Chapter 6 Drew
Day six was a ranger station outside what had been Pampa.
The convoy had pushed three hundred and twenty miles on the northern Oklahoma reroute by then.
The Bay outriders' safe-passage note had paid off twice already.
Once at a fuel-junction outside Borger where a small Vampyren patrol had let us through after Renn flashed something on his radio that he refused to explain, and once at the Texas-Oklahoma line where a human-irregular cohort had taken one look at our convoy markings and waved us through with the brisk professional courtesy that suggested they had been told to expect us.
Renn had not asked the Bay outriders what the favor cost. He had said, later, on the radio: fuel debts compound.
We will owe them again in a year. That is how Bay-aligned operates.
Cora, you traded a debt I'll be paying for two years.
Cora had said thank you and not asked the price.
I had been thinking about the price for ninety miles.
Cora put the convoy in the lot for a two-hour stop.
Cruz needed to inspect the second truck's brakes.
There had been a soft pedal on the morning's downhill.
And Sylvia wanted to redress my wrist; the stitches had been in for three days and Sylvia had decided three days was the inspection window.
Renn took the perimeter. I had been authorized off-rotation for the stop.
I walked the lot.
The lot was empty the way these lots had been empty for eleven years.
Whatever had been here had been scavenged.
The trucks that had been parked at the pumps were rust-skeletons.
The pump housings were stripped to the frames.
The grass that had grown up through the cracks in the asphalt was dry now, post-rain by months, the brown that meant Oklahoma was about to be in trouble.
The cabin at the back was unlocked.
I pushed the door. It opened. The hinge complained.
The inside was a one-room ranger's living quarters.
A bed, stripped. A small kitchen with the appliances pulled out, frames left.
A wood stove that had been broken by what looked like a deliberate blow with a sledgehammer.
The bandit cohort that had passed through here at some point had broken the stove because broken stoves did not get re-used and re-used stoves were a sign somebody had come back. A small writing desk under the window.
A shelf above the desk.
Three books.
I stopped at the door.
I had not seen three books in one place in eleven years.
The Mojave library was twenty-six books on a small wooden shelf in the schoolhouse, and Cora had built the library bag-by-bag from salvage runs, and every book on the shelf had been read aloud to the kids and then read aloud again, and the spines had been re-glued by Tomas's wife who knew bookbinding.
Twenty-six books was the largest collection of books I knew about in the western alliance.
Cruz had told me there was a larger collection at the Las Vegas barter market but I had not seen it.
Three books on a ranger's shelf in the Texas panhandle was not a large collection.
It was the three-book shelf a junior ranger had kept because junior rangers were people who needed something to read after dinner.
The dust on the shelf said the books had been there for at least eleven years.
The bandit cohort that had broken the stove had not bothered with the books.
They had not thought the books were worth taking.
I walked to the shelf.
I read the spines.
A Stephen King paperback. The Stand, the long edition, the seventy-eight-chapter one with the original ending. A field guide to Texas wildflowers. A copy of The Grapes of Wrath.
I picked up the Steinbeck.
The cover was cracked. The chemical glue at the spine had failed. The pages were the cheap thin pulp the paperback houses used in the 1960s and 1970s when paperbacks had been a quarter. I had read this exact edition, not this copy, the edition, because my foster mother had owned a copy.
My foster mother's name had been Ellen Reyes.
She had been a tenth-grade English teacher at Mountain View High School in Phoenix.
She had been thirty-eight years old in the August before the invasion.
She had been at the school on a half-summer-prep schedule when the ships came over the horizon and the school had been one of the buildings that the city had used as an emergency shelter for the first three weeks.
She had been there with about two hundred other people, and she had been there with an infant a Vampyren liaison had brought to her on the second week.
This one was raised in our pre-conquest camp, the mother died in birth, the father is one of ours but is not coming back, we cannot have a half-blood at the breeding pool, will you take it.
She had taken the infant. She had named me Drew because her brother's name had been Drew and her brother had been killed in the first week of the invasion and Drew was a name she had needed to keep in the room.
