I sat outside and languished over my current situation. The trailer was without power and it was as hot as an oven in there. Meanwhile, the stench continued to grow until I smelled like a Great Lake that had been drained and refilled with sour milk. The smell was ten times worse than it had ever been on my worst days. I gagged and pinched my nose, thinking that I couldn’t live for long in my present condition. The power and my telephone had both been disconnected, and it took electricity to run my well. Luckily, I had stored some supplies away in the unlikely case of an economic cataclysm. I had always been an avid reader and one of the books I had read depicted such an event in the near future. The book had frightened me enough to stock up on canned foods, bottled water… and toilet paper.
There had ever been a lot of traffic down my little street, but a few dozen cars usually passed my trailer each day. I went out to the shed and found a can of spray paint, which actually sprayed paint after five years. I made a crude sign, but I thought it would be effective.
Have Toilet Paper. Will Barter.
The first car, a sky blue four-door Saturn, drove by about an hour later. It slowed down and suddenly screeched to a halt. A brave young woman got out of her car, she had one hand over her mouth and her other was holding her nose. I could hear her clearly as she shouted up to my porch, even though she was at least one hundred feet away. “I want to see Will Barter!” she shouted up to the house.
“Who are you looking for?”
“Will Barter… I’ve got three teenaged girls!”
Well, you know how it is. I completely forgot about the sign and what I had written on it. I blame it on the smell. I was foul on a scale of Biblical proportions. “There’s no Will Barter here!” I shouted back at her, waving her on.
I hated when people smelled me and I could see it in their faces. That’s another thing a man should never have to experience, even from one hundred feet away. You have never been humbled until someone projectile vomits on your behalf. I watched the woman with the black hair get back into her sky blue Saturn. I could hear a heated exchange between the woman in the car and her passengers. I presumed they were her daughters, since I could see three of them. I could also hear them, seeing how they had all of the windows rolled down.
They were arguing about Will Barter. Do you think I put two and two together? I screamed at them: “There is no Will Barter here! Get out of here before I jump in there with you! You wouldn’t like that!”
That got her moving. The Saturn pitched forward and gravel spit from her front tires. I had a bad feeling about this. She promptly drove straight into the irrigation ditch and her hood was completely submerged in the brackish water before the Saturn’s engine died and white smoke plumed over the windshield.
I could hear all of them screaming something that sounded like: “Arrgh!” That is the precise instant that I realized that they had been looking for me. I jumped up from my chair and ran into the trailer. I grabbed a twelve pack of some fine two-ply and ran back outside. I had many more back in the spare bedroom and I was suddenly delighted that I had such keen foresight. Maybe it was because I knew it was one of the few things that I really couldn’t do without. Not that it mattered at the moment. “I…will barter!” I shouted, sounding like Tarzan speaking to a telemarketer. I rephrased the statement. “I have toilet paper, lots of nice, soft toilet paper!”
The car doors opened and three lovely young ladies slowly got out of the car. I suspected a couple of them were older than teenagers, but there was no mistaking the resemblance. They seemed to be hypnotized by the toilet paper. I held it up above my head.
The mother got out of the car. She was shorter than her girls and looked embarrassed by what she had done. Her eyes suddenly fixed on the toilet paper and her expression changed instantly. She pointed at me. “Will Barter,” she said angrily to her girls. Then, she continued to me. “What the hell kind of toilet paper is that? You’re trying to put me on, there is no such thing as white toilet paper! And does that read two-ply? Just what the hell is that supposed to mean?”
I could see that a lot had changed while I was away. I wasn’t quite sure what that meant to me, but I would find out in due time. I tore open the plastic and removed one of the double rolls of my best stock. I reared back and tossed the soft roll like a football. A long ribbon of white sheets trailed my pass.
I have watched enough television to see what can happen on air drops in disaster areas. This was no different. There was a mad scramble for the soft, spiraling roll, which fell woefully short of its intended receiver. They dove on it as if it were made out of thousand dollar bills.
The mother emerged from the fray holding the roll of toilet paper as if it were the Stanley Cup. She smiled and I could see that she was very pleased with herself. “We are going to share this,” she announced to her daughters. She tore off a square for each of them and they held it up to their cheeks as if it were the finest silk. “Where did you get this?” the woman demanded to know. “How did you make it so soft?”
