CivilWarLand in Bad Decline: Stories and a Novella (15 page)

The country opens up, all dips and rises and cool shadowed blue places. Two tan dogs flee across a dam of sticks and mud. Birds swoop over and their shadows follow like quick black checkmarks. Just after three I reach the Thru way. Foot traffic predominates. Every so often some elite guy chugs by in a motor vehicle, windows rolled up tight, and people fall all over themselves to either genuflect before him or lay goobers on his windshield. Legions of the sick wait to die along the shoulder. Wandering undercover bureaucrats whip out clipboards and assess odd taxes, bridge taxes and sleep taxes and taxes for if they catch you eating weeds without permission. Any weed on public property is considered a government agricultural product. If you eat a weed you’re required to utilize a handy pre-addressed envelope to mail in your fee. The envelopes are kept in roadside racks that people keep pulling up to burn for firewood. What used to be exit signs are covered with government propaganda banners. One shows a smiling perfect blond girl flipping a burger. Sneaking up on her is a lustful hunchback wearing a Flawed bracelet.

KEEP THE AMERICAN GENE POOL PURE
! the sign says.

If You Must Fuck a Flawed, Wear a Rubber,
someone’s scrawled over it.

I follow a herd of thin cattle driven by armed riders who whip the little people out of the way while chanting the name of the multinational corporation that owns the cows. I watch a tyke fascinated by the cowboys. He’s so fascinated he wanders under a heifer and into the herd. His mom’s at a food stall trying to buy hardtack in bulk at a good price by agreeing with the vendor that far from being unattractive, facial moles impart character. The vendor has facial moles aplenty. The kid vanishes among the cow bellies. I wait for someone to notice but no one does. So I vault over the cows and grab the kid and vault back out.

The mother hugs my neck. A crowd gathers. The vendor tries to recoup his losses by shrieking insults at the cows.

“You’ll be steaks!” he shouts. “You’ll be steaks and I’ll gladly eat you, if you ever try to harm a human boy again! Hear me, fatties?”

“A man of courage,” the mother sobs, “who risked his all to save my Len.”

“Forget it,” I say. It’s embarrassing. People are gaping. A smartly dressed stout man comes over and takes my hand.

“In these times, strange times that they are,” he says, “seeing someone do something that’s not patently selfish and fucked-up is like a breath of fresh air, good clean fresh air, not that any one of us would know good clean fresh air if a vial of it swooped down and bit us on the ass! Haw haw!”

Pretty soon the whole crowd’s laughing. He hands out shiny quarters and confidently tweaks chins. He puts a big white arm around my shoulder.

“Life has been kind to me,” he says. “So very kind. Damned kind. When I was about your age, I had an idea.
I thought: These hard times have taken the wind out of our collective sails. People live like pigs. Time for a dash of luxury. And do you know what I did?”

“No,” I say.

“I built mud huts for minimum wage for five grueling years,” he says. “Ate bread crusts and never had an alcoholic beverage or a minute of relaxation. I worked every minute of overtime I could, cautiously saving my wages. Then do you know what I did?”

“No,” I say.

“Just outside Erie, Pennsylvania, I built the most ass-kicking clean-air geodesic dome you’ve ever seen, and spent my last dime on rich soil and some ash saplings. Are you following me? Of course not, no offense, because that was
my
moment in the sun, the instantaneous showing-out of
my
genius, not yours. And the culmination? Do you know it, the culmination?”

“No,” I say.

“GlamorDivans,” he says. “A difficult period while my ashes came to maturity. Then whammo, Sector A gets buzz-sawed, my special team of overpaid but brilliant carpenters swoops in, and before long, do you know what occupied the center of my warehouse under a special spotlight?”

“No,” I say.

“Six damn GlamorDivans,” he says. “Were their cushions specially handsewn by an incredibly talented seamstress I found in a rinky-dink tailor shop in Milwaukee? Yes. Did the ash shine under my spotlight like something from an earlier and more sane age? You bet. Did I tromp my ass off to identify loaded potential buyers? Yes yes yes.
Did I own a car? Nope. Did I walk over five hundred miles and ultimately succeed in selling all six and buying a whole other load of ash saplings et cetera until I was the loaded and very happy man you see before you?”

“Yes,” I say.

