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

by Brian Francis Slattery

  A ragged, rattling gasp claws out of Myra Jong’s throat, and as she hits the ground, a unified shout of horror and exhilaration rises from the slaves, flutters the edges of the circle of men and women until it collapses and explodes outward, flying across the crops, out to the freeway, over the sea. Tyrone Fly is still holding the scythe, can’t seem to let it go. The slaves riot around him, pass around eight-year-old six-packs of beer, plastic bottles of vodka and rum, send up cheers again and again while he stands there, looking over his work. At last he lifts his head and sees Marco moving away from the slaveowner’s house, walking slower than anyone else, but gone before Tyrone knows it; and in that span of seconds, Tyrone Fly is visited by the Vibe for the first and only time in his life. His brain floods with premonition, of the ripples he created movingon far beyond the freeway, pouring north through the redwoods, south through Los Angeles and San Diego, east over the mountains; manifesting on the high plains as a rising wave of tools thrown down, gunshots, smoke rising from grain silos. But he won’t be there to see it; no, the Vibe puts him in the air somewhere, on a rickety machine whipping its wings high above unrecognizable ground, and Marco coming for him in a cloud of steam and blood.

  There are parties until dawn from the wire fences at the edge of town to the peak of the dune, the liberated tear the tents down, burn the oily fabric. Couples flit from the flames to bed down in the fields; the beach rages with shouts and dancing. Nobody can say where the instruments come from, but there’s a band with an accordion and a cacophony of drums, the leader bellowing words across the sand, the crowd yelping and shrieking back. The desperation will come later, when they understand how the world has wrecked them, set them adrift; but tonight is all freedom and possibility, the next day ages away, the last few months, years ago, and receding into a gray distance beyond where the memories can reach. And so they forget how the revolution started, that it had begun weeks before, when Marco flew through the camp, took Hideo and Carolyn with him, and they all met at the edge of the surf, together for the first time in six years.

  “Well,” said Zeke, “we all look thinner.”

  “We look like hell,” Dayneesha said.

  They stood in the sand, shifted from foot to foot. Marco pulled at his lip and spat, and all at once, they were rushing forward, catching each other in their arms and crushing each other hard enough to empty lungs, break ribs. It’s good to see you. It’s so fucking good to see you, man. Then, they did what they do best: They began to plan. The revolt was easy, the sort of operation Marco had done since he was a kid. He could do half of it himself; the slaves, he was sure, would do the rest.

  “But then what?” Dayneesha said. “We do this, and the Aardvark sends more than one man after us.”

  “We’ll have to finish him too,” Marco said.

  “He is the center of the slave trade, the emperor of New York,” Hideo said. “It will take an army. And something to pay them with. This is a … bigger thing than we have done in the past.”

  “Are you saying we shouldn’t do it?” Dayneesha said.

  “Maybe.”

  “You don’t think we can come up with the money.”

  “No. I am talking about the violence it will create.”

  “Do you want to stay a slave?” Marco said.

  “Of course not,” Hideo said.

  “Then what other choices do you have?”

  Many, Hideo thought. Flee to Asia and never return. Change his face; change his name. Disperse again across the world. The end of him and Carolyn; they could both live as long as they never saw each other again. He in Tokyo, an accountant for a holding company, shoved by pushers into a train each morning, a wife and three children in a house with steep stairs, frayed tatami, a large gray spider that eats the flies. Carolyn in Halifax—she always said she liked it after the Digby job— running a clothing store, married to a second violinist in a string quartet, no children. They could be happy, both of them, in moderation, but neither could look at the ocean, the water that connected them, without thinking of the other, and the memory would be a razor, cutting them if they tried to get too close. Better than slavery, better than death. But Dayneesha was right; Marco was right. The Aardvark would never let them go. One day there would be a bomb in the train station set just for him. A massacre in his house, his wife lying on the stairs, facedown, feet pointing at the ceiling. A bomb on the ferry from Halifax to Dartmouth, on the boat’s second run of the season, so the water would kill her if the flames didn’t. And even if they escaped, they could never stop moving; never stayin the same bed for more than four days; never rest long enough to even think of the other again, except in visions that left them hungry.

  But still, but still.

  “What do we all say?” Hideo said.

  “I say we do it,” Dayneesha said.

  “I’m in,” Zeke said. Hideo looked at Carolyn, then at the dune, to the east. If Johanna were here, he thought, she’d split the vote.

