The Park Service: Book One of The Park Service Trilogy (7 page)

CHAPTER 11
You’ll See Soon Enough

The days roll in and out with the tides in the quiet cove.

I’m ashamed of myself because although I think about my father and my people down in Holocene II, I’m having too much fun to do anything about it. I push the thoughts away.

I share a small tent with Jimmy, and every morning when I wake, he’s already out swimming. I stand on the shore and watch him cutting through the water, disappearing beneath the waves and then surfacing again surprisingly far away and in another direction entirely from where I was looking.

I spend afternoons walking the cove collecting shells and investigating things I’ve read about but thought I’d never see. Sand dollars and starfish and crabs that scuttle from overturned rocks. I wear my shoes only rarely, the soles of my feet growing thick and calloused. A steady diet of protein is putting weight on my bones, and I can do fifty pushups without breaking a sweat. My jumpsuit gets tighter by the day and I tear the sleeves free because my arms are filling out. On hot days, I wear it unzipped with my chest bare, and although not nearly as dark as Jimmy is, I’m becoming bronzed in the sun.

Everything here is about food—finding food, preparing food, eating food—which takes some getting used to because in Holocene II rations arrived automatically every week. They have boats here hidden in the cave at the back of the cove, and on the days they cast them off, the men are gone until sunset, returning with the boats low in the water, the hulls piled high with fish. On days Jimmy goes out with them, I’m on my own to investigate the cove.

There are kids everywhere. Baby’s crying for milk, toddlers being chased by their mothers, boys and girls always organizing some new game or intently watching the adults work. I ask Jimmy why so many kids and he tells me that most are orphans whose parents have been killed.

“Besides,” he says, “we needs lots of ’em jus’ so a few can survive the Park Service.”

“That doesn’t seem right,” I say.

“It’s jus’ the way it is.”

“Still, it doesn’t seem right.”

Jimmy shakes his head. “Right ain’t got nothin’ at all to do with it,” he says. “You’ll see soon enough.”

Today, when the boats return, Uncle John grabs me and walks me to where they clean the fish. I’m nervous because he’s the one who said to let the Park Service have me.

He stares down at me, his eyes the color of honey, his face as black as night.

“You’s jest ain’t gonna go away, is ye?”

“No, sir,” I say, shaking my head.

“Well then,” he says, “you’s better get learnt on helpin’.”

He slaps a stone knife in my hand, the black blade polished so smooth I can see my reflection in it. Then he hooks a fish through the gills and hefts it onto the pine-log cleaning table.

“Stick ’em in the arse, and cut up to his gills.”

Even the idea of it grosses me out, but I don’t dare argue. Slipping the knife point into the hole he pointed out, I slide the blade up the belly and slit it open, the skin parting in a red gash.

“Now,” he says, pointing, “slice into his jaw flap there and cut his tongue loose. Good. Now put yer thumb in his mouth, pull it free, and every bit of his plumbin’ll come clear with it.”

I push my thumb into the mouth, its bony lip sharp against my hand, and pull down toward the slit in its belly. Its tongue rips free, then the pink gills, now the ribbed throat trailing its guts in gray and purple coils as they suck free of the slit belly.

Uncle John slaps me on the back.

“There now. That’s how ya do it, boy. Two cuts is all ya need. Now wash ’em out good and finish the rest.” He turns to go, then turns back, smiling at me with his honey eyes. “The knife’s yours.”

I look down at the knife in my hand and I smile, too.

Waking first for once, I lie next to Jimmy and listen to him breathing. His sleeping face in the morning tent-glow is young and free of worry and I wonder what dreams he dreams, what he allows himself to wish in that private world of sleep.

His face tightens, his eyes open.

“I’m gonna start sleepin’ with my knife if ya keep starin’ at me,” he says. Then he sits up and rubs the sleep from his eyes, pulling his knuckles away and blinking at me. “You’s wanna learn to swim today?”

“I don’t know.” I try to sound bored rather than scared.

“Come on,” he says, gripping my wrist and pulling me from the tent. “It’s easy as breathin’ once ya get it down.”

There’s just a hint of morning blue above the cove, and I sit on a dark log by the shore and roll up jumpsuit legs.

“What’re ya doin’?” Jimmy asks, stripping naked. “You’s like to drown in that damn thing. Take it off.”

