American Salvage

by Bonnie Jo Campbell

  “I didn’t know that,” said the man. The sun was shining through a big tree’s branches, lighting up orange and yellow leaves, indistinct, but bright as heaven.

  “Most people don’t know.” Hal scratched his head, which was nearly as bald as the baby’s.

  “Everything else—that ninety-eight plus dollars—is loaned out.” Hal didn’t want to scare the man too much, but he knew that if a couple of rich guys went to the bank a few blocks away from here, Hal’s old bank, and asked the teller for all their money in cash, then the vault would be cleaned out, the bank would have to close its doors, and that would make angry people line up outside and start breaking windows. After a while the mob would start overturning cars. Hal didn’t have anything left in the bank—he’d spent most of his money on the ten acres north of town, on the pole barn he now used for a house, on the gasoline generator and the windmill he’d ordered, but hadn’t yet received.

  Probably the banks would fail before the new year, because people would wise up and withdraw their money at the end of November, and the government would struggle for two or three weeks before collapsing. Hal had heard on the Faith Channel that the government was printing all kinds of money—increasing the money supply by fifty percent—but that wasn’t going to be enough. The banks were doomed.

  “Did you know we get ninety percent of our gasoline from foreign countries?” Hal asked.

  “No. I didn’t know that, either.” The man was still smiling, apparently still not realizing the gravity of the situation despite Hal’s telling him clearly.

  “The seaports are the least prepared of all. That’s why there won’t be any gasoline.” Hal held back the worst, didn’t say that boats full of foreign oil would be floating aimlessly, their captains not knowing where to go with their controls all haywire. American nuclear submarines might launch missiles by accident and blow the ships up, or the Russians might launch missiles and pretend they did it by accident. Russians and Chinese would likely invade the United States, as they’d wanted to do all these years. Russians and Chinese were accustomed to chaos, and with the government collapsed, they could finally dominate America. They’d try to make everybody renounce Jesus, but they wouldn’t succeed with Hal Little. No, Hal knew that hell fires were worse than any pain on this earth, and his belief in Jesus was his ultimate survival tool.

  In addition to Jesus and the generator and gasoline, Hal had a chainsaw, sharp knives, a spare set of prescription telescopic glasses, a solar-powered hot-water tank, and sixteen books on survival, including an out-of-print pamphlet from the US Army detailing which bugs were edible. He had not yet bought his fifty-pound bags of rice and beans, because he was waiting until the last minute for optimum freshness. He didn’t want to eat rice and beans, but there probably wouldn’t be any other food after hunger-crazed mobs broke the plate-glass windows and emptied the shelves of the Meijer’s Thrifty Acres and the Harding’s Friendly Market.

  “Well, I hope you change your mind before the new year,” Hal said, “for the sake of that baby.”

  “How much do I owe you?” asked the man.

  “Thirty dollars.” Hal accepted the two bills. “Do you want a receipt?”

  “Naw.” The man reached out to shake hands. “And thanks for coming out right away. You really saved us.”

  “You’re welcome,” Hal said. As Hal walked toward his car, he passed the figure of the woman kneeling by the driveway—weeding flowerbeds, it looked like, which would explain the sweet smell of their yard. The baby was still on her back, reaching out his arms to Hal.

  Although he’d never gardened, Hal would take this thirty dollars to the Farm N Garden tomorrow and buy non-hybrid seed corn to plant next spring to grow more feed for the chickens.

  He’d have to eat some of the roosters if he ended up with more than a few, the people at the Farm N Garden had told him, or the hens wouldn’t lay eggs. Hal had never killed anything before, as far as he knew, and he wasn’t looking forward to it. He’d been meaning to buy a gun, a shotgun, probably, and a couple thousand rounds of ammunition. Although he’d never fired anything more powerful than a pellet gun, way back when he was a boy, he thought he might be able to shoot at unruly people if they came out to his place and threatened to steal his gasoline or generator or chickens. He knew it was un-Christian to think about killing folks. It was better not to plan on it, but rather to act in self-defense in the heat of the moment.

