Be Nice

by David Portlock

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Wallis said. He suspiciously eyed the bartender. “So why’d you help us?”

  “I think it might be better if I showed you.”

  “If you showed us?”

  “You need to see what things are like for yourselves.”

  Wallis sat back. “Not good enough.”

  “I’m afraid it’ll have to do.”

  Janey chugged her water. “You said you didn’t like Be Nice. Is that why you helped us?”

  “That, and a whole lot more.”

  The bartender drove his pickup to the edge of a narrow cliff face and parked. Wallis and Janey, in the front seat next to him, followed as he hopped out.

  Janey slipped on her rose-colored shades. Wallis shielded his eyes and looked around.

  The bartender lifted a pair of binocs from around his neck, handed them to Wallis, and pointed to the base of the cliff. “Take a look. Right down there.”

  Wallis raised the binocs to his eyes and peered over the edge of the cliff.

  Janey reached for the binocs. Wallis handed them to her. She focused the lenses and saw a plateau that extended from the bottom of the cliff; tracts of lush fields had been subdivided into large rectangular plots of land. Hundreds of workers, wearing gray sack cloth, toiled in the blistering sun.

  “Well, what do you think?” the bartender asked Wallis.

  “I don’t know,” Wallis answered. “It looked like a farm. I’ve seen them before online. Now why are we out here?”

  Janey lowered the binocs and turned to the bartender. “Yeah, for real. This is what you wanted us to see?”

  The bartender popped another aspirin. “You got it, girl. And there’s thousands of those farms out here exactly like that one. And the poor bastards who they get to work on them, the farmers have them juiced up on the meds. Those friendly folks you ran into back in Jamesville, they’re the ones who run the whole show.”

  Janey handed him the binocs. “And you wanted to show us this because?”

  “Well, ya see...oh, about a hundred or so years ago, way after Be Nice took over, those Jamesville folks, they said they’d only give up their guns and weapons if Be Nice let them keep their homes and their farms. Be Nice agreed to it, so now the Jamesville folks send cotton and vegetables out to the big cities, and they also get to keep a little bit for themselves. And they make a pretty decent profit too, I hear.”

  Janey bristled. “They make profits?”

  Wallis noted the bartender’s thirty-eight tucked in the waistline of his pants. “I thought you said you gave up your guns.”

  “Well, I have this here because this is still tribal land. We get to make our own laws.”

  Wallis looked at the workers in the fields. “So who are those people? I mean, where’d they come from?”

  “No idea. All I know is Be Nice keeps bringin’ `em out here in trucks, vans, you name it. So, as long as the food and cotton keeps rolling out and the money keeps rolling in, no one asks any questions.”

  “How much money do they make?” Janey asked.

  “They don’t make shit,” the bartender replied.

  Wallis and Janey didn’t say a word.

  The pickup truck rattled back to the reservation.

  “But, the thing is,” the bartender said, “this desert, all this land out here, it ain’t gonna be around too much longer. See, the Chinese and the India Indians, they gotta have places to settle down. I hear they even got a few thousand pods going up over in Monument Valley. And the Africans and the Arabs, they’ll probably show up after them. So, in the meantime, my people and I are just trying to keep our heads down until it happens. When all this wide open, beautiful land is turned into concrete and skyscrapers. But, hey, there’s no way to stop billions of Chinese, India Indians, Africans, and Arabs. So if you’re a Jamesville farmer and you have enough loot so’s you’re sleeping in the penthouses when they show up, and you ain’t gotta see them or hear them or especially smell them, well, that sounds like a goddamn good deal to me.”

  Wallis and Janey ate vanilla ice cream in the communal hall. The bartender sat across from them, chewing on a handful of cashews and peanuts.

  Wallis finished his ice cream. “But you still didn’t answer my question.”

  “It’s like I told you,” the bartender said. “I saw you on the news. And if Be Nice is pissed at you, well, that kinda makes us, like, almost friends.”

  Janey slurped ice cream from her bowl. “Yeah? And why’s it do that?”

