“Hashkeh,” he said.
Jack said, “Unusual name.” He wondered whether it might actually be Navajo. This guy looked like his ancestors came over on the Mayflower.
“Well, you’ve got our names,” Hashkeh said, “so who are you?”
“Jackson Pence. Lately of New York City. Currently . . .”
Hashkeh interrupted, his voice challenging, a few decibels short of belligerent. “But what are you doing here?”
Jack deliberately refrained from answering, and just looked back at this Hashkeh character with unruffled disdain. He was no longer posturing for effect. He was becoming angry.
Hashkeh puffed out his chest and took an aggressive step toward Jack. At this, Jack executed step two of his quickly-formed strategy. He focused on Hashkeh’s mouth and imagined his own body a spring, tightly coiled from the feet up through the fist. And then he released the spring. The contact seemed a mild brush in that microsecond, but evidently was more—Hashkeh’s head snapped back. Having made first contact and leaving Hashkeh momentarily stunned, Jack sprang at Roland as best he could, but now he was off balance, and Roland was forward on the balls of his feet, as he had been from the moment Hashkeh bowed up at Jack. Roland’s fist landed just short of Jack’s jaw, raking Jack’s chest. All this was the work of two seconds. Roland’s center of gravity followed the thrown fist. He was off-balance. Jack pushed him from behind, bumping his head loudly into the side of the car. Hashkeh rushed Jack again, but was slowed by Roland in his way, bouncing off the car. Jack backed up a step. He moved to withdraw his gun. If he didn’t draw it, these goons would draw it for him—that’s the downside to carrying a gun. The force of Hashkeh’s rush pushed Jack’s right arm back, just as he was withdrawing the gun from its holster. The gun went clattering across the pavement, coming to rest underneath the car near the rear bumper. Jack had a microsecond jump on Hashkeh and dove for the gun, gouging his left shoulder on the tailpipe. He gripped the gun but now had no room to get his left hand up to chamber a round. At the same moment, Hashkeh slapped his hands on Jack’s overcoat at Jack’s hip, dragging him out from under the vehicle in one powerful motion. Jack corkscrewed as he came out, managing to put the pistol in Hashkeh’s face. Hashkeh hesitated. Jack sprang to his feet. Roland stepped forward, a few steps to the right of Hashkeh, ready to spring. Jack bluffed, holding them at bay with the uncocked gun.
“Do it!” he screamed. “Which of you dies?”
Still they hesitated, now relaxing their posture as they relented.
Jack calmly lowered the gun, racked the slide, and brought it back up. He was tempted. He could drop them both right now. Who would know?
“Sit down,” he said.
They complied.
“Take off your shoes and throw them over there.”
They did the swivel-head thing, but complied.
Jack sat down in front of them, his back to his vehicle. He placed the gun in front of him, barrel toward his captives, keeping his eyes on theirs.
“I desire a parlay,” he said.
Roland and Hashkeh looked at him blankly.
“Oh, where to start,” Jack sighed. These guys were hardheaded. He didn’t expect a witty repartee. Two motorcyclists, riding in tandem. Sitting on that parking lot in their pimped-out riding clothes, their bikes no doubt hidden nearby, they looked for all the world like misbegotten Mormon missionaries. Jack had the feeling he’d have to draw out information one syllable at a time. “I guess with this,” he said. “Why are you both dressed the same?”
“We’re both Road Patrol.”
Jack rolled his hand in front of him, to say give me more. “We’ll be here all day at this rate,” he said. “You know, I think, that ‘Road Patrol’ means nothing whatsoever to me.”
“We go out on the roads from our base, just to know what’s going on.”
“For whom?”
“For the community,” Roland said. He was less hostile and the smarter of the two, but if one of them was the leader, it was Hashkeh.
“What community? I told you, I came from New York. You guys just jumped me in this parking lot. I don’t know what’s going on, and you might as well start explaining it to me. If you don’t, I’m going to assume you’re stalling me on purpose, maybe until your friends show up, so I’ll just have to hog-tie you,” and at this Jack began to rise again.
