Maggie, Patrick Sean Lee [digital e reader .TXT] 📗

I see nothing, hear nothing. Perhaps I should call?

I move more rapidly, slamming through the dead stalks, now, as though I were a beast in the jungle trying to evade a predator. But, I have a weapon. If someone has her I won’t hesitate to kill him.

“Maggie! Maggie!” I finally yell. The words fall from my mouth as though I’ve screamed them into a pillow. I stop. Listen intently, frozen for a moment. Listening.

Nothing.

***

An hour has passed. I’ve made a wide circle through the field, and I’m back to our ragged home. I curse myself for having fallen asleep. I curse whoever has her. The state of this land. The sun. The silence. Myself.

There is a farmhouse a few miles back in the direction we came from yesterday. I’ll go there. Perhaps she was simply hungry and thirsty enough to have wandered off alone in search of something to eat or drink. The farmhouse is where I would go if I were a child. Maybe she’s safe, sitting cross-legged on the floor in its kitchen, struggling to open an overlooked can of beans, or beets, or fruit cocktail. God, give me this one wish; that she’s there and safe.

***

The county road runs straight as an arrow; north and south twenty yards or so in front of the white clapboard house. The heat has baked the paint and turned it whiter still, purifying it, perhaps, for the Second Coming. It hits me that maybe that is what this terrible upheaval is all about. Maybe God isn’t dead after all. The ridgeline of the dark green roof sags, and ribbons of thermal air rise from it like ghosts, and the windows—those that aren’t broken—are dark. There is an old well pump behind the house with a long gray spout and gently curving handle. My impulse is to run to it, but I check my step—the well is probably dry anyway. The back door is ajar, standing forlornly beneath the lean-to porch atop the four-staired stoop. I have the pistol drawn and walk through the dust toward it, watching for any movement in the shadows of the interior. The weathered wooden steps creak with each step, and even with the gun I am frightened. I’m just a damned schoolteacher for God’s sake.

The kitchen is a disaster. It looks like the storms of Africa have wheeled through with a new fury, driven by demons. Every single utensil is on the floor, the cupboards are open, the doors ripped off their hinges. Paper crumpled and spotted black litters the floor. The smell of urine and excrement is heavy. Broken chairs that once seated a family lay haphazardly. I pass over all of it and walk cautiously down the hallway, stopping to peer into an equally devastated bathroom, a parlor with more destruction, the living room. All devoid of life. The second floor rooms are the same, only hotter. Maggie is not here, and so I return to the main floor.

The barn and an outbuilding stand fifty yards away at the rear, in front of a picket fence that has toppled into the dust and tumbleweeds that are like leggy buttresses. The small outbuilding is empty, save a few piles of non-essential tools and odds and ends no one wanted when they scoured the shelves. I leave it.

As I cross the short distance to the barn, one door moves slightly in the searing breeze. I can hear the sun; the crackling of it. Its death knell. I enter quietly and adjust my eyes to the near darkness, listening for a moment, but the only sound I hear is my heart hammering. She’s here, she must be, gagged and terrified. A thick post to my right affords protection, and I move quickly behind it. If he or they shoot, the worst that will happen will be a non-lethal wound. And then they will die—at least two of them.

“Maggie!”

No response. No gunfire. I call again. No response.

I am from the city and have never seen the inside of a real barn. This one erases my image of a bucolic home for horses. It once housed some kind of animal, though; there are several stalls on the left of the cracked concrete main walkway. Piles of hay, useless as food for starving humans. On the right are stacks of weathered wood on a scaffold-like platform, a few rusted tools hanging from large nails driven into the posts. A dented barrel with what looks like a short chimney piercing the top. No need for a stove any longer. In time it will crumble into more dust.

“Maggie,” I whisper. “Are you…” a foolish question I cut short as I walk down the walkway. Ten minutes later I have turned every strand of hay over looking for my sweet, innocent child. She is not here. There are no hidden trap doors, no concealed spaces in the walls or rafters. I am near to tears. At the rear of the building, however, there is a heavy door, padlocked shut from the outside. Frustration and despair move me to somehow open it, even though hope of finding her alive has faded.

Ten minutes and a frantic search for a hammer or crowbar finally rewards me. The end of the crowbar nearly yanked hold of my eye, jammed as the tool was in between the stacks of boards on the platform.

I am hungry and thirsty and sweating moisture out of my body that screams for water, but I manage to pry the latch free of the large screws that secure it to the planks of wood.

Maggie is not inside. I curse…but there is something. An old motorcycle leaning pristine on its kickstand in the center of the small, dark room. I would trade ten thousand of them for one cup of water. A hundred thousand for Maggie. I wonder if it still works; if there is gasoline in the tank. With such a means of conveyance I could cover thirty or forty miles through these cursed fields every hour in search of her. On this bike I might be able to find little Maggie, but if not, I could aim it at one of the trees with the throttle open, and so be done with my hideous life.
***

The tank, I found, was nearly full, and the well, thank God, was not dry, which is a curiosity in this Bessemer world. A crushed plastic milk container rifled from the kitchen becomes my canteen. It will hold a quart or so of the precious water. I am hungry, but my thirst is abated, and so I am off to scour the area for Maggie.

The sputter-rattle of the engine must alert anyone of my approach. I watch the stalks fall as I blaze through them, and I stand on the foot pegs to see the terrain and anything hiding or running. But there is nothing out here except dead corn until I come to a long, wide ditch that winds through the landscape near the far north end of the acreage. I follow it along its ridge, noting the remains of shoddy camps, praying that Maggie is here and that there aren’t so many of her captors that my two bullets can’t bring them down.

The hours drag on. I’ve covered a vast area, stopping often to drink, ignoring the pangs in my stomach. There is nothing here, and so I backtrack and search again, wishing for a full magazine of bullets with which to kill anything and everything I pray I’ll stumble onto. I am becoming them. Where have they taken her?

***

A week has passed, and I have abandoned hope of finding the only thing left of my miserable life. I cannot bring myself to dwell on my precious Maggie’s fate. Perhaps she is alive somewhere, but the prospect is fraught with doubt. God damn this world.

I am in Canada, now, a land singed and beaten by the merciless sun no less than any I have seen behind me, and I’ve coursed through Nova Scotia to Cape Breton where the angry sea batters the coast. Those clever or lucky or unfortunate enough to survive mill through the ravaged streets, or lay hopeless in doorways. Faces reflect an angst that is written in despair in vacant eyes. I ride through their midst, hoping one last time to see my child, but I expect no miracle. A park stands ahead, overlooking the sea, and in it is a lighthouse. I go there and drop the bike near the cobbled walkway leading to its entrance, and then amble around it to the seaward side. What do I expect to see far out in the gray-azure swells that follow one another toward this end of land? An ark? A spirit rushing like a tidal wave with rescuing arms extended to me?

I see my death in the waves that smash into the rocks below me.

I sit defeated with my back against the red-painted brick of the silent beacon. My pistol has two bullets. I’ll only need one, and so I withdraw the weapon from my waistband, and ask Maggie for forgiveness.