by Terry DeHart
It’s all on our heads and hearts now, another unremarkable generation that wanted to change the world. And we have changed it. Oh my, yes we have.
We’re following the highway. That damned road is still our guide. Scott flies low, but even then we lose sight of the ground for tense minutes at a time. We’re in clouds and then we’re in dark sky. I hope the clouds aren’t radioactive. We’ve been lucky, so far. The jet stream flows to the north of us, and that’s what kept us out of the death clouds. But poor Oregon. The clouds are almost certainly stacked up over it, as they always are this time of year, but now the clouds are hot, hot, hot. I hope someone lives. I hope the trees remain, at least. The flowers and crops of the Willamette Valley and the deer and elk in the Coast Range and Cascades. The black bear and cougar and salmon and trout.
My mother is gone, God bless her, but I hope the mud of the Willamette Valley is still fertile. I’ve always wanted to retire in Oregon. I haven’t ever told Jerry, but part of me always planned to end up back there. Back home, where I could visit the old neighborhood where people knew the unsavory parts of my history, yes, but also the basic goodness of my family. Americans have shallow roots, but I miss the sweet, sad feeling of being a Northwesterner. The feeling of being strong and reliable when I’m four months into a nine-month rainy season. The feeling of wearing flannel without irony and driving up old logging roads into wilderness that has no street signs or lights, traveling to places where you could die of exposure if you weren’t careful. Nameless clearcuts and roaring campfires. The luxury of feasting on trout pan-fried with butter and salt and dill in the midst of the dark temperate rain forest. Toasting marshmallows after. The smell of beer on my father’s breath as he told us scary-funny tales about Sasquatch. The glow of my mother’s eyes in the firelight, smiling. The feeling of being in the wilderness, but being safe as I said my prayers and climbed into my sleeping bag.
That’s the part of Oregon I hope is left.
We almost fly into a series of big power lines then. They’re right in the windshield and Scott adds power and pulls back on the controls and it pushes my guts down into my lap. Both Scott and Old Bill are swearing their heads off, but we come through the other side just fine. They swear for a while longer and then they laugh as if they’re old friends. But then the silence gets heavy again, and we drone on into the night.
I’m looking forward to daylight so Scotty can take us up high and we can fly in a straight line. The Lord said in His Good Book that the most honorable roads were intended to be straight and narrow. God brings the moon out from behind the clouds for us. It’s the first time I’ve seen the moon since the bombs went off. Maybe our Lord and Savior is showing off. Maybe He thinks it’s the least He can do, considering.
So I watch the milky glow of the moonlit road beneath us. The dead cars and trucks look soft beneath us, and I imagine they’re already beginning to decay. Snowy patches on the ground give a hint of our speed. That sweet, man-made heat keeps blowing from the vents, and it smells like hot metal and progress and freedom and the luxury of peace. All of my being wants to begin the celebration of our survival, but I know it’s too soon, and so I push the joy back into its bottle and save it on a shelf in my mind, for later.
Melanie
They have him and he’s here with me now. That’s a curse for him and maybe an improvement for me. He killed two of them to get here. There are only sixteen boys now, and they’re so pissed off about Dad’s attack that they’re ripping their own hair out. They’re also beating on Dad. But Bill Junior won’t let them kill him.
Bill Junior says something and the beating stops and they drag Dad over to the fire. I’m handcuffed to the steering wheel of a wrecked cop car. Bill Junior uncuffs me.
“Help your old man. If you run, he dies.”
I don’t say anything. When I was a little girl I always thanked people for everything they did for me, but then I learned about the power of silence. I get up and try to find the right wrecked car, and then I do. I open the trunk. The boys use the trunks like drawers to stash their plunder, and I was lucky enough to see where they put the medical supplies. I pull out gauze bandages and antibiotic ointment and Ace bandages. There isn’t any medical tape for the bandages, but there’s no shortage of duct tape.
