“Repack it, and let’s go.”
6.
The bus sucked.
Junior had half expected a nice coach, with wi-fi, a bathroom, and reclining seats. Instead, the bench seats, covered in green vinyl, were stained and sometimes slashed. Wisps of white filler poured out where it had not been worn down to the yellow foam. It smelled like unwashed bodies and diesel.
The bus hit another pothole; the jolt seemed to wake some of the passengers for a moment, but then their heads flopped back against the windows or against the jackets they wadded up as makeshift pillows and they returned to half-sleep for however long until the next bump in the road. Sitting in an aisle seat, Junior could see out the front window, past the bored driver whose crappy music was leaking out of his earphones as a tinny hiss punctuated by too much bass. The lights – the left one was noticeably stronger – illuminated the road maybe 100 yards out. After that, it was just formless blackness. The yellow line running to the left disappeared then returned, then disappeared again because no one had bothered to repaint it. It reminded Junior of Morse Code. Dot-dash-dash-dot-dot.
They were probably five hours from Reno; it was nearly four a.m. and he could not sleep.
They had gotten to the bus station on time despite their deadly detour. Ricky met them as planned and Turnbull handed over the rest of the money. The travel docs worked; a bored security guard scanned them and they were a go. He waved them past and down to the buses. They loaded on time but left an hour late. A long hose had broken in the cooling system and the bus driver had to wrap it a dozen times with duct tape. There were already two other taped up holes in the same hose.
The passengers were in no mood to talk; this was a purely utilitarian exercise – you left Vegas at night and got to Reno in the morning with minimal hassle. Most people tried to catch some shut eye; the only noise was the loud clacking of the engine and the music leaking from the driver’s earbuds.
Junior had thought a lot about what happened in the house, how he would not have killed the thieves if it had been up to him. He had told Turnbull that, and Turnbull replied, “No, you probably wouldn’t have. That’s your problem.” And Turnbull had not said anything more, packing a jacket in a tight ball next to a window pillar and bracing it with his head before shutting his eyes.
When they got pulled over at a checkpoint, Junior saw Turnbull’s eyes crack just a bit, his hand disappear under his shirt. The PSF officer was well-aware of the essential shittiness of holding down the graveyard shift out on People’s Route 95. He half-heartedly swung his flashlight from face to face, alighting for a moment on Turnbull, who did not react, and shining it in Junior’s eyes – Junior held up his hand and blinked. Nothing. Just another batch of surly, stinky people in a crappy bus in the middle of nowhere. The thug turned and walked off the bus without a word. The driver closed the door, reinserted his ear buds, and started back up the highway.
They transferred buses in Reno, taking care to stand apart during the long wait – the bus to Los Angeles was two hours late – just in case the PSF was looking for two men traveling together. The bus finally rolled out wheezing and belching black smoke.
Reno had never been a showplace city, but it was barely a city at all any more. The high rise casinos were closed. Many of the businesses were boarded up. The people on the street seemed listless and without direction – they did not seem to be going anywhere. Junior looked for one, but never saw a single smile.
They turned south on old US 99, now the Prosperity Freeway. The bumps and jolts from the ruts in the road shook their teeth and made sleeping impossible. They stared out the window.
The Central Valley’s legendary farms were gone. Once, settlers had merely poured the Sierra Nevada’s bountiful water on the earth and the crops had practically sprung up overnight. But the water was gone. The run-off of the snowpack that California’s intricate system of dams, reservoirs and canals used to catch and store now ran out to the sea through the Delta unhindered. After the Split, free from the constraints of the federal government, the new government had decided to fix what it saw as the mistakes of the past and had decided to restore the California that existed before any of its 40 million inhabitants’ grandfathers had been born. They started tearing down the dams. Not all of them, to be sure. The Hetch Hetchy dam, which fed the Crystal Springs reservoirs hundreds of miles to the west on the San Francisco Peninsula that slaked the thirst of the coastal elite, stayed intact. Those were deemed necessary. But the others, the ones that stored water for farmers and for people in less exalted places like Modesto and Stockton, came crashing down to widespread self-congratulation. Turnbull and Junior watched the result pass by outside their windows – miles and miles of burnt brown former farmland now reclaimed by the desert, and towns abandoned and empty.
