The Unit

by Terry DeHart

  I’ll meet a girl who maybe won’t know about my history, but maybe she will. I’ll buy or build us a place to live and we’ll make love anytime we want, in every room of the house, and I’ll learn how to brew beer and we’ll be good neighbors and we won’t miss church on Sunday morning. Maybe I’ll run for sheriff or mayor, or maybe I’ll get into some kind of business, but I won’t let my work take over my whole life, because family is the thing that matters. We’ll have kids, sons and daughters, and we’ll raise them to be strong and good, so this kind of shit will be less likely to happen again.

  Below us the mountains are dropping down into plains. Redding is okay. There isn’t any electricity, but we fly over hotspots of campfires and the light of lanterns and candles glowing through the windows of all those unelectrified houses and hotels. There’s a halo of smoke over the town. It looks like an old town from maybe the early 1800s. I can’t see much, but I can smell the woodsmoke and a hint of something that smells like horses and shit. It might be a safe place, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it isn’t. BS adds some power and climbs higher. I almost decide to take the controls from him, but then Redding is behind us, another mystery.

  We fly farther south until we must be over Red Bluff. There isn’t much old-timey sweetness about Red Bluff. It’s on fire. The whole town is burning. We fly over and the thermals take us up to eight thousand feet before BS can take us into cooler air. There isn’t much oxygen up here, but there’s us. Us and the heat and smoke, all that’s left of a sun-dried little town I barely remember seeing from the windows of Dad’s now-dead car.

  But then someone outside of town is flashing a light at us, a good, strong light. I take the controls from BS and circle us back down over the southern part of town.

  “I wouldn’t do that,” BS says.

  “Yeah. I know,” I say. “But maybe that’s the trouble with the world.”

  “Okay then. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  He sits his old ass back in his seat and crosses his arms. I take us down to three thousand feet AGL and we take a look. It’s two hours until sunrise, and we can’t see very much, but the person on the ground keeps flashing that light at us. It probably isn’t the time or place to be curious, but I take us down to two thousand feet. I’m thinking that maybe there’s some kind of order down there. People who are official, and only not self-elected assholes. Maybe the National Guard is down there, finally helping the people who need helping and killing the ones that need killing. But then a brighter light locks onto us and I see a shitload of flashes on the ground and bullets reach up into the sky. Big bullets. I take us into the thermal again to get us back to a safe altitude. We take the elevator of heat and destruction back up into the sky and I know I won’t be indulging my curiosity about the good of man anytime soon.

  Farther south we drone through the long, flat grind of the Central Valley. I get a cramp in my leg, so I let BS fly again. No lights. No cars are moving, but sometimes I can see reflections from their dead headlights. Sometimes when the moon almost manages to break through, I see the cars and trucks lined up like some kind of museum exhibit, or some kind of advertisement for alternative energy.

  We get down into the long, open places. Rice fields and the marshlands that the environmentalists restored and the edges of the Sacramento Delta. The dim moonlight shines against all that standing water.

  I remember flying over this country when I was first learning to fly. I was flying only to build up hours and I took Candi with me, my first real girlfriend, and she thought it was a beautiful place. As we flew over the wetlands, birds rose up from the water like we were in Africa or something. I kept us high enough to avoid a bird strike and Candi leaned over to look out my side of the aircraft and her breasts brushed against me. I was in heaven then, and she was the hottest thing I’d ever seen and done and I remember wishing the flight school’s old Cessna 152 had an autopilot.

  But now isn’t a good time to have a raging hard-on memory. It takes less time to travel the length of the Central Valley than I’m used to. Cruising above Interstate 5 at 130 knots. The Cessna 182 is a faster bird than the flight school’s old 152, and I like it. There isn’t any other air traffic, needless to say. No left-lane hogs or traffic jams down below. I take the controls from BS and he falls asleep in about ten seconds, flat. I fly and fly and fly. I try not to think. We finally fly over the farm towns north of Sacramento. Marysville and Olivehurst. I see a random sheen of light from a community swimming pool. Rooftops seem to be flat in the night. There isn’t any electricity, but I take us higher because of the power lines I know are strung all around here.

