The Wind in a Bottleneck

The wind enters through a gap under the canvas covering the window. It dances into a corner and caresses the sleeping child’s cheek.

The room is bare, just scarred wood floor, and broken windows with canvas nailed on the outside that blocks the light of the dying day. The room is swept and clean, not like some rooms, where filthy clothes, empty bongs, bottles, crushed cans, hypos, broken furniture, and sometimes pieces of desiccated bodies litter scabby carpet–or cracked tiles, or peeling vinyl–and pile up against crumbling plaster walls. The child under a torn canvas, slightly less dirt-crusted than the window covering, stirs in her sleep, but then her breathing slows again, and her body relaxes.

Minutes later, something slams against the house, something small, but the room that is used to stillness tosses the echo around its empty shell. Beneath the echo is a lilting whoooooo. The child sits upright, the canvas slips from her thin frame and reveals her loose, robe-like yellow garment. A hempen cord looped around her middle draws in the fabric.

Wind, she whispers. 

She scrambles to her feet, tucks the trailing fabric around her legs and up into the hemp cord, like pants, and rushes through the interior doorway. She returns to the room carrying several large, nested plastic buckets and a spade with a two-foot D-handle. The noise that woke her echoes through the room once more.

Yes, wind. 

She recognizes the sound that heralds the precious wind: A loose board that bangs against the house and the hollow melody of the wind as it goes into and emerges from a bottle on the porch.

She unlocks and pulls back the heavy, hinged steel bar from the thick metal door that leads to the outside. There is no one on the porch, no one in the yard. From a crawl space beneath the house, she pulls a child's red wagon. She puts the buckets and spade into the wagon box, and as the light on the horizon fades, she tugs the wagon through the thick, still dust that surrounds houses that slowly fade into the night, houses that perch on the edge of a rocky bareness that was once a street.

She walks nearly a mile before she turns right and parks the wagon next to a shadow that is darker than the inky twilight. It is a house that supports a sagging porch, like two weary or drunk travelers, who pause here because they cannot take another step. Here they stand, waiting for the earth to pull them down so they can finally rest.

The child is small, spindly, with just a dusting of dark hair covering her scalp, her face  a stain above the faded, dirty robe. Her eyes permanently squint, the better to see through heat mirages or darkness, the better to smell the death or rain a rare wind carries.

Rain coming, she whispers.

Under the porch, lying face down, she uses her spade and digs deep into the ground. When the packed soil finally feels cool and a little wet, she scoots backward to the wagon and positions her buckets so that she can push the soil into them. When they are full of the heavy, damp soil, she takes four pieces of thick plastic sheeting from a pouch close to her body, under the robe. The plastic pieces are circles with their edges puckered together to form little bags. The girl stretches the elastic apart and places the plastic sheets over the buckets, where the elastic holds them fast. She then stacks them in her wagon and retraces her steps through the thick dust that carpets the stone-hard ground of the dead yards.

Back at the house, she sees movement through the half-open door. She stows her wagon in the crawl space and climbs the two steps to the porch. She smells them before she sees them. Sweat. They are not local.

Two figures stagger into the front room from the interior doorway.

“Nothin’ here but a powerful stink, Burt.”

“Look, a kid, Hal.”

“She’s wearin’ a blanket, lookit that,” Burt says.

“Got a name, kid?” Hal asks.

“Breezy,” she says. 

They move closer to her. She stands still as a desert night. Hal reaches for her robe. Just before he touches the fabric, something tugs his arm so hard that it suddenly dangles limp at his side. He howls in pain and tries to back away. He cannot take a single step as Breezy binds his legs to Burt's. The child tugs the hemp cord and the two boys fall hard, the blow to the wood echoes through the room.

“Hush or I will gut you for your fluids,” she says and holds a large blade up to each of their faces.

Her calm unnerves the boys, who are much larger and heavier than Breezy. She removes a detached length of her robe and wraps it around the boys, turning their bodies deftly and without comment.

“Why we gotta hush? Nobody here,” Burt says. Hal whimpers as Breezy jerks the cloth snugly around them.

“Right. Nobody here ever. I don't care for noise,” she says. She leaves the room.

“You think she gonna kill us, Hal?”

“Nope. She wants something. If she wants to kill a body, she'll do it right off. And she kin, don't you think? You see that blade? You see what she done to my shoulder?”

“Oh, she sure kin. Now hush. She comin’ back.”

She carries two empty plastic pails and a step stool.

“If you didn't wet yourselves in fear when I trussed you, I would appreciate it if you'd pee in these here pails.”

The boys stare, the whites of their eyes glow in the darkness.

