The Shadow of Armageddon

Home > Other > The Shadow of Armageddon > Page 39
The Shadow of Armageddon Page 39

by LeMay, Jim


  “But the number of faiths rampant in the world proves that people desperately need this sort of comfort, no matter how unbelievable their religion’s tenets sound. The Bible says it best. To paraphrase: ‘man cannot live by bread alone.’ To add the phrase the Good Book left unsaid: ‘He needs a good-sized daily dollop of bullshit.’ From the likes of pastors Gates and Gephardt.”

  Matt slapped John on the shoulder and grinned. “But while we’re on the subject of learning, let’s go see if Bernie has a little time to talk to us.”

  Chapter Twenty-six

  John followed, wondering why Matt wanted to talk to Bernie. Downstairs they found Carmella, chief among Bernie’s women, serving the gang members. When asked where Bernie was, she said on the back stoop having a smoke. They found him there.

  After exchanging greetings, Matt sat on the stoop beside Bernie while John stood nearby, still wondering, not without a touch of uneasiness.

  “Guess we all have a lot to celebrate,” said Bernie, handing Matt a pinch from his pot pouch, “especially you guys.”

  “Guess so,” said Matt, packing it into his pipe. “But say, I got something to discuss with you. Has to do with John.” (John’s heart leaped.) “Billy Kane told us that Coleridge Gardens has a school, and I feel strongly that John should attend it. That begs two questions. One: could you get along without John during the school hours, and two: what can you tell us about the school?

  Bernie looked steadily at Matt from under lowered brows, then sighed and shook his head. “Sure, I could make time for John to go to school, Matt, but you don’t want to put the kid through that. First of all, since John is twelve, this is the last year he would qualify even to go to school.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. You see, it only has grades one through eight. Grade one starts when the kid’s five so he’s twelve in the eighth grade. The philosophy is, a kid don’t need much education in this day and time. Education led to the rise of the technics, the collapse of society, all that neo-Luddite bullshit. And I hear it’s not much of an education. There’s lots of prayer and preaching. You don’t have to ‘pass’ a grade; the next year you just get pushed on to the next one. The most important thing to parents is to get the kid through school and get him or her to work in the fields or the parents’ shop or at the Mayor’s looms.”

  “I thought,” said Matt, “his interaction with other kids would be good for him. He’s never been to a formal school and hasn’t been around kids his own age much.”

  “His ‘interacting’ with these kids may not be very enriching. Lots of them are taught to look unkindly on folks that don’t go to church regularly.”

  John interrupted. “I get along fine with the people at the market.” He was curious about school life himself.

  “I’m sure you do. But they see you as an outsider, part of a scrounger gang that’ll soon be gone, not as somebody who’d be sitting in the midst of their children, corrupting them to your wanton ways. Don’t get me wrong. These Coleridge people aren’t evil. Just the opposite – most of them are pretty decent folks – but their prejudice in favor of fundamentalist morality rubs off on their kids and we all know what little bastards kids can be.” He nodded to John. “Present company excepted, of course.

  “I’ve seen you read on occasion, John, and some pretty sophisticated books at that. And you mentioned that a real live teacher has tutored you. I bet you already know more than you’d learn from Brother Gephardt in – ”

  “Gephardt!” said Matt and John in unison.

  “Why, yeah. Didn’t you know he conducts the school?” Both Matt and John lost interest in his enrollment immediately, and the subject never came up again.

  As they left Bernie Matt said glumly, “I should’ve fought harder to keep you at Kane’s Cove.”

  Soon it was suppertime. Ruben returned from the mayor’s just in time to join the Mitchell gang and the Pike County Dykes for the meal. Most of them went to the bar afterwards to rehash the Columbian battle. After dark a few of the townspeople who wanted to hear news of it entered the bar. Gossip had it that people at Haas House knew the particulars and that someone had related them to the Mayor. Ruben told what he knew of the Columbia conflict. Then Lou Travis regaled them with Matt’s and Jerry Jordan’s roles which made them instant heroes, despite Matt’s protestations to the contrary and the unlikely possibility of honoring Jerry in person. The credit, Matt said, should go to a Columbia youth named Phil Blankenship.

