“How many of you will be coming?” she says.
“I don’t know. Hundreds, maybe. Thousands?”
“Watsonville wasn’t that big, was it?”
“No. But there have already been more revolts.”
“How many?”
“I don’t know. Word got around about what had happened in Watsonville.”
“How?”
“I don’t know.”
He could have just taken Hideo and Carolyn, Johanna thinks, taken them and vanished. It would have been so mucheasier, and then she could leave Laguna Beach at last, them lying together under a broken ceiling fan, salt on their clothes, as the water broke the rocks beneath the house. I can’t be with you, the things I’ve seen you do. Then, on the road, on the mountain. Why are you here? Why are you fucking here? She felt his answer before she heard it in the rags of his breath. I want to deserve you.
“Oh yeah,” one of the women from Watsonville says. “You’re the mayor of this town, right?”
“That’s right.”
“Someone had a question for you. He wanted to know if he’s good enough yet.”
I can’t go back, Johanna thinks. But that’s only four words against the mountain outside Asheville, the Pacific off California, and she swoons as the parade of shades moves through her, impatient for the next pause at the top of the curve of history. It has to be coming soon; they can feel it.
Tyrone Fly’s hands are bleeding. There are cuts along his wrists and fingers; the skin on his hands has rubbed open. Blood flows along the handle of the saw, jumps onto the teeth and spins off in droplets, onto his shirt, into the ground at the foot of the tree. The man at the other end of the saw groans: A callus broke, and now his hands are bleeding too. They’re a third of the way through a redwood, and at the rate they’re going, it’ll take another four hours. Then another team will come to knock it over, hack off the limbs with axes. Inside the foreman’s office, the slaveowners are talking with four Thai businessmen representing a chief executive officer who is building a palace for his third wife that must be a testament to his fortune. He started with mahogany, tore down what he’d built and started over when he heard that redwood was available again, and now he needs more of it, faster, his representatives say. The slaveowners wait, and the representatives hand over a briefcase of yuan. A few years ago, they might have used it to buy more equipment, power saws, trucks. But people arecheaper than gas these days. Once you use the gas, it’s gone; you can always get another man.
Tyrone Fly managed to stay out of slavery a month and a half. The first week he hitchhiked from Watsonville to Santa Cruz, where there was no work; through San Francisco, which was blackened by fires. In Eureka, he worked as a short-order cook in a diner that fried eggs on strips of tin over open flames. Then the chickens died and they ran out of eggs, and the owner walked into the woods and shot himself. The two waitresses headed down the coast; we hear something interesting’s happening in LA, they said. In the last week of his freedom, Tyrone Fly lived in the parking lot of a liquor store underneath garbage bags held together with duct tape, lashed over tree branches with twine. Eureka’s slave market was a half a mile away; he could spot the ones who were on their way to sell themselves, boots worn to scraps, looking at nothing, willing themselves into blindness. He held out for a few days until it got to him that they looked better than he did.
The loggers had calipers for his arms and legs, the fat on the side of his hip. They didn’t even check his teeth, didn’t care if he lasted very long; they went through slaves like the slaves went through the wood. In the ocean at the base of a cliff, there was a pile of them with broken legs and crushed skulls, mangled torsos, tied up in burlap bags weighted with stones.
“You’re not one of Myra Jong’s, are you?” the auctioneer said. It was a trick, a trap, Tyrone Fly thought. They know the truth already; they’ll kill me if I lie.
“Yes, I was, sir,” he said.
“Did you have any active part in the revolt?”
The shudder along the scythe’s handle. “I did not, sir,” Tyrone Fly said, “unless you call running like hell active. I don’t think anyone can blame me for running, sir.”
The slave market had stitched together the particulars of the revolt from scraps of stained cloth exhumed from blood-darkened earth, the memories of the guards that survived, slaves who were caught and thought that telling would get them off easy; knew also that the folk version of the story was already taking on a tone of reckoning, a judgment passed upon sinners by the righteous. Jong and her men struck down by a force that flew from the ocean and killed them in their beds. A few of Jong’s slaves were killed on the spot when they came back up on the block—a bit of retaliation—though word of that didn’t get out the way the news of the revolt had.
