and they scavenged the neighborhood but found nothing useful. A shrunken skeleton wrapped in thin stretched mottled leather sagging on an 80d nail driven into a front door. One side of the head bashed in down to the zygomatic arch. Eyesockets ever regarding the wooden shingle hanging from its knobbed neck, the faded word looter scribbled on it with a Sharpie. It did not look like the remains of a human being at all but like some kind of scarecrow patched together out of the hides of other animals and it hung there telling all th
e story it had left to tell.
They went back to the boulevard and started in on the stores. There were signs that people had lived in some but not in many years. More coyote and raccoon prints than shoeprints traced out in the dust and filled in again, outlines softened. Rat droppings everywhere and a few dark shops become pigeon roosts.
Chay took a ten-foot length of one-and-a-half-inch copper pipe from a plumbing supply. In a small dark room in back of a Mexican grocery Avy found a stand of lockers. Nothing in the unlocked ones and padlocks on the other two. She ran the prybar through the hasps and twisted and the lockers’ metal tabs gave way after being wrenched back and forth a few times. Sneakers far too large for her, desiccated antiperspirants, a large tee shirt and an extra large sweatshirt. She flapped the shirts and stirred up dust that made her sneeze. She rolled them up and put them in her backpack left on the register conveyor belt and picked up the backpack by a strap and left the store through its smashed-in window.
Chay could not fit inside the RV so Avy sat on the tailgate of a junkfilled Toyota shortbed beside the all but invisible curb near the house, dangling her sneakers and kicking at weeds as Chay removed his first aid kit from his pannier and opened it. She took a deep breath and started to take off her shirt but blood had seeped through the bandages and stuck to it and she stopped and poured water on it and rubbed the fabric and then slowly peeled the shirt off and threw it into the truck bed. She looked down at the gauze strips. Russet blotches like some kind of mold. She felt behind her and pulled at the curling ends of surgical tape banding her. The odd sensation as her skin lifted up and the tape peeled from her. Dried blood cemented the gauze to her skin. She poured more water and rubbed gently and paid no attention to the pale red flowing down her belly to darken the waistband of her shorts. Then she pulled at the taped gauze strips and they sloughed off redbellied and dripping like interrupted leeches. The sudden air cold against the puckered cuts. A wisp of cotton stuck to one crusting edge and made a faint ripping sound as she pulled it free.
Most of the wounds were superficial cuts that would scab and itch and heal. The left claw had found more purchase in her right breast and cut deep. The wound was wet and felt hot to the touch, and the skin on either side was plumcolored and swollen. Her father had taught her about germs but she didn’t understand it completely and wasn’t sure she believed what she did. But she knew to bathe the wound with alcohol and keep it clean and covered.
She looked up. Chay stood before her with the bottle of Stoli and an unused shop rag taken from a plastic bag.
Yeah, okay, she said.
He poured vodka on the folded rag and bent to her. She looked at his alien face and clutched the edge of the tailgate and did not make a sound throughout. He set the vodka bottle down and re-dressed her wounds as before. It occurred to her as he worked that she had inflicted just this kind of injury and much worse among his kind without restraint or remorse and yet here she bore such wounds and he treated them. She shook her head. The symmetry of it too perfect. You would be a fool not to learn what lesson this is trying to teach you.
She wiped herself dry and put on her new sweatshirt and bunched the sleeves and rolled the wrists. Thanks, she said. She slid off the tailgate and eyed the bottle as he repacked his kit.
Are you gonna make another spear tonight?
Spear yeh.
Not gonna hunt?