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

by Brian Francis Slattery

  “Is this man a slaver?” Hideo says.

  “I don’t know,” Zeke says. “It’s hard to tell.”

  “If he is, it will be bad for us. Nobody will buy Kari and I.”

  “Kari and me, dear.”

  “Nobody will buy us,” Hideo says. “There is too much history now. It will be better for him to leave us in the ocean.”

  “Unless we give him a cut,” Zeke says.

  “Of what?”

  Zeke looks at him.

  “We do not have that to give yet,” Hideo says. “We will sound like insanities.”

  “Maniacs,” Carolyn says.

  “Yes, yes. Maniacs.”

  “What else do we have?” Zeke says.

  A few hours later, the giant’s wide feet sound in the hall. The heavy thing is pushed aside, the door swings open, and the giant is there with three empty bowls and a cauldron of simmering orange stew that swings from a pole laid across his shoulders. Squatting, he dips the bowls into the stew and scoops, puts the bowls on the floor.

  “No spoons,” he says. “Sorry.”

  “Hey,” Zeke says. “Tell your captain we have something to offer him.”

  “Everyone offers something,” the giant says.

  “Our offer is big,” Zeke says.

  Captain Bengwe Saloon’s smile is wide and generous, like he’s tasted a peach for the first time. He extends his broad palm to each of them, clasps his other hand around theirs when they shake it.

  “Before any of you speak,” he says, “I should tell you that I know who you are. I know that you, Hideo Takahashi, and you, Carolyn Crowley, are slaves from the Watsonville compound, and the slave register believes that you are still at large. More important, I know that the two of you—and you, Zeke Hezekiah— were once members of the Slick Six. All three of you have bounties on your heads. Very large. And the Aardvark does not like those who stall his efforts, which I am doing by not handing you over today, this hour. So you are problems to me in waysthat I do not believe I have to describe to you. It is all very troublesome. So what is this offer you have to make me?”

  “What would you say to a piece of New York?” Carolyn says.

  First the captain laughs. Then he’s not laughing.

  “How big?”

  “Not prime real estate,” Zeke says. “But big as you can grab, if you’re there at the right time.”

  “The city is not yours to give away, Mister Hezekiah. It is the Aardvark’s.”

  “That depends,” Zeke says.

  “Do you know of Inu Kimura?” Hideo says.

  “Of course,” Captain Bengwe Saloon says.

  “That is who we are going to see,” Hideo says.

  “What are you planning?” says the captain.

  Zeke tells him. The captain’s eyes do not widen, but his scalp twitches. He crosses his arms, asks questions. Zeke answers, and the captain puts his hands on his hips. When Zeke finishes, he shakes his head.

  “Your plan is insane,” Saloon says. “It is very tempting to turn you over in Singapore. Or perhaps kill you all here, sail to New York, and collect the bounty myself, before I am accused of something. But I have heard of what you have done in the past. Stealing houses. Many ships. Hundreds of millions, from people that governments are afraid to touch. Those jobs were also insane, and you did them. And I would like an island in New York Harbor. Not a big one. But an island, enough for me and my people.”

  “So it’s done, then?” Zeke says.

  “No,” the captain says. “First I must tell you that until I own my island, I own you. I reserve the rights to throw you overboard, or shoot you in the head, or turn you over to the Aardvark, if I do not believe my island is coming to me.”

  “How can we refuse?” says Carolyn.

  The captain barks, a short laugh. “You cannot. Now. Where was the freighter taking you?”

  “To Osaka. Kimura,” Hideo says.

  The captain nods. “We will be there in two days.” He moves in close, pats Zeke on the back, then slaps him on the cheek, not soft.

  “I own you,” he says, and smiles his big, genuine smile, as though it has rained all his life, and now it’s his first sunny day.

  The captain returns them to a different cell, a bunked room below his own quarters; every night, the cot that the captain and his wife use rocks against the floor. The man himself is vocal, almost florid. They hear almost nothing from his wife until the end, when it’s easy to imagine that her strength could destroy her husband. They screw in eight languages. The first night, Hideo, Zeke, and Carolyn are a little embarrassed. By night five, all sympathy is gone, and what humor they could draw from it—lip-synching, miming with the furniture, conducting—is also gone, and there’s just annoyance, wishing that the captain and his wife would take just one night off.

