by Jf Perkins
By that time, Mom was sitting on the open ground, hunched over. She was either panting or sobbing, I couldn’t say. She had lost everything in the previous five minutes. Her own innocence, her husband’s, and worse, her son’s, but most of all, she had lost the ability to pretend that she lived in the same world she had before.
Chapter 2 – 4
Terry looked up from his idle scanning of the horizon. He figured that if he was going to stand watch, he might as well watch. Bill was staring into the distance as he spoke, and refocused on Terry when he sensed the young man’s sharp change of position.
Bill took a quick look, just in case, and asked, “That’s hard to understand, isn’t it?”
“It is. What did your mother lose? Seems to me that she should have been happy that ya’ll won,” Terry said.
“You have to understand that, before the Breakdown, good people never had to kill anyone. Mom had a lifetime of thinking that only bad people did what she had just done.”
“I can see that, I guess... It’s just that I grew up never knowing a single adult who hadn’t killed someone, or at least tried to kill someone.”
“That’s what I mean,” Bill said. “In a few short days, Mom went from a life where the biggest worry was getting us kids to school on time, and making sure the house was in order, to having to fight for our lives three times...” Bill pushed his gray hair back. “And that’s not counting everything that could have happened in the schoolyard.”
“Ok. I can see where that would be a shock. I just don’t have any idea of what it was like before. I mean, I’ve read about it, but most of the books had at least some danger and killing, so I thought that was normal.”
Bill laughed a bit and said, “No. That’s the thing. Our lives were so safe and boring that we all loved to read that kind of thing to get some excitement.” He leaned against the tree and continued, “Real life had none of that stuff. Imagine that you were safe from all the dangers we face. Imagine that if you followed the rules, the worst thing you had to think about was a car accident, or if you were really unlucky, you might get robbed once in your life. There were bad people, of course, but they always seemed to be someone else’s problem.”
“It was really that safe?” Terry asked.
“Sure. My dad was one of the rare people who even imagined it could ever change. I guess he spent a lot of time thinking about different situations and how to deal with them. He was always ready to claim incredible good luck, but I know for a fact that you make your own luck, and he made ours by being able to think one step ahead of most everyone else.”
“What about Kirk? He seemed well prepared,” Terry asked.
“Well, Kirk’s a special case. I think it’s easy for us to look back and consider him part of the good luck, because he was willing to do things that no one else would do. He could pull that trigger and just consider it part of a day’s work. Most people can’t do that. In my mom’s case, on that day, she was watching her fourteen year old son go from a good kid, the kind of kid that other parents admired, to a cold blooded executioner. It’s hard for a mother to see something like that in her babies.”
“What about your kids?”
Bill sighed deeply and replied, “It’s a new world. They grew up scrambling for cover like the rest of us. Aggie and I didn’t have to make the same giant leap that my mother did. Our struggle is different. We take the fact that they were born knowing that killing had to be done, and we try to temper that with a conscience that understands that there are better ways, and killing is usually the worst option.”
“No offense, but I’ve only met one of your children, and she seems all too ready to take a head off at the shoulders.”
“Well, if you knew how many times Aggie and I have had that conversation... We may have learned to regret all that time she spent with Uncle Kirk.” Bill grinned like a proud papa. “Of course, until this country gets back on its feet, we believe she’s better off with her mean streak.”
“Maybe so,” Terry said.
Bill added, “One thing I know for sure. No matter what we had to do from that point on, Mom took it as reality, not some wild theory of my father’s, and she performed every last necessity as if her family’s life depended on it. That was good, because all too often, it did.”
Chapter 2 – 5
Arturo and Dad did the weapon collection and corpse dragging, taking the bodies off in the same direction as the first two, and kicked dirt onto the drying blood in the camp before they called us back from behind the log where we were hiding. We came back to find our mother sitting almost as catatonic as Francine, who still hadn’t moved an inch. I never forgot that she pointed out the men, but I doubt if anyone else even knew. Lucy went to Mom, and sat down next to her. I talked to keep Tommy and Jimmy distracted from the mood of the place. I don’t know what they saw, but they seemed unaffected after they got over the shock of all the guns going off.
