* * *
JUNE 19
BANKS OF THE RED RIVER
The next two days I followed the same routine. I snuck out of Witmer, spied on the growing community gardens, and took a route through the backstreets to my place by the river. As I sat beneath my tree wondering how long it would be before I could abandon this fool’s errand, but enjoying the solitude, I heard the splash of oars. Two canoes came plodding along the muddy waters from the south. They saw me on the bank and one canoe turned toward me with paddles dipping strongly into the river.
The strangers were dressed in leather and furs like French voyageurs or Lewis and Clark scouts. Probably members of a black powder reenactment club. Tomahawks were tucked into beaded belts, but they had aluminum Coleman canoes and hunting crossbows with razor tips on their gear. The canoe crunched into the dirt on the shore and the lead voyageur, a bearded man with a paunch under his fringed buckskins, stood cautiously and pulled off his sunglasses.
“I’m Tapio Hakula,” the bearded man said with a big smile. “We represent the Fargo community. We’re contacting folks to join with us. Working together is better than being left on your own, wouldn’t you agree? So who is left in charge up here?”
“Anything from Bismarck?” I asked, standing. I wiped damp dirt from my behind and kept my hands away from my weapons. “Minneapolis?”
Tapio looked to the south and then at the other canoe, which had turned to hold position in the slow river. “Those’re overland, so that’ll be a few days before we hear from the cyclists.”
“I’m from the university,” I said. “We need an important message delivered to someone at NDSU.”
“Who?”
“Anyone in physics, engineering, or chemistry, I suppose. We’ve got a theory about the Change and observations to support it.”
I held out the manila envelope stuffed with a dozen letters. “We need to spread the information.”
“You don’t look like a professor,” he said.
“You don’t look like a politician,” I said. “Why are you dressed like that?”
Tapio looked at his leather outfit and spread his arms in a welcoming manner. He laughed.
“It gets people talking before fighting.”
“Will you take the letters?” I asked.
“Fair enough. We won’t be headed back for a while. We’re going up to Pembina before turning around.”
He gripped the envelope as I let go.
“Your responsibility now.” I just hoped they wouldn’t use all the copies to wipe their ass along the way.
* * *
AUGUST 3
WITMER FORTRESS
“Everything we worked for can’t just go away. Science can’t turn into something called magic for our grandchildren.”
Kirk’s fingers were blue from the mimeograph ink.
“We’ll never have grandchildren or even regular children at the rate we’re going.”
I flipped through a Penthouse magazine and then tossed it onto the couch we had pulled up the stairs.
“I need some air.” Kirk didn’t like having the windows open in the bandit lair, because the breeze would blow his papers all over the place. “Could you check the chickens?”
I climbed to the roof. I caught Kirk with a stethoscope checking the heartbeat and breathing rates of the chickens once, but only for estimating the pressure flow and how it matched his demon theory. Other than collecting eggs, he left it to me to play Igor to his scientist. I approached the fine metal mesh, meant for a high frequency Faraday cage, and the enclosed birds.
The flock stared with evil beady eyes to see if I had brought food. Oatmeal, to my surprise, was their favorite. They scattered when I had empty hands, except for one dark brown hen. The dark brown hen had peck marks on her neck and broken feathers. She still wasn’t laying while the other chickens were. The rest of the brood would eventually kill her if I left her in there. I did feel hungry, and not for more eggs or aging potted meat product. Hatching a plan, I opened the coop and grabbed the pathetic hen. Kirk wouldn’t approve, but I did it anyway.
* * *
AUGUST 3
COMMUNITY GARDENS
I began to doubt the wisdom of my gut as I drew near the guarded entrance to the community gardens. I had seen outsiders approach the gate when I spied on them before, so I assumed it wasn’t by invitation only. There were two guards on either side of the makeshift entrance, just like you’d expect for a castle from the movies. When I saw the corpse with an arrow with green plastic fins protruding from its chest on a concrete slab, I nearly turned away with my cardboard box. A burlap sack covered the dead man’s head and sprinkles of white powder had been thrown over the body. Lye or carpet deodorant?
