Loosed Upon the World

by John Joseph Adams

  “Hey, man!” I call out, and lurch from the darkness. The guard leaps to his feet and pulls something from his pocket. My heart stops. But it’s not a gun—too small. It’s a cell phone. He’s supposed to call somebody else if there’s trouble.

  “Stop,” he says in a surprisingly deep voice.

  I stop, pretend to stagger sideways, and then right myself and put on what Ruthie calls my “goofy head”—weird grin, wide eyes. I slur my words. “Can I ha’ one o’ those beers? You got more? I’m fresh out!”

  “You are trespassing on private property. Leave immediately.”

  “No beer?” I try to sound tragic, like somebody in a play in English class.

  “Leave immediately. You are trespassing on private property.”

  “Okay, okay, sheesh, I’m going already.” Now I can make out the huge bulk of the pipeline, twenty feet beyond the guard shack. I stagger again and fall forward, flat on my face, arms extended way forward so he can see that my hands are empty. “Aw, fuck.”

  The guard says nothing. At the edge of my vision I see him finger the cell. He doesn’t want to look like a fool, calling in about one drunken kid, waking up Somebody Important at three in the morning. But he doesn’t want to make a mistake, either. I help him decide. I turn my head and puke onto the ground.

  This is a thing I learned to do when I was Ruthie’s age: vomit at will without sticking a finger down my throat. I practiced and practiced until I could do it anytime I wanted to impress my friends or get out of school. So, I lay there hurling my cookies, and I’m not a big guy: five-nine and 145 pounds. Middleweight wrestling class.

  The guard makes a sound of disgust and moves closer. Clearly, I’m no threat. “Get out of here, you fag. Now!”

  I flail feebly on the ground.

  “I said get out!” He yells louder, like that might sober me, and moves in for a kick. When he’s close enough, I spring. He’s bigger and older, but I was runner-up for state wrestling champion. Before he knows it, I’ve got him on the ground. Illegal hold, unnecessary roughness, unsportsmanlike conduct: two penalty points.

  He shouts something and fights back, even though that increases his pain. I’m not sure I can hold him; he’s strong. I hear a truck in the distance.

  The guy is going to get free.

  My father will be here any minute.

  Adrenaline surges through me like a tsunami.

  The ground is littered with construction-site rubble. I pick up a rock and bash him on the head. He drops like a fifty-pound sack of fertilizer, and that throws me off balance. I go down, too, and my head strikes some random piece of metal. Everything blurs except the thought Oh, God, what if I killed the fucker? When I can see again, I drag myself over to him. Blood on his head, but he’s breathing. I’ve dragged myself through my own vomit. The truck halts.

  Men rush forward. My father says, “Danny?”

  “Christ, Larry, what is this?” Mr. Swenson, who farms next to us. Used to farm next to us.

  I gasp, “Took . . . out guard . . . for you.”

  “Oh, fuck,” somebody else says. And then, “Kid, did he see your face?”

  The answer must have been on my own face, because the man snaps, “You couldn’t have worn a ski mask?”

  “Shut up, Ed,” Mr. Swenson says. I can’t get out my answer: I didn’t know there’d be a guard! Someone is bending over the guard, lifting him in a fireman’s carry. Someone else is pulling back my eyelids and peering at my eyes—a doctor? Is Dr. Radusky here? No, he wouldn’t . . . he can’t . . . Things grow fuzzier. I lose a few minutes, but I know I’m not passed out, because I’m aware of both my father kneeling beside me and parts of the argument floating above:

  “—do it anyway!”

  “—Larry’s kid screwed us and—”

  “We came here to—”

  “The law—”

  “I’m not leaving until I do what I come for!”

  They do it, all of them except Dad. Quick and hard, panting and grunting. The night shrieks with pickaxes, chainsaws, welding torches. Someone moves the floodlight pole closer to the pipeline.

  The huge pipe, forty-eight inches in diameter and raised above the ground on stanchions to let animals pass underneath, is being wrecked. Only a thirty-foot section of its monstrous and unfinished length, but that’s enough. For now. I hear a piece of heavy equipment, dozer or backhoe, start up, move. A moment later, a crash.

