Zombies of the Gene Pool

by Sharyn McCrumb

  Chapter 3

  For three months gravity feeds the main sluice pulled nightly at the dam. The reservoir drains. Each afternoon he stops on the bluff to watch the valley fill with air, light wrapping the fine branches of trees rising from the surf ace full-grown but leafless, though no wind has blown for thirty-seven years.

  – DON JOHNSON Watauga Drawdown

  They might as well be exhuming a corpse. Jim Conyers stood on at the edge of the grass line-the spot where he usually fished-and stared at the dead landscape stretching out below. Where once the opaque green water of Breedlove Lake lapped at the hillside, there was now red mud, a no man's land of bare trees and asphalt roads leading back into the mire. This patch of grass used to be the edge of the lake, but now if Conyers wanted to he could walk farther down, into the valley of… the shadow of death… Wall Hollow, into the remnants of the drowned village. He could revisit the farm and the other places he remembered from long ago. If he would just go down, he could go back. He stood as still as the black trees that had appeared from beneath the receding waters of the man-made lake. Conyers could imagine the body of a drowned swimmer caught by the hair in the skeletal branches of those trees, like some modern Absalom condemned for his trespasses. He did not want to go back.

  In early May, the Tennessee Valley Authority had decided that after nearly four decades under water the foundation of the Gene C. Breedlove Dam needed inspection, and the only way to examine the structure and to effect any necessary repairs would be to create a drawdown. They were going to drain the lake.

  A drawdown was a slow process, a matter of opening the sluices to let the lake water bleed into the Watauga River, so that gradually, over a period of three months, the green shroud would diminish, exposing the valley for the first time in thirtyfive years. There wasn't going to be any big ceremony, though, to mark the event. Even people who never got over losing their homes in Wall Hollow didn't feel called upon to celebrate its temporary resurrection. Everyone seemed to feel a little embarrassed at the prospect of having to look at the decayed remains and then having to say good-bye again. The drawdown was not a permanent reprieve, merely an incident in a bureaucratic summer. For approximately three weeks the valley would have a horizon of sun and sky instead of mud clouds in a sheet of green water. And then the floodgates would close again, and the water would come stealing back.

  All summer long the people came quietly, in groups of twos or threes, to stare at the ebbing lake, straining for a glimpse of the ruins. Jim Conyers always went alone. A couple of afternoons a week he would leave Barbara to mind the shop, and he would drive the fifteen miles or so from Elizabethton to his fishing spot to watch the progress of the drawdown. It shamed him to come, though. He felt like a man at a peepshow, or, worse, like a spectator at the scene of an accident.

  In one more week, the drawdown would be complete, and what was left of Wall Hollow would be visible to all comers. Perhaps by then he would be so busy with the reunion that he would not mind about the lake anymore. He tried to imagine meeting the guys again, but no clear image would form in his mind. He was somebody else now, and that somebody didn't have much in common with the Hollywood types like Mistral, or with Woodard, who had just turned eighteen for the forty-fifth time.

  Jim Conyers reckoned that he had never been one of them, really. He was just Dugger's buddy from home. He and Dale had gone to high school together, and they were probably kin somewhere on their mothers' sides of the family, if you went to the trouble to trace all the Millers and the Byrds in that end of the county. They had never bothered. Everybody in east Tennessee had a passel of cousins; friends were even more special. He and Dale had pooled their dimes to send away for copies of Astounding Stories and the other magazines that were the staples of adolescent reading back then. They'd swapped tattered Zane Grey novels for dog-eared copies of H. Rider Haggard, and they'd sat side by side in the dark watching Flash Gordon battle the moon men. But Dale had been the one who took everything a step further.

  When the army sent them their separate ways, their approaches to the hobby began to change. While Jim went on reading Damon Knight and Jack Finney in blissful solitude, Dale began to answer the "Pen Friends" ads in the science fiction magazines, and he became involved in all the fan publications. All this was detailed in Dale's carefully typed letters to him, but Jim, who was stationed in Korea, was too caught up in events there to notice when Dale's hobby turned into a way of life. When they got home to Wall Hollow, fandom didn't particularly interest Jim, but he was glad to see Dale again, and it seemed as good a pastime as anything else in east Tennessee, so he put up with it.