The boys don’t visit me anymore. I’m slightly more than meat now, probably because they want me to get my dad to give them millions. It’s all bullshit, but my Goggy is with me now, sleeping, I hope. Most of his head is wrapped in silver duct tape. The boys get drunk and they get into another of their stupid fistfights, two of them fighting in the firelight, and the others placing bets, and then one boy gets knocked out cold and the rest of them leave one by one and pass out in their motel rooms and cars and shacks.
It’s been years since I spent time alone with my dad, but it doesn’t seem that long ago. We were a busy family that really only came together once a year, at Christmastime.
“This isn’t much of a vacation, Dad,” I say.
He doesn’t answer, not that I expected him to, but I keep talking. He’s unconscious, maybe in a coma, and everyone who ever watched TV knows that people in comas might be listening for friendly voices to guide them back into the world. So I give him one.
“Do you remember it, Dad—the good things? I’m pretty sure you remember the time I got busted smoking pot. I told you it was the first and the last time I tried it, and I loved that you pretended to believe me when I told you that. But listen, it was the last time. I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but I thought you should know. It wasn’t your fault that I tried weed. I know you and Mom must’ve gotten high when you were young. I’ve seen the pictures of the eighties. Greed is good. A person couldn’t walk down the street without getting propositioned by a coke dealer, right?”
His breathing speeds up and I think maybe he can hear me.
“But it’s not your fault that the world was a shithole when you were young, just like it’s not your fault that this happened.”
His eyelids flutter and I keep talking.
“Do you remember when I rode a bike on two wheels for the first time? When I won the all-around in varsity gymnastics? Do you remember my first boyfriend?”
I tell him about things that happened in my childhood to see if he remembers them. His eyelids don’t flutter again. I imagine he’s trying to remember, but when those things happened, he wasn’t there. He was always at work. So I trick myself into believing he was there. And then I start to make up memories, just to guess what his answers might be. Remember when I hit that line drive in softball and beaned the pitcher? He sends out a vibe like, Sure. Who could forget that? I know he’s lying, but I don’t give him the look. The “you’re full of shit” look.
It never happened. I never beaned any pitcher with a line drive, but I wish I had. Nope. It didn’t happen, and even if it had happened, my dad was at work. But I can’t stop lying, and neither can he, even though he’s in a coma. I tell him lies and he sends out untruthful vibes until our lies become wistful what-ifs and apologies. Remember when…? Sure I do. And the time when…? That was a great day, wasn’t it? And so on, until we make up this wonderful, wonderful life that never happened, my dad always right with me to cheer me on, no matter what.
But then I can’t help myself from being kind of mad at him. He’s a mess and I’m a mess, and we have all this baggage. But sometimes we can break through all of that. He surprises me sometimes by being not so uptight. Sometimes he doesn’t drink too much, and he isn’t an asshole, and sometimes I can appreciate it. I haven’t thought about it forever, but there was this one time when we really broke through the crap.
When I was thirteen, I argued with him so much that he stopped opening his mouth for a while there. I don’t know how many times I told him I hated him, but he didn’t run away from me. He didn’t lock himself in his study or go for long drives like some dads would’ve done. No, he sat next to me on the couch. Not too close, but not too far away, either. He w
ouldn’t look at me and his face was serious and he didn’t talk, but he was sending out this vibe that I couldn’t understand. At that age, I was pissed off when I woke up in the morning and pissed off when I went to bed, so at first I took his silence for criticism. So I’d sit there for a while, then mutter a few vile things and stomp away to my room.
But it made me curious, the way he kept sitting next to me. He might’ve had a small drink before he sat down, but he didn’t keep drinking, like he usually did. I stopped muttering at him when he squeezed himself onto the opposite end of the couch. I stopped running to my room. I stopped looking at him, too, and he didn’t change his game, so we sat on opposite ends of the couch. We didn’t say a word and we didn’t look at each other, either, and it was like some kind of contest. We sat and we sat and we sat. Isn’t that something from Dr. Seuss? But that’s what we did, and it was like a competition. We’d sit after dinner and watch whatever was on the tube, the news or cartoons or PBS. Whatever. And we wouldn’t bitch or change the channel. We’d just sit and work very hard at ignoring each other, even though we were only about three feet apart.
