Another Like Me

by Albert Norton, Jr.

  The first thing Jack did was slow down considerably in order to take in any sign of movement in and around the vehicle, especially in the area across the street and in the bush further away from the road. If this were an ambush, it would likely take the form of an attack from hiding places removed from the apparently disabled truck, once he’d slowed to a stop for the decoy. Jack realized, too, that he had no reason not to signal to the cowboy that he was taking precautions against exactly that, so he stopped dead in the middle of the road a good 100 yards from the cowboy, scanning 360 degrees with the naked eye while he broke out his binoculars. Then he did a similar scan with the binoculars, settling on the face of the cowboy, who wore an expression of understanding patience, the only thing reasonable in the circumstances if he were only having vehicle trouble.

  Creeping closer, Jack continued to scan to the left and the right. The cowboy had returned his hat to his head and stood with his right hand on his hip until Jack came within an easy sight distance, and then he smiled and made an open-palmed wave that was somewhere between howdy neighbor and stop, please. On inspiration, Jack sped up a little, just when he would have otherwise come to a stop, and took the turn into the park at Lyman Lake a little fast, slipping a bit on the bits of gravel that had accumulated at the middle of the T-intersection. He continued turning, around the big monument sign to the park, re-approaching the intersection from this different angle. He thought that if there were malevolent intentions afoot, he might smoke them out by spotting others than the cowboy, or just by seeing signs that the ambush plans were having to be revised on the fly. As he approached the stop sign again from the turnaround that encircled the Lyman Lake Park sign, Jack watched the cowboy as well as his surroundings. The cowboy was now lounging against the front left quarter of his truck, still waiting patiently, making no sign of any kind to anyone. Jack pulled up to the park/highway intersection for one last look, and decided that this might be a good place to stop anyway while he got the lay of the land, inasmuch as he could peel off to the north or the south with equal alacrity, if need be. Before switching off the engine, he noticed two AR-15’s mounted between the driver’s and passenger’s seats of the cowboy’s truck, in brackets like those used for shotguns in law enforcement cruisers back in the day. The sight was reassuring, in a way, because if the rifles were there, they weren’t in the hands of would-be assailants. Jack switched off his engine and stepped out.

  “Afternoon,” the man said, making no motion of moving closer. He spoke as if they had been thrown together by chance, rather than by his need.

  “Afternoon,” Jack replied.

  “Much obliged for your stopping,” the man said, making a little motion with his hand to his hat brim, in lieu of actually doffing it.

  “You alone?”

  “I am. Having a little gasoline problem.”

  Jack was not entirely appeased by this, and he continued to stand at the front of his vehicle, just as the cowboy stood at the front of his, the two of them being a little more than the width of the highway apart. How could the cowboy be only out of gas? That was an avoidable situation, and an ordinary person would take extra pains to do so in this wild country in normal times, not to mention now. Jack mulled this, in no hurry to let on what caused him to hesitate.

  The reason for the hesitation wasn’t lost on the cowboy. “Deserves some explanation, I expect, and I propose to offer it if I may.”

  Jack was bemused by the archaic elocution that long-time westerners occasionally lapsed into, especially when in the mode of getting to know a stranger. He decided to respond in kind, just for the heck of it. “That would be most welcome, sir, inasmuch as the circumstances are unusual for these awkward times.” He smiled inwardly at playing the dime-western character.

  At that moment, Jack spotted another face, some thirty yards or so behind and above the cowboy, peering down on them through a thick clump of juniper. Without further word or expression, moving deliberately but quickly, he reached back into his vehicle and pulled out the closest rifle. Leaving the car door open and chambering a round, he lifted the rifle to his shoulder and aimed it between the cowboy and the face behind him. Either would take it as an immediate threat, and that’s what Jack intended. The face dropped down again out of sight.

  “Whoa, fella!” the cowboy exclaimed. “I ain’t got nothing.”

  “I don’t appreciate being lied to.”

  At this, the cowboy looked over his shoulder and then back at Jack. “Just my boy, mister, that’s all, I swear to you.”