  More pipe down.

  It’s over in twenty minutes, during which I vomit once more, this time unwilled. Puking again blurs my vision. When it clears, my father is pulling me to my feet. I stagger against him. Before someone kills the floodlight, I see the Allen Corporation Great Lakes Water Diversion Pipeline lying in jagged pieces. I see dust covering everything to an inch thick and still falling from the sky, like rain. I see the farm the way it was when I was Ruthie’s age, the corn green and spiky, Mom’s lilacs in bloom, the horse pasture full of wildflowers. I see my dead grandfather driving the combine. I know then that my head hasn’t cleared at all, and that I am hallucinating.

  But one thing I see with total clarity before I pass out: my father’s grim, tight-lipped face as he half carries me to the pickup full of men.

  * * * *

  The law is at our house by six thirty a.m.

  Before that, Dr. Radusky came by. He made me do various things. “Concussion,” he said, “consistent with falling off his bicycle and hitting his head. Keep him awake, walking around as much as you can, and bring him to my office tomorrow for another look-see. No school today or tomorrow, and no wrestling for longer than that.” He didn’t look at my father, but Dr. Radusky knew, of course. The whole town knew.

  “Larry,” my mother says in the hallway beyond my bedroom. They’re taking turns making sure I sit up, walk around, and don’t sleep. “Sheriff is downstairs.”

  “Uh-huh.” My father leaves.

  My mother comes into my room and snaps, not for the first time, “What in Christ’s name were you thinking?”

  I don’t answer. If they don’t see that I’m a hero, the hell with them.

  “I’m going downstairs,” she says. “Don’t lie down, Danny. Promise me.”

  I nod sullenly. As soon as she’s gone, Ruthie slides in. She’s dressed for school in jeans and an old green blouse that used to be Mom’s. It’s been cut down somehow to sort of fit her. “Danny,” she whispers, “what did you do?”

  “Nothing, squirt.”

  “But everybody’s mad at you!”

  “I was out riding my bike and fell off it and hit my head. That’s all.”

  “Out riding in the night? Why?”

  “You wouldn’t understand.” My head throbs and aches.

  “Were you going to see a girl?”

  I wish. “None of your business.”

  “Was it Jenny Bradford?”

  “Beat it, squirt.”

  “I’m going to go downstairs and listen.”

  “No, you’re not!”

  “If I don’t, then will you tell me another picture?”

  Ruthie scavenges photographs. She ferrets them out of the boxes and envelopes where Mom has shoved them, hidden all over the house because Mom can’t bear to look at them anymore. I remember her doing it, crying as she ripped some from their frames—there used to be a lot of framed pictures all over the place—and tossed the silver frames into the box for the pawnshop. Now Ruthie finds them and brings them to me to identify things: That’s Great-Uncle Jim in front of the barn we sold to the Allen people; that’s Grandpa driving the combine. She doesn’t remember any of it, but I do.

  She pulls a picture from under her blouse and holds it out to me. This one is newer than most of her stash, printed on a color printer from somebody’s digital camera. I remember that printer. We sold it long ago, along with everything else: the antiques handed down from Great-Grandma Ann, the farm equipment, the land. None of it was enough. The house is in foreclosure.

  I say, “That’s our old
horse pasture.”

  “We had horses?”

  “One horse.” White Foot. He’d been mine.

  “Where’s the horse?”

  “Gone.”

  “Where’s the pasture? Is it the dirt field over by the falling-down fence?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But what are those?” She points at the photograph.

  In the picture, the pasture, its fences whole and whitewashed, is full of wildflowers, mostly daisies. Wave after wave of daisies in semi-close-up, their centers bright yellow like little suns, their petals almost too white, maybe from some trick of the camera. When was the last time I saw a daisy? Had Ruthie ever seen one?

  I say, “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

  “You just said bad words!”

  “They’re called ‘daisies.’ Now go away, brat.”

  “You said bad words! I’m telling!”

  Heavy footsteps on the stairs. Ruthie, looking close to tears, thrusts the photo under her blouse and skitters out the door. It isn’t the tears that do me in, it’s the blouse.

