The Elephant Mountains by Scott Ely Read Free Book Online

He didn’t imagine the men he killed believed in much of anything. But he kept all this to himself. He didn’t know exactly what a person was supposed to do when someone said they were going to pray for you and you had made it clear to the person doing the praying that you didn’t believe in that person’s god or any other god.
    â€œThank you,” he said.
    She looked like she was getting ready to say something but changed her mind. She just stood there, looking down at the grave.
    Then she spoke.
    â€œDo you think your mother will ever come visit his grave?”
    â€œProbably not,” he said.
    He wondered if she was thinking of her parents, lying there rotting in the house. It would be a kindness, he thought, if the vultures came in through, say, a broken window and devoured them. She would return and there would be nothing but clean bones left. Or if the house washed away or burned. That would be good too.
    â€œAnd you?” she asked.
    He told her of his vision of his father’s grave covered by a warm shallow sea.
    â€œI like that,” he said.
    â€œMe too,” she said. “There could be coral. And those fish with all the colors. The water would be very clear.”
    â€œYes, I can see that.”
    He imagined schools of bright-colored fish hovering over his father’s grave. That was a pleasant daydream. But it made him vaguely uncomfortable that she was participating in his vision.
    â€œSharks too and huge rays,” he said.
    â€œTo stand guard on his grave,” she said.
    Then he realized they were both becoming too fanciful. And unexpectedly this did not feel like a good cure for grief.
    He went to the shed where they kept tools and welding equipment. It was set up on steel pilings just like the house. He used a cutting torch to cut a rectangular piece, about the size of a license plate, out of a sheet of steel. Then he formed his father’s name, WALTER COLE , from pieces of wire and welded the letters to the steel. He welded the plate to a steel pipe and took it out to the grave where he drove it deep in the ground with a sledgehammer.
    â€œNo hurricane will bother this,” he said.
    â€œWe should say something,” she said.
    He went to the house and got his father’s copy of The Iliad , his favorite book. They stood together at the foot of the grave while he read a passage from the account of the funeral of Patroklos. “‘And let us lay his bones in a golden jar…,’” he began. After he finished he felt satisfied. He thought his father would be pleased. But Angela was not pleased or satisfied. She stood there and said some sort of prayer under her breath. He could see her lips moving. He kept his mouth shut and tried to be respectful.
    They boarded the airboat, and he started the engine. It ran beautifully. They went out to the flooded road and headed for town. They would be able to pick up the highway to Lake Pontchartrain there. The bodies and the vultures were all exactly in the same place. When they went down Main Street, Angela pointed out her father’s appliance store. He hoped she did not want to visit her house.
    In the center of town he turned the boat onto the highway that led toward the lake. He placed Angela in the bow to look out for debris and ran as fast as he dared. They went through one flooded little town after another and did not see a single person. Before long, the water was over the tops of some of the houses, and they floated cautiously over the submerged towns. In the countryside they came upon dead animals and an occasional human corpse. He was beginning to think this was going to be easy. He had feared what they might meet up with in one of those little towns. Besides the problem of running into people who might want to kill them, there was the additional worry that they would encounter stranded people in need of food and water. They had only enough for themselves. But it would be hard to