She had taught me to read with this book.
Not because she had loved it. Because it had been the book that was at hand when I was four and a half and starting to ask why she was opening my picture books one-handed while she held me.
She had picked the book up because it had been on the bedside table where she had been reading it before the invasion, and she had not picked up a different book for an entire year because she had been raising a half-Vampyren infant alone in a half-collapsed apartment building outside Phoenix and the book had become the book.
She had read me the Joad family.
I had been four and a half when she had started reading me the Joad family.
I had been seven when she had died.
I held the book.
The dust came off on my hands. The pages were soft with the soft that books got when they had been sitting in a humid place that had then become dry.
The cover photograph was the Lange one. The dust-bowl mother, whose face had been on the cover of every paperback edition since the 1960s.
The same cover Ellen had owned. The same cover I had stared at for two years between ages four and a half and six and a half while she had read me the Joads.
I sat down on the edge of the bed.
I opened the book.
The first chapter, I knew by heart. To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.
Ellen had read that sentence to me three hundred times before I had been old enough to read it myself, and I had read it to myself another three hundred times before I had been old enough to understand why Ellen had read it to me, and I had not opened the book since I had been twelve, which had been four years after Ellen died.
I sat on the bed with the book open.
I did not read.
I just held it open at the first page.
The door of the cabin opened.
I knew it was Cora before I looked up. I had registered her step at the cabin door's threshold and I had registered the shift in her breathing when she had seen me on the bed with the book.
She said:
"Drew."
"Cora."
She came in.
She did not sit on the bed. She sat on the edge of the desk under the window. She did not look at the book. She looked at me.
"Sylvia is going to come find us in twenty minutes for the wrist redress. I am buying you twenty minutes."
"Thank you."
"Drew."
"Yes."
"Whose book."
"Mine," I said. I noticed I had said it. I did not amend.
She nodded.
"Tell me."
I closed the book. I held it on my knees.
"Ellen Reyes. My foster mother. She had a copy. She read it to me when I was small. The first chapter, I had memorized at five. The whole book, I had read by myself by nine. I have not opened it since I was twelve."
"Why not."
"Because it was Ellen's book. After she died, the copy I had was the copy I had been reading along with her.
It had her marginal notes. Pencil. The notes were in the corners.
Things she had wanted me to remember when I was old enough.
Casy the preacher: the soul lesson. Tom Joad: the choice.
Things teachers wrote in books for the kids they would not be alive to teach in person.
After she died, I read the marginal notes once and I closed the book and I never opened it again.
The book is at the Mojave camp now. I have not opened it in nine years. "
"You brought it to Mojave."
"I brought it to every place I have lived since I was twelve. I have not opened it. I have carried it. There is a difference."
Cora was very still.
"This copy doesn't have her notes."
"No."
"You can read it."
"I could."
"Are you going to."
I looked at the book.
I had not thought about reading it. I had thought about looking at it. The looking had been enough. The looking had been the most reading I had done of the book in nine years.
"I don't know."
"Drew."
"Yes."
"You can take this copy. The cabin is empty. The book has been here eleven years. Nobody is coming for the book. If you want it, it's yours."
"Yours."
"I am offering it. You take it or you don't. That's yours."
"Cora."
"Yes."
"That is a giving."
"It is."
"You are giving."
"Yes."
"To me."
"Yes."
I looked at the book.
I thought about Ellen's marginal notes. I thought about the copy at the Mojave camp on the small shelf above my cot at the south edge of the camp where I lived in the tent that was as far from the kitchen as a tent could be and still be inside the perimeter.
I thought about how the marginal notes had been in pencil and how pencil faded over eleven years even when the book was kept dry and how the next time I opened the book the notes might be too faint to read, which was something I had been not opening the book to avoid finding out.
I thought about Ellen.
I thought about Cora.
I said:
"I will take the book."
"Okay."
"It is yours that you have given to me. I am not yet ready to call it mine."
"Drew."
"Yes."