I look around. The boats are already gone, the men gone with them. The women and children are still sleeping. Still, I’m nervous to be naked in front of Jimmy. I stand and unzip my suit and let it fall to the ground. When I step out of it and look back, it lays on the shadowed beach like a shed skin. Even with my tan, I look pale and infant-like compared to Jimmy. I hurry into the cold water to cover up my nakedness in the waves.

Jimmy walks me out until the water’s up to my chest, but I stop there, not wanting to go any farther. A wave comes in and knocks me backwards. I cough and spit and wipe my eyes.

“Dun’ be a damn wimp,” Jimmy says.

“I’m not a wimp.”

“You’s actin’ like you’s is.”

I dive headfirst into the next wave and paddle my arms like I’ve watched him do. And it works—I’m swimming!

Excited now, I paddle into deeper water. Then I sink. Fast. The water closes over my head and everything gets quiet and dark. I’m back in that silent elevator again—panicked, holding my breath, flailing against an invisible door.

A shadow darkens my eyes, strong arms wrap around me from behind, Jimmy’s bare chest pressing against my back, and then I’m rising toward the pale light. My head breaks free and I gasp in lungfuls of cold air. Jimmy cradles me, laughing.

“It’s not funny,” I say, shaking with fear.

“I know it ain’t.”

“Then why are you laughing?”

“’Cause I cain’t help it.”

“Well, I was swimming for a second.”

“Ya did good, buddy,” he says, “ya did good.”

When he calls me buddy, I smile, even laugh a little, too.

First, he teaches me to tread water. Then we work on the breast stroke. Before long I’m gliding easily across the cove—back and forth and back again. I even learn to dive, carrying up small rocks to prove to Jimmy that I touched bottom.

We swim until I’m too exhausted to go on. Then we float together on our backs and watch the sun rise over the bluff, the saltwater carrying us on gently rocking waves. I feel cradled by the ocean, my insignificance absorbed by the Earth, suspended and weightless in the blue-morning peace. I think of everyone down in Holocene II, doing their daily routine, having no idea that this heaven is just five miles above their heads.

I have to find a way to tell them.

We scamper dripping onto the shore and quickly pull on our clothes just as the waking children come scrambling down the beach, screaming. We share a silent smile above their heads and then head up to camp for breakfast.

Jimmy says I take to the water like a baby seal.

He gradually leads me from the cove and into deeper water where we spend mornings diving for mollusks. When the sea is calm and the water clear, I can see an entire underworld—jellies rising and falling on invisible currents, colorful fish patrolling reefs, beautiful plants waving from rocky shelves.

We drag nets of oysters onto shore and shuck them in the sun, sucking them from their shells and swallowing them raw. Afternoons, I float on the surface with my head underwater and watch as Jimmy holds his breath and walks on the sea floor with a spear gun he’s carved from ash wood and stretched with sinewy tendons stripped from a deer. He’s a dead-on shot, too. He hands the speared fish off to me, and I hook them through the gills and swim them to shore, carrying them into camp to clean them, their panicked hearts still beating in my hand.

My skin is almost as dark as Jimmy’s now, and I’m filling out more every week. I do my daily pushups and Jimmy shows me how to do pullups from a tree limb. I cut the legs off my jumpsuit, making them little more than a patched pair of zip-up shorts, the Foundation crest so faded you can hardly see it.

One afternoon while the men are inland hunting, Jimmy takes me out in one of the boats. Keeping the cove in sight, we row into deep water and drop nets. Then we lie on our backs in the bottom of the boat, rocking gently, listening to the waves lap against the wooden hull.

I remember lying on the beach that Sunday before my test, I remember dreaming about escaping that life down there. I’ve come a long way from five miles underground. I feel a pang of guilt about my father, about not making an effort to get news to him, but I do my best to push the thoughts away, pushing the guilt away with them.

A gull arcs across the blue dome of sky above. Then I see a flock of much larger birds silhouetted against the sun. But as they approach overhead it becomes clear they’re no birds made of feather and flesh. They’re too perfect, too smooth, too slick. They come rushing in on silent wing in perfect formation.

“What are those?” I ask, pointing.

Jimmy lifts his hand to shade the sun, following my finger with his eyes. Without a word he grips the edge of the boat and throws his weight into the sidewall and tips us over. When I emerge from the water, coughing, everything is dark.

“What happened? Why’d you tip the boat?”

Jimmy clamps his hand on my mouth.

We tread water beneath the boat, rising and falling on the waves. After a minute, Jimmy peers out. Without saying a word, he slips beneath the capsized boat and swims fast for shore.