  The sky is gray at first light. I fly over grazing land, and there are shapes down there. Cattle, their hides rotten. There’s smoke rising in the distance. We get to the outskirts of downtown Sac, but that can’t be right. Fires are burning everywhere and it takes a second for my brain to figure out what my eyes are seeing.

  I fly over maybe a half mile of fire, then I get to a place where there’s nothing left to burn. There’s a black hole where the Capitol Mall should be. Nothing. No streetlights or neon or random city lights. It’s darker down there than it was in the mountains, and it smells like burned meat and plastic, then it smells like roadkill and old charcoal at the bottom of a barbecue.

  I fly a long circle around the place we once called downtown. The sun slides above the rim of the Sierras and I can see better. The bomb made a huge hole in the ground. It probably didn’t go off high above the city like the bombs we dropped on Japan. It must’ve gone off right on the ground and it made big crater that makes an almost perfect bowl in the ground. It looks like something from a disaster movie, and I don’t want to believe it’s real. It’s a Hollywood set, a practical joke, an advertisement, or a sick antiwar protest. But it’s not. I waggle my wings and go into a tight turn and Mom wakes up. She yawns and takes a look. She looks for second then jerks up straight in her seat.

  “Oh no.”

  It’s just about the biggest understatement I’ve ever heard, but she says it in the sharp, hissing voice she uses when the shit hits the fan, using the voice that always freaked me out when I was a kid. The voice I heard once when we were driving cross-country at night, and I was maybe nine years old and drowsy, and a car crash happened right in front of us, and Dad slammed on the brakes and swerved and we slid off the road and headed toward oncoming traffic and we didn’t know if we’d make it, and Mom said exactly that same thing.

  Oh no.

  I fly us back through and out of the smoke. I leave downtown Sac behind us because downtown is death, and death is still hot and hungry. I fly toward our neighborhood because I want to see if anything is left of the house I used to call home.

  Bill Junior

  Her old man might make it, and he might not. I take Melanie out of service so she can help her pops. My men bitch like crazy when I do it, but I put a guard on the shack, and I check the place myself every few hours, and so far my pirates are keeping their swords in their scabbards.

  I’m not sure why I’m being so nice to the girl, but it’s something I need to do, no matter why. I watch her helping her old man, and it does something to me, because I can’t imagine anyone doing that for me, staying up all hours and holding me and changing my bandages and crying and worrying. It makes me jealous, but I’m also hoping that someone will care that much about me, someday, and right now it doesn’t seem completely impossible.

  And of course maybe her old man really is rich as God. And if it’s true, maybe I’ll find a way to get the fuck out of here in one piece, with Melanie and the gold we found and hopes of even better things.

  Susan

  Dear God, why did I let myself believe that our city might still be okay? And now I’m not sure of anything. Home was the prize—the point of all of the walking and risking and praying and fighting and flying. But I knew it was a possibility that the city was ruined, so there was nothing left to do but see it for ourselves.

  At first I
don’t believe it, but I’m a believer these days, so I try to look down at the hole like an anthropologist, a surveyor, an engineer, an insurance adjuster. I’m a FEMA official looking for survivors, then I’m a funeral director with pre-cremated clients, then I’m me again, the claws of anger beginning to pierce the shock.

  I ride out a long wail that scares the bejesus out of me. Even while I’m screaming, I know it doesn’t help anything, but I scream like a raging baby, expelling all the air from my lungs, winding down and then taking a deep breath and doing it again. My face is hard and hot and I can feel my veins and arteries worming their way to the surface of my skin, but I can’t stop myself. Scott and the old man turn to look and then they turn back. They hold their heads very still and let me wail.