  Maybe it would have been different if he had moved away. As it was, he enrolled in Milligan College on the GI bill, and took a job at the Esso station in Wall Hollow to cover his other expenses. In order to save money on rent, Jim moved in with Dugger and the collection of fan friends he had accumulated on the Fan Farm. The new guys were intelligent-certainly more interesting to converse with than anyone down at the gas station-and al-

  though he found them a bit silly at times, they were good people who shared his interests. He was the only practical one of the bunch, though. Take the great expedition to San Francisco, for example. The Lanthanides had talked about going to Worldcon for months. They had written to their entire network of pen friends announcing the journey, but not one of them had saved a penny toward expenses for the trip. In the end, they had borrowed five dollars from him-his gas station paycheck-so that they could go.

  He remembered the bustle of activity as they prepared to leave… on that bright and cloudless morning. That phrase from the old hymn had fit both the morning and the mood of the Lanthanides on the day of their departure. "When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder I'll Be There." Dugger had been singing it all morning, but he was probably referring to the Golden Gate of San Francisco rather than to the Pearly Gates of Heaven. They reminded him of pilgrims headed for Mecca in their mixture of ecstasy and zeal.

  But for all their enthusiasm, they were very inefficient pilgrims. They announced that they were going to leave at seven, but it was well past ten before they even got around to loading the car. In the end, Jim had to load it for them, because they had no more idea of utilizing space than a bluejay. Then, when he'd offered to check over the car for them, Bunzie had protested that they were in a hurry, and off they went, promising him postcards and autographed paperbacks upon their return.

  He smiled at the memory of their return the next night. He and Curtis had been sitting on the dark front porch, smoking Camels and watching the lightning bugs flash in the fields, when they heard the sound of an engine and a discordant version of "Shrimp Boats" carried on the wind from the direction of the highway. A few minutes later, a gleam of headlights along the gravel drive signaled the return of the Lanthanides. He had expected them to be despondent or enraged over the ruin of their plans, but they were all in good spirits, already bubbling with an alternate scheme. He would always remember the courage and good humor they had showed in the face of disaster.

  Without a word of regret for their ill-fated journey, the Lanthanides had plunged into their preparations for their own convention. Erik, who fancied himself a ladies' man, got on the phone and persuaded femmefan Angela Arbroath to borrow her mother's car for the weekend and drive up to join the festivities; Dugger had gone off to spend their travel money for beer and party snacks; and Surn, as usual the serious one, had proposed that they commemorate the event with a time capsule.

  "A time capsule?" snorted Deddingfield. "In Wall Hollow, Tennessee?"

  "Sure," said Woodard, eager to ingratiate himself with Surn. "When the Russians bomb Washington, the Smoky Mountains will protect us from the clouds of radiation. It's one of the logical places for civilization to be reestablished."

  If Dugger had been there, he would have pointed out that the prime target of nuclear attack, Oak Ridge, lay just to the west of them. Jim said nothing; bickering was his least favorite of the Lanthanides' attr
ibutes. Besides, since they were stranded on the farm with a crippled car, there seemed no point in debating where to place a time capsule. It seemed to him to be a fine and solemn gesture. Leave logic out of it.

  The others spent an hour discussing the properties that a time capsule should have, with Dugger, who had returned by this time with "refreshments," arguing that what they really needed was a deactivated torpedo. That being pronounced generally unavailable, they were about to agree on using an old carpetbag that had belonged to Dugger's grandmother. At that point, Jim decided that it was time to put logic back into the discussion.

  "You need something waterproof," he said. "There's a lot of groundwater here in the valley, especially in the spring. What if we got another flood like the one they had in 1903?"

  Surn agreed with him. "We need something airtight and waterproof. Preferably something that won't rust, too. Remember that a lot of what we're putting into the time capsule is paper. You want your short story to be readable in 1984, don't you?"