  “Don’t you get it? You’re the fly in the milk, girl. You’re like mouse shit in a salt shaker. You’re, uh…you’re like a big turd floating in a swimming pool—”

  Wallis launched from the table. “Hey! Are you clackin’ about race?”

  Janey pushed away her bowl. “Did you just say I look like shit?”

  “Relax. They’re just sayings. Calm down. Okay…now tell me, what’s your side of the story? Did you two really do all the stuff Be Nice says you did?”

  “Eff no. What happened was, me and Wallis…it’s real crazy, but we did these drawings—”

  “A big superhero. A big sun. Yeah, I saw it on the news. What about your folks, did you really bust `em up?”

  “We didn’t touch `em. Be Nice, they did it. But Wallis, he did off this big Be Nice honcho.”

  “Oh, yeah, I caught that.”

  Wallis took his seat. “Okay, so what do you want? And no more of those racist sayings.”

  “It’s simple. I want your spirit.”

  “Our what?”

  “You heard me. I want your spirit. It’s what makes you special. It’s clear you won’t go along with the system. You rebel, you fight back. It reminds me of how my people used to be a long time ago.”

  “We don’t know anything about you.”

  “Like I said, boy, this land, this rez, it’s Native owned. And the longer I can keep it that way, the better. So, if I help you, and you keep scuffling with Be Nice, that’s good for me and my people. Figured if I showed you that farm and told you a few things you didn’t know about, you might take it with you. You might even spread the word to some of the folks in the big cities—”

  Janey murmured under her breath, “The Dead.”

  “What?” Wallis said.

  “The people workin’ on those farms, baby, what if they’re the people Be Nice makes disappear? Y’know, they’re the Dead? And, if you think about it, he’s right. I mean, if everybody knew what Be Nice’s really been doin’—”

  The bartender hugged her. “It might slow things down a bit. It might make it a lot harder to move all those foreigners in and me and my people out.”

  Wallis pulled Janey to his side. “I got one question.”

  “Shoot.”

  “So why do you work in that Klanny town?”

  “A man needs to keep busy.”

  “I don’t understand. Why do they let you?”

  The bartender popped two more aspirin. “I guess cuz they like to be served by people who look like me. I think they kinda see it as…a tradition.”

  A black pickup truck parked out front. Tyler Sanchez slid out of the driver’s side. He propped his cowboy hat on his forehead, wiped the sweat from his brow, and lit a cigarette.

  His denim outfit was faded brownish blue. A tuft of night black hair drooped over the side of his face, hiding his right eye. He leaned in his pickup truck and lightly tapped the horn.

  Wallis and Janey were lead out of the communal hall. Seeing Tyler, Wallis maneuvered Janey behind him.

  “It’s okay,” the bartender said to Wallis, “that’s just Tyler.”

  “And who the eff is ‘just Tyler’?”

  “That’s Tyler Sanchez. He’s a real good friend of mine. And he’s also volunteered to be your driver.”

  Janey stood at Wallis’s si
de. “He’s our driver?”

  “Tyler owes me a few favors, so he’s agreed to take you to stay at another rez, a better one over in New Mex. They’ve got green grass, a few trees, even a lake with some fish. I figure you can relax, take some time off, and maybe figure out your next move.”

  “So this’s them, huh? Wallis and Janey?” Tyler said, as he blew a wisp of hair from his face. “Shit. All the stuff I done seen on the news, I would’ve thought they’d been at least ten feet tall.”

  “He’s a profiteer, but he doesn’t do any business with the Jamesville folk.”

  The shock wand in Wallis’s jacket sleeve drifted into his hand. He activated it and held it up to the bartender. “If you’re lyin’, if you’re tryin’ to pull some shady shit on us…”

  “Boy, right now, me and Tyler, we’re about all you got. But, if you wanna take your chances on your own, that’s fine by me. You’ll end up being jacked up on meds, drooling like idiots, and picking lima beans and carrots all day. And if those farmers get wind you’re here, and they decide to tell Be Nice instead, Native rez or not, there won’t be much I can do to help.”

  Wallis steered the hog into the bed of Tyler’s pickup. He closed the rear door, walked up to the bartender, and offered his hand.