  Hal got into his car, put on his telescopic glasses, and fastened his safety belt. Saving yourself was your duty. If this couple with the baby didn’t even believe in Jesus yet, they were probably doomed. Unless they started right away, there wouldn’t be enough time for them both to start believing and to make preparations for the end. A Faith Channel minister had prepared viewers for Armageddon two years ago, but that had been based on mistaken information given him by the Catholics, he said, and the minister himself had reinterpreted Nostradamus’s predictions to mean that the end was rescheduled for the coming year.

  Most righteous people were saying that if Y2K didn’t destroy America, doomsday would arrive the following September, but Hal had heard a late-night minister explain how “sept” meant

  “seven,” so maybe doomsday would come in the seventh month, July. At that time, the minister predicted, a meteor a quarter mile across would plunge into the North Atlantic, causing a tidal wave that would swamp many nations, including England, and go underneath the North Pole—probably crack up the North Pole or push it partway around the world—and worst of all, the force would bust open all the oil refineries around the North Sea and send flaming gas out onto the water, so that all the way to America the ocean would be on fire. One by one the oil tankers would explode, and nuclear submarines would spit missiles at populated landmasses.

  Of course Hal Little would be okay in that extreme situation, because Jesus would carry all believers to safety. Or if a mob of people who’d already broken the plate-glass windows and cleared out the shelves of Meijer’s and Harding’s showed up at his property with their torches and pistols, Hal would not leave his pole barn. He had faith that when the situation looked hopeless, Jesus would lift him and his barn right up into the sky, float it like a sheet-metal balloon into the clouds and up farther to the Kingdom of God, where He would set it down again gently, so it nestled into the Heavenly Woods—not right next to the other houses, but not far away, either, from the other Men of God who had prepared for the end. Hal would be pleasantly surprised if he were set down near a Faith Channel minister, or near his own father and mother, both of whom had died in a terrible traffic accident twelve years ago, due to his father’s failing vision. It was even possible that Hal would end up somewhere near the tall, smiling man and his wife.

  With his glasses on, he could see the man was now holding the baby in one arm, and when Hal looked, the man waved, and he waved the baby’s hand. Hal could swear the baby reached toward him again, made a little jumping motion.

  Up in Heaven, when Hal opened his reinforced steel-and-aluminum, solid-core front door into the New Holy Universe, he knew he’d hear the sweet voices of birds and angels. He hoped he would smell flowers. He hoped there would be babies.

  Boar Taint

  The boar hog was advertised on a card at the grocery store for only twenty-five dollars, but the Jentzen farm was going to be a long, slow drive, farther down LaSalle Road than Jill had traveled, past where the blacktop gives way to gravel and farther past, where it twists and turns and becomes a rutted two track. Ernie was finishing the milking when Jill hooked up the stock trailer. He had given her directions already, but before she pulled away, he came out and stood beside the truck and studied her, the way he’d done when she went to Ann Arbor last time—they’d been married almost a year, but maybe he hadn’t been sure she was coming back.

  “Are you sure your foot’s okay?” Ernie asked. A cow had stepped on it when a stray dog ran through the barn that morning, and she was wearing the laces on her work boot loose.


  “It’s fine. I’ll see you in a couple hours,” Jill said.

  “You sure cursed up a storm.” Maybe he was stalling because he didn’t want to go back inside the hot barn—it was muggy and smelled of bleach from yesterday’s scrubbing.

  Jill said, “Let’s have tomato and bacon sandwiches for supper.”

  “You think you got enough daylight? Sure you don’t want to wait until tomorrow?”

  “Somebody else’ll get there first thing in the morning.” Jill had seen the advertisement for the hog only an hour and a half ago; maybe nobody else had seen it yet.

  “That road’s going to be muddy and washed out from all this rain,” Ernie said and ran a big hand through his black hair. He was ten years older than Jill, and if he was like his father, he would go gray by fifty and be no less handsome for it. Like his father, a widower, Ernie’d had his choice of women after his divorce. He said, “You wouldn’t want to try to navigate that road after December with anything but a snowmobile.” He wiped the sweat from his neck with a navy bandana. There was a bright new blood blister under his ring fingernail.

