“How long will we be here?” Dayneesha says.
Keira Shamu shrugs. “A week? Two weeks? I don’t know.”
“Really?”
“Sure. Nobody knows how to drive the bus but Felix. We tried once. Big mistake. Of the on-the-sidewalk, off-the-wheels variety.”
“Two weeks is too late,” Asia Sherman says. “They’ll be in Oklahoma by then.”
The New Sioux, Asia Sherman says, follow a strict route, stopping along a chain of towns, camps, and posts that stretches from southern Canada to northern Texas and back again. In a week they’re due in Salina, Kansas, where they’ll stay for two days, load their horses with slabs of dried meat, canteens of water, boxes of bullets from Indonesia. The people of Salina, those who are left, are complicit in the secret. Three hundred and sixty-three days out of the year, the long straight streets are quiet; they say you can hear the paint peeling off the bungalows near the crumbling grain mills. But for two days, the Sioux horses line Santa Fe Avenue; the Sioux children riot on the wide lawn behind the middle school, line up at the Cozy Inn to eat sliders by the bagful—beef, onion, pickles, ketchup, mustard—like the collapse never happened. The Sioux ride slower out of Salina than they rode in, packs full, stoves fixed, boots reshod with dried buffalo hide culled from the returning herds. For those two days, the Sioux sleep behind doors, in beds. The other side of the window, Asia Sherman likes to say. For some, the stillness, the lack of a breeze, troubles them. They churn the sheets, stare at the squares of light thrown onto the ceiling by the moon, which is reflected in water that puddles in the street. But for Robert Blackfeather Sherman, it’s the best sleep he gets all year; his dreams are among the most clear. He’s riding his horse at a full gallop through the alleys of a mossy city dense with skyscrapers, reins in onehand, machine gun in the other, a knife in his teeth, the cries of his people all around him.
“So we have to get to Salina soon,” Marco says.
“That’s the idea. Problem is, nobody’ll take you,” Asia Sherman says.
“Why not?” Dayneesha says.
“You’ll see.”
The Limon train depot behind city hall is a low stucco building slung along the curve of the tracks running from Denver and south into the plains; it was built when Limon was the Hub City, balanced at the confluence of roads and rails, when the forces of commerce, fickle gods that they are, conspired to raise a town out of the earth and abandon it. But the people stayed, turned the train station into a museum. At the time they wouldn’t have said so, but now that the station is a station again, it seems obvious that the trains would come back; the rails were abiding their neglect, forgave their forgers when they crawled back to them. The station’s walls are plastered with broadsheets bearing news from two weeks ago about the haps on the coast; grainy advertisements looking to hire coal men waver behind the bonfire near the split-rail fence, by the line of antique farm equipment, the remnants of the museum days. A bazaar swirls under a striped tent driven into the pale gravel, selling wide sides of salted beef, heaps of used clothing, a mountain of sneakers. When trains pull in from the north and south, throwing their shadows over the old schoolhouse, the market opens into shouts and sirens, twanging music from a set of speakers taped to the tent pole, a theater troupe in costumes of brilliant rags, a curtain hanging from a wire stretched taut around coat racks. They do modern morality plays, tales of cosmic balancing wrought upon former insurance executives, of a great leveling in the economic order of things, a new society fierce in its kindness. The actors wear papier-mâché masks, bulbous heads stiffened in cackles and grimaces; they crouch into frog and monkey shapes, jump upand sweep their arms across the stage, contort themselves into grandiloquent gestures, elbows and knees bending to the contours of withered tree limbs. Beware, they say, the day is coming soon. Sooner than you think. A bird salesman stretches out his arms, and the claws of a dozen species line up from his shoulders to his hands. They’d carry him off if they could.