  More people drifted in from Coleridge Gardens and from outlying farms until the crowd rivaled those during the Harvest Market. The bar was crowded and the tables filled up. Bernie was so busy that, after they finished washing the supper dishes, all three of Bernie’s women remained downstairs to help and John bused tables and washed glasses.

  Matt sat at the end of the bar with four beers and three shots of whiskey, bought for him by Bernie’s customers as tokens of their esteem. Annie Austin joined him with a smile, sipping a glass of wine. He smiled in return, raised a glass of beer to her. “Won’t you help me with some of these drinks?”

  “But you earned them for helping cause the demise of two of our powerful enemies.”

  “Like I’ve said so often it doesn’t bear repeating, the true hero is a kid named Phil. Since he’s not here to properly honor I’m drinking to him. I could use some help though if I’m to find my way to my room tonight.”

  “Then I suppose I should help you honor him. As you know I’m not much of a beer drinker, but I never turn down a sip of Wild Billy’s whiskey.”

  He hadn’t gotten to know her well during the harvest market. He had been gone much of the time, a few days to look for their stash and the much longer journey to Nellie’s Fair. They had talked a few nights over their drinks in the bar and flirted casually. He liked her open straightforward manner and subtle sense of humor.

  He stood up and indicated that she should take his seat.

  “No, let’s go out on the porch. It’s getting stuffy in here. I’ll help carry your drinks.”

  “Good idea. It’ll keep people from buying me more to drink.”

  Soon they sat on the porch railing with their drinks beside them.

  “You were right,” said Matt. “This much more pleasant.”

  “So tell me what you did to make Chadwick and Matheson so mad at each other.”

  “I didn’t do anything. They were already pissed at each other.”

  “Don’t be so grumpy. I want to hear about it.”

  “You’ve already heard about it in there.” He nodded toward the bar. “They’ve talked it to death.”

  “I want to hear it from you.”

  So he related the story of his trip to Stanley Market and then to Columbia, much as he had told it to the gang.

  “So my part in it was minimal. I was only the catalyst, not a hero.”

  She shrugged. “Maybe, but you cleverly wielded falsehood and deceit, often underrated virtues, not to mention safer and more sensible than brute force.”

  They turned at a clatter in the yard behind them to see a cart crammed with people approaching. When they drew close enough, Matt recognized two young men and a young woman who occasionally performed music at Bernie’s along with their girlfriends and boyfriend.

  “We heard there’s a party goin’ on here,” said the boy who jumped out first, guitar in hand. “Heard somebody killt the scrounger that run Columbia an’ all his men.”

  “Something like that,” said Matt. “You can hear all about it inside.” As he had so many times before, Matt wondered how news traveled so fast around here. And changed so quickly from the truth.

  There wasn’t room for the musicians indoors so in a short time they were set up on the porch and Matt and Annie retreated to the front yard with what was left of their drinks to sit under one of the large oaks. People drifted out from the house and formed couples to dance on the lawn.

  Annie took Matt’s hand. “Let’s dance.”

  “I’m not very
good.”

  “Anybody that can bullshit two gangs into killing each other can bullshit his way through a dance.”

  And so they did. In fact they danced several times, and people bought them more drinks, Annie as well as Matt because she was with him. The impromptu party lasted a long time. After one dance toward midnight, Annie took Matt’s hand and drew him into the shadow beside the house. She threw her arms around him and gave him a quite serious kiss. He tried for another, hoping to increase their intimacy. She pushed him away.

  “No,” she said with a slight hiccup and a giggle. “Thanks to you I’ve had too much to drink. I gotta go to bed. Alone. But I live just a ways up the Grange. I’d love it if you’d come up to see me.”

  “I’d like to, but maybe I can’t this fall.” He was thinking that the gang would have to return their savings to the bank in Nellie’s Fair.