Every few hundred yards they passed a derelict vehicle, sometimes a car, sometimes a bus or a tractor trailer rig. They had run out of gas and lay where they had stopped. Their owners never bothered to come back for them. Most had been pillaged, their hoods propped up and all the parts that could be carried away long gone, taken by the scavengers who wandered the empty landscape of what had been the breadbasket of the west.
The billboards, though, were all new, replaced every few weeks, but rarely before some graffitist marked them with his tags. “PRESIDENT DE BLASIO LOVES CHILDREN” one said, the picture showing the grinning, elderly President surrounded by eager, uniformed kids. The graffitist – who knows where he got the purple spray paint, since such items were so hard to find in the government stores – had added an engorged appendage to the aging President’s photo that unwholesomely changed the nature of the love for children the text referenced.
Another billboard warned, “THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC STANDS AGAINST RACISM, SEXISM, DENIALISM, TRANSPHOBIA, AND ISLAMOPHOBIA!” The photo depicted a diverse group of angry young people, fists up, implicitly promising to unleash their wrath upon those who failed to meet their exacting standards. The artist had hit this sign too – in purple, capital letters he had written “WHERE IS OUR FOOD?”
A third billboard quoted the President: “WE WILL NOT TOLERATE WRECKERS AND HATERS FROM THE UNITED STATES ATTEMPTING TO STOP OUR REVOLUTION!” In the background was the latest flag of the People’s Republic. The artist had not got to this one yet. Maybe he had been deterred by the pile of stinking garbage strewn around the base of the sign.
The billboards were all posted on wooden frames; metal would have been taken by scavengers for scrap within a matter of hours.
The bus was making good time, despite the desperate condition of the freeway, largely because the road was nearly empty other than a few buses and some trucks. The air conditioning was out, so the bus’s windows were cracked as far as they could be. It was stifling. An old man sitting in the row in front of Turnbull was sweating profusely, and had finally reached his limit.
“These buses used to be comfortable!” he shouted. “They used to work! Everything used to work!”
“Shut up,” said a bitter woman across the aisle who, under other circumstances, probably would have been fat.
“I won’t!” the old man cried. “I remember how it used to be before! It was good before. The stores had food! We had cars!”
“You old racist fucker, shut up!” the woman screamed.
Shamed, the old man looked down. “It was better before,” he mumbled.
“I’m calling the police!” the woman spit. The old man just looked down at his knees.
There was a rest stop at fifty kilometers south of Stockton. Dust and litter blew across it before being carried off into the distance. The old cyclone fence that had divided it from what had been the surrounding farmland was gone, the metal poles had been cut off a few inches above their cement footings and the metal dragged away for scrap years ago. The bathrooms were shut tight; those so inclined could walk to a stinking ditch and do their business behind a rude screen of plywood nailed to shallowly-planted beams. Feral cats wandered about, wary of
humans, gorging on the rodents.
Some Mexican food entrepreneurs had set up crude stands on the grass; Junior caught the smell of cooking meat and realized he was hungry. Turnbull was more concerned with the two black uniformed People’s Security Force thugs lounging beside their SUV at the south end of the lot, their AKs hanging off their shoulders. No doubt they were collecting a cut of these unauthorized capitalists’ business.
“You want some food?” Junior asked.
Turnbull satisfied himself that the thugs were not giving even a second thought to the bus and its disgorged passengers then replied.
“Yeah, but not here.”
“It smells good. Anything wrong with me getting a taco?”
“What kind of meat is it?’
“What kind?”
“Yeah, what kind? You see a lot of cows around here? I do see lots of kitty cats.”
“I’m not that hungry.” Junior took off toward the improvised latrine.
By the time Junior returned, the angry lady from the bus had found her way to the far end of the lot, and was animatedly describing the old man’s heresy to the thugs. They seemed bored, yet they followed her back to the bus. It was hot, but apparently not too hot for some fun. They confronted the old man, who sheepishly tried to explain that he was just so tired that he didn’t know what he was saying.
