Third World

by Louis Shalako

  His heart genuinely ached to see her, with a hint of sadness on her face.

  “I’ll make up a plate for her later.” She wrung her hands and looked at Hank.

  “Maybe I could help with the washing up?”

  She brightened a little at the thought of company and talk. Although Hank was the quiet type, he was also very intelligent and he knew everybody out his way.

  “That would be welcome.” It sounded so formal, but she turned and he followed her into the kitchen.

  ***

  Hank was surprised when she asked him to take her riding. He’d thought it was just brunch, maybe followed by a half hour, or more likely at least an hour of small talk.

  He’d been sort of dreading it all through the meal, although it hadn’t been quite as awkward as he had been expecting.

  Hank hadn’t heard that she was teaching school, and so that took up a while, and then they talked about her mother Andrea, with him a bit diffident as she was laying right there in the next room.

  “You want to go for a ride?” He could hardly refuse, although the surprise was considerable. “Do you have a mount?”

  She shook her head.

  “No, but the neighbours, the Baldoons, will let me take Blossom.”

  Hank knew them of course. Elmer Baldoon ran a private postal system, the only kind there were on Third World. It ran between here and the capital. The route took in the towns along the road, and no others, no matter how small a side-trip it would be. They said he’d turned down Long Ridge, a village only five hundred metres from the turnpike—a trail of markers across the plains, with a thick scattering of taiga conifers along that stretch if he remembered right. He hadn’t seen it in years.

  “Ah, well, ah…all right.” On some inspiration, he didn’t say anything about asking her mother. “It’s a beautiful day for a change.”

  Her smile stabbed him right in the solar plexus. It was like he was looking for a catch or something.

  This wasn’t a child. This was a young lady, the most beautiful one in the area in his humble opinion, and all of that was the reason for being here. He looked down at his clothes, his Sunday best. It was bad enough riding into town in them, and even sitting in church with them on. He just wasn’t used to it.

  “Don’t worry. We don’t have to go far, and we can stay on the path.” She reached with both hands and took Hank’s in her own. “As you can imagine, I don’t get out much these days, maybe the odd dance and to the store and such. But seriously, I think it might do the both of us a world of good.”

  After the heavy meal, far more than Hank would have prepared on his own for any occasion, he had to agree.

  “Well, all right.”

  “Let me change into riding clothes. I’ll just be a minute, I promise.”

  She was almost as good as her word, and by the sounds of it she had made a stop in her mother’s room.

  He caught the words.

  “I’ve made up a plate for you mother, and I’m going riding with Hank.”

  Andrea’s response was muffled but the tones were approving or reassuring or at least not a protest. Polly went into the kitchen. After a time, she went into what was presumably her bedroom. Finally, she came around the corner wearing boots, leggings, and a short skin skirt and jacket.

  In her wide-brimmed hat with a low crown, in Hank’s opinion she looked plumb adorable. Considering the way his heart hammered, fun might not the right word for it.

  If only he could forget his age and just relax.

  ***

  Elmer was in the barn when they rode up, with Polly, warm against him and smelling divine, on the back of Hank’s mount.

  “Hey!” Elmer stabbed his pitchfork into the ground and looked at his hands as if checking for dirt or blisters, one or the other. “Hank! How in the hell have you been?”

  “I was wondering if I could borrow Blossom for a while, Mister Baldoon?” Polly slid down before Hank could even think of what came next and how to accomplish it.

  Elmer looked puzzled and then his eyes cleared. He looked at Hank with new eyes it seemed, straightening up a bit and taking in the clothes.

  “Why, sure, that’d be fine.”

  “I’m fine.” Hank nodded at Elmer. “The bracken is coming up thick and lush this year.”

  “Ah.” Elmer helped Polly dismount and then Hank got down.

  Polly went into the barn and the two men hovered there.

  Elmer stood inspecting him with a funny look on his face. After a while Hank spoke.

  “We’re going for a ride.”

  “Ah.” Elmer thought about that. “It’s nice up by the gorge.”

  Hank nodded. He hadn’t thought of that, and it wasn’t too far to go.

  Polly and another girl came out of the barn. A red-haired lass, very much her father’s daughter, with her pug nose and broad face, she was in her mid-twenties. Her name was Alison as he recalled, and when she gave him a bored look he tugged the brim of his hat. Alison was all bellied up, which sort of took Hank by surprise.

  Blossom was saddled and the girls exchanged a few pleasantries. Hank had heard Alison was bespoken of the Harwell boy, whom he actually thought to be a couple of years her junior.

  That’s the way it was around here—not enough men or women to go around, no matter how you looked at it.

  The Harwell boy had regular work northeast of town on a small homesteader’s ranch up there and that probably accounted for his not being here, pitching in with the chores and all. They would need a house and some land of their own soon enough. She looked to be about four or five months pregnant, although Hank didn’t know much about such things.

  ***

  It was only natural as they were riding along, to talk about this and that and the other thing.

  Soon enough, they were telling each other more intimate details.

