Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America

by Brian Francis Slattery

  The freighter was half-emptied when a sound came out of the fog, first like seagulls, then like seals. Then like pigs. Then, it was clear, it was human voices throwing out ululating screams, like Marco had never heard. A dark boat pulled itself from the mist, headed for the pier at great speed.

  Keira blinked at the accelerating vessel, pulled the joint from her mouth. “All our people are accounted for,” she said, her voice all pinched surprise. “I hope these are friends of yours.” She coughed.

  “No,” the biologist said. “They’re not.”

  For the Inuit of northern Greenland, the people on the boat, the fungus was a secret treasure. For a few, it was a sacred instrument, a means of speaking to the gods; for others, a thing that set them apart from everyone else, for the good times they had with it were like no others. For the elders, it was an investment, a thing they could offer to the pharmaceutical industry when the forces of the global market threatened them with extinction at last. Take this and give us the patent, they would say. Give us enough money so that we can afford to be left alone. The elders had shared it with an anthropologist seven years before with great reluctance, because they weren’t stupid, knew how academia was chained to commerce. The individual who had convinced the elders, a younger Inuit who called himself Herjulf, had vouched for the anthropologist’s goodness, made a brash promise: that if the fungus was ever in danger of commercialization, he would do whatever was necessary to prevent it.

  Sure enough, the anthropologist made a passing reference to the fungus in an article about marriage rituals and Inuit interpretations of dubbed television shows, noted the plant’shallucinogenic properties. Two months later, psychedelia aficionados were calling the anthropologist on the phone, arriving among the Inuit asking to speak with the gods, trying to be sensitive because they didn’t realize that many of the Inuit took it just to get high. The elders gave Herjulf a sideways glance. But the seekers turned out to be decent people, took the drug as the elders instructed them to, thanked them for the experience later. Thus the elders lowered their guard just enough to let another enterprising young Inuit smuggle a patch of the fungus to Nuuk, where the engineer bought it, saved it for cultivation, used just a little himself to see what the fuss was about. When the elders discovered the youth’s transgression, they ostracized him, then turned to Herjulf. Remember what you said you would do, the elders said, and Herjulf agreed to honor his promise.

  But his investigation was too slow. By the time he found out what the engineer was doing with the fungus and where it was going, the freighter had already left the harbor, bound for Canada, and his choice was clear. He enlisted the suicidal captain of a small fishing boat with maybe two sails left in her, barreled across the chop of the North Atlantic, around Yarmouth, up the Bay of Fundy, just in time to part the fog at Digby Harbor. The boat’s engine roared, frothing through the water, and as his captain took another swig of tequila for courage, Herjulf started a bonfire on the deck. What he knew, and what everyone on the pier was about to find out, was that the same chemical that gave such a blissful high was also a firebomb, and there was still an eighteenth of an acre of it in the freighter’s hull, along with several full tanks of gasoline.

  In the next few seconds, only two things mattered: where on the pier you were, and how fast you could run. The biologist, the engineer, and Keira and her joint were the closest to the shore, and Keira had been a sprinter. She had time to dive behind a stack of tires, turn around, and watch as the boat rammed the freighter and sent a widening sphere of writhingorange fire across the surface of the bay, over the pier, changing transfixed men into ashen models of themselves, turning gray and brittle where they stood. Marco was standing right next to the freighter when it went up, and she swore she watched the flames eat him; yet, the next day, he met her without a hair singed in a used bookstore overlooking the water. As the police wandered up and down the blackened pier trying to understand what had happened, the two of them split the advance payments out of professional courtesy. The Slick Six came away with $440,562—still not bad for three hours of work.

  “I’m afraid,” Keira says now, in the Americoids’ trailer, “that we have no work for you at this time. The bottom appears to have fallen out of the high-end drug market.”

  Zeke’s brain catches on this. If the bottom falls out of the high end, where does it go? He chuckles a little—this is just the kind of thing that he finds funny and nobody else does—and the gamblers at the table next to him eye him, eye each other, accuse each other of having sent signals through Zeke until the dealer reminds them that they’re playing for bottle caps, that they’re all best of friends.

