Fallen Land

by Patrick Flanery

  “I guess so,” he says, finding himself both horrified and transfixed by the rhythms of Maureen’s speech. She never loses eye contact, holding his gaze with such force that he feels at once violated and excited by the power she projects.

  “The idea is that we pay them one percent of the federal minimum wage while the rest of that notional pay goes to nonprofit victim-support organizations, a donation we can write off for tax purposes. Inmates get paid to learn a valuable skill, they make EKK products and components, in states like this they also do agricultural work, and all those things they make are products we can sell or components that contribute to things and processes we already sell. The revenue generated by inmates will support the running of prisons themselves. It’s a genius proposition, Nathaniel.”

  “Forgive me if I’m being too modest, Maureen, but it sounds like you’ve already worked it out. Why do you need me?”

  “You’re not being too modest, not at all. What I’ve done is sketch the big picture. All I really need you to do is fine-tune the state-by-state details, and that’s still a big job. You have to be sure it’s all within the law. If the law is in our way, you’re empowered to use our lobbying agencies to get the laws changed. More importantly, though, you’ll need to oversee the integration of our manufacturing needs with skills training and operations relocation. You have to work out the numbers. I’ve seen your record. I know you’re capable of achieving this. I’ll expect progress reports every other Friday by ten AM, in my little inbox, and by the end of the year I’d like to see the program start to be rolled out as widely as possible, state by state, wherever we can. Research the law. Research areas where manufacturing is costing us much more than it should be. Find us ways to make the prisons pay.”

  AS NATHANIEL HEADS BACK TO Dolores Woods in the company car at the end of the day, driving home from work for the first time in his life instead of walking or taking some form of public transportation, he experiences a return of that overwhelming urge to flee, to pick up Julia and Copley and drive straight out of the city without looking back, never stopping until they hit the East Coast, as far from the heartland as they can possibly get. He can see how this new job will change him, force him to become a different version of himself. The nature of the job is nothing like what he was expecting, although a part of him knows that, in its way, Maureen McCarthy’s plan is nothing that should surprise him. A corporation is in the business of making money, and making as much money as it can in the most efficient way. He has always assumed, however, that his own work is motivated by a greater, an altruistic impulse, one sanctioned by the corporation because low rates of recidivism can only be good for society as a whole. But then, as he waits in traffic, progressing at two miles per hour through lights that tell him when to stop and when to go as the rain begins to fall again, washing the rolling gray sprawl of the city westwards, he begins to wonder how much EKK wants rehabilitation to work at all. If the idea is to tap prisoners as a free labor force that only has to be housed and fed and regulated by an increasingly technological presence, then perhaps the real goal is not rehabilitation, but the training of an entire group, even a class of people, who will go on reoffending throughout their lives, re-entering a corrections system that exploits their labor potential for the profits of a corporation that manages ever more numerous aspects of life inside and outside the walls of the prison. He has to admit, it has the quality of genius: the criminal class transformed by legal means into the largest body of slave labor since the great emancipation.

  For the first weeks after the new owners move in, Paul keeps the containment door to the basement locked, pretending he does not hear the sounds filtering down along the plumbing and electrical lines, the way these new people move through his house shouting to each other from room to room, stomping and running and slamming. On most mornings the woman is in the basement workshop before breakfast, again after dinner each night, and during most of the weekend. He does not have to see her to know she is standing at the workbench: the lights in the bunker pulse off and on whenever she is there, her body bent over tools and machines that produce high-pitched whines and reverberations which shake the foundation of the house.

  At such times, Paul closes his eyes, turns off the lights, and pushes his fingers into his ears, feeling the attack of the woman’s tools on his skin, metal points puncturing, penetrating, boring into his body.

  It is important to pretend he still has a normal life. Each morning he weighs out his cereal and eats it with reconstituted powdered milk. He takes long showers that pull water from the main house, ticking up quantities of consumption on the meter of the people who have forced him into hiding. He keeps the lights on all day, whether or not he stays at home. He lets the hot water run in his kitchen and bathroom sinks. Each morning he leaves the bunker through the containment door that opens onto the nineteenth-century storm cellar, locks it behind him, unlocks the old wooden cellar doors, locks those, and climbs the steps into the woods, waiting for a moment to be sure no one is watching before parting the gates of brush that camouflage the entrance. In the evening he follows the profiles of trees he is beginning to know, looking for the hollowed-out trunk in which his ventilation pipe is hidden, any signs of manufacture obscured by a mass of creeper that grows along its length. As autumn descends, the creeper has started turning red so that in the angle of the evening sun the dead trunk appears to be in flames.

  Weeks pass and it is getting lighter later in the morning and darker earlier in the evening. Most days it rains: thunderous downpours that split Paul open, storms that pattern the sky in a kaleidoscope of dark blue and magenta shale, as if the polarities of earth and atmosphere have been reversed, the fiery bedrock of the world cocooning a watery, gaseous sphere. Another tree not far from the entrance to the bunker is hit by lightning one night and explodes, embedding blond shards of wood in the surrounding earth and plowing up the forest floor. The smell of the ruined tree is nauseating: rotten meat, ozone, and gunpowder bonded together, dispersed through the woods by an unholy creature of land and sky, a priestly giant swinging her thurible.

