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

by Brian Francis Slattery

  Johanna’s first nights in the barn were sleepless. She lay there in the dark, twitching her eyes at every snapping twig, talking tree. She believed at first that it was her fear of being prey, then understood that it was the isolation itself. The animals moving around the barn at night smelled her inside and didn’t care. The trees, the mountains didn’t know she wasthere. A prelude to being dead, dead and forgotten. She moved her hands in front of her face and couldn’t see them. It was as though she was gone already. But she has come to accept it now, and sleeps deeper than she has in her life. The fading chirps of birds, the insect orchestras, the crackles of rodents and their predators in the brush have become her ocean waves, the sounds that signal slumber. She doesn’t know it, but her hearing is sharper, lets her know things that she remembers when she wakes up. She’s not surprised anymore when there’s blood on her doorstep, the last act of a battle between mouse and owl.

  Even so, she doesn’t hear the assassin’s approach. He leaves his stolen truck at the bottom of the hill, flits up the road, down her driveway, in almost perfect silence. The first sign she has of him is a shape in the window, gone the moment she looks, but then he is in the room, moving toward her without a sound, as if the man himself is far away, and has sent his shadow to do the killing.

  “Who are you?” she says.

  “I was going to ask you the same question,” the assassin says. His head turns from side to side, surveying the room. “I can see that they were here for a while. A few hours, maybe. Meaning that you were the purpose of their trip here, not just a stop on it.”

  “I asked you who you were—”

  The assassin is within reach of her, one finger over her lips. His hand smells like mint.

  “Are you Carolyn or Johanna?”

  “…”

  “Oh, you can tell me. I already think you’re one or the other, and my employer would be just as interested to see you dead either way.”

  “I’d be pretty interested in that myself,” she says.

  The head tilts. “You must be Johanna. But it’s irrelevant. The only thing I want to know is where they’re going.”

  “Let me guess. If I don’t tell you, you’ll kill me.”

  “…”

  “I’m not telling.”

  The shape in front of her draws closer, puts his face up to hers. She can hear him draw breath through his nose, release it from his mouth. It smells like mustard, and she thinks of Marco swimming in California, his hands on her in the road hours ago. It wouldn’t be so bad to be done in now. Not so bad. She blinks, and he’s at the door.

  “I’m not going to kill you,” he says. “It would be unprofessional. But Johanna? Don’t wish for death so hard. One day it will come, and I have news for you: It’s never quiet.”

  He knows this because he can see how the ribbons of the dead end. They blur into flowers, balls of hazy light, the trails of thrashing limbs, convulsions, a soul rattling in its husk. They never want to go. The assassin has heard the things that people resuscitated on operating tables talk about; the bright corridors, the reunions with friends and relatives, the chance to give historical figures a piece of your mind. He doesn’t know about that. From what he can see, even if there are sweet gardens beyond waiting for us, we still fight it all the way up to the gate.

  CHAPTER V.

  The last laugh on the ALAMO; old friends,

  NEW SLAVES.

  Two ghosts, Silas and Isaac, flicker in and out of sight, leave the lines of their clothes and bones trailing behind them in rags of light. Over a century ago, they drove cattle between Oklahoma and Mexico, picked up enough Spanish to move the cows, get the good tequila, the women who didn’t mind talking to men who spoke like children, the peppers named after local gods that opened up their skin and dissolved them in their chairs. They killed seven Mexicans in the war of independence, took three bullets and a piece of shrapnel between them; Silas still has a stitch in his hip that sways him when he walks.

  One night they slept on the rocks on the banks of the Brazos under a blanket of weeds and rushes and dreamed the same dream, of farmers tilling fields with elephants and purple plows, planting flowers that opened tendrils of petals and sprouted houses of red and yellow, all in a row, multiplying to cover the earth, until the river rose and pulled them in. They woke up just long enough to drown.