A cardboard sign hung from the corpse’s neck. PETER RABBIT.
“Hey, Gunderson, what are you doing here?” one of the guards called out to me.
The big black guy was named Pennington and had been a trainer in the sports department. He held a baseball bat and wore the green and white Fighting Sioux tracksuit.
“Hardly recognized you with the beard.”
I tore my attention away from the corpse. “I need a salad.”
“I hear ya,” Pennington said. He waved me through. “I could kill for a real, honest-to-god cheeseburger.”
“I heard some whacko let the beefalo out of the pens west of town.”
The other guard, a shorter, squatter white guy, leaned on a long pole tipped with a pruning hook. Must have been a hockey player judging from the missing teeth and mullet, but I couldn’t recognize him without a jersey.
“To establish great herds on the prairie again.”
I stepped into their compound. A dozen people tended the fields beyond, once gridded into family plots, now a single large farm in the nearly abandoned city. A mountain ash shaded a small lean-to of plastic tarp, sandbags, and two-by-fours.
“If any buffalo get in my gardens, they’ll get an arrow through their heart,” came an older woman’s voice from the shelter.
Patsy Helmsrud, one of the administrative staff responsible for students with athletic scholarships, ducked out of the lean-to. I remembered her because she presented a bag of zucchinis to me when I’d first in-processed nine years ago this autumn.
She wore a Harley-Davidson leather motorcycle jacket, tight on her barrel frame, and carried a red compound bow with confident ease. Stickers for Forx Archery and Red River Bow League were plastered on the flat steel limbs holding the cams and four arrows with florescent green fletching hung from the mounted quiver. Patsy had a square, no-nonsense look about her, dark hair chopped short that would be butch on anyone younger and touched with gray. A judgmental middle-aged aunt or opinionated shirttail in-law.
“Then we’ll eat good again, eh?” the hockey player said.
Patsy gauged me slowly. “I know you. You came through my Twamley office a few years ago. Football scholarship?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Did you drop from university?” Patsy tilted her head in disapproval, which tucked her chin into the folds of her neck.
“Messed up my knee. Got my engineering degree instead of playing. Now I’m in grad school. Well, I was.”
“Well, good for you. You seem to be keeping well.” She assessed me like I was a show animal at the state fair.
“Doing okay, I guess.”
“Now, what do you want from our growers’ cooperative and do you have money?”
“Dollars?” I asked.
“Gold or silver,” Patsy said with a sneer. Pennington and the hockey player snickered.
“Better,” I said, and opened the cardboard box. The brown hen poked her head up and tried to flutter out. I snatched her legs and held her splayed upside down for Patsy.
“This should be good for a sack of fresh produce.”
Patsy’s lip
s pursed in a sour expression. “She laying?”
A nearby garden worker, a bottle blond sorority type, had stood when she heard the hen’s alarmed clucking. The blonde had a pleasantly round face with high cheekbones that had taken a nice tan over the summer. She wore shorts and a loose T-shirt that exposed straps from an athletic bra over her broad volleyball player shoulders. Her nails were crusted with dirt. When she made eye contact with me, I sucked in my gut out of habit, though I’d slimmed since the Change.
To Patsy, I said, “No, but I’d bet she’d taste better than scrawny red squirrels from the park.”
The blonde smiled and distracted me.
* * *
AUGUST 25, 1998
WITMER FORTRESS
The memory of the blonde’s gray eyes troubled me, as if she had asked a question I wasn’t prepared for. I could only guess what she had seen, a hermit trading a chicken for a rucksack of vegetables. All I knew was that I felt dissatisfied and angry. Back at our lair, I told Kirk, “We have archaic knowledge. What use are we now?”
“Archaic? It’s been six months, Jason. Some rules may have changed, but we’re capable of discovering the new rules.”