“I can’t blame you for running, Mr. Fly,” the auctioneer said, and sold Tyrone Fly to a certain Simon Nightingale for a sum that would take him twenty years to work off, if nothing happened to him first. His blood slicks the blade of the saw now. Yesterday, he thinks, Boo Handle was driven into the Northern California earth like a railroad spike by a tree the size of an office building. Saved us the work of getting rid of him, Simon Nightingale said, loud enough to hear. He’s trying to scare them, but everyone’s heard of Watsonville, heard too about a revolt in the camp just south of them. Not so much a revolt as guerrilla warfare, less an uprising than an assault with local assistance. They say it started with rockets angling from the hills into the camp, a streak of steam and smoke, a mushroom of fire, men with machine guns running among the stumps of trees, the slaves dropping their tools to join them. Tyrone Fly turns to his partner on the other end of the saw, and they both nod, both know what’s coming. When it does, in tracers darting among the trees, feet rustling through foliage, cries leaping from tent to tent, and searchlights snapping on and sweeping the grounds as the guards try to return fire, Tyrone Fly finds that he can’t move, doesn’t want to, can’t quite figure out why until his partner finds him lying on the floor, ducking and covering, and stands over him with a pickax and a shovel, offering him first one, then the other, as a grenade howls through the forest, releases the screams of shredded timber, dismembers men behind him. Tyrone just shakes his head no, puts a look on his face that lets his partner read why: I don’t want to kill anyone ever again. His partner nods, uncages a ragged yelp that says he’s willing to try. Afterward, when Simon Nightingale is lying in a disassembled heap on the porch of the foreman’s shack and the guerrillas are taking names, handing out weapons, swelling their ranks, his partner catches Tyrone again before he slips into the woods.
“You going with them?” Tyrone says.
“Yeah. We’re going north, then east. Coordinating with other groups, they say.”
“Others?”
“They say there’s an army of us out there.”
“You’re a braver man than I,” says Tyrone Fly, and as they extend their hands and shake, each one leaves his blood on the other. The Vibe draws a line from them that shoots due east, rearing up over the Klamath Mountains, the Warner and Toano Ranges, across the expanse of the Great Salt Lake Desert. It plunges into the water, climbs out to skip along the spine of the Uinta Mountains; jumps into Colorado, and at last descends onto a metal bridge spanning the Snake River as it winds through scraggled mountains, the caravan of Doctor San Diego and the Americoids lumbering over the shaking girders. An array of solar panels is bolted to the roof, angled toward the sun, but the bus is stalling anyway; several dozen of the Americoids are gathered at the back and front, pushing and pulling, trying to show the engine and axles how to do their jobs. Felix Purple is in the driver’s seat, pumping the gas pedal; he doesn’t know why, but it helped a day ago in Utah, let them avoid what he likes to call a Donner Party situation. At last, the engine grumbles to life, the bus shakes and rolls over the rest of the bridge, then idles on the road while the Americoids climb onto the trailers, fire up the stereo and sixteen bowls, and Bob’s sneer ride
s a whooping slide, God told Abraham, kill me a son.
The solar panels are a new thing, just a few days old, bartered for after the Seven Days of Light were over. In return, the panel owners got a few of the trailers’ speakers; a duffel bag of wrinkled euros in small denominations; and eight pairs of pants, which a few of the Americoids now regret having given away, seeing as how they’re in Colorado in autumn in Hawaiian shorts. They’re also still working out the solar panels’ kinks. The big problem is that the panels take up space on the roof once occupied by Americoids, so the trailers are more crowded, it’s harder to sleep, even harder to gamble, and dancing is out of the question. Some of the Americoids tried to hang out under the panels, the thinking at the time being that the panels would keep off sun and rain, let the Americoids surf the bus all the way across the country. But once the panels are fired up, the heat under them is intolerable, and nobody can figure out if that’s what’s supposed to happen or if they hooked them up wrong. All they know is that after a few hours, they can’t take it anymore. Only Doctor San Diego stays on the roof. He seems immune to the radiation, or maybe he’s using it, the Americoids say. He takes over a minute to fill his lungs, exhales over the next two, eyes closed, mouth grinning wide, face tilted toward the sky.
