by Andrew Smith
One day, I will paint that.
An Unfortunate Choice Outside Rebel Land
“They saw us, Olive! Motherfuckers saw us! Yip-yee-hoo!”
Olive knew when Breakfast was excited and happy. She smiled and hugged the boy, patted his back.
The plane passed overhead, slightly to the east of the highway. Then it took a wide turn and looped back around at a lower elevation. But Breakfast was mad that the plane didn’t stop. He didn’t know anything about flying machines or how they got down from out of the sky, or even if they could. He had seen planes on the ground before, had even tried to drive one, but he couldn’t make it work.
But Breakfast was certain that whoever was inside the plane had spotted him and Olive as they waved and jumped up and down on the cab of the septic-pumping truck.
The plane disappeared to the south, and the whirr of its motor faded into the wind.
“Dang!” Breakfast sighed. “Well, at least we know we ain’t alone. I always knew that, anyhow, though. Come on, Olive girl, let’s see if we can’t get down that way and find where those people are heading to. Dang!”
Olive nodded.
Olive would do anything for Breakfast, who was completely wild.
Their State Line Septic Service pumping truck ran out of fuel in northwestern Tennessee the following day. It stopped running in the middle of a once-wide highway that had been narrowed by the overgrown trees on either side of the road to the extent the truck could barely squeeze through in places. The pumper truck coughed to a stop beside an enormous fenced-in park called Rebel Land.
“If there’s no gas in that big tank back there, maybe we’ll find a state trooper car at Rebel Land, and then load up all my money and our goodies,” Breakfast said. “Wild, Olive! Wild!”
Olive wiggled in her seat.
Breakfast climbed down from the cab and went around to the back of the truck. There must be gas in that big tank, he thought. What else would anyone keep inside such a large container?
At the rear of the big steel tank, just above the truck’s bumper, were two valves that clamped shut the mouths of wide steel pipes jutting out from the bottom. Breakfast decided he would open the lower of the two valves.
He wanted to see if it really was fuel inside the big tank.
Breakfast, who was very strong, grunted and strained as his little calloused hands nudged loose the brass closure on the pump truck’s valve. Breakfast scratched his balls and picked a wad of wax from his ear and smeared it like butter on the bumper of the truck.
Then Breakfast twisted the valve cap around a half turn, and then just one more.
“I’m wild!” he said. “Hoo-hoo! Wild!”
Olive thought it was funny.
Olive stood above Breakfast at the edge of the pumper truck’s bed just when the wild boy opened the lower valve cap on the tank. A great gushing fountain of sixteen-year-old, ash-black shit and septic fluid hosed into the boy’s belly, knocking the wind out of him and toppling Breakfast down to the roadway.
The spouting geyser of stewed shit coated Breakfast like a county fair corn dog in a batter of something so magnificently foul Breakfast instantly began vomiting and wishing for death, all at the same time.
But Olive clapped and smiled and jumped on the bed of the truck, joyously entertained by the spectacle of the wild naked boy flopping around in all that greasy sewage. She also began to feel a little bit dizzy from the powerful gaseous stench that rose like a steaming fog around everything.
Breakfast, who almost never got mad about things, was enraged.
“Fuck! Motherfucker! Gah!”
The contents of the tank gushed and gushed, all over the roadway, all over the boy, who could not get to his feet in the slippery goo.
Breakfast flopped and wriggled like an eel on a mudflat, spitting, cursing, and choking.
Olive wanted to help the boy, but she wasn’t about to get down from the truck and wade out in the spreading slick of muck.
Roaring incoherently like an animal, which basically is what Breakfast was anyway, the boy finally managed to stand up. He flailed his arms and shook his wild knots of hair, spitting. He vomited again, and then ran from the roadway, twisting and thrashing through the brush, screaming in rage and agony, over and over and over, running, running, running.
Olive jumped up and down on the truck bed, clapping.
Breakfast always put on such great shows.
Breakfast was very fast. He ran, swearing and gagging, desperately looking for water or mud—anything he could jump into or squirm around in to get all the shit off him.
“Motherfucker!” he screamed. “Who the fuck would drive around in a truck filled with shit and piss?”
It was a reasonable question.
And now Breakfast knew what State Line Septic Service meant. It meant: This truck is filled with shit.
Breakfast was wild with rage, naked, and covered in a thick sludge of fermented human waste that was older than he was. He was also not paying attention to his path. He had no idea where Olive was, or the truck, for that matter. But Breakfast decided he never wanted to see the fucking State Line Septic Service pumper truck again, anyway. He just kept running blindly, dripping shit.
The boy had gotten inside Rebel Land. Breakfast did not even consciously recall scaling the ten-foot-high chain-link fence that surrounded the place.
Breakfast had never seen anything like Rebel Land, which used to be a theme park. In the moment, he cared nothing about the colorful displays of human beings in scenes of battle, or the large wood-and-metal structures that looked like elevated, twisting railroad tracks, because he had spotted a large green lake on the other side of a spiked wrought-iron fence.