  After closing the gates of brush that conceal the cellar doors, Paul adds more branches, sticks, and piles of leaves. At times he fears that making the entrance look so much like an animal’s home might attract the attention of a hunter expecting to find beavers or muskrats; although the creek running nearby is often almost dry by late summer, in recent days it has started to flow again, shallow but fast.

  In the woods he tries to avoid stepping on fallen twigs, keeping to the stretches of sodden leaf matter and skirting the muddy creek bed where he can identify the spoor of deer, foxes, and coyotes, which he has heard at night wailing to one another. Moving through the woods, he keeps his body hunched, bent at the waist, low to the ground to avoid detection, neck straight, eyes alert, head cocked and swinging from side to side, narrow hips drawn tight. People walk these woods even though the land is private, trespassers straying from the neighboring reserve where hunting is allowed. Turkeys and deer are in season. There are poachers, too, who take their chances with traps, intent on killing whatever they can. In many ways he feels less exposed walking through streets than he does darting through trees, picking his way across an obstacle course of noise-making matter liable to betray his presence. But now he too is a trespasser, walking on land that belongs to Nathaniel and Julia Noailles and which, at some unmarked place, becomes public land: land that once belonged to the old widow Washington but which has now been claimed by the city. On streets there is no ambiguity: a street is a place where anyone can stand, a sidewalk free for passage, observed, open to all. In the woods there are no visible borders other than the sign at the entrance to the reserve or the NO TRESPASSING notices nailed to trees threatening violators with prosecution or bullets if they stray onto private land. There are places to hide, and places where others may be hidden.

  He misses the way he and his father hunted, the closeness of sitting tog
ether in silence with no expectation of speech on either side, where silence was an oasis open to all comers rather than a vacuum demanding presence and fulfillment. In silence he could listen to his father breathe, hear the hand slide along the rifle, aware of the man shifting his weight from one leg to the other if they were standing for a long time, or leaning back against the wall of a wooden hide and exhaling breath that always smelled clean and alpine. When they hunted alone, even after a kill, they hardly spoke. His father communicated directions in two or three words. Ralph was always more comfortable with nouns than with verbs, with the naming of things that required action rather than a description of the action itself. Action was only to be implied. “Rock,” he’d say under his breath, and Paul knew he was meant to follow his father to a large boulder and crouch down in silence behind it, waiting, balancing together on a cold late autumn morning, at their feet the smell of leaves, a fawn mustiness and fallow decay. Most of the time his father would see the deer first, and the silence was so complete between them the man only had to tilt his head in the direction of the animal for Paul to follow his gaze, for them both to aim, for his father to exhale the word “Mine” or “Yours” depending on his assessment of who had the better shot. In those moments the word was more expulsion of inflected air than anything approaching a whisper, let alone speech. It was the best and purest communication that ever passed between them. Even after making a kill, retrieving the deer and undertaking the field dressing, silence persisted. “Gut,” his father would say, and Paul knew then to use the steel hook, piercing the hide near the stomach, slipping the point up toward the neck, slitting open the cavity of the animal so his father could reach inside, pull out the internal organs and cut them away, leaving the rest of the body intact until they got it home to skin and butcher in the garage.

  The rides home in the truck, the kill or kills secured under the canopy in the back, were as silent as the hunting itself had been, although the ease and comfort of the wood-bound quiet coarsened, thickened into tension by the expectation that now, when silence was no longer necessary, speech should occupy the space between them. Paul could never bring himself to speak first, so he waited for the man to speak, to ask him what he had done in school that week, or, if his father was feeling buoyant about what they had managed to kill, to tell Paul stories of his exploits in the air, of the surveillance missions over war zones, the thrill and significance of work that filled the largest portion of Ralph Krovik’s life.

  PAUL’S TRUCK IS PARKED IN River Ranch, the neighboring subdivision, which was a horse farm before it sold to the area’s largest developer. The houses on those streets are more modest than the ones Paul built in Dolores Woods, the owners less prosperous, a neighborhood of blue-collar families with no resident doctors or lawyers or corporate executives: plumbers, electricians, schoolteachers, construction workers—people more like Paul. Either the residents of River Ranch own more cars and trucks than most people, or their garages are smaller, but there are always vehicles parked on the streets and Paul’s truck does not attract attention as it might in Dolores Woods. There, in any case, his former neighbors would be bound to recognize it. Nonetheless, to avoid attracting attention, he parks the truck on a different street in River Ranch each night, always making a note of its location so he can find it the next morning.

  There is nothing more suspicious than a lone man walking through suburban streets. The face he finds in the mirror each morning belongs to someone who can only be suspicious. He shaves, keeps his hair tidy with electric clippers, irons his clothes, anything he can do to trick the world into believing he lives above ground in a house instead of a bunker, free from the burden of more debt than he can ever hope to repay.