  “No chance of snow today,” she said and Ernie nodded. Whether it was a joke or serious bad news, Ernie nodded the same way.

  “You know, I went to school with a Jentzen kid,” Ernie said. “Had only one pair of overhauls to his name. He never brought anything to eat for lunch, not even lard-and-salt sandwiches like us regular poor kids. He still couldn’t read in the fifth grade.” Ernie folded the handkerchief, slid it into his back pocket. His slow movements worked on her like a liquor, calmed her agitation, even when she didn’t want to be calmed.

  They heard a long, low moo followed by squeals from the gilts.

  “Twenty-five bucks. That’s an awful cheap price for any kind of hog,” Ernie said. “You got to ask yourself.”

  Jill nodded. She had asked herself and ignored the answer.

  She drove out slowly, so she could keep looking back at her husband making his way into the barn. The man had an easy way of walking that made her think he could walk all day and all night, too. Whatever poor condition this hog was in, Jill would bring him home, quarantine him for a few weeks, worm him, and dope him with broad-spectrum antibiotics. Jill was sure Ernie felt skeptical about this whole plan she had concocted with the neighbor for raising pigs for pig roasts; the longer he didn’t express his skepticism, however, the more desperate she felt about succeeding, especially after her last two farm schemes had gone so badly. Ernie kept himself focused on his hundreds of acres of the same corn, oats, and beans he’d been harvesting for the last three decades, and Jill had begun to think maybe she ought to do the same.

  She meant to arrive at the Jentzen place in the daylight, but she stopped in town to get some rye bread and, as an indulgence, an imported dark chocolate bar with hazelnuts, something she rarely bought for herself, and then she got a little lost on the unmarked dirt roads. As she bumped along, too slowly to deter the deer flies, the truck steered itself by staying in the washed-out ruts. When the glove box popped open, she leaned over and extracted a pocket flashlight before slamming it shut.

  The chocolate bar on the seat thrilled her, perhaps more than was reasonable. She would keep it in her underwear drawer, she decided, and eat one square a day.

  The road dead-ended into mud puddles in the yard of a two-story wooden house, and one look told Jill that the Jentzens were not hooked up to the power grid. The setting sun lit the western windows, turned them gold, but the others, those not boarded over, were dark, dusty panes, and the barns beyond were already swallowed in shadow.

  People back home in Ann Arbor refused to believe there were still folks without electricity in America. When Jill had first come to Ernie’s a year and a half ago as a post-graduate student working with experimental bean crops, Ernie had only the diesel generator in the barn for the milking machines and fans. Last winter she had persuaded him to get the electricity connected to the house and barn, although they hadn’t yet found the time or money to install outlets or rig up fixtures. Now there were table lamps plugged into extension cords in most of the rooms of the farmhouse, but Ernie, if left to his own devices in the evenings, still sat at the kitchen table with the oil lamp or the Coleman lantern. Jill was always meaning to convince him to play cards with her or mend household appliances and furniture, but he preferred to rest and talk and drink bottles of cheap beer from the grocery. And in the end, she was happy just to read and have the man touch her with those strong hands of his, calloused and infused with wild energy he picked up from fixing tractors and mending fences and birthing calves. She became weak to the point of stupidity under the influence of those hands. Despite their exhaustion, she and Ernie had made love nearly every night through the winter, spring, and summer. Jill did not want to get pregnant—maybe not ever—

  but she was beginning to fear her birth control pills might not hold up to the frequency and ferocity of their embraces. Ernie already had two kids from his previous marriage, both of whom hated farming.

  Jill parked the truck and retied the red handkerchief around her hair, which had gone frizzy from the humidity. A big clapboard house like this Jentzen place could have been a showpiece in the historic district in Ann Arbor, with the siding, trim, and glass all repaired, but out here, rising up from the dark weeds, this turn-of-the-last-century house seemed doomed to collapse. She ascended the steps to the front door and knocked, but the wood was so soft and wet her knuckles made little sound. She might have pushed the door open a few inches and yelled inside, as folks did at her and Ernie’s place, but there was no door handle, and the door was shut tight. After a short wait, she ventured around the back and walked up the wooden stairs. The bottom step was rotting through in the middle.