Marco, Dayneesha, and Asia Sherman are sitting on a mattress with six kids who are crawling over each other for their turn to sit next to the pretty ladies. Someone in the back is blaring a fat piece of Philly soul out of a one-speaker radio; even through the distortion, the speaker screaming for a break, you can hear the voices rising and falling, offering salvation or sex, though in the strings singing over that monster groove, the difference doesn’t matter. Felix Purple is whistling another song in another key altogether, both hands on the wheel, pulling the trailers a little faster than usual. He’s got a new honey in Limon, Colorado, a baby with a baby. They met last year when the Americoids broke down on I-70 heading into town, and she drove out in a red truck rattling with gas cans and whiskey bottles. They talked all night, watched the sun from the east shoot across the plains, the gnarled ranch fences, the low brush and sage, paint the tops of the hills beyond, then flood over the town until they were breathing in pink light. Then he was gone for two months. When he came back, she made him meet her at her house, wouldn’t let him out for two days. When he came through the third time, she was round and out of breath, craggy from creating life. You don’t have to be around for this, she said. I didn’t mean to sign you up. Felix Purple took a long look at the road stretching to a point across the prairie outside of town, at the bus and trailers teeming with Americoids, his tribe since the collapse of the country, his people on wheels.
“What if I want to sign up?” he said.
“I won’t stop you,” she said.
It’s been a long few months since then; the colors of the country seem paler now, drier. He spent the Seven Days of Light dead sober, danced a few steps, lit up a doob with some dudes he was tight with, but it had no effect. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to be there; he did, he did; but for the first time in his life, he wanted to save a piece of himself for later. And he kept thinking about the child. A girl with dirty braids, defiant teeth. A boy with gigantic glasses taped to his face, writing symbols in the sand. And her, her little wooden house in Limon, the giant trees shading the roof, the rotting porch, its three rooms; just a few hundred square feet of the world inside, but maybe enough to drive the rest of his days.
“You’re hauling pretty fast,” Dayneesha says.
“People to see, my man,” Felix Purple says. “People to see. Where did you say you were headed again?”
“The plains,” Marco says.
“Care to be more specific?”
“Kansas?” Marco says.
“That narrows it down.”
“Moving target,” Marco says.
Felix Purple eyes Asia Sherman through the rearview mirror. He squints, squints again. He knows that face, or parts ofit, has seen them ever since she joined the Americoids. Now he reconstructs it at last, unsmiling at the butt of an M-16, the business end pointed at his throat while the New Sioux wheeled and fired in the air, tied the Americoids’ clothes into bundles, siphoned off ten gallons of gas from the bus, lashed everything to their horses’ flanks, raced into the South Dakota dawn. The Americoids have never been back there. Doctor San Diego says the place is a blight on the planet, for the evil mojo that transpired there, the killing of a race for land, the ravage of the land itself. Felix Purple doesn’t want to go back either, doesn’t even like crossing the plains. At the time, the gun at his neck, he kept his cool, even asked Robert Blackfeather Sherman to back off a little, because the metal against his skin was uncomfortable. But in his dreams, a burst from the rifle separates head from neck; the head rolls out the window, lands faceup on the side of the road, and his eyes watch his body jerk into motion, make the bus and trailers careen down the road while the Sioux send a volley after them that fills the Americoids with bullets. He’s never thought much about it before, but it hits him now: She’s more than just a talisman.
“You look just like him,” Felix Purple says.
“Like who?” Asia Sherman says.
“You know who.” He puts two fingers behind his head, wiggles them like feathers in the wind. “You related?”
“He’s my father.”
“So you’re going home-like.”
“You kidding?” Asia Sherman says. “I’m not going anywhere near them.”