  The others nodded. "How about a milk can?" asked Dugger.

  The suggestion was thoroughly discussed but finally vetoed on the grounds that milk cans might be susceptible to rust. By then they had reached the two-hour mark in the discussion, always a danger point in Lanthanide planning sessions, as it was the time at which things either dissolved into a shouting match or were postponed indefinitely for lack of sustained interest. To keep the previous two hours from having been a total waste, Jim Conyers spoke up. "How about a pickle jar?"

  "Too small," said Deddingfield. "It wouldn't even hold one story."

  "Not the pickle jar in the refrigerator," Jim explained patiently. "I mean one of those ten-gallon jobs that they keep on the counter at Mclnturfs store. It's made of glass so it won't rust, and it's watertight, and it's big enough to hold just about anything you'd care to save."

  "We don't have a ten-gallon pickle jar, though," said Woodard.

  "True, but I was in Mclnturfs this morning, and there were only five or six pickles left in the jar. I say we buy whatever ones are left and offer Xenia Mclnturf a dime for the jar. All in favor?"

  The motion carried, after Bunzie added a rider that the pickle jar expedition be extended to include a trip to Elizabethton to see War of the Worlds at the Bonnie Kate Theatre. After that, another two-hour discussion began over what was to be put into the time capsule, but Jim went to bed and left them wrangling. Knowing the Lanthanides, he was sure that they wouldn't actually get around to burying the time capsule for a couple of weeks, and that whatever went in would depend upon their moods on the day of the burial. He had been right on both counts.

  For another ten days they had worked on their short stories for the time capsule, and Bunzie had written to John W. Campbell Jr., asking him for "a letter to the future" to be included. When the reply came a few days later, it was placed unopened in the pickle jar along with the War of the Worlds poster that Pat Malone had swiped from the theater in Elizabethton and the rest of the Lanthanides' treasures.

  The burial ceremony took place at sunset one Tuesday evening. The Lanthanides had marched up the hill behind the house to a spot chosen by Jim and Dale Dugger, and pronounced by them "easy to locate again." It was midway between the stone fence and an old sycamore tree that grew about ten feet south of the fence line. After the first ceremonial spadeful of earth had been dug by each of the Lanthanides, accompanied by speeches in varying degrees of pomposity, Jim and Dale took turns digging the three-foot hole. After that, the pickle jar/time capsule was wrapped in a burlap feed sack and buried, while the group sang "Off We Go into the Wild Blue Yonder," referring not to the Air Force but to the future of space travel. Jim Conyers' last memory of them all together was on that September day, standing in the shade of the sycamore before a tiny mound of freshly turned clay, gazing skyward and singing.

  That had been the last perfect day, and when he felt twinges of nostalgia it was always that scene that he pictured. He wasn't really sorry when it ended, though, as it had a few months after that September day. Pat Malone had taken off a short time later, after what was reported to be a huge fight with Surn. Jim wasn't there at the time; he had been spending more and more time with Barbara since the fall term began. After that breach in the Lanthanides' solidarity, more factions began to form, so that there was nearly always a feud going with somebody at the Fan Farm. Jim took to studying late at the library with Barbara. He had already begun to be tired of the slanshack by early 1955, when Stormy got that teaching job in Virginia, and Bunzie finally took off for California. Jim had just become officially engaged to Barbara, which meant that he had less time to spend at Dugger's. Finally he found a roommate at Milligan and moved on campus to be closer to his bride-to-be. By March they were all gone except Dugger. When the TVA announced that it was constructing a man-made lake in the Wall Hollow valley, there was no one left to care except Dugger, who couldn't afford to hire a lawyer to fight it. Not that it would have done any good. Poor people never did seem to stand much of a chance against the government, as far as Jim could see.

  He remembered Dugger's last day on the farm. The TVA had spent most of the spring months preparing its new lake bed. It had hauled farmhouses away to higher ground, lumbered the oaks and poplar trees from the yards of the former residents, and relocated some-but not all-of the family cemeteries. The day the floodgates closed, Jim had driven out to Dugger's farm, partly out of curiosity and partly on a hunch that Dugger would be there alone and in need of a friend.