People are always going east from Limon by train; they slide across the prairie on the old freight lines as fast as they can, for the plains are a hole in the world, the place where the map goes blank. They’ve been using steam engines, old coal furnaces. Nobody talks about what happens when the coal runs out. And the trains don’t go to Salina at all anymore. The last train moving between Kanorado and Goodland found the tracks bucked off the earth, bent toward the sky. The crew spent three hours standing in the sandy red earth out there, arguing with the train’s owner, who refused to believe that the rails were ruined, thought he could bend them into wholeness again through will alone, as the sunlight slanted to a near-perfect horizontal, wavered away into greens, blues, deep purples that slipped into blackness. That night, the owner snored in time to his pulse while the engineer lay awake, petrified, because he heard the howls of steam and gears far off in the night, was sure he knew what was making those sounds, and tiptoed through the gravel, turning off all the lights. The Janis Joplin, a rusting train of coal cars heavy with animals and crates of ammunition, the engine silver and red with portraits of the singer screaming on the sides, the phrase Dios Bendiga in a semicircle around her head, is about to leave Limon for Columbus; they’re going up to Denver, then down through Colorado Springs and Pueblo, crossing into Kansas at Coolidge. They’ll get as close as McPherson. From there it’s forty miles north to Salina, and Marco and Dayneesha will have to find a way to cover it themselves; though no one recommends it, they won’t say why.
“The New Sioux,” Marco says.
“No,” they say. “At least you can bargain with the New Sioux.”
“See?” Asia Sherman says. “I told you.” She likes the two of them, doesn’t want Dayneesha to go, considers sleeping with her just to get her to stay, but knows it’s no good: the man’s eyes won’t stop looking east, and the woman doesn’t want to be here anymore, won’t stay if he doesn’t. Marco tells the engineer that McPherson’ll be close enough, and the engineer shrugs like he’s talking to a man who insists on jumping off the top of a crane; almost sure to kill you, but hey, it’s a free country. Asia Sherman gives Marco a salute and wishes him luck. Be ready to dodge bullets, she says. Or worse. She looks into the sky, gives Dayneesha a long hug, pulls her in close, whispers in her ear: Get away from him. He’s bad news.
“I’ll keep it in mind,” Dayneesha says, and kisses her on the cheek. “You sure I can’t get you to come with us?”
“I can’t go back,” Asia Sherman says.
“But it’s your family.”
“Which is why I can’t go back.”
Oh, honey, Dayneesha thinks. You’re just going to throw it all away? Just like that?
“Take care of yourself, now,” she says.
“Always.”
“And don’t party too hard.”
“Never,” Asia Sherman says, and blows Dayneesha a kiss, pirouettes away, her feet tracing the steps her mother taught her. Asia Sherman’s first memory is of her parents dancing in the kitchen, a dim light swinging on a chain, throwing its glow over sheetrock walls, a brown linoleum floor, Sam Cooke crooning through a tinny speaker, her mother’s hands on her father’s shoulders, his hands on her back, her head on his chest, blue eyes closed, her cousins in a circle around them. She remembers her father as a man who smiled, clicked his heels in the driveway, clinked bottles with his friends on weekends, made up stories to amuse her about the secret, sentient lives ofthe neighbors’ dogs. His first visions came to him when she was fifteen; he came home dazed and sobbing, said nothing while he ate boxed macaroni. Later that night she could hear them talking in bed. I’m scared, he said, and she kept hushing him. Go to sleep and dream of good things, she said. Dream of your daughter. But the visions kept coming, piling onto him until he broke, and his smile left him. Her parents destroyed the radio in the kitchen when Asia was nineteen, in a fight that ended with broken dishes and glasses obscuring the linoleum, cuts on their faces and hands, tattered scrawls of blood painted across their clothes. Her
mother left her father that day, took his 1989 Ford and drove out of Pine Ridge as fast as the car would let her, and Asia watched her father gain followers, people who believed in him. We will reclaim history, he said, but all she saw was violence. She came home one day to find him and five other men loading guns, stacking thirty-six of them on the couch in the living room; she was there for the parties in the road as the government went under, the packing up, the abandonment of mold-infested houses before they tore off in a swarm of jingling bridles and whining children, past the graves of their ancestors, the places where they’d been brought down. She ran away at last after a year and a half, after a battle with local militia that left thirteen Oglala dead. What was the point of that? she said. Retribution, he said. This isn’t retribution, she said, it’s just people dying. When she hears the stories of the New Sioux now, she shakes her head, tries to keep from crying, for her father is gone now, has become a puppet of his visions. Your father is a prophet, they say, and she doesn’t reply, can’t say what she’s thinking: My father is a slave, a zombie, and when history has no more use for those visions, what will he do then?