  And then it passes, and I can breathe in and out. My wounded arm is throbbing to the beat of the airplane’s engine. Scott skirts the bomb crater and flies toward the eastern suburbs. He leaves the hole where the Capitol once stood, and heads for our neighborhood, our home. It’s the worst nightmare of Fail-Safe and On the Beach and duck-and-cover and the documentaries about nuclear war. Red circle in the center. Bright orange ring for the unsurvivable blast. Dark yellow rings for the zones of fire and lethal radiation, and so on, out to a radius of dozens of miles.

  When I was a little girl I used to sit on the warm wooden floor of my childhood home and draw red and orange and yellow rings over my coloring book pictures, not understanding what they represented, but loving the symmetry, the rings circling my home and saying, This is where you live; if you get lost, this is the way home.

  We fly out of the smoke, and I recognize the buildings below. The Methodist church, the elementary school, the Wal-Mart. Scott circles our neighborhood. Our house would probably be in one of the medium-dark yellow rings. There wasn’t any fire here, or fallout, but it’s too close to the blast zone, and I know we won’t be able to go back. Not ever. My garden, with my plans for tomatoes and bell peppers and lettuce and sunflowers. My kitchen with its new granite countertops. The oven that cooked all those meals. The potholders that Melanie made in the third grade. The baby footprints and pictures and the documents we thought were important enough to store in a fireproof safe. All the memories now poisoned unto death.

  Scott turns us away and climbs higher. The radiation must be passing into our bodies now. I don’t feel anything but I can’t slow my breathing and I start to hyperventilate. Dizzy at low altitude, and it doesn’t help to look out and see the road crowded with cars and trucks that will never run again. I begin to see bodies, their feet facing the blast. My head hurts. My uterus hurts. I get tunnel vision. But I’m sick of thinking like a victim. Like prey. We’ve been at the mercy of others for far too long, and I can’t take it anymore. I don’t want peace; I want justice. I’m dizzy and then I’m not myself at all. The pain fades into the background and I break through the clouds in my head and fly fast and straight in the sunlight. I’m hard and without emotion, and I feel free to do anything I want to do. Why should only ambushers and rapists and killers be allowed to indulge themselves? It’s my turn now.

  I cock Old Bill’s old gun. It makes four clicks when I pull back the hammer. I grind the barrel into the place where his spine meets his brain. I feel nothing at all for him, and I almost forget that my son is close enough to touch. It was people like Bill who did this to us. Bill didn’t bomb our city, but his kind did. His foreign counterparts in crime and sleaziness and greed, and the mean and fearful masses egging them on. He might be at the bottom rung of people who do things like that, but he’s one of them, no doubt about it, and one of them needs to pay. It might as well be him.

  He reads my mind.

  “Wasn’t me that done this.”

  He turns and I pull the gun from his spine and let it wander up to his brainpan. He turns his head until the muzzle is pointed at the corner of his forehead.

  “I didn’t have nothing against Sacramento. I thought it was a fine old town. It had all kinds of hookers, you know. Tall ones and short ones and whores of all colors and persuasions and talents.”

  He laughs his phlegmy, horny old-man laugh. “And speaking of fucking, hey, look on the bright side—the state of California won’t be taxing us up the ass anymore. Not for a while, anyhow.”

  He’s enjoying himself. I finally catch my breath. He offends me. If thy eye offends thee, pluck it out. My finger is moving from the triggerguard to the trigger. My finger is on the trigger and I’m down in the charcoaled city center. I’ve been cremated and the wind is mixing my molecules into the great mounds of ashes. I’m down there mixing with friends and acquaintances and strangers and children. All the children, their dust and dead promise blowing through the remains of the city.

