Caleb was examining the vehicle. “There are a lot of bridges that aren’t on the Federal map,” he said, almost to himself. Then he asked, “Why do you call it Rudolf?”
“Rudolf Diesel!” said Fizz, in a different, stranger accent than most of his speech. He seemed to think that answered Caleb’s question.
Priscilla whispered, “He speaks German.” Luz found Priscilla’s instant and obvious crush on Fizz annoying.
Fizz looked at the girls. “Sure he did,” he said, and smiled at Luz. “He was German. He probably spoke like eleven languages, not just English and Spanish. Everybody did back then. He designed this engine—or its ancestor, anyway.” He pointed to the cooling metal engine on his vehicle.
“I hope you paid him for it,” said Sammy.
“No, I remember,” said Caleb. “Diesel was one of the men who made the internal-combustion engines.” A troubled expression crossed his face. “That’s from history. You shouldn’t tell people you named your car after him, Fizz.”
Fizz wrinkled his nose and brow, scoffing. “Figures the only thing the Federals are consistent about are their interstate highway monopolies and their curriculum suggestions. Diesel wasn’t a bad guy! The 19th century, which is when he invented this, only ended a couple of hundred years ago. Don’t you guys have grandparents? Don’t they talk about when everybody could go everywhere?”
Some do, Luz thought. Aloud, she said, “Our abuela has been everywhere. She’s from Chiapas, and came here from California before the oil finally ran out.”
“And we can go anywhere we like, anyway,” said Sammy. “We just like it here.”
“But going places takes forever!” said Fizz. Then he finally seemed to notice the uncomfortable glances being shared between Caleb and Sammy. “Not that this isn’t a great place to be. The hemp-seed oil Rudolf is burning for fuel right now is from around here someplace. Or it was. My tanks are about dry. That’s why I turned north when the Tennesseans wouldn’t trade me any.”
Luz nodded. “Sure. The biggest oil press anywhere is over in Frankfort. Our uncles sell them most of their hemp. What have you got to trade that the Feds would want?”
Fizz made the face again. “Eh, they’re not much for bartering with people like me.”
“And who’s that?” asked Sammy. “Who are people like you?”
Fizz looked them all up and down, deciding something.
Then he said, “Revolutionaries.”
“Revolting is more like it,” Sammy gasped. He and Luz were working very hard, barely turning the pedals of their bikes over in their lowest gears. Fizz had brought out some cords from the toolbox on his machine, and between them, he and Luz had figured out a way to rig a Y harness connecting the automobile’s front axle to the seatposts of her and Sammy’s bikes. The others rode behind the automobile, hopping off to push on the hills.
Except for Fizz, of course, who rode the machine the whole time, manning the steering wheel and chattering happily to curious Caleb and smitten Priscilla. Luz wished she could be back there. She had a thousand questions about the wider world.
Fizz had insisted they take a little used, poorly surfaced route into town. He said he wanted to approach the council of farmers and merchants who acted as the community council before they saw his machine. “I had trouble some places,” he said. “Farther south.”
Now, as they hauled the stranger and his strange vehicle, they kept the fleet of canvas balloons anchored high above Lexington dead ahead. Federal government ornithopters were forbidden to land inside the town limits, but Kentucky was still the primary source for their fuel, so the brass-winged engines could usually be seen clinging to the netting below their coal-laden baskets, crawling and supping like the fruit bats that haunted the orchards ringing the town.
Responding to Sammy, Luz asked, “What’s revolting?”
He answered her with a question. “Do you know what we’re pulling? I’ll tell you. It’s a car. A private car.”
Luz took her left hand off the handlebars long enough to point out a particularly deep pothole in the asphalt. Sammy acknowledged with a nod and they bore to the right.
“Don’t be silly,” Luz continued after they’d negotiated the hole. “Cars ran on oil. Petroleum oil, I mean.”
But Luz had already noticed that a lot of the machine’s parts were similar to those she found when she went scrounging with her mother. The steering wheel, for one thing, was plastic, and plastic was the very first word in the list of nonrenewables she’d memorized in grade school. Luz was still five years away from the age when she would attain full citizenship, and thus be allowed to learn to read, but like most teenagers she had paid close enough attention when adults practiced that art to recognize a few words. One of the words stamped on Fizz’s machine was “transmission,” but she did not tell Sammy this.
“Well, I guess he made a car that runs on hemp-seed oil,” said Sammy. “Or somebody did, anyway.” Sammy doubted every part of Fizz’s story. “He probably stole it off the Federals.”
Luz doubted that. The only vehicles she knew the Federals to use besides their Army trucks were bicycles, the coal-burning horses that patrolled the highways, and the ornithopters that patrolled the skies, their metal wings flapping like a hawk’s. Bikes and horses and ’thopters and trucks alike shared a sleek, machined design. Nothing at all like the haphazard jumble of Fizz’s “car.”
The group managed to attract only a few stares before they made it to one of the sheds behind Luz and Caleb’s house. Luz supposed that people assumed they’d found a heap of scrap metal and had knocked together a wagon on-site to transport it to their mother’s salvage shops. People brought her old things all the time.
