Snapshots from the Bad Side #3

I pushed a small dolly-cart full of food along the dock. The boats that were previously full of life were lifeless. Some were locked up, others had maybe one person left behind as caretaker.

These were the dog days of August – the winds that were so prevalent during the spring and summer were gone. The sun beat down on the top of my head. The colony was almost a ghost town. I had this nauseating feeling…it made me want to cut the bowlines and gun for the horizon.

We made the decision at the end of the second day. After Dad left, the panic set in. We went from boat to boat trading stories. Did we know what was happening? Did we know anyone in the ‘Danger Zone’, as we were starting to call it? We weren’t referring to cities, there were too many places where things were going wrong. An Indian couple – a guy who went by “Ray” (who knew how many syllables his real name was) and his wife Mala, they were from San Jose. As we passed their boat, I heard frantic Punjabi as he spoke with someone – she was sitting on their top deck crying and using a dishtowel to wipe her eyes.

If it weren’t for the fear in everyone’s eyes, you’d think it was a big party. Plasma screens with their sound turned way, way up chattered the news in several languages. People were standing around and discussing things. I took a sip off of a cup of beer, my first in almost a year. Then someone reached in and slapped it out of my hand – I guess everything else in the world was going crazy, but the ‘no alcohol to minors’ rule hadn’t been rescinded. Nancy tugged at my hand and pointed back the way we came. It was too loud for me to hear her but she wanted to go back to home base.

The noise dampened as I slid the cabin door shut. You could still hear it, like you were hiding in the back of the coat closet at a cocktail party. We continued to watch the news hoping to hear something, anything, about our parents. As the hours passed, she fell asleep in a nest of blankets on the floor and I did the same, lying on the couch.