Another Like Me

by Albert Norton, Jr.

  Perhaps they desired occasional warfare in order to risk death, borrowing, as man ever has, purpose from exposure to mortality. We always look to our own demise for an answer to the question of purpose. We’re never more alive than when we are in the presence of death.

  The Apache were motivated by liberty. But again, to what end? What struggle did their autonomy aid them in? As with the Diné, the living was easy, at first, even if the horror of the vast die-off was not. What hardened their resolve for autonomy? Why had liberty become their god? There was an identifiable struggle—the need to get one’s living from the land at a future time when the living would not be so easy as it had been at first. They evidently did not feel that a complete collective like the Diné was required for that struggle, and they did interact with others in trade, as Jack had already seen on his visit to Rupert’s. The need for mere human companionship was not unmet among the Apache. So looking at it from their perspective, it made sense to Jack why they would look upon the Diné with suspicion.

  But aside from that struggle for a living, which, after all, is an age-old struggle of man, did the Apache struggle with the question of why they were here? They did not have the collective, as with the Diné, to buffer their individual struggle for meaning. Jack imagined them each alone under the wide sky, wondering at his reason for living in the absence of the distractions of the former world. There had to be a missing piece, for both the Diné and the Apache.

  Peter and Robin probably thought they had that missing piece. God. But what struggle was there, for them? Did their vote for God place them in a zone of serenity above the cares of this world? Why would they have bothered with the zombies? That certainly was not without risk. Same with befriending Jack. And for a long time, they had lived with no knowledge of anyone else. What had motivated them then? In a sense, they were content to just live, leaving the question of ultimate purpose to be supplied by God. Living with Him was sufficient purpose for now. They weren’t left in pointless existentialist angst like Jack supposed the Apache must be, and they weren’t left with the illusion of purpose, as with the Diné.

  Anyway, his policy in this odd environment would continue to be neutrality among the groups, though his loyalty to Peter and Robin would be absolute. He would find out, soon enough, how the two of them had been affected by a further taste of interaction with humans who were not zombies. The lantern light illuminated the windows of the house like a beacon in the darkness. Jack was careful to turn at an angle within the circular drive so that his headlights would play against the house and alert those inside that it was he, as evidenced by not hiding his presence. No need to startle them by bustling at the door. He then turned off the engine, considering all that the yellow light represented to him. Salvation, he felt, not just home. Friendship, not just survival. And purpose, perhaps? People are not meant to live alone, he thought, though the Diné surely had it wrong in what they thought that meant.

  Jack got out of his car and smelled the wood smoke from the chimney. He turned his back to the house, looking out over the pasture immediately before him, the one Peter wanted to make useful again, and the mountain behind that, and the starlit heavens above that. There was a half-moon, but the stars by themselves were impossibly bright. The pasture ended at the garden to his left, with the mountain behind it, but to the right, the mostly-level pasture extended quite a distance, ending at a line of trees along a creek in the middle distance, with a low mountain range visible in the far. The open space made the night seem brighter. Jack stood there a while, his breath visible in the cool air, and took in the cold blue majesty of the created night-time world, knowing that his turn toward the beckoning light of the little house would be all the sweeter for this moment of solitude before the vastness of creation.

  Behind him, he heard the back door to the house open and then Dewey’s paws scampering toward him over the gravel of the drive. Dewey would no doubt have been barking if he hadn’t sensed that it was Jack. Perhaps it was Dewey, rather than his headlights, that had alerted Peter and Robin to his presence. Jack turned at the noise and waited for Dewey to trot up, petting him when he did. Behind Dewey was Robin, bundled against the cold.

  “What did you learn?” she asked.

  “Well, I met a fellow named Bridges, and his boy. Bridges knows Rupert. And I had a little run-in with the canyon people—I’ll tell you all about it. They’re real, all right, and there’s at least some truth to what we’ve heard about them. But I’ll tell you all about that, too.”

  “Hungry?”

  “Starved.”

  They started back toward the house. “But I want to hear all about your visit. How did it go? Is it a real case of love at first sight?”

  “I don’t know about that. They were certainly talking a lot in a very,” she made an active gesture with her hands.

  “Animated,” Jack supplied.

  “Animated way. They were walking all over Rupert’s place.”

  “How did the Willises treat you this time?”

  “They were great.”

  “No guns.”

  She laughed. “No. I got to know Mrs. Willis. She showed me some things I can put to use, maybe we can preserve more of the meat than we’ve been able to. But their garden isn’t much. I think Peter is going to help them with it.”

  “We’re in the middle of our own garden projects.”

  “But Millie doesn’t live here,” Robin said, pointing out the obvious.

  Inside, at the table, they talked of all these things. Jack shared the details of his altercation with Roland and Hashkeh, thinking that it revealed much about the Diné thinking and would thereby help them unravel how much of what they’d heard was true, and how much was the invention of fear. And likewise, Jack’s interaction with Bridges. It was instructive to know that the Ruperts weren’t alone in their extreme view of independence, and that, in fact, there was a shared sense of threat from the Diné.

