Another Like Me
Page 8
Chapter 8
“They called themselves what?” Robin was indignant.
Jack reared back, hands up, in a gesture that said don’t shoot the messenger. “They didn’t call themselves that before?” he asked.
“I never heard them call themselves anything. I didn’t think they could be organized enough to have a name for themselves. And why ‘Apache,’ of all things?”
“I assume they like the fierce-sounding name of it.”
“Fierce? They don’t know the first thing about the Apache. The Apaches thought the Mexicans and then the whites were fierce. And treacherous.”
“Well, it’s not necessarily an insult, anyway. Maybe they intend it to be more like a sports team.”
Robin looked at him blankly.
“You know, like the Washington Redskins. Florida Seminoles.”
Still a blank look. Jack had to remind himself that she had only been eleven or so when the whole world changed.
“The Army Apache helicopters? Okay, how about these names—Alabama, Tennessee, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Kentucky. Probably more.”
“The states are Indian names, like Utah?”
“Utah’s another one, yeah. The Utes. Names of Indian tribes, or just Indian words for places. I mean, it wasn’t intended to insult the real Indians.”
“There’s a helicopter called an Apache?”
“Yeah. Or was.”
She shrugged. “But this isn’t like a sports team or the helicopter. This is different.” Robin’s dudgeon was not placated. “The zombies don’t honor the Apache. And what are they trying to say, anyway, that they drink at the boundary of the rez like a real red man?” Her eyes flashed, their flecks of orange livid.
“I’m not trying to defend them.”
Peter broke in. “Mom was Apache. From San Carlos. She became a Christian and married my dad, who was from here, and then when he died, she married Pops, a White Mountain. Robin’s dad.”
“A ‘White Mountain’ . . .”
“An Apache tribe.”
“So you’re both real Apache. But your Mom wasn’t a White Mountain Apache?”
“No, Pinal Apache,” Robin said.
Peter explained. “There were lots of bands of Apaches split up and recombined, sometimes enemy bands together. Especially in San Carlos. It was a mess. Robin’s full-blooded—she gets worked up about this. I think she’s about to go on a one-girl war-party.”
“For what it’s worth,” Jack said, turning back to Robin, “these guys probably aren’t making it a boast about their fierceness at partying. Plus, I don’t think people think of themselves that way anyway. Everyone thinks he’s noble, even these zombies. It helps if he can think of himself as part of a noble group. And since they’re borrowing nobility from the group anyway, it’s not such a stretch that the group itself borrows its nobility from another group if that’s what they have to do.”
As he said this, it churned up an idea that Jack thought he’d wrestle with later. He was still processing the idea of being restored to a society, such as it was, and how his consciousness of self had been affected. Did he think better of himself because he had a connection with people he respected? There was no question but that Peter’s and Robin’s estimation of him was important, or rather, what he believed their estimation of him to be. What if he’d fallen in with Bonzo and Mitchell first? He couldn’t help but think that he’d be a different man now.
“No excuse,” she said. “They should be their own men.”
For just a moment, Jack thought she must be responding to his thoughts, rather than what he had said, but then remembered his own last words. “Oh, you mean one should be, not just appear to be. Esse quam videri.”
Clearly, neither she nor Peter understood that, and Jack just moved on.
“Maybe you could help them with a better name for their group. And what about Indian? You don’t mind the word Indian?”
“No, it’s just a name used by people who aren’t Indians, and then Indians started using it. There’s nothing dishonoring about it. It’s just like Apache. Apache isn’t an Apache word.”
“Oh. What do Apaches call Apaches?”
“Well, Apaches, really, but it used to be Indé.’”
“Indé?”
“You sound surprised.”
“Is Indé the same as Diné?”
“They’re close. They’re both used. But the Navajo were more likely to use the word Diné. The languages of Apaches and Navajos are similar.”
“So Diné was more commonly used to refer to Navajo?”
