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

by Brian Francis Slattery

  In Mongolia he learned how to break horses. Master a horse, Red Kwon said, and you can master any machine. Marco laughed, and Red Kwon pulled a wooden pole from behind his back and put him on the ground with it. Listen to what I say to you, boy. The first horse bucked him off and drove its hooves into his back and legs before he could get away. He spent five months on his back under thick blankets in a yurt, drinking yak’s milk and shivering with pain. After he got back on the horse, he was bucked almost every day for a month, but stayed on longer and longer; he understood then that it was anger keeping him alive, anger that healed the wounds, dulled the ache, and it was stronger than the horse, flat-eared and screaming. After another week, the horse understood this and submitted. The Mongols applauded; a few weeks later there was a party: throat-singing over horse-head fiddle and doshpuluur, vodka and kumis drunk out of bowls that smelled—like everything else—of horses, though Marco didn’t notice it anymore.

  “You know what broke the horse,” Red Kwon said.

  Marco nodded.

  “Good. Now when something breaks you, you will understand that too.”

  But nothing broke him for years. He learned how to kill in treetops and caves, in apartments in gleaming cities; learned how to fly in India, how to become invisible in Indonesia. He brought death to gangsters in Bratislava, arms dealers in Freetown, businessmen in Dresden, ivory traders outside Abéché. By the time the Slick Six found him, he had made and given away a small fortune three times over, scattering it between a string of orphanages across Central and South America, none of whom would ever learn who their benefactor was, or what he had done. When he shook Hideo’s hand, kissed Carolyn’s, he was all glass and smoke. Johanna got to him first, after a night of sambuca in Hanoi, a cot in a wooden room open to the Red River, her sour lips; then the rest of them crept in without him even knowing. Then one day in Kinshasa, after a con involvingdefunct government bonds and a pickup truck full of gold and reactor-grade uranium, they were sitting on the sagging roof of an old colonial post office building drinking beers, and there were stars blinking through the clouds, and Marco realized that he was happy for the first time in his life. The happiness broke him, but Red Kwon was wrong: He didn’t know it. He understood only that he wanted to be good, good for his new family, good enough to deserve them. That was all. He didn’t see the betrayal, the way his family let him go onto the prison ship while they spread themselves over two continents, free and never needing to work again.

  “How much farther to Salina, do you think?” Dayneesha says.

  “Depends on how fast we walk,” Marco says. “Two days?”

  “Any idea what we’ll do then? What if the New Sioux aren’t there? What if they are there?”

  “We just have to state our case.”

  “What if they don’t buy it?”

  Marco smiles. “I’ll get you out of whatever we get into, Day.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “No. What?”

  “It’s nothing,” Dayneesha says. Flashes back to her hands against the side of the bus in Oklahoma, Robert Blackfeather Sherman whispering in her ear, We won’t kill you, and Dayneesha thinking, I don’t believe you. This wasn’t what she agreed to when Hideo contacted her years ago. She wanted numbers, names on screens, keys clattering under her fingers. Her brother in community college, her mother in a little green house outside of Chicago’s last suburbs, and her at a club, feet moving. Not this.

  A line of trees appears at the edge of the land, and the fields, all at once, become fenced-in crops, the last of summer’sharvest, the beginning of fall’s. Peppers and tomatoes hang from bowed branches tied to trellises; squashes crawl along the ground. Three women and two men are kneeling in the dirt, pulling weeds. One of them looks up at them and waves. Dayneesha waves back. Five men approach them, riding horses at a fast trot along the side of the road, guns tied to their saddles. One of them is wearing a red wool hat, the letter L stitched in white thread. When they get closer, the horses slow to a walk, stop at what they think is a safe distance; though, in reality, they’re already dead if Marco wants them to be.

  “Mind if we ask what brings you out here?” the man in the hat says.

  “Going to Salina,” Marco says.

  “Not much in Salina anymore, except maybe a hamburger or two. You two Sioux?”

  “No sir,” Dayneesha says.

  “But we’re trying to find them,” Marco says.

  “What for?”

  “Revenge.”

  The men on horses look at each other. Nobody moves for their guns.

  “Well, the Sioux aren’t around here just yet,” the man in the hat says, “because we haven’t been raided yet. They’re due any day now, though. We have food and a place to stay, if you’d like. First night’s free; after that you have to work for it. We can always use more workers here, and between you and me, the work’s not that hard. Easier than starving, anyway. Most people who find us wind up staying.”

  “Why?” Dayneesha says.

  “You tell me.”

