Black Autumn Travelers

by Jeff Kirkham

  “I’m going to go now and let you get some rest,” Julie said, hovering over his bed.

  “Keep the boys close,” was all Cameron could think to say.

  9

  “Johnny struck through the Shaolin slum

  Prum-prum-prum on my Shaolin drum

  Niggas don’t dare to step in the square

  Kids ain’t playing over here, playa

  Only one way, and that’s my way

  Grim Reaper calling, Judgment Day.”

  Judgement Day, Method Man, Tical 2000: Judgement Day, 1998

  Wallula, Washington, “Starbucks Camp”

  In the night, the cold came like a destroying angel. It started with a benign sprinkle of rain, but it was cold rain. The Starbucks Clan huddled around the dead campfire, trying to conserve energy and to draw out every minute before retreating into the tent.

  There were now ten of them sleeping in a six-man tent. Sage had yet to sleep there, preferring his sleeping bag under the stars. But that night it not only rained; it snowed. Sage had no choice but to climb into the tent or disappear from camp, something he was still reluctant to do.

  The group relegated Sage to the bottom of the tent where their feet bumped and prodded him all night. Once again, they treated him like a child. He did most of the work, brought in most of the food, and they still stuck him at the bottom of the tent. He should have been a full member of the group, not the guy people used to warm their feet.

  The problem was Justin. He wouldn’t give Sage his due as the guy keeping them alive. Justin held a jealous grip on leadership and contributed nothing. The unspoken but obvious truth: if Justin didn’t keep Sage down, he might lose breeding rights to the females. As far as Sage could tell, Justin had been banging all the girls, probably even gut-sick Penny.

  Why the women let Justin have sex with them, Sage would never understand. Maybe they thought Justin would keep them alive. Maybe something ancient and primitive in their minds drove them toward the Alpha Male. It made no sense. Sage kept them alive, not Justin. He only pranced and preened. Why couldn’t they see that?

  As he lay sleepless at the bottom of the tent with one of the men’s calloused feet jammed into his lower back, Sage admitted he was playing the fool. As the morning light began to take the tent from black to gray, he decided to do something. With snow on the ground, things would go from bad to deadly bad.

  As dawn came, the sun peaking weakly over the horizon, beads of water condensed inside the tent and an intermittent drizzle speckled their faces. The breath of ten sleeping people hit the icy tent walls and formed into droplets. The shells of their sleeping bags were getting soaked by the light rain. Within a night or two, they would start feeling the damp inside their bags. Without an inevitable change in weather, Sage knew from experience in Boy Scouts, hypothermia would become an issue.

  As light rose, their discomfort mounted and people began to stir. The new guy, Felix, unzipped the tent fly and stepped out. He had slept in his clothes. After him, the girls started waking and picking their way outside. They hustled to their duffle bags and suitcases to find warmer things to wear.

  Nobody had slept much. When Sage stepped from the tent, there were five people standing around the fire pit fumbling with kindling and matches. He left them to their catechism of endless lighter-striking and went over to his backpack to get a sweater and his Arc’teryx wind shell.

  He came back to the fire and stood with the crowd, his hands stuffed into his pants pockets. Felix banged away on the lighter, hopelessly putting flame to wet wood. Sage could see that Felix’s kindling was way too big and way too wet. Sage knew starting a fire in these conditions would require half an hour of shaving wood curls and carefully standing up a pile of tiny twigs and dry paper. Instead of helping, he left Felix to struggle.

  “Don’t just stand there like a retard. Help me get this started,” Felix said, glaring at Sage.

  “Fuck you, Felix.” The words came out of Sage’s mouth before he could stop them. He knew he was in a black mood because of his terrible night’s sleep, and he knew his emotions were raw. His logical mind told him they were sinking, and helping Felix, even with this fire, was a net loss of energy. Sage would be fine without the fire, tucked in his Gore-Tex shell, conserving calories.

  Justin wandered over to the wet fire pit. The snow had slowed down, leaving just an inch of white on the ground, scraped away where the group had walked. A skiff of frozen mist hung over the depression where they camped, and drifted down in fat, lazy pom-poms of snow.