  “How do you think Dayneesha and Marco are doing?” Carolyn says.

  “I don’t know. Marco’s never done anything like this before, has he?” Zeke says.

  “I do not know,” Hideo says. “Has he?”

  This is the thing about Marco: They’re all a little afraid of him. More than a little. Before the Slick Six were six, Hideo, Dayneesha, and Carolyn were in Miami, in sunglasses, suits of yellow linen; legs crossed in chrome chairs; pink-and-green cocktails under a white cloth umbrella; in front of them South Beach’s brick boardwalk, palms, sea, and heat-lightened sand, passersby in a flashing stream of bikinis and sculpted shorts, unbuttoned shirts, the patter of European inflections. A boy in a red bathing suit digging in the sand with a plastic cup, hisbalding father calling to him in French, the boy shaking his head non, non, non.

  “We need another man,” Carolyn said.

  “What would he do?” Hideo said.

  “The physical stuff. Intimidation. Maybe incapacitation.”

  “Like your evil twin,” Dayneesha said.

  Carolyn laughed, and six men and three women turned their heads to stare at her, couldn’t remember her face fifty yards later, though that night, their dreams were soft and sweet. “Right,” she said. “My evil twin. With a man like that, we could double our profits.”

  “And maybe commit new crimes,” Dayneesha said. Her eyes narrowed.

  “What if one of them was manslaughter?” Hideo said.

  It took less than a year. They were stealing proprietary information from the offices of a diamond company in Johannesburg. The company had never let the information become electronic; it was handwritten in a plastic-bound book, scattered throughout the brains of two dozen employees who had all memorized pieces of it. Hideo sent Marco in to get the book after Dayneesha had disabled one of the alarms from a laptop. They knew that another would go off soon, thought they would have enough time to get out. They didn’t. Hideo was waiting across the street in a green sedan when two private security guards pulled up in an armored truck, came out with guns already drawn. Marco emerged, book in hand; he would be shot there, Hideo thought, sent to the morgue, dragging questions behind him. They should have stayed with fraud, counterfeiting, laundering. Then Marco moved, faster than Hideo had ever seen anyone do anything, and all the rigidity in the guards left them, their guns floated to earth, the guards themselves fell backward down the stairs without stumbling or trying to break their falls, and Hideo held his breath as the guards’ souls swept past him, howled down the South African highway.

  The alarm in the building started to shriek, but nobody else was coming. Marco walked across the street, passed the book through the window.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  “Marco,” Hideo said. “Those men—”

  “—Isn’t that what you hired me for?” Marco said.

  “The stealing, yes.”

  “What did you expect me to do?” Marco said. “They would have killed us both.”

  But later there were more security guards, police officers in uniforms, bent over steering wheels, lying in front of cars, thrown out of windows. A truck driver with a gun in his hand, somersaulting out o
f his cab to sand away his skin on the road. Four street toughs with knives and clubs, propped up against the side of a bus, broken glass driven into their eyes. A woman in tight red pants with a chainsaw, electrocuted and set on fire with a severed power line. They piled up in Hideo’s mind, limbs at unnatural angles, faces turned toward him, mouths open. When Marco’s sentence was passed and he was taken out of the courtroom by armed escort, Hideo began to breathe in, and his lungs kept filling; his chest swelled with it, expanding until Hideo thought he might float into the air, bump against the ceiling. They would have to get him down with poles and hooks. Then the air slid out from between his lips, flowed across the room; his heart slowed, relaxed in its bed, and Hideo realized that he hadn’t taken a breath like that since Johannesburg. He spent hours that night marveling at how oxygen moved through him; he was discovering continents, expanses of golden grass, deep green valleys drawn by silent rivers, unmarked by people; and that space never left him, not in the clubs of Los Angeles or on the beach with Carolyn, not even on the roof of his house with guns he didn’t know how to use. In the fields outside Watsonville, as the guards swapped stories of casual torture whilethe dogs strained on their leashes, even then he could count on his lungs, keeping time with the surf rolling in below the dune. But there on the Lucky Sun, his breathing is short again, the old constriction returning; he’s being pulled away from the space he found, dragged back toward the cage that circumstance built around him years ago, and he doesn’t want to go in.

