He was looking at Lecti. She still held the letter in her hand. She remained silent.
He spoke again, “If I was going to hurt you, I would have done it when you were asleep. Your brother was gone. By the way, tying me to the tree was a pretty good idea, Deo.”
He lifted the already untied cord from his leg and showed Deo the loose end.
Not knowing quite what to say, Lecti and Deo said nothing for a moment.
Finally Lecti spoke, “You got a name?”
“Yeah, Eleon.”
“Great,” said Lecti, “I guess you already know our names.”
Getting up and moving stiffly, Eleon tried to slowly work out some kinks. Deo’s gun was still pointed in his general direction. He noted the cooking gear.
“Any chance of something to eat? I don’t need much. I don’t think my stomach’s ready for a meal.”
He picked up the bottle with the remaining alcohol and pitched it across the water, close to the empty bottle.
Lecti watched him closely. She felt exposed when she realized that he had untied himself as she slept and feigned sleep as she read the letter. He must have been sizing them up, but he had not tried to take any action that threatened them. There was one way to find out what he intended.
She picked up Eleon’s shotgun, which she had unloaded while he slept. Then she casually tossed it to him as she said, “Sure, we didn’t eat it all. I was just going to dump it and wash the pan.”
Eleon admired her thinking. He could tell from the weight of the gun that it was unloaded. A shell was not heavy, and it had taken him some practice to be able to tell when his weapon was empty. Besides, only a fool would give back a loaded shotgun this quickly. Eleon knew this kid was young but not a fool. She was testing him.
He sheathed the weapon and reached for the pan.
As he straightened, he dipped a couple of fingers in the pan and placed the result in his mouth. Chewing slowly, he contemplated Deo’s gun.
“When you decide to trust me,” he mused, “you can return my knife and the shells.”
Walking over to the big tree, he leaned his back against it and concentrated on the container. There was more than enough to satisfy him, but he ate it all anyway.
Deo holstered his gun. He and Lecti’s eyes met and they each knew that the other felt okay about their new companion. They would remain wary and return the shells and knife sometime in the future.
“What do you know about those guys you were traveling with?” Deo asked.
Eleon looked up and returned to his meal as he spoke. “Not much, I only met them this side of Sacramento. We took 80 into Reno and then came south into Carson. Didn’t talk much. They weren’t my kind of folks.”
“Through Reno?” asked Lecti. “We heard that Reno was too radioactive to be safe.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard that too,” replied Eleon, “but it’s Salt Lake that was too radioactive to pass through. Reno’s fine. By now, even Salt Lake should be okay.”
Eleon used to keep several radiation sensitive nametags in a small packet. Whenever he pulled into the outskirts of a large city, he would pull one out and place it in front of him on the bike. Reno was completely clean. On the other hand, he had only gone into Salt Lake City a few miles before he noticed the tag changing color. He quickly turned around and headed back up Parley’s Canyon, the route by which he had entered the valley. The tag worried him. He spent the next two days traveling a northern route in order to avoid the city. In Twin Falls he had a conversation with a local man that had buried someone with flesh falling off his body. The dying man had barely been able to tell him that he had come through Salt Lake. But that was just after the plagues.
“Okay, okay, what about Zip and Cotton?” Deo seemed agitated.
“What do you want to know? I really don’t know them.” Eleon didn’t understand what Deo was getting at. “Why do you care anyway? They were strangers to you.”
Lecti was listening, not inclined to participate in the conversation. She did have one question, though. “Did they leave Carson with you? We know you left the hospital earlier than them. Did you meet up with them later?”
Eleon was puzzled by their interest.
“No, I came here right after going through town. I didn’t stop or pass go or collect two hundred dollars, either.”
The allusion was lost on Lecti and Deo. They didn’t know what the strange phrase meant.
Trying to draw the kids out so that he could figure out what was going on, Eleon fed them what little he knew from what he had overheard at a rest stop coming from Reno to Carson.
“They were talking to each other about Las Vegas. Said something about the road through Tonopah.”
Eleon knew he’d hit pay dirt. Deo smiled, a smile that made Eleon feel cold. Strangely, Lecti didn’t seem to appreciate the information. She looked pissed.
“Look,” Eleon said, “if you guys will level with me, I’ll try to help you. I don’t know what you want, and I don’t understand why these guys matter to you.”
Suddenly the light dawned. Eleon thought he understood. He was still fuzzy from the way he had spent the last day. He had forgotten Toshi. He looked at Deo.
“Whoa, wait a minute, now I get it. It’s that girl. She must have left with them or maybe they took her. You want the girl.”
Deo’s face fell. He turned away, his head down.
Eleon did not understand. Somehow he was misreading the situation. He looked to Lecti.
She spoke softly.
“They killed her. They killed her in the hospital and left her on the floor. When we came back they were gone. You were gone. If Hey You hadn’t told me, we would have thought you were part of it.”
“Hey You? Is that the black girl in the stinky coat?” inquired Eleon.