  “Sage, help him start the fire,” Justin ordered. “Felix, don’t use the word ‘retard.’ It’s an ignorant word.”

  Sage didn’t move, ignoring him. “I’m going to check the traps,” he said as he walked away.

  There it was, Sage thought as he headed toward the alfalfa field. The first schism.

  He would never go back to being their beast of burden. He and Justin were at an impasse, and Sage wasn’t going to save their asses anymore.

  And this is how emotions get people killed.

  Sage noticed that his internal voice was starting to sound a little like his dad.

  We’re making cascades of deadly mistakes because Justin insists on being in charge. His ego is going to get everyone killed. I’m reacting to his ego instead of figuring out our survival. I’d be doing us all a favor if I shot him.

  As he crunched through the snow, Sage tried to distance himself from the drama. He knew Mother Nature would keep throwing punches morning, noon, and night. But she wasn’t the real killer. With technology stripped back, human ego would kill millions.

  Mother Nature came at a man straight on, knocking him to the ropes by sheer force. Human ego, on the other hand, crawled out from under the canvas, slid up a man’s leg and laid maggots in his brain. When it all fell apart and people died, it wasn’t because of snow, water, drought, or heat. It was emotion. Mother Nature only finished the job human ego started.

  He hoped Justin could see reason.

  Sage smiled, hearing one of his Grandpa’s overused sayings in his head: “Put hope in one hand and shit in the other. See which one gets filled first.”

  His smile faded. Without hope, he might have to fight Justin.

  Something about that idea rang false. They no longer lived in a world where fighting someone meant pushing them around, posturing and calling names. The stakes ran too high in this world and few could afford posturing.

  Unless he planned on breaking his word to his father—that he would do whatever it took to survive—Sage would have to keep bowing down or kill Justin. One or the other. Trying to find the in-between would be an invitation for Mother Nature to make the decision for him, and Sage had little doubt which she would choose.

  Men with hardness lived. Men with weakness died.

  Sage shivered, even beneath his top-brand outdoor clothing. He pictured, for a moment, Justin dead at his hands, a gaping hole in his chest. Sage knew what kind of wound a 30-30 Winchester caused. The rifle would easily put down a wild hog, and few rifles could claim the same. His 30-30 would tear Justin apart. The others would see his destroyed body, blood gushing into the snow. They would see Sage holding the gun.

  He pushed the thought away with prejudice.

  Not today. Today he would find animals to eat and buy them more time to work this out.

  With the scrim of white on the ground, he had a hard time locating his snare lines. After a maddening thirty minutes, he finally spotted one loop, frosted in snow.

  He already knew it would be a bust. If the rabbits had been out last night in the snow, he should have seen paw prints. It seemed unlikely that animals would be running around in the snowfall. They would probably stay in their dens until it stopped snowing and then venture out.

  It was the same deal with the dead falls. All his figure-four traps were exactly as he had left them, except for one that must have fallen in the wind. He reset the trap and headed back to camp.

  Sage considered a
lternatives.

  He could leave the Starbucks Clan. He had his hiding place up on the hillside. Without Sage, the Clan would search the surrounding area, looking for food. They would eventually find Sage’s stash and devour everything within a few days. He couldn’t carry his supplies far enough and carefully enough to prevent the hipsters from stumbling upon them.

  His nuclear option was the rifle. He had the 30-30 lever-action stashed on the rock ridge. He could always drive the Clan away by threatening them. Could he point a gun at Penny and the other girls and make them walk away to their deaths? Would they even choose to go with him if he split the group? After that, would Justin always be a threat, apt to slit his throat in the middle of the night to regain the women?

  Sage still wanted to get with Penny. Maybe if he saved her life and took her away, they could be together. She wasn’t doing well, waking up in the night at least a half-dozen times to go to the bathroom. She needed real food and clean water. Sage could supply both, but he would have to trust her with his secret stash. He would have to take responsibility for her, which would be a huge violation of his agreement with his father and his grandparents.