  The men on horses gallop ahead of them, and Marco and Dayneesha cross the line of trees, pass by a gas station set up with troughs of feed and water; a woman with blue hair sitting in a pink recliner against the side of the building, watching over eight tables, a pair of boots, a box of plastic bottles, an ottoman with a zebra-print cushion. Along the streets hedged with broad-leafed trees, wood siding gleams bright white and blue; fences stand taut and upright; roads have neat patches in them, the work of someone who’d never fixed a highway before, but figured it out. People clop by on horseback, clothes stitched with fishing line, baseball hats held together with tape. But there’s fat on their midriffs, taken from livestock squealing in backyards, from the crops south of town; looking at them, Marco realizes he hasn’t seen a healthy person since Malaysia. On Main Street, the brick cobbles are lined with stands of ruddy vegetables, flower-print clothes, silverware, firewood, a wood stove squatting underneath saddles and tackle, horseshoes looped around an iron ring. In the middle of the street, a band is ripping through Swedish fiddle music that throws out vines of happiness amid the sweet scent of pancakes and lingonberries. The banners from before the collapse still hang on every streetlight—WELCOME TO LINDSBORG—but they look a hundred years too young for what’s going on below them. The people here are surviving by going back. There’s talk of dismantling the electrical system, using the metal for something else. Maybe we never needed it in the first place.

  They put Marco and Dayneesha up in the second floor of the toy shop on Main Street, and that night, there is dancing, to a band of trumpet, accordion, bass, drums, and saw pumping out maniacal polkas. They drink corn liquor that tastes horrible but does the trick. At the pace they’re going, Dayneesha knows, half of the town will be up until the next day. She goes out to join them, and they pull her in with a collective whoop; glad you’re here, glad you made it. At first she thinks it’s just partying, but later, when a wind starts to pick up off the plains and the accordion works harder, the trumpet blares and blows, and the people cry back in ecstasy, she understands that it’s defiance. It’s a war with the prairie, a war with history and what it did to them, and it doesn’t matter whether they’re winning; it matters that they’re fighting.

  By an hour before sunrise, the accordion player has dragged his voice into a ragged yelp; his fingers play fewer notes, but his arms are still nailing the rhythm. Blood runs down the bass player’s wrist, he’s wrapped his fingers in leather. The drummer’s in a stupor, the trumpet player passed out from the liquor an hour ago, and the saw player stands over him, wailing out his own parts and shouting out the trumpet player’s lines in ripe harmony as the dancers shout and spin, stomp the groove into the bricks under their feet. Against the brightening sky, Dayneesha thinks she sees Marco on the roof, scanning the land north of them, watching for smoke. She wants to invite him down to join them, but she’s beginning to understand. It’s about the slaves and th
e Slick Six, the Aardvark and his years at sea. The bloody footprints he left as he walked across the earth. He found something and lost it, and he’d burn down the world to get it back. Down in the street, in the squeal and thump of a party that still has a few hours left in it, she pities him, and is afraid for everyone else.

  Days pass in windy heat, crisp cold, the plains dark under the bowl of the sky. There is still no sign of the New Sioux. No reports from the outlying farms of raids, no men on horses galloping away with vegetables dangling from their saddles. No shooting along the highway; no disappearances of livestock. Maybe they’re late, says Lindsborg’s mayor, who runs a hardware store at the end of the main drag. He shrugs. I don’t know what to tell you. Except that folks around here like you, and you’re welcome to stay. There are signs of something else, though, clanking and chugging, the steam-forged tone of a factory whistle warping upward at the end, the trumpeting of an elephant. The refugees from Buhler heard the same sounds the night before the fires, the stampeding animals, the blood running over the cracks in the sidewalk. On the third night of Marco’s and Dayneesha’s stay in Lindsborg, there are reports that two cows are missing from a farm east of the town. The New Sioux, some say. But then the cows are found farthernorth, under the overpass to I-135, lowing at the drizzling sky from its the dry shadow. Their owners had left the gate open. The refugees from Buhler are not calmed. They look up into the hazy clouds, open their mouths, put their tongues out. Swear they can taste diesel in the rain.

  “Come on,” the mayor says.

  “It rained like that before Buhler too.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything,” the mayor says.

  “Can you explain it?”

  “Can you explain anything that’s happened in the last five years?” the mayor says. “It just happened, okay? It happened.”

  The mayor was born and raised in Salina, moved to Lindsborg when he was twenty-two because of his wife, a Lindsborg native with long red hair who refused to leave the house with her dying parents in it. They buried them and stayed, ran an antique shop for tourists who wandered off the highways while driving across the country, who dribbled into town for the dwindling Swedish festival every summer. The tourists told them about how crowded it was around New York, how you could sit in your car and go five miles in three hours, couldn’t walk down the sidewalk in a straight line. They could see it on television, in the movies, people hanging off of straps on screeching subways, staggering off commuter buses. And the money was weird: stocks rocketing up and crashing down, people buying one-bedroom apartments in tenement buildings for two million dollars, people living on two dollars a day. Cars that cost as much as houses, only to be chewed on by the salt on northeastern highways in the winter. People taking cars and trains six hours a day to work and back. Penthouses, public housing. Most expensive slice of air in the country. Poorest congressional district. The people on television in suits and ties shrieking about these issues as hundreds more in suits and ties shouted at each other behind them, as though it all mattered. They looked out the window, to a brilliant sun throwing bands of color across the horizon, to the mist rising from thefields, to the sound of crickets, dogs, a solitary car. Silent fireworks in the sky every night. The mayor walked out onto the porch, turned back toward his wife, who sat on the stairs. Promise me we don’t have to leave here.