  The sun pulls itself out of the mountains, throws its light down on the Americoids, who wake up tangled in blankets soaking with dew, sit up on their elbows and squint, munch on their morning breath, and watch Felix Purple pace in front of the bus, wonder what’s got him so wigged. Felix Purple has been up for hours, impatient for Limon. As soon as most of his tribe is shambling around in the dawn, he climbs into the driver’s seat and turns the key over, but the bus doesn’t start; the engine clicks like an angry insect. For a few minutes he convinces himself it’s because he left the lights on the night before. It was the bad mojo sitting behind him, he thinks, harshing his vibe, making him forgetful. But why didn’t anyone tell him? If the lights were on when it was dark, wouldn’t someone have noticed? He glances over at his tribe. Maybe not, he thinks. At last, he slides up the hood to look at the bus’s guts, and sees the problem: The battery’s gone. There’s a square hole under the hood, two squirming alligator cables snapping for their contacts. Felix Purple wheels around, robes and hair spreading wide in groovy centrifugal motion.

  “Someone has liberated our battery, compadres,” he says.

  The news wafts over the Americoids in a hazy cloud. Some of them think that they themselves might have made off with it, they were so messed up the day before. They berate themselves, throw down their drugs and mash them into the earth, thinking that maybe their sacrifice will return the battery to them. It doesn’t. Others take it as a sign that the universe is displeased with their tribe. Still others have the idea that perhapselectricity can be drawn from another source, start hooking up a lightning rod to the engine. This thing’ll jump-start as soon as the next thunderhead passes over them, they say; all they need is for lightning to strike, and then to never turn off the bus again. They could spend the rest of their lives in motion, gathering water from the windows, harvesting birds with nets, picking oranges off the trees as they drive by. They could see the country twenty times over, the fields of Ohio, the canyons of Utah, until they died in the darkness of a trailer and the other Americoids commended them to the currents of the next body of water they crossed, be it the Mississippi, the Susquehanna, or the Columbia.

  “Don’t you have a spare battery?” Dayneesha says.

  The Americoids within earshot all stop and look at her.

  “Huh,” one of them says.

  Perched in the floating ibis position on the roof of the bus, eyes closed, and facing into the flow of the planet’s magnetic field, Doctor San Diego is unperturbed. The battery will come, he says.

  “The battery will come,” Keira Shamu says.

  Two hours later, just as the lightning rod is being mounted, three people round the top of a slope to the north. They have the battery suspended in a stretcher between two wooden poles like a boar on a spit and are taking turns carrying it. They approach Felix Purple, address him with a holler, as if none of the other Americoids are there at all.

  “We had to borrow your battery,” one of them says. “Sorry if we held you up.”

  “And you are?” Felix Purple says.

  “Gladys Petersen. My boys, Dirk and Powell. We live over there”—she points to the northeast—“about four miles or so from here. Us and a few dozen other families. We just needed a little juice to get our own vehicles going. Yours should start up fine.”

  “How long have you been out here?” Felix Purple says.

  “One forgets. Maybe a decade?”

  “You didn’t come out here because of the collapse?”

  Gladys Petersen gives a slow shake. “No, but we did hear something about that.”

  The Petersens had already been in the hills for four years when the electricity went out. They’d built their cabin within earshot of the buzzing towers of power lines arrayed in a rugged range across the valley, wires drooping between arms of metal over a bald rift cut into the woods. They could hear the wires talking at night through the pulsing din of insects and birds, were always aware of the sulfur glow of distant towns projected onto the bellies of clouds. One night Gladys woke up in near-darkness, her pupils dilating to show the contours of the cabin’s insides, the guns on the wall, the fat stove with its pipe poking through the ceiling, her sleeping sons turning in their beds; and her ears caught the soundscape: She heard animals calling to each other and trees creaking, but no electric hum at all. She had to confirm it, put her coat on over her nightgown and walked in her bare feet over fallen needles to the cleft in the forest. Sure enough, the wires were silent, the clouds above her no longer illuminated from below, no planes thrumming overhead, no light at all save the dimness of the stars straining through the atmosphere; and Gladys Petersen felt the ground growing around her, the land opening up, the roots pushing through the dirt under her feet, the branches of the pines reaching toward each other across the empty space the power lines had left. She felt the planet turning on its imperfect axis, and she closed her eyes, turned her face toward the sky, and couldn’t keep from laughing.