“Yes, and Indé was a way for the Apache to refer to themselves as the center of beings that matter, just like Diné in Navajo—‘the people.’ But Indé actually means ‘death.’”
“Why would the Apache call themselves ‘death’?”
“Because . . .” Robin looked at Jack by way of appraising his ability to understand. “Because they were fatalistic. It’s how they thought about the spiritual world. When they came into contact with white people, they knew they were coming to an end. As a people. They started calling themselves Indé.”
“And it made them fight with more abandon. Less cautiously.”
“Exactly.”
“But the word Diné. Diné is just a self-reference for Navajos?”
Robin nodded her head. “The Navajo word for Navajos.”
“I heard that name Diné on my little adventure yesterday.”
“What did you hear?”
“It’s a rival group, apparently.”
Jack and Robin both perked up. Dewey lifted his head, too, in response. They were standing at the opening to a little outbuilding between the house and the barn, an extension to the greenhouse. Peter was just inside, at a work bench, sharpening hand tools they used in the garden. At Jack’s comment, Peter stopped what he was doing, and turned all of his attention to Jack. “Now? You mean a whole other group out there now?” he asked.
“That’s what they said.”
“What the zombies said?”
“Yeah. They’ve mostly checked out of reality, but they came to life over these Diné. They had a lot to say about them.”
“Well . . .” Peter didn’t know where to start. Robin was inscrutable as always, but more alert given the turn the conversation was taking. “Is this Diné another group of zombies, or what?”
“Not my impression,” Jack said. “Not from what these guys were saying. Of course, they were well into an alcohol and marijuana haze before I got any real information, but I don’t think it’s a lay-about group like that. The Apaches . . .”
“So-called,” Robin interjected.
Jack chuckled. “You want me to keep calling them zombies?”
Robin looked down. “No.”
“These people I met do not like the Diné. They seem to think the Diné are some sort of cult-like commune. They don’t mix with other people, they have no individuality, and they do everything for the group, never on their own. Actually, they think the Diné are a bunch of zombies, but for a different reason than being stoned all the time. Faceless cogs in a big machine. But there’s a grudging respect there. They’re afraid of the machine. The Diné are seen as a threat, but the reasons were vague. I tried to ask, but I just got a repeat of how nonhuman the Diné are.”
“Where do they live?” Peter asked.
“I had the impression it was north of Eagar, but I don’t really know.”
“How many?”
“No idea.”
“Well, where do they interact? How do the people you met even know about them?”
“Ah. There’s some mobility among the, well, the Apaches, until we come up with a better name. Sorry, Robin. They get around, apparently, from town to town, and sometimes they just run into Diné. The Diné won’t hardly talk to the Apaches, according to the party animals I was with. So the Apache think the Diné hate them. As a result, the Apaches hate the Diné.”
“This is confusing. Apache called themselves Diné, too,” Robin said.
Robin and Peter were thoughtful for a moment. Peter went back to sharpening a hoe, but in a distracted way. Robin asked, “Well, you said the Apaches aren’t really Indians, right?”
“I only met six of them. A couple of them I suppose could have been part Indian, but it was my impression that they just adopted the name.” In an offhand and almost under-the-breath manner, Jack added, “I don’t know how it matters, now.”
“And the Diné? Are they Indian?”
“Well, of course, I didn’t meet any of them, and it didn’t come up at my little soiree in Eagar. I just had the impression it was a rival group. Maybe not ethnically different, but definitely different.”
Peter gave up on the hoe and perched on a stool nearby. Robin climbed up to sit on the workbench, and Jack took the remaining stool.
Jack said, “You’ve never encountered anyone besides the drunks, have you?”
“No,” Peter began, “We thought those were the only ones besides us. And there were only a few each time. I think we ran into them four times, and then gave up. We saw some in Flagstaff. Actually, twice in Flagstaff. Once in Winslow, and once in Show Low. Three or four each time. Some of them we saw more than once. Maybe a total of seven or eight. But they were pitiful. No motivation for anything.”