  But their ghosts still follow the trails between Colorado and the Fort Worth stockyards, haven’t even noticed the changes in the land, the cities jutting out of the ground, falling back in. They pass now, oblivious, pulling fish from their throats, right through Dayneesha’s warehouse, the first floorpiled with two-by-fours, signs for boots and Western wear, the yard in front mazed with junked cars. Nobody sees them come or go, though Dayneesha’s cousin Ray, who hasn’t spoken since he fled the Southwest, cocks his head toward the cyclone fence and sniffs, swears he catches the tang of chiles tickling the hairs of his nose. It takes him back to his touring days, a chipped electric guitar in his hand, a sweating microphone at his mouth. A club in Memphis off Elvis Presley Boulevard, posters of R. L. Burnside stapled to the walls, goin’ with you babe, I’m goin’ with you babe. Later, a haul across the country, and then a show in Socorro, New Mexico, walls of orange and blue, a girl spinning and shaking in front of him, then sliding a habanero into his mouth after he gets off the stage. Take a bite, she said, just one. He always said he’d go back and find her, and he did, but the new war in Mexico found her first; when he saw what it had done to her, all his words left him.

  “I can’t believe it’s so green here,” Ettie Duchamp says. “I thought Texas was supposed to be a desert.”

  “If it was a desert,” Dayneesha says, “what would all the cattle have eaten? Sand?”

  They are sitting on the second floor around a pressed wood table, the chorus of hums from the machines around them resolved into a flat seven, coffee in tin cans getting cold. Ettie Duchamp’s lips purse in pursuit of a comeback. She’ll think of one hours later, as she’s falling asleep, another one a month from now, when she sees a baby stroller, a smoked ham hanging in a window. But right now she flounders in a miasma of associations that refuse to congeal. Her lips unpurse.

  “We have people from down this way,” she says.

  “Whereabouts?”

  “Shreveport.”

  “That’s in Louisiana. We’re in Texas. Big difference, sister.”

  “Honey,” Ettie says, “when you’re from New York, talking about the difference between Texas and Louisiana is like talking about the difference between Venus and Mars.”

  “I wish Mexico felt the same way,” Dayneesha says.

  History is playing a prank on Texas, always making it choose between independence and peace. The border skirmishes are now almost all north of the Rio Grande. There’s been a stand at Corpus Christi, but fingers of the front flick at Houston, Austin, Dallas. In Fort Worth, they feel the report of falling rockets, see the long streaks in the sky. Every month or so the Dallas night is a lightning storm of artillery, the crumbling thunder of buildings breaking. The next day, the refugees arrive on the freeway, in wagons pulled by cows, cars with the engines ripped out to make room for aunts and uncles, harnessed to horses instead. They set up camps in the serpentine parks along the Trinity River, blue and green tarps stretched between PVC pipes, wash their clothes in the cocoa water under the Main Street Bridge and string them from the trees near the vast parking lot at the end of North Taylor Street, where kids kick a soccer ball skinned of its color, patched with duct tape, denim, and glue; they holler and hop while their parents squint at the sky, waiting for new streaks of cloud to be drawn there, arc down between the abandoned office buildings and disappear behind the tower of the Tarrant County Courthouse. For an agonizing instant the illusion of peace persists; then it grows into fire and withers in the heat. They know the shore of the river is next—it has to be—and some of them are already heading for Ranger, for Cisco, for Baird, places the war might pass over. But for now t
hey just want the hours to stretch out wide across a huge afternoon, the ripples on the river to slow until they’re like the unfurling of a warm blanket; the ball to rest at the peak of its flight, then laze to the ground, until yesterday and tomorrow are a hundred years away, and there’s only this game on the dusky asphalt, children with bloody knees chasing the shadow of the patched sphere, looking up into the sun, taking so long to blink that it’s like they’re all sleeping. Perhaps when they wake up, America will be whole again.

  “Here,” Ettie says, and slides a coil of fiber-optic cable across the table. “I hope this is what you wanted. It took my sister an awful long time to get it.”

  Dayneesha smiles. “You don’t have to sell it to me, babe. Everything’s already agreed to. But Charlene wasn’t lying. This is good stuff.”

  “The rest is in the truck. And this will give us coverage for—”

  “Six months.”

  “How about we make it seven,” Ettie says. “Like you said, it’s good stuff. And you need us as bad as we need you.”