“Yes!” he says. “I thank God every day for the saga he gave me to live out. And now I say to you, because of the courage you manifested in saving that nameless little brat: Want aboard? Want to change your life forever and for better? Want to be part of the GlamorDivan Team and earn five hundred dollars a month?”

At the facility I made fifty a month and was the envy of every dispossessed who stood outside the retaining wall gaping up and swearing.

“I’ll take that involuntary exhalation as an enthusiastic yes,” he says.

I stand there nodding my head with my eyes watering.

“Here’s the situation,” he says. “I blame love for my woes. Not my love, but a barge guider’s. Over seventy GlamorDivans, bought and paid for, hang in the proverbial lurch because my pal Sid, whom I literally dragged out of the gutter, has met the woman of his dreams and suddenly loathes travel. That’s neither here nor there. What’s here is, some of Buffalo’s wealthiest are sitting around in their parlors even as we now speak, thinking: I hope old Blay didn’t screw me out of four thousand bucks. And with each passing moment my name’s sinking deeper into the muck, because buddy, I’ve already cashed the checks. It’s routine. It’s a cash-flow thing. Totally aboveboard. But all the same. My not-thin ass is in a sling, not that it hasn’t been there a million times before in this catch-as-catch-can line of work,
but at any rate my question to you is: Do you have a hankering to see Buffalo or make me very happy or accrue some serious money real quick? If yes to any of the above, it’s on the scooter with you and let’s see you use some of that coolheadedness and courage to make us some loot. Ha ha! Life is good!”

His scooter’s hidden under some branches. I climb on. We fly along the side roads. He’s got a sweaty back and a nice touch on the curves. Scrawny subsistence farmers gawk at us and walk away shaking their heads as our dust settles on the brims of their economy hats. Finally we reach the Erie Canal, where two armed Flaweds guard his blue barge.

“Why the weapons, you might ask?” he says. “The common man is my friend. I used to be him. But I’m not him now. You wave some beautiful household furnishings in front of the common man’s nose, there’s no telling what he might do. And these are
my
GlamorDivans.
My
body built those ten thousand mud huts.
My
signature went on the check for the saplings. Anybody fucks with my product, I sadly have to bite their head off. Or rather you do, in my stead. Shoot their heads off, rather. Whatever. Haw!”

“Sir,” I say, “I’ve never driven a boat before.”

“Who’s driving?” he says. “You’re pulling. I apologize. I realize this was mule work in the old days but hey, these are the new days, so we best turn up our collars and deal with what is, what is now, the existing lemons from which lemonade may be made, eh? Ah, it’s exciting to see a rich man in process. You, that is. Don’t think of yourself as a surrogate mule, think of yourself as an entrepreneur of the physical.”

I should have known. Mules are at a premium. Thousands have died of a bone marrow disease. The ones that lived lost the use of their legs. You’ll walk past a field and there’ll be fifteen or twenty of them lying on their sides braying. High-school kids get a kick out of pouring gas on them and lighting them up. It’s a craze. The animal rights people do their best to prop them back up and slap on feed-bags and post antivandalism signs, but no sooner are they back at headquarters than the mules are either toppling over or burning.

“There’s ample grub in the hold,” Blay says warmly. “It’s good food. I’m a man who likes to eat. And here’s two bills. The rest I pay on arrival in Buffalo. Mike and Buddy know the details. Meet Mike and Buddy.”

So I meet Mike and Buddy. Their Flaws are dental. Buddy was born with no teeth and Mike has twice as many as he needs. Both smile at once. It’s disconcerting. I look at the barge.

A nice barge.

Alike and Buddy take a cash advance and go into town to get ripped.

“Truly nice fellows,” Blay says, “albeit none too swift in the head. Between the two of them they have maybe one-third of a brain. Watch them closely. Rarely leave them alone. You’re to be the thinker and planner of the operation. The nerve center. The guru. The Normal.”

“I’ll try,” I say.

“You’ll succeed,” he says. “I can look at you and see a winner. Dream big, win big. Stick with me. Self-actuate. It’s been a pleasure meeting you. See you on the other end. I’ll be the one proffering a huge wad of cash with your name on it.”

He gives me a hug. What a sweet man. He likes me. He trusts me. The way his girth makes him rasp even when he’s standing still is endearing.