  “So Peter,” Jack said. The tone of this preface alone made Peter roll his eyes. “I’m told you walked arm-in-arm with the object of your affection, whispering sweet nothings.”

  “I did not say that,” Robin said to Peter.

  “Robin said she couldn’t make out what you said, but you were all cow-eyes in her presence.”

  “What does that even mean?” Robin asked. “I did not say that, either,” she said to Peter.

  “But calling her ‘my little elkette.’ Really, Peter, isn’t that a bit much?”

  Robin shook her head, smiling. To Peter, she said, “I told him I saw you and Millie talking. That’s all.”

  “You’re a strange man,” Peter said to Jack.

  “Well, tell me about the Willises then. They seemed pretty normal when we were there before, aside from being skittish over the people from the canyon.”

  “They are, as best I can tell. But I think they wouldn’t fit in well even if all of a sudden everything was like it used to be.”

  “Rupert had a lot to say about the government and how glad he was to be out from under it, last time we were there.”

  “I didn’t see as much of Rupert this time around, but I talked with Scott. He looks at things pretty much like his Dad. Maybe even feels stronger about it.”

  “Well, let me tell you how I read them,” Jack said, “and you tell me if this seems right now that you’ve seen them again. I think before everything happened, Rupert felt like he and other people like him, independent people already trying to be as self-sufficient as possible, were being absorbed into what he would see as a society—and especially a government—that was becoming progressively more socialist every day.”

  “Yes.”

  “And his big worry in life—at least with regard to politics and the country he was a part of—was that this trend was taking ever more of his liberty.”

  “Yes. And taxes. Don’t get him started on taxes.”

  Robin added, “At lunch he was saying that every dollar of taxes was the loss of a dollar’s worth of freed
om. He really resented the taxes.”

  “And with an outlook like his, I don’t wonder,” Jack said. “I don’t think it was just a financial burden to him. It’s freedom he’s talking about. And I would say he’s got a point. You note that he’s talking about a world that is basically irrelevant now. Why would he care so much, except that what he didn’t like about that old world drives him in the new one.”

  “But what would be his beef now?” Peter asked. “He’s got no one to rob him of his freedom anymore.”

  “See, I think it’s still his idea of freedom that gets him going,” Jack continued. “Whatever he thinks about the big change, it at least had the benefit of restoring freedom. I think that’s how he sees it. Freedom is more important than prosperity to him. More important than a lot of things. There’s no government to tell him how he can and can’t live, or to take what he produces to spend on things he thinks are foolish or worse. So he looks at these canyon people as a threat to the freedom he has now. It’s not about territory or resources, but it’s about people. If the Diné gain in numbers and they feel they have all the answers for how people should be, it seems natural to Rupert that they would come knocking on his door, announcing that they’re the new government and we all have to be like them.”

  “So that would make him even more sensitive than just knowing there are some folks around who don’t understand liberty the same way he does.”

  “Right. From his perspective, people who live independently like him are never a threat, even if they choose to use their freedom differently. He doesn’t have much regard for the zombies, for example, but they’re not a threat to him. There wouldn’t automatically be a move afoot by independents to organize everyone in such a way as to hang on to individual freedom. They’ve already got it and are exercising it as each sees fit.”

  “But he definitely doesn’t see the canyon people as having the same attitude,” Peter observed.

  “No. To be a Diné in the first place, you have to buy into the idea that the society is the thing, not the individuals who make it up. And I’m saying all this not having figured out the Diné for myself. I’m just speaking from how the Apache perceive them. Rupert would say that as long as the Diné think that way, they can’t help but expand to take in the families like Rupert’s. By persuasion or otherwise. I don’t know if Rupert has articulated it this way or not, but in his view, the Diné are dangerous because their way of thinking won’t let them live and let live, like the rest of them do.”

  “I think that’s exactly his worry,” Peter said.

  “Well, he’s not alone in that. Bridges thinks like that, too, and these rancher and farmer folks know each other. They drop in from time to time. They talk.”

  “What about you? Whose side are you on?”

  “I’m not on a side,” Jack said. “My introduction to the canyon people today was a little rough, but I’m not going to prejudge them based on just that. Anyway, it all seems ridiculous now. I understand that the canyon people’s mindset seems to point inevitably to control, and that’s anathema to the independents. And I don’t like it, either. But, on the other hand, let the canyon group form whatever weird little cult they want. There’s plenty of room, plenty of opportunity to join or remain independent—it seems like everyone can have the society they want.”

  “I wonder if people said that in the beginning,” Robin said.

  Both Peter and Jack just looked at her.

  “The beginning?” Jack asked.

  “Of everything,” she responded.

  Jack was purposely quiet, taken aback by his very young friend, and not for the first time. He said to Peter, “Your sister is wise.” He paused again. “You’re right, Robin. How is this different?”