“Piss or blood, boys. Take your pick. One of them, you walk out of here. The other, I compost you and in a few weeks, I eat you as eggs and chiles for my breakfast.”

“Holy Lucifer!”

“Fuuuck.”

Breezy positions the stool under the bound boys’ upper bodies, opens the fronts of their trousers and places the pails so they will catch whatever water the boys release. She tied them back-to-back, so she could put the pails beside them simultaneously.

After a tense moment, the thudding splash and fast streams against plastic twist Breezy's lips into something like a smile. Both boys grunt and strain for every drop they can squeeze out. Breezy covers the pails and takes them away.

The boys, impatient, wrestle themselves off the stool and then realize they have even less advantage now. They lay on the bare wood with their worn, ripped trousers open.

“She gonna cut ‘em off?”

“Nah. She ain’t more than ten.”

“Thirteen. And y'all ain't my type,” she says from the interior doorway.

“Well, we did what you said, now untie us.”

“The least you can do is give us some of them eggs and chiles.”

“Can't do it, boys. But here is a root you can take and eat. You can roast it or you can eat it raw. Don't waste the water in it. You won't see no more for a long time.”

“What do you mean? We come up from the Gulf, where they harvest seawater. Everybody says there’s fresh water up thisaway.”

“Nope. Ain't rained in four years.”

“Well hell. What should we do now?”

Breezy looks at the boys. They remind her of boys who once lived in the town, and once played on their street with her brother, some of them would pull her in her wagon.

“Boys, you got any skills?”

Hall grunts. Then he laughs until he coughs.

“Hal used to be a mechanical engineer.”

“What did you do, Hal?”

“Made wind turbines.”

Breezy understands his mirthless laughter.

“How about you, Burt?”

“Nothin’ special, me. Worked in refineries mostly.”

“You brothers, friends, or lovers?”

“Cousins, girl. Why does it matter?”

“Brothers are the most loyal. Got no use for friends or lovers–jealousies cloud judgment. Cousins might do.”

“What? You know what, never mind. Just cut us loose, yeah?”

“Gonna. Only I was tryin’ to think what could put you on the right road.”

Breezy loosens the cord and fabric and the boys stand. Hal supports the arm hanging from his dislocated shoulder with the other hand.

“Here,” Breezy says and grabs Hal’s arm before he can protest. She places her foot against his hip and gives the arm a sharp tug and they all hear the joint grind as it pops back into place. Hal doesn’t make a sound.

“We'll be going, now,” Burt says, shaking his head.

Breezy shrugs and nods at the door.

They hesitate.

“What?”

“What were you thinking about, when you said ‘put us on the right road?’ You got work we can do for a bed and maybe some of them eggs?”

“Screw eggs. I ain't had roast bird in ages,” Burt says.

“Can't eat the birds until they don't lay no more eggs,” Breezy says. “Come on, I'll show you something.”

She leads them outside to the crawl space.

“There really ain't nobody else around this place?”

“Just living corpses, insane because they harvested their family members for fluids.”

“Jesus. Cannibals?”

“No. Like I said, you can't kill the birds until they stop giving eggs.”

Hall and Burt stare blankly.

“They kept them alive and recycled urine like I'm fixin’ to do with that fine sample you provided. When the urine dries out and the kidneys fail, the strong take the blood of the weak, filter out the water, and cook the solids. Nobody eats meat because it takes too much water to digest it--meat don't bring in enough fluid and it takes too much from you. Better for compost.”

Breezy pulls the buckets of dirt out and motions for the boys to each take one.

“Why they wearin’ bonnets?”

“Burt, you're the water refiner. Tell Hal why they're wearin’ bonnets.”

“Where'd this dirt come from, Breezy?” Burt asks.

“Dug down two or three feet, under a porch for it.”

“She's gonna get the water out of it, Hal. That right, Breezy?”

“Yep.”

For the rest of the night, Breezy and Burt set up the evaporation system while Hal secures every vessel in and around the house onto the roof. He doesn't need to be told to clean out the barrels beneath the gutters at the four house corners. 

The house ready, Breezy points to the houses up and down the street.

“I got barrels there, too.”

The boys fix up a total of seven empty houses while Breezy puts their urine through the filtration process.

“How you know to do all this?” Hal asks while they sit for a moment in the front room of the house.

“Wind, just a couple gusts, at sundown. If we're lucky, there's a cold front. If miracles are real, rain's comin’ sometime before noon. If it comes before too late in the day, we'll have a good water harvest.”

The luck and the miracles come.

The three of them stand naked in the yard and let the rain cleanse their skin. They open their mouths and take it inside their bodies, straight from the sky. It rains hard for fifty minutes. It rains softly for another ninety minutes. 