  “We’re not looking for work,” Marco says. “We’re looking for Johanna.”

  Keira Shamu starts singing the song, nails Dylan’s whiny swoop.

  “She was named after that song, you know,” Zeke says.

  Keira rolls her eyes. “Who wasn’t conceived to that song?” She drifts into the next two verses while the table next to them is pushed over, bottle caps flying off in a wave of pinging metal. At last, she snaps back to attention.

  “You want to know where she is, right?” she says.

  “We heard Asheville.”

  “You heard right. But the place is just big enough that knowing Asheville doesn’t get you all that close. Within ten miles, sure. But that’s no good when you need to be within ten feet. You know, when I was living in Milwaukee, I met a couplewho after they started dating realized that they’d gotten on and off at the same bus stop within five minutes of each other every weekday for three years. Like the Liza Minnelli song … how does it go? She met a Londoner first, but they did not hit it off, yah dat dat dah dah dat daah, daah, dah dat dat da … anyway, they only met after she switched jobs and moved to another neighborhood. Big kielbasa fans, those guys. When you’re younger you can eat what you want, but as you get older those nitrates can start to catch up to you. Speaking of nitrates—”

  “Keira,” Marco says.

  “What were we talking about?”

  “Johanna.”

  “Right. Johanna is one of the easiest people to find in Asheville. The trick is that nobody there calls her Johanna. They call her the mayor. Because she’s, like, the mayor. They elected her this July on the platform of making Asheville its own country.”

  “Isn’t it a little small to be a …” Zeke says, “though Singapore pulled it off, didn’t it.” Now he can’t help himself. “There’s no good reason they couldn’t do it, except for the issue of backing up their currency. They’ll either need to start collecting things of intrinsic value—gold, silver, saffron, uranium, whatever—or start producing something”—here Zeke’s head tilts, he eyes Keira—“very lucrative. You wouldn’t happen to be involved in that particular aspect of Asheville’s plans, would you?”

  “Like I said, we have no business for you,” Keira says.

  “Is that a roundabout way of telling me to mind my own business?” Zeke says.

  “Interpret it any way you like,” Keira says. “Nobody’s going to stop you. You have all the freedom in the world; you can do whatever you want. Paralyzing, isn’t it? Now, Marco, honey, before I come down and my mind completely goes, can you tell me one thing?”

  “What’s that?” Marco says.

  “How did you escape the explosion on Digby pier?”

  “Trade secret.”

  “But I’ve always been so forthcoming with information. Come on.”

  Marco pauses for a second, then bends down and whispers in Keira’s ear. Her eyebrows meet in concentration; she nods four times. Then, at last, she smiles.

  “Ingenious, dear,” she says.

  The brakes scream; the trailer tilts forward, harder and faster than before; the back end lifts off the road and begins a vertiginous swing to the right. For a second, gravity flees, and ladies and gentlemen, we are in space; everything is aloft and moving: bottle caps, people, tables, cards, hookahs, and dice float through the air. Then the trail
er lands, and everything splashes to the floor. The stereo coughs up its batteries and goes silent. I think my arm’s, like, busted, someone says. Then a pair of hands bangs on the side of the trailer from the outside, a desperate voice screams to be let in before two shots cut it off. The sound of running feet, five more shots, cries for help. Marco looks at Zeke, who nods, and they both vault to the ladder, climb to the roof.

