The Gray Machine

Drift, Body

Hey ho, the great gray road, forward to eternity...

Finally, his broad, limp form was tossed past the breakers into the beach surf, where it lodged in the smooth sand, mostly bare. Tiny fish nibbled at wounds in his ashen skin in the tide pools around his body, recognizing him with piscine placidity as they might recognize a shipwreck or a coral reef. He became a passive fixture of their silent kingdom, now until forever.

Or so it might have been, had the five drifters not seen him, slowly being buried by the tide.

✧

The cloudless evening sky was violet, the ocean air gentle. Blonde, sunburned Kevin "Dimple" Rhodes watched Summer gaze across the Gulf, her clear eyes just a shade darker than the ocean. The breeze danced through her chocolate cinnamon hair, flapping the yellow bandana like some ancient flag. Her fingers courted her old Stella guitar strings, stirring the voices of her companions.

Rolando – small for fifteen and easy to miss even in a crowd of five – had been lost in thought as the others sang and spoke, long black locks mimicking the Coatzacoalcos waves. Wednesday was grinning in her homespun tie-die dress, gray beginning to show in the roots of four-foot sun-bleached locs. Her companion in a faded bomber jacket, Uncle John, tended to the slow-roasting cans, his gray-gold hair clumped with sweat despite the cool of evening.

And beyond their song, the drifting body nestled into wet sand.

The five had sat on the windswept beach since afternoon, far from the hustle of making ends meet, from the posturing of politicians in towers of war, from water shortages and brain implants and famines. Two old and three young, and as many shades of skin among them as the patchwork stitching on their vagabond clothes.

The hobo stove, the twisted swath of metal like a robot vulture perched in the trash fire. No one had charged for ocean access. The desalinator dripped beside them, just enough for the five. Cans of Juanita's beans, carne asada, pickled nopalitos, and clumps of instant coffee floating in condensed milk hung over lapping flames. The flavors mingled with smoke, a thousand campfires on a thousand beaches from stories told since the dawn of time.

Dimple tossed another roll of newspaper into the fire with his all-American hands. He pulled Summer close, kissing her light brown freckled neck as she sang. There was no life like this in the civilized world. No freedom like the senses you were born with. In his dried out little hometown of Boone, Colorado, a man's life started out counted by school bells. Then came Ego brain implants, quarter whistles, factory bells, and water ration alerts. Finally, gameshow commercials, medication timers, and heart rate monitors. Your hours were counted, divided into neat little boxes.

Watching Summer play, Dimple couldn't help but remember how she'd freed him, when they'd first met on a day much like this. She'd been high on mushrooms, twirling fire sticks on the green, before the red sandstone columns of the Norlin Library. After three days naked in Summer's single bed, making love on the hour, eyes and bodies joined, they'd left school to ride the rails, and days were no longer counted.

✧

"Whatcha thinking 'bout?" Summer asked, taking in Dimple's grin with a smile to match.

"When we left the rest of it for this. For the rails," he said.

"For me, it was 10 years ago today," Summer told the others, folding her story into her song. "My dad and I left my mother in Dos Cebezas. Slipped away through darkness." She'd been thirteen when her father had come back, lean and sick and black as night, a shadow of the man she'd known as a girl. "Jumped the Union Pacific line, up the Central Valley, towards Mojave, Fresno, Oakland. Days quiet, evenings musical, Death Valley nights moonlit violet. He taught me where to sleep and eat, where to find fresh water for less than seven bucks a glass. How to find your fulcrums, to tell which lines got collectors and busbars... made me sing again when I'd gone silent." And the last bit added with a grin wide as Dimple's. "Most of all, he taught me how to play this damn thing."

Summer strummed her dad's favorite – Kris Kristofferson's Me and Bobby McGee, recalling half a lifetime ago, when her voice blended with his bloodhound bey. In her mind's eye, the man and woman in the ballad made their way from Kentucky to sunny California, making the road their home, until the woman stole away one night in Salinas, for reasons Summer would never know. Just the way things go, no matter where you roam.

They were adrift, parentless, sons and daughters and dreamers of the sky and sea. Summer leaned back in Dimple's strong arms, cradling the guitar, and smelled the ocean and the roasting hobo burritos mingled with Dimple's shaving cream.

But as it had a thousand times before, her voice broke off. The beast of progress had knocked on the evening's quiet door.

Only embers between the beast and the rail.

The surf receded and the pale body remained, half-submerged just within the soft breakers. Her breath caught in her throat, the way it always did, when the beast came knocking. When it knocked, you answered.

✧

Rolando Ruiz had been watching the others, smiling, half-looking for patterns in the rushes. He enjoyed the stillness, the music of their voices, and letting that almost-forgotten thing – paz? – wash over him.

But he stood bolt-upright the moment he saw the body, but found himself unable to move.

Wednesday turned to follow the girl's gaze, her eyes narrowing when she caught sight. "John... JOHN!"

John looked up, face red and baffled. He dropped his tin spatula in the sand, jaw working.

Wednesday was already halfway down the beach.

The shape in the water was so still. Pale blue sea foam lapped against perfect white sand around it, with all the malignancy of a puppy licking a hand. Rolan didn't fear it, exactly—not after all he'd seen on the road from Maras. But it wasn't just a body, somehow. It caught the light oddly, like it had been cut and pasted from a very old photo.

Thoughts clamored, the way they always did – recent headlines about uprisings and droughts swelling form the deadly Global Water Accords of 2029, faces of political leaders that might match this one, strikes and rebellions, the direction of the wind, the interval of the gulf tide, shifts in gulf stream direction against body-mass index averages, as a function of hours afloat... Freighter shipping schedules, timetables of New Ferrosur and surrounding railways, cargo manifest rosters, bulk shipping demand adjusted for shifting market pressures in Central American and Caribbean exporters across hundreds of industries, murder rate statistics...

It all painted a wheel in Rolan's mind, at the hub of which rested a grim conjecture: the most likely place and time of homicide, assuming the body was or wasn't dumped from a ship, from land, from canal...

His knees snapped into gear, and he bolted his friends.