  “Fine,” Hideo said. “I will go to Osaka to line up the funds.”

  “I think I know where to find the army,” Dayneesha said. The bus holdup in Oklahoma, the protestor kinked in the gravel by the side of the highway. Anyone else want to fuck with the New Sioux?

  “Do you think they’ll do it?” Zeke said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you even know how to find them?” Hideo said.

  “We’ll find them,” Marco said. “Just get the money.”

  They all nodded at each other then; through the years in prison and exile, the houses corroding in the rain, the flesh burned off in flight, they could feel the old buzz coming back; for Hideo, the buzz and the fear, the tang of nausea, of being history’s fool. And as they wondered where Johanna was, thought that she should be here with them, she lay writhing in her bed, in thrall to bad sleep. In her dream, she and Marco were struck by lightning at the same time; the electricity opened up their heads, and their memories rode the bolt into the atmosphere. They wandered through the next five years, while the burns on their faces healed into stains, but their pasts never returned. She slept on the moss of the Willowemoc as it wound through the pines of the Catskills; he leaned on a cyclone fence around a factory in Bridgeport, Connecticut, eating a sausage on a roll for the first time. In a cinder block bar near the airport outside Marshall, Arkansas, she and amustached man slinked back and forth to a waltz keened out on a fiddle and electric guitar while the rain hammered the planet so hard that everyone spent the night, slept under the tables, in each other’s arms, jackets folded under their heads. He fixed houses in Indiana, balancing fifty feet up, shingling the ridges of roofs with buckets of tar roped to the chimney; at night there were small parties with the local girls in Valparaiso, twenty-two cases of Warbird T-6, a man with six facial piercings stomping his feet and blaring a harmonica to the songs on the radio, making them better. They met at last in West Virginia outside a shack selling ice cream and live bait amid the flooded gorges, off a highway carved into the sides of mountains that reared up like breaking waves. They didn’t know each other but they recognized each other’s faces, the shadows that the lightning had left on their skin, and they walked up to each other, kissed before they spoke. Their memories were still in the air somewhere, gathering above them, trying to get back in, but they couldn’t hear it, couldn’t see it, didn’t need to know.

  CHAPTER VIII.

  The NEW SIOUX in repose; seven days of light;

  the crossing of the PACIFIC and the

  PURCHASE of MANHATTAN.

  The hills of Wisconsin push themselves out of the planet’s hide and break into crags that betray bedrock from the Driftless Area to Devil’s Lake. At the army plant five miles south of Baraboo, generations of grasses are burying spent ammunition under layers of their dead, already talking about winter, when ice will freeze the lakes, bring down the limbs of trees, and paint a slick skin on the scrap animals in Dr. Evermor’s empire of metal: hordes of iron insects stamping in the dirt; flocks
of giant birds with feathers made from scissors; an avian symphony of aluminum and steel, with gargantuan basses that taper with grace into the heads of auks, a battalion of beaks fluting into trumpets, bodies swelling into timpani, splitting into harps, xylophones, and strings, all led by a rusty bug-eyed ostrich conducting his brethren in a clanking, buzzing elegy for the end of industry. All still standing, standing still, though the sculptor is gone. The storm he’d been waiting for showed up at last almost a year ago, a boiling darkness pregnant with electricity, and the man kissed his wife, climbed into the tower of one of his creations, flung his arms wide, and waited; and lightning forked from the sky, sparked around him, and carried him off.