  The Americoids’ convoy is bent all over the road, the three trailers in a zigzag, the bus facing almost sideways. They at first see only hills and trees; a man scrambles out from under the trailer and disappears into the underbrush. A voice from behind is yelling at Felix Purple to move the fucking truck. More people run into the woods; shots follow. Marco and Zeke turn around. In front of them is a cleared valley boxed by razor wire, barred with barracks of corrugated metal, a cluster of rusting factories rising from the cracked earth, spouting small fires. In the fence running along the road is a wide hole, clipped and propped open by what is now the corpse of a woman with a large pair of pliers. Other corpses lie around the hole, but even more people are writhing through it, crawlingunder the trailers, vanishing into the woods. The man yelling at Felix Purple wears a blue jumpsuit and has a shotgun. Felix is squinting, yelling back, You going to shoot, go ahead and shoot, I don’t give a damn. Other men in blue jumpsuits run along the fence; they follow the people in dirty clothes into the woods, and there are shots. Inside the compound, a last few are sprinting toward the hole in the fence, but a multitude—six or seven hundred—are being corralled by more men in jumpsuits, who fire into the air around them. One last man breaks off from the crowd and runs like mad for the perimeter. The guards do not hesitate. They shoot him in the legs, and while he wriggles on the valley floor, one of them walks over to him, hoists him up on his blasted feet, and slits his throat. It is this, killing a man like he was a pig, that makes Marco understand. He has seen it before, people killed like livestock: he was six and in Bolivia, and the fence was rustier, farther away; but there were barracks, a building on fire. Other children nearby, all of them with weapons; the adults with knives, whips, their voices. They were circled around Javier, a fourteen-year-old who knelt on the ground with burns on his hands, the product of a homemade bomb that went off too soon, took his best friend with it. They’d intended for it to explode when they went out on patrol, throw the training camp into disarray while they crashed through the jungle to the road to La Paz, climbed aboard a bus to the cinderblock neighborhoods around the capital and never pick up guns again. Instead, there Javier was in the middle of the camp, his friend in pieces in the bomb’s ashes, his own hands unusable for the rest of his life, which he knew totaled about six minutes. So he spoke his mind, running a spittle-strewn string of curses toward the adults. Do your own killing. Fight your own fucking wars.

  One of the adults nodded at Marco and smiled.

  —Hijo. Disparaste tan bien esta mañana. Vamos a ver si puedes acabar con el, he said. You did so good at shooting this morning, son. Let’s see if you can finish him.

  Marco shook his head.

  —Has matado hombres muchas veces, the adult said. You’ve shot men many times.

  —Jamás a un amigo. Never a friend.

  —¿Cuál es la diferencia? What’s the difference?

  Marco calculated, stepped into the circle with Javier, raised his machine gun.

  —Sabes que puedes dispararles a ellos en vez de a mí, Marco, Javier said. You know you could shoot them instead of me.

  Marco shook his head again.

  —Eres un esclavo, Javier said. You’re their slave.

  —¿Dónde lo quieres, Javier? Marco said. Where do you want it?

  —Al cerebro. Y no erres. In the brain. And don’t miss.

  Another fire blooms from the valley; black smoke boils into the yellow air. The wind shifts, spirals into a small cyclone, and the Vibe gathers itself out of the air to hover behind Marco, tap him on the shoulder. You have been bad, my man, the Vibe says, and by bad I do not mean badass, but bad.

  I know, says Marco. I know that.

  You must do something about this. This thing in front of you. This thing in you, the Vibe says.

  What am I going to do? Marco says. It’s history.

  Later, you will know, says the Vibe, and undoes itself, drifts away on the curls of the breeze.

  On the roof of the third trailer, beatific and oblivious, Doctor San Diego is asleep in the lotus position, a wide, tooth-flashing smile on his face. He has been through this part of the world seven times in the last four years, each time pulling a tighter circle across the continent to come back. He is in decaying orbit around Appalachia, and his smile gets even wider when his sleeping brain imagines his younger self, the one who believed in inexorable progress until a San Francisco earthquake sent his house into a gully while he crouched in the aisleof a supermarket, hands over his head, cans of soup racketing around him. He now understands that this expectation of progress applies only to young nations, for most of the planet lives among the ruins of dead empires: Angkor Wat, the Great Zimbabwe, Rome, the Mughal palaces. The plumbing in Lisbon, five hundred years old. The ancestral pyramids and roads in Central America and what the Spaniards did to them. Progress is a soothing lie, thinks Doctor San Diego’s addled brain, and for over two centuries, all of North America lay swooning under its comfort. Except you, the doctor says to the South. You woke up over a century ago, in blood and fire. You have your rotting plantations, your mass graves. The thought that the best times are behind you is a spike in the skull. But it prepared you for this, the death of the Union, the last lowering of the flag. While the rest of us reel and clutch at the air, you know there is nothing to do but accept. You’ve already done it once.