  “You’ve been out of the world a long time,” Felix Purple says.

  “I suppose we have. But then, he’d know something about that.” By he, Gladys Petersen means Marco, whom she’s just noticed.

  “What do you mean?” Marco says.

  “You’ve been out of the world too,” Gladys Petersen says to him. “You’re still gone.”

  She comes in close, puts a black-nailed finger on Marco’s shoulder. “You ever get tired of trying to get back in, you just come and find us, all right?” She points to the northeast again.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Marco says.

  “Sure you do,” Gladys Petersen says.

  Marco is still thinking of her as they descend toward Denver, careening out of the mountains, sending marmots and pronghorn in waves of flight before them. He’s thinking of the black nail on her finger, pointing to a round hill spiked with grass. He has this idea in his head that he’s been there—a hillside, a stream, fields carved out of the woods, houses of felled pines. Scarves of smoke unfurling across the sky. Rangy livestock. Children with mud-colored skin, vegetable gardens in a corral of chicken wire, the pelts of wolves and coyotes soaked in their own blood to ward off other animals. Men with callused palms sleeping beneath piles of wool blankets. A woman smoking strips of venison for the winter. They listen to the radio as if they’re receiving the last transmissions from a distant planet destroyed by a meteor five centuries ago. In the winter when the storms come, the sky is like the ocean, a roiling gray capped with whi
te, and they’re underwater, looking up into the shimmering light as the snow whips around them, turns their lips to ice. It doesn’t seem so bad, that life. But Marco is a man who does things, and there’s still so much to do.

  From a distance, driving down from the snow-shot Rockies, Denver looks as it did before the collapse, towers of glass rising from flat earth, the smoky highway a strip of rippling mercury; but now it’s people on mares, in horse-drawn buggies made from the bodies of small cars. A few people have real carriages; some they got from museums, others from someone who decided to start making them again, read books, broke into an abandoned factory to bend wood, cast metal, cut glass.

  Denver has become a horse town again, a hitching post; along the streets downtown they’re selling mirrors, razors, glass that looks like it came off of the office buildings. Books, piles of them, speckled by mildew and faded by the sun, the pages fried brown around the edges. Nineteen ninety-five, the numbers in the corners say, but a man with three teeth is selling them for fifty yuan, or an intact cooler with ice packs, or a set of silverware for four, and people alight from their carriages to thumb through the pages.

  The Americoids take Highway 86 away from the Rockies, cross Wolf and Comanche Creeks, the West and East Bijous, until they’re driving through waves of land, all brown earth and low scrub, rusting wire lining the road, snipped and rolled back to let paths meander through. A few ranches, much reduced in size, shrunken versions living in the shells of their former selves. Some of the land has been given up, and the scrub grows tall; the grass gone to seed chatters in the wind. They reach the old interstate and climb the hill into Limon, a town of houses along forested streets, a wide boulevard angling down the middle, people on horses trotting through the asphalt intersections, stopping in front of storefronts to tie the reins to parking signs. A mural of John Wayne on the side of a brick building, staring down passersby like he’s expecting something. What do you have to say for yourself, pilgrim? All Felix Purple can think about is his baby and his baby; he’s mad with it now. He folds the bus and trailers into the empty parking lot next to the grocery store with alarming speed, stops the engine, and before anyone can thank him for his awesome driving, man, he’s gone, ambling down the street, a straw doll made from California grass in his hand; he chewed on its leg a little himself to make sure the taste was bitter and sweet. The Americoids spill into the bright Colorado sun, blink at the buildings, the road to the east, the brown hills. Then, one by one, they wander into the town with packages tied to their backs, looking for trees to sleep under, the friends they’d made who’ll let them doze off onan old green couch, under a window, the cold night air soothing them to sleep.