  My parents come in with Sheriff Buchmann. The room is too full. I know from her face that Mom hates Buchmann seeing my patched bedspread, faded curtains, sparse furniture. Me, I just hate the sheriff.

  He says, “Daniel, did you go last night to the site of the Allen Corporation’s pipeline?”

  “No, sir.”

  “How’d you get that bandage on your head?”

  “Tripped in the dark and fell off my bike.”

  “Where?”

  “Corner of Maple and Grey.”

  “And what were you doing down there?”

  “I had a fight with my father and wanted to get away.”

  “What was the fight about?”

  “My grades. My teacher called yesterday. My math grade sucks.” Could Buchmann tell I’d been rehearsed? He’d check, but Mr. Ruhl did call yesterday, and my math grade does suck. My parents gaze at me steadily, without emotion. They’re good at that. So is Buchmann. I want to ask if the pipeline guard is okay, but I can’t. I wasn’t there. It never happened. Unless the guard can ID me.

  I gaze back, emotionless, my father’s son.

  * * * *

  Ruthie is drawing daisies. I don’t know where she got the paper. Her crayons are only what’s been hoarded for years, now stubby lengths of yellow and green laid carefully on the kitchen table. So far, she’s covered three sheets of thin paper with eight daisies each, every flower in its own little box. They have yellow centers, green leaves, and petals that are the white of the paper outlined in green.

  “Hi, Danny! Is your head better?”

  “Yeah. What are these?”

  “Daisies, stupid.”

  “I mean, why are you making them?”

  “I want to.” She looks up at me, crayon stub in her fist, her face all serious. “Do you know what my teacher taught us in school today?”

  “How would I know? I’m not in the second grade.” Unlike me, Ruthie likes school and is good at it.

  “She taught us about the pipeline. Some people broke it Monday night.”

  My hand stops halfway to the fridge handle, starts again, opens the fridge door. Nothing to eat but bread, leftover potatoes, drippings, early strawberries Mom picked today. She will be saving those.

  Ruthie says, “The pipeline people are fixing it. It’s supposed to carry water to ‘The Southwest.’ ” She says the words carefully, like she might say “Narnia” or “Middle-earth.”

  “Is that so,” I say. I take bread and drippings from the fridge.

  “Yes. The water will come from ‘Lake Michigan.’ That’s one of the Great Lakes.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “There are five Great Lakes, and they have four-fifths of the fresh water in the world. That means that if you put all the fresh water in the world into five humongous pots, then four—”

  I stop listening to her math lesson. The guard couldn’t ID me. I watched him on TV—we still have a TV, so old that nobody wants it, but no LinkNet for any good programs. The guard looked even younger than I remembered, no more than a few years older than me. He also looked more scared than I remembered. I spread drippings on my bread.

  Ruthie is still reciting. “The water is supposed to go to farms around the ‘Great Lakes Basin,’ but it’s not. It’s going to go through the big pipe to ‘The Southwest.’ Danny, why can’t we have some of that water to make our farm grow again?”

  “Bingo.”

  “Answer me!” Ruthie says, sounding just like Mom.

  “Because the Southwest can pay for it and we can’t.”

  Ruthie nods solemnly. “I know. We can’t pay for anything. That’s why we have to move. I don’t wanna move. Danny—where will we go?”

  “I don’t know, squirt.” I no longer want my bread and drippings. And I don’t want to talk about this with Ruthie. It fills me with too much rage. I put the half-eaten bread in the fridge and go upstairs.

  The next night, the pipeline is attacked in Fuller Corners, twenty miles to the south. There were two guards, both armed. One is killed.

  * * * *

  “Daniel Raymond Hitchens, you are under arrest for destruction of property, trespass, and assault in the first degree. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney—”

  The two cops, neither from here, have come right into math class during final exams. They cuff me and lead me out, my test paper left on my desk, half the equations probably wrong. My classmates gape; Connie Moorhouse starts to cry. Mr. Ruhl says feebly, “See here, now, you can’t—” He shuts up. Clearly, they can.