  And the ghosts of the South writhe in the ground, spit the dirt from their mouths to speak: No, doctor, you have it all wrong. We have been fighting for more than a hundred years, and we will keep fighting until our bones turn to earth, and the Earth falls into the sun.

  CHAPTER IV.

  This little ASSASSIN goes to market; a

  REUNION with and brief history of JOHANNA

  SALINGER; a prison ship transformed; how the

  RIBBONS OF HISTORY make Johanna

  vulnerable; a conversation at night.

  The gas station at the Virginia border has been out of gas for three years. The pumps are gone, the building’s glass removed, the lengths of rubber hose sectioned off and taken away. Weeds chew through the seams of the asphalt and concrete, spread fingers of green across the black-and-white surface. But everyone knows it as Georgia Pine’s gas station, for the open-air market where people come to barter, the thick braid of cables running from the power lines along the road to two dozen outlets, the stalls clustered under the rusting canopy, fanning out toward the road, shooting out along the shoulder. People trade clothing and kitchen utensils; plastic buckets reinforced with duct tape; guitars glued together from the splintered shells of five other guitars; copper pipes; baked goods; pirated French cell phones, you can’t read the screens, but you can still call. In the shade of the garage an old-time stringband, slicing fiddle, stabbing banjo, thumping bass, banging guitar, is raising a righteous ruckus on “Indian War Whoop,” music born of sharecroppers and slaves, of sparks from the friction between Africa and poor Europe. The banjo player lost his fingers in a fire but glued nails to his hands, and now he smacks thebanjo around with metal and thumbs. His startled voice scurries across the market, chased by the groove, which pulls words from him about Wounded Knee and smallpox; we should never have let them land. They run their sound through stacked speakers that take up two of the market’s outlets, blast their rhythm into the hills. Georgia Pine herself handles security with a sawed-off shotgun and a smile, does small engine repair on the side. The older mechanics say she’s only been at it for a few years; they can see it in the way she handles the tools. But they can’t deny her skill, because she’s putting them out of business. They watch her with a jealous eye as s
he opens up a chainsaw, works with screwdriver and pliers, bleeds out only three drops of oil before she stitches the wound, pats the engine good as new, walks off with a basket of vegetables and a box of lightbulbs. They can’t figure out how she does it, bitch to each other over gumbo under the awning where the pumps used to be, now housing trays full of grits, pans of vinegar barbecue sauce, the beer someone’s devoted his life to making; if he has to live without beer, he says, he’s not going to bother.

  In the days after the collapse, when the lights blinked out and the alarms went off, and police cars slept on their sides in the street, there was blood on the walls of their towns, men with rifles walking from house to house, whistling come on, come on, we won’t hurt you, while the brewer and his neighbors crouched in a ditch, water up to their shoulders, hands over their children’s mouths. They watched small wars break out and die, a man killing his boss with a chisel for sleeping with his sister, two families sharpshooting at each other through the windows of their houses over the unsettled lay of a property line. Two women knifed to death in the pink booth of a family restaurant; nobody ever knew why. A chain of exploding barns; machinery gutted and dismembered; the tension that law enforcement stifled, released at last, scraping across the county, peeling off years of progress. They slept in shifts, rememberedto duck, taught their kids algebra, told each other to hang on. Now the wars are over and the apples are tart and sweet, the wells filled with clear water, and they shoot deer with arrows from the roof of their garage, hang the animals from their porches and invite fifteen people to share the meat. They throw parties in the winter that last for five days, hours of firewood and dancing, windows fogging with steam and smoke, a band doing their best James Brown with accordion and guitar, motor parts, an old trombone, and everyone shouting about getting on up, clapping their hands on the two and four until the rain stops and dawn comes. They ride horses home, cars rigged to run on batteries; they walk along the quiet, cracking highways with groggy children on their shoulders, tugging their hair, and think, this is what they survived for.