The Final Chapter Read online

  “Maria didn’t like that I called them that, but I had to call them something. I figured it was better than calling them boy and girl.

  “She finally agreed to grant me that one small concession. I think she felt she owed it to me for getting out for five straight days searching for them.”

  “And you eventually found them?”

  “Yes. I described them to the nuns at the Alamo food station.

  “One of them told me she heard they lived under the bridge on I-37 and Brooklyn. Where the old Brackenridge Elementary School stood years ago.

  “Sure enough, that’s where I found them.

  “They wouldn’t come with me. They thought I was a crazy old coot and didn’t trust me.”

  “Imagine that.”

  “Shut up. You want to hear the story or not?”

  “Sorry. Go on.”

  -7-

  “Anyway, they’d heard about me and thought I was crazy. Word got around, and I didn’t know this until they told me later, that I was a mass murderer who went to prison for twenty years and only got out because of the blackout.

  “Rumor on the river was that I still killed and took the bodies up the stairs to my ninth floor hotel room, where I devoured them.”

  “I can see where the people might think that. You look like the cannibal type.”

  “The way I see it, John, if thinking I’m a cannibal makes people stay away from me I’m all for it.

  “Anyway, it explains a lot of the stares I get from folks when I walk up and down the river.

  “When I first addressed them and told them me and my wife saw them eating dog food and wanted to help them they didn’t believe me.

  “I had to go back and drag Maria down there to talk to them.

  “She was finally able to convince them I wasn’t really as crazy as I look, that a lot of it’s for show.

  “And after she visited them a few times and took them food and coffee and such, she finally convinced them to come back to the hotel.”

  “How come I didn’t see them?”

  “They live on the floor above me, the tenth floor.

  “That was Maria’s idea. You see, I like to run around in my boxers most of the time. I like to be comfortable in my own place.”

  “Julio, that’s a very ugly visual. I’m glad I’ve never seen that.”

  “Well, I tend to put pants on when I expect company and when I’m getting ready to go out. If you’d showed up half an hour early, then you’d have seen me running around in my boxer shorts watering all my plants.

  “Anyway, if you keep interrupting me, damn it, I’ll never finish telling you all about Kibbles and Bits.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Okay, so Maria talked them into coming back to the hotel, but she didn’t want them to have to see me running around in my underwear all the time and I wasn’t willing to wear pants all the time in my own place.

  “So we put them up on the tenth floor.

  “It took some time, but we made their floor look almost exactly like ours.

  “We used the wooden headboards to make planter boxes for the patios and carried up a ton of dirt, three backpacks at a time.

  “Then we transferred plants from our own planter boxes or gave them seeds from our plants and they grow their own food up there now.

  “They help take care of the chickens on the roof now and Kibbles helps me around the hotel. You know, with the maintenance and stuff.”

  “Does Kibbles have a real name?”

  “Jason. Kibbles is Jason and Bits is Jessica. But they don’t mind their nicknames. They say they kinda like them, in fact.

  “We thought they were a young couple. Boyfriend and girlfriend. I don’t know why we thought that. I guess it was because there are a lot of young single couples that hang around the downtown area with no place to go.

  “Turns out they weren’t a couple at all.

  “They’re brother and sister.

  “Kibbles was sixteen when we found them. Bits was fourteen. That was four years ago, so now they’re…

  “Let’s see now… oh, hell, you can do the math.

  “Anyway, they came from a troubled home and their mom was in prison somewhere in California. Drug trafficking, although they didn’t know the details. She was serving a thirty year sentence so whatever she did must have been pretty serious.

  “They hadn’t seen her in ten years or so and had pretty much forgotten her.

  “Kibbles said as far as he was concerned she was no longer a part of their lives. They moved on with their Dad and he got a job here in San Antonio and they’d lived here for quite a while when the lights went out.

  “Their dad was probably one of the first people killed. They said on the second night of the blackout he told them to stay home where it was safe and he went out to loot some food from a supermarket a couple of blocks away.

  “He never came back, and Jason went out the next afternoon and found his father dead in the street. Shot in the back, apparently by a robber who took whatever food the dad got from the supermarket.

  “From that point on they were all alone.

  “Neither had any skills when it came to hunting or fishing or trapping, so they relied on the supermarkets and then the trailers for food.

  “When they got desperate they ate dog food.

  “Eventually somebody told them the nuns at the Alamo passed out one meal a day for all comers and they made their way downtown just for that.

  “They took to living under the bridge, going to the Alamo and signing in every day and getting their one meal.

  “The rest of the time they’d just hang out, and if they got hungry between meals they’d eat from their dog food bag.

  “That’s what they were doing the first time we saw them

  “Anyway, after they were with us for a year or so they seemed to be fitting in pretty well, so Maria asked if they minded if we adopted them.

  “They were kinda indifferent to the idea, so she talked them into it and about three years ago we all walked into the district court and some judge signed some papers and all of a sudden we had two kids.

