Red Walker

by Scott Allen

  Dana sprawled in the chair. He desperately wanted sleep, but he knew he had to make this woman trust him first. “Tell me the whole story,” she said.

  Dana tried to be coherent, covering everything of importance since he had met Marjorie. He did not skip all the deaths. Finally, Nance seemed satisfied.

  “Well, there’s no more Male Control in Texas, and no one to punish me if I help you. We’re both free for now, until we find out what the Mexican government is like. So, I’ll do what I can for you, out of respect for Marjorie. I’m going to put you up in grandma’s old room. I notice you’re still bleeding,” she said, and pointed to his leg. There were spots of blood on the floor. Let me go set up the room, and I’ll let you get in bed. I’ll see if I can’t do something for that leg.” She left the room, carrying her rifle, and was back a few minutes later. Always keeping her eyes on him and her rifle at the ready, she led him to a small, cluttered bedroom, with a double bed, covers pulled back, with several towels laid across the sheet at the foot. “Lay down here, and I’ll take a look at the leg. Wounded leg on the towels. I’m no doctor, but I have had to patch up farm animals. Too expensive to hire a vet for every little cut.”

  Dana lay on the soft bed, on the clean cool sheets, wrapped only in a towel. It was strange to have a woman fussing over him, and stranger still to be nearly unclothed while she did. Nance examined his leg, careful not to touch near the wound. “Well,” she said, “I think the entrance wound will heal by itself, but the exit wound needs to be stitched. You did a good thing by tightening that towel around the wounds, that probably prevented an infection. By the way, Dana, what’s been eating on you? You’re covered with bites.”

  Dana was uncomfortable with being so exposed with a woman so close, but he answered, “Uh, mosquitoes, chiggers, ants, and probably some other bugs I never identified.”

  “Well, I’ll bring back some lotion to put on them, along with the stitching material.” Nance returned with some materials in a small box. “OK, first I’m going to disinfect the entrance wound and then put a bandage on it that will pull the sides together. It will hurt a little.” She put some gel-like substance on her finger and daubed it on the wound. Dana gritted his teeth and said nothing. Then, she put an adhesive bandage on one side of the wound and pulled it tight, fastening it to the other side.

  Then, she turned his leg to the side and examined the exit wound. “I’m going to put some topical anesthetic on the skin around the wound to deaden it. I probably should inject anesthetic directly into the skin, but I don’t have any. This stuff seems to work OK on cows and pigs, but I have no idea if it helps for people. Who knows what a pig feels, anyway?” She daubed something on the wound area and then took a large, curved needle out of the box, and dipped it in a solution. Dana was frightened by the size of the needle, and she noticed. “Yeah, it’s a needle meant for large farm animals, but it will have to do. Sorry. I wish I had some of the stuff that surgeons use to close wounds, a kind of glue, but that’s impossible for regular people to get. We’ll give the anesthetic a minute to take effect.” She ran some thread through the eye of the needle. Dana looked at her and decided she was pretty, but he was so apprehensive about what she was going to do next that the thought dropped from his mind.

  After a minute, Nance said, “OK, this might sting.” Dana felt a poke, which did, in fact, sting a great deal. So much so, that his sharp intake of breath was quite loud. “Just hang on, Dana, I’ll be through in a few minutes.” It wasn’t as bad as some of the shocks he had received on his ankle bracelet, but it was bad enough. Nance finished, placed a bandage over the wound, and said, “A pretty neat job, if I say so, myself. Don’t get it wet. If you want to take a shower, we’ll wrap it in plastic. Take these pills. You can have two every six hours. They should help a bit with the pain. Here’s the bottle of lotion.” She left the bottles on the bedside table.

  Dana lay exhausted on the bed. The pain was down to a dull throb. Nance said, “When you get up, if you’re hungry, just eat anything in the kitchen. I’ve laid out those grey food bars – the whole ones – on the counter, too. Sleep tight.”