The Janis Joplin has four machine-gun emplacements, mortars pointed sideways out of windows, what looks like a howitzer on top. Three cars are crazy with chickens, and withinhours, chicken guano. Marco falls into a game of backgammon with the engineer, who’s drawn a board on a stray plank of wood, uses red and black bottle caps, tells Marco to be careful not to bend them, because it took him forever to collect the set. The engineer used to work for the air force, in various unusual capacities, as he puts it. There were warehouses of machine guns that nobody but him and three other guys had the keys to, and on the last day before the fall, when the secretary of defense’s tin voice whined over the loudspeaker, informing them that the armed forces was no more, that there would be no final paycheck, they played the national anthem. The engineer was at the door to the first warehouse before the bombs were bursting in air. He fumbled with the key for three seconds, then kicked the door wide, and damned if there wasn’t so much as a bullet inside. The engineer laughs. Somebody outside must have had information—outside information, you might say, he says, and laughs at his own joke; outside information, ha. He never did see any of the other three guys again.
“That where you got the howitzer?” Marco says.
“Nah,” the engineer says.
The train trundles through eastern Colorado, following the highway through the towns of Hugo and Kit Carson, past rows of motels in fading coats of what used to be friendly colors, the cutout silhouette of a cowboy marking what used to be a barbecue joint. The land turns red and brown with scrub and weeds. A lone silo stands by the tracks, rusting and stripped of its sheath, the machinery inside throwing a shadow that looks like a monkey slumped in a cage. The road is gauzy with dirt; a dervishing dust devil wraps itself in earth, pulls itself up into a flickering cone that the wind whips into a mimicry of flame. They pass through Cheyenne Wells, a city of trailers and feed towers near the cylinders and tarantula legs of a shambles of a grain elevator that crawls near the tracks, dropping rust onto the ground. The state ag school, the gas stationon the edge of town, are all awash with dust. Just before the town ends and the ruddy earth begins again, there’s a playground made of tractor trailer tires and sewer pipes, painted blue, red, yellow. A sign hangs from the jungle gym: WE LEFT. YOU SHOULD TOO.
Then the engineer tells them what happened twenty miles south and more than a hundred years ago, near where Highway 96 rockets over the ground outside of Towner and Chivington, when 133 Cheyenne men, women, and children were massacred near Sand Creek by American soldiers bleary with whiskey. Kill every Indian you find, their commander had said, and they complied, and mutilated the dead besides; even though Black Kettle waved a huge American flag over his head and had his people rally underneath it, because the Americans had said they would be safe if they did.
On the engineer’s first trip to Limon from St. Louis, the train broke down for three days in Cheyenne Wells, and the engineer went to see the spot where all those people had died. He couldn’t find it. There were just cracking benches under trees near where the road crossed the creek’s dry bed. A few miles west, near a set of corroded rails, the state of Colorado had put up a memorial marker at a rest area, but the sign had been vandalized into illegibility. The engineer stood in the gravel, regarded the empty hills. A hawk lurched in the breeze, dangling its gangly legs in flight. Nobody passed on the road for twenty minutes; the only signs that we’d done anything at all with the land were the broken fences, the ragged telephone poles, the hollow grain silos simmering in the mirage down the road. This is what we killed them all for, the engineer thought, for this; and understood something of their anger. We had to get them off the land, the American myth said; it was about the land, our destiny, unbroken dominion of the soil between two oceans. But it wasn’t about that at all, was it? We named the towns and counties in equal share after the people we’d slaughtered and thosewho’d done the slaughtering, and now the wind was taking the towns apart; the telephone poles and trailers were becoming dirt again. One day it would all fall over, and the names, the state borders, would exist only on maps that sat fading in the metal racks of abandoned convenience stores; and the engineer wondered if all of the first Americans—the Comanche, the Kiowa, the Onondaga and Mohegan—would shake off the long nightmare of occupation and return to the places that had once been theirs. There could be new towns in the hills and along the rivers again; they could stand in the metal and plastic ruins we left behind, and the people could name everything again, as though the world were starting over, a new cycle of reincarnation, the past just a pull at the heart, a note sounding in the brain when they passed over the ground where their ancestors had fallen.
