“Except I ain’t taking you,” Randy states flatly.
Pest snaps his head toward him angrily, but before he can speak, I grab his shoulder and jerk him to get his attention. Reluctantly, he looks away from Randy and toward me. “You have something else to do,” I tell him. When Pest tries to turn away, still angry, I give his shoulder another tug. “Look at me!” He does, at first reluctantly, but when we’re looking at each other, I see his blue eyes soften, and the stiffness in his face relaxes. “Listen,” I tell him. “I can do this, but I need you to do something for me.”
“What?” Pest asks.
“You have to promise me to look after Eric,” I say. “You don’t know what I’ve already been through to keep him safe.” I look at him with sharp eyes. “Eric means more to me than anything in this world. I wouldn’t think of leaving him with anyone but you. But you have to promise me. You have to promise me that you’ll look after him.”
Pest and I look at each other for a moment, in silence, eyes glistening. I can see him thinking, feel him trying to figure out another way. And I feel some communication between us, something difficult to describe, something like trust and faith and weakness all together. It’s a strange feeling that passes between us, like we’re indestructible and fragile all at once. Finally Pest nods at me, once, curtly, accepting this new deal. The next second he pulls away from the table, his chair screeching against the floor like the scream of a witch. He shoots a foreboding, hateful look at Randy, and then turns away and retreats from the room, down to the basement. We hear him slam a door shut. It echoes in the church.
Randy chuckles and when I turn back to him, his smile goes wide, and he’s all teeth and green eyes. “Well,” he says. “Guess it’s just you and me.” He stands up. “You better go say your goodbyes. We leave in an hour.”
125
I don’t know how to say goodbye to Pest. I don’t know how he became so important to me in such a little time. Or maybe it hasn’t been such a little time, really. In the end, we stand with Eric in his cell. Neither of us want to look at each other. I tell him he has to wash Eric every day, that he has to try to get him to eat, that he has to feed him salt water. I tell him to be careful that he doesn’t get scratched or accidentally bitten, even though I know it doesn’t matter. You can’t get the Worm twice.
I don’t know how to say goodbye to Eric either. He stands tall and straight these days, sometimes even on the tips of his toes, as if he’s trying to lift himself into the air. He keeps his eyes wide open, but sometimes, and I have no clue as to why, he squints his left eye real tight. It’s almost like a wink, except that it lasts a long time, sometimes as long as a minute, and then his face relaxes and his jaw drops again. He’s got his eye shut now, pinched tight, and it really seems to me that he’s saying goodbye somehow. But I have no idea. Looking in his other eye, I don’t see any sign of the Eric I knew. I see nothing but a dark pit and the wriggling of worms.
“Take care of yourself,” I tell him. I embrace him, trying not to notice his cold body against mine, or the smell of soap and ammonia. He smells like a place that has been scrubbed and disinfected and is now off limits to living things. But the smell is far, far better than before, and it makes me feel like we’re winning. I put my hand on his gray cheek. “I’ll be back so soon, you won’t even miss me.”
His face suddenly relaxes and then his jaw drops. “Unh,” he says softly.
Suddenly I get an awful feeling that I’ll never see him alive again. I freeze on the spot, stiff with fear.
“I’ll take care of him,” Pest whispers to me, putting his hand on my shoulder.
I turn toward him, fighting down tears. “Don’t let anything happen to him,” I tell him. “Promise me!”
He pulls me in for an embrace. I put my head on top of his and try not to cry. “I promise,” Pest says. “Nothing will happen to him.”
Then I pull away from him, falling back into the loneliness of my own body. I can’t bear to look at them, either of them, so I turn away. I leave the basement without looking back, but the feeling that I’ll never see them again won’t go away. It follows me all the way up the stairs, out the door, and into Randy’s cart where I’m too proud to show any tears or weakness. But as the church shrinks in the distance and the gates of Cairo shut behind us, I feel like I’m falling into a dark emptiness.
126
Randy doesn’t speak to me the whole first day. He sits on the riding board of the cart he bought in Cairo, holding Tangerine’s reins loosely in his hand. Sometimes he hums or sings or whistles. Mostly he just watches the road.
That whole first day, I feel like I’ve made a big mistake. I should never have left Eric. I keep waiting for the feeling to subside, but it doesn’t. It just grows bigger and more certain. I tell myself that I’m not leaving him, not forever, that I’m doing this for his own good, for our own good, but it doesn’t diminish the hollow feeling of guilt I am carrying. It’s like a dark eye in me, always open, always probing my mistake. I swore I wouldn’t leave him.
And I did.
127
The first night, on our journey to the north and east, Randy builds a fire. While he does that, I take Tangerine down to a stream to drink. After I tie her to a tree where she can get some fresh grass, I make my way back to the fire. Randy has planted himself in front of the fire. The way he does it is so natural that I can tell he’s done it thousand times. His long, spindly legs are crossed, and his feet are bare, being warmed by the fire. He looks like a scarecrow that’s collapsed.
He looks up at me when I come closer and smiles as I join him. Randy looks different out here, more real somehow, like visiting someone for the first time in their own house where they feel free to be truly themselves. I see there’s two pots on the fire, one with water, and one filled with a kind of stew made from old, wrinkled potatoes, shrunken carrots, and dried venison. Without wanting to, I think of how easy it would be make a thin mash of it to feed to Eric. I know he’s not there, I don’t forget that, but I think of doing it. The dark eye inside me opens.
“You don’t remember what it was like before the Worm, do you?” Randy asks me suddenly. I turn toward him and shake my head before I sit down near the fire and hug my legs to my chest. I notice for some reason that Randy’s hair is so messy, it looks like it’s trying to crawl off his head. “I envy your generation,” he says, smiling, but looking deeply in the fire. “I think it’s worse for those of us who remember what life used to be.” I think he’s waiting for me to ask him what it was like, but I don’t.
Randy sighs. “You know, there was a time when I used to drive Pop’s car to the movies. When the movie was done, we’d all meet up at the diner. We’d eat burgers and drink shakes. We thought it was all going to last forever.” He laughed. I’d never heard him be so bitter before, but then again, I’d never talked with him much before and never about the time before the Worm. Eric always told me that people could be divided into two: those that never talked about the time before the Worm, and those that couldn’t talk about anything else. Those who did all the talking and remembering, he told me, they were the ones who didn’t make it. “You ever seen a movie?” Randy asks me.
I nod. “One time,” I tell him. “I saw one on a big television, back when the generators were still working.”
“Hell of a thing, movies,” he says to me, like I said nothing. “You get in this dark room, and everyone is talking and whispering, eating popcorn, and slurping soda. Then the room goes dark except for this flickering light up in the booth. And everyone goes real quiet. Like it’s a funeral. Then suddenly, boom!” Randy holds up his hands. “Light!” He laughs, all the bitterness gone. “The movie starts and you’re in a total different world. For like two hours, you don’t notice anyone. You might as well be sitting in a cave all by yourself. Then, when it’s over, it’s everyone wakes up, like we’ve dreaming together and we wake up together. And we’ve all had the same dream. A wonderful dream.” His eyes drift away into the fire.