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

by Brian Francis Slattery

  “You’re taking his offer seriously,” she says.

  “Yes,” he says.

  “It’s insane. You know that, right?”

  “Yes. But everything we’ve done in the last five years has been insane.”

  “True.”

  “What do you think I should do?” he says.

  “Your dreams are telling you to do it.”

  “But you have more common sense than they do.”

  She pushes herself off the floor and goes to him. His eyes rise to meet hers, and they’re back on the reservation, when they first met. He’s standing in front of the post office, a map in his hands, water around his feet. She’s in the driver’s seat of a pickup truck that’s older than her father. Their eyes lock for two seconds as she’s driving by, and then she turns to the openwindow and spits. Their lives are running out ahead of them, she thinks, waving at them from the horizon. What else can they do but follow?

  “Just one question,” she says. “Do you trust him?”

  “No,” he says. “I think he knows not what he does.”

  “But you don’t think it matters.”

  “No.”

  “Then I think we should do it.” She shakes her head. “New York City.”

  He strides out of the temple. Marco is waiting on the steps; the two soldiers standing next to him tense up, guns pointed at his head and stomach, waiting for Sherman’s word. He lowers their guns with a wave of his hand.

  “We’ll follow you,” he says. “We leave in two days.”

  Marco smiles, they shake hands, and Robert Blackfeather Sherman sees it again, as he did when Marco knelt before him just a few minutes ago: The light warps around Marco Angelo Oliveira; the colors of the trees and sky stretch and smear, as if Marco is an empty place in the shape of a man and the earth and air around him are screaming to fill it.This page intentionally left blank

  CHAPTER XII.

  Revolutions.

  The Colorado morning starts cold, a bite that nips the skin, talks about the coming frost. Then the sun angles horizontal across Limon, paints zebra stripes of bright pink and shadow over the roads and the Americoids’ bus, which is still jackknifed in the grocery store parking lot; bursts into the windows of the houses where the Americoids sleep, in oblivion. On the bus, they slumbered through thunderstorms and swerving near-accidents, hailstones as big as a fist; a little sunlight is nothing. But Keira Shamu, snoring faceup on a couch in a sagging bungalow, wakes up after a minute of the light tickling her eyelids. She snorts, blows her nose, wonders how that happened, but then realizes it’s the Vibe tickling the atmosphere around her, making her magnetic, pulling her toward the hinges of the door. Time to go. Time to move, if you want to see what’s going down on the eastern shore of this dissolute nation.

  She finds Doctor San Diego meditating in a handstand on the roof of the train station, greeting the beginning of the day, makes her steps quiet at first because she’s afraid of startling him. But he knows she’s there; he was with her when she woke up. Greetings and congratulations, for we get to live another day.

  “I need to get to New York,” she says.

  Doctor San Diego lifts one hand off the roof. “I understand,” he says, and she has the uncanny sense that he does, even though she never told him what Marco told her about his plan, in the dark near the Snake River. The theft that stops the clocks.

  “We’ve been here for a while now,” she says.

  He lifts the other hand off the roof, maintains his position. “Yes.”

  “Do you think we could start heading east?”

  “It’s not for me to say,” Doctor San Diego says. “You’d have to talk to Felix.”

  She finds Felix Purple sitting on the rotting white porch of his baby’s house, eyes closed and facing the sun, a cup of coffee in his hand, curling out steam. He opens his eyes when he hears her step.

  “Keira!” he says. “How goes it, my friend?”

  “It goes,” she says.

  “Getting used to Colorado?”

  “You could say that. Look, there’s something we need to discuss,” she says. “About getting to New York.”

  “You, or all of us?”

  “What’s the difference?”

  Felix Purple thinks about that. The difference, that is. Her arms. Her mouth open in sleep, showing yellow teeth. Their boy’s fat fingers. Bacon frying in a shallow pan. She’s my woman and I’m her man.

  “My definition of ‘us’ appears to have changed,” Felix Purple says. “My tribe has grown smaller. More sedentary. Once we were hunters. Now we are gatherers.”

