But why bring all that up? It wouldn't make Ellen Mae feel any better. If you lost everything, it didn't really ease your pain much to know that other people, somewhere else, might be hurting even worse. People who wanted to judge your pain by your privileges were mean-spirited people-the kind of people who thought it must be big fun to be an invalid, as long as you were rich. Alex knew better. Sure, if he'd been poor, he'd have been dead long ago-he knew that. He wasn't poor. He was a rich kid, and if he had any say about it, he was going to stay that way. But that didn't make his life a picnic. Let her talk.
"When I figured that much out," Ellen Mae said, "I decided I was gonna learn all about Comanches."
"How come?"
She paused. "Alex, there are twokin~ of people in this world. The people who don't wanna know, even if they oughta know. And the people who just have to know, even if it's not gonna help 'em." She smiled at him. "Troupe people-we're all that second kind. People who just have to know, even though we can't do a damn thing about any of it."
Alex grunted. He was of a different kind, personally. He was the kind who didn't mind knowing, but didn't feel up to devoting much energy to finding out.
"So I read a lot about Comanches. I mean, with the towns empty and the cattle gone, it was a lot easier to understand that kind of nomad life... . That's one good thing about living nowadays. You can read about anything, for nothing, anywhere where there's a laptop screen. So, I read all these on-line books about Comanches, and how they lived, while I was living off the backs of trucks, hunting, and gathering scrap metal.
"And that's when I started to really understand this land. For instance, why us wreckers got so much heat from the Texas Rangers. Why the Rangers used to just show up out here, and chase down our convoys, and shoot us. They had databases and cell phones and all, but there wasn't anything cute and modern about the goddamned Texas Rangers-the Rangers in the 2020s were exactly the same as the goddamned Texas Rangers in the 1 880s! And if you were some nomad, living out of a tent in West Texas, then the Rangers just weren't gonna be able to stand havin' you around! Simple as that!" She was shaking her soup ladle.
"They just couldn't stand it, that we were out here wreckin' stuff, and that we hadn't cleared out for good and gone exactly where the government said we should, when we should. That we didn't pay taxes, or get vaccinations, or have any rule books." She stirred her stew, and tasted it, and started crumbling a dried ancho pepper.
"Sure, every once in a while a few wrecker boys would get all liquored up and smash up some stuff in towns where there were still people livin'. That happened, and I'm not denyin' it. We weren't all perfect. But the Rangers used that as their excuse for everything. They came right after the wreckiñ' gangs, the Rangers did. They just wouldn't let us live. They broke us up, and they shot us and arrested us, and they put us away in camps."
"What did you do then?"
"Well, I didn't get arrested myself, so I went up to Oklahoma to meet some real Comanches."~
"Really?"
"Hell yes! There's more Comanches up in Oklahoma right now, after everything, than there were when the tribe was out riding the free range. That's the weirdest part of it. The Comanches didn't die out or anything. They just got changed and moved. They been up there multiplying, just like every other human being in the world. There's thousands of Comanches. They're farmers, and they got little stores and stuff... they're big on churches, y'know, big churchgoing people. None of that weirdo cult stuff, but good old-fashioned Christians. I wouldn't call 'em prosperous, they're pretty damned poor people for Americans, but you see a lot worse on TV."
"I see. So what did you learn from that?"
Ellen Mae laughed. "Well, I married one... . But they know about as much about living off the buffalo as you know about being a German spy, kid. I dunno ... the oldest folks still use the language a little, the smell of the old life is still around, just a little bit. I wanted to learn about herbal lore, about living off the land. I ended up learning a lot about botany. But mostly I learned it off text files and databases. Hell, Alex, it's been a hundred and fifty years."
She sighed. "That's a long time. I mean, I grew up m West Texas. I was a nice girl from a decent ranchin' family, went to high school, went to church, watched TV, bought dresses and shoes and went to dances.... We thought we owned this land. How much of that life do you think is gonna be left in a hundred and fifty years? Fuck-all, Alex. Nothin'."
"Well, I wouldn't say that," Alex said. "After all, there's government records. The government's real goad about that. Databases and statistics. Stuff on platinum disks that they keep in salt mines."
"Sure, and in Anadarko there's American Indian museums where everything has got a nice tag on it, but it's gone, kid! The Comanches got smashed and blown away! We got smashed and blown away! First we did it to them.. And then we did it to the land. And then we did it to ourselves. And after we're gone for good, I don't know why the hell anybody is gonna want to know about us."
Alex was impressed. He'd seen old people talking openly about the declining state-of-the-world on old people's television talk shows, the crustier, more old-fashioned talk shows, without many video effects, where people never did very much. But old people usually seemed pretty embarrassed to bring up such matters right in front of young people. Probably because of the inherent implication that the world's old people were ecological criminals. Who probably ought to be hauled into court by a transgenerational tribunal and tried for atrocities against the biosphere.
Not that old people would ever allow this to happen, though. There were shitloads of old people still running everything all over the world, and they were in no hurry to give up their power, despite the grotesquely stupid things they'd done with it. Sometimes they would allude to all the awful consequences of heavy weather, but always in very mealymouthed, very abstract ways, as if the disasters surrounding them had nothing to do with anything they'd ever done themselves.
Alex kinda figured that there might be some kind of reckoning someday. When everybody who might be tound guilty was safely dead and buried. It would probably be like it had been, back when the communist government finally fell in China. Lots of tribunals of guys in suits issuing severe public reprimands to lots of elderly dead people.
"Well, I can tell that you learned something useful," Alex said. "'Cause I never saw anybody eat like this Troupe eats."
"Off the land," Ellen Mae said, nodding. "It ain't easy, that's for sure. The old species balance, the original ecology, is completely shot out here. Believe me, it's nothing like the High Plains used to be, and it never will be again. There's all these foreign weeds, invader species, depleted soils, and the climate's crazy. But the West Texas flora was always pretty well adapted to severe weather. So there's still Comanche food around. Stuff like pigweed. Hell, pig-weed's an amaranth, it's a really nutritious grain, but it'll grow in a crack in a sidewalk. Of course, you'd never think to eat pigweed if you didn't already know what it was."
"Right," Alex said. He'd never seen pigweed-or, at least, he'd never recognized it. He felt a dreadful certainty that he was going to have to eat some of it pretty soon.
"It's been a long time since anybody was out here, gathering the wild forage. But now the grazing pressure is off the native plants. And there's no more plowing, or crops, or herbicides, or fertilizers. So even though the weather's bad, some of those native plants are coming back pretty strongly. Stuff like poppymallow, and devil's claw, and prairie turnip. There's nowhere near enough for a cityful of civilized people. But for a little tribe of lering nomads, who can cover a lot of ground, well, there's quite a lot of food out here, especially in spring and summer."