  Charlene Duchamp’s People Movers have sprawled out of New York City to fling routes across the country from ocean to ocean, fuzzing the borders of Canada and Mexico. The Duchamps didn’t think much about it at first; they just took people where they wanted to go, from New York to Baltimore; Baltimore to East St. Louis; East St. Louis to Memphis, Cheyenne, Sacramento. First it was couples with suitcases, men in sweaty suits, teenagers with duffel bags who insisted they weren’t hungry even after two days on the road. Then it was families with clothing balled into nets, dragging animals in cages. People who were leaving and not coming back. Which meant the Duchamps weren’t getting any return customers.

  “We need information,” Charlene said back then. “The places that are going under, places where people are trying to get out. Do you have that kind of thing?”

  “Sure,” Dayneesha said. “You follow the catastrophes and stay one step ahead of the slavers, and you’ll have all the business you can handle.”

  Now the Duchamp People Movers are a continental network. They have satellite offices in Seattle and San Diego, a major hub in Miami. Their trucks drive into the holds of ships and everyone gets out, arranges their luggage into a pile they can sleep on. The refugees are going to Europe and Japan; they’re going south of Mexico. They land on the coasts of Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras, pray against malaria and Chagas, move into the mountains. They walk into Canada, follow roads into Osoyoos, Onefour, Coaticook, Grand Falls. Help me out, they say, I just came from the United States. It has all made Charlene Duchamp very wealthy. She has a small compound in southern New Jersey at the edge of the Pine Barrens, where the Aardvark cannot reach her. He once tried to buy her cooperation over sushi and sweet white wine on the deck of the Empire State Building. When she refused, he tried to have her thrown over the edge; she pulled a short knife from the sole of her shoe, hamstrung one of the Aardvark’s boys, backed into the elevator. Your wine sucked, she said.

  “Deal,” Dayneesha says. “Seven months. I’ve had a good year. Just remember this when times get hard for me. And tell Charlene I miss her.”

  “She misses you too,” Ettie says. “But she don’t miss coming down here. Why are you down here anyway?”

  Dayneesha nods toward her cousin Ray, who’s upstairs cleaning the guns, tapping his foot in a mean shuffle.

  “Family,” she says.

  “It’s always family these days, isn’t it?”

  This exact phrase flits through Zeke’s head several hours later as their headlights flit over the sign telling them they’ve left Louisiana. Come again soon! He’d seen pictures of Louisiana on television, documentaries about old accordion players, and had imagined the state as a vast swamp. He knew that was impossible, but he’d always wanted to see it: the smooth, dark water, the cypresses leaning over their mirror images, draped in Spanish moss; this place where land dissolves into water. There’s an honesty in it. Put a rock in the stream and it dissolves into sand. Put a continent against the surge of the tide, and the ocean eats the coast, the land breaks in half, surfs across the world for ten thousand years to break against a far shore, push jagged peaks toward the sky, like crests of water themselves, just slower. In the Midwest, or up in the mountains, where you can compare the place you’re standing to photographs of it from a century ago, it’s easy to think things will stay and stay, but in the marshes you can see how the land and water trade off with each other. Once you move past the terror of it, Zeke thinks, it doesn’t seem so bad.

  But they cross Louisiana in the dark, and he doesn’t see any of it. And Marco, behind the wheel, hands at ten and two, hasn’t said anything for three hours. So Zeke thinks about Johanna; he could tell what she was thinking, and under her inquisition, there was a pang in his brain telling him that he’d involved himself in something stupid. This family thing. It was too much at first, more than Zeke had designed his detachment to bear. He almost didn’t get in the truck, almost stayed with Johanna and risked it, getting his head shorn from his neck, sent to the Aardvark in a vacuum-sealed crate.

  But now, in the Louisiana night, where the humidity is a hungry creature, he thinks it through, goes back to the beginning, to the day he first met Marco, when the Slick Six were not six. It was just Hideo, Dayneesha, and Carolyn, and they’d taken on Marco to do a bank vault next to a water main undergoing repair; they had uniforms from the city, hard hats, signed permits. They cleaned the vault out in three hours, but now the gold needed laundering. They knew they had to be smart about it; they also knew that between them, they didn’t know enough to be anything but stupid.