  “Then I’ll see you at Christmas. I always go to Wild Billy’s party. I stop by here on the way.” She kissed him again, not so sensuasly, and went up to her room.

  * * * *

  Bernie’s prediction about there being less work for the rest of the evening couldn’t have been further from the truth. John was beat. He was relieved when the crowd moved outside to listen to the music and dance. As he helped clean off the tables and caught up on washing glasses, Bernie clapped him on the shoulder.

  “I appreciate your help, John. Couldn’t have done it without you. But we’re caught up now. Go out and join the party.”

  “Okay, Bernie, but I’ll be back in if you get behind.”

  John went out and sat on a large fallen limb under the trees across the yard from the house, feeling the need to be alone for awhile after escaping the crowded hotel. He watched the dancers. Among the other couples, to his surprise, he saw Matt and Annie Austin. He had never seen Matt dance before, but he seemed to know what he was doing. Annie was surprisingly graceful for a big woman.

  The music and dancing reminded him of the party at Kane’s Cove and how he had grieved that night for a parent he scarcely remembered and one he had never known. He no longer thought of them with such pain of longing but in a bittersweet way. A few short months ago he had felt he had no family. Now he had two: the gang and Bernie’s people at the hotel. Sometimes he worried that the gang would not allow him to go trucking next summer; at others he felt sure he would be included. This was one of the positive nights. And he no longer felt insecure at Bernie’s. The landlord and his women treated him warmly, Joey had become attached to him in his strange awkward way and Bernie had mentioned batches of beer to be brewed during the winter.

  His thoughts began to wander toward scrounging, wondering what truckin’ with the gang would be like ... when a shadow suddenly appeared over him. He looked up to see Lou Travis standing there.

  “Whatcha doing out here all alone, John?” boomed the man’s great voice.

  John realized he was ready for company, especially this great gentle bear of a man.

  “If you sit down,” said John, patting the branch beside him, “I won’t be alone.”

  The limb creaked and rolled a little under Lou’s great bulk. John immediately plied him with questions about trucking and how scroungers selected the best truck. The answer to the latter, Lou said, was the things John himself would find most useful and irreplaceable. Like everlights that had been stored in complete darkness, a very rare commodity now, though Lou had found a half dozen a couple of years ago; or anything mechanical that could be used to start a fire such as a card of the ancient disposable firestarters. Doc had found several right after the Last Days. The other guys would have put too small a price on them if Boss Johnson and Mitch had not recognized their worth.

  “Who’s the best scrounger in the gang?” asked John.

  Lou hesitated for a moment, stroked his beard. “That’s a tough one. Mitch is the best at planning our trips, but once we get wherever he leads, Doc’s the best at finding good truck. Mitch is the best at getting us all to agree on things and the best at selling truck. Doc’s good at selling too, but Stony and I are the worst at that. Stony always feels sorry for people and wants to give ’m good deals, and I always see both sides of the negotiation. Matt’s also good at selling and good at finding truck. And of course Matt’s the smartest of all of us. Even though he’s a little irritating at times because he lets us know it.” Travis chuckled.

  “Yes,” said John. “He’s able to explain almost everything.”

  “That’s right,” said Lou. “Lots of times I think of all of Matt’s arcane knowledge and the way he makes sense of it. I figure if we both lived to be over a hundred I’d never learn all he knows. So many times he surprises me with insights I could never get to on my own. Even if I had access to his store of information, which sometimes seems unlimited.”

  One of Bernie’s women, Lovey, then approached Lou, holding out her hand, saying, “Dance with me, Love.”

  “I warn you,” he said, standing up. “I got two left feet.”

  “I got two right ones,” she said, winking at John, “so it’ll work out fine.”

  And indeed, when they got out on the dance floor, Lou looked like nothing so much as a great clumsy bear leaping up and down in place.

