Closer To Heaven - Patrick Sean Lee (rosie project .txt) 📗

and so was Saint Therese. Maybe because the rectory was sort of part of Saint Andrew’s, that’s why the bad clouds stayed away from us. Anyway, we were alone, unless Munster and the man came around again, and we knew we’d have to accept that and make the best of it.

 

“Curb.” “Big crack.” “Car”…only one body in one of them…”Dead body.” We dodged it.

We finally got to Target. It had been a long walk. Jerrick didn’t walk as fast as me or Lashawna. The front doors were open wide because a lady had fallen right into one of them and blocked the doors from closing again. She smelled. We stepped past her and walked straight to the appliances aisle way back at the rear of the store as quickly as we could.

“What do they look like?” I asked Jerrick.

“Just look for the word “Generator”. I don’t actually know what one looks like. It probably has plugs and stuff on it.”

Lashawna and I ran up and down the aisles, but neither of us could find anything like that. I saw toasters and microwaves and hair dryers, but no generator. We went back to where we’d left Jerrick.

“Nothing like that here,” Lashawna said. “Now what, genius?”

Jerrick stared ahead and crinkled his lips. He was thinking.

“Umm…what else do we need?”

“Toilet paper! Shampoo. Soap. Water. Video games! Cans of food. Brand new blankets.”

“Shoes, purses, sweaters and dresses…”

“Okay, let’s get those things, then we’ll look for another store that has a generator,” he said. We all stayed together, filling our basket with lots of canned food. Next, Lashawna and I went to the clothing department for girls. Jerrick stayed with us, but after a while he became angry. There were so many cool clothes, and it took Lashawna and me a long time to choose some of the ones we liked best. He kept saying, “Come on!”

“We’ll take you over to boys,” Lashawna promised.

“I don’t care what any of the boys’ clothes look like. Just get me a few sweaters and some pants and shirts. I’m tired of hanging around in the stupid clothes department.”

“How about a basketball or a soccer ball?” I was being nice.

“Sure, why not. I can bounce it in our bedroom. It won’t get far from me in there.”

Jerrick was suddenly in a bad mood, so we hurried, and after we’d filled Lashawna’s buggy with our clothes, and gotten a few nice sweaters and things for Jerrick, we hurried past the sports department and went outside into the sunlight.

“Wait! We forgot toilet paper and things for the bathroom,” I shouted. Jerrick slumped his shoulders and sighed.

“Go back in, then, and get some. But hurry up!”

“Don’t go away,” I said. I thought that was funny, but I don’t think Jerrick did. He just made a face, and then sat down on the curb in front of the store. Lashawna began pulling the clothes she’d gotten out of the buggy and holding them up to her. She was not at all nasty like her brother.

I ran back to the aisles where the things we needed were stacked on the shelves and grabbed some. I also found toothbrushes and toothpaste and a few other things we’d forgotten to even think of. It was all too much to carry, so I laid those things down in the main aisle and ran to find a hand basket. I hurried because I knew Jerrick was angry. Just when I got almost back to the checkout place where the small baskets were I turned my head left. I know I saw something moving between the aisles way far down at the other end. I stopped. Maybe it was a coyote, I thought, but I couldn’t be sure. Maybe it was another child like me? A man or a woman? A cloud? I didn’t know what else to do, and so I said a prayer to Saint Therese to protect me, and then ran down the aisle until I came to the end. Nothing was there. I ran up and down the big aisle, left and right, looking, but all that was in any of the smaller aisles were little boys’ clothes and a few dead, stinky bodies. I listened, but there was no sound at all.

I must have imagined seeing something move.

I ran back to the front, grabbed a small basket, and then back to where I’d left our toilet paper and toothpaste and soap. That must have taken a long time, because when I finally left the store, Jerrick was on his feet, walking back and forth with a frown on his face.

“Got them,” I said.

“Finally.”

Lashawna spoke after Jerrick made another nasty face at me. “Do you think Home Depots would have generators? There’s one down at the end of the shopping center. They have tools and things. Maybe they’ll have a generator.”

“Yes,” Jerrick said. “Let’s go there. Leave the basket here. We’ll come back for it later.”

And so we did. We went into that store, way down at the end of the parking lot. There were no clothes or toys or sports things, so we hurried to the electric tools department. We didn’t need a saw or a drill or a hammer, but Lashawna saw the sign on one of the bins that said “Generator.”

“Bingo! Ohmagosh! It looks so big. I don’t know if we can even lift it!”

“It has wheels on the back.” I said that.

Lashawna and I pulled and pulled until we made it come out of the bin. I fell on my rump when it finally gave.

