War Day

by Whitley Streiber; John Kunetka

  "I'm Brother Arana," he would snarl, "and don't you forget it."

  Carlos had been five years ahead of us at Central. "You remember Brother DeLoach?" he asked.

  "He was principal our freshman year. He retired."

  "He taught me a hell of a lot. I was a real bad kid when I went there. Angry, you know? And so damn stupid. I'd been a year at 98 WARDAY

  Southton already! They hit me with a razor strap there. I was down for selling grass. Shining shoes and dealing grass to the soldiers on Alamo Plaza, then going to the Alameda to see Cantinflas movies. You know what we got for a joint—we called them Mary Janes—back in the fifties? We got a dollar. But they cost us eighty-five cents apiece. So we were risking years of freedom for fifteen cents! Sure enough, the next thing I knew I was down for a year and my mom and dad were thinking they had raised a rotten kid. When I got out I applied to Central. No way I'm gonna get in, my parents figure. Im fourteen and already a jailbird. But DeLoach, he lets me in. 'You stay away from the Mary Janes or I'll paddle your behind' he says. 'You're a smart kid, that's your problem. We'll give you a little something to do with your mind, you'll stay out of trouble.' "

  "Did it work?"

  "I loved that school! One of these days I'm gonna go back. I'm gonna see—"

  Silence. We are suddenly very still, we alumni. Night has just touched us in the middle of the afternoon.

  The Dream Bandidos

  The Trailways sign had been taken off the wall of the station, and the newsstand carried papers with names like Revolucion and

  Viva Aztlan! There were also Mexican and Spanish papers, El

  Diario and La Nota. The Japanese Asahi Shimbun en Espanol

  was prominently displayed, as was the London Times—in English, of course. I would have bought a copy, but it cost the equivalent of three dollars.

  Jim was delighted to find that the candy counter was well stocked. Last year, M&Ms and Hershey bars reappeared in Dallas, but here in El Paso you can get all manner of colorful locally made confections as well. We stocked up on fresh pralines and other in-digenous sweets in the fifteen minutes we had before the bus left.

  It was a brand-new Japanese Hino, very comfortably appointed and efficiently air conditioned. In El Paso in August this is a definite plus. It was about ninety degrees, and would probably be a hundred before the end of the day. The driver was wearing a spiffy green uniform. He carried a .38 in a gleaming holster.

  We settled into our plush tan seats and prepared for the one-hour journey to Las Cruces and the border. In the bus around us were well-dressed travelers, the men in light summer suits and dark glasses, some of the women even in silk dresses. These people 9 9

  100 WARDAY

  were Aztlan's elite. Apparently the common folk go to Las Cruces in something other than Super Express buses, if they go at all.

  Across the aisle from me sat a man in a magnificent suit, perhaps even a Savile Row creation. Beside him, his wife was wearing a designer dress of light blue silk. I tried to engage them in conversation, but they turned to each other and began to speak animatedly together.

  The bus was soon on its way up the long, straight road to Las Cruces. There were trucks on the highway, many of them filled with farm produce. Sometimes we saw cars too, mostly the Toyota and Nissan limousines that are the modern hallmark of the Japanese businessman. A Chevy Consensus or two passed, and the usual sparse collection of prewar jalopies.

  We were about twenty miles from Las Cruces, just south of the town of La Mesa, when the bus slowed and turned off the interstate. "La Mesa," the driver called, and a couple of passengers began to take their baggage down from the overhead racks. All along the roadside into town, there were makeshift dwellings. Derelict GM buses with Sun City Area Transit (SCAT) markings had been made over into shelters. There were tents and even geodesic domes. I saw some blond children toddling about, and an Anglo woman working on a truck. Anglos in Aztlan? Jim and I agreed at once: we would interrupt our trip in La Mesa. We'd take potluck on the final miles into Las Cruces and just hope the nervous Senor Espinoza wasn't having us followed.