  Outside the classroom, they frisk me. I bluster, “Aren’t I supposed to get one phone call?”

  “You got a phone?”

  I don’t, of course—gone long ago.

  “You get your call at the station.”

  They take me to the police station in Fuller Corners. There is a lot of talking, video recording, paperwork. I learn that I am suspected of killing the guard in the Fuller Corners attack. The surviving guard identified me. This is ridiculous; I have never even been to Fuller Corners. That doesn’t stop me from being scared. I know that something more is going on here, but I don’t know what. When I get my phone call to my father, I am almost blubbering, which makes me furious.

  My parents come roaring down to Fuller Corners like hounds on a deer. Along with them come more TV cameras than I can count. More shouting. A lawyer. I can’t be arraigned until tomorrow. What is arraigned? It doesn’t sound good. I spend the night in the Fuller Corners lockup because I’m seventeen, not sixteen. The jail has two cells. One holds a man accused of raping his wife. The other has me and a drunk who snores, sprawling across the bottom bunk and smelling of booze and piss. He never wakes the entire time I’m there.

  * * * *

  Dad drives me home after the arraignment. I am out on bail. More TV cameras, even a robocam. I recognize Elizabeth Wilkins talking into a microphone on the courthouse steps. She looks hot. Everyone follows my every move, but in the truck, it’s just my father and me, and he doesn’t look at me.

  He doesn’t say anything, either.

  We drive through the ruined land, field after field empty of all but blowing dust. The thing that gets me is how fast it happened. We learned in school about the possible desertification of the Midwest from global warming. But it was only one possibility, and it was supposed to take decades, maybe longer. Then some temperature drop somewhere in the Pacific Ocean—the Pacific Ocean, for fuck’s sake—changed some ocean currents, and that brought years of drought ending in dust that blew around from dawn to sundown. Ending in grass fires and foreclosures and food shortages. Ending in Fuller Corners.

  Finally, my father says, “This is just the beginning.” He keeps his eyes on the road. “But not for you, Danny. You’re not going to prison. If that’s what you’re thinking, get it out of your mind right now. Not goi
ng to happen. They got nothing but made-up evidence that won’t hold up.”

  “Then why was I arrested?”

  “PR. Yeah, you’re the poster boy for this. Bastards.”

  On the courthouse steps, Elizabeth Wilkins said into her microphone, “The protestors are even using their children in a shameful and selfish fight to stop the pipeline that will save so many lives in the parched and dying cities of Tucson and—”

  I am not a child.

  “Dad,” I blurt out, “were you at Fuller Corners?”

  His eyes never leave the road, his expression never changes, he says nothing. Which is all the answer I need.

  I thought I knew fear before. I was wrong.

  * * * *

  At home, Mom is frying potatoes for dinner. It’s warm outside but all the windows are shut against the dust, and all the curtains are drawn tight against everything else. Ruthie lies on the kitchen floor, frantically coloring. I go upstairs and sit on the edge of my bed.

  A few minutes later, Ruthie comes into my room. She plants herself in front of me, short legs braced apart, hands clasped tight in front of her. “You were in jail.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it. Go away, squirt.”

  “I can’t,” she says, and the odd words plus something in her voice make me focus on her. When she was littler, she used to go stand on her head in the pantry and cry whenever anyone wouldn’t tell her something she wanted to know.

  “Danny, did you break the pipe?”

  “No,” I say, truthfully.

  “Are more people going to break the pipe more?”

  “Yes, I think so.” Just the beginning.

  “An ‘eviction notice’ came today while you were in jail. Does that mean we have to move right away?”

  “I don’t know.” Is the timing of the eviction notice with my faked-up poster-boy arrest just coincidental? How would I even know? The people building the pipeline, which is going to be immensely profitable, are very determined. But so is my father.

  Ruthie says, “Where will we go?”

  “I don’t know that, either.” The Midwest is a dust plain, the Southwest desperate for water, the Great Lakes states and Northeast defending their great treasures, the lakes and the Saint Lawrence Seaway. Oregon and Washington have closed their borders, with guns. The South is already too full of refugees without jobs or hope.