Kirk dropped effortlessly into lecture mode. “How often have you imagined going back in time with the knowledge that you have now? We’re opening a new field, a new era. Discovering the workings of the universe after this change. It’s the new edition of science. Version 2.0.”
“Why bother? We’re running low on food.” I desperately groped for any excuse. “There’s no reason for me to stay here.”
“I’ve been reading.” Kirk’s challenging tone changed to something closer to mollification. He patted the stack of old theory journals on his desk. “Maxwell’s demon may violate entropy locally, but if you expand the box to include this demon, eventually he will add disorder to the system. It can’t go on indefinitely.”
“So this Change will go away?” I asked.
“Yes. Eventually.”
“We’ll find a fix? We’re after a solution?”
“Yes, of course.”
So I believed him and continued to help. He needed me.
* * *
SEPTEMBER 13
WITMER FORTRESS AND SIGMA CHI HOUSE
“We’ll need to fill the balloon before the last of the helium leaks out.”
“So late in the day?”
I’d have to hoist the heavy metal cylinders to the roof from the lab in the basement. I had already changed into jeans and a clean T-shirt.
“Yes. Launch at dusk so the balloon catches the light from the setting sun over the horizon against a dark sky. That way I can track it.”
Kirk touched the binoculars dangling from his neck. Then, as if he remembered I was standing behind him, he asked, “What else do we have to do?”
“I thought we’d go to the harvest dance that Patsy Helmsrud is throwing.”
I’d been invited by Pennington the last time I visited, trading extra eggs for chicken feed and fresh veggies.
“Free food and music. Haven’t heard music in a while.”
“You go. I have to protect our lab.”
“Kirk, this is getting old.”
“Old?” Kirk asked. “The easy stuff had already been done in physics. Didn’t you ever notice? What was the last big scientific breakthrough?”
“High temperature superconductors,” I said glumly.
“That’s nearly ten years ago, but no paradigm shift. Now the universe changed. We can be the first to use old techniques to discover the new paradigm.”
Kirk dropped his left hand to the sword at his belt as he paced in front of the dusty chalkboard. “Since stellar behavior seems unaffected, I believe Maxwell’s demon, while pervasive, must be confined to an envelope close to the Earth’s surface. The balloon payload will contain a strobe light connected to a battery that I’ve saved that will start blinking when it goes above the demon’s limit.”
I was sweating by the time I got the steel cylinder to the roof. Compressed gas cylinders had been dangerous, called “Sleeping Giants” by Dr. Rao in his lab safety course. But since the Change, I had lost my caution, dropping the cylinder with a clang. Kirk waited with a limp weather balloon attached to a Styrofoam payload box. The last of the helium hissed into the expanding sack of white rubber. Those high altitude balloons always seemed so pathetic and droopy when released. It rose rapidly in the last golden light of evening. The harvest moon rose fat and pumpkin orange in the east.
“I’m heading out then.”
“If you want to miss this,” he said as if only a dimwit would pass on the opportunity.
I left Kirk tracking the balloon with his binoculars. He craned his neck back and had the telescope nearby for when it got too high for the low power optics.
I took a quick birdbath using our collected rainwater to remove my sweat. I left through the loading dock; the steel door slammed and locked behind me. I walked across the overgrown campus.
I heard music as I reached University Avenue and fraternity row and, except for the dusty and smashed cars on the street, it made me think of previous autumns when school had just started and all the freshmen were being rushed. I crossed near the burned husk of the Sigma Chi fraternity and arrived at the old Sigma Nu house next door, a formidable brick and tile-roofed structure. Patsy Helmsrud and her crew had taken it over, expanding their control from the gardens to the north into campus. A handful of haggard-looking people milled around on the weed-choked lawn and backed off nervously as I walked through them.
Pennington, acting the bouncer in his green tracksuit, waved me up the steps and shook my hand. He smiled and clapped me on the back.
“Heard a story about you messing up the provost’s gang.”
“Just a misunderstanding,” I said. A momentary flash of guilt nearly drove me back to Witmer.