  Dana called after her, “Nance?” She returned to the doorway. “I wish I could tell you how much I appreciate all this. I don’t know what I would have done without your help. I probably would have died out there.” She waved away his thanks and left the room. He rubbed the lotion all over his bites, and pulled up the covers. The room was cool. He had not slept in an air-conditioned room since he was 12. Feeling as if he had been transported to some magical place, Dana slept.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Dana woke in the wee hours of the morning, momentarily disoriented, wondering where his tarp was and where all the mosquitoes had gone. He found the bedside table lamp, and fumbled around for the switch. When he could see, it was obvious that the room was decorated by an older woman with a lot of cherished memories. The walls, and the bureau and side table surfaces, were covered with pictures of individuals and family groups. Several of the pictures had someone in them that looked like a younger version of Nance. And, there was a middle-aged man in many of them. He had a strong face and a gentle smile, and given that the largest picture showed him alone with a middle-aged woman, he guessed they was Nance’s grandfather and grandmother. There were also pictures of boys and young men, sometimes leaning on fences or riding horses, which he guessed were Nance’s father and uncles.

  By the clock on the wall, it was seven hours since his last pain pills, and his leg was throbbing, so he took two.

  He noticed that his clothes had been laundered and placed on a chair near the bed. They were back to being black instead of red. He was hungry, and threw back the covers, put the clothes over one arm, put his crutch under the other, and walked into the bathroom to pee. There was a drawer with what was obviously a man’s razor in it, and Dana painfully shaved off a lot of brown stubble with the very dull blade. He used a wet hand towel to give himself a quick bath, and wash the blood off his face. He got dressed.

  In the kitchen refrigerator, he found some good things to eat, and satisfied himself without depleting the fridge much. It was not generously stocked. He took the food on a plate, adding one of his nutrition bars, out to the living room and sat.

  The living room was lined with bookcases, except for a viewscreen on one wall. After eating, he hauled himself over to the shelves and looked at the books. There were about a thousand titles there, and his first scan indicated he had heard of none of them. There was a lot of dust on the tops of the books. The bookshelves had labels on the shelves, like “Philosophy,” “Government,” “Farm,” “Home,” “Languages,” “Classic literature,” “Contemporary fiction,” “Math,” “Science,” and so on. He took down a classic literature book titled, “The Innocents Abroad,” by someone named Mark Twain, and brought it back to his chair.

  It appeared to be a story written in the 19th century about a trip on a ship from the United States to Europe. Dana had trouble understanding why this would be interesting, but as he read further, he detected a note of humor in the author’s tales. The author himself was frequently the object of his own humor. At one point, he described buying a pair of gloves from a pretty and persuasive young shop assistant in France, gloves obviously too small, tearing them, and then having to pay for them. His friends made fun of him, and the author took it good-naturedly.

  Dana asked himself if any such book, or a modern equivalent, could have been written today. First of all, American men did not travel. They were confined to a small radius around their dorms and confined by their hardware. Second, the thought of a man describing a woman, in print or out loud, as “pretty,” or anything like it, would have resulted in severe punishment for sexism. Third, it was humorous. Humor was considered dangerous by the authorities. Men never told jokes, because they were likely to give offense to someone, or insult the powerful, resulting in punishment. Except, of course, for jokes about men. It was liberating to Dana to read such a book, although
he didn’t understand many of the terms, and suspected he missed many of the jokes. It described a different world, one where people were so much less constrained that it was impossible to imagine.

  As he continued to read, and Dana was a very fast reader, he noticed the sky outside was becoming lighter. There was a clock on the wall, and noticed it was 5:45. He realized he had not known the time since his wristband had been removed at Marjorie’s house. He had been living by the cycles of the sun and the moon.

  He heard footsteps in the hall, and Nance appeared, barefoot, in a t-shirt and shorts, carrying her rifle. “Did you sleep well? Are you hungry?” she asked. “I can make some breakfast. And, I can get you a better razor. You must’ve found that old one in the bathroom.”