“I have more than this!” I shouted, holding up the package. “I need some things and I would like to make a trade!”
The woman eyed me suspiciously as she tucked the roll under her arm. I was sure of one thing, I definitely had their attention.
The Saturn came out of the ditch on the third attempt. The temperature was somewhere near ninety and the air was thick with humidity. I gagged at my own stink. The Polaris spun in the gravel, but it finally bit into the earth and the car popped up and out of the water. She was able to start the engine and she let it idle with the air conditioning on. The girls were nearly green because of the smell and they got into the car, still holding their little squares. The woman introduced herself as Theresa and she bravely stood her ground as I questioned her. She seemed to become more or less immune to the stench and she explained it was because she had come from a large family with only one bathroom. Still, she held her nose while we spoke.
“When did toilet paper become so valuable?” I asked, sitting on Odd Whitefeather’s ATV across the road from her, as she leaned against her car, clutching her roll of toilet paper as if it were a family heirloom.
She laughed. “What? Have you been living under a rock? The trees have been gone since I was a little girl, but I have heard that there are still quite a few of them in South America. I’ve also seen pictures.”
“Gone? Where did they go?”
“Quit pulling my leg, you know damn well that they were destroyed by the Washington Wood Weevils. Well, all except for the trees on the reservation. For some reason the weevils couldn’t survive out there. Maybe the wood tasted bad, nobody knows. That’s why we went to war.”
“You went to war over toilet paper?”
She looked at me as if she wanted to slap my face. “No, we went to war over natural resources. Hello? Did you ever go to school? That was pretty big news, like, you are probably the only person on the planet who doesn’t know that. Are you an alien, or are you just stupid?”
“I guess I’m just stupid,” I said, squinting my eyes against the sun. I held the rest of the twelve-pack on the seat. I still had eleven rolls and I knew that was what she was after. I’d give them to her, but first I needed a little information. “So, they went to war over the trees. Who went to war? Remember, I’m stupid so explain it to me very carefully.”
“Listen, I’d love to sit here and chat with you, I really would. And I’ve been trying to think up a polite excuse to get out of here, I really have. The truth is you stink. It’s vile and I just can’t stand it any longer.”
I opened the package and tossed her another roll. “Does that help?”
She looked panic stricken as she tried to catch the new roll while still holding the first one. To her credit, she snatched it cleanly out of the air, gritting her teeth in concentration. You would have thought I was throwing her Brad Pitt’s underwear.
“We went to war against the tribes, everybody knows it. Get a history book.”
That was the s
econd time I had heard that and it got me thinking. “What happened in the war? Who won?”
“Who won? Oh my God, we won. The savages didn’t have a chance, but they put up one helluva fight. We had no choice but to put them down, it was the humanitarian thing to do.”
“Put them down?”
“We engineered a chemical to take care of the problem. The chemicals caused a lot of cancers of the male variety. And now we girls can’t seem to make any baby boys. A boy hasn’t been born since the war ended.”
I was too stunned to speak. Chemicals explained a lot of things. Still, I wanted more. I opened up the package and tossed her another roll. This time she left her prizes on the hood of the Saturn as she fielded my toss. “You dropped chemicals on the reservations?” I asked. “What kind of monsters would do such a thing? Did anyone speak out against it?”
“No,” she said, shaking her finger at me. “And don’t you start speaking out against anything or anyone, do you hear me? They don’t like that and everybody watches everybody here. Open your mouth and you’ll find yourself strapped to the wall of a prison cell. You haven’t heard this? I can’t believe you, everyone knows that.
“I’m not messing with you. I’d tell you my story, but you wouldn’t believe it. What happened to the Natives?”
“What? They’re all dead, except for a few here and there. It wasn’t my idea.”
I was sickened by her flippant attitude, even though I knew she was simply citing the facts. She wasn’t to blame for giving me the terrible history lesson. I had asked for it. I threw her another roll and fired up the ATV. “You’d better get out of here. You’ll catch my smell, it does that.”
She was in her car and one hundred yards from me in less than five seconds; the Saturn’s engine revving like a chainsaw. Four rolls of toilet paper to the good.
Chapter Fifteen
Brindle's Odyssey Page 23