“You didn’t see any in Eagar? Or Springerville?”
“No, and we’ve been there a lot because it’s close. We never saw them that far south.”
“When you did see them, did any of them seem to be the leader?”
“No, they were all about getting more stoned or more drunk. We tried to talk to them, but they were either already too drunk to reason or just had no use for us.”
“Any names?”
Peter looked to Robin for help. “Jason?”
“Jamison,” Robin said. “We saw him twice. And a guy named Paco. Remember the guy we kept trying to call Ted, and he kept saying Theodore?”
“It’s not like we had deep conversations with them,” Peter continued. “But we tried. At first, we wanted to know where they came from, how they survived, were there others. But they think about their past about as well as they think about their future.”
“Which is not at all, I suppose.”
“Right. We tried to point them to God. They were hostile about that . . .”
“The only time they got excited about anything,” Robin interjected.
“Not the kind of enthusiasm we were looking for,” Peter continued, “and after the first couple of times, we tried not to say there was a better way to live than the way they were living, or to bring God into it. They weren’t very communicative.”
“Or didn’t have a thought to communicate. One of the guys I met last night was named Paco. Did they ever say anything at all to suggest that they were part of a bigger group, Apaches or anything else?”
“No,” Peter said.
Robin also shook her head. “The last time we saw any of them was almost a year ago, though.”
“Well, I’m not sure all of these self-described Apaches are drunks or stoners. These guys I met kept talking about their group, mostly to say how much they’re individuals and not like the Diné, but they seemed to take some pride in their individual idiosyncrasies, including other people they consider to be Apaches, too. People who do things. Families who herd sheep or who live kind of like you do, some crops and root cellars and the like. Hunters, not just looting stores all the time. Not a lot of people total, one guy said sixty, but not all of those are drunks, apparently, or full-time drunks, anyway.”
Peter asked, “Why would those other people say they’re ‘Apache,’ too? If you’re not a zombie yourself, why would you align yourself with people who just smoke dope and never think about tomorrow?”
“Just what I was thinking,” Jack responded. “Maybe it’s all in the zombies’ heads that others are part of a tribe with them, but that doesn’t seem likely from the way they talked about it. On the other hand, if they really are a tribe of some sort, it’s all the more remarkable because all these people seem to be quite independent of each other. Even the short-sighted stoners are very independent-minded, as long as the booze and gunja is available, and the food is free. So as far as I can tell, the only uniting factor among them and the other so-called Apaches is that they’re not Diné.”
Robin spoke aloud the thought that occurred to all of them. “If they’re that independent but have banded together anyway, it had to be for a reason. Maybe we should learn something about the Diné.” She hopped down from the bench and took up her basket of greens from the garden, causing Dewey to stir, too. “I’m going to get this started. With the snow, we need to go ahead and eat up as much as we can of the spinach.”
“Back in the day, I never thought I’d be this eager for fresh spinach,” Jack said.
Robin left them, crossing the drive to enter the modest ranch house through the back door.
Jack turned back to Peter. “Has it been hard living here on your own? She was just a child when everything happened.”
“I was only seventeen myself. But not too hard. Mom and Dad were pretty self-sufficient anyway, so we had a good start.”
“I bet the zombies made you feel even more alone, in a way.”
“I can kind of understand them. As long as the food is there to just pick up and eat, it’s easier to just go through life without feeling like you need to work.”
“They’ll be surprised when they wake up one day, and the food’s all gone bad.”
“I feel like they’ll just roll another joint.”
“No doubt. People can lose the instinct to work altogether. I’ve certainly seen it where I’m from. Life means struggle, but struggle means life. Back in the day, people got hooked on government handouts. They were like zombies, too, just using a different drug. And then it kind of spread. It seemed like everyone became hooked on being taken care of, directly or indirectly. People felt entitled to things just by belonging to society at large. I don’t think it’s just drugs that make a zombie a zombie. I think it’s not struggling.”
“Sounds right, I guess.”