  We got out at the brand-new La Mesa bus station and began walking back along the highway. A clump of Japanese in white coveralls came out of a restaurant and watched us for a time. "Mo-

  mentOy por favor," one of them called at last.

  "Yes?"

  "Ah. A moment, please."

  We stopped.

  "You are—tourists?"

  "We're writers. Doing research for a book about America."

  "Ah!" Bright smiles. "You write about us?" Even brighter smiles.

  "What do you do?"

  THE WEST 101

  The smiles become fixed. "We agricultural specialists."

  "Helping out with the soya plantations, eh?"

  "That's right. This is soya country!"

  They let us walk on. When we passed the outskirts of La Mesa, it became obvious that there were no soya plantations in this area.

  You could see all the way to the Portrillos across the desert. "They were uranium workers," Jim said quietly.

  "You're sure?"

  "Those pouches at their waists—you saw them?"

  "Yeah."

  "They contained face masks. I've seen people wearing them at Los Alamos. And those blue plastic strips on their collars. If they get a dose, those strips turn red."

  I looked back into the quiet town. The bus was long gone, and there wasn't a car in the street. In the distance, a motor rumbled.

  Cicadas screamed in the trees.

  We caused an even greater stir in the tent community than we had among the Japanese. People began shouting, then running, and in a few minutes at least seventy or eighty had gathered along the roadside. A young woman came forward. She had an enormous

  .357 Magnum strapped to her belt. She was perhaps twenty-five, tall and sleek, her face weathered, her hands red from hard work.

  One hand rested firmly on the pistol.

  "May we help you?" she asked. Her accent was familiar, the broad twang of West Texas.

  Jim spoke, his eyes on the gun. "We're writing a book about postwar America. We'd like to talk to you, if you don't mind."

  "Where you from?" a man asked from the crowd.

  "Dallas. And we're on our way to California."

  Surprisingly, this revelation caused general laughter. "You got entry permits?"

  Jim frowned. "We're writers. Surely they'll let us in."

  "Hey," the man shouted, "y'all hear that? All we gotta do is go up to the Yuma P.O.E. and say we're writers. We're in!"

  This was not a friendly crowd. But I felt sure they had a story.

  "Could we buy some supper?" I asked.

  The girl with the Magnum nodded. "You got pesos 'A'?"

  102 WARDAY

  "Five. Will that do it?"

  "Ought to, if you like rice. That's what we got. Rice and soybean soup."

  The group began to disperse back into the camp. The girl, our guard, stayed close. Her hand remained firmly planted on the pistol. She had a soft, open face, but the way she held her lips told me that she could be dangerous. The gun was serious.

  Up close, the camp was a hodgepodge. There were L.L. Bean tents arranged with old cars to make shelters, the buses we had seen from the highway, trailers, and even a few portable buildings.

  Why, in a nation of empty housing developments and abandoned apartment buildings, anybody would be living like this was beyond me.

  "You don't have homes?"

  "No, we don't have homes."

  "Go to Dallas. You can take over a couple of neighborhoods."

  She snorted, tossed her head. "We're on the wanted list in Texas. Don't you ever go to the post office?"

  "A lot of wanted posters at the post office. I never saw one with your face on it."

  "It's there."

  I was afraid to ask why. Jim sat in the dust, very quiet, his eyes sharp. He did not speak.

  "We're robbers," the girl
said. "Espinoza let us stay here when we got chased out of Texas by the highway patrol."

  "Robbers?"

  "We live by our wits," an older woman said. "You've heard of the Destructuralist Movement?"

  I had indeed. They believed that there should be no social structure beyond the extended family. Even tribes were too much for them. "Destructuralists tried to burn the Dallas Civic Center."

  "That was us," the girl said simply.

  No wonder they had left Texas. "People were outraged."

  "People are addicted to social structure. Warday has given us a historic opportunity to break the boundaries of social control. To be free."

  "We can't rebuild the economy without social structure," Jim said.

  THE WEST 103

  The faces around him went hard. I wondered if we might not be arguing for our lives here. I hoped that he realized it. "We don't need the damn economy,' a man said, his voice full of bitter sar-casm. "The economy's worse than an addiction, it's a curse!"