  Robert Blackfeather Sherman leans back in a wooden chair in the patched, veiny shade of a tree that’s lost half itsleaves; arms folded, smoking a long pipe that needles out from under his wide Stetson, sends threads of smoke into the branches above him. His horse, a mangy thing with bullet scars in its flanks, rips out grass to the roots with thick teeth; his gun, an antique M-16 for which he casts the bullets himself, angles within reach, a leather cap tied over the barrel to keep the dirt out. The sun is not yet down, but his wife is already sleeping in their tent, pitched under a tree that will fend off some of the rain when it comes. Soon his unborn son will wake up in her womb; he’s convinced the fetus is nocturnal, that it sings to him from the uterus and affects his dreams. Sherman has a bit of Crazy Horse in him, his men say, the way he listens to what his sleeping brain tells him. But it hasn’t led them astray yet. It was his dreams that told them to abandon the Pine Ridge Reservation, the vinyl-and-brick houses, the naked sheet rock, the graffiti and the gravestones. They saw the announcements that the government was going under on grainy televisions, partied in bars and in their homes, serious revelry that ended with houses on fire; chickens beheaded, plucked, and eaten; people dancing in the dust of the Dakota roads to radios skanking out Burning Spear while others lay on the ground laughing about just how Marcus Garvey’s words had come to pass. That night Robert Blackfeather Sherman read his future in a mound of torn coats and old shoes piled at the place where Chief Big Foot had fallen after the white men shot him. His dreams drew his people together, they took the name Sioux—that slur, that desecration—and decided to own it again, because they’d be enemies, not friends. So Robert Blackfeather Sherman led them into the expanse of the Midwest, from the Canadian border into Oklahoma, raiding army depots for weapons, stealing horses from farms, becoming scourges of the landscape, living spirits of retribution. Robert Blackfeather Sherman is a legend now, and his people prosper; their tents cover the hill that slopes before him down tothe river that flows into Sauk City; children play in the frigid water where bald eagles fish. His people are a movable city, and he its leader, without reserve.

  His wife shifts and moans inside the tent, the hills smother the last of the sun, and Robert Blackfeather Sherman’s pipe drops from his mouth as the skeletons of skyscrapers rise in his brain, Mohawk ironworkers dancing along I-beams hundreds of feet above the street. Then Dayneesha’s face forms in Robert Blackfeather Sherman’s head, an urgent expression on her face, mouthing the same phrase over and over. In Oklahoma, his hand had fallen upon her shoulder as she stood with feet far apart, her own hands on the side of the bus, eyes on the road beneath her. We’re not going to hurt you, he wanted to say; when his nephew shot one of the passengers in the head, spat out a taunt, Robert Blackfeather Sherman was disappointed, angry. It was a waste of life, a waste of ammunition, and later he lectured the younger man. We can’t kill without discrimination, he said; it muddies the message. They can’t understand that we’re exacting revenge, taking back what’s ours, if they’re dead. His nephew scowled, screwed his foot into the dust, shot back: You think they’ll ever understand it anyway?

  Dayneesha won’t leave him. Her face is as urgent as ever, and now warping stripes of light rise around her, music ascends from an unseen depth, a rumbling beat climbs to the surface, getting louder and louder; then it all winks out, and he is back in Wisconsin, leaves scuttling at his feet, the next season sharpening the edge of the air. Who the hell is that? he thinks. And why am I thinking of her now?

  Eighteen hundred miles away, in the desert outside of Las Vegas, a forty-foot neon cowboy, thumb hitched in the air, cigarette dangling from his mouth, is getting bent into the outline of a jellyfish smoking a cigar. The glass sculptors wiggle out a cloud rising from the lit end, turn the whole thing on, and thecrowd goes mad; a stack of speakers the size of a restaurant throbs out a bass line that makes waves in the sand.

  “I said,” Dayneesha says, “she’s one of the New Sioux!”

  “We ran out of pork, like, a year ago,” says a man dressed in multicolored tissue paper, a pink eyepatch over his right eye.

  “Not moo shu! New Sioux!”

  The man looks at the speakers, then cranes his head, looks behind him. “Excuse me,” he says, “but it looks like my booty’s shaking. I have to go.”

  Dayneesha narrows her eyes at him, trying to get him to stay; but he’s gone already, and now spinning dancers pour around her in a tide of legs and frothing arms. She swims through them for ten minutes as the lake of revelers gets wider and wider, churning into a boil of hoots and screeches that slice into the spaces between the beats, fatten the groove, make everyone dance harder. By the time she reaches the edge of the festivities she’s in a much darker and quieter place, where couples, small groups in red and pink and blue, steal into the scrub, arms around each other, heads leaning in to kiss.

  “This is useless,” she says. “I don’t know why we thought this would be a good idea.”

  “One of them must know where she is,” Marco says. Dayneesha doesn’t even jump; doesn’t know how she got used to it, knowing that Marco would appear as soon as she wanted to talk to him; could disappear whenever he wanted. He was never there; he was always there.

  “Nobody here knows anything,” she says. “At least for the next five days they don’t.”

