The Third Tarp

Harold’s eyes jab at the tarps again like a tongue probing a missing tooth. He sighs in disgust at all of it.

Two missing teeth. Two. The first two, now two more.

It’s the heat that bothers him the most today. After the power went out for the third and final time, that was the next bad thing: the end of electricity–the end of air conditioning. In Georgia, summer mornings can be breezy, almost pleasant, but the afternoons and evenings are reliably hot and humid. Sheryl called them sweltering.

He sits in his rocker and waits for the sun to dip behind Springer. It will still be hot, but with enough damp rags, he imagines he might sleep again, just like he has every night since he spread the tarps on the lawn. He remembers removing eight stones from Sheryl’s wall that ran along the creek. He remembers the tears as he placed each rock on the tarp corners.

“It sure is a hot one today. I’m going to make an iced tea. You want?”

He winces.

She knows we haven’t had ice since everything fell to shit.

He turns his head to the left, away from her rocker, and mutters something they knew meant, ‘No, thank you.’

His eyes flick to the two tarps to the right of the paved stone trail to the carport. Neither his truck nor Sheryl’s Accord have moved from where they have sat for months.

The end of gasoline was the first bad thing where folks realized that help wasn’t coming and that they might not bounce back this time. The dried-up pumps weren’t the first bad thing. That was the internet. Folks had taken it, like most things, for granted.

Yeah, it doesn’t look good this time.

Any word from the governor?

By then, the feds had unofficially shrugged their shoulders and slipped away, punting the ball back to the states, counties, and cities. The states-rights crowd were grimly jubilant, sharing their ‘Well, it’s about damn time’ looks with each other. As though now, life could start.

Do what you can to maintain order.

That this might be the end was implied but never spoken. For the time being, the idea of exerting power or influence or aid or direction from a federal level was laughable.

“Sky ought to be clear enough to sleep on the back porch again tonight. You game, old timer?”

Yeah, the walkers would love that.

He lets the question float in the air, unanswered.

His eyes find the tarps again. Still there. Still stretched out over them. He sighs again. He would give everything for just one moment, just one touch from her hand again. One last touch.

Scooter crawls out from under the front porch. His steps are tentative. The arthritis is getting bad.

Harold envied the old dog’s ability to seek out the cool air beneath the house, but as bad as the dog’s joints were, Harold’s were worse. Getting up and down the three steps to the porch was all he could manage these days.

The light dims, and Harold senses the sun slipping behind the mountain. The wrens commemorate its passage with a few bars of birdsong. Scooter doesn’t even notice. His hearing is going too.

It would be a mercy, Harold thinks. In his head, he finds the shotgun in the storage shed.

Scooter sniffs at the blue tarp, whines, and shuffles toward the green one, but then falls onto his bloated belly and whines some more.

“Nuff of that, Scoot. They’re gone, buddy.”

Scooter startles as if he’d forgotten Harold sat where he sat every evening before sunset.

A breeze riffles the hairs on Harold’s arms. For an instant, he is content. Then his eyes tag the tarps again, and that’s the end of that.

Lacey and Jared. Eleven and thirteen. The last of their kids. In the end, it wasn’t the walkers or the gangs, but the fever that got the last two. In a way, they were the lucky ones.

Daddy was the philosopher. Not me.

His father had often talked about life, the importance of finding joy where you can, and never wasting time. He stressed to both him and his brother Kevin (who died in the first wave of walkers) that you should never part from a loved one without telling them how you feel about them. To his credit, LeRoy was good at following his advice. In the weeks just before the outbreak, Kevin and Harold had spent more than one evening remembering their dear old dad. Just two brothers keeping watch over the night, sharing a bottle of bourbon, remembering happier times, and celebrating the man who had brought them into the world. Sharing their favorite memories, keeping him alive, in their heads, at least.

The first shift of crickets begins their evening chorus.

So it goes.

One day, you will kiss your sweetheart for the last time.

One day, you will speak with your brother for the last time.

You will think ‘I have time,’ and that is true until the day it isn’t.

Harold wipes his eyes.

One day, you will be no more. If there’s something you got a hankering to do, best be about it while you can. Tomorrow is promised to no man.

Harold remembers her touch. Married thirty-eight years, plenty of time to tire of a woman’s touch surely, but he never did. He never lost his love for her.

One day, you will touch your loved one for the last time.

LeRoy rested his heavy, calloused hand on the back of their necks when he said this, cementing in their heads, this raw truth.

The thing about last touches is we never know it’s the last one. Do we?

He would look them in the eyes and wait for an answer. LeRoy looked deep into his son’s eyes, seeking and instilling wisdom.

You think you have time.

The breeze ruffles the surface of the tarps, and Harold thinks again about finding the shovel from the chaos captive in the wasp-infested shed.

The tarps again.

They’ll leak soon enough.

But it would be the last time. The last time he would see his kids. It had been three days since they died. The heat was already breaking their bodies down. The scent of death hung heavy in the air.

He thinks about uncovering the tarps now and shivers in terror. He had waited too long.

I will bury them in the morning first thing.

“Did you say something, Harold?”

His eyes swivel from the tarps to her rocker. The empty one next to his.

Then he remembers the third tarp. The one set up near the creek because that had been her favorite place.

He squints the tears away. Through his watery eyes, he can see her again. In his eyes, she is nineteen, then fifty-three, then twenty-nine; her face sliding back and forth through time.

“It was nothing, honey.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. You about ready to turn in?”

He extends his hand to the memory, fully expecting her to take it this time, and it dissolves.

One day, you will kiss your sweetheart for the last time.

Harold enters his house and holds the door for the thirty seconds it takes Scooter to make his way up the three steps and follow him inside.