  “I don’t know.” Hank stared off at the horizon, where the rolling green hills faded off into half-tones and pastels and a kind of faint grey smudge. “Just the thought that a man could get up one morning and just start walking, and go all the way around the Earth—”

  It was funny how he still thought in those terms, force of habit he supposed.

  “But to walk all the way clear around the other side, and never hit nothing—not a gol-durned thing, pardon my French.”

  She giggled as Blossom sidestepped an animal burrow, although the creature put its head down for a quick sniff. The animals were more or less following their original heading, with all the training Hank had put into his mount.

  His animals went where he pointed them and Blossom was amenable to suggestion.

  “It fired my imagination. Not that I ever really did anything about it.”

  “Do you miss it?”

  “What?”

  “Earth, dummy.” That was the second time she’d called him that, not that he minded it.

  It implied something, but she was riding with him and it couldn’t be all bad.

  “Well…” Hank gathered his thoughts.

  People thought he was intelligent, but he had a habit of thinking for a while before he spoke. That’s really all it was. He simply couldn’t help it. He tried to tell her about Earth.

  She’d never seen it, only heard about it and maybe seen pictures.

  The trouble was he didn’t do that sort of thing very well. But maybe she wanted more than the truth. That other world was fascinating to someone who never had and never would see it.

  “There are things I miss.” There were a million things he missed, coffee for one. “A real forest would be nice—I once swam in the ocean, it was real warm. My folks took us to a tropical island, with palm trees and a coral reef. A place called Jamaica. We were there for a week.”

  The tears were very close to the surface. Thoughts of his mother and father always brought up such sadness. He felt such guilt, for surely he had railed against going, leaving school, and his friends, to get on a ship and go off into space.

  They wer
e doing what they thought was right.

  He realized that now.

  And yet some of those friends had clearly envied Hank, saying he was so lucky to have the opportunity. How little they knew. All they had to go on was the slick recruiting ads that were all over the media back then.

  She said nothing. How could anyone explain or describe coffee? It simply didn’t grow here, and it was prohibitively expensive. The free stuff at the café was ersatz, and he couldn’t even really define the word ersatz.

  “I don’t miss the big cities, the traffic.” She had no idea what traffic even was. “I don’t miss the crime, the poverty of the soul. The pollution, and the news media. The constant noise, the blaring sirens. Voices yelling in the night and no one even looks out the window sometimes.”

  Polly listened, with eyes a bit round and with a little white showing.

  He looked at her.

  “There is a world of beauty, and a world of pain. People who were born here will never see that beauty. In some ways they really are better off than us back there. They have things you and I can never dream of.” Hank was just confusing her.

  There were certain things they would never be exposed to. The place had some advantages.

  She told him about a magazine, a couple of years out of date. It was going the rounds as such things did. Her friend had lent it to her and she was obliged to pass it on to a friend or even a deserving stranger. That homely spirit, the neighbourliness, was the best thing about Third World. She took it for granted, of course.

  She loved pictures of New York, and the insides of people’s houses. It’s not like women didn’t dream, and the pictures helped.

  It was the way things were done, very pragmatic and very altruistic the people were around here.

  It made sense to feed your neighbour when the odds were they might be feeding you in a year or two. There was some sort of communal spirit.

  Maybe that was what was different about Hank. He still knew what private property and possessions were, and a time when magazines littered the coffee table.

  Peltham still knew what credit was. There were a few old-timers left, and then what?

  “Oh, look.”

  He broke out of his reverie to see a pony-cart off to the north, coming down a wisp of a trail towards town.

  “Huh.”

  The white-clad figure of a girl sat beside a darker figure, probably male but they were still a ways away.

  “It’s Emily.” Polly peered intently. “That must be Ted.”

  “Oh.” He had no idea of who she was talking about.

  “They’ve been stepping out for a while.” She gave him a quick look. “You’d think at some point there would be an announcement.”

  Hank grinned in acknowledgement.

  “If he hasn’t made up his mind by now…” She left the rest unsaid.

  Hank felt kind of frozen and wooden, but the rest of the saying was clear enough. A fellow who waited too long wasn’t likely to get around to it at all.

  They sat their mounts and the animals chewed grass and the low growths that corresponded to nothing in living memory as far as Hank could make out but the horses tolerated it and the critters were weaned on it, and that was something.

  The cart crossed a marshy spot in the bottom of the valley and came up the hill towards them, the small critter pulling the weight, huffing with the exertion but the pair making no effort to get out and walk which was what Hank would have done just to save time. It was good to get off the mount for a while to stretch the legs and ease lower back muscles, always flexed by the hard saddle and the fluid movements of the mount. He helped Polly dismount, heart pounding and very aware that he held her around the waist, and that she smelled heavenly.

  He’d noticed a difference between Earthies, the old-timers, and people born on the planet, especially the younger generation. They didn’t care for time. They had no drive, no ambition.

  Their lives were complete.

  On the plus side, it was like they didn’t have a care in the world. In that sense, the company had delivered on its promises. It really was a whole new way of life. Even Hank had to admit that it had changed him, and in many ways for the better.