  Rather than heading back to the camp empty-handed, Sage made a detour to the onion field. The plowed dirt had turned to mud. Sifting for undersized onions was now an order of magnitude more difficult because the sticky mud weighed three times as much as it had. It glommed onto everything—his hands, his boots, his pant legs.

  Sage pawed through the muck, ignoring the sludge, and found eight small onions. Like so many things now, if he wasn’t willing to get muddy, he wasn’t worthy of survival. He stuffed the onions into the big pockets of his shell, getting the pockets filthy in the process. Then he plodded back to camp.

  The group had given up on the fire and stood around in the sullen throes of hunger. As Sage arrived, some of the girls’ eyes followed his movement with interest. He went to work, wordlessly, building a fire. He shaved long, paper-thin strips off the sticks Felix had abandoned. When he had a large pile of shavings, he pulled some paper out of his bag—the instructions to his water filter. Nobody noticed that he had burned water filter instructions for the last two fires, which was a good thing, since nobody knew he had a water filter.

  Once he had amassed a small pile of shavings, Sage set to work with the tiniest twigs, arranging a six-inch teepee around the fine fuel. He patiently added more twigs, leaving a small opening for his lighter. He laid on slightly larger twigs, building the teepee up to ten inches tall. Sage gathered a pile of larger and larger sticks and set them within easy reach. He knew from experience: don’t start a wet fire without everything in perfect order.

  The paper instructions burned slowly at first since they weren’t true paper but some kind of industrial plastic-fabric-paper. He laid his head near the muddy ground and blew gently into the pile of cinder-fringed paper. With breath so slight he could barely tell he was exhaling, he saw the pile begin to smoke. Then, with a last careful exhale, the tiny teepee crackled and flamed.

  Sage looked around to see who had witnessed his small miracle of practice and patience. A few of the girls stared at him blankly. The others had lost interest. Sage shook his head and continued to add to the fire. Soon he had a small bonfire going. He wanted it to burn hot and fast, leaving a pile of coals to roast his onions. Within fifteen minutes, the sagebrush had burned down and he had his coals. He fished the onions out of his pocket and the girls slid to the edges of their lawn chairs.

  “Ooh, can I have some of those?” one of the new girls pleaded. The others chimed in with their own entreaties.

  “You guys know where the onion field is. You’re going to have to get your own onions. These are for Penny and me, since she’s too sick to get her own.” Penny heard her name and perked up.

  “I’m sick, too,” one of the new girls whined. Sage hadn’t bothered to learn her name.

  “Nora and Condie can show you where to dig for onions. I suggest you get moving. You’re feeling slow and lazy because you’re beginning to starve. If you don’t get moving now, you’ll die right here in camp.”

  “Nobody is going to die,” Justin announced. “And we don’t need your onions.” He turned to Sage. “Today, we are going to the farmer’s house to get our share.”

  “We have a share at the farmer’s house?” Condie asked.

  “The farmer has plenty,” Justin explained. “There’s no reason for us to starve when he’s fat and happy just two miles down the road. Those farm animals belong to the earth and the earth belongs to all of us. Just because he enslaved animals does not make him the Lord of the Manor. It’s time we make him do the right thing.”

  “Make him?” Sage wondered aloud.

  “He needs to give us food, whether he likes it or not. The time of the ruling elite is over.”

  Sage scoffed “He’s going to blow your ass away if you go in there thinking you can force him.” The further Justin slid into malnutrition and the longer Sage stayed strong, the less he felt the need to edit his emotions with Justin.

  “We’ll see. Maybe we’ll visit at night.” Justin smiled. “You know, I’ve been noticing that coat of yours. Looks expensive. Are you a ruling class capitalist, too, little man?”

  It suddenly struck Sage that he had no idea what a desperate, hungry person like Justin was capable of doing.

  Suddenly, Sage didn’t feel certain of his own safety. When faced with losing his status as leader, Justin might be capable of anything. Sage’s sense of the Starbucks Clan flip-flopped. In his mind, they went from being a benign bunch of fools to a malignant pack of wounded animals.