  In California nobody would talk to them about the New Sioux, or spent the next twenty minutes explaining that trying to find the New Sioux was a death wish; so they’ve come to the Seven Days of Light to find the Americoids, to find Asia Sherman, wheels within wheels. This approach is turning out to be more fun. Already the mob of dancers is forming tentacles that sweep away from the speakers, people pulsing against each other with their hands in the air; the music shifts from a pound to a sprint, a beat that’s almost too fast to follow, and the people drop pills and quicken, throw out shouts that tell everyone else that they’ll still be doing this when the sun goes down, comes back up again; they’ll greet the next six tomorrows with feet moving, arms waving, chanting words in a language they won’t understand later, though they can’t speak anything else now.

  Eight months after the collapse, Las Vegas ran dry; the people turned the faucet and got nothing, not even a shudder from the pipes to mourn the water system’s demise. The rumors flew that the dam at Glen Canyon had gone and taken Hoover with it, piled up a five-hundred-foot wall of water and stone that scoured the Colorado, erased five dozen towns, turned the Imperial Valley into a vast lake of submerged cotton and drowned alfalfa, unleashed the algal blooms of the Salton Sea and diverted it into a greater ocean that stretched into Mexico, the foundation for a floating city of birds, a wilderness of fish. Las Vegas residents hiked up into the mountains to the sand flats of Lake Mead baked into cracking, expecting to see the basin empty, a bright white band beginning hundreds of feet up on the hills where the water had bleached the rocks; Hoover’s shattered shell in the cleft of the valley; the river roiling far below, still chewing on its release. But the water was still there, chafed by the wind into whipping waves; it was the pumps that weren’t working. The machinery had failed; something had gotten into the intake and wasn’t coming back out. Nobody knew how to fix it, and as Las Vegas parched, people left in funereal droves, a line of cars like fluttering candles across the Nevada flat. The da
ncers, musicians, party promoters, cardsharps, booking agents, and restaurateurs watched them go, turned and looked at what their city had become, the silent giants of dead casinos, fountains flooded with sand, cascading rainbows of neonplaying across empty concrete, blank stages, serene copses of slot machines and blackjack tables. And beyond the strip, the development that never happened: the barren earth cut into swirls and checkers of roads; street signs planted at the corners of paths beaten into the dirt; the bones of half-built houses growing out of empty lots; heat-split and straining, a wooden staircase dangling into space; the remains of the commerce of risk and dreams.

  “What do we do now?” said a baccarat dealer, wrist in a sling from slapping cards for years, and a go-go dancer smiled, a spark in her eye.

  “Well,” she said, “we could throw a party.”

  They cut through the copper umbilical cords that fed the dying city; scrounged up an array of decaying solar panels and sound equipment; hauled it all out to the desert in electric golf carts and construction gear; festooned it with strings of bulbs and molded plastic, stripes of neon; deconstructed the unfinished houses and arrayed them into stranger shapes; draped them with scarves of shining fabric; built another city from the body of the old one; and got the word out that they were throwing the biggest party since the collapse of civilization. They flew in six DJs from Europe in small planes, set up rings of phosphorescence three miles wide, and waited to see if anyone would show up. They expected a few thousand, had nightmares of only a few hundred, starving, hoping to be fed, then destroying everything. Instead, four thousand people were there on the first day, circuit boys and party girls with silk streamers and delicate drugs who pitched a tent city in a fan around the towers but almost never inhabited it, for the party was too good; the signal went out on satellite phones and brought more partiers, a spiral of vendors with aluminum carts and propane tanks boiling chilis and stews, animals to be slaughtered and butchered, wagons of blankets and used clothes, fruit from California, bright blue tarps, amplifiers powered by hand cranks and treadmills, jinglingbottles of alcohol, boxes of bandages, antiseptic, splints. The vendors set up in a ragged grid near the tent city and made a killing. The party grew to ten thousand on the fourth day; the promoters hauled out more lights from the desiccated strip, more speakers, thought they needed more music; but by the third day, the partiers had formed five bands with electric guitars and trash cans, dented horns and cracked violins, a bass built from a water tank, everyday people taking it higher, doing a full Sly set with ska instrumentals that skittered into the wide ditch of a groove left by the ghost of Fela Kuti; and the celebration burned for four more days until the batteries wore out and the lights faded. Then there was only the desert night, undiluted by surface light, and the partiers, the vendors, the cooks, the animals, slept under a moon huge in the sky, close enough to kiss the earth.