“Are you going to get your father?” Sammy asked. “Because you should.” Then, unusually, he left before Luz asked him to, saying he had to get home.
His little sister, however, clearly had no intention of leaving. She wordlessly followed Fizz as he crawled around checking the undercarriage of his machine.
“I guess this job posting is open all week,” said Caleb, pulling the paper out from his belt. Luz had completely forgotten the original purpose of their ride. “Maybe we can go on Wednesday if we can get enough people.”
“Sure,” said Luz.
“So it’s okay if I work here?” Fizz asked. “You won’t get in trouble?”
Caleb was worried. “Our father will be home soon—”
“Wait,” Luz interrupted. Fizz and his car were the most interesting thing that had happened to Luz in a long time. “Mama’s in the mountains, gleaning in the tailings from the old mines. I’ll go to the shop and talk to Papa.”
“That’d be great,” said Fizz, popping his head out from under the machine right at their feet. “Looks like you’ve probably got everything I need to get Rudolf up and running.”
Luz left quickly, knowing it would be better for them all if her father knew what was waiting for him at home.
The shop was the more or less permanent stall in market by the courthouse run by their father. It served as the main bike shop in town. Luz and her friends had free use of a parts box that was pretty extraordinary by anybody’s standards, and their father had connections all over the place if they needed something he didn’t have, or couldn’t recycle or rig themselves. He fixed the Post Office’s long-haul cargo bikes for free in exchange for good rates bringing in stuff from the coast, but always insisted that his children—and his other customers—make an honest attempt at repair before they settled on replacement.
Papa moved around the stall, putting away tools and hanging bikes from hooks in the ceiling. “Yes, he could have driven here from North Carolina,” he told Luz. “Before the Peak, people made the trip in a few hours.”
Luz didn’t doubt that her father was telling the truth, but thought of the hand to heart gesture again, of the difference between knowing and feeling the truth. She could feel the truth when somebody said the sun was hot, but could only acknowledge the truth whe
n somebody said it was 93 million miles away.
“That’s what he was talking about, I guess,” she said. “Fizz. When he said that it takes forever to go anywhere now.”
Without warning, Papa dropped the seatpost he was holding to the shop floor. It made a dull clattering sound as it bounced back and forth.
“Hey!” said Luz as he grabbed her arm, hard, and pulled her out the open end of the stall.
Out in the street, he let go, and pointed up at the sky. “Look up there!” he barked.
Luz had never heard her father sound so angry. She found it hard to tear her eyes away from his livid face, but he thrust his finger skyward again. “Look!” he said.
Luz stared at the sky, gray and cloudless as ever in the spring heat.
“That is a bruised sky,” he said, punctuating his words with his hand. “That is a torn-up sky.”
His mood suddenly changed in a way that made Luz think of a deflating tire. He leaned against the corner support pole of the shop. “You don’t know what our ancestors did to this world. There’s so much less of everything. And if there is one reason for it, it’s in what this stranger told you. ‘Forever,’ hah! It takes as long to get somewhere as it should take—his expedience leads to war and flood.”
Luz didn’t understand half of what he was saying.
“What about the Federals?” she asked. “They drive trucks and have flying machines.”
Papa waved his hand. “We are not the Federals. We live lightly upon the earth, light enough that the wounds they deal it will heal. Your grandparents’ generation fought wars so that we could rescue the world from excess. People like us act as stewards, we save the rivers and the sky and the land from the worst that people like them do. When you’re older you’ll understand.”
Luz thought about that for a moment, then said, “People like us and people like the Federals?”
Papa looked at her. “Yes, Luz.”
“What about people that aren’t like either?” Luz asked.
Papa hadn’t answered her before Priscilla came tearing down the street. “Luz! They took him! They came and took Fizz and his machine both! Caleb couldn’t stop them!”
She slid to a halt next to them in a cloud of dust. “It was Sammy! He brought the deputies!”
Luz instantly hopped on her bike, and saw from the corner of her eye that her father was pulling his own from behind the workbench. She didn’t wait for him to catch up.
Hours later, Luz and Caleb pedaled along abandoned streets behind the tannery and the vinegar works, looking for the stockade where the deputies had taken Fizz. They might have missed him if he hadn’t shouted out.
“Hey! Luz!”
Fizz was leaning half out of a ground-floor window in an old brick building set in an unkempt lawn of weeds and trash. As they rode over to him, a deputy rounded the corner and growled at Fizz to stay inside the window. Clearly, the deputies weren’t used to having prisoners. When Caleb asked if they could speak to Fizz, the man shrugged and instructed them not to let him escape.
“The trial’s tonight,” the deputy said, then went back to the corner, where he sat on a stool and idly turned the letter-pressed pages of last week’s town newsletter.
“I’ve had it worse, that’s for sure,” Fizz told them. “They seem a lot more concerned with Rudolf than they are with me. I hope your father didn’t get in trouble for it being at your house.”
Luz and Caleb glanced at one another. The car had been much easier to locate than its driver. They had stood with the other younger people and watched uneasily while their parents and grandparents hung the vehicle from a hastily erected scaffold in the square. Their father had rigged the block and tackle the men used to haul it above a growing pile of scrap timber.