  “But we need you to drive.”

  “Someone else can drive. It’s a bus, not a spaceship.”

  But none of the other Americoids will do it; they don’t want to be held responsible, condemned to sobriety. Driving’s a big job, man. I’m sure you’ll find someone else to do it. Hey, let me know when we’re leaving.

  “Why don’t you drive?” Felix Purple says.

  “I don’t have a license,” Keira Shamu says.

  “You don’t need a license”—he puts quotes around the word with his fingers—“to do anything.”

  “I mean I don’t know how to drive. At all.”

  “Oh,” Felix Purple says. “Well, don’t start now. It’s a raw deal.”

  It’s the same with all of the Americoids she finds; not right now, maybe later, why don’t we wait a couple weeks, what’s the hurry? What do you want to go to New York for, anyway? She tells them she’s gotta tear across the country for the big thing that’s happening, can’t you feel it coming? But it’s Zeke too, the lameness of his jokes, his detached calmness; the charge that jumped between them when the drugs were in her, the gunshots outside, the fire in the valley. She needs to know if it’ll jump again without those things, though even if it does, she has no idea what she’ll do. She’s standing near the bus in the orange afternoon, Lefty Frizzell sliding out of a house behind her, about to give up and just go herself, leave her people behind, when Asia Sherman strolls up in her jacket, hands in pockets, the words a little more faded in back after Nevada, her past that much further away, but still where she’s from.

  “People are saying you want to go to New York,” she says. “That true?”

  Keira Shamu nods, and Asia Sherman nods back. They don’t even have to talk about it. Asia Sherman has been thinking about her father, the visions in Pine Ridge, the shootings up and down the Midwest, gurgling wounds, blue smoke from gun barrels. It was still violence, people dying, but maybe her father was right, maybe it was also retribution, the calling in of the debt of history. She needed to see it for herself. And there was the hope, a moth in her head, that maybe her father would return to her, the one that existed when their radio was whole, sound thrown from a distant antenna, and the world wascomposed of her relatives’ faces, the clink of bottles, her parents’ feet squeaking across the linoleum floor.

  They leave on the next train heading east, crammed into a car with fifteen other people and eight crates full of pulleys and kitchenware that the train’s owner swears won’t shift in transit. From the roof of the station, Doctor San Diego watches her go, blesses the train with his grooviness. He follows it with his eye for longer than he has ever followed anything, keeps it in his mind when it’s out of sight. He’s trying to slow time, stay between the precious seconds as long as he can, for he knows what’s coming. At last, the Vibe appears in front of him, reaches out its hand. I only exist to serve you, Doctor San Diego says. And you have been most faithful, the Vibe replies. The doctor stands up, takes a good look around, at the broad, bright sky hazy with thin clouds, the glint of the sun off the rails, the red hills rolling away into plains and forests, meadows and beaches, towns and cities. The country he loves, the people he loves. He doesn’t know how to say good-bye to it all. The Vibe takes his hand and pulls him close, speaks into his head, the last lines of the long, dark joke of American history; and Doctor San Diego laughs, closes his eyes, and fade
s into the air.

  The other Americoids sense his departure, drift out of Limon by train, by bicycle, walking in a line along the highway north toward the Rockies, because Denver’s got to have a few parties left in it. They trudge on the shoulder by the dozen, turn around and stick out their thumbs whenever anything drives by, act surprised when nobody stops. In time, the only thing left of the Americoids in Limon is Felix Purple and the bus, its parts eroding away from salvage and casual robbery. The windows leave first, then the tires. Soon the whole caravan is up on blocks and jacks, except for the two wheels with slow leaks in them. Then the mattresses inside go, the engine, the doors. Screws, panels, rivets. At last, people start blowtorching off sections of the metal walls. Within six months, only parts of the chassis are left, and Felix Purple salutes themevery time he passes, his kid on his shoulders, his woman’s hand in his. Now and again there’s a twinge, Highway 61 in front of him, lost in the rain near Clarksdale and that famous crossroads, the wipers moving from side to side. A sausage cooked over a fire under a full moon, crashing waves. But it happens less and less all the time.

