He says: “What I’ve got to do is get ready for when she won’t be around at all.”
18
I TURNED THE CLOCK away from me, wanting to sleep in. The air in #6 was heavy and my dreams were irritating, full of vouchers and memos. Sleep here and there, but no rest. Noise began to mount up — motors, voices. I lay awake with my eyes closed and imagined spies at the foot of the bed, roasting me with motionless eyes.
“Thirty-five hundred deaths per kiloton isn’t even in the ballpark,” Sonny insists.
Sunday brunch at the Golconda Cafe. Fried ham and French toast, a lake of syrup on my plate. Glucose opens the flaps of my metabolic carburetor and I’m all in a hurry with nowhere to go. From Sonny’s silvery tape machine, between us on a chair of its own, come highlights of a Nuclear Survivability Conference.
“Don’t worry about civilization,” says a curiously accented voice. “Concentrate on staying alive to enjoy it.”
I went out prowling for relics. A garrulous Mormon, one of those Old West hobbyists who sometimes pass through, had tipped me to a likely site and drawn a map on a Golconda napkin. I was moving along a shale track toward dark lava tongues emerging from the sand like mummified brontosaurs, paying more attention to the elementary ballpoint diagonals of the map than to what was right in front of me. It took a second or less for the offside tires to slip from the troughs, over the unbanked lip of shale, and dig themselves in. I was alarmingly tipped and stuck fast.
Opatowski told this one: Two years ago, in the next county, an old man had lost himself, blown his engine on a forgotten length of ranch road. Some pitiful, turtlish instinct made him stay inside his car and in a day or two he’d baked to death in his underwear. They found a note on the dashboard asking that someone inform his grandson, who ran an air charter service in Valdez, Alaska.
But I had a two-quart canteen and the sense to start moving, shirt knotted over my head. No sleepwalking, stay on the offensive mentally. I took up, in order, the following: ultraviolet rays so intense in Antarctica that the atmosphere is nearly germ-free; the scheme, continuously discussed, to squeeze petroleum from hidden terraces of Rocky Mountain shale; long-vanished swamps and three-story tree ferns turned now to coal; sulfates and alkali and the sweat that was burning my eyes. Be watchful too. Avoid confinement in a narrowing corridor of heat. But I didn’t find any arrowheads or pot pieces along the way, no shapely bits of bone. I saw a hubcap half buried, a chuckwalla retreating into a crevice of porous yellow rock. My tongue contorted and my head was clanging, clanging hard. Mission bells, campanas, responded my obedient brain. What fun.
Following the curve of a dry wash, I heard a whang and watched sand spit over my feet.
“No sweat, amigo. Just holding my perimeter.”
The man was jug-eared and thick through the chest. He wore camo fatigues and a black beret, held the AK-47, now aimed at the sky, against his cheek.
“That was a fucking bullet,” I said pointlessly.
“You’re fine. Gun control means being able to hit your target.”
I spread my arms and threw up a smile just as wide, the way you’d handle a guard dog.
“Regular army?”
“I’m just a citizen,” Sonny Boyers said. “Like you.”
I looked flat fucked out, he thought. I should come back to camp, meet his family, share some lunch. Why disagree? He resembled, with his shiny black boots and oiled rifle, a breakneck mercenary, but moved with the diffidence of an art student, and I followed along. He fired into the air as we approached the camp, and an answering shot came.
Dawn Boyers was glaringly blonde, round-faced, heavy-breasted. A sly, burly couple they made, two escapees from a beer stein bas relief. She wore the same dappled fatigues, but a blue chiffon scarf girdled her solid neck and lumpy turquoise earrings hung like beetles from her ears. The two silent, unboyish boys stood on either side of her, grade-school sentries with recalcitrant eyes.
“One for all,” and Sonny combined wink and smile without completing the motto.
How to fit in? Yucca stalks, erosion, hard perimeters, children in combat regalia. The only reassuring thing was their truck. It had wide tires, hydraulic suspension, and probably enough juice under the hood to pull my car free.
The boys started the fire with a bow drill and blackened hot dogs at the end of forked sticks. Lemonade was yellow powder shaken with water in a plastic jug. Portions were carefully equalized and Dawn said grace.
“Make blessed what we are about to consume. Help us in our struggles to reach strength, but guide us, too, in the path of your safekeeping. In Jesus’ name. Amen.”
The reverent commando family ate with eyes downcast, in silence, chewing warily as if alert for broken glass. How to fit in? I understood that I was among people quelled by belief, for whom irony was no base metal. They saw clearly. They moved along an unwavering white line. I had only to ask a stupid question or two and the precepts were delivered, all glossy and round, like nuggets from the transparent globe of a Kiwanis gumball machine.
Societal collapse was imminent through war, revolution, economic disintegration, natural catastrophe, whatever came first.
“I don’t know when it’s going to happen,” Sonny admitted. “Noah didn’t know exactly when the flood would come. He just knew it would.”
A family prepared could renew and rebuild. The boys had been taken from school so they could be properly taught in the home. All worked together toward the goal of a self-sufficient unit. Knowledge was the tool that couldn’t be stolen: herbal first aid, knots and lashings, shelter construction, orientation by sun and stars, firearms training, tracking and reconnaissance.
“Survivalism is misunderstood,” Dawn squeaked like a cork twisting in a bottle. “We aren’t paranoid and we aren’t bloodthirsty. We just want to live.”
The boys plinked cans with their.22’s. Sonny didn’t mind pulling my car free, but first he wanted to show me how to draw water from cactus pulp and set deadfall traps for lizards.
“You might not be so lucky next time,” he said. “To have somebody come along like I did.”
Sunburn bloomed on my forehead. I thought of a family trip to the Adirondacks. My mother sprained her ankle sweeping out the cabin. My father went under some birches with Dubonnet and a canvas chair and read through the works of Charles Evans Hughes. Carla sat for hours by the lake, afraid to go in because of sharp rocks and leeches.
Velma, in the black acetate waitress outfit Opatowski asks her not to wear, freshens my coffee. She looks dubiously at Sonny and his tape machine.
“What we’re talking about are plans for the conquest of this planet,” he says. “While they’re promoting this detente business with one hand, they’re stockpiling warheads with the other.”
“The Russians then?”
“Who’s predicting? I just say study the evidence, the patterns. The inevitable…Okay, like a big curl of a wave coming in and it’s casting a shadow on the beach. We’re right now standing in that shadow.”
“You want high, swift drama. Glorious climax. But I’d bet on something much slower, degenerative.”