I sit on the deck of the barge with a semiautomatic. The water’s brown. As prescribed by federal regs, all inflow pipes are clearly labeled.
RAW SEWAGE
, says one.
VERY POSSIBLY THORIUM
, says another. Dusk comes, an early moon pops up over the swaying trees, the barge slips around on its tether like a mild dog happy to be tied, and I help myself to some noodles and milk.

Noodles. Milk.

Freedom, I think: very nice.

In the morning Buddy cooks eggs. They’re good eggs. He gums them. Bits fly all around. Bits get on his chair and the saltshaker. Buddy and Mike fart with impunity, making a big comical show of lifting their butt cheeks. I think about participating to win their respect but then Mike says it’s time to start pulling. We each take a tether. We walk in a row. It’s not easy but it beats toadying to the whining rich. At nine we take a break and apply salve to our shoulders and have some bottled water. Every now and then a kingfisher pulls something out of the muck and looks askance at it and eats it anyway. Along the shore are decaying tract houses which now serve as bunkhouses for barge pullers. At noon we stop at one for lunch. In the yard is a filthy man digging up potatoes with a taped-together hoe.

“Go on in, fellas!” he says. “My wife’s put out a heckuva fine spread today. Mostly it’s just potatoes, but she does great things with a spud. Don’t take my word for it! Go in and see for yourself, by tasting some!”

Inside are nine kids and one other guest and an astounding tableful of potato-centered dishes. She’s carved potatoes into crude figures. She’s baked them and fried them and disguised them with sauce. She’s mashed some of them into pulp and dyed them and spread them across the surface of others. Understandably the kids are husky. Everyone pitches in. The youngest walks along wiping the face of the second youngest as the second youngest carries bucket after bucket of water to the mother, who’s washing and washing potatoes, then pitching them across the kitchen to identical twins, who cut them up while jabbering in pig Latin.

“Nineteen hours a day minimum!” the frazzled dirty father yells to us as he comes in. “It takes everything you’ve got. It absolutely kills you. I’m thirty but I look sixty. But what can you do? If you step off the treadmill for a minute you lose everything you’ve worked for!”

“Honey!” the wife yells from the steamy kitchen. “Stove’s off!”

He grabs a wad of paper and runs in and stokes the stove. Meanwhile the kids are filling our tumblers and dusting off our shoes and toting laundry down to the Canal and hanging the finished laundry on a line that keeps snapping and being mended by a teenage boy who’s wearing a tool belt and shouting orders to everyone at once. The baby starts crying and a limping child grabs a spoon and scoops up some mashed potatoes and pours on a little sugar, then sprints across the room to stuff the mixture in the baby’s mouth.

“Good work, Gretel!” the sweating mother screams
from the kitchen. “Now come take this scalding hot tray away!”

The other customer is an old man with a sales case, who flinches every time something crashes to the floor. Whenever the wife rushes by in a frenzy she touches his shoulder and says she’s sorry everything’s so crazy and not very appetizing, and he nods and flinches as something else crashes to the floor and shards of whatever broke fly across the room and the older kids scurry to pick them up before the baby crawls over and puts them in her mouth.

We fill our plates and go out into the yard and sit in relative peace among baskets and baskets of potatoes and piles of car parts and a goat who keeps looking over at us and making a hacking sound. The husband rushes out with a raw potato in his mouth and starts rebuilding an engine.

“If you want something nice, you’ve got to get it for yourself,” he says around the potato. “I want a generator for my family. Lights at night. A fan in the summer. And I’m getting them!”

“Honey!” the wife yells from inside. “Come get the cat off the baby. It’s trying to eat her bib.”

“Coming, sweetie!” the husband yells, and grins and shrugs at us. “It’s always something. But I’ve got to give it everything I got. That’s my mission. My place in life. My calling. I’m no warrior. I’m no lover. I’m a plodding dad, plain and simple. But I love it!”

He sprints towards the house and trips on a bit of fence he’s been mending and falls directly into a rosebush.

“Ah well!” he says as he pulls himself out. “Nobody said it was going to be easy. And this is definitely not easy. Wow. These thorns sure hurt. But hey. You’ve got to get up
and keep on going. You snooze, you lose. Ouch. Yikes. Concentrate, concentrate.”

“Honey,” the wife screams. “The cat’s standing right on the baby’s tray with his paws in her food! Please don’t dawdle! Cats have germs. Unless you don’t mind your daughter eating cat germs!”

“You’re snapping at me, love!” he shouts as he starts towards the house again. “Please don’t snap!”