  In New York’s harbor, the Rosalita is still at anchor a short swim from the rim of the floating city, its hull covered with graffiti in thirty-two languages, an explosion of faces, animals, buildings, the work of artists who wanted to mark the famous vessel. The prison ship is now a sign, posted at the limits of the Aardvark’s power—there’s a blackened smudge near the stern, the bruise left when the Aardvark tried to blow a hole in the hull by driving a boat packed with explosives into it. It should have succeeded. Everyone in the Rosalita was asleep, the former prisoners, the new citizens, even Big Mother, who should have been watching that night. But the bomb went off early, illuminated the harbor, forced a pulse of water against the shore. Big Mother woke from the flash, saw the flower-shaped cloud rise above him lit from below by the sinking boat’s fire, the Rosalita rocking on the tide.

  Maggot Boy Johnson is on watch now, though he knows it’s pointless. Nothing’ll put the Rosalita down until it finds the Mozambican coast and Malaysia crawls out of the hull. He’s looking over the city’s cluster of towers, clear and sharp with shadow in the early October light. Then he notices a rustling among them, like millions of birds flying from the buildings together, wings flashing in the sun; it’s leaves turning in the wind at the ends of limbs, growing from great trunks of maples and oaks that push their way between the skyscrapers, rising and thickening until they’ve cleared the concrete heights. They unfurl their crowns, and the branches spread over the length and breadth of Manhattan. Brooklyn and Queens become a forest that sends the smell of pollen across the water. Inside the ship, a satellite phone rings; Maggot Boy Johnson hears Big Mother’s hello, startled from sleep. A string of uh-huhs, then Big Mother’s steps on the stairs to the deck.

  “It’s time for us to go. According to the plan,” Big Mother says to Maggot Boy Johnson.

  “I know,” Maggot Boy Johnson says.

  “You got the papers?”

  “Right here.” Maggot Boy Johnson pats the briefcase in his left hand.

  “What kind of a name is Kuala Lumpur, anyway?”

  “Capital of Malaysia,” Maggot Boy Johnson says, and smiles, a big wide thing. He turns to the city. “Don’t worry. We’ll be back soon.”

  From his tower, the Aardvark watches the Rosalita swing its bow northward, churn its way up the river under the skeleton of the George Washington Bridge. He leaves the window, sits behind his desk, tilts back in a leather chair, places a pink sugar-coated amphetamine tablet on his tongue that slides to the back of his mouth, angles down his throat. His empire is crumbling beneath him. The slave revolts keep coming east; there are signs of unrest in Ohio already. He could swear that they’re spreading faster and faster, a wave sweeping out of California; by the time it reaches New York, the Aardvark thinks, he’ll only see it for a second, a glimmer of light on the New Jersey horizon; then it’ll rush over him before he can run or say a word. And then there’s Kimura, calling in his debt. It’s not just that Kimura did it, the Aardvark thinks. He was entitled to it whenever he wanted it. The Aardvark remembers the pagoda in Osaka, how Kimura took him in, all smiles. This will be so good for both of us, Kimura said.

  “I don’t know how to thank you,” the Aardvark said.

  “Thank me by repaying me,” Kimura said, “though I know I do not have to say that.” He waved his hand as if swatting away a tuft of dandelion down. “The money means nothing. It is numbers on paper. Our reputations, the ground beneath our feet, are all we have.”

  But now the Rosalita is gone, and the light plays on the Hudson. Something’s happening, the Aardvark thinks. Something’s about to happen. Where is Marco?

  A few miles southwest near the bottom end of Manhattan, Maria Lista Sandinista hasn’t left her jail cell in two weeks, says she’s on a hunger strike, but she’s really been finishing her bomb. It lies under her bed now, complete, bars of explosive hung with wires that squirm into an electrical switch, a battery. She’s amazed that such a small thing will be able to do so much harm, her orchid bulb, ready to bloom petals of fire. Sometimes at night she curls herself around the bomb, holds it against her chest, as though it were a small dog, an infant cub, closed eyes and soft claws, paws working the air. Her fingers tangle in the wires, wrap around the fuel, and she thinks: Where is Marco?