  The bartender shook hands. “You just keep raising hell, young man. You just keep raising hell.” He waved to Janey in the front of the pickup. “And that goes for you too, little lady!”

  Janey waved back and put on her shades. Wallis got in the truck and shoved her to the middle of the front seat.

  Tyler tipped his cowboy hat to the bartender as he flopped behind the wheel and started the engine. After several backfires and puffs of black smoke, the pickup rumbled across the reservation boundary.

  Tyler checked the outside temperature on a cracked thermometer duct taped to the driver’s side mirror. It measured 127 degrees.

  “I don’t get it. There’s nothing out here,” Janey said. “So how do you and those Native people survive? How do you make money to live?”

  Tyler put on a pair of mirrored shades and cranked up the AC. “Well, I mostly trade in goods and services. Whatever folks out here need, I make sure that they get it.”

  “Yeah, but…what about all the Natives? What do they do? I mean, there’s no W Lines…”

  “The big casinos, up north and back east, they fund the Natives when times get real tough.”

  “What, you mean, like, with all their gambling money?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, that’s nice, I guess.”

  “It sure is, sweetheart.”

  Tyler gave her a wink.

  Janey smiled back.

  Wallis shot a look at Tyler; his expression read: her name’s Janey, not sweetheart.

  “Well, anywho,” Tyler quipped. “Sooooo what’s your story, what’s the deal? I mean, did you two really off some bigwig Be Nicer?”

  “Janey didn’t. I did. This guy, he tried to hurt her…so I choked him and I broke his effin’ neck,” Wallis said, making sure Tyler got the point.

  “No one out here. No one on the highway. Do people only come out at night when it cools down?”

  Without looking at Janey, Tyler nodded.

  “Well, how far are we from this rez over in New Mex?”

  Tyler plucked a GPS system on the pickup’s dashboard. “It says about a hundred-fifty…two-hundred miles.”

  Wallis looked around the pickup. “So you got any water? Anything to drink?”

  “Yeah, just hit the glove com.”

  Wallis pressed a button on the glove compartment. It popped open. Stale snacks, paperwork, pens and pencils, and two bullets rolled out. In the rear of the compartment, a small tin cup sat next to a clear plastic tube that led to the engine.

  “Tug it once for water, tug it twice to shut it off.”

  Wallis tugged the tube. Warm water flowed. He filled the tin cup and shut off the water. He took a swallow and offered the cup to Janey.

  Janey took a sip. “You ain’t Native. You’re Mex. So why you helpin’ us? Just cuz you owe Joe Joe some favors?”

  Tyler placed his cowboy hat in her lap. “Take a look-see.”

  Janey flipped over the hat. A sweat soaked color photo was stapled at the top; the photo was of two boys playing in a park.

  “Okay, that right there is me an’ my brother, Jesse. My little brother, Jesse. We used to live over in Topeka…that’s in Kansas. And we lived with my mama; she raised us both…mainly because my old man, that son-of-a-bitch, wasn’t worth a pile of llama shit. Well, anyway, me an’ little Jesse, we got outta the Learning Center together…the one in Topeka…and the next thing you know, Be Nice came knocking.”

  “You used to be in Be Nice?”

  “Oh, hell no, not me. They were mostly after little Jesse. I wasn’t exactly what you’d call…the stomp stomp kind.” He replaced his cowboy hat on his head. “I wanted to create things. Be, like, an architect, y’know? Build tall buildings an’ maybe live in `em some day.”

  “If the stars are all that matters…and they don’t stomp…then why should we?”

  Tyler gave her a look.

  “That’s what me and Wallis think. We’re both artsies.”