We became very good at it. I could go into a state that was close to a coma. Dad would let his eyes narrow to slits and he’d breathe without sound through his mouth like he’d just fallen asleep. We were like cold-blooded animals, dormant right there in the living room. Maybe we were mediums channeling the emptiness that existed before us, and after us, and always. We sat for hours and I could never tell who won the competition, but after a while it started to crack me up. When he puts his mind to it, Dad is pretty good at cracking me up. He’d do weird things to get me to laugh, and that was one of them. And I did start to laugh at his game, but I couldn’t let it show. I’d sit like a corpse but I’d be laughing my ass off, inside. Weird or disgusting things would come on TV and Dad would be looking right at it, but he wouldn’t move a muscle, and that cracked me up. We watched ads for erectile dysfunction, and we didn’t flinch. We watched ads for products that treat vaginal dryness and diarrhea and genital warts, but we didn’t break our silence, and so we showed each other just how we felt about the culture of television, and how we felt about life in general, and maybe how we felt about each other, all without saying a word. Genius, huh?
For about a week we did that almost every night after dinner, and Dad was stubborn as hell, so I couldn’t quit, either. We sat and we sat and we sat, but I was laughing inside, and I knew he was laughing, too. And then one day Mom finally stood in front of us and asked us what in God’s name was going on, and Dad looked at me and I looked at him, and we laughed our asses off. The look of love he had in his eyes cut right through my anger and I’ll never forget it, all the things about life that were better after that.
And he’s here with me now, doing his quiet thing. I sit three feet away from him and I play the Ignoring Game with him. He’s playing it, too. I listen very hard to make sure he’s breathing, and then I hear his breath. His eyes are closed and his mouth is open. Yeah, he’s good at this game, so I have no choice but to go to that place inside me where I used to go.
I become a rock. A hibernating squirrel. A smartass ghost. I send vibes to him and I think he’s doing the same, because if I ever thought he wasn’t scheming in some way to make me laugh, or to feel better about my life, or to give me orders and commands, then I don’t know what I’d do. I remember every single argument we ever had, before and after we played the Ignoring Game, and I don’t know what the hell I thought I was doing. He’s my father, for Christ’s sake. If we make it out of here, I’ll be my own person, steady in the world, and maybe someday I’ll thank him for that. I’ll leave home, but when I visit, I’ll never go back to the way I was before we played the Ignoring Game. Never. When this is over, I plan to retire from my career of giving him shit. I’d tell him about it now, but he wouldn’t believe me.
I have to prove myself first.
Scott
We’re flying over mountains and we bounce into the burned-smelling clouds sometimes. I hope we won’t get sick. I don’t know the terrain. It makes me nervous as hell, and it shows in the waggling way I fly. Old Bill begs from the left seat for fifteen minutes before I let him take a turn at the controls.
“Thanks, kid,” he says. “You don’t know how much I’ve been looking forward to this flight, present company excluded, of course.”
“Shut up and fly.”
I don’t trust him, but it turns out that he’s a good pilot. He’s smooth at the controls and he keeps the plane on a steady course through updrafts and crosswinds. But we don’t fly more than one single mile before he starts giving me shit. He puts his fat finger on the artificial horizon indicator.
“See that instrument right there, the one with the little airplane on it? That’s how I know we’re flying straight and level. And don’t you worry, I’ll keep us out of the trees because I know this country. I know every hill and bump and ditch better than you know the chancres on your boyfriend’s dick.”
“Maybe you should get out and join all that nature down there.”
He laughs and keeps trying to show me how a daddy drives his car. Fuck off and die. That’s what I want to say to the old dickhead, but I don’t. He’s right about the flying. He looks at his watch and at the compass and altimeter, and he knows where the mountains are. If I would’ve kept flying, I would’ve ended up with a mountain in the windshield. But I don’t have to take his shit.