“All right, all right,” Hashkeh said. “We are Diné. We’ll tell you where we’re from, it’s no secret. We’re from Tséyi’. Well, we’re transitioning there, from Chinle.” He said all this last with an uplift of the chin, proudly.
“Why do you have a Road Patrol? Are you under some kind of threat?”
“No, but we aim to keep it that way.”
“Do you know what’s gone on in the world? Do you know there’s practically no one left?”
“We are ‘the people.’ This time, we’ll get it right.”
“Well, that’s some information, I suppose,” Jack said, “but a far cry from answering my questions.”
Roland took up the mantle for his sloganeering partner. “Well, you asked about road patrol. We are for defense of the Diné. We’re not on the offensive.”
“You fellows are slick,” Jack said. “I’m not looking for help in how to characterize the Road Patrol. I want to know why you think you need it. If it’s defensive, defensive against what? And if you’re trying to insulate your community by driving around a hundred miles or more away, how is that not offensive? For that matter, how can you say you weren’t on the offensive with me?” It occurred to Jack that he was drawing on his lawyering skills to get answers, but even so, he was having to work at it.
Hashkeh just looked at Roland, so Roland resumed their defense. “We want to preserve the integrity of the community, and that requires us to be alert. We don’t want compromise from the ways of the old world. It’s too bad what happened, but now that we’re starting over, we want a new beginning. An opportunity to get it right this time. We’re not looking for trouble, we’re just trying to protect what we have.”
“How many road warriors like you?”
“’Road patrol.’”
“Fine. How many?”
“Twelve. Always twelve.”
“So you’re what, the shock troops for the community? The SS?”
“It’s not like that.”
“And the community. How many?”
“Ninety-seven as of yesterday.”
“Don’t start that again. Talk to me. A death? A recruit?”
“A child.”
This was an interesting tidbit. Jack wondered how many children had been born to the Apache since the big death. To anyone in the whole world. “How many under four years old?
“Five.”
“How do you know these numbers so exactly?”
Roland shrugged to say he just knew.
“How many families?”
“It’s not the old way, so there’s not really an answer to that. It’s complicated. I’m not trying to dodge you. We sort of live together.”
“And who’s the leader?”
Hashkeh smirked his condescension. Roland didn’t hide his very well, either. “We don’t have one,” Roland said. Proudly, Jack thought.
“So who appointed you?”
“It’s a group decision. An honor for us. We’re entrusted with it because we’re believed fit for the task.”
“Hence the nifty outfit,” Jack responded. He was tempted to comment on the remark about being fit for the task, in light of their being overthrown by just one man. But he refrained.
“The uniform is practical, but yes, it’s as I said, an honor to be on Road Patrol.” Roland was now literally looking down his nose at Jack.
“Why aren’t you armed?”
“The community is armed. Well-armed. You’d do well to remember it. But we don’t all run around shooting off privately-held guns like drunken cowboys. We don’t individually carry guns. We keep them in a safe place for defense.”
<
br /> “Communally.”
“Yes.”
“So no one is in charge?”
“I told you, we don’t operate that way.”
“No elders, no wise men, no legislators, no judges?”
Roland for once hesitated, swiveling over to Hashkeh, who just shook his head, as though to say it’s complicated.
Roland resumed. “We don’t have official positions like that. We’re like the Diné of old. I’m trying to tell you. They had it right. We don’t appoint people to any of those positions. But there are a few who are especially well-respected. They may be consulted. But only because the people involved choose it.”
“You know . . .” Jack wanted to give Roland a piece of his mind about all the failed utopias of history, and the horrors of the consensus societies the fake Diné were now trying to emulate. He thought better of it. Now was not the time to argue it, if there were ever a time. “I would like to consult them.”