He’s much too fast to keep up with.

When I finally get to shore and race into camp, I find him hustling the women and children to the back of the cove and into the cave where they store the boats.

“What is it?” I ask, stopping at the cave entrance to catch my breath. Two dozen staring eyes blink back from the dark. Jimmy grabs my arm and pulls me into the shadows.

“Drones,” is all he says.

And that’s enough.

Later that afternoon, the men come stumbling into camp carrying a body on a makeshift stretcher. What remains is not much more than a mangled pile of charred flesh, and I have to look at the pallbearers faces and count them off by name to see who it is they carry. The only one missing is Uncle John.

Nobody talks that evening as we work to gather wood. We disperse in silent groups of twos and threes, carrying back what dry driftwood we can find and dragging it up the path, out of the cove, and stacking it two meters high at the top of the bluff.

If anyone is worried about the fire betraying our location to the Park Service, nobody shows it. We lie outside our tents and watch the flames high on the bluff, burning white-hot in the breeze, like some lighthouse warning to any lonely traveler lost on the dark and starless seas. With no Eden here, it must be sad to say goodbye forever. I expect a prayer of some kind, or maybe a eulogy like I’ve read about in lessons, but nobody says a word, and the only sound besides the flames crackling in the breeze is the stifled sobbing of Uncle John’s pregnant wife.

In the morning, we use turtle shells to scoop the ashes and toss them into the wind.

CHAPTER 12
Idols from the Past

John Jr. is born three weeks later.

The night before a full moon.

In the morning, Jimmy leads me along the bluff south out of the cove. He’s hardly asked me anything about my people, so today it catches me by surprise when he says:

“Tell me about where you’s from.”

I watch him for a moment, trying to guess why the sudden curiosity, but he seems preoccupied, staring ahead as we walk, swaggering loose and easy the way he does. It hits me how he’s perfectly adapted to his environment, surviving off the land.

“Please tell me,” he says.

“Well, we don’t have anything to do with the Park Service, if that’s why you’re asking.”

“I ain’t sayin’ they’s did.”

“Good,” I say, relieved. “I don’t know what to say, really. My people are just people. No different than yours. Except we live underground and we didn’t even know this was up here.”

“What’s it like down there?”

So I tell him about Holocene II. About my mother dying when I was born, about my father raising me. I tell him about turning fifteen and taking the test. About being called up and getting on the train and the train crashing and my climbing out. I tell him how we’re taught that the surface is uninhabitable and has been for nearly a thousand years.

He nods, listening without interrupting me once. The only sound he makes is a kind of grunt when I tell him about retiring at thirty-five and living forever in Eden.

“Who’d wanna live forever?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “Don’t you?”

He shakes his head and spits in the dirt.

“We return to the Earth when we’s gone.”

“You mean from ashes to ashes, and all that?”

“Where’d ya hear that?” he asks.

“Hear what?”

“Ashes to ashes.”

“I don’t know—I probably read it. Why?”

“I like it,” he says.

We walk in silence for a while, our feet kicking loose rocks, our eyes trained on the coastline ahead.

“Now you tell me about your people.”

“You already know ’em,” he says.

“No,” I say, “I mean tell me about how you got here.”

“We’ve jus’ always been here.”

“You have?”

“Yeah, we’s Americans.”

“Native Americans?”

“I dunno. Jus’ Americans, I guess.”

“Well, tell me about the Park Service then.”

He sighs. “All I know is stories they pass down.”

“Okay. Tell me those then.”

So he tells me about his people surviving a great war and migrating to the coast in search of food. He tells me they came to vast cities, destroyed and empty. He says they settled there and began to rebuild. And then the Park Service came.

“There was no safety,” he says. “No place for us to hide. Machines, ships, flyers. Even the stars was shadowed by drones killin’ our people. Least that’s what they tells me.”

“What did they do?”

“Went on the run,” he says. “Hunting and hunted.”

“Who are they?”

“The Park Service?”

“Yeah, the Park Service.”

“I dunno. Nobody knows.”

“Well, why’d you think I was one of them?”

He points to the faded Foundation crest on my jumpsuit.

“It’s no connection to them,” I say.

He shrugs. “What’s it matter fer anyhow?”

“Don’t you want to fight back? Change things?”

“Change things? It’s how things is. It’s how they’s always been far back as stories tell. Many, many moons now,” he says, “and will be fer many more to come.”