  “Yeah, okay. You artsy folks, you tend to see things a little differently. But my reasons were a bit less…let’s see…cosmic? I wanted to build ice stuff, but I wasn’t very good at it. And the folks at the Learning Center, well, they kinda figured I’d run around with Jesse for a while and then sign on with Be Nice…maybe go into shop work later, maybe be a mechanic or somethin’.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Oh, Jesse, he went Be Nice for sure. But one day, they made him do somethin’, somethin’ I didn’t quite like. They found out my old man, Mr. Not-Worth-a-Pile-of-Llama-shit, he’d been gettin’ drunk a lot and mouthin’ off some hateful mess. I got word the old bastard had been talkin’ a lotta hate speech about the homos, and then he’d been talkin’ hateful about the women…y’know, sick-ass, rapey kinda shit. You might say he was lookin’ to get himself whooped on somethin’ tragic.” He took off his sunglasses. “But I don’t see why little Jesse had to be the one to do it.”

  “Your brother, he’s the one who stomped him?”

  “Yes, he was.”

  “What’d you do after that?”

  “I took off and I ended up out here. Just…just doin’ a little bit of this an’ that, y’know, anything to make sure the ends meet up.”

  “Tyler.”

  “Yeah?”

  “How old are you?”

  “And that’s another thing…ain’t no one puttin’ me on those goddamn meds in three years!”

  Wallis pointed to the highway. “What the eff is that?”

  Tyler looked to his left and immediately slammed on the brakes.

  A massive, whirling funnel of dust cut across the desert.

  “We got us a twister! And a big one! It’s all the damn heat and weird ass air currents out here! It happens all the time!” Tyler pounded buttons on the dashboard and felt for a lever by his left leg. “Okay, y’all, hold on!” He wrenched the lever back to his hip.

  Ten inch cylinders dropped from the pickup’s undercarriage and stabbed into the highway. The rear door and bed of the truck folded into a dome and sealed off the driver’s cabin. The tires vanished into the wheel frames and lowered the truck to the ground. Inside, Tyler flipped a switch on the stick shift. Fresh air hissed out of the AC vents. “We’re gonna have to ride her out!”

  Wallis held onto Janey. Tyler held tight to the steering wheel, white knuckled.

  The AC shut off, followed by plumes of brown dust that clawed in through the air vents. Wallis and Tyler kicked the vents closed. As Tyler yanked a handkerchief from his jacket, preparing to wrap it around his mouth, the twister passed
overhead.

  The intense rumbling steadily decreased to a low tremor and lessened to a distant drum beat. Tyler tied the handkerchief around his mouth and got to work. Wallis and Janey coughed and choked on the thick, cinnamon-colored air.

  Tyler jammed the lever by his left leg forward. Nothing happened. He jammed it again and again until, finally, the truck’s mechanisms came back on line. The engine started, the gauges on the dashboard registered. The metal dome outside unfolded.

  An hour later, Tyler crawled from beneath the undercarriage. Wallis and Janey waited by the side of the road. They were the color of the terrain.

  “`Fraid we’re gonna have to camp here tonight,” Tyler said. “It’ll take me at least twelve hours to fix her. Okay, let’s go. Little girl, you get in there behind the wheel and steer, and me and white bread’ll push us off the road.”

  Wallis grabbed him by the arm. “What did you call me?”

  “Push!”

  The Brennan helicopter touched down at the rear of the bullet train. Ms. Fallings and Mr. Dylon jumped out and ducked under the whirling rotor blades. Rows of bullet trains streamed around them, in and out of the Durango rail yard.

  The music was thumping; the kids were dancing, drinking, and fucking in the aisles. Liquor bottles and beer cans, bags of marijuana, and used and unused condoms littered the floors.

  Ms. Fallings knocked on the door of the last car. Ms. Garner answered. Her hands and face were splotched with dried blood. She had an orgasmic look on her face as she leaned against the wall and lit a cigarette. “The truth serum didn’t do very much.” She showed her bloody fists. “Neither did these.”

  Ms. Fallings drew her close and kissed her on the mouth. “Engine trouble, that was good.”

  Ms. Garner affectionately kissed her neck.

  “Get to your cabin.”

  Turned on, Ms. Garner responded, “On my way.”

  Ms. Fallings and Mr. Dylon entered the last car. Ms. Fallings placed her leather jacket on the table next to the control box and the pink syringes; they were empty except for one. Mr. Dylon inspected the digi-cam on the tripod. He rewound the footage and pressed play. On the view screen, he watched as Ms. Garner punched Abe in the face.