“We made a lot of noise, so everybody keep a sharp eye out, ok?” Arturo said.
Dad was staring into the distance for long seconds, but managed to shake himself out of it. He quietly passed around paper more bowls and plastic spoons. He walked around with the huge pan, and spooned chili into our bowls. I sat in a little triangle with the boys, and showed them how to crush saltines into the chili. We ate hungrily, while the rest of the party didn’t eat much at all.
Finally, Dad picked up his bowl. “Let’s not waste good food, people,” he said, and started mechanically shoveling chili into his mouth. One by one, everyone else followed his example. All except Francine, who ignored her chili until it grew cold beside her.
After lunch, a little bit of life began to stir in our group again. Dad and Arturo made a quick plan to try for more supplies from the school, and rumbled off in the station wagon. He had left us with a small ax, and told Kirk and me to cut down some of the little saplings on the edge of our woods. He had shown us the type of trees to cut, and warned us not to cut anything else. Kirk had the ax of course, being the oldest, and headed over to the trees Dad had indicated. We were in boy heaven. Like all young boys, axes presented a terrible temptation to us. We had never really used one, since cutting down anything in our yard back home would have meant a fate worse than death, and we knew that instinctively. Here, we had a whole grove of potential ax targets and a license to kill trees. Awesome, at least until we learned the next stage that any boy with an ax learns. Cutting down trees is hard work!
We chopped and chopped on the first tree, taking turns as our flabby suburban arms grew tired. The tree was only about three inches in diameter, but it could have been the size of a house for all the progress we were making. Kirk went at it with a vengeance, chopping straight into the side of the tree with all his might. I was more deliberate, taking swings and trying to figure out why it wasn’t working. My pace made Kirk impatient, and he began to give me a hard time about doing half the work he was doing. He didn’t complain too much, though, because it took me longer to wear my arm out, and he got more rest. Eventually, out of pure frustration, I took a wild swing, coming down on the tree at angle, and the ax sank in almost an inch. We looked at each other with the same basic thought. Eureka!
From that marvelous breakthrough, akin to the discovery of fire as far as we were concerned, it only took us a few minutes to work out a technique that involved chopping at alternate angles, cutting a deeper v-shaped notch until the ax broke through to the other side. With our new skills in play, the small trees came down at respectable rate, and we had twenty or thirty of them stacked up when we heard the station wagon rumbling and slithering back through the tall grass. We grabbed the ax and ran the seventy yards back to meet them at our camp.
Arturo and Dad got out of the car with smiles on their faces. Apparently everything had gone well. As evidence, there was a big green wheelbarrow tied on the roof. The first thing I did was to look in the back seat for any new people they may have found, with thousand yard stares or not, but the back seat was
full of tools, shovels and picks, rope, buckets, and a whole bunch of other devices I didn’t recognize. The cargo area had another load of the same kind of food they had brought before. We set about unloading, using the wheelbarrow to speed things along.
“There’s a maintenance shed in the corner of the schoolyard. We broke in to find all the tools. It was better than we hoped.” Dad said.
“What are we going to do with all of this stuff?” Mom asked.
“You’ll see. Everything is useful to us.” Dad replied.
It was odd that the conversation was so normal again. During lunch, I thought nothing would ever be the same, and here they were, two parents playing the typical question and answer game. It was reassuring, and proof that people can adapt to almost anything. Dad rounded up the food supplies in the same mysterious way, the stacks of food already looking like a monument to the past.
“Ok, men,” Dad began. We knew that meant he was going to make us work. “We have a hole to dig.” Again with the we’re-going-to-Disney tone. It never fooled any of us, except maybe Dad.