“Yeah.”
Nothing was as Eleon expected. He was glad that the black girl was kind enough to provide him with sleeping accommodations and had quite probably also saved his life by telling Lecti and Deo that he wasn’t involved in Toshi’s death.
Toshi was dead. No wonder Deo was unhappy. Now he understood Lecti being unhappy when he pointed them in a direction.
Deo walked off.
Lecti watched him go and almost followed. She thought better of it and after giving Eleon a scathing look, marched up the hill, over and through the ruins toward the break in the fence.
There was a lot to think about. All three took a break from each other for the rest of the afternoon.
Deo found a place in the tall structure and kept a lookout as he pondered.
Lecti explored the amusement park. She found nothing amusing.
Eventually Eleon hiked up to his bike and found that someone had searched it. He found nothing out of place. His back-up pistol was no longer loaded. He reloaded with rounds from a box he kept hidden in the bottom of another bag. Then he pulled a small artist’s tablet, a pencil, and an eraser from his pack. Finding a comfortable seat with a good view of the flats, he started to draw.
Chapter 16
That evening Eleon contributed to dinner. Two snares that were set before he started drinking held cottontails. He added the rabbits, skinned, gutted, and dismembered, to a pot of his own and sat it next to the fire. There were no herbs worthy of eating next to the little stream, so all he added was a dash of salt from a pouch of spices in a pocket of his chaps.
Neither of the kids said much at first. It looked to be a depressing evening. When Deo came back with a load of firewood, he threw it down as though he was angry.
As dusk developed into night, Eleon tended the fire. The small flame lit the immediate surroundings with flickering shadows that played on the overhanging cottonwood and the far shapes of the flats. The liquor bottles lay unbroken and glittering across the creek as the fire flared and ebbed.
Thoughts passed through Lecti’s head. She was consumed, at first, with worry over Deo and his anger. After thinking about it all afternoon, she was worn out. She needed to be distracted.
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She focused on Eleon. “So your father wrote that letter. How bad was it?”
She had given the letter back, earlier. Eleon had replaced the paper into its envelope and folded it into his pocket with a degree of care verging on reverence.
At first, Eleon thought about blowing her off. It was probably not worth the effort. He felt bad for these kids, though. They were smart. They were more than that. They were good kids on the way to becoming good adults. All they had to do was outlast the pitfalls that all people encountered in their youth. He had no doubt that they would acquire wisdom eventually. They already had plenty of common sense.
“It was bad. Bad, and it got worse.” Eleon threw a twig into the fire. “He wrote the letter because he felt a tremendous amount of responsibility for the way his generation had allowed everything to deteriorate. People became nothing more to the government than a necessary evil that kept businesses operating. Strange things became normal, and as they became normal it became normal for things to get worse. People became helpless because they forgot how good it was to control their own lives. They became fat and lazy and so complacent that they gave up. The government kept them housed and fed, and they were content.”
Intrigued, Lecti continued, “What were the strange things, the ones that became normal?”
Not replying immediately, Eleon gave it some thought.
“Early on the insurance companies got really strange. People originally bought insurance to protect themselves from losses they couldn’t afford. They all pooled their money in an insurance company so that when one of them had something bad happen, the pool of money was big enough to help out the person that had the problem.”
Deo spoke up. “That doesn’t sound like a bad idea. What’s so bad about that?”
“Well, first off, there was a flaw in the thinking. The assumption that they were only insuring their own loss gave way to the idea that they should become responsible for everyone’s loss. If they were frugal or just plain poor and owned a cheap car, they had to buy more insurance than they needed just in case they ran into someone else’s expensive car. They had to cover the injuries and loss of someone who made several times more money than they did. It wasn’t bad enough to be responsible for the accident, they had to be responsible for the way another person lived. And eventually it became mandatory. No one was allowed to only insure themselves.”
Lecti looked skeptical.
“That’s just crazy. People can’t be that stupid.”
“It happened so slowly that it seemed like a normal transition.” Eleon explained, “It got worse than that. If you made a claim because you had some kind of covered problem, the insurance companies started to charge you more money just because you used the insurance that you were required to have and that you had paid for. The government allowed it because the insurance companies gave the politicians money for their campaigns.”
Deo laughed. Eleon was making a joke, and he had almost fallen for it. As his father had liked to say, he was born in the morning, but it wasn’t yesterday morning.
Lecti was having a problem following the logic, having no real frame of reference or similar experience, and she had trouble believing it, too. She smiled.
Eleon frowned and said, “You don’t believe me.”
“Well, come on,” replied Deo, “that does seem pretty incredible.”
“People didn’t think it was incredible at all. It became normal. That’s what I was talking about. It became normal to live with ignorance and stupidity.” Eleon understood that these kids didn’t get it because they lived in this world without any structure.
He paused, wondering if he should go on, and then said, “There’s more. Do you want to hear about it?”
Deo laughed again. He was enjoying this.
“Sure, this can’t be real, but sure, let’s have it.”