  Dana replied that he had slept well and had just eaten a little while ago. Actually, it had probably been three hours ago, but Dana was well aware of the state of her refrigerator and didn’t want to impose. So, Nance made herself a bowl of cereal and sat at the counter.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  “I noticed a lot of photos in your grandmother’s old room. Some of them looked like a younger you,” said Dana.

  “Yep, those are me. Lots of pictures of my grandfather and my grandmother, and my father and uncles, too,” she replied.

  “Tell me about your grandfather, Nance. He looked like a nice man,” said Dana.

  “Oh, he was. I adored him,” said Nance, her face brightening. “He and my grandmother owned this farm, and it had been passed down in his family for generations. But, he wasn’t just a farmer. He was very well-read (she pointed at the bookshelf), and was involved in a lot of community organizations as a young man, according to Grandmother. Everyone around here really respected him. I saw him speak once at some sort of public meeting. I was only four years old, so I didn’t know what it was about, but apparently he was pretty eloquent, because he got a lot of applause. He taught my father and my uncles all about farming, and when I was young, he started teaching me. He was gentle, and kind, and funny, and knew exactly what to say to make me feel loved. He used to read to me before bed. Like I said, I adored him.”

  Dana asked, “And what about your mother and father?”

  Nance’s face clouded. She reached around behind her to set the cereal bowl on the counter, the turned back and put her hands on her knees and looked directly at Dana. “It’s not a good story. I never knew them. I was born about the time they started taking men away around here. The rural areas were the last areas where they did that. The story my grandmother told me was that my father had a sweetheart who lived a few kilometers away. The wanted to marry and have children, but it was becoming obvious that it would be prohibited. So, she got pregnant anyway, with me. Pretty soon, they came for my father and my uncles. My father’s sweetheart, my mother, was taken to a facility where she gave birth.

  “Since I was a girl, they didn’t kill me, but returned me to me grandparents, and sent my mother somewhere. I don’t know where, and maybe they killed her. They let my grandfather live, because farmers were scarce and food production was dropping. They eventually made him wear a metal collar to keep track of him. He knew they would eventually come for him, so he started teaching me how to manage the farm as soon as I was old enough to do anything at all. I had a good fourteen years with him and Grandmother before he was taken away. You can imagine how I felt about that. Grandmother was devastated, too. She lost her sons, and then her husband. I slowly worked myself out of my grief, but my grandmother was always sad.

  “We had to be busy all day, every day, to manage the farm. It was hard for us. We worked from dawn until after the sun set every day, except when I was in school, and we were exhausted and sore nearly every night. The government gave us quotas of what to produce, and we never met them. They were impossibly high. But, I think they weren’t able to keep track of production. I think their records were an awful mess. So, we just produced as much as we could, and they paid us the standard rates, which was enough to keep us afloat.

  “It wore my grandmother out. She was never happy again, and she got sick and died seven years after Grandfather was taken. I was left alone to manage the farm, and I’ve been doing that for the last three years. I cut way back on production, enough so that I can manage it alone. I got my college degrees through the viewscreen. The government paid for the agriculture degree, but I was only taking that so that I could double-major in history. I just do the best I can. I miss my grandparents horribly, and I miss having other people around. All of the surrounding farms that are still working are worked by women, and there’s hardly a chance for us to meet and talk. The only way out of being a farmer is to get permission to get pregnant, and the government hates giving permission to a farmer.

  “To be honest, I hate this life. I hate the hard work and the loneliness. I hate working outside in the cold and the heat and the rain … and the damned insects. I hate trying to deal with pigs that weigh three times as much as I do, and stink all the time. I hate having to haul feed from the bin for them, I hate having to help sows give birth – they are the nastiest beasts on earth - I hate having to wait for the government harvesting machine to come and harvest my corn while it’s getting overripe, I hate having to help the truck driver from the government slaughterhouse force the pigs onto her truck. I hate fixing the drip irrigation pipes in the cornfield, and the solar panels on the roof and beside the barn. I don’t even know what I’m doing half the time, and I have to spend money on repair services. I can only barely manage because Grandfather made a lot of improvements to the farm so that it didn’t require as much strength. Maybe the Mexican government will let me do something else.”