Then he stops and turns to me.

“Ya remember that thing ya did that nigh by the fire?”

“What night?”

“The first night,” he says. “The poem.”

“Yeah, I remember.”

“Can ya really read?”

“Sure, I can read.”

“Good,” he says, smiling. “Follow me.”

He leads me up a narrow path into the red-rock cliffs. We climb high, passing exposed bulkheads of rock with shells and fossils peeking out from their weathered faces and I wonder at the strange fact that all this was once under sea. He stops when we arrive at the opening of a cave.

“Ya dun’ mind goin’ in, do ya?

“No, I don’t mind. Really. I’m fine.”

Stepping inside, he uses his flint and stone to light one of several torches waiting there. He offers one to me, but I wave it away and follow him into the cave. The opening fades behind us and our world shrinks to the ball of light cast by the torch. The flame flickers in the musty air, sometimes almost touching the ceiling of low passageways, sometimes casting a faint glow on stalactites hanging high above like teeth ready to close down and swallow us forever into the belly of the Earth.

I feel panic creeping on, a familiar feeling of being closed in, trapped with no escape, the way I felt the first fifteen years of my life. I breathe in, breathe out, and follow Jimmy deeper.

Reaching a small circular cavern, he touches his torch to others waiting propped in the cracked walls, and with each new flame, the cave’s contents come more clearly into view.

It’s an underground junkyard, a hoarder’s heaven—but to Jimmy it might as well be Tutankhamun’s tomb.

He leads me around the room, touching everything once as if to make sure it’s still there. Strange, leftover things. Things I recognize from lessons and educationals, things that must be a mystery to Jimmy. A rusty manifold from some ancient internal combustion engine. Two warped wheels without tires. A boat propeller with a broken blade. An iron post. Bits of glass. Antique transistors. A green-plastic circuit board from some twenty-first century computer.

When he finishes touching everything, he leads me to an old rusted oil drum resting in the farthest corner. Propping his torch up, he reaches his arm inside and removes something heavy, wrapped in oil-soaked leather. He stands holding it in his arms, caressing it as if it were a pet.

“This is a big, big treasure,” he says, his eyes both excited and solemn at the same time. “It was recovered from the city before we left. My people keep it hidden here many centuries now. This here ...,” he pauses to hold up his covered treasure, “This is our foundin’ father.”

“One of the first presidents?”

“Maybe even a god,” he says. “My grandpapa was named after him, my papa. Even me. My son I will name fer him, too. And then maybe even he has a son to name James.”

He pauses, staring into my eyes, the torch flame reflecting on his black pupils. Then he continues:

“My pa says it is our duty to multiply, to carry on the race. He says we’re seeds. He says we must survive until a golden time comes again. It is our duty, our right. You understand?”

I nod that I do.

“Good,” he says, nodding, too. “I need a favor from ya.”

“Sure,” I say. “Anything.”

“None of us can read. Well, not much anyways. I hoped ya could read me this writin’ here.”

He holds the heavy treasure out in his trembling hand, and with the other he pulls the leather cover free, revealing a bronze sculpture of a man’s head. A gleaming bust, worn and polished by a thousand years, a hundred hands, but an unmistakable and boyish face with thick wavy hair and perfect features—features I recognize immediately from lessons on American culture.

He twists it so I can see all sides in the torchlight, then he points to a plaque at its base. The plaque is etched with dates, the name, an inscription honoring the man and his short career.

“What’s it say?” he asks, excited, pushing it closer to me, turning it gently under the light.

I study the writing long enough to read it three times.

“Can ya read it?”

“Just the name,” I say. “James—just like you.”

“Nothin’ else, though?”

I shake my head no.

“No? Ya sure?”

“Listen, it’s a beautiful bust, and I’m sure you’re right—he must have been some kind of idol from the past.”

He sighs. Frowns. Runs his fingers over the plaque and the text etched there, as alien and as dead to him as Latin would be to me. Maybe more so. Then he accepts it and nods. Covering the bust again, he returns it back to the bottom of its barrel. He stands and collects his torch and snuffs the others out and leads me from the cavern out the way we came.

I look back once at the darkness swallowing the room, our shadows stretched long and quivering on the torch-lit floor as if lingering behind to stay there forever with the past, and I have the strange premonition that no soul will ever see it again.

I feel bad about myself for having lied to Jimmy—but I just couldn’t tell him that James Dean was just a movie star.