  When he was young, his older brother stole a muskrat trap out of his dad’s workshop. One of the neighbors’ cats often wandered into their backyard in their old home in the city. In the middle of the night, the tomcat would make a horrible ruckus for some reason Sage never understood. Now he knew that the cat had been out pursuing females to breed, yowling and mewing his sexual angst.

  Sage’s brother cocked the muskrat trap one night, staked its chain into the lawn, and set a chunk of hotdog on the pressure plate. The next morning, the muskrat trap had disappeared.

  Sage got his brother and they went looking for the trap. They found the cat behind a coiled garden hose, leg broken and twisted in the jaws of the trap. The tomcat had yanked out the stake and backed into the first corner he could find.

  The cat’s eyes burned with desperation and fury. Sage had never seen a living creature so incensed. His big brother ran off and came back with an aluminum baseball bat. Sage watched, to a chorus of hollow twangs, as his brother beat the wounded animal to death. Before it died, the tomcat fought back with a devil-possessed fury Sage would never forget. Sobered by the horrible scene, but fearing the trouble they would be in if their father found out, the boys quietly buried the cat in the rose planter and headed off, late for school.

  Looking at Justin, Sage remembered that tomcat.

  “I’m not going into anyone’s home in the middle of the night,” Nora stood up, marshaling her strength. “What you’re proposing isn’t right, Justin. You may have the right idea about the Earth, but threatening other people to make them comply is wrong. I will not be party to violence. I’d rather die.” She sat back down a little too hard and the lawn chair groaned.

  Sage waited to see what would happen next. Nobody followed Nora’s lead, whether for weakness of body or weakness of mind, Sage didn’t know.

  “I’m going to collect some more onions. I’ll be back in a bit.” Sage turned and walked away without waiting for a response. The scene had unnerved him and he wanted nothing more than to put some distance between himself and Justin.

  “Hey, little man, stop.” Justin trotted up to him with something obviously concealed in his hands. Sage came to full alert, his senses amped. Justin stepped toward him with a strange expression.

  Is this it? Sage wondered.

  His shoulders hunched defensively and he freed his hands from his coat p
ockets, suddenly very aware that he had no weapon.

  Justin shoved a crushed plastic sack toward Sage. “Here’s a grocery sack. Bring enough for everyone or don’t come back.” He slapped Sage on the back with a malicious grin.

  Justin returned to the girls standing around the smoldering coals and set to work stoking up Sage’s fire.

  Sage barely suppressed the urge to run.

  Once he had made some distance from the Starbucks Clan, Sage cut a wide loop, keeping out of sight but heading back toward the pond and the ridge. He longed to get his hands on his rifle, but what good would that do him? He wasn’t going to shoot Justin just because the man might be dangerous.

  Then it clicked in his mind—an absolute line that he could not cross, under any circumstances or for any reason. No matter how this played out, Sage would not allow Justin to hurt the farmer or his family. At the end of the day, Sage was more tribe to the farmer than to the Starbucks Clan. Regardless of his hard-on for Penny, regardless of Nora’s nobility and regardless of his rebellious rumblings against his own father, he wasn’t going to permit Justin to ambush the farmhouse.

  No matter what else happened, Sage now knew his bottom line.

  He thought about his own family: his dad, his mom, his grandmas and grandpas, and his aunts and uncles. He knew his family, his true clan, would always side with the farmer―with people of the land over people of the city. That distinction didn’t resonate precisely, but without knowing the farmer at all, he knew that the farmer would be more like his own family. More like him. With so much change around him, Sage’s family rose as his guiding light, an immutable truth about who he was at his core.

  The city people had interesting ideas, and their lifestyles seemed smart and sexy. Nora’s philosophies and Justin’s politics rang seductive and maybe even true to some degree. At the end of the day, though, the Ross soul that lived in Sage would not be seduced. His family, despite their failings, would always gravitate toward accountability and plain-speaking. And, regardless of women and philosophy, Sage would always be a Ross.