  “Why didn’t you just quit the farm after your grandmother died, and find work somewhere else?” asked Dana.

  Nance stared at him for a moment. “I guess you don’t know how things worked for women, do you? We got assigned work, based on what the government thought needed to be done. I was from a farm family, like most of the women around here, and there was a big need for farmers. So, whether I liked it or not, I was a farmer. I could have applied for other work, but given the shortage of farmers, I would have been turned down. You don’t just leave your assigned job, it’s a criminal offense, and you can be assigned something much worse. If you wanted to teach public school or college, or you wanted to go into political work or be a manager in a government office or a big business, you could forget it. It was only the daughters of the elite of the Womyn’s Party that got those kinds of jobs.

  “After my grandmother died, I thought about getting a partner to help me handle the place. I knew a lot of girls in high school, but they were all either working on their own family farms, or wanted to do something else. There might have been some woman that wanted to work here, but frankly, it would have been a lot more trouble than it was worth. Girls form cliques, and they’re mean to the other girls not in the cliques. They always struck me as neurotic, bitchy, and constantly worried about what other girls thought of them. I didn’t care, so I hung out with some other farm girls and worked hard on making good grades. I hoped my college degrees would get me off the farm, but they didn’t.

  “Now, I’m wondering what I’m going to do when the Mexican authorities arrive. I’m thinking that, if they’ll let me, I’ll sell the place and move to some nice town and find work teaching kids English. I’m pretty well read, and I like kids, at least I think I do. I could also teach US or world history. My grandfather made sure I knew the real history, not the twisted stuff you get in school. And, I could brush up on my Spanish so I could interact with Spanish-speaking kids. In the meantime, I’ve got to keep the farm running so it’ll be worth something if I sell it.”

  Dana suddenly felt guilty and sad. He was sad because she hated her life, and guilty because he was probably keeping her from her work, work with which he could not help. “Nance, I feel like I should help you with the farm, but I’m not sure what I can do right now.”

  “Well, there isn’t much unt
il your leg heals enough, probably in a week. Maybe the best thing for you to do is to catch up on the truth about American history. We could talk about it at dinner. You’ll see a lot of books on it on the shelves, in that section. I’d recommend that one there,” she pointed, “with the blue cover, first – it’s many decades old, and it was what kids were taught in high school then. Also the thin one next to it. That’s the US Constitution before the radical feminists got ahold of it. When you’re reading the blue book, keep in mind that the United States was a constitutional republic at one time. My grandfather used to say it had descended into totalitarian socialism run by radical feminists. That should keep you busy.” And, for the first time, he saw Nance smile. “I’ve got to go take care of the damned pigs,” she said, her smile turning into a curled lip of mock disgust. “I took the afternoon off yesterday to mow the lawn, so I’m behind.”

  She disappeared into the back rooms. A few minutes later she reappeared, with overalls over a long-sleeve shirt, shoes, and a hat. “Actually, there is one thing. I normally carry my gun, because I never know who might show up. You could get your gun and sit under a tree near the barn while you read. If anyone shows up, you can cover me. By the way, I charged it up; it’s over there in the closet. I guess you realize there’s no protection for us now, no police officers and no army. We’re on our own. My wristband doesn’t even work anymore, all communications are down, so I just took it off. Good thing we still have electricity from our solar panels.” She paused and looked at Dana. “It’ll be nice to have someone to watch my back.” She smiled.

  She picked up a liter bottle of green liquid from a shelf near the door, poured some in her hand, and wiped it all over her face and neck. “Insect repellent. The pigs attract every kind of pest. Better use some before you come out.” She smiled again and left. Dana nodded, and hobbled over to the bookcase to get the book, and then to get his gun and some insect repellent.