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didn’t read it out loud. He didn’t even mention it. He just saw it and drew it out between his fingers and tucked it away.
    She sat on her backpack and drank a little water and picked at the granola in her palm. Leaving the nuts. Letting ground-up bits of them slide back into the sack every time she went for another handful and thinking he wouldn’t notice.
    “Eat those, you skinny thing,” he said, when he couldn’t let her keep it up any longer. “You need the protein.”
    She did. Licked her palm clean and made a face.
    “Good girl. We’ve got a ways to go yet. Have some more.” He told her about a time when kids her age ate everything in sight and just about couldn’t stop eating. Couldn’t help themselves since food was everywhere in those days and it cost next to nothing. This was before his time, but his parents had lived through it. Blame those big factory farms, pumping out more food than people needed and finding ways to make them want it anyway. Poisoning it with sugar. It was as if somebody had thrown a switch and the whole business forgot how to stop or even slow down, so it just kept going.
    Things were different now. Supply and demand. Hardly enough of anything to go around. But boy did it cost.
     
    *
     
    The fenced-in fields gave out after a while and they walked on among low rolling hills. Trails of broken blacktop going off in all directions and lines of concrete split by tall grass and crumbled cinderblock ruins set one after another. Here and there a metal pole angling up out of the ground with a frame for a sign on top but the sign dangling or just plain gone. He told her they’d called this a subdivision and she didn’t ask a subdivision of what. It was just a word.
    “Are we getting close to New York?”
    “No.”
    “How much closer are we now than when we started?”
    “As far as we’ve walked.”
    “Daddy.”
    “A few miles. I don’t know.”
    “Carry me.”
    He did.
     
    *
     
    Miles went by with him walking and her on his shoulders. Heading south and a little west with the face of the white cat for warding off trouble. Stopping every half hour or so to rest. As they went along one subdivision bled into another like it was all the same thing, although there had been a day when it was divided up and parceled out. When there were townships out here and school districts and high schools with longstanding rivalries on the football field. When different things belonged to different people. None of this belonged to anybody now. PharmAgra owned the fields and National Motors owned the highways and AmeriBank carried the paper that kept it all straight. But out here in the Zone the idea of ownership had gone back to the way it was before any white man had set foot here. When the Indians possessed it all and didn’t even know they possessed it because they didn’t want to possess anything.
    There wasn’t even a means for staking a claim. But some still did. Even right here. Exactly here. The dark low noise of a tarpaulin flapping signaled it. The day was fading and the sun was dying and they heard that batwing rustle from off to one side of the road. Up along a half-circle of blacktop with a big wrecked building at the far end. The blacktop surrounding a patch of broken dirt and in the middle of the dirt a steel pole jutting up. A chain hanging loose from the top of the pole, clanging in the little breeze. The low rustling sound rose from somewhere back in the direction of the building. They weren’t ignorant and superstitious like city people about what kind of terrors might be out here, but the girl was only five years old and no bigger than a breath and the sounds were darkly suggestive. The ghost ship clanging of the chain and the liquid rustle of something furtive rising up as the sun went down.
    She leaned into her father like a bareback rider and nudged her knees into his shoulders and whispered “Go,” and he went. Running or at least jogging, his breath coming harder.