“No,” said Luz. “Papa’s fine.”
“I don’t think Rudolf will be able to say the same,” Caleb said.
The serious look that passed over Fizz’s face made Luz notch her guess of his age back up another year or two. But then he flashed a wide grin and said, “Rudolf’s never offered an opinion on anything at all, Caleb. We hit the road before I figured out how to make him talk.”
When they didn’t join his laughter, Fizz nodded and said, “I see that you’re worried. Don’t be. I’ve been in communities like yours before. Heck, I’ve even been in jails like this one before. Your council and”—he raised his eyebrow—“I’m guessing your father, too? They’re more concerned about the machine than the machinist. They’ll do whatever they’re going to do to Rudolf and then storm and glower at me for an hour and send me on my way.”
Luz said, “Papa’s name came up in the lottery at New Year’s, so he’s on the council this year. And yes, he’s concerned about the machine. But I think he’s even more concerned about the use you put it to.”
Fizz didn’t reply. He gazed at her steadily, as if she knew the answer to a question he’d forgotten to ask aloud.
“‘Everybody could go everywhere,’” she finally said, quoting him.
“Ah,” Fizz said. “Your friend said that everybody still can.”
Luz shook her head. “I don’t think Sammy is my friend anymore. And anyway,” she added, her voice unexpectedly bitter, “he’s never wanted to go anywhere.”
Fizz was sympathetic. “What about you?” he asked her. “Where would you go if you could?”
Luz thought about it for a moment. She remembered Fizz’s route along the Gulf of Mexico, but even more, she remembered her grandmother’s stories of California.
“I would go to the ocean,” she said. “My grandmother was a surfer. You know, on the waves?” She held her palm out flat and rocked it back and forth.
Fizz nodded.
“She says that I’m built right for it. It sounds . . . fast.”
“And light on the earth, too,” Fizz said. “Am I saying that right?”
“You’re close,” said Caleb, frowning at them both. “It’s ‘lightly upon the earth.’”
Luz had never thought about how often she heard the phrase. It was something said by the older people in the community over and over again. “How did you know people say that here?” she asked.
Fizz shrugged. “People say it everywhere,” he said.
Luz had expected her father and the other council members to be arrayed behind a long table in the courtyard square. She had expected the whole town to turn out to watch the proceedings, and even for Fizz to be marched out by the deputies with his hands tied before him with a coil of rope.
She had not expected Federal marshals.
There were two of them, a silver-haired man and a grim-faced woman. Neither of them bothered to dismount their strange horses, only issuing terse orders to the closest townspeople to fetch pails of coal they then turned into the furnaces atop the hybrid creatures’ hindquarters. They seemed impatient, as was ever the way with Federals.
Luz sat on the ground in front of a bench crowded with older people, leaning back against her grandmother’s knees. “I thought the covenants between the town and the Federals guaranteed us the right to have our own trials,” Luz said.
Her abuela patted her shoulder, though there was nothing of reassurance in it. “My son,” she said, speaking of Luz’s Papa, “is more afraid of what this Fizz can do to us than what the Federals can. The council asked the marshals here.”
Before Luz could express her dismay at this news, the Council chair banged on the table with a wrench to quiet the crowd. “We’re in extraordinary session, people,” she said, “and the only order of business is the forbidden technology this boy from . . . North Carolina has brought to our town.”
Before anything more could be said, Luz’s Papa raised his hand to be recognized. “I move we close this meeting,” he said. “We’ll be talking of things our children shouldn’t be made to hear.”
The gathered townspeople murmured at this, and Luz was surprised at the tone. She would have expected them to be upset that they couldn’t watch the proceedings, but except
for the people her age, most there seemed to be agreeing with her father. Before any of the council members could respond to the suggestion, though, Fizz spoke up.
“I believe I’m allowed to speak, yes?” he asked. “That’s been the way of it with the other town councils.”
Luz saw the woman marshal lean over in her saddle and whisper something to her partner, whose dead-eyed gaze never shifted from Fizz.
The chairwoman saw the exchange, too, and seemed troubled by it. “Yes, son,” she told Fizz. “We’ve heard this isn’t the first time you’ve been brought up on these charges. But you should be careful you don’t say anything to incriminate yourself. It might not be us that carries out whatever sentence we decide on.”
Fizz looked directly at the marshals, and then back at the council. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I see that. I’ve not been in a town controlled by the Federal government before.”
Papa’s angry interruption cut through the noise from the crowd. “Here now!” he said. “We’re as sovereign as any other town in America and signatory to covenants that reserve justice to ourselves. It’s our laws you’ve flouted and our ruling that will decide your fate. These marshals are here at our invitation because we want to demonstrate how seriously we take your crimes.”
Luz did not realize she had stood until she spoke. “What crimes?”
Papa frowned at her. “Sit down, Luza,” he said.
Before she could respond, Fizz spoke. “I can choose someone to speak on my behalf, isn’t that right? I choose her. I want Luz to be my advocate.”
To Luz’s surprise—to everyone’s surprise—the voice that answered did not come from the Council, but from one of the Federals.
Telling the Map Page 8