  "People are dying because the economy's in such a mess," I said. "At the rate of two hundred and fifty thousand a month, to be exact. That's about eight thousand a day. Nearly a hundred just since we started this conversation."

  "You're real smart," the girl said. i

  "I'm a human being. I love other human beings."

  "People are dying because nature is rebalancing the earth's ecology."

  "They're dying because of Warday."

  Another voice intervened: "Rice's ready!" This was a lean young man with bright gray eyes and a dusting of beard. People lined up before a big stainless-steel pot. They carried their own utensils. Each was given a smallish serving of rice topped with cooked soybeans. I thought of my lunch with Hector Espinoza. In fact, I longed for it. I still do. I would give a lot for another taco as crunchy and perfectly seasoned as that one, full of juice and chicken, just the other side of hot. The rice and soybeans were a pitiful meal. It reminded me of the famine, and made me feel frightened.

  The sun was making long shadows when we were finished. I sensed that Jim was as eager as I to get away from this place.

  When I die, I want to be given the grace to go for a good reason. I didn't want to die to serve the frustrations of some very unhappy and confused people.

  "We have a vision," the girl said, "of a true Jeffersonian society in America. This could be a nation of farmers, where everybody is self-sufficient and God-fearing, and the family is the center of things." Her voice rose. "I had a family, you guys! I had a little girl. She was taken from me by heathens. She was taken for no good reason, and she was killed out in the backyard by people who had decided that my family no longer belonged in Roswell, New Mexico."

  A man put his hand on her shoulder. She turned and kissed him in what seemed to me a private way. "We all lost people," he said.

  "That's why we come together. This is a family."

  104 WARDAY

  Another voice was raised. "If you're writers, write that another world like the world we had before Warday is going to mean another war. We have to change. We have to turn aside from the hypnosis of politics and the addiction of vast economic systems that eat this beautiful planet and spit out garbage. We need to turn to one another instead. What counts is the person in bed beside you, and your children, and the people next door. The rest is all addiction and hypnosis and more Wardays."

  My impulse was to try to comfort them, to make all the horror and the suffering of the past few years go away. But I couldn't do that. All I could do was eat their poor meal and look across their fire at them.

  The girl with the gun sighed. "Okay," she said, "here's what's gonna happen." She nodded at Jim. "You're gonna go wherever you're goin'. But you aren't sending anybody after us, like from Texas." She put her free hand on my shoulder. "You're stayin'

  here for a while, just to make sure he doesn't send anybody."

  I felt the blood drain out of my face. I really did not care to end up trapped in the worst place we had thus far encountered. What would they do with me? Lock me up in one of those stifling, filthy, derelict buses?

  "Three months," Jim said.

  "Six."

  "Let him go in three months. If you don't, I'll assume he's dead and tell the Texas police where to find you."

  "Pour months."

  "Four."

  With that, Jim got up. I was appalled. Apparently he proposed to just leave it like this. I was going to spend four months with this bunch. "I'm triaged," I shouted. "I gave up precious time with my own family for the book we're writing. You can't take even more of my time, not if you love the family the way you say you do."

  "We didn't invite you here."

  Jim turned without a word and walked to the road. He soon disappeared toward La Mesa. At that moment I hated him.

  I screamed after him. I flung my empty plate at his departing shadow.

  THE WEST 105

  "You're lucky it didn't break," the girl said. "You'd have to figure out how to mend it. And we don't have a lot of glue."

  A great woe overcame me. I was facing four pointlessly wasted months. "I swear to you, I'll keep your secret."

  "The Texans would kill us."

  "I'm not even going in that direction! I'm on my way west."

  "California's just as dangerous. Radical Destructuralists have been executed there."

  How odd that the terrorists of our time would hate authority but believe in what used to be its core symbol, the family. The old anarchists would have been very confused by these people. But, in a way, they made sense to me. I could understand their dream of a peaceful, agricultural America, where the horizon ended with the next farm.

