As Lowell couldn’t imagine why saying “goblets” could be perilous in a public park, he assumed the boy meant G-as-in-gun. The coyness was absurd. It was widely known that encampments like this were armed to the teeth. “You know how to work that?” he charged.
“I read up,” Willing said pleasantly. “It’s not complicated. That’s why stupid people have been getting their way with these things for centuries.”
“Wouldn’t want to fault your research,” Esteban said. “But if anybody’s packing in this party—no offense, it should be a grown man.”
“Whoever carries has to be Willing to use it.” The kid did have a knack for delivering punch lines with a straight face.
“You could be a danger to yourself—” Carter said.
“This is a distraction,” Willing cut him off. “Stories like ours—and worse—are all over the web. I think we got off lightly. The administration’s expression civil unrest is misleadingly mild. We’re not talking widespread insomnia. And the ‘unrest’ is mostly in big cities like New York. We have to get out.”
“Where’s any better, in your expert opinion?” Lowell sneered.
“Gloversville, obviously.”
“Oh, yeah?” Goog said. “Who died and left you president of the world?”
Willing ignored his cousin, as usual. “There’s food, shelter, and a well. I talked to Jarred. He’s short of labor he can trust. It’s easy to find people desperate for a job. But food is at a premium. Employees get tempted to steal. Organized crime is heavily into the agricultural black market. He’d welcome us all, if we’re willing to work. That would include standing armed guard over the fields at night. Thieves are harvesting whole crops while farmers sleep. Jarred has room for us, too. The Mexican migrant workers who’ve been squatting over the last two winters have moved on.”
“If Gloversville is such an oasis,” Esteban said, “why would they leave?”
“To go back to Mexico, of course,” Willing said. “Mexico signed on to the bancor. It picked up a lot of the trade that the States has lost. The economy is booming.”
“He’s right,” Carter said. “Though it’s hard to sort fact from fiction lately—”
“Dad, enough! Give it a rest!” Avery and Florence said at once.
“I was only saying!” Carter snapped. “TV news, webzines, they’re in rare accord: immigration’s reversed. Mexico’s established a huge military presence at the border. Nationals are being let back in, but white Americans are universally denied visas—even temporary tourist visas. Illegal immigrants from El Norte are being deported in droves.”
“Gosh,” Nollie said. “Hispanics are undocumented. Whites are illegal.”
“Hypocrites,” Avery muttered.
“I don’t call it hypocrisy,” Esteban said. “I call it payback.”
“Except the Mexican border police are giving third-, even second-generation Lats a hard time, too,” Carter warned.
“Do you have a Mexican passport?” Willing asked.
“Why would I?” Esteban said. “Any more than you would?”
“That’s too bad,” Willing said. “It would now be much more valuable than one from the American State Department.”
“That’s a turnabout I could drink to,” Esteban said. “About time you honks find out how it feels when folks who happen to be born in a place lord their precious passport over you like they’re anointed. Man, at the border right now, I’d laugh my head off.”
“Can we please get back to what we’re going to do?” Jayne implored.
Willing gestured to the encampment. “We’re luckier than most of these people. We have somewhere to go. We have only one problem: how to get there.”
“We should sneak back and swipe the Jaunt,” Avery said. “They only took my one key fob.”
“No,” Lowell confessed morosely. “They were way ahead of you. They demanded mine, too, and the spare.”
“I’ve tallied our cash,” Willing said. “We can’t afford a single bus or train ticket to upstate New York. And even if we had the money—according to InnerTube, Port Authority, Grand Central, and Penn Station are mobbed. We’re not the only ones who’ve figured out it’s time to go.”
“So what are you proposing?” Lowell said. “That we all pile onto your bicycle, like one of those 1950s stunts with phone booths?” (The taunt fell flat. Willing wouldn’t know what a phone booth was.)
“We’ll have to walk,” Willing said.
“To upper New York State?” Lowell cried.
“It’s a hundred and ninety-four miles by car. Somewhat longer, by back roads. Esteban used to lead treks along the Palisades for a living. He can show us the way.”
“My, I can’t believe Our Lord and King would hand his scepter to someone else,” Lowell said, and Avery kicked him.
“The first part is straight-forward,” Willing said. “Down Flatbush, over the Brooklyn Bridge, up the Westside bikeway to the GW. All these exit routes are getting crowded, so it can be faster to walk than drive. But it’s not like a disaster movie. Zombies aren’t rampaging through the streets. There aren’t any giant lizards on Fifth Avenue. The Empire State Building is still standing. Midtown isn’t on fire.”
“Son,” Douglas said, having sagged onto the pile of backpacks stacked on the tarps. “It took us four hours to go three miles last night. At my age, that’s about as far as I’m good for in a day. Off the top of my head, I reckon that would put us on the road, and preyed upon by the kindness of strangers, for over two months. You younger folks might have a chance. But you’ll never make it to Gloversville with Luella and me in tow. You should leave us behind, you hear? We’ve had our day. It was a good day. Better than yours is likely to be, from where I’m sitting.”
“We’re not leaving you behind,” Willing said firmly. “If it takes two months, so be it.”
“But what about supplies?” Jayne asked. “We barely have enough food to make it through today. If our cash can’t buy a bus ticket…”
“The camps don’t use cash,” Willing said. “It’s all barter, some credit, but you pay your debts with real goods, too. We can’t carry enough provisions for the whole trip. But we can make a start. Because, Avery? People around here are desperate to lock down what little they’ve got left. They have to be able to make shutters.” He pulled a fistful of plastic baggies with Home Depot labels from his backpack. “So guess what’s in short supply?”
Avery smiled. “Hinges.”
The plan was lunatic. Yet Lowell welcomed an excuse to get out of this cesspit, and accompanied Avery and the boys to the nearest supermarket on Third Avenue, where they parlayed a portion of the cash for nonperishables with a high calorie-to-weight ratio: fudge, salami, halvah—the antithesis of the micro-greens and tuna-carpaccio table they’d laid in Georgetown. On their return, Willing had traded hinges for raccoon jerky—a local delicacy.
Meantime, Florence helped Lowell convince Avery to stop leaving messages for Savannah. They shouldn’t deplete the remaining credit on the fleX. Of the three kids, their daughter had demonstrated the keenest aptitude for living on her wits. The girl had friends in Manhattan, and was at the age when she couldn’t abide the company of her parents. They had to have faith, and hope for the best. Avery left Jarred’s address, as well as their whereabouts in Prospect Park—locations bound to put their daughter off reuniting with her family anytime soon.
Sure enough, Savannah fleXted late that afternoon: “im nt gnna liv on any fking farm.”
If this motley Chosen People were to set off on their exodus the very next day, as their underage Moses had commanded, Lowell thought privately that burdening their party with Douglas and Luella was self-destructive. That dapper old geezer and his mad consort would never manage a hike of two hundred miles—sleeping rough, depending on serendipity for sustenance, probably trudging much of the trip on an empty stomach. Fair enough, they were his wife’s grandparents, but condemning the expedition to certain failure merely to express loyalty to elders near death anyway seemed sentimental. They’d be better off leaving the couple at the encampment, since charity often arose more readily among the penniless than among the prosperous. In short order, however, Lowell was relieved to have kept the opinion to himself.