“You some kind of racist?”
“No, I’m just tired!” he protested.
Junior seemed on the verge of opening his mouth, but Turnbull subtly grabbed his arm.
One thug swung the butt of his AK into the old man’s gut. He crumpled to the ground, then rolled around moaning. The other passengers watched, indifferent. Then the thugs turned away to return to the SUV; they made their point and there was no sense hauling him in. The bitter woman smiled as the old man struggled to his feet and stumbled back to the bus.
They rode south for several long hours, the bus shaking and clattering nonstop as the driver seemed incapable of missing even a single bump or pothole. The old man clutched his abdomen and moaned every once in a while. The passengers tried to sleep or just stared out the dirty windows.
A few miles south of Tulare, which was nearly deserted, there was a sign for the Corcoran State Prison and Social Rehabilitation Center. Most of the traditional criminal convicts had long since been released as victims of the racist prison-industrial complex. The prison, and the camp built beside it, was now devoted to social criminals in need of reeducation. The bus grew quiet as it passed by the sprawling penal colony.
They covered still more miles. Bakersfield was never a particularly pretty place even before the country split apart, but now it seemed to be barely a city at all. There was almost no activity to be seen from the freeway – the factories and warehouses and grain silos were silent. Parking lots were empty except for abandoned cars and the occasional bum pushing a shopping cart. The fast food places that had once lured travelers were simply abandoned. Before, when a particular restaurant had to close, the company would swoop in and remove all the signs, logos and trade dress. It would not do to have a closed down McDonald’s just sitting there. But here in Bakersfield, no one had bothered. McDonald’s, Carl’s, Jr., Wendy’s – at some point the companies had just walked away.
When the country split, there had been promises of free trade, that nothing would be different as far as commerce, that it was simply a matter of social laws and lifestyle and that the two nations would be like brothers, just living in separate houses. The blue coasts would live their way, and the red interior its way, but nothing would get in the way of business. That lasted about a year, and within five years the blues had closed themselves off from the red states completely. Many companies just walked away from their investments in the blue states – they left everything. And now the corpses of those thriving businesses simply decayed, anything salvageable long-ago pillaged by the scavengers.
The bus wheezed and chugged as it began the long climb up old Interstate 5 – now the Barack Obama Freeway – to the Grapevine, the pass through the mountains north of the Los Angeles basin. The road rose on a miles-long ramp from the floor of the Central Valley through a crack in the hills heading south. At the base lay abandoned what had been a massive truck stop and rest area – the faded signs promised Starbuck’s and Chevron and a host of other forgotten brands. It was a transient camp now, made possible by the government water tanker parked in the middle of the parking lot. Junior estimated the line of people waiting in the sun to fill their jugs and bowls was 200 meters long.
Another billboard came into view: “DEATH TO THOSE WHO SUBVERT THE PEOPLE’S RULE!” It depicted a bunch of smiling kids gathered around a gallows. The former blue states had largely gotten rid of the death penalty for actual crimes well-before the Split. Once independent, their new leaders wasted no time in resurrecting it for crimes that involved challenging their rule.
As the freeway continued south, it worsened. The bus slowed considerably, which at least buffered the jolts and shaking from the deteriorating road bed. Without air conditioning, the atmosphere inside the coach was stifling. Turnbull felt the sweaty skin of his arms stick to the vinyl seat back, peeling off slowly whenever he moved.
The bus entered into the main cut of the pass, the grade steep enough to slow the bus to a crawl. There was a shudder, unlike the usual ones from the potholes, and then a stream of obscenities from the driver. The engine now sounded like it was grinding metal upon metal, and from under the front window rose a cloud of steam condensed on the glass. The driver, with effort, turned the slowing bus to the right and pulled off to the side against a sheer cliff face of grey shale.
“What’s wrong?” yelled a bald man sitting behind Turnbull and Junior.