  I could see something more than violence and rage in these people. They weren't just inept terrorists or starving road people or fanatics. They had their wounds too, like all of us. And because of that, I could make a case for tolerance and understanding.

  As soon as night fell, the camp went to sleep. As we have all found out, it takes a high level of nutrition and lots of artificial light to keep human beings awake after sunset. They were still like the rest of us were during the famine—dead to the world as soon as the sun went down.

  I heard the wet rhythm of sex in the shadows, and sensed stirring here and there in the silence. Birds made their evening calls as last light disappeared behind the Portrillos. Heat lightning flickered. A young woman's voice, calm and pure, softened the murmuring of the children with a lullaby:

  "Come and sit by my side if you love me

  Do not hasten to bid me adieu

  But remember the Red River Valley

  And the cowboy who loves you so true."

  When Jim woke me in the middle of the night, I was at first astonished. But not enough, fortunately, to cry out. He can move more quietly than a shadow; he learned his moves in Asia. We had 106 WARDAY

  gone together in the jungles of hate; escaping this camp of exhausted, sleeping people was not difficult.

  "They might have killed us if they'd seen us," he said, once we were out on the Las Cruces highway.

  "I know it," I said.

  Desert nights are always cold, and that one was no exception.

  We walked north for hours. No cars passed. Toward morning we came into the little town of Mesquite. A neon sign and three pickup trucks identified an open diner. We had American-style eggs and bacon, and big mugs of coffee.

  "Is this New Mexico or Aztlan?" I asked the waitress.

  She laughed. "You guys hitching up from 'Cruces?"

  "El Paso."

  "Well, you're out of Aztlan. It peters out between La Mesa and here. Just past where the Japs are doin' their uranium mining."

  We had seconds of coffee and bought some salt beef and Cokes for the road.

  Los Alamos

  It was nearly dark when Whitley and I reached the outskirts of Santa Fe, in northern New Mexico. In the distance, beyond the thin line of awakening city lights, lay the Jemez Mountains. Hidden there, on the mesa, was
the city of Los Alamos.

  We felt that a visit there was essential.

  It took a long time, however, to find a ride to the mesa. There was no bus service, and the Santa Fe taxis wouldn't take us out at any price. Finally we got a ride with a Los Alamos resident, in his gleaming new Toyota.

  Los Alamos was always a company town, and the company was Uncle Sam. Warday would seem to have ended the need for all that. We really expected to come upon a scene of abandonment.

  Since the war, scientists have not been well treated in the United States, and this is especially true for nuclear scientists. And there isn't any funding for their work. We couldn't imagine the state of New Mexico, for example, spending money to keep Los Alamos in operation.

  Our driver, whose name is best left unsaid, explained some fundamental truths of current life. The people of the mesa had been sealed off from the outside world on Warday. Units of the New Mexico National Guard had blocked all entrances and exits, followed by regular Army troops.

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  Then there was a black year, when the economy of Los Alamos failed due to the absence of government checks. The Army guard-ianship was abandoned and the unpaid soldiers drifted away.

  Most of the scientists and their families left, too, choosing to make their way in some less hostile environment. The others created a miniature farming community, using their technological skills to develop viable desert agriculture. We saw the results of this work—trickle-irrigated crops, strange-looking greenhouses made of plastic, and an elaborate hydroponic system.

  We crossed the Rio Grande and made our way up onto a plateau called Parajito, which resembles a large hand divided into finger-like mesas. There had been rain earlier, and the air was heavily scented with fir and spruce. A peace lay on the land, almost as if it were uninhabited. But after a few miles we came upon the administrative complex. I felt an odd fear, seeing the absence of bustle among these familiar buildings. The library building and its classified papers archive were empty, doors swinging open, windows dark.

  Our driver told us that there had been a serious attack by local residents right after the soldiers left, and some of the damage to the library had been done then. Local people had also talked of trials for the Los Alamos scientists, but there had been no arrests.