“He never has soap.”
That was true. For over a year, August had been a fixture in the afterlife, something to mark the time by. He arrived once a month on his mule-drawn buggy with goods to trade and information to gather. He wanted to know how they were feeling, and he liked to share notes about the weather, too. Once Frida had a cold, and he’d asked her what color her snot was.
“Clear,” she’d told him.
He’d smiled and said, “It’s going to be real cold tonight, so bundle up.”
Frida had once traded August an acorn squash for a dented tin of evaporated milk and, another time, her old cashmere sweater for a knife, recently sharpened. As he handed it to her, blade down, he’d said, “For cooking, or weaponry.” A statement, not a question, for it was understood that all tools in the wilderness needed to be versatile.
August was a thin black guy, probably ten years older than they were, just shy of forty, and he wore the never-quite-faded desperation of a former addict. “A tendency toward the vampiric” was how Cal had once put it. August even called himself a junkie, and he was: he traded junk for other junk. He liked to say he was the last black man on earth, and he might have been; around here, all jokes looped back to sour.
“I want to try planting some garlic,” Cal said. “Maybe he has some.”
“Okay.”
“There’s that look again. What is it?”
“It’s nothing. Go digging.”
“Whatever it is you’re worrying about, just don’t.”
She said she’d try not to.
Cal waved at her from the doorway.
“Breathe!” he called out behind him.
Frida exhaled. How could he tell?
He’d been saying that for as long as she could remember. He’d said it a lot during those first few months out here. He had kept her calm. Occasionally, his own nervousness about their survival spiked, and the air around him tightened, but most of the time, he seemed almost peaceful. It was as if he’d just returned from a monastery, his eyes gentle and open to the world, its good and its evil, the fair and unfair. Meanwhile, she could not even remember to breathe. It had taken everything to keep herself from saying, We’ll die out here, won’t we?
Back then, she and Cal were living in the shed, and they thought they might be there for good. Neither knew that they’d eventually have a house to move into.
They’d stumbled upon the shed, searching for a good spot to settle, and its presence had saved them. The truth was, they had been clueless, some might even say reckless, about their plan. They were headed for open space, and that was all. “I just want to go away,” Cal had first said to her. “I can’t stand how awful everything is here.”
Because she understood, Frida hadn’t asked him to elaborate. He could have meant L.A.’s chewed-up streets or its shuttered stores and its sagging houses. All those dead lawns. Or maybe he meant the closed movie theaters and restaurants, and the parks growing wild in their abandonment. Or its people starving on the sidewalks, covered in piss and crying out. Or its crime; the murder rate increased every year, and the petty theft was as ubiquitous as the annoying gargle of leaf blowers had once been. The city wasn’t just sick, it was dying, and Cal had been right, it was awful.
The shed had been a sound-enough structure: the walls, floor, and ceiling made of wooden planks, a roof covered by six tires, held together with baling wire. Cal had said, “Let’s move in,” to which Frida had replied, “Yeah, sure, nice outhouse.” But she knew this shed was better than anything the two of them would be able to build on their own. Cal had done construction on his father’s farm and, a little later on, in college, but he’d never built a home.
“I can do it,” he’d told her as they moved their stuff into the shed. He said they could sleep there as they built an expansion. “I can do it with your help.”
“That’s what I’m worried about,” Frida answered. “You and me, alone.”
At first, that’s how it had been. August hadn’t found them yet, nor had the Millers, their closest and only neighbors, a few miles to the east. They later learned that Bo Miller had built the shed, years before. Their first four months out here, Cal and Frida had spoken only to each other, and sometimes that was the hardest thing, more trying than the planting or irrigating or the labor it took to build the rudimentary outdoor kitchen. Though she’d tried to prepare herself, Frida couldn’t believe that they were really alone. Just the two of them.