After I wrote this book I began to get messages and emails through my website at nickcolebooks.com and on Twitter @nickcolebooks. People told me their stories. There were elderly people who’d read The Old Man and the Wasteland and told me they felt just like the Old Man. They knew they were old, but they still felt they had something to contribute—like they had one last adventure in them. There were families who read the book together. One chapter at night. Together and reading. Making memories that might last forever. There was one guy who finished the book in the bus on his way home from work. He rushed up to his apartment to tell his wife about it as she was preparing dinner. As he told her about the ending, he began to cry. And there were the soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq who probably felt just like the Old Man: all alone in the desert. And there were the people who were having another tough year. And …
Life is tough. Despite our best efforts. Life is tough. But sometimes you’ve got to go a little farther out into the gulf. Sometimes you need some of that real courage, the kind Harrison Ford’s character talks about in The Mosquito Coast: “Three-A.M. courage.” And you might get beaten again today, or maybe, just maybe, you might get a chance. You might hook the big fish. You might just win one. Whatever happens in these tough times, winning and losing isn’t so important. Just don’t give up. Christ told his disciples to keep asking, keep seeking, keep knocking.
And so it’s three A.M.
Our Old Man has been turning, tossing. Trying to figure out a way to beat the day that will come with the rising sun. A way to take back something from “Before” to be used in the “Now” that is a burnt up and ash-covered world.
The only book he’s read for the last forty years is about another Old Man who was eighty-six days unlucky, and then in the dark of morning that other Old Man went farther out into the gulf waters in hopes that today might be the day he caught the big fish.
Our Old Man rolls over and hears the rusty springs in his bed. He is tired of sleep. He is tired of losing. He is tired of being “curst.” And so he puts his feet onto the dirt floor and considers going farther out into the Wasteland today.
I hope you enjoy what follows.
Nick Cole
October 2012
It was dark when he stepped outside into the cool air. Overhead the last crystals of night faded into a soft blue blanket that would precede the dawn. Through the thick pads of his calloused feet he could feel the rocky, cracked, cold earth. He would wear his huaraches after he left and was away from the sleeping village.
He had not slept for much of the night. Had not been sleeping for longer than he could remember. Had not slept as he did when he was young. The bones within ached, but he was old and that was to be expected.
He began to work long bony fingers into the area above his chest. The area that had made him feel old since he first felt the soreness that was there. The area where his satchel would push down as he walked.
He thought about tea, but the smoke from the mesquite would betray him as would the clatter of his old blue percolator and decided against it.
He stepped back inside the shed, looked around once, taking in the cot, patched and sagging, the desk and the stove. He went to the desk and considered its drawers. There was nothing there that should go in his satchel. He would need only his tools. His crowbar, his worn rawhide gloves, his rope, the can of pitch, the tin of grease and his pliers. Not the book.
But if I die. If I go too far or fall into a hole. If my leg is broken then I might want the book.
He dismissed those thoughts.
If you die then you can’t read. If you are dying then you should try to live. And if it is too much, that is what the gun is for. Besides, you’ve read the book already. Many times in fact.
He put the book back in its place.
He went to the shelf and opened the cigar box that contained the pistol. He loved the box more than the gun inside. The picture of the sea, the city and the waving palms on the front reminded him of places in the book. Inside the box, the gun, dull and waiting along with five loose shells, an evil number, rattled as his stiff fingers chased them across the bottom.
Moving quickly now he took the old blue percolator and rolled it into the thin blanket that lay on the cot. He stuffed them both inside the worn satchel, reminding him of the book’s description of the furled sail. ‘Patched with flour sacks… it looked the flag of permanent defeat.’ He shouldered the bag quickly and chased the line away telling himself he was thinking too much of the book and not the things he should be. He looked around the shed once more.
Come back with something. And if not, then goodbye.
He passed silently along the trail that led through the village. To the west, the field of broken glass began to glitter like fallen stars in the hard-packed red dirt as it always did in this time before the sun.
At the pantry he took cooked beans, tortillas, and a little bit of rice from the night before. The village would not miss these things. Still they would be angry with him. Angry he had gone. Even though they wished he would because he was unlucky.
Salao. In the book unlucky is Salao. The worst kind.
The villagers say you are ‘curst’.
He filled his water bottle from the spring, drank a bit and filled it again. The water was cold and tasted of iron. He drank again and filled it once more. Soon the day would be very hot.
At the top of the small rise east of the village he looked back.
Forty years maybe. If my count has been right.
It was an old processing plant by the side of the highway east of what was once Yuma. It was rusting in the desert before the bombs fell, now it was the market and pantry of the village. Its outlying sheds the houses of the villagers, his friends and family. He tried to see if smoke was rising yet from his son’s house. But his daughter-in-law would be tired from the new baby.
So maybe she is still sleeping.
If his granddaughter came running out, seeing him at the top of the rise against the dawn, he would have to send her back. He was going too deep into the wasteland today.
Too dangerous for her.
Even though she knows every trick of salvage?
I might need her. What if I find something big?
‘I may not be as strong as I think, but I know many tricks and I have resolution.’
My friend in the book would say that, yes.
He would send her back. It was too dangerous. He adjusted the strap wider on his shoulder to protect the area above his heart where the satchel always bit, then turned and walked down the slope away from the village and into the wasteland.
He sang bits of a song he knew from before. Years hid most of the lyrics and now he wanted to remember when he first heard the song. As if the memory would bring back the lost words he’d skipped over.
Time keeps its secrets. Not like this desert. Not like the wasteland.
In the rising sun, his muscles began to loosen as his stride began to lengthen, and soon the ache was gone from his bones. His course was set between two peaks none of the village had ever bothered to name after the cataclysm. Maybe once someone had a name for them. Probably on charts and rail survey maps of the area once known as the Sonoran Desert. But such things had since crumbled or burned up.
And what are names? He once had a name. Now the villagers simply called him The Old