A sign over the arched gate said BATTLE OF HAMPTON ROADS THRILL RIDE!
Breakfast vaulted over the fence. He dashed to the edge of the lake and jumped.
Beside the gate stood a painted plywood sign that looked like this:
Breakfast did not stop to measure whether or not he was too tall to live through the Battle of Hampton Roads Thrill Ride! But he did notice, in passing, the way people at Rebel Land spelled “probably.” And although the twelve-year-old boy was actually tall enough to die a horrible death if he rode the nonfunctioning Battle of Hampton Roads Thrill Ride!, what at that moment was more likely to kill Breakfast was something else entirely.
First Day in Cicada School
Inside our hole, my father, Austin, had assembled a model of the world for me in pictures and words.
His model was intended to inform and educate me, perhaps to prepare me by serving as some sort of map.
I realized as I drove with Mel around the place called Waterloo, or wherever we were, that my father had always anticipated, straddling time as he did, that I would at one point in my life feel compelled to leave the hole.
But the model—like Breakfast, my visible man—is not the thing.
Think about it: My father’s model of the world was supposed to represent everything that was outside the hole. The only thing that can re-present anything real is the thing itself. No models can ever adequately perform that job.
The model presents—and re-presents—only the model, and nothing more.
And the data—what’s really outside the hole—does not call to us, so we must go to it, and then interpret its meaning with our incompetent human minds. The data is mute; we give it an imperfect voice.
And that’s exactly why, after he got out of his hole, Max Beckmann painted the way that he did. He understood this, and as a result, his art was more real than all the mute things in the world that it captured.
One of the first things Max Beckmann painted after coming out of his hole was a portrait of Adam and Eve, the first new humans.
• • •
The next day I used the hand pump and a five-gallon gas container that was fastened to the back of the motorhome to draw fuel from a tanker truck we found at a place called Kum & Go.
I wondered why people in Iow
a used to spell like that.
There was so much to learn.
All the windows at Kum & Go were broken.
It was a lot of work, filling up the van. I made a mess, too, and got gasoline all over myself, which smelled bad and made me feel a bit woozy. There were so many things I hadn’t considered before leaving the hole—like cleaning my clothes, for example.
Mel and I put together a new world. It was thrilling and frightening, all at the same time.
Mel found the instruction notebook for the motorhome’s equipment, and while I filled and spilled, she studied it. I heard her inside, flipping switches, turning motors on. The van, like the world, I suppose, was full of things I had no idea were there. I wondered if not knowing things were out there actually prevented their existence, and if, with each new thing Mel and I stumbled upon, the universe was increasing in size.
“We have hot water here,” Mel said. “There are solar panels on top, which provide all the electricity. And if you turn on the water pump, you can take a shower.”
I didn’t say anything. It made my chest ache, thinking about taking a shower with Mel.
Why couldn’t I tell her? In three days, I had transformed into a hung-up, inhibited, before-the-hole sixteen-year-old human being who kept asking himself over and over and over, What if I’m wrong?
And our universe kept growing bigger and bigger and bigger.
I stopped the van that afternoon outside a three-story, boxy brick building with top-to-bottom plate-glass windows fronting its entrance and the floors above. The place was called Henry A. Wallace Middle School. It was fascinating to me for two reasons. First, I always wanted to see what an out-of-the-hole school was really like, especially after hearing all the stories Dad and Robby had told me about how deeply school had affected them—and not in particularly pleasant-sounding ways, either. And second, Henry A. Wallace Middle School was one of the very few structures we had driven past whose windows and doors had not been smashed and broken.
Apparently, there was not very much inside a middle school that anyone might have found attractive during the great extinction of before-the-hole Iowans.
Still, I wanted to go inside.
“Why here?” Mel asked.
“We are assembling the world, Mel.”
“I thought we were looking for your father and Robby.”
“This is part of finding them. Trust me,” I said.
I had never asked Mel to trust me before. It had never been necessary inside the hole, but then again, so many things had been unnecessary there.
Mel carried the rifle, and I carried the other gun—the one that could kill the creatures, the Unstoppable Soldiers—and we went along the sidewalk to the front of the school.
The day was cold and clear. Wind blew strands of Mel’s black hair from under the flaps of her cap around her face in thin whips.
“What?” she said.
Mel caught me staring at her. I felt my cheeks radiate heat.
“Nothing,” I said. “It’s just so strange being out here. Seeing us out here together. Are you afraid?”
Mel said, “No.”
We walked up the concrete steps to the front doors at Henry A. Wallace Middle School. The bottoms of the doors had been piled up with sixteen years of rotting leaves and windblown garbage. I pulled, and then tried to push, the door’s handle.
I could not open the door.
“Okay. Let’s leave,” Mel said.
I argued, “The fact that it’s sealed is a good thing. There won’t be anything inside.”
“If there’s nothing inside, then why go in?”
This was a typical challenge from Amelie Sing Brees, and it’s why I liked her so much.
“You know what I mean, Mel. Aren’t you even a little bit curious about what things were like for kids before the hole?”