“Hey,” I say. “Shut up or I’ll put it down on the road and give you a tune-up.”
I don’t know where I got that “tune-up” shit. I heard it on TV, probably, but it works on Old Bill. It’s a language he understands. And so he does shut up, mostly. He smiles at me and wags his head to his old-fart music. He whistles along with “Free Bird,” which I shouldn’t like because it’s the music of rednecks and Joe Gut Six-Packs, but I kind of do like that song. I wouldn’t have figured Bill Senior could keep a tune, but he’s one of those guys who can really whistle. He whistles better than the Lynyrd Skynyrd lead singer sings. It pisses me off. Everything he does pisses me off. I decide to stop thinking of him as Bill Senior. I’ll just call him “BS” from now on.
So BS flies and I let my thoughts wander to the time just after the bombs. The people of Yreka took us in. They barbecued all the fresh meat in town, and we feasted like I’d never feasted before. Then they set us up in tents in store parking lots, and after a few days the local families “adopted” us. They did the decent thing, out of the goodness of their hearts, and made up a blind lottery. Each “unhoused” family was given a number and each local family that was involved drew a number, and that was the way they did it.
We didn’t see the drawing. We used duct tape to put our number on our tent, and then we waited. Our number was 007. They did everything at city hall or somewhere, and we didn’t see it, but it wasn’t long before the locals started showing up, greeting people, taking families out of the tents and into their houses. It was damned nice of them. I’d like to think that we would’ve done the same thing in their shoes, but I’m not so sure. That kind of goodness doesn’t seem to be in the world anymore, but maybe someday it will come back to us.
I was hoping that we’d be adopted by a family with a hot daughter. Can’t blame me for hoping. But that’s not what we got. A retired military guy and his wife drew our number. The man had been a colonel in the army. He was as uptight as Dad, and he was in his seventies, but he was also the nervous type, like I am, with maybe some kind of social anxiety disorder. But he had some good ways to deal with the wobbly-ass world. His hobby was brewing beer. I liked him right away. Gray dude. Gray hair and gray eyes and gray skin, but he took us into his house and gave us mugs of tasty beer at night.
His wife was just plain great. She was one of those old ladies who makes you feel special. She reminded me of my sweet, dead gramma, and I fell for her right away. When I smiled at her corny jokes, I was really smiling. But I don’t want to think about that time anymore, becau
se it’s gone.
Right now my dad is fighting what might be his last battle. And Mel—I have no idea what they did to her, and I don’t want to guess. Maybe she’ll take a gun when I offer one to her, if I ever get another chance. She needs to pick up a gun and get to work. The thought crosses my mind that if I give her a weapon, she’ll turn it on herself. But no. She wouldn’t do that.
Me, I’ve been healed for a purpose and a cause, and He has revealed His plan to me, clear as the clearest day. I plan to get a group of people together. Young guys like me who want to make the world a better place, and aren’t afraid to fight. Call it revenge or justice or taking out the garbage, I don’t care. Mob or posse, it doesn’t matter. He has spoken to me, and He told me that I am to be His instrument in this time, His perfect weapon, and He will work His miracles through me. I’ll get Mom settled in Sacramento, and then I’ll get a group of guys together and we’ll do whatever it takes to save Dad and Mel.
But we won’t stop there. We’ll stay in the wild places, fighting to bring goodness back into the world. Maybe we’ll call ourselves marshals, but whatever we call ourselves, we’ll go wherever the assholes live. We won’t steal or kill people who don’t deserve it. We’ll be strong, but nice as anything, like the way I remember my grandfather, who fought in Hue City in Vietnam, but we’ll also be as hard as my grandfather was, and we won’t hesitate to kill the bad people, the people who need to be killed to give goodness and decency a chance. We’ll be the law and we won’t allow ourselves to become assholes. We’ll be everywhere and nowhere, blowing the bad shit right out of the world, and then we’ll settle down and enjoy the peace we’ve brought.