“I told you, it’s not like that. “There’s no ‘them’ to consult. You go to people around you that you respect. To do that, you have to know them, and they have to know you. Some among us are consulted because they are respected by the people who go to them. You’re not one of us, you have no reason to approach any of us. You can’t park your flying saucer and say ‘take me to your leader.’”
Jack appreciated that. A little pre-apocalypse cultural reference. But what next? “Then take me to your community,” he said.
“Are you one of them?”
“One of whom?”
“You know, those drunks or those anti-progressive cranks?”
Jack just made an inquisitive face.
“Call themselves ‘Apaches’? They’re reactionaries. Or drunks. They call themselves Apache just because we call ourselves Diné. But they dishonor the name. We mean something by ours.”
“Still, it’s good for them to have a handle, as long as you’re setting up an ‘us vs. them’ scenario. Agree?”
“Who’s setting up the ‘us vs. them’? We want to live in peace. They can join us, but not if they insist on their selfishness, their hidebound traditional ways.”
“Peace, you want, but not freedom.”
Roland’s eyes widened in a flash of ill-concealed anger. “We have freedom. Isolation is not freedom. People aren’t made to be alone.”
Jack sighed, purposely drawing out the time before his response. “Well, I’m not an Apache,” he said. He picked up the gun as though contemplating how it would work. “I’ve met some, though. They call me an outsider. You might as well think of me that way, too.”
Roland and Hashkeh just looked on impassively.
Jack put the gun back down on the asphalt pavement. “I’m not your enemy. Or at least,” tapping the handgun he’d just set down, “not until you made me one. Be what you say you are. I’m not here to compromise your community’s integrity. It’s just me. I haven’t rejected the Diné. I don’t know them. Is no one allowed in or out? Is that how it is?”
Stone faces.
“Can I visit?”
Swivels again and impassive looking at Jack.
“Can I visit?” Jack insisted.
“We have to consult the community,” Hashkeh said.
Chapter 13
Now Jack could travel at ease. He had unexpected leisure and was able to enjoy the landscape without fear. He drank it in, turning out often to overlook the mesas and the errant arroyos. Several times, he turned down dusty side roads so that his car would be hidden from the highway by the pinion scrub, so he could confidently get out and walk, attempting to puzzle through the logic of the hardscrabble landscape so plainly formed by water, where water was so scarce.
On his second such stop, Jack found that he had carelessly stepped right up to the brink of a precipice, standing at the top of a vertigo-inducing wall, giving way a good forty feet below not to another sandy wash, but to angry roils of turbid water making its way from the north, turning from south to southwest below the point in space where Jack stood.
Jack imagined how it would have been if he were here, rather than in New York amongst the deep manmade canyons of concrete and steel and glass, on the first day he realized he was completely alone. It would have been different, he thought. There his surroundings were manmade and, therefore, seemed all the more barren when people weren’t about. Had he been here, might he not have felt the loss of others less severely? This country itself lived, it seemed, and he felt embraced by it. Indian sentimentality, perhaps, but the arid and parsimonious landscape inspired it.
The landscape was not alone in this conspiracy arrayed against Jack’s senses. Above, to impossible heights, rose cumulus clouds mounted atop a colossal nimbostratus pedestal far in the distance yet prominent on the stage of existence. Here was the throne of Olympus. Eye-squinting white light exploded from just behind the uppermost reaches of the cloud, against the phthalo heavens, blanketing the topmost reaches of the cloud in purity itself.
After his third stop on his sojourn back south, Jack resolved to cease the sightseeing, despite the soul-arresting scenery, and continue on to Alpine. The awesome majesty of the heavens poised above the humble earth below would not by itself detain him. It would not yet be dark when Jack arrived, he calculated, despite his dithering, and Peter and Robin wouldn’t necessarily expect him tonight anyway. He would be going back through this country again soon enough, he knew. He could tarry then, if he chose. Jack couldn’t conceive why it would take a commune of less than a hundred souls a full week to decide whether to even allow his visit. He supposed that this was the first time they’d considered such a thing. Evidently they hadn’t considered anyone else to be truly neutral yet. Or met anyone who professed to be, anyway. Perhaps Jack was a test case. Whether he was or not, he was pretty confident that this was not some sort of setup. The Diné struck him as being too rigid to pull such a thing off.