“So what are you two doing with her?” Felix Purple says to Marco and Dayneesha. “The New Sioux have no use for you.”
“It’s us that want to use them, sir,” Marco says.
Now Felix Purple is starting to put it together. “What are you brewing?” he says.
“Nothing you need to know about,” Marco says.
Felix Purple takes his eyes way off the road, to the children wrestling in the seat next to them.
“Stay away from these three, kids,” he says. “They’re some bad hombres y mujeres. Especially the hombre.”
It’s snowing east of the Snake, and the road, cracked and half-buried by a landslide, turns to muddy slush. Felix guns it for a few miles, then gives up.
“Denver’ll have to wait for morning,” he says to Doctor San Diego, under the solar panels.
“So mote it be,” Doctor San Diego says, and smiles; and Felix Purple glories in his benevolence.
The fires of the Americoids cluster on the hillside around the caravan, baking the earth dry; they sit around the light and speak in the drawled, lilting dialect that’s becoming theirs and nobody else’s. Ten of them have written hymns to the Vibe in it, a rolling gospel in five-part harmony with percussion and baritone sax accompaniment. The music wheezes and bleats, an animal calling for its young. The sax is meandering through its verse; then it rushes forward, drags back; when the singers respond, it’s as if they’re following the rhythm laid down by the lungs of the hill they’re standing on. The land breathes in, shakes in a long sigh, and the Americoids tap their feet in compliance. Soon they gather next to the trailers to sleep. Inside the second trailer, Marco, Dayneesha, and Asia Sherman are stretching out, just closing their eyes, when a lantern light swings across them.
“Keira?” Marco says.
“I’d heard you’d joined us again.”
“Couldn’t stay away.”
“Is Zeke with you?”
“No,” Marco says.
“Where is he?”
Marco props himself up on his elbows, looks toward the roof.
“Somewhere near Hawaii, maybe.”
“Vacationing?” Keira says.
A bad joke. Everyone knows what happened in Hawaii after the food ran out, and the ships stopped coming, and there was no way to leave. Everyone but Marco, who wonders for a moment if Hideo, Zeke, and Carolyn are nestled in the sand somewhere, but the hint of betrayal never enters his mind.
“No,” he says. “Just on his way to Asia.”
&n
bsp; “What about me?” Asia Sherman says.
“Not you, the continent.”
“I am not incontinent,” Asia Sherman says.
“I know.”
“I am an island unto myself.”
“Shhh,” Marco says. “You’re still asleep.”
“Why is he going to Asia?” Keira says.
“Promise not to tell anyone?”
“Promise.”
Keira kneels down, and in a soft voice, Marco tells her everything. His breath is cool, and the words stream out of his brain until Keira’s mouth opens, her heart quickens.
“Wow,” she says. “Do you think you can pull it off?”
Marco shrugs. “Think it’s worth trying?”
“It’ll change everything.”
“That’s the idea.”
The drugs in Keira want to say more. This is more than dodging explosions in Digby, riding fire. You’re bending back history. The next few weeks have singing strings fixed to their ends. But you cannot guide the arrows; you can’t even say which way they’ll fly.
“Quiet,” Keira says to the drugs, and stands up again, shifts from foot to foot.
“When you see Zeke again, tell him I say hello.” And her voice wrinkles; she thinks back to the way they all floated in the trailer in Virginia. How Zeke’s body brushed against hers. After gravity reclaimed its domain, his eyes moved down and to the side to avoid her stare. He felt it too, she knows he did, soshe sends out a signal now that vaults toward the moon, traces a parabola in the stratosphere, and descends over the dark Pacific waves. It pierces the deck above the room where Zeke lies in a hammock, reading a ten-year-old style magazine still suffused with the stench of perfume samples, rife with articles about the bank accounts of celebrities, tips for unusual sex positions, dozens of pages of ads for purses, suits, and footwear. The signal slows and turns, slithers up his leg and under his shirt, warms his skin, and Zeke responds, puts the magazine down, closes his eyes, though he can’t say why.
Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America Page 18