  He was fourteen…no, fifteen when they got here.

  The trouble was the social isolation of the place. Just the sheer raw numbers, or lack of them. It was like you could count everyone in the world if you had the normal number of fingers and toes…it meant nothing to the younger ones, and everything to him.

  It was like no one around here knew what a bicycle or a skateboard was.

  There was no way in hell he could ever go back to the old life. The thing to do was just to accept that, and try to make the best of it. Sooner or later we all have to die, and his life had been no more tragic than any other. For Hank, life was sort of objective, and the people around him were living their lives more subjectively. There was no stigma to eating a turnip when it was all anyone had. They had never tasted lobster, or crab, or chocolate. They had never seen television, or listened to a morning show on the radio. They might know what a car was. Most had never seen one. He grinned at the thought of what a nine-day wonder it would be if one actually showed up in town. The cars he was thinking of wouldn’t even make it this far. The roads, all two or three of them, were just too poor. People traveled at five kilometres or ten kilometres an hour and thought nothing of it.

  Rip away all the veneered layers of social status and expectation, all narcissism and sense of entitlement, and a turnip tasted a lot better. It was all they had, all anyone had sometimes. Even then they thought Hank was rich. It’s not like he lived any different than they did.

  It was one of the things that set him apart, and he was all too aware of it. His own biological clock was ticking, terms he had never consciously used before in his self-assessments, and he had no idea of what Polly was actually like. Accustomed to being on his own, self-sufficient, and accountable to no one really, Hank was doing well. Even if he loved Polly, and there were no assurances that was what was actually happening to him, if they were really incompatible then marrying the girl was the wrong thing to do.

  That was something else that set Hank apart, for surely no one else on this gol-durned planet gave a hoot as to who lived with whom, or who married who, or who knocked up so-and-so.

  People shrugged and rolled their eyes and life went on as before. Marty was the only preacher in a hundred kilometres and nature took its own course. A lot of folks made the pilgrimage to his church only after five, ten or their twentieth anniversaries. They saved a little money and took their time. It was more romantic for the women, he supposed. He figured the men could care less, for the most part. It made the womenfolk happy, and those were some good parties.

  That’s what they said, anyways.

  “Hi!”

  Hank was aware of being sized up, much as how a side of beef might be sized up by a half a dozen households pitching in, to cut it up themselves and maybe save a bit of money. He took off his hat and nodded, and the other gentleman, a brown-bearded young man of about thirty, nodded and did the same.

  They put their hats back on.

  The gentleman had an unpleasant habit of spitting off to one side, which he did often and well, but he seemed a cheerful sort and quiet too, as he sat back, reins drooping, and let the womenfolk have their fun.

  “Hi!”

  “Hi, Emily.”

  Suitable greetings being exchanged, the ladies set to.

  Turning their backs on the males, heads down, they went up a small rise ostensibly to pick some flowers. The wildflowers were one of the few compensations of the place thought Hank, not that he would have ever chosen the planet based on such attributes. They were just there, and yes, they were nice.

  Ted looked sort of familiar but Hank didn’t think they’d met before. He’d bet ten dollars he knew the fellow’s dad from somewhere.

  “Nice weather—for a change.”

  The young man grinned and spat
.

  “Sure is. Say, you got any work up around there?” It was just another conventional remark, but one that got him to thinking.

  Ted had figured out who he was and yet Hank wondered sometimes himself.

  “Ah. Not right now, not as I can say.” Hank stewed on his own thoughts. “You never know, though.”

  Ted nodded thoughtfully as well.

  A word of explanation often set things right.

  “I don’t harvest for another three, maybe four months. Last time, the prices were maybe not so good, and I don’t really know if it’s worth my while to go for a big crop this time around.”

  A big crop meant more money, but the brokers knew exactly how much they needed, whereas no one around here did. Unsold bracken was almost worthless and you wanted to control your costs.

  Hank regarded the fellow. He had to be Ginley’s son, or nephew, or cousin, a real young one, or something. He just had the look about him of a Ginley. Ginley had worked for him, years ago, basically a hard worker but needing to be told everything, when there were times when Hank would have been glad to leave the man to it and go off and do something else.

  “What’s your dad’s name? If you don’t mind my asking?”

  “Jeb Wilcox, over in Four Corners.”

  “Ah.” Hank had never heard of him.

  But he was almost sure there was some relation.

  “I’m Hank Beveridge, by the way.” The two men shook hands. “Tell you what, if I need help I’ll ask for you or leave word at Peltham’s.”

  Ted agreed that was fine and they turned to await the ladies, strolling a short distance away as some infernal feminine plot was hatched to ensnare good men everywhere with their charm and their wiles.

  Hank had his head tipped back slightly to observe some black specks flying past at a fairly high altitude, hundreds of metres anyways, going from the northwest to the southeast. His mind was still on women, and marriage, and love and all the lust and sensuality that he had once known about, in the way that kids do, in another life, another time and place. It was all bound up in one big old ball of wax inside of his head. When he was very young television and the news-feeds were everything. These kids had never played a video game.