“We had some misunderstandings with them too.” Pennington nodded in casual agreement. “Hey, we’re starting a five-man football league, to pass the time, if you’re interested?”
“I’ll think about it,” I said. I forced myself through the massive wooden door, banded with metal and studs like it was stolen off a castle.
“Don’t start any trouble, okay!” Pennington called after me and laughed.
Inside, a three piece acoustic band covered Nirvana, Sheryl Crow, and some other popular songs in the large, first-floor party lounge. The band might not have been particularly good compared to what once played on the radio, but they compensated with enthusiasm. Their music quenched a thirst in me that I hadn’t noticed I had until now. Too many silent, sleepless nights had passed in hiding, hypervigilant for any sounds beyond Kirk’s faint breathing.
I ate grilled squash and onions and boiled beans with bits of ham served from pots in the corner. The cook had splurged on the black pepper. A pleasant contentment flowed from my belly while I scraped my plate clean.
I surveyed the room, but I didn’t recognize the guests, a mixture of older neighborhood couples and college-age kids. They all had forced grins and a vast desperation that came with being lost. I wondered what they had gone through outside that I had escaped by hiding in Witmer. The wood floors creaked as people huddled in small groups and the faint odor of stale beer permeated the building. The bottle-blonde from the gardens—Mandy as I had learned—leaned against the stone fireplace and listened to Patsy Helmsrud voicing her opinions on the Fargo emissaries and the lack of common decency among those who stayed behind within the town limits.
Patsy was no fool, nor was she generous by throwing a party or raising civic morale. Everyone who remained nearby attended and saw her wealth and power over the local food supply. Even if someone grew their own, they’d eventually come to Patsy for help in some way. Rabbits, both two-legged and four-legged varieties, had a way of ransacking unguarded gardens. Everyone gushed their thanks and well wishe
s as they shuffled past her.
After wiping my beard on a sleeve, I approached Mandy. She had cleaned up nicely in a simple skirt and gray cardigan. She looked at me with a strange desire, as if I had a sports car and a massive stock portfolio. We chatted. She had been an elementary ed major from Williston and had been Patsy’s work-study before the Change.
“Dance?” I asked with a newfound bravery.
Patsy nodded at Mandy and she accepted. The band played “Candle in the Wind” as we moved close. Mandy curled against me and rested her head on my chest with her hands tucked beneath her chin in a surprisingly vulnerable gesture. She seemed to melt as I caressed her well-toned back. Her hair smelled of dandelions.
Mandy brought a mug of watery beer to me and suggested we should sneak off into the bushes for alone time. I downed the brew and laughed, picking her up by the waist. She giggled and kicked playfully. Then I noticed that Pennington and the other jocks weren’t there anymore. I set Mandy down gently and rushed out the unattended door as she called after me to wait.
* * *
At the loading dock, with my knee aching from the run, I banged my hatchet against the steel door. I could hear the hollow echoes inside. No Kirk. I considered the tunnels, but we’d left lead bricks on the grating. I circled around the building, but my fortifications held, even against me, their creator. On the south side, I saw silhouettes in the light of the full moon scaling the thick ivy covered wall. I gripped the tough vines and scrambled after them as if I were on a cargo net at an obstacle course.
The climbers had partially torn the vines from the brick above me, so I had to be careful with each hand and foothold. As I crushed the soft leaves in my fists, the tendrils popped free and I could taste the bone-dry mortar dust. The climbers crested the lip of the roof. The damn rooster started crowing as they disappeared from my view. I found a dangling rope, the explanation of how the climbers had reached the top so quickly, and latched on to pull myself up before they destroyed our refuge.
A grapnel fashioned from a fishing boat anchor was attached to the end of the rope holding it at the top. I heaved myself over the short wall onto the roof. I swung my bad leg over the edge and my hatchet slipped from my belt, tumbling to the dirt three stories below. I wiped sweat from my forehead with my hand and realized I had smeared sticky leaf pulp smelling of peppery lawn trimmings on my face.
Tales of Downfall and Rebirth Page 17