  Jack kept the firearm level and sighted on the cowboy’s forehead for several seconds. And then several more.

  The cowboy looked over his shoulder again and called out, “Junie, come here, son.”

  Junie came, sliding down the steep slope below the juniper on his bottom. A boy of about ten.

  Jack lowered the rifle. An acceptable lie, he thought. The cowboy had reason to be cautious, too, after all. He returned the firearm to the vehicle and resumed the conversation as if nothing had happened. “A gasoline problem,” he said.

  The boy was now at the cowboy’s hip, partially behind him, with the cowboy’s arm across his shoulder and resting against his chest. “We didn’t just run out. We have a leak. In that extra tank back there,” the cowboy said, pointing to a square tank in the bed of his truck. “We were getting supplies and scrounging, making a big loop around the north of Phoenix and on up to Flagstaff. We were going to gas up there, but we saw canyon people and decided to head on back and refuel on the road. But when I stopped, I saw the spare tank was rusted through. We been on rough roads a while now, trying to steer clear of St. Johns, and I just plain ran out of gas.”

  “Why go to the trouble of steering clear of St. Johns?” Jack asked, though he had an idea as to the answer.

  “The canyon people are in there all the time. That’s kinda their southern outpost, you might say.”

  “Maybe I’m from the canyon.”

  “Well, are you? You don’t look it. I’ve only heard of ’em riding motorcycles this far out from home, but anyway I’ve never seen one alone before. You are alone, ain’tcha?”

  Jack looked over his shoulder at his car, instinctively, though he knew perfectly well he was alone. “Yeah, I’m alone.”

  “And plus you just don’t look like it.”

  Jack finally crossed the road and walked around the truck, peering inside and in the bed, and taking one more thorough horizontal scan. “Your name is Junie?” he said to the boy.

  “Junie,” was all the boy said in confirmation.

  “Jack,” Jack said to the cowboy, reaching to shake his hand.

  “Joel,” he responded. “Bridges.”

  “Where are you from? Springerville? Eagar?”

  “Over toward Show Low. Just outside the Indian reservation.”

  At that, Jack undertook to share some gas. They moved with some efficiency, not wanting to be out of commission longer than necessary right on the highway, but the exchange afforded them some time to speak. Bridges was well aware of the Diné paranoia of the Apache or anyone else who might sully their socialist fantasy. He expressed it, however, in a tone of paranoia of his own, similar to that espoused by Rupert—that the Diné attitude about the relationship of people to each other was somehow a threat to the Apache. Jack had the impression of Bridges that he had formed about Rupert. They had the tough, independent streak typical of rural westerners, but it was deepened by the aloneness experienced by everyone, and then deepened further in reaction to the opposite streak of collectivism in the nearby Diné. Bridges knew Rupert, and Jack was forming an impression, from Bridges’ discussion of his interaction with neighbors, that there was an ongoing discussion about the Diné and a growing sense of unease on the part of their neighbors. These rugged individualists were thorough, if occasional, in their news-sharing and interaction with like-minded neighbors, precisely because at most times, they lived in isolation.

  It seemed not to have occurred to Br
idges, before now, that in the new world there would be anything other than the two categories of people—canyon people and all others. It was clear that he had not met anyone else he might consider an outsider to those groups. He and Jack exchanged the usual stale intelligence, to the effect that there was no sign of human life outside the independent neighbors in the region and the curious cult commune that called itself “the people”—the Diné.

  “Why are you so concerned about those people at the canyon anyway?” Jack asked.

  Bridges paused before speaking. A thoughtful man, apparently—more so than Rupert or Scott. “There’s a lot of mistrust there, but we’d do well, I guess, to figure out why, if we can. They’ve not made demands on the rest of us, exactly. At least, not that I know of. But they ride through these towns surrounding Chinle, a hundred miles out or more, and have pretty much stripped them clean of anything worth having. The closer you travel to the canyon, the more you’re going to see them, and the more they act like you’re in their territory, like you’re a trespasser.”