  John saw Matt and Annie return to the dance floor. After their next dance, they disappeared into a shadow beside the house. A little later Matt emerged alone and started toward one side of the clearing. When he saw John, he paused at where he had been seated to pick up two pints of beer, one nearly empty, before making his way over to where John sat. He sat down next to John on the limb and placed the two pints on the ground beside him. They sat without speaking for a time, while Matt finished the nearly empty beer and lit his pipe. John thought of his conversation with Lou Travis, of how greatly the big man respected Matt’s knowledge and wisdom. John realized how lucky he was to have access to Matt and how often Matt surprised him.

  “A question, Matt?”

  “Umh-hmh?” Matt looked a little drunk and stoned and sleepy.

  “Of all the puzzles of life and nature and, and everything, if there was just one question you could have the answer to, what would it be?”

  Matt chuckled. “That’s an easy one.”

  “Really? What is it?”

  Matt exhaled a deep lungfull. “What did Johnson do with that fucking stash?”

  He stood up, yawned hugely, and winked at John. “Gotta get some sleep. See you in the morning.” He left for the hotel and his room.

  Yes, Matt often surprised him.

  # # #

  Appendix: The World in 2072

  In 2072, the world was home to over twelve billion people. It was a standardized world, with a uniform culture and only a few major languages. Most people spoke Chinese, English, Spanish, Arabic, Japanese, or Russian, at least as a second language. In fact over half of the 6,700 plus languages existing at the turn of the previous century had become extinct along with most of the cultures that spoke them, and many more disappeared every year. Businesses were uniform the world over: the same stores selling merchandise in Baltimore or Seattle could be found in Bombay or Sarajevo. People wore identical suits or work clothes to their jobs every place in the world, kids wore identical sneakers. People listened to the same music and shared the same entertainment, alcohol, and drugs.

  One might think of a culture as the entire body of behavior patterns, ideas, institutions, and all other characteristics that a society carries forward. Each individual culture contributes a unique set of attributes to the world that differentiates it from all other cultures that have proceeded and will follow it. Of course, while each culture boasts its own ideas and institutions, it is not disconnected from others. A society borrows cultural elements from its predecessors and contemporaries and passes them on in new forms to those following.

  Western civilization, borrowing widely as it had from many sources, was such a mongrelized culture. As a youngster it thrived on dissent and originality. It put old ideas into new forms never b
efore considered. Perspective had never been used in the ancient art of painting; no one had ever put together a musical phenomenon like the symphony orchestra. The Western culture could arguably be considered the greatest culture the world had ever seen, especially as it spread across the whole planet. A Chinese businessman grumbling at the arrogance of Westerners claiming their culture superior to all past and present might that very day be leaving his office in a Western style skyscraper wearing a European business suit in an automobile to listen to a Beethoven symphony.

  But although the culture of Western Europe, as redefined by America, encompassed the entire planet, it had long since lost its vibrancy and pertinence. It had passed from the vitality of a youth that had produced such a rich legacy of architecture, music, literature, painting, and culture through the mature years that created the industrial revolution and sparked the most brilliant surge in science, engineering, and medicine mankind had ever seen. The current, twenty-first, century had witnessed its final descent into a sad aimless senility.

  The signs of its decline were ubiquitous.

  The empire building of the past two centuries had begun a reverse trend toward the end of the twentieth. The Soviet Union, for example, had dissolved into Russia and fifteen or so other nations as that century waned. Since then Russia itself had spawned several smaller states, mostly tiny warring ones, many in the Caucasus region. The former kingdoms of Scotland and Wales established autonomous parliaments in Great Britain. After decades of bloody insurrection, the Kurds wrested away portions of Syria, Iran, and Iraq to fulfill their centuries-old dream of having their own nation for the first time in history. (The Turks successfully and ruthlessly prevented their Kurdish minority from adding territory to newly founded Kurdestan.) Quebec periodically strove to part from the rest of Canada; the Zapatista rebels still fought the Mexicans as the Basques did the Spanish; Corsica wanted independence and its own language while Venice tried to establish its own tiny state separate of Italy. (The rising Adriatic Sea made the city’s desire irrelevant by drowning it.)

 

‹ Prev