  He had found Dugger sitting on the rocks that had once been the foundation of his farmhouse. The house was long gone, and the empty cellar looked like a bomb site. Together they looked out at the bulldozed desolation, and Dale had said, "Kind of puts you in mind of Korea, don't it, Jim?"

  They walked on past the house site then, into what had been the backyard, and they sat for a long time on the stone fence, talking about the rest of the guys, and about books-about anything except the water that was spilling over the banks of the Watauga and coursing into the valley. Conyers thought of asking about the time capsule then, but he decided that it would have been rude, a denial that there would even be a future. So he tried to keep Dugger's spirits up by talking about his forthcoming wedding. Dugger must come, of course. He didn't remember what plans, if any, Dugger had been making for his own future. He wasn't going to live in the new Wall Hollow. A lot of the old residents chose not to.

  When the sun was low in the sky, they could see the shine of water from the old cow pasture, and in order to get Dugger out of there Conyers offered to buy him a fifty-cent dinner at the college cafeteria. Absently, Dugger agreed. His eyes kept straying back to the valley, as if he were trying to take a picture of it in his mind.

  They got out by going straight up the wooded hill past the stone fence and coming out on the paved roadway that skirted the mountainside. Jim had parked his motorcycle there, knowing that vehicles weren't allowed down in the valley anymore. With Dugger riding astraddle behind him, he gunned the bike and took off for town, too fast for Dugger to look back.

  It was on this same road that Jim Conyers was standing now, looking down into muddy water that receded day by day. He was twice a grandfather now, and Dale Dugger had been dead for

  thirty years. He couldn't get over the feeling that somewhere down in that lake bed was his youth, waiting for him to come back and dredge it up. Conyers smiled at this bit of fancy, wondering if the other Lanthanides felt that way or if the reunion was a colorful way to make a buck. Impossible to tell. They had long been strangers to him. He wasn't sure he wanted to get reacquainted with these successful old men who had once been his friends, but he supposed that he would have to try. Barbara was very excited about the prospect of the reunion, and about meeting famous people from Hollywood. It was only a few days, after all.

  He kept looking at the lake, trying to get his bearings. Was this the spot where the farm had been, or the cliff overlooking the town? Near the bottom of the slope a skeleta
l tree had risen out of the depths. Was it the Dugger sycamore? The blackened trunk might have been any species of tree, and the other landmarks were still submerged. He would have to wait. A few more weeks and the lake would diminish even more. Then perhaps he would be able to distinguish the ruins of Dugger's house and the road that had led to Mclnturf's store. Perhaps when the drawdown was complete, they could locate the time capsule which now seemed so valuable. But that was not what brought him week after week to the fading shore. Jim Conyers knew that whatever he was looking for in the dead waters of Breedlove Lake, it was not that.

  Chapter 4

  Fans are always at their best in letters, and I took them at their self-stated value.

  – FRANCIS TOWNER LANEY

  "Ah, Sweet Idiocy"

  Forty years ago, when the Lanthanides were reading comic books instead of selling serial rights to them, there was a comic series called "The Little King," featuring a diminutive cone-shaped monarch with a red robe and a perpetual scowl of ill-humor. People of a certain age invariably remembered that cartoon character when they encountered the less regal but equally peevish George Woodard.

  The resemblance at the moment was great. Wearing a tatty red bathrobe over his clothes to combat the chill of the basement, the stout and shortsighted George Woodard paced the damp concrete floor, back and forth between the clothes drier and the mimeograph machine, in search of literary inspiration.

  The next issue of George Woodard's fanzine Alluvial was due out in a week, and he had to begin the page layouts tonight.

  There were many articles to be typed up, and many estimates of column inches to be calculated to make sure that everything fit in the correct number of pages, which is to say: the most that could be mailed for a single first-class postage stamp. George believed in getting his money's worth from the post offal (or post orifice or post awful-the puns varied per issue), but since his three dozen subscribers were of mostly straitened means, he could not expect them to pony up more money for a bigger ish.