  Jack decided to hold close to his vest, for the time being, his interaction of earlier in the day with the road patrol. Bridges and the independents he talked to weren’t imagining things, as Jack knew firsthand. On the other hand, Roland and Hashkeh had been pretty forthcoming with Jack, once they were subdued, and for all he knew, they might have had a similar beef with the Apache.

  “Do any of your neighbors live up more in the vicinity of the canyon? Do you know?”

  “No, it was Navajo land, and bleak in places. ’Course, the people calling themselves Navajo aren’t really Navajo—they don’t have any more business up there than I do.”

  “Well, it’s not Navajo land now anyway,” Jack stated flatly, signaling a desire to get back to the point, the point being why there was hard feeling with this commune.

  “No, I suppose not. I know ol’ Jake McDonough ran some cattle on land nearby to Chambers, which is on the way up to Chinle but south of the reservation. But he moved down toward the Apache reservation and teamed up with his brother.”

  “But the Apache land is good land, by all accounts. Maybe McDonough just moved because it was available now.”

  “Could be.”

  “What I’m trying to get to is why there’s such mistrust to begin with. What is there to disagree about?”

  “Well, look here,” Bridges said. “I say live and let live. They can get up there in their commune and reinvent mankind if they want to, if they keep it to themselves. But I don’t see ’em doin’ that. They think they’re superior, and they got their set way of thinking about things, but I sure don’t want to live like an ant in an anthill. I don’t trust ’em. I don’t feel like they’re just going about their lives and minding their own business like the other folks still left. What’s all that organization for? Each person giving up his right to live as a free being. Why? I have to suppose that it’s to make the group stronger, but to what purpose? Who is there to be stronger against, but us? I reckon they make us free men out to be the enemy.”

  “Maybe they feel threatened. Maybe they just want to take precautions. So they can defend themselves.”

  “Defensive or offensive, it’s a fine line, knowing which is which.”

  Chapter 14

  Jack and Joel Bridges parted as friends, if not allies against a common enemy. Jack knew he would be late getting back to the ranch of Chatto and Kashata, which was now the source of a living for Peter, Robin, and Jack. He resolved to take it slow and not pause at Springerville or Eagar because with this last stop, his last few miles would now be in darkness, contrary to his usual policy of only driving during daylight. Still, it was pleasant to be headed home. Pleasant to have a home to head to. Jack looked forward to seeing his friends, who were more a family, and getting the news of the day. But meanwhile, he would ascend the lonely highland toward Alpine with care, and turn his mind over to the puzzle of the communal canyon people, on the one hand, and on the other, the peoples burrowed here and there in the surrounding landscape, each a kingdom unto himself.

  Jack understood Bridges’ thinking. He thought the Diné were a threat because he saw them individually sacrificing freedom, handing it over to the common collective, and they wouldn’t do that, to his mind, without a strong motivation. The only motivation Bridges could imagine would be greater military strength against non-Diné, like Bridges, Rupert, Scott, and others. But perhaps that thinking could be applied in reverse, too. It turned on the question of what people were really for, ultimately, and one could ask that about the ardent individualists, too. Suppose it were true that the Diné regarded people as existing only for their place in the community, so much so that they willingly shed their individuality for it. That might satisfy an individual need for purpose, but it would only beg the question of what the group as a group is for. What was the purpose of the Diné as a collective society? Bridges and those like him inferred that it must be to better enable them to wage war against their neighbors. But perhaps not. Maybe ultimate human purpose just remains unanswered among the Diné. In their world, individuals got purpose by being in the collective. But the collective purpose was—what? No answer.

  There was an ingrained motivation to sacrifice oneself to a higher cause, Jack thought, whatever form that cause might take. For the Apache, their individual freedom. For the Diné, the collective. For the zombies—well, they were an exception, perhaps, in that they made no sacrifice unless one counted the slow-motion self-destruction. For Peter and Robin? How about them? What was their higher cause to which they would sacrifice? And for that matter, what was the sacrifice? If they willingly subjugated their will to God’s, that would certainly seem a sacrifice, and yet he knew Peter and Robin would remonstrate against that proposition. Probably on the grounds that they received more than they gave; that there was ultimate freedom somehow. Propositions that Jack remembered vaguely from his occasional Sunday School as a child.