They enter Kansas, and the ripples in the earth flatten until they can see the curve of the planet falling away far from them, the long lines of roads stretching to the horizon, marked by black crosses of telephone poles etched into the sky. There are fields full of thrashing grasses, bowed and dusty heads of dead sunflowers. Shocks of wildflowers that crept into the gigantic farms to invade the soil, still dotted with dead corn and wheat, are taking over everything now: the giant centipedal skeletons of irrigation equipment; the rusting boxes of tractors and combines; the tilted fossils of oil derricks, their hammerheads pointed to the earth, axles rusted in place. All choked with tiny yellow wildflowers. Every dozen miles, something blocks the tracks: a telephone pole, an animal carcass, an overturned car, a tree thrown there by a cyclone. Hauling them aside takes longer than it should because the train workers don’t want to be out there; they draw lots with a set of marbles to figure out who has to go. The men at the machine guns tweak themselves up as the engineer scans the clouds, like he’s thinking of shooting one of them down.
“You know, if someone were coming, you’d see them from miles away. Lots of time to prepare,” Marco says.
“That’s not what we’re worried about,” the engineer says.
“What are you worried about?”
The engineer seems distracted. “I seem like a rational guy to you, right?” he says.
“Sure.”
“Not bonkers, off the deep end, sucking on the gas line, anything like that?”
“No.”
“Because I’m going to tell you something that makes me sound like a real nut job. I’m going to start by telling you that we don’t like to talk about them, because they can hear us. And I don’t mean that all superstition-like—I mean that they can hear us. Their ears perk, and they know we’re afraid of them. And that makes them come.”
Marco leans in. “Tell me everything,” he says.
When the Great Plains emptied out—when the last of the cars put the last of the gas in their tanks and shot east, west, south—the people left behind wandered down the wide main streets under the shadows of stone courthouses and municipal buildings, blank stoplights swaying on cables over empty intersections. They ate what
was left off the shelves of the grocery stores: wilting produce, pickled olives out of jars, relish, ketchup, processed cheese sagging in warm, dark refrigerators with broken bulbs. They slept in hollow bungalows and factory houses; heard how the prairie was seeping into them, lifting off the clapboards, driving chisels of air underneath, soaking into the foundations and turning them to silt, marking the rooftops for lightning. Let the flames come now. They started sleeping in yards, on splintered playgrounds, in the empty streets. Then they left the towns, walked into the sea of weeds, lay down half-starved and stared at the sky, arms out, mouth open, the fires of wildflowers all around them. And the sky stared back, screaming down from its heavenly reaches anddescending onto the plain to eat them; and the prairie crawled into them, under their fingernails, into their ears, behind their eyes, into their brains.
You’d have thought those people would’ve just died out there, but then there was Cyclone Cal and the Circus of Industrial Destruction. Story goes that Cal worked in a rendering plant outside of Arkansas City, Kansas, processing the skulls of lambs, the intestines of swine, the bones of chickens, hooves and horse heads, euthanized cats and dogs, skunks, rats, and raccoons killed on the roads and brought in by the state. He saw the mountains of the dead on the plant floor, shimmering with swarms of maggots, saw it all shredded and boiled into soup, the fat skimmed off, meat melted off the bone. He smelled that soup wherever he went. It had leached into his skin. They finally let him go on the day he ran onto the floor, dove into the stripped carcass of a steer, and curled up inside its rib cage, saying we were all the same, us and them; this is what industry did to us. It took three of them to get him out again. People saw him in Arkansas City, Winfield, Wichita, standing at the gates of factories, mills. I can smell it on you too, he told them. The stink of machines, the offal of progress. He got his picture in the paper twice for disorderly conduct. Then, right before the collapse, he wandered into the fields.
Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America Page 21