He and Arturo picked up a collection of tools, and walked towards my tree, the one I had climbed. Every male in the camp followed. We all preferred to include ourselves in the “men” category, even if it meant we would have to work. When we were close, Dad picked a spot as far from any trees as possible, while still under the shade of my big maple. He was marking a rectangle by sweeping the leaves aside with his foot, while Arturo went back to get the wheelbarrow. Once the area was cleared to the soil underneath, Dad took a square shovel and dug a little trench around the outside of his rectangle. This was going to be a big hole.
“Everyone grab a shovel, and start digging inside the lines. The dirt goes in the wheelbarrow.” Dad announced in the tone of a sports announcer. That guy could get excited about anything.
Dad and Arturo had the biggest shovels. Kirk and I were using shorter, gardening style shovels with a flat handle on the end. Arturo gave the young boys their own special hole to dig with some little trowels, to keep them out of the way. We started digging, and once we got below the top layer of dirt, we discovered that the soil underneath was about ninety-nine percent rock. Not big rocks, just lots of them. Our process slowly evolved into Dad working with the pick to loosen the rocky soil, and the three of us shoveling the loosened dirt and rock into the wheelbarrow. Dad would rest while we did that, and then would take the full wheelbarrow to a place on the opposite side of the tree, where the land started to slope sharply downward. There, he would dump the dirt over the edge. Occasionally we would hit a root from one of the trees and Arturo took the job of cutting it off at the edge of the hole with a bow saw or an ax. Surprisingly, the young boys were making good progress on their hole as well.
By the time we were four feet down, the sun was getting low on the horizon, and Dad called it for the day. Kirk and I were astonishingly glad, since we had never worked this hard in our entire lives, and we were trying to decide whether the blisters on our hands were worse than the pain in our muscles. From the look of it, Dad was feeling about the same, but Arturo was taking it in stride. He told us he had dug many holes in his life.
“Ok, boys. We’ll finish it in the morning.” Dad said, this time sounding like we were coming back from Disney. I dreaded the morning, I can tell you.
With my mother living in a new reality, we walked back to camp to dinner waiting for us. We ate chicken noodle soup with cornbread my mom had somehow made over the camp stove. When Dad asked her how she did it, she simply said, “Aluminum foil.”
It was the best food I had ever eaten, after a day of hard work and danger. To this day, I still marvel at how a hard day affects the taste buds. We talked about whatever came up, and learned that there were still over forty people living in the school lobby. Dad said it was getting bad in there since the water had stopped working, and the people were not clever enough to do anything but to keep using the facilities without flushing. Dad and Arturo had spent some time trying to convince them that it was time to move on, that help was not coming, but they refused to believe it. They figured that they just needed to be patient, and the government would get it all straightened out. When Dad explained that the government couldn’t fix the situation, for a whole range of logical reasons, they began to get agitated, like he was speaking some kind of heresy, and he and Arturo decided to leave before things got ugly. Arturo was surprised that none of them seemed to notice the significance of the running station wagon parked just outside the doors. No one even asked for a ride. Some people never learn, was his observation.
Arturo was getting anxious to go in search of his wife, but he wanted to make sure things were in order here first. “I owe you guys, for keeping Jimmy safe, and for the chance to go at all,” he said.
After dinner, Dad and Arturo agreed on a watch schedule, and sent us to bed. We were more than happy to go. Since Arturo had the watch, Dad went into the tent with Mom, and we could tell that a serious, tearful talk was going on. We had Jimmy wedged in with us, and Arturo wrapped Francine in two layers of space blanket. She never moved.
Chapter 2 – 6
I woke up early, to the sound of little Jimmy snoring directly into my right ear. The little fellow could scare a bear away. I winced at my first movements and literally staggered out of the tent to find a convenient place for a morning pee. With that need satisfied, and a few minutes to find my brain, I noticed Dad sitting on the log we had used for cover the day before. I went over and sat down next to him, and he gave me a hug around my shoulders.
“Morning, son. You did good work yesterday.”