  She didn’t answer. After another moment’s thought, Jack added, to both Robin and Peter, “What about you? Whose side are you on?”

  “Oh, we’re not on a side,” Peter responded, looking over at Robin.

  “Religious reasons?”

  “Well, we’re not pacifists. I think we’re supposed to resist evil. But we want to act in a way that pleases God. In everything.”

  “Everyone has their own idea of what’s evil. No one agrees.”

  “Something is evil or good only if God says it is. And the Bible says ‘the days are evil,’ so we know it’s everywhere, and we have to be wise.”

  Jack nodded his head but took this in as a small note of division between them. As much as he felt aligned with Peter and Robin, their respective starting point for any question was going to be different, and it made him feel just a bit more distant from them, and therefore a bit more alone.

  Chapter 15

  Jack parked in the exact same spot in Sanders, at the exact moment prescribed. He didn’t even have time to turn off the engine before he heard the motorcycle engines. They were close. He could hear them though his windows were closed tight, it being even colder now than it was the previous week. Two figures in motorcycle regalia, the same getup Jack had seen the previous week, roared up to the front of Jack’s vehicle. Jack couldn’t tell if they were Hashkeh and Roland, or another pair. They didn’t stop, nor even slow down significantly, but instead waved him forward. Jack put the car back in drive and glided out after the two, headed to the interstate exchange a short distance away. Jack noted that they passed the on- and off-ramps closest to them, and instead went over the bridge and took the on-ramp down to I-40, as if there would be other traffic there, and as if there were traffic laws to be obeyed.

  They headed west on I-40 for only about ten minutes, and then exited and headed north on the highway to Chinle, which dog-legged at Ganado and Burnside. Once on that highway, Jack saw in his rearview mirror another pair of motorcyclists take up behind them, dressed the same way as the first two and riding identical sports bikes. He was certainly committed now. The little motorcade progressed north through the cold arid atmosphere, driving at a steady speed but below what they might have in earlier days when one could count on the roads being maintained. At Ganado, now fully on the old Navajo reservation, the motorcyclists stopped for gas. Jack noted that they pulled it up from the underground tanks manually, in narrow, cylindrical dippers deep enough to hold perhaps a half-gallon at a time, lowered into the tank by a thin chain. It was a tedious operation to watch. None of the motorcyclists took off their helmets nor spoke. They had signaled to Jack to park next to the same storage tank caps, but Jack made no move to take gas, having filled up before Sanders, and with plenty in reserve. Nor was he inclined to show them his technique if it could be helped. Maybe they hadn’t grasped how to use and power a pump though they were apparently mechanically adept enough to keep the motorcycles in trim.

  The scenery on the remaining route to Chinle was other-worldly, even compared to the dramatic landscapes thus far, from Alpine to Ganado. For much of the remaining distance, the world seemed flat in all directions, with scrubby, knee-high, and well-spaced knobs of creosote brush that were a washed-out blue-green color, brittle in the sunshine, aridity, and winter temperatures. Collectively, they gave a grey-blue tinge to the landscape that contrasted little with the bleached sand-colored soil and weathered rock. The flatness gave way not to an empty horizon, but to mesas that arose and then abruptly leveled off, in flatness above the flatness. Occasionally he would see a mesa begin abruptly from the desert floor, run for miles along the horizon, and then step up to yet another similarly flat mesa. The surroundings were desperately flat in every direction, except where these step-ups occurred.

  Or so it seemed. Part way along this leg of the journey, Jack noticed, off to his right far ahead, and ever more obviously as he approached it, that there were deep step-downs from the plain he was on, to another level thousands of feet below. He realized that he was actually on just such a mesa as he had observed on the horizon, except that he and the road were on the top end of this one. The distance vertically and horizontally to the bottom was so far that whatever was on that level was too indistinct to make out
. In addition to that, Jack could see that the vast step-downs were not level and then perfectly vertical. Instead, the top of each vast step was tilted up toward the east, and the drop off was not quite vertical. The entire arid plain and step-down to lower plain was one enormous uplift in the earth, across many miles. It seemed to put Jack back in time. An atavism, surveying his surroundings in an antediluvian age.

  After a time, the mesas on the horizon gave way to a little more variability in elevation, appearing more like low foothills to interrupt the expanse of flatness, but in places, the road would approach these little foothills and even run through cuts made in them. They were higher than they had seemed from a distance. Many were built in the usual tumble of mixed rock faces, but often there would be horizontal striations, or bulges, running for miles, and often at a disorienting tilt from the level of the road. Jack realized from the occasional strain of his engine that the road was not as flat as it seemed to his eyes but was actually on a nearly imperceptible gradient. He would notice that the way was quieter and smoother until he would cross a wide sandy spot that would evidently hold a little water in the occasional rains, but was otherwise dry. Then a mile or so on he would notice the engine seemingly gasping to keep up, and requiring a little more gas to maintain speed. But for that, he’d have gone miles without noticing an incline or decline at all.