Instead of being insulted, Eleon chose to go on. He noticed that although Lecti was smiling, she was also looking very thoughtful.
“As insurance became mandatory, they began to start denying claims. You know what a claim is?”
Lecti and Deo both nodded, although they looked blank.
“They started to pick and choose what they would cover…pay for. Instead of covering any loss, they began to say that they would not cover acts of God. Things like earthquakes, floods, and high wind. They started to tell people that they couldn’t build their houses in places where those types of things happened, even if they rarely happened.”
“But wasn’t that why people paid for insurance?” exclaimed Deo. Both he and Lecti understood the concept of money. The Roseburg community used three coins of different values.
Eleon answered the question. “Exactly, it was just what insurance was for. The health insurance companies started to deny claims based on people having ill health before they purchased insurance. They started to pick and choose who they would insure. When health insurance became mandatory, they denied claims as a matter of course until it ruined peoples’ credit and drove them into bankruptcy. In the meantime the companies were getting paid by the government to insure retired people and others without jobs. They denied those claims, too.”
“Wait,” said Deo, “what’s that, credit, and what was it, bank-something?”
“Bankruptcy. But that’s another story. It has to do with how much money people made at their jobs and how much they spent,” explained Eleon.
“Well, if insurance companies kept people from getting what they paid for, why didn’t people quit paying?” asked Lecti. “Why didn’t they just go find the guys who ran the insurance company and make them give them their money?”
It was an argument that Eleon was familiar with. He had made it to his father long ago as a child.
“I can’t possibly explain the whole process or the whole system to you. The short answer is that the officials were on the side of the businesses that gave them money to campaign so that they could stay in office. The laws were written to protect the business instead of the consumer. And the other thing you asked…the people that ran the companies insulated themselves from their customers and even their own employees by having so many layers of management. Consumers stood no chance of being heard. And as long as the business executives were getting away with it, they had no incentive to change. The people that ran the companies made more and more money as they abused the system. It was all about getting away with it. It became normal over time and nobody realized what was going on because it was gradual.”
Deo sat silent. He was no longer laughing.
Finally, he said, “I’m not sure I understood everything you said, but from what I did understand it sounds like people were idiots.”
Lecti nodded, “Yeah, I agree.”
“No, they were just beaten down by the powers that were aligned against them, and they didn’t have any leaders that would go against the system and stand up and say, ENOUGH!”
Eleon smiled a slow, tired smile. “Even the news services and the churches became controlled by big money. When logic and evidence was used to try to combat a problem, there was a group of people that were paid to come up with reasons for doubt. People actually started to believe that truth could come in different forms and that reality became a matter of perspective. Science was touted and believed by the population when it was used in advertising to sell them products but was distrusted when it clashed with the intent of big business to make money or shirk responsibility.”
Deo was quiet for a moment and then asked, “There must have been some people that realized what was going on. Didn’t they try to change things?”
“Sure, of course not everyone was taken in. There were so many issues, though, and so many conspiracy theories that most people didn’t know what to believe. The majority of the population didn’t want to believe what was happening anyhow. They just chose to believe what they were told by the news media. Unfortunately, most people are like that.”
Eleon paused to gather his thoughts, and then conti
nued. “The enlightened few were made out to be nut cases and crack pots. No one listened to them except other nut cases, some of which really were nuts, which made the likelihood of building a consensus even less likely. The people that really knew what was going on became suspect simply by associating with the wackos.”
It was getting late. The sun was well below the horizon, and the stars were out in force.
Looking up at the sky, Eleon made Deo and Lecti an offer.
“Listen, I’m tired of this. It’s hard to remember and talk about the past. There’s more to it, much more, that I really don’t want to think about, and I’d like to stop now. How about putting out the fire, and I’ll tell you about the constellations that I can recognize?”
Deo and Lecti were familiar with the stars. It was another way that their dad spent time with them before he died.
“Sure,” she said, “that would be nice.”
Deo followed Lecti’s lead.
The rest of the evening was short. Eleon identified several constellations and told them stories about the ancient people that had named them. The gods smiled down from the heavens as they grew weary and drifted into sleep.
Morning broke sunny and warm. The days were getting longer and the temperatures were increasing. As Lecti and Deo moved lower in elevation and away from the Sierras, it was warmer at night. They weren’t even using the sleeping bags, except as a place to rest their heads.
Grumpy and sullen, Deo rose early and kicked at Lecti’s feet to wake her. He stayed quiet, wishing to leave before Eleon woke.
Lecti got up and started to gather her things.
Eleon was not asleep. Once again he only appeared to be.
“So you’re off,” he said. “Don’t want to stick around for breakfast?”
Deo looked harshly at him. “We’ve already wasted enough time.”
“I’m coming with you.” Eleon suddenly made up his mind. “You can use the help.”
Both Deo and Lecti were taken by surprise. There was no reason for this man to take up their cause, and Deo was not in the mood to question Eleon’s motives. He was all about getting on the road.
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