Jack kept an open mind about the bogus Apache and the canyon people. He considered himself an outsider to the Apache, just as Peter and Robin did, and just as Rupert and Scott and the rest of them considered him to be. He intended to remain neutral with regard to the canyon Diné, too. Lawyer instincts, he supposed, not to accept one side of the dispute as a given. He was not interested in some sort of societal reform, nor was he aware of being in service to any particular ideology himself, and certainly not in the context of the tension between the canyon people and their neighbors. Jack wanted friends. People against whom he was not in any sort of presumptive enmity. There was nothing about either group that Jack was aware of thus far that would put him at odds with them. He believed there to be no theoretically scientific way for human beings to organize that so far had relevance in this Brave New World.
Jack re-crossed the concrete bridge just east of St. Johns, thinking how different everything looked when one’s state of mind goes from nervous anticipation to tranquil repose. Now he noticed the cottonwood trees and the fine, thin air, rather than the dust and the blockiness of the utilitarian bridge. His take on the canal was the same, however—the water still looked dense with orange-hued mud. Jack stopped at the same gas station where he’d refueled earlier, this time just topping off his gas tank. There was a small grocery store across the street, so Jack went in to see if there was anything worth appropriating. He opened the door and was greeted with the stale, sour smell of rotting food and mold, still rank after all this time. The store was narrow at the front and deep from front to rear, with windows only at the entrance, so this made for a dank, dark cave-like recess at the back of the store. Jack had “shopped” in worse places, however, so he ranged the shelves, as far back as he could see. There was nothing worth having, and the disarray and empty spaces on the shelves told him that others had been here before him.
The road just south of St. Johns ran straight and open, and then there would be a wide, gradual curve, resulting in the reorientation of the road perhaps fifteen or twenty degrees at a time. Jack was conscious that he was probably only thirty
minutes out from Eagar/Springerville, if that. And from there, he would be only an hour from home, even going slow in deference to a rush-hour of elk. Tomorrow he was off—it would be Sunday.
Approaching the Lyman Lake turn-off, Jack noticed a pickup truck with its hood up pulled over to the right. He was sure it hadn’t been there on the northbound trip that morning because he’d turned into the Lyman Lake Park then, and he’d have remembered. As he approached, a figure stepped out from in front of the vehicle, partway into the road, flagging him down with a cowboy hat in the right hand.
Encountering people in the normal way takes some getting used to after a long hiatus such as Jack had experienced. He sometimes thought of that first encounter with Robin as being overreaction, but as he re-examined it in the light of his experience to that point, how would he have done it differently? And then there was the disorientation of seeing his own car being driven up the street by what turned out to be pseudo-Apache zombies, but at least he’d had a little warning about their existence. Each time, it had been a little easier. Even being watched from the shadows, at home with Peter and Robin, was easier on the nerves because at least Jack knew of the existence of those others and was understanding of their curiosity about him, just as he was curious about them. And it evolved that he was at peace, if not actual friends, with those he had encountered. The space-suited Diné had certainly spiked Jack’s alarm, but in the end they’d just turned out to be somewhere in the middle of the range of weirdness he had expected. As with all the encounters subsequent to that first one with Robin, Jack at least had the benefit of knowing that such people existed.
Now he was being flagged down by a cowboy who was probably just experiencing car trouble on a lonely high-plateau road in the waning afternoon of an early-winter day. In normal times, it would be second nature to stop to lend help if he could, in such an isolated place, there being nothing so far to indicate danger. On the other hand, Jack’s inclination to extreme guardedness had not dissipated entirely, especially after being assaulted by the cockeyed road patrol just a couple of hours before.
Another Like Me Page 13