  The muzzle of the gun wanders away from Old Bill’s ear and then back and away again. We hit a patch of turbulence, or maybe the turbulence is only in my mind, and the gun bucks and roars in my hand. The air is blasted and bitter with the smell of spent gunpowder. We sit with our mouths open. Scott’s lips start to move but I can’t hear what he’s saying. Old Bill puts his hands to his ears and opens his mouth to scream but I can’t tell if he’s making any sound. He turns and his face is livid. He grabs the barrel of the gun. I pull the trigger, but I hadn’t cocked the gun again after it fired, and nothing happens. My fingers lose their strength and Old Bill has it then. I reach for it, but I only have one functional arm, and he bats my hand away. He cocks the revolver and points it at Scott’s head. He’s shouting, and his words dribble into my wounded ears. He’s calling me bad names and then I can hear again.

  “I’ve had just about as much as I’m gonna take,” he says.

  He points the gun at my face.

  “Sit the fuck back.”

  I do. He points the gun at Scott again.

  “If you try anything, we’ll only have one pilot on this flight. Understand?”

  I nod. Scott keeps us straight and level, obeying Old Bill’s command to fly us back to the north.

  Melanie

  My Goggy is still alive, so things could be worse. But we’re in the hands of people who make it their business to make things worse. They let me give him water, but he’s not with it enough to swallow.

  I get a cloth and clean the small part of my dad’s head that isn’t bandaged. Scalp wounds bleed like crazy. He starts bleeding again. It takes me half the morning to get his head wound to clot, while the boys sleep off their hangovers. The kid on guard duty watches without saying anything. He doesn’t tape up my hands and I don’t do anything that might make him want to.

  The boys are mean bastards when they wake up. I make coffee for them and watch them moan and groan and glare at my dad, and it makes me happy to see their pain. I wish they were in a lot more pain, but then I wonder if that idea violates my vow of pacifism. No. I’m not a saint. And even saints and heroes must’ve had bad thoughts about their oppressors. Don’t you think Gandhi wanted to bring pain to his enemies? Maybe even Christ looked down from the cross at the laughing Roman soldiers and thought about how nice it would be to shoot some fire and brimstone up their asses. It’s only human.

  Bill Junior soaks his head in cold water and then walks over to us. He walks with his feet turned in and his head down, like he’s walking across the stage of a Western movie set.

  “Will he live?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because he’s my dad. He’s tough and he’s going to live. Get used to the idea, because that’s just the way it is.”

  “Good.”

  He walks away and organizes a burial party for the two boys Dad killed. I try not to look at them. I don’t care that they’re dead. Not a bit, even though I was partially responsible for their deaths. If I hadn’t let myself get kidnapped… If I would’ve fought harder or run faster or hidden myself better—if, if, if—then those boys might still be walking the earth and joking and grabbing their crotches and standing in line to pull a train on someone.


  Yeah. After a few minutes of wallowing in that thought, I can look at them. The living ones don’t bother to cover the bodies of the dead. They leave them staring up into the overcast, their eyes glazed with the stupidity of death. The living boys pile a stack of lumber into a shoddy funeral pyre, then they strip the bodies. They save some of the clothes and they fold them carefully, and then they toss the corpses onto the pyre.

  One of the dead ones was called “Rick the Prick” because he had such a big one. The first time he raped me, I bled for a long time. The other kid was Ralph, just Ralph. He had a weak chin and he liked to hit me. They look too small to have been as dangerous as they were. They look pathetic, but I can’t stop watching them burn.

  Bill Junior doesn’t say any words over them. The fire is low and smoky and he throws a cup of gasoline on it and walks away. The fire blossoms into the sky and seems to hover above the bodies, then it gets right down into the evidence of their existence. I don’t feel good about how they died, my responsibility for it, but I watch the fire feed on them until they look just exactly right.

  Scott

  I look at the gauges. There’s a big hole in the instrument panel. I hear a steady tone in my ears, but it’s getting quiet enough that I can hear other things, too.

  “Fuel’s getting low.”

  My voice sounds like it came from down a hole. BS shakes his head.

  “Just keep us headed north, boy.”