  Seven hundred miles south, the Free State of Asheville is getting slaves from the west, freed by the revolts. They arrive in scores, packed into the backs of trucks meant for livestock. We heard we could be safe here, they say. We heard we could be free. The fields around the town are a thronging city of wooden beams draped with laundry and mossy blankets; they’re starting to build houses from the woods nearby, dig trenches for plumbing and sewage. They’ve already run a few power lines into the camp, siphoning electricity off the town; when it gets dark they eat under a string of naked bulbs, turn on the radio to listen to whatever the country-music freaks are playing from their station on top of the next mountain over: the Louvin Brothers, the Delmore Brothers, Hank, Hank, Hank. They say they’re starting to like it here. Johanna toured the new city yesterday, kicked up the dirt on the paths between canvases and tarps, let the steam from stews curl into her nostrils.

  “You’re all from the revolts?” she said.

  “That’s right.”

  “Are there a lot more of you coming?”

  “Oh, yes,” they said. “Many more. Unless you can make some other place free too.”

  She’s heard the stories about how the revolts are spreading, a virus through the body of the Aardvark’s domain ever since the magic happened in Watsonville. There’s not a doubt in her head about who’s responsible. She’s seen the pictures of some of the corpses, a model of how tidy death can be. And every couple of days, just-liberated slaves show up in her office, at her house, saying they’ve got a message for her. The words are getting garbled because they’ve passed from mouth to mouth, but she can hear him speaking through every one of those strangers’ throats, the baritones and sopranos, the accents that take in the ice near the Canadian border, the sand near Mexico, the mist rising off the Oklahoma fields, the trees hanging over the hollows of Kentucky. The street corners of the cities on the coast, the towns on the rivers. Am I good enough yet?

  Where is Marco? she thinks. And looks at her deputies, the growing town.

  “Ralph?” she says.

  “Ma’am,” Ralph says.

  “How would you like to be mayor?”

  “Do you mean for a day?”

  “No. For the rest of my term. Into the next one, I suppose, if you win the election.”

  “Hadn’t given it much thought.”

  “Well, think fast. I’m leaving.”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow. I have someone to find.”

  She’s up before dawn, leaves the door to her house open, a sign on the table that says USE ANYTHING YOU NEED, and walks down the mountain toward the intersta
te, a duffel bag in her right hand, a shotgun in her left. It occurs to her while she’s hitching a ride toward Tennessee that she doesn’t even know where to start. But the highway she’s heading toward runs north or south along the spine of the Appalachians. Allshe has to do is pick one, start asking the world where he’s gone; sooner or later, it will have to answer.

  The swinging arms of I-787, which runs along the Hudson in Albany, saw their last big trucks years ago, and for a month or two, stillness reigned upon them; they became sculptures, monuments to the industrial age. Then the first buildings were erected on them, metal garden sheds with windows cut out of them, sleek trailers with the wheels taken off; flanked by people on horses and bicycles, a few stray cars, small pickups that ran on vegetable oil. They took out the guardrails separating the road from the river; cut them into pieces; welded them into piers that grew one by one from the shore, reaching into the river’s current, straight, bowed, or sagging at the mercy of the heat and cold, the wet and dry of the seasons. But it was enough. Small ships left Albany, sailed down to New York, came back again. Near the strap of land that runs from downtown Albany to the Route 7 bridge over the river is a market, rank with the products of the fields to the east and west, glimmering with machinery from the south. The old houses on cobbled streets on both sides of the river fill with the finery of the new age: furniture from Asia, fabric from Europe, paintings from the latest exhibition in Mumbai. There are women who trade with seventeen countries from a cell phone on Troy’s shore. It’s an old joke already that they’ve never had it so good since everything went to shit, but it’s true. The city’s heart beats now like it did centuries ago, when it fought New York City for supremacy of the state. They never forgot that they’d lost.