  During the first days after the new people moved into the house Paul drove around to construction sites asking for work. Most of the guys knew him and were aware he had lost everything. They all looked sorry for him, pretended to be sympathetic, but none had any work to spare. No one was building homes anymore, and the few that were still going up had either been sold in advance or were likely to stand empty on completion.

  Paul has never worked any job unrelated to construction or carpentry. He lacks the clothes and patience to do retail work, and when he asks about shifts at restaurants the managers say he needs food service experience. Yesterday a waitress in a diner told him a grocery store was opening a new branch and they might need checkers or—she glanced at the breadth of his shoulders and chest—a few strong men to work in the back. “I bet you could get a job as a bouncer,” she said, but Paul has never liked bars and does not want to stand outside of one looking like a pimp or a prostitute.

  Last week he made signs advertising CARPENTRY WORK AT GOOD RATES BY AN HONEST AMERICAN AND A CHRISTIAN with his cell phone number and e-mail address. After taping a dozen of these to streetlight poles at major intersections, he remembered he has no reception in the bunker and neither a computer nor internet access, while his phone is so old all it can do is send and receive calls. He looks for an internet café but these no longer seem to exist. Everywhere has FREE WIFI, or WIFI HOTSPOTS that charge a fee, but no actual computers. The public libraries, where he might have sought refuge, have all been closed by the city in the last three years.

  Each day, as soon as he is sitting in his truck, often in the parking lot of a mall or shopping plaza, rain pounding the windshield, his clothes wet and cold, he dials Amanda’s cell. He has phoned every day since she left more than a year ago. At first she answered, would speak to him briefly, and even allowed him to speak to Carson and Ajax.

  “Where are you?” he would ask in the first few conversations.

  “Mom and dad’s,” she would say.

  “How’s Florida?”

  “Hot. The boys like it, though.”

  “Are you getting your own place?”

  “Soon.”

  He knows he is not an intuitive person, but he could tell even when the number still worked that she did not want to speak with him. A month after moving to Florida Amanda stopped answering Paul’s calls. He phoned her parents’ landline and her mother or father would make excuses: she’s at work, she’s gone out, she’s asleep, it’s late here, try tomorrow. They were always polite. Some weeks after that they told him she had moved out.

  “Can I have her new number?”

  “She—I don’t know what it is, Paul,” her father said.

  “Don’t lie to him,” her mother said in the background.

  “She asked us not to give you the number, Paul. I’m sorry. Why don’t you come out here? We can try to get things straightened out between the two of you.”

  “I have to get the house back first, Robert. I have to get back on my feet. Will you tell her that? I’m getting back on my feet. Everything’s going to be okay. She should make plans to move back here by the end of the year. Tell her not to get too comfortable, okay? Will you tell her?”

  “I’ll tell her, Paul.”

  A month later, after Paul had been phoning several times each day, having different versions of the same conversation, Amanda’s parents changed their own number. Since then Paul has phoned directory assistance every day but there are no listings for Amanda or her parents. To hide from him, to keep him from his sons, knowing he lacks the money to come find them, they have made themselves disappear.

  Nonetheless he dials Amanda’s cell and hears the notice of disconnection. His wife has disconnected herself from him, separated him from his sons. When the divorce papers arrived, he burned them along with the restraining orders. At some point, he understands that his signature may no longer be needed, that a judge will rule Amanda is free to pursue other men. It may already be too late: there may be another man now taking the place of husband and father, usurping Paul’s position in the family he has lost.

  WEEKS PASS. PAUL GOES OUT each morning to look for work, comes home in the late afternoon, eats, exercises in the bunker, tries to ignore
the noise of the new owners in the evening, and goes to sleep. October arrives. He buys gas for the truck until he has no money left and can no longer make the insurance payments. He sells his watch and wedding band at a store that advertises in tall yellow letters: WE BUY GOLD. There is nothing in his bank account. He has no unemployment payments, no welfare, and has not registered for food stamps. He does not believe in handouts and cannot imagine turning to the government for help, nor does he have any idea where he would go to find such help in the first place. He puts a FOR SALE sign on his truck and parks it in a wealthy suburb across town. An hour later a kid who has just turned seventeen phones him wanting a test drive. Paul goes to meet him at the kid’s house, where a wrought-iron fence punctuated by brick and stone piers encircles the property. Copies of Greek statues fill the backyard.

  “Why do you want my truck?” Paul asks as the kid speeds through the curling streets of his neighborhood, the houses half as big again as any Paul built.

  The boy furrows his brow and squints across at Paul in the late afternoon light. “What do you mean?”

  “Watch the road, kid. You could have any truck you want.”

  “But I like your truck. It’s solid. And it’s cheap. It’s badass.” They return to the kid’s house where he pulls to a stop in the driveway. He offers Paul half the asking price.

  “Do me a thousand better.”