“What?”
“Thanks.”
“For what?”
“You know.” He waits for her to say more, but she doesn’t. Outside the turbines turn and croak their lazy circles and sink them into sleep.
The next morning, it takes him a moment to shake off his dreams, to orient himself in the museum, to recognize Ella spreading the curtains and letting in a slash of sunlight.
He sees then his backpack, stained and patched, made mostly from canvas and bottomed with leather. He has asked for it many times — so many times that she has threatened to throw it away if he asks again — and now here it is. The flap is open, as if it has disgorged all its contents on the floor. There is a blister pack of stainless steel nails, a chisel, a hammer, a faded rubber ducky with the beak hanging off, a rusted coil of wire, three sheets of sandpaper, a corroded butcher knife and metal spatula, three bottles of aspirin and another for springtime allergies.
She sits on the edge of the bed and folds her hands in her lap and asks if he sells these things and he says yes, and she asks if people wonder where he finds them and he says not really. “Because I’m a thief, you know. You don’t want to ask too many questions when you’re buying from a thief.”
“You’re not a thief. You’re a grave robber.”
“No, no. I steal from the living too.” He tells her that he can pick any lock, climb any wall, slip through any door or window in the Sanctuary. This he says in a rush of pride and excitement — and then realizes whom he is speaking to and goes quiet and readies for a scolding.
But she only tucks her hair behind her ears, a delicate gesture for her, and says, “What about that one?”
She is talking about a photograph, discolored and bent in half, the picture flaking along the crease. A family on a sand dune. Two parents, three kids, all leaning into each other, their smiles bright and their hair windblown, while sunlight sparkles in a thousand crystalline points off the ocean behind them. “Why would you take this?”
“I don’t know.” He crawls out of bed and squats to study the photo. “I guess I like the way it makes me feel when I look at it and hold it in my hand. It’s like it’s got this charge, a little life in it still.” The mother appears to be laughing. One of the children, a boy, isn’t looking at the camera at all, his eyes on a gull riding the breeze. Simon imagines the bones beneath their faces and wonders where they might be interred. “This whole museum is a bit like that, don’t you think?”
Ella studies him for a pregnant moment. Then she goes to the closet and swings open the door and pulls from beneath her clothes an old toy chest with a hinged lid and a rocking horse carved into the side.
She shows him what she has never showed anyone. What she calls her dream box. Inside there are toy ponies, a pink plastic comb, a Renoir magnet, a pack of playing cards, an angel calendar, a yellowed copy of The Hobbit with the pages crumbling out of it, and more, much more, including a folder full of photos and clippings. She holds everything with the tips of her fingers, taking care not to bend or dirty them. He doesn’t ask her why she has it, this box full of everything. He understands. They are the same, both refusing to acknowledge that they live in a place where fantasies must be discarded.
Here is a vinyl record in a brittle paper sleeve. Françoise Hardy, it reads across it. Simon takes it from her. “Have you ever listened to this?”
“No.”
“My father had records he used to play.”
“Your father.” The danger of last night, which seemed so far removed a moment ago, now flashes across her face. She looks as though she might say something, but a tapping sound distracts her. They turn to the window, where Lewis’s owl waits patiently beyond the glass.
Chapter 22
HIS NAME IS Jon Colter, but for some time he was known as the Black Fist. He might have invented the name. He might have encouraged its use. He liked it. He felt it captured what he was, how he wanted others to consider him. Someone once told him the scariest part of any story was when a character crept forward to investigate a strange sound. Whatever nightmare waited around the corner did not matter, its revelation almost always a disappointment. It was the imagined threat that mattered most. A fist was a threat. A clenched fist raised and ready to swing. In this capacity he served the Sanctuary for many years.
He began as a sentinel, and one day, when ranging the Dead Lands, he walked through the open door of a house that was a wolf’s den. They sprung and burrowed their muzzles into him and mauled him nearly to death before the other sentinels fired arrows and sent them limping and yipping off.
Eventually he healed, the scabs and then the scars hardening him back into the shape of a man. His mouth slashed open along the left cheek a permanent half smile. He sought out the wolves, hunting them down in their den, chaining them and whipping them into submission, making two of them his own, so that he would walk the streets leashed to them, first as a deputy, then as sheriff under the late Mayor Meriwether.
Saddled on the back of a black horse called Nightmare and guided by his wolves, he now stalks his way across a parched country, a never-ending valley of the dry bones with no Ezekiel to call them up. He is schooled enough to know that God drove men west — across the ocean, across America. They followed the compass of Manifest Destiny and they claimed the country in God’s name. But their God must not have been pleased, because he smote them down and cursed them with the hot wind breathed through his clenched teeth.
The same breath that wakes Colter tonight, on a farm outside of Omaha. He first hears the birds squawking and fluttering in the rafters of a pole shed. And then the hiss that swells into a sound like grain sliding down a metal chute. His horse whickers and his wolves whimper and pant and he hurries outside to see a vast section of the sky absent of stars. They have been eaten up by the black wall of sand moving toward him. He barricades the door and drapes blankets over the broken windows. When the sandstorm hits, the shed lets out a metallic groan as if ready to collapse, but it holds strong as the wind scours the metal and sends dust swirling through every available crack and he and the wolves huddle down with their eyes pinched shut.
He is not afraid. Not of the heat, the emptiness, the radiation, the bone piles and splintery ruins, whatever danger awaits him. He prefers to imagine the world fearing him, as it was before, when he roamed the streets of the Sanctuary, one hand leashed to the wolves, the other teasing the machete sheathed to his thigh. Everyone made way for him, darting down alleys, pressing their backs against buildings, closing their eyes if the wolves paused to sniff them.
He was not a big man, but their fearfulness made him feel that way. Too big. So that he and the mayor began to thrash against each other, their tongues like quarreling daggers. He thought he knew one thing and the old man another. “You are the muscle; I am the brain.” That’s what the mayor always said, and Colter came to reject it. He knew best which wards needed more or fewer patrols. He knew best what ordinances and punishments worked and didn’t. After a heated city council session, after they closed the meeting and took to the hallway, after Meriwether jammed a finger against his chest and told him to stand down, Colter lost his temper, twisted the old man’s arm behind his back, and broke it with a damp pop. Not on purpose. By accident. If temper could be considered accidental.
Sometimes the world felt like a game in which everyone vied for power. Those who didn’t have power tried to maneuver or rage against those who did. And those who had power pushed to oppress further those who didn’t. He played the game well, until he lost it. On the floor, with his arm bent unnaturally, the old man screamed and ordered Colter’s own deputies against him. He might have said sorry if given the chance.