He passes around snapshots of his ranch and we sit oohing and aahing while holding our lemonades between our knees. It’s beautiful. The skies are blue, the cottages immaculate, the mountains white.
On my soft seat I say a little prayer:
Let this be real.
We ride in style through Joplin and Miami and Vinita and Big Cabin. Ventor passes out sunscreen and shoots an antelope from the wagon and gives us each a big chunk and a side-salad with croutons. He laughs at our jokes and praises any initiative we take and tells us about the summer picnics on his spread, which will feature badminton and ice cream and bluegrass music and pretty Flawed girls from other ranches who really know how to dance. We make Tulsa. We make Sapulpa. We make Chandler, Warwick, Luther, and Arcadia. A thousand-member dog pack has just swept through Oklahoma City and distraught cabbies are sprinkling lye on their dead oxen while trying to trick beggars into the yoke. West of El Reno there’s a wide river and a collapsed bridge. A chalked sign on a plywood scrap says: Neerest ferry 200 miles south.
“Ouch, this isn’t good,” Ventor says. “Not that it’s bad. Not that I’m trying to predestine our failure via negativity or manifest an Eeyore paradigm.”
We start off south along the river. Kids fishing from rotting docks turn to call us Flawed pigs. In a tent town there’s a bingo game proceeding under a filthy awning.
Hidden away in a patch of reeds is a rowboat.
“Wow, talk about willing one’s own reality into being,” Ventor says. “Here I was just wishing we had a boat and one basically materializes! Super. I admit it’s not the exact boat I was visualizing, but still it’s a boat, and I for one am going to try to focus on its boatness, and not on those kind of huge gaping holes in the sides there. And while it’s true we’ll have to abandon our wagon and our horses and our supplies, I intend to put these losses behind me and work on viewing the fact that we now have to walk to Utah as a particularly challenging challenge I’ll someday look back at while laughing sagely.”
“So we’re stealing this boat,” Leonard says.
“No, Leonard, we’re not stealing the boat,” Ventor says. “We’re borrowing the boat, albeit leaving it on the far bank once we’ve finished borrowing it.”
He tells Leonard and Gene Sinclair and me to go across first and tells Leonard to row. Gene’s a former schoolteacher with tremendous armpit goiters who’s constantly measuring them with calipers.
“Good luck, men!” Ventor yells across the water. “Remember, I trust you implicitly!”
When we reach the far shore Gene and I pile out and Leonard starts back across.
“I have to admit this freedom would be kind of exhilarating if my goiters didn’t hurt like the dickens,” Gene says. “We could just walk away. Boy, wouldn’t that be nervy! A guy tries to give you a nice cottage and some dignity and you bite him in the ass.”
I think of Connie. I remember the autumn before the purge, when the Flaweds in our grade school were fitted with bracelets during a surprise Assembly. Connie and I stood there blinking madly as a Normal janitor named Fabrizi fired up his welding tool. At home Connie decorated her bracelet with glitter glue. Dad called her a trooper and praised her gumption, then broke down in sobs.
I get up and start jogging towards the trees.
Gene begs me to come back and swears that if it weren’t for his aching goiters he’d teach me a lesson about ingratitude by beating my brains out. I cut across a granite ledge and drop into a canebrake. I hear Gene shouting to Ventor. Then there’s a gunshot and some dirt kicks up at my feet and a little pine splinters to my left.
Free again, for what it’s worth.
That night I sleep in a ditch. I dream that Mom’s stroking my hair while reading me a comic book. I wake at dawn in the middle of a street market. There are jugglers and men expertly carving up big dogs and a few feet away from me a tall balding Normal selling pancakes from a cart. A couple of militia teens walk by with an entourage of eight Flaweds and a weeping Normal farmer.
“What did he do, boys?” asks the pancake guy. “If you don’t mind me asking.”
“Educated his Flaweds,” says one of the teens. “Let them read whatever they liked. Now they’re so educated they don’t listen for shit and we have to keep whacking them.”
“Yeah,” says the other. “They want to debate every little point.”
“No we don’t,” says a Flawed geezer, who promptly gets a gun butt in the midriff.
“So we burned down his farm,” says the first teen.
“Do I ever endorse the wisdom of that decision,” says the pancake guy. “You fellows are awfully youthful to be so insightful.”
“You should have seen Todd pouring gas on the beets,” says the first teen.
“I couldn’t believe how hard you kicked that one kitchen chick who was shrieking while crawling away,” says Todd.
“Chick was like shrieking at me,” says the first teen.
“Then she bites his leg,” Todd says. “I was like: Brad’s hating this. He thinks this sucks.”
“I was hating it,” says Brad. “I did think it sucked.”
“And yet you responded with remarkable restraint, by merely kicking her?” the pancake guy says. “I find that really, you know, great.”
“We were going to respond by doing her in the barn,” Brad says.
“But then the lieutenant comes up and goes no, because she’s a virgin,” Todd says. “I was like: dang.”
“I was like that too,” says Brad. “I was like: dang.”
“We were both like: dang,” says Todd.
“So we went out and wasted all the cows,” says Brad.
“Your delts looked so killer when you were slitting their udders,” says Todd.
“I’ll bet your delts looked killer as all get-out,” says the pancake guy.
“Then asswipe here started the barn on fire when he was supposed to be flamethrowing the ducks,” says Brad. “Lieutenant was pissed. Asswipe freaked.”
“I didn’t freak, I was bummed,” says Todd. “I was bummed because the lieutenant thought I was a dick.”
“You were a dick,” says Brad. “You were a dick and you freaked.”
“For my part,” the pancake guy says, “I doubt very much that you were either an asswipe or a dick, nor do you strike me as the type of boy inclined to freak, not that I’m trying to be difficult or contradict anyone.”
Then he tosses a pan of hot grease into the ditch and steps square on my chest and I start screaming bloody murder.
Brad puts his gun in my ear and drags me out.
“Congrats, dude,” he says to the pancake guy. “You just copped a free slave.”
“But I don’t want a slave,” says the pancake guy. “I can’t afford one. I can barely keep myself in batter as it is.”
“Tough bones,” says Todd. “The regs require local resale by the finder. And that’s you.”
“God forbid I should appear neurotic or recalcitrant, boys,” the pancake guy says, “but I have no idea where one sells a runaway slave.”
“Try Tanner’s,” Todd says.
“Tanner’s is a hoot,” says Brad.
“Ooh la la,” says Todd.
Tanner’s is a brothel in a former Safeway. A wiry Normal in a jogging suit is counting crates of condoms in what used to be Produce.
“Don’t tell me,” he says. “You’re in the mood for love.”
“Actually I’d like to sell this Flawed,” the pancake guy says, blushing.
“New flesh, Artie,” the wiry guy says, and a pudge with a stun gun steps out from behind the crates. “What do you think, son? Think he’d make a good addition to Staff?”