“Sorry, I’m philosophizing about ancient history. Hardly relevant now. You and Robin keep right on going, though. You keep learning, you get your own food. And you were thrown into it so young. I admire what you’ve done.”
Peter shrugged. “It’s just life. It was hard losing Mom and Dad, though. Especially for Robin. But we’ll see them again. We don’t believe that things happen without a reason. Even the sickness.”
“You’ll see them again? You mean in heaven?”
“Sure. Heaven.”
“Are you Mormons?”
“No, why would you ask that?”
“Well, I see Mormon churches everywhere out here, and before they were always going on those two-by-two missions, and all that clean living.”
“We knew a lot of Mormons, but we aren’t Mormon.”
“So what flavor are you?”
Peter smiled. “I don’t know if it was a denomination at all. We went to a little place, Alpine Bible Church. But it’s not the local church that’s so important, it’s God, and God’s way of redeeming us. It’s about Christ.”
“So you’re all the way in. Admirable.”
“What about you?”
“Oh, look, I have great respect for people who are religious, but I’m just not.”
After dinner, Jack brought in just a few things from his car, not wanting to appear presumptuous. Robin and Peter were unreservedly welcoming, but Jack was still processing the nature of his relationship with them. For almost three years, he’d gathered mounting evidence that he was, in fact, the last person left on earth, experiencing a gradual shift in his self-awareness and slipping slowly but unwittingly into despair. And then, with a flash suddenness, his whole world had snapped back into alignment.
Jack toss
ed and turned in bed that night. He couldn’t put out of his mind a thought that had come to him while he was talking to Peter and Robin. What if he had bypassed Luna and had wandered into Eagar with still no awareness of other men? He couldn’t get out of his mind the photographic imprint of those dark almond eyes of Robin’s—wary, poised for good or for destruction. But surely, if his encounter with Bonzo had been his first human encounter, then Bonzo would be his platform, wouldn’t he? It would be on the little stage in Bonzo’s mind that Jack would see himself anew. This is what caused Jack unrest. What would Bonzo have approved? Nothing good for Jack, clearly. Not that his past experience would have set him up for falling in as a zombie, necessarily, but if Jack became what he thought Bonzo thought he was, then Jack’s conception of self in the new world would certainly not be good.
Jack realized that his having encountered Peter and Robin, rather than the zombies, was immensely significant. He considered all the many encounters with others before the die-off. Were they all similarly significant?
Chapter 9
Jack was well-pleased that he was able to give as much as he did. The work had been difficult at first, he had to admit to himself, but he had pressed on. He learned to navigate between the good pain of accumulated soreness from work he was unused to and the bad pain of exacerbating his car wreck injuries from two years previous. The first, he could work through. The second, he treated as if he were in physical therapy—guardedly. In an unexpected way, he found the work invigorating. He might have thought of it as mindless grunt work before the new world, but now he found it to be more satisfying than his best day in his Manhattan law office. He slept better at night than he ever had in his life. Breakfast was plentiful, if unconventional, and he dug in for needed fuel, rather than merely because it was the time of day for the next meal. In a few days, he began to feel the soreness dissipate, gradually replaced by a toughness in body that he’d not experienced in many a day. It was fitness of a different kind than that of his younger, more athletic days—better in some ways even than his fittest days in college.
The one-acre garden would soon be more than four acres. They spent a week in fencing—laying it out with due consideration for the terrain, the drainage, the proximity to the wild bramble and trees which might embolden critters at the perimeter, and the quality of the soil. They didn’t have to clear trees because the land to be added onto the existing garden space had all been pasture, but Peter explained that this wasn’t necessarily a good thing. Apparently, the compaction of the soil after the livestock meant a lot of work to make it suitable for growing things, especially since they wanted to do it right the first time—not for a minor return in a single year but for ongoing development of the soil, year after year. Jack had no idea, before now, that good husbandry of the land meant cultivating the bare soil as much as the plants to be grown in it.