by Victor Allen
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Jack had made the fifty mile trip to Marty’s Feed and Seed in a sort of a funk, watching the sun crest over the Mantagua river and begin its westward journey. From the time he had awakened this morning, he had felt as if he had been tracked by some eerie, minor key melody that accompanied him like an uncordial spirit. He was distracted. It wasn’t as if he had debated whether going on this yearly ritual was even necessary, but he had to maintain some sense of routine while he worked things out in his head.
It was all fraying. The America he had once known (or thought he had known) seemed to have been consumed like flash paper, leaving behind less than ash. Being not that far from DC, drone flights as part of the Civil Air Patrol were common. He could see one, even now, before it had gotten up to altitude, flying out of Andrews Air Force base. It would circle around in its sector from Baltimore to Hagerstown, unseen and even unknown by most. He tried to stay away from DC (the District of Criminals), but he occasionally had to make the trip there, as well as New York and Boston. As a matter of convenience, he’d had a pay pass transmitter installed on his vehicle so his tolls could be automatically deducted from his bank account. You just clipped the little black box to your sun visor. He never even considered that his every move and location could be pinpointed to the second by the transponders. He didn’t know that when he went to the airports or visited a bank, the detectors could count the money in his wallet from the magnetic strips embedded in the bills and, if it was determined that he was carrying an “inordinate” amount of cash, he could be arrested as a drug dealer, terrorist, or organized crime figure. Whatever fit the narrative of the moment. But Jack still believed. This was America. It wasn’t a surveillance state.
Still, on his forays into the cities, he had been shocked to see on the subways and street corners the odd military men -always in pairs- in full combat gear, cradling fully automatic weapons, as if DC were Tel Aviv or some third world hellhole. Police forces all across the country had up-armed and up-armored, and he really wasn’t sure why.
And this most recent thing, the attempted coup d'etat of his farm, had come completely out of the blue. Maybe the Feds had found Uranium or something in the area. It was nothing so profound as Saul on the road to Damascus, but he was beginning to see things he thought he would never see.
He eased around the hairpin turn just before the Rollsback bridge. The drop off wasn’t straight down to the river, but it was steep, and it was rocky, and it was about a hundred feet. No cataclysmic gorge and maybe that was why proper guard rails had never been installed.
With the bridge behind him, he tried to listen to the radio and enjoy the latter half of the fifty mile drive. The news came on with the first minute devoted to the stock market at an all time high, the US National debt now at seventeen trillion dollars, and hot wars going on in Syria, Egypt, Iraq and Ukraine. The next three minutes were dedicated to basketball and hockey scores, the latest results from American Idol, and the continuing sad saga of Honey Boo-Boo. He was almost relieved when he switched off the ignition after pulling in to Marty’s Feed and Seed.