This story was published in a slightly different form in the (sadly) now defunct online magazine, “Neverary,” edited by the incomparable Lon Prater.  Hope you enjoy.

Malingering

by

Joseph Paul Haines

I didn’t notice Billy standing there until I had the front side of the Mustang jacked up and the driver’s side tire removed.  He was outgrowing his clothes again.  I’d have to do something about that soon.  Since the oil peak and subsequent crash in the early nineties, I’d become quite the tailor.  Who could afford to buy clothes anymore?  One day, demand simply outran supply and there was only so much oil to begin with.  The collapse of society started soon after.

Some said we had twenty years.  Some said fifty.

“Stand back, son,” I told Billy, scanning the edge of the treeline for any movement.  It wasn’t always safe outside.  You never knew when or where scavengers would show up anymore.

“Uh-huh,” Billy said.  He retreated a couple of inches, almost knocking over the portable scanner in the process.  It’d been blessedly silent so far today.

“Watch your step,” I said, glancing at him.  “What are you doing out here?”  Billy rarely left the confines of the basement and the puzzles of his chemistry set, particularly when I was working.  You’d think that he could discover an alternate energy source and save the planet all by himself from watching him work.  Part of me wanted to be angry with him for leaving his mother alone in the house, but that wasn’t really fair so I let it go.

“I don’t know,” he said.  It’s always been tough for my boy to talk to me.  I don’t know why.  It’s not like I treat him badly or beat him, God forbid.  Sometimes he’d walk around the house for days looking like he had a piece of paper on the tip of his tongue that he was afraid to spit out.

“Well then, give me a hand,” I said.  “Hand me those pliers.”  Billy spun around a couple of times, his chin to his chest, and finally bent over and picked up the pliers.  I held out my hand and he set the cool steel in my palm.

“Dad?”

“Yes?” The once silver discus of the rotor had rusted to a burnt orange circle.  I removed the retaining pins from the sideways stretched horseshoe of metal that held the brake pads in place.

“Why was Mom yelling last night?”

I knew this was coming, I just didn’t know when.  “Hand me those pads, will you?”

Billy’s chin went back into his chest.

How am I supposed to tell my son that his mother is . . .well, no longer herself?  How do you tell your son that his mother’s brain is slowly eating itself away with cancer?  He had enough to worry about as it was.  With the food shortage, Billy didn’t even have a one-in-fifteen chance of making it to adulthood and he knew it.  When oil prices went sky high, food prices went with them.  A six-year old shouldn’t have to worry about starving to death or planet-wide oil wars or being shot for a bag of potatoes.  He shouldn’t have to watch his mother slowly die in front of his eyes.

“The white box.  With the blue stripes,” I said.

He found it.

I slipped the first pad from the caliper, easing the kidney shaped piece of metal from its resting-place next to the rotor.

Billy handed me the box.  “Dad?”

“Your mother is sick,” I said.  I opened the box and pulled out a new pad.  It seemed such a waste to put new anything on this car, but I had saved up enough gas to get us out east, away from the coast.  I heard that farming communities were forming all over the middle states and if the Chinese hit the coast and went after the pipeline, I wanted to be long gone.  I just prayed that a man with a sick wife and a little boy would be accepted there.  In this new world, everyone had to pull their own weight.  I had to hope that there was compassion left out there somewhere.  That is, if the car even made it that far.

“There’s something wrong with her brain.”  I pushed back on the piston that shoved the pads together, creating space for the new pad.

“Oh,” he said.  Billy squatted down next to my open toolbox and started pushing the tools around.

I slipped the new pad into place and wiped the grease on the leg of my jeans.  Normally Cheryl would kill me for that, but under the circumstances . . .

“Dad?”

“Damn.”  The second pad was stuck.  I wiggled it back and forth.  “What, Billy?”

“Do you think that doctors could fix her?”

The pad popped loose.  It was warm to the touch.  “I don’t know, son.  Even if we found a doctor that would barter, I don’t know if they can help.  But that’s why we’re heading east, son.  We’ve got to try.”

Billy pulled a pack of Bubble-Yum from his pocket and unwrapped a piece.  He had saved this pack, making it last for over six months.  Billy knew that it was probably the last pack he’d ever have.  The sickly-sweet smell of grape drifted by before he popped it in his mouth.

The second pad required a bit of effort, but eventually settled into place.  I leaned over and peeked through the holes in the pads, trying to line them up with the caliper.  The gravel bit into my knees.

“Dad?”

I jiggled the first pad a bit, then slid the pins into place.

“Dad?”

“What?” I said, maybe just a touch more gruff than I had intended.

Silence.

I turned and stared into his eyes.  His tears reflected the sun.  He had a hammer in his right hand and he held it out toward me.

“Can’t you fix Mom?”

I looked deep into his eyes to see if he understood what he was asking, then eased the hammer from his hand, feeling the cool, lethal heft of it.

Maybe it would be better for everyone.

#

The sun set behind us as we made steady progress east.  The roads were littered with abandoned automobiles once you hit the rural areas, so the going was slow, but steady.

I looked in the rearview mirror and smiled at Billy.  He smiled back.

Absently, as I always did, I reached over and set my hand on Cheryl’s leg.  She didn’t notice, just continued staring at something on the horizon and humming softly.

The time for hard choices was coming, that much was certain.

But not yet.

Not today.

End