“It’s heavy!” I said.

“I’ll pull it home. You guys push the basket. We’ll need gas for the generator, so we have to find some somewhere, too. Do you see a can marked “gas” or “fuel” or anything like that?”

“No,” I said.

“No,” Lashawna said too.

“That’s just great. We have a generator, but no way to start it up.”

“All we need is a container,” Lashawna said. “Once we find gas, we can just fill up a bucket. They have lots of those here.”

Another problem solved. Jerrick had to work very hard to get the heavy generator home. The front of it kept hitting his heels because the handles were very short, and for the first time since I met him, I heard him cuss. But nothing like the words Daddy used to say when he was angry or frustrated.

We passed lots of abandoned cars and gas stations, but figuring out how to get gas out of any of them was hard. Until Jerrick came up with an idea that I didn’t like.

“Either you or Lashawna will have to crawl underneath a car or a truck. Find the gas line, cut it, and then fill up one of our buckets.”

“Not me!” I shouted.

“Then you do it, Lashawna,” Jerrick said.

That didn’t seem to bother Lashawna. “Okay,” she said right away.

Getting the gas took FOREVER! Lashawna crawled under a car and yanked the tube down that carried the gas. It wouldn’t stretch to the bucket, and the bucket was too big to fit under the car. Gas came out of the tube, but it just went all over Lashawna and the pavement.

“Isn’t there an easier way?” I said to Jerrick.

“I’m all wet!” Lashawna screamed.

“Just stay there and don’t light a match,” Jerrick told her. “Go find a smaller container, Amelia. Hurry up,” he ordered me.

All of this took so much time. At last we got the bucket filled, but Lashawna had to go through three cars to do it, and even worse, once it was full, we couldn’t lift it! We all decided to leave the darn bucket where it was, take our generator and clothes and things home, then come back for it with a wagon if we could find one of those.

It was very late by the time we got the gas home. Lashawna smelled, so she took off all her clothes and washed the gas off her, then came out of the bathroom with a brand new outfit on that I think made her look so pretty. We were all very hungry. We hadn’t stopped for lunch. We’d have to have uncooked spaghetti sauce and hard noodles, or else eat more tuna and crackers.

“Can we make the generator work?” I asked Jerrick in our bedroom.

“Tomorrow,” he answered me.

“We have time…”

“Tomorrow. I’m tired.”

Jerrick was snotty, and so I left him and went with Lashawna into the kitchen to make dinner, but I really wanted to go back and put on a new dress instead.

 

NINE

 

Jerrick must have slept good. He woke up first and went outside where we’d left the generator, by the metal box that he said held the circuit breaker things. That’s where he was going to somehow have Lashawna or me plug the generator in. It was very complicated sounding to me, and I hoped Jerrick knew what he was doing.

“Worst case,” he told us yesterday, “we’ll have to run an extension cord from the generator to the microwave, and if there are more than one outlets in the generator, we can run another extension cord to a lamp. Really, though, we want to disconnect the circuits from the box and hook all of them into the generator at once. That way everything here inside will work when we turn the switches on.”

I didn’t know what he meant, exactly. Inside that metal box all I saw were lots of little wires, red and white and green, and I think a blue one, going down into someplace behind the funny looking switches. I didn’t know how we’d get them into the generator, but Jerrick just said, “No sweat. We’ll splice them.”

Okay, I thought. Whatever spliced meant.

I woke up and heard Jerrick banging away outside at the end of the house where the circuit box thing was. I wondered if he was trying to get the wires from there down into the generator all by himself. I got up, put on a new sweater that was pink and white, and then ran out to help him.

He was pouring gas into the top of the generator, though how he knew where it was really going was a mystery. He’d somehow found a funnel someplace. I guessed Father’s garage. It was red and looked exactly like one that Daddy had. Jerrick spilled as much gas over the edge of the funnel as he got into the funnel, and from there into the generator. That was probably okay, though, because every car on every street had gas in it. All we had to do was send Lashawna and her big bucket and the little one, and get more.

“Hi Jerrick,” I said. He was finished pouring and spilling the gas. “You need a bigger funnel!”

“Look in there and see if I got the tank full.” Jerrick set the bucket down while I looked into the gas tank. It was sure full.

“Yes. Now what?” I asked him.

“I’m not positive,” he said. “I found some pliers and wire cutters and screwdrivers and a hammer in the garage. We have to take the circuit breakers out and get to the wires. Do that, and describe what you see in there.”

I did that, and I knew then why Daddy cussed when he worked sometimes. It was very hard. There were big screws that