“Shut the fuck up!” the driver shouted, opening the door and stepping out. A tractor trailer rig passed by and made its way slowly upwards.
“This could suck less,” said Turnbull.
“What do we do?”
“What they always do here. Sit here, wait to see what happens, and hope it doesn’t get any worse.”
The driver managed to get the cowling up, and the steam dissipated. But he just stared at the engine as if doing so would somehow change the circumstances. It was clear he had no idea how the bus he operated worked. So he just stood there.
“What’s going on? What are you doing?” the same man shouted. This time the driver ignored him.
“This is bullshit!” swore another passenger.
The hateful woman who had narced on the old man turned around in full scold mode. “You shut up! You should be grateful we even have a bus! You think they have buses like this in the racist states?”
Junior raised an eyebrow. They certainly had no such public transportation in the red.
“Fuck you, bitch,” the bald man responded. “There aren’t any cops here and I will fuck you up!”
“Racist –“
“Bitch, you better shut the fuck up!”
Outside, another bus pulled to the shoulder in response to the driver’s desperate waving of arms.
“Time to go,” said Turnbull, standing up and making his way forward past the angry woman. She stared at him, as if she were demanding his intervention, but Turnbull ignored her.
The driver ran to the door of the rescue bus. It opened and he disappeared inside just as Turnbull and Junior exited their own.
“Get our gear,” Turnbull said as the other bus’s door slammed shut and its engine roared.
“You’re shitting me,” he said as the other bus pulled back onto the freeway and began to climb the Grapevine again.
Junior re-appeared with their packs from the storage bin underneath. “No way.”
“Way.” He took his pack and stepped around to the roadway. From inside the bus, they could hear the passengers screaming and shouting at each other. There was a crash of glass – someone had kicked out a window.
Down the road was a pick-up truck slowly grinding its way up the grade. Turnbull dropped
his pack and stepped out into the freeway waving his arms. In his hands, he held a stack of bills.
More people were coming off the bus now; inside, it sounded like they were tearing out the seats.
The blue Ford pick-up, probably from the early 2000s, slowed and stopped. The driver was in his fifties, with a dirty denim shirt and greasy hair.
“You want a ride, huh?”
“LA. We got a hundred.”
“Four hundred. Each.”
Turnbull did not hesitate. “Okay. Four hundred each.”
“Well, if you’ll pay four hundred, you’ll pay five hundred,” he said.
Turnbull threw his pack in the back and nodded for Junior to join him. Then he opened the door to the cab and leaned in to the leering driver.
“How about four hundred each and I don’t rip your throat out and take your piece of shit truck?” he said pleasantly. The driver took the eight hundred total, and Turnbull hopped into the back. They shared the space with an old transmission and about twenty feet of rusty chain.
“Keep down,” the driver said through the cracked rear window. “It they see you riding back there I’ll get pulled over.”
There was a whoosh from the bus, and inside a flickering orange light. Someone had set it on fire. Now the passengers were pelting it with shale rocks from the cliff face.
The pick-up began to inch forward slowly, but then the frightened face of the angry woman appeared over the side, her hands gripping the edge.
“Let me in!” she howled, trotting along with the accelerating truck. “I’m Privilege Level 6!”
As if that mattered out there in the middle of nowhere – your privilege level was useful for leveraging jobs, schools and getting a residence inside a secured sector, but not so much when the government was not watching.
Privilege levels were sold as similar to reparations. They were to be a way to remediate historical oppression and discrimination by creating a new hierarchy of the favored to replace an alleged hierarchy of oppression that had largely faded away decades before. The high would be brought low, and the low raised high, or something like that. But that had only inspired more jockeying for oppression pole position. Did someone whose great-great-great-great-great grandfather might have been a slave outweigh the oppression of someone whose great-great-great-great-great grandfather might have been shot by Custer? What if your cousin had been a transsexual in the 1970s – that had to be worth something, right? Soon, everyone named O’Connor or O’Malley was claiming their ancestors had been brought here as indentured servants, and that this ancient injustice had to be worth a point or two on their privilege levels.
People's Republic Page 8