Mel shrugged. “A little bit.”
I used a rock to break the window on one of the doors. After that, I could reach my arm inside and push against the bar on the opposite door. It popped open an inch but got stuck in the wedge of all the muck and debris that had built up along its threshold.
From there, I wedged my fingers in the opening and pulled the door outward.
Mel and I went inside.
“This is our first day in cicada school,” I said.
The door opened onto a massive hallway. To the right, behind another wall of glass, was a place called Administration. The floor was polished, still glossy after all these empty years. And at the end of the hall, which was lined with at least a dozen windowed doors, some still propped open, a wide stairway rose to the left.
On the wall opposite the Administration place was a long glass case filled with golden trophies and plaques and photographs of boys and girls. They must have been students at the school, I thought. At the back of all the display was a triangular flag that said Henry A. Wallace Middle School Wolverines.
I think Mel and I, fascinated as we were by this display, studied it for half an hour, at least.
She said, “What are wolverines?”
“It’s a kind of animal,” I said. “I have read that they are very mean, and dangerous, too.”
“Do you think there are wolverines here?”
I shook my head. “Not enough for them to eat anymore. I’m sure they used to keep the wolverines here as a deterrent to children against breaking the rules.”
“They used to feed children to wolverines?” Mel was horrified.
“Did Robby or my dad ever tell you about the things that happened to them in school? It was a terrible place.”
Mel grimaced, thinking about wolverines roaming the hall, no doubt.
But it was the photographs of all the kids that made us both feel sad and lonely.
Mel said, “I can’t even imagine what it would be like to be around so many other people, around so many kids.”
One of the photographs had a caption on it that said Henry A. Wallace Middle School Boys Basketball—2014 Iowa City Tournament Champions. There were twelve boys in the picture, posing in two lines of six. The front-row boys were on one knee, and the back-row boys stood. All the boys were smiling, and nine of them had their hands raised with an upward-pointing index finger signifying, I assumed, the number one. And every one of the boys had a thick purple ribbon around his neck with a large gold medallion hanging from it.
A dark-skinned boy in the back row had his medal clamped between his teeth. They were all dressed oddly, too: in big, baggy, white boxer shorts and T-shirts that had their sleeves cut off.
Wendy would not approve of boys being dressed like that.
The boys’ shirts all said HAWMS WOLVERINES across their chests, and below this each one had a different number.
One of the boys in front had a big orange ball with narrow lines on it resting on the floor by his foot.
“I wonder what those boys were doing there,” Mel said.
I had no idea what any of it meant. But I answered, “Basketball was apparently a form of punishment. The numbers on the boys’ shirts list how many times each boy had broken the rules. That one there, in the back with forty-two on his belly, was probably the first one to be handed over to the wolverine.”
Mel laughed and shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
Under the photograph was a caption that listed the boys’ names. Number 42—the big breaker of all the rules—was named Julian Powell. Standing next to him, the boy with the medal clamped between his teeth was named Denic Jackson.
Names and faces.
“Clearly they are rule breakers. You can tell by looking at them. Before the hole, boys were simply not allowed to come to school like that, in their underwear. Before the hole, everyone in Iowa was all hung up, exactly like Wendy is right now.”
“I think basketball was a kind of game,” Mel said. “But it’s stupid that it was only for boys. Why couldn’t girls play with them?”
Of course I knew she was right about basketball being a game. I only wanted
to put the world together without all the instructions, without all the rules.
Then, unable to let go of my past, I answered, “Maybe girls were not allowed to play because the game had something to do with tossing small bags of rocks at your balls.”
Mel laughed and put her hand on my chest. “You’re never going to forget that, are you?”
“Trust me. It would be impossible to forget it, Mel.”
I wanted her to keep her hand there on my chest forever, but she dropped it, and we sidestepped around a few seconds of awkward silence and gulping, and continued studying the display. It turned out there were photographs of girls in the trophy case at Henry A. Wallace Middle School too, but the girls were all shown doing different things than boys did, and they were all segregated too.
Iowa had been filled with Wendys.
We saw pictures of a girls’ volleyball team, a dance team, and something called “cheer.” To be honest, neither Mel nor I had any idea what the function of the “cheer” team must have been. I theorized that they were responsible for telling jokes and lifting kids’ spirits after they got hit in the balls, or possibly after wolverine rampages against rule-breaking middle school boys and girls in the halls.
“This is the dumbest thing ever,” Mel said. “Why would they make the boys and girls do different things apart from each other?”
“Maybe they were afraid.”
“Of what?”
“I don’t know. Maybe bags with rocks in them.”
Mel pushed me.
If I were on a basketball team, I would want Mel to be on it too, rocks or not.
The Last Dance of the Year!
With all its unbroken windows, there was plenty of light inside Henry A. Wallace Middle School.
Past the trophy case we saw an enormous hand-painted banner made from blue paper. It had been taped to the wall sixteen years ago, decorated with stars and balls and colorful squiggly lines that advertised what was called the Last Dance of the Year!