  She peered through the screen door and knocked. She studied the lines of the room until she began to make out the silhouette of a shriveled old man in a thin undershirt, sitting motionless at a table. His sunken chest made her want to turn around and walk down the stairs and get into her truck and drive away, but she’d come all the way out here, and she would damn well get that hog, sick or mean as it might be. She made herself knock again. Anyway, it was stupid to think a dead man would be sitting at a table—surely, he was just a skinny old guy with bad hearing. After what seemed like a long time, a woman’s voice said, “Come in.”

  Jill stepped inside the hot, dark kitchen, felt her work boots press grit into the plank floor, yanked her arm back just before it brushed against a big wood-burning cook stove, on top of which a three-gallon pot of water steamed. Although a fire burned in the stove, not even a candle was lit to defend against the oncoming darkness. A woman was standing at a big double sink, facing a boarded-up window with her back to Jill, washing dishes in slow motion. Jill approached her, also in slow motion—the woman had told Jill to come in, hadn’t she? Jill allowed her eyes to trace the skirt of the woman’s sagging housedress, down to the backs of her thin calves, one of which was marked with a dark, vertical gash. Her canvas shoes had no laces and stretched to accommodate her swollen ankles. Jill felt an urge to tighten up her own bootlace, although it would’ve hurt.

  As her eyes adjusted to the dim light, three more silent men materialized at the table, and a boy. The thick bodies, the big table, the chairs that didn’t fit under the table, the stove jutting out—

  it all made the room feel crowded, as though it would be difficult for her to turn and run if she needed to. Two of the men wore uniform shirts over their gray undershirts, and it was probably the dark that made all their bearded faces seem uniformly grimy. The boy was thin and shirtless in his overalls, maybe thirteen, with dark blond hair stringy from sweat. His mouth hung open, and his panting made Jill think of the way her chickens sweated through their open mouths on the hottest days.

  The men all had a forward curve to their shoulders, with their forearms resting on the table as though they were defending bowls of food, only there were no bowls. The man across the table glanced up at h
er, and Jill raised her arm to wave, but when his eyes settled on her breasts, she changed her mind and crossed her arms instead. Could this guy with the huge fists and slick rubbery forehead be Ernie’s old classmate, the kid without a sandwich? The old man with the sunken chest stared into the center of the table, at the empty cutting board and the plaid box of store-brand salt, and Jill wondered if these men were prepared to sit in silence all night until the sun came up.

  Sometimes Ernie fell asleep sitting in his kitchen chair, his arms folded on the table.

  “I’m here about the boar hog. For twenty-five dollars,” Jill said. “If you still have it.” When she got no immediate response, she began to wonder if she were in the right place. Maybe there were run-down farms like this at the end of every dirt road in the county. “There was a card up at the grocery,” Jill said, trying to stay calm.

  “Russell, go get the hog for this lady,” the woman said without turning. Her voice was slow, rusty, as though speaking were painful.

  The boy rose, walked around Jill, and went out the screen door, and its springing shut made almost no noise against the damp doorframe. It had rained practically every day this August, an absurd amount of rain, overflowing ditches, causing Ernie’s field pond to swell onto manured land.

  (Strange to think it was her pond, too, her manured land.) As a result, the pond water was now polluted, and they had to water the cows in the barn, which made for extra work.

  “Give me the money,” the woman said. She wiped her hands on her housedress and limped over to Jill.

  Despite the swollen ankles and two missing teeth, the woman appeared not much older than Jill, maybe thirty-five at the most. Her hair was still a rich brown, but her face was rough, as though sunburned season after season. Jill always tried to remember to put on sunscreen, but rarely reapplied it after sweating it off. The woman held out her raw hand, and as Jill gave her the five and the twenty, she noted her own hand was torn up from scrubbing the cow barn’s concrete floors and walls to prepare for this morning’s inspection. Jill’s gloves had shredded against the concrete, and it would take weeks of medicated lotion before the skin healed. Without ever meeting Jill’s gaze, the woman limped back to the sink and resumed her slow-motion dishwashing.