Landscape With Flowers

I’m waiting for the crosstown bus, like usual, wondering if I have time for a cigarette, and the sirens go. Every siren in the city. Blows out my ears. I think oh shit, now what. Big white flash. Big wind. And I think, This is It. 

Then I wake up looking at this blue sky with fat white clouds. Like I’m lying on the grass in the park on my day off. But somebody forgot to mow the lawn. I mean, when I sit up, the grass is over my head. I’m thinking that I’m having some kind of nightmare, when someone says “Where on earth are we?”

This white lady stands up in the tall grass. She’s about my age, a little taller than me, curly dark hair with lots of gray. I stand up and put out my hand. “Joe Williams. I have no idea where we are.”

“Miriam Sorge. I thought I must be having a nightmare.” She kept patting the navy purse over one shoulder, like to make sure it hadn’t been stolen or something. It looked like real leather. Not that I know from real leather. Or purses. I’m not the kind of guy who wears one.

Miriam told me that there was fog that morning, and it made her late. “I hate to be late,” she told me. She was listening to Wagner on her radio, she explained, with the windows rolled up. She even hummed some of that Wagner stuff for me. Not my kind of music. Anyway, she thought the sirens were just the usual accident. Until the flash. Then, like me, she woke up in the field that needs mowing.

I told her that I’d heard the sirens and seen the flash, too. Maybe, I said, it was only New York City.

“I live in Pittsburgh,” she said. “Lived there. But why aren’t we dead?

I had no answer for that.  She was wearing high heels that caught in the grass. “Take ‘em off,” I suggested.

“I’ll ruin my stockings,” she said. 

Someone laughed. A younger woman, also white, stood up from where she’d been hidden in the grass. “First world problems,” she said, and laughed again. Miriam frowned at her. I’d been thinking that I might be in heaven, but I didn’t think anybody would say anything like that in heaven.

“I’m Carey Ververs,” said the young woman. Her shirt had paint smears on it.

“I’m Joe,” I said. “This here’s Miriam.”

 “I was walking to work,” Carey told us. “There was a flash, and I was here. We knew it would happen sooner or later.” 

Miriam said that she’d been expecting it all her life. “Even younger people, like you,” she said to Carey, “people who didn’t have to duck and cover under their little school desks, like my aunt, or get frightened by those TV programs that showed how people melt when the atomic bomb hits, you knew what it was.”

“Yeah, but how’d we get here?” I asked. “Is it heaven, or what?”

Carey smiled. “Maybe. Only I thought there’d be more people in heaven.”

“It’s not the heaven I learned about,” snapped Miriam.

I asked where Carey had come from. “Little town in upstate New York,” she said. When Miriam and I told us where we were from, Carey frowned. “Must have been a large bomb. It could have taken out most of the east coast.”

That was so depressing that we all just stood and stared around us. At the bottom of our grassy hill lay a grove of some kind of tall trees. No idea what kind. I’m a city boy; trees are trees. “Maybe there’s water down there,” I said. That’s what they say in TV shows.

Then a voice rose up out of the grass, a woman’s voice. “I understand it now! I can see the pattern. Clean and clear. Beautiful!”

She was beautiful. Tall, long legs, light brown skin, wide-spaced eyes. I fell in love. Even though I’m way older than she is.

“Um. Hi,” I said. “I’m Joe.”

“Devora,” she said. Miriam and Carey also introduced themselves. But Devora ignored them. She just kept talking.

“There’s a grove of trees every seven hills. Each one with a spring, or creek. About three miles in that direction, is another grove. But that one has apple trees!” 

“And Johnny Appleseed. In a tin hat.” Miriam snorted. “I hate apples. Maybe we can find a rabbit.”

“No!” Devora stamped her foot. She wore sandals. “No killing. There’s been enough killing. We can let go of the killers in our spirits, and cultivate our wisdom. We need to live lightly on this new world!”

I fall in love and it turns out she’s a crazy person. 

Miriam seemed to agree with me. “Lightheaded is more like it,” she said. “Let’s see if Joe is right about the water.” She headed downhill, wading through the grass, shoulder bag swinging, tottering in her high heels. I went after her, to catch her in case she fell. Carey followed. She had the same idea I did, catching up with Miriam and taking her arm.

Devora strode along beside us, still talking. “The bomb was supposed to kill the people and leave the buildings standing. But instead, all the growths of civilization have evaporated. The Lakotas hoped that their Ghost Dance would wash away everyone’s anger. And it has. They have finally sent the white man’s empire back to the sea it crawled out of. “

Okay, I’m browner, blacker, than Devora, and I’ve heard this hooey before, and it sounds great until you start thinking about bagels and guys who play music in the subway and a beer with your buddies at the end of the day. Yeah, there’s plenty of bullshit, too, even in New York City where half the people are brown or black. I mean, she had a point. Still, I was gonna miss my buddies. And beer.

Maybe my buddies would show up later. We couldn’t be the only ones, even if this isn’t heaven. But there wouldn’t be any beer.

“You from some reservation?” Miriam asked. Before I could tell her that was nasty, Devora did it for me. “We do not all live on reservations, despite what the white people did to us. I’m from the Wampanoag tribe, in southern Massachusetts. There should be water down here.”

Under the trees, the grass was shorter, or squashed by brown leaves. A little stream ran through the trees and kept on going down a hill that led to more of that giant grass. I was really thirsty, and I guess Carey and Devora were too. We just lay down and scooped water into our mouths. Only after I’d had three mouthfuls did I wonder about poison. But none of us fell over or got sick.

While we drank, Miriam went behind a tree and came back carrying her shoes. I figured she must have put the pantyhose in her jacket pocket to keep them safe. Like she was gonna need them for a party.

Carey had made a little cup out of some leaves she wove together with grass stalks, and brought Miriam some water. “Thank you, dear,” Miriam said. “That’s a very clever little arrangement.” I wondered if Carey was some kind of wilderness woman. So I asked her how she learned to make cups out of leaves, and she said she liked to make things out of whatever was lying around. “I’m a painter,” she explained. “I paint apartments, and I paint pictures.”

After we’d all had a drink, and Miriam had washed her face, Devora stood up. “I’m going to find those apples!” she proclaimed.

“I’ll go with you,” said Carey, but Devora announced, “I must go alone!” Everything she said was like that, like she was talking to a crowd through a microphone.

The three of us sat by the creek and watched her go. No one said anything, but I’d bet none of us thought we’d ever see her again. The water growled in my stomach. I thought of bagels with garlic cream cheese, hot pretzels from street vendors, and pastrami sandwiches.

“So why us?” I asked, to take my mind off food. “Only four of us. Where is everyone else? What are we supposed to do here?”

“That Devora told us all about it,” Miriam barked. “We’re supposed to starve to death because we were mean to the Indians.”

I didn’t point out that black people were part of that group, too. Meanwhile, Carey was collecting something from the dead leaves that littered the ground under the trees. “Acorns,” she said. “I think you have to boil them first.” 

“Nuts and berries? That simply will not do,” said Miriam. “And how will we boil those nasty things anyway? I left my cooking pot in my other purse.”

On the other side of the creek, a brown shadow that I thought was a rock sat up. Long ears, twitchy nose. A rabbit. It didn’t seem worried about us three hungry, drooling humans.

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