  “They’re good kids, John. They’re nothing like you at all.”

  “Yeah, very funny. Do I get to meet them?”

  “Sure. When I sell all my seeds we’ll go back to the hotel and I’ll introduce you.”

  “Speaking of seeds, Julio, you never answered my question. Why do you go through all the trouble of coming down here and selling your beans and seeds? You’re all set up in a hotel pretty much all to yourself. You’ve got all the food you can eat, and you’re as safe as a bug in a rug.

  “Why put yourself through all of this? It seems to me you don’t need the money.”

  “Oh, did I leave that part out, John?

  “I do need the money. I’m buying the hotel, you see. And it ain’t cheap.”

  -8-

  “What do you mean, you’re buying the hotel? Is it for sale? And even if it is, the price would be millions. Do you have that much money?”

  “Yep. And nope. And nope.”

  “Huh?”

  “Yep, it’s for sale. By the city, and only for the back taxes. City ordinances say that abandoned properties not registered as abandoned within two years become the property of the city.

  “Nope, the cost isn’t millions. It’s whatever is owed in back property taxes. That happens to be fourteen thousand dollars a year times seven years.

  “But you know me. I went in and made a nuisance of myself by disrupting city council meetings and calling the mayor a highway robber and such. I told them every member of the city council was trying to get rich off the little man.”

  “I’ll bet they loved that.”

  “Nope. They hated it. They asked me what it would take for me to go away.

  “I told them I’d go away if they agreed to negotiate the hotel’s back tax bill. They agreed, and we settled on one year’s back property taxes. Fourteen thousand dollars.

&nb
sp; “It’s a bargain if you ask me. And they gave me ninety days to pay it.

  “The eight hundred blue I’ll make from selling my seeds today will make my last payment. Three weeks ahead of schedule.

  “I’m going down Monday to start the deed transfer and then I’ll be a real honest-to-goodness hotel owner, by God. Let them keep calling me Loco Julio. I’ll get the last laugh.”

  “Julio, what do you need a hotel for?”

  “I don’t.

  “Not really.

  “But I want it, and that’s even better.

  “You see, Maria was always worried the original owners would come back someday when the world got back on its feet and evict us.

  “She said they wouldn’t be very happy that we burned all their carpet and furniture to stay warm during the winters, and turned their rooftop into a big chicken coop.

  “She said they’d kick us out of there and slam the door behind us.

  “Now they can’t. Because after the paperwork is done next week, I’ll be the new owner.”

  “But what do you know about running a hotel?”

  “That’s the beauty of it, John. I don’t have to know anything about it.

  “Because I’m not going to run it.

  “Kibbles and Bits are. Because I’m leaving it to them.”

  “Excuse me? Aren’t they too young?”

  “John, someday the world will be sane again. It’s starting to get that way now, but it’ll take years before people start to travel again.

  “By that time Jason and Jessica will be seasoned.

  “As for running the place, they can learn as they go.

  “They can open just a couple of floors. Say the first two floors. Forty rooms. They’ll have only a few guests each night and they can cut their hotel teeth on that.

  “Then, as they get better and better at what they’re doing, they can open the rest of the hotel a floor or two at a time.

  “If I’m still around then I can help with the maintenance.

  “If I’m not they can ask around. As many hotels and motels as there are in downtown San Antonio I’m quite sure there are some survivors who worked in the hotel industry.

  “All they have to do is find them and hire them to help run the place as they learn.”

  “I’d really like to meet Kibbles and Bits if you don’t mind,” John said. “I always believed you had no heart. I’m curious to see the kind of people it took to make you care about somebody besides yourself.”

  “Very funny. Well, I already told you I wanted you to meet them, you smart-aleck dumbass.

  “Just let me finish selling my seeds and we’ll go back to the hotel.”

  “If you don’t need my help, Julio, I think I’ll look around while I’m waiting.”

  “Go ahead, you big dummy. The day I need help from the likes of you will be the day I’ve given up on life and decide to go visit Maria in heaven.”

  John started to say something but thought better of it.

  It didn’t matter, though.

  Julio seemed to read his mind and said, “So, you don’t think I’m going to heaven, is that it?”

  “Actually, Julio, you couldn’t be more wrong.

  “What you’re doing for two kids that need help is downright saintly.”

  “Even if it was Maria’s idea to adopt them?”

  “Yes, sir. Even if it was Maria’s idea to adopt them.”

  Julio was stumped.

  John complimenting him caught him totally off guard.

  He finally settled on, “Damn right!”

  John smiled and left him there, walking around Travis Park to see what the other vendors were selling.

  Most of them were trading one type of vegetable for another. Or selling it to those who didn’t have the particular type of vegetable they were interested in.

  Some of the transactions were quite complicated.

  He saw one woman moving back and forth between no less than four other vendors, wheeling and dealing for things she didn’t really want, but which she needed to trade for the watermelon she really relished.