  When the collapse first began, it was just more suits and ties shouting. He didn’t pay a lot of attention. But then the television showed people in the street rioting, chairs through windows, flames in the cities on the coast. A few of the television channels disappeared; the gas stations outside of town ran out of gas. Then the shelves in the supermarket started going bare; the price tags came off.

  “How much for this box of matches?” he asked the cashier.

  “How much you got?”

  Then the dollar was gone, the banks were gone. The street became the new market, filled with haggling people. It was weird, he thought, but it didn’t seem so bad. They were all playing Old West; they looked like the photographs he’d seen of Salina in the early railroad days, when it was the grain capital of the world, pictures taken from the roof of a building on Santa Fe Avenue, looking down toward the Masonic temple over a rippling surface of hats and carriage tops, horses and umbrellas, the turning flow of skirts. They were photographs you could hear: fiddles and barkers, a pump organ, the numbers for the price of wheat, announcements about when trains were leaving for the rest of the hungry world. But then they heard that the big farms west of them were closing; there was no more government money to run them, not enough people close by to buy what was left. Hundreds of miles of unharvested grain rotting in the fields. Farms black with crows, picking over the remains. A wave of people moving east, half-starved. Where are you going? he asked them. East, they said. Haven’t you heard that the towns to the west are dead now? All around Goodland, there’s nobody there anymore. It’s got to be better to the east. But the mayor looked out over the fields again, the rising mist, the colors in the sky.

  “I still don’t want to leave,” he told his wife.

  “Me neither.” And smiled. “You’ll see. It’ll be better than it ever was.”

  She was right. The town’s economic development committee closed their offices, took up farming and masonry, knitting, shoe repair. There’s no television out here now except what people get off satellite dishes; a little radio from a few local boys who run the station out of the attic of their parents’ house when the power’s on; thirty-two computers that still work after five years thanks to the tender ministrations of a dedicated geek able to resurrect the dead. Sometimes they miss the movies. The mayor wants to have Hollywood Night in the main intersection, set up some chairs and throw the picture against the side of a building, and they’ll all sit in the summer air, swatting away flies while giants play out the melodrama of a country they’re already forgetting the details of. He found a working projector that would do the trick, but he hasn’t found any films yet. It makes him sad sometimes; but then he rides out to the farms, comes back to his house, his wife, his children, and wonders why he’s so upset when the life he’s living now is nothing to be afraid of.

  The water in the Caribbean is turquoise, brightening in rings around islands that slope out of the water, rear up with spines of palms, deciduous trees draped in vines. The islands are like sleeping dinosaurs, Zeke thinks; he keeps expecting them to raise their heads from the water on leafy stalks, turn to appraise the Lucky Sun as possible prey, then swim off together in a flock, leaving swirls of sand boiling in their wakes. But the islands do not move; people fish among them from wooden boats, laying nets in the water, tying them down. One sail has a snorkel painted on it, half obscured by a mended patch of bright red, a scar from a hurricane that descended on St. Croix two years ago, when some people fled to the jungle in the interior of the island while others stayed to loot. They say that everybody seemed to be armed that day, that there were drums coming from the forest, from places that nobodyhad thought were inhabited. This planet, Zeke thinks, is just waiting for us to go; then there will be no more history, and the world can go about healing itself from the damage we’ve done.

  They’ve been at sea for two and a half weeks, following the dots of islands through the South Pacific, the locks of Panama, during which the captain’s wife stood at starboard for the entire day. Near the Caribbean coast, a man waved to her from a distant bluff, and she waved back. Captain Bengwe Saloon has become friendly with his property, tells them stories of his pirating, of oil tankers ablaze off Norway, black smoke heaving into the sky, of the time he crept aboard a Chinese cruise ship from an aluminum dinghy, of the girls he knew before he was married. So many girls, he says. His wife knows he’s making most of them up, but lets him talk all the same. Hideo, Carolyn, and Zeke are friendly back, share four bottles of rum that almost send Hideo and Zeke into the ocean off of Easter Island. But if they push too far, the captain snaps, puts them back in their cell. Reminds them of
who owns them if things don’t work out.

  Hideo has been avoiding Zeke as much as it’s possible to on a fishing boat, and Zeke knows it. He’s quiet in the bunks, quiet at dinner. Zeke sees Hideo and Carolyn talking to stern, approaches them and makes a joke involving the phrase “sucking the monkey.” Neither of them says anything. What’s going on? Zeke later asks Carolyn. She shakes her head. Hideo needs to talk to you. I’m with him, but this is his thing.

  The Lucky Sun enters the Sargasso Sea, and the ocean slows, the wind slows, there’s only the sound of the boat’s cranky motor. Hideo comes on deck, walks over next to Zeke. Puts his hands on the rail.