“Thanks, Dad. You did too.”
Dad smiled and said, “I’m feeling it now.”
We both rolled our arms around with exaggerated groans and enjoyed the bonding that comes from such shared pain. Smiling, he asked, “You doing ok, with...” He made a wide gesture that encompassed life, I guess. “... Everything?”
“Sure, Dad. It’s different, but not so bad.”
“You know, it’s probably going to get a lot harder. People are upset and taking advantage of things now, but soon they’ll start to get really desperate.”
“I sort of figured that.”
“Arturo and I are going to look around the area today. He calls it recon. We’re going to see if there is anything obvious to worry about.”
“That’s a good idea. Maybe the people who live around here are nice,” I said.
“Maybe. Hopefully... Anyway, if there’s no real problems, we’ll probably stay here for a while. We’ll have to do some work to make it safer, but we’ll be ok.”
“Ok, Dad. I’m up for anything.”
“Good. Let’s go see about breakfast.”
We ate our morning bowl of oatmeal before anyone else emerged from the tents. Lucy was out first, followed by Mom. Then Arturo walked in from the woods, wearing his space blanket like a cloak. Dad explained that he slept out there where he could hear anything coming in from the back side of the camp. Arturo looked bleary-eyed and ragged.
“I’m getting too old for this sh... crap,” He said.
“I appreciate it, Art. We probably would have been dead about three times over if it weren’t for you.” Dad replied, handing Arturo a bowl of oatmeal and a box of raisins.
“Well, that’s true, which is why you and I are going on a little recon slash training hike today.”
“Great. I hope you can talk really fast, because you need to get on the road before regular old crazy turns into full-on ‘tango uniform’ out there,” Dad said, looking concerned.
“What’s tango uniform mean?” I asked. I expected the men to ignore me, since they were in the middle of grownup talk.
“True, true. Unless something changes, I’ll head out tonight, or early in the morning. Bill, tango uniform means really messed up.” Arturo chuckled.
“Ask me when you’re older, Bill. Is it better to drive at night, you think?” Dad asked Arturo.
“Hard to say. I
t might be harder to navigate, and harder to see problems ahead of time, but it may also make it harder to see me. If I need to worry about cops, they’re usually easier to out-think when they’re tired.” Arturo replied.
“Voice of experience?”
“I was young once,” Arturo replied with a grin. “Even better, they probably won’t have working radios. All I have to do is outrun them.”
“Well, you have the right car for that. This side of a Corvette anyway.”
“The hard part will be finding gas.”
“Yeah. That’s one reason to take the back roads, through Alabama and the panhandle. Less traffic and no news means you may find some mom and pop places that will take cash.”
“I hope so,” Art said. “I sure would hate to hike to Florida and back.”
“Don’t forget there are about 30 million dead cars out there now. There’s a siphon pump in the back, so you don’t even have to use gasoline for mouthwash.”
“I like the way you think, David.”
Dad held up three fingers in the Boy Scout salute and said, “Be prepared.”
We started the day with digging. At first it was painful all over, but eventually our muscles loosened up and only the blisters continued to bother us. Dad said, only about two hundred times, that he wished he had thought to buy work gloves. Tommy and Jimmy, with Mom’s help, decided we could handle digging without them, and so it was just the four of us. We made good progress, especially when we got past the six-foot mark. At that depth, the rocks began to thin out and made way for solid greenish-tan clay. We were using buckets on lengths of rope to lift dirt out of the hole, and I was in charge of dumping them into the wheelbarrow. It fell into a rhythm. I would empty five buckets, push the wheelbarrow over to the slope, dump it, and come back in time for two more buckets. When the hole was nine feet deep, Dad and Arturo took some time to scrape the walls straight and even. We dumped that dirt and then we all stomped around on the bottom of the hole until the floor was fairly flat and hard packed. Then Dad dug a small, deep hole in the center of the floor and threw some rocks into it to fill it up even with the larger hole.