  Many had jewelry they were selling for blue money.

  They seemed to see the writing on the wall and sensed someday soon trading in jewelry would no longer be the norm.

  They wanted to dump their jewelry before they got stuck with it, or had to sell it at vastly lower prices.

  He also saw things that shouldn’t have surprised him but did anyway.

  Many of the vendors were winterizing their excess crops so they wouldn’t rot.

  He saw several of them selling sun-dried squash and cucumber chips.

  John had never heard of such things but sampled both and found them quite tasty.

  “It’s a replacement for the potato chip,” one vendor said.

  “They’re shelf-stable and will last for years. They’ll be a treat in the dead of winter when you get tired of dried beans and jerky.”

  Others sold processed corn and wheat flour.

  “Ground by hand, the way your great granny did it” announced a hand-painted sign.

  One enterprising seller hawked fresh corn oil.

  “Make your own French fries and au gratin potatoes,” he yelled among the crowd. “Now you can deep fry your meat instead of burning it in a dry skillet.”

  Others offered to trade services for vegetables.

  “I have a pull-start tiller. I can till up your yard after you harvest your crop,” one man said. “With softer beds you’ll increase your yield next planting season. It’s win-win. The bushel of vegetables you pay me is nothing. You’ll get ten times that with a higher yield in your next crop.”

  He was a popular guy indeed.

  The soil in and around San Antonio was notorious for its clay content. It was pasty and hard and after a rain resembled a child’s modeling clay.

  Anything a gardener could do to break up the soil and soften it helped him get a better crop.

  This guy, therefore, did a thriving business.

  John took him aside and asked how business was, and the man responded by pulling out a tiny spiral notebook.

  On the first page were scrawled the addresses of seven takers whose gardens he’d planned to till up in the following week.

  “Each of these people will give me a bushel of whatever they’re growing,” he said. “I don’t have to grow anything myself. It’s all done for me.”

  The market had everything from hand-made clothing to boot and shoe repair to canned vegetables for the coming winter.

  Not to mention jerky and dried fruit and vegetables of every kind.

  All were trading in either goods or in blue money.

  The entrepreneurial spirit was alive and well in San Antonio, as it was all across the nation.

  -9-

  Business was brisk for Julio as well, and John was still looking through the vendors’ wares when the grumpy little man sold the last of his seeds.

  He went looking for John instead of the other way around.

  John was speaking to a man selling refurbished television sets.

  “They’re guaranteed to work for six months. I’m here every weekend. You can ask your friend there. When you buy I’ll mark the date on the back with a permanent marker and sign my name below it.

  “If anything goes wrong with it within six months I’ll either refund your money or trade you another set for it.”

  John turned to Julio and said, “Did you know they figured out how to fix televisions, Julio?”

  Julio wasn’t impressed.

  “Big deal. You still need a generator to operate it. Or did you forget the power’s still out?”

  “That’s a temporary thing,” the vendor countered. “The city says full power will be restored by February. And if you have a generator you won’t have to wait until then.”

  “The city’s been making and breaking promises about the electricity for over a year now.”

  ‘It’s just a matter of time, my friend. The mayor hi
mself made a promise. He said if the power wasn’t back on by the end of February he wouldn’t run for re-election.”

  “John, did this clown tell you that only one TV station is back on line?”

  The clown had an answer for everything.

  “That’s true. But the other two are expected to be operational within a few months, and the NBC affiliate that’s working has the strongest signal of all of them.”

  John shook the man’s hand but declined on the purchase.

  “Thanks anyway, but I’m not in the market right now. I’m just amazed that you’re getting them working again.”

  “I’m here every Saturday, my friend. Come see me when you’re ready to buy.

  “And don’t listen to your pessimistic little friend. This city will be back to normal in no time, you mark my words and see.”

  “The city’s come a long way since I left,” John said as the pair walked back to the hotel.

  “Yep. And it’s got a very long way to go.”

  John chuckled.

  “That TV salesman is right, Julio. You really are a pessimistic guy, aren’t you?”

  “Today’s my birthday, John. Did I tell you that?”

  “It is? Really? Well, happy birthday you old coot.”

  “It’s nothing to celebrate. I’m seventy six years old today.

  “How much longer do you think I’m gonna be around?”

  “Heck, I don’t know, Julio. But they say only the good die young. And if that’s the case you’ll likely live forever.”

  “Not funny at all, dummy.

  “I know the world will be back to normal someday. All the TV stations will work again and the streetlights will come on at night and the air conditioning will start cooling the hotel again.

  “I know all that.

  “But I won’t be around to see any of it, so why in hell should I get all excited about it?”

  “Julio, you’re in better shape than any seventy six year old man I’ve ever met. You climb nine flights of stairs each and every day. Sometimes several times a day.

  “And you’re not even winded when you do.

  “I am, but you’re not. You’re probably going to outlive me.”

  “You better hope not.”