  The individuals among the Diné might sacrifice by turning their will over to the collective. It could be that they just didn’t go the next step in their individual imagining—to answer for themselves individually whether the Diné collective goal, whatever it may be, satisfactorily answered the questions we all start out with. What are we for? Why do we exist? The very act of sacrificing his autonomy obviated the need to inquire further, for Hashkeh and Roland and the rest of that mysterious crew. The shift to thinking as a collective would mean that the individual question of purpose had already been preempted. A person’s desire—no, need—to sacrifice his individuality to something greater would be the motivation to pledge himself to the collective. And then that individual motivation would be reinforced by the imperatives of the culture that resulted, presumably. Once this was the paradigm for living, the members of the community might absorb it so completely that living collectively became presumptively right.

  So there was the flaw in the Diné thinking, perhaps. But didn’t the same problem exist among the Apache? They were rugged individuals unwilling to cede any of their liberties to the collective, but why? They were stronger individually, but perhaps weaker as a group. The Apache retained their individuality, or their attitude that each was a law unto himself. But the question ‘why live at all?’ remained unanswered. Bridges could probably have answered no better than Hashkeh or Roland the question of what people were for.

  Jack wondered how Robin and Peter viewed this—or whether they’d considered it at all. They’d had no connection to the canyon people and hadn’t known they even existed, until recently. But now that they did, they gave no sign of sympathizing with them any more than the Ruperts and Bridges of the world. They hadn’t known about the Apache, either, until quite recently, except for the zombies. They were sympathetic to the zombies, but only in the sense of wanting to help them out of the mire, not in the sense of agreeing to the precepts that governed their lives. Robin and Peter had an awareness of themselves that was not dependent on others. It seemed unlikely that they would
subjectively align themselves with the Diné any more than with the Apache.

  And what about himself? Who was Jackson Pence? Why did he live? Before he was alone, his purpose for living had been to procure his food and shelter, and to interact with others on his own terms. That was really all. Then when he became alone, getting the necessities of life took a greater share of his energy, but he had a larger purpose, too—to find others like him. In his newfound solitude, he had wanted to rake back that piece of his existence so that he could look into someone’s eyes and see their consciousness of him reflected there. And then he despaired of having that ever again. The despair came not just from being lonely, but from being without the only source of self-awareness he could imagine. Jack now frankly admitted to himself that he had been rescued, in an important sense, when he had discovered Robin’s footprints in the snow.

  But then he found that he had still not answered that awful question. He was put back to where he started, before being alone, only now he was aware of the question of purpose—and the lack of an answer for it—in a way he had not been before. It’s easy when one is well-fed and entertained to grapple occasionally with deep questions, surveying the options, and then returning the question to the shelf, to be explored again later. The quest for meaning can become just another form of entertainment. Peter and Robin were religious people, and sincere in it—there had certainly been no one around that they might impress with their religiosity. They didn’t writhe about in existentialist angst, but then who could, when just living consumed so much of one’s attention and energy? Peter had hinted at self-awareness as being connected to God. Using his own analogy of how one’s interior self-awareness is illuminated, Jack took it to mean that the light came from God and not from someone else, and not from oneself in reaction to another person.

  Jack felt that he was right at the edge of understanding, pushing through like his headlights in the murk of late twilight. The purpose-seeking of individual Diné might lead them to meld with the collective, on a deep subjective level rather than mere companionship and a sense of belonging. But then the purpose of the collective remained elusive. There would be no collective mind to adopt such a purpose and to steer toward it. All of the purpose Jack could imagine for the collective society of the Diné was survival against the elements or survival against enemies. Both instances of struggle. But as to the first, this society had formed at a time when there was no struggle for food or space or anything else. And as to the second, why would there be an enemy at all? The whole world was available for them, there was no need for interaction with anyone who might be an enemy. Even if they bought wholly into Indian hokum about the sacredness of particular places—like the canyon—were they really under any threat from enemies?