When the rain stops, the sun is up. All trace of wind is gone. The three rush to the rooftop containers and pour their contents down the gutters to fill the barrels a little more. Then, they use the wagon to haul all the barrels they can salvage into the house. They lose one barrel to a stooped figure who grins with a gaping, toothless mouth, whose stench, like a festering animal corpse when its skin bursts in the heat, hangs in the now-humid air.

That night, Breezy teaches them the system. She draws a map of the house, the covered back garden, and the chickens that run from a room in the house, out a hatch in the back door, into the garden.

“Pee in the jars. Purify it immediately. That is drinking water. Your pee turns brown, and your back starts to hurt, drink some of this. Last resort. Everything else is for the chickens and the garden. Water the plants every three weeks, exactly like I show you, and never ever leave the plastic open.”

“How long will this much water last?”

“This is twice as much as I got last time, Thank you, boys. You follow this plan to the letter, it lasts eight years at the most.”

“You have a near-perfect closed system,” Burt says. “How do you lose water from it?”

“Sweat. Try as you might, even if you never go out in daylight, even if you always sleep in the basement during the hot part of the day, you lose some to sweat.”

“But…”

Breezy shakes her head slightly and motions toward the interior door. She leads them down a hallway to a swinging door, the kind that once hung between restaurant kitchens and their dining rooms. The door doesn’t swing. A makeshift gasket holds it in place.

“Put your hand on that.”

“It’s cool.”

“Yes.”

“You got electricity?”

“Some. Not enough for air conditioning.”

“What, then?”

“Solar for a fan. A thick piece of cloth that holds water a long time in front of the fan.”

“Swamp cooler?”

“Swamp cooler.”

“What for, though?”

“Keeps the chickens alive.”

Hal and Burt take turns peering through the foggy window a third of the way down the door. Six chickens strut around the large room. They are all various shades of brown. Some have black patches. They are silent.

“That a roo?” Burt asks. “Our  ‘buela had a roo looked like that. He’d sit on your shoulder if you sat on the porch steps.”

“Yes. That is a roo.”

Breezy walks to the other end of the hall where there is an identical door.

“Chickens can in-breed for a while, but I have to keep a couple of different little farms for them, so I can keep swapping out the roos and put in fresh roos from different nests who aren’t too closely related to the hens. I only hatch a few eggs each year.”

Hal and Burt stare at the girl, small, they think, for thirteen.

She leads them up the steps to a room on the upper floor. It is warmer up there, but still not as warm as the outside. They peer through another little window at a bright room. The walls are covered in a shiny material. The windows, one in the south wall and one in the east wall, let in abundant light. In front of the reflective walls, shelves made of metal tubing and wire racks, built on castors,  stand in rows. Each shelf contains rectangular plastic pots, each pot filled with rows of plants. Some of the plants are large, and some are tiny seedlings.

“This is the rest of the water. The chicken shit fertilizes, but the plants need water to produce fruit. The whole room is a water cycle and I can conserve a lot of it, but you lose it to the thirsty air.”

“What is that buzzing sound?”

“Wings. Pollinators.”

“Bees?”

“Some. Mostly wasps, lacewings, ladybugs.”

Breezy does not open the door. The light stirs up the insects. She thinks of the slight wind from the insects’ wings, almost as precious as the jobs they do–their weight and that slight wind are the only forces that strengthen the plant stems and stalks. Breezy runs her hands over the seedlings, to simulate a breeze, but she fears the oils and germs on her skin, which she rarely washes, will devastate her crops.

“This is paradise, Breezy.”

For a week, Hal and Burt help Breezy scavenge water from soil under porches and patio slabs, where it goes to hide after the rain. They evaporate it into plastic hoods, from which it drips into holding vessels. For a week, Hal and Burt eat eggs and chiles, herbs and greens. Their gums, which have bled for so long, they’ve forgotten a time when their mouths tasted of anything but copper, heal.

At the end of the week, every holding tank, barrel, bucket, bottle, and basin is filled with purified water. Hal improves some of the mechanisms and Burt shows Breezy new ways to position filters and how to use sunlight for purification.

“How long do you think we can stay here, Breezy?” Hal asks one morning after they finish their supper of eggs and greens.

“As long as you like,” Breezy replies.

Later, while they sleep deeply and Breezy monitors the blood flowing from their arms into clean bottles, she sings softly to them of spring rains and summer wind and the sound of the leaves of cottonwood trees, which went extinct long ago, before Breezy drained the blood of her father and brother.

As long as you like, she whispers, and as she continues her songs, her breath stirs the fine strands of hair that fall across their serene cheeks.