  They researched Zeke first: his tax returns, employment contracts, bank records. Observed him from the fire escape of the apartment across the street. Discovered he was very single; a monk, almost. He worked, ate almost every dinner in the expensive Peruvian restaurant around the corner. He read, did yoga, showered before bed. They watched him do this for almost a month, joked about what an unbelievable bore he was. Then Marco cut the pane out of the picture window in his bedroom, slipped the latch, and woke Zeke with a knife pointpushed into the skin of his throat. Zeke opened his eyes, didn’t wet the bed, didn’t even jump.

  “There’s nothing here,” he said. “Nothing worth anything.”

  “I know that,” Marco said. “We have been watching you.”

  “What do you want, then?”

  “You.”

  “My organs could get you five figures apiece, depending on the market, exchange rate, and transportation costs. Sometimes I smoke a cigarette socially, which I’m sure knocks a few thousand off of my lungs. I can get you much more if you keep me alive.”

  “I was hoping you’d say something like that.”

  The gold was dispersed across the world within a month, stationed in bank vaults across Africa and Latin America; melted down into haphazard shapes; planted in mines; made into wedding bands, hoop earrings, birthday presents, anniversary gifts. Dayneesha bought a house in Fort Worth for her grandparents, Hideo a place in Osaka for himself. Marco told nobody what he did with his cut, but a war orphanage near La Paz seemed at once to double its operating budget. They gave Zeke a commission for his trouble, thanked him, never expected to see him again; they didn’t think he liked the work. Neither did he. But the next day he sat in his office and glowered. He now thought of the regulations he’d spent years learning and defending as obstacles that annoyed him. And they were so easy to avoid, it seemed to him: a false name here, some doctored photos there, a good paper trail for the feds to walk down and get lost on. He reminded himself that he was thinking like a criminal, that he didn’t actually need the money, that it wasn’t worth the risk; but months passed and there were no phone calls from banking commissions, no officers with warrants standing next to his doorman. He took three weeks’ vacation, told everyone he knew that he was going to Vermont, charged a room outside of Montpelier to his credit card, and let someone else stay there while he flew to Paris, hired a profes
sor of literature to take him to the house in Roussillon where Beckett lived during World War II; the white walls, the red shingles, the arched windows, the arms buried in the back yard, the leftovers from his aid to the French Resistance, the Boy Scout stuff, he used to say. At night they stayed up in the cafés and debated about the best North African guitar players. Ali Farka Touré, dammit, the professor argued, ears red with inebriation. I don’t care how good everyone else was, before or since. He opened it all up. Zeke paid for the rooms, the bottles of wine, bought paintings, had them shipped back under an assumed name. The night before he went back to work, he sat in his apartment, drank vin doux naturel from Banyuls and looked at his art. He called Hideo the next day.

  “I want in.”

  “You cannot have in.”

  “Let me in or I rat you out.”

  “Rat us out and you rat yourself out.”

  “Oh, just let me in already. You know someone like me can expand your operation. I don’t have to tell you by how much. Your biggest problem is hiding the money you get. Let me in and that problem goes away.”

  “How far away?” Hideo said.

  “Off this planet,” Zeke said.

  Then it was years of raves in the shells of oil tankers in India, electric guitar and drums in the Malian desert, Dayneesha doing ecstasy and dancing for three days in a club on a rotating disk at the top of a Hong Kong skyscraper, breakbeats pounding and skittering across the floor. Zeke, later, bleary with hashish at a ghazal dub show in Kurdistan, soaring Muslim melodies over a smoked-out Jamaican one drop, and everyone waving like kelp in a languid current, him with a girl in a long brown dress whose name he never knew. In Iceland, they ate the eyes of sharks, chased them down with aquavit that sliddown their throats like mercury. On the sandy coast of Liberia they ate fish they couldn’t recognize; twenty minutes before, a huge woman had caught them with her hands and grilled them over a pile of charcoal. The meat sashayed away from the bones, was butter on the tongue, and Zeke knew that fish would never taste better to him than it did then; it never did.