Trouble No Man

by Brian Hart

  Aaron picked up his glass and sucked it dry and then put it down, whack, on the counter. “Back to work.”

  “Thanks for the ride, man,” Roy said.

  “Yeah, no problem.” Aaron smiled his big, tough, scarred smile and fixed Karen with another needlessly heavy stare. “You know what I think?”

  “What’s that?” she said.

  “I think that maybe we’re not so different, me and you. We both have our family tying us to this place, my dad, Mace and whoever else, it doesn’t matter, and that means something.” A big half-gold, goon smile. “Fuck you if you don’t get it. That’s what I think.”

  Karen smiled, but clearly didn’t know what to say. Who would? She nodded yes but Roy couldn’t read her eyes, then she leaned over and touched the big dork on the arm. She liked him. She really fucking liked him. She was happy to be near him. “It’s not so bad to feel connected somewhere,” she said.

  Roy didn’t know why she’d said it, but once she had, he sensed she’d needed to say it, or something close to it, for a long time and that it was true. She was in her house. She was home. All at once Roy wanted to get Aaron out the door and gone. He’d brought up Whip. Touchy stuff. And what did tied to a place have to do with anything? Does a masochist thank the rope? Probably.

  “You aren’t alone,” Roy said to Karen.

  “I know that,” Karen said.

  Aaron buttoned his coat, pulled up his collar. “I better get. Tell Mace I said to chill the fuck out when you see him.” He took Karen’s hand for the second time. “Great to see you.”

  “Thanks for the ride,” Karen said.

  “I could give you some money for gas,” Roy said.

  “You could but I wouldn’t take it. Call me when your rig’s done and I’ll give you a lift.” Aaron went out the door and seconds later they heard the diesel clatter to life and he was gone.

  Roy and Karen sat in the still warming kitchen, refrigerator buzzing, ice cubes melting in their empty drink glasses.

  “What if I don’t want to stay?” Roy said.

  “Then, I don’t know what,” Karen said.

  [14]

  M>45

  CA 96118

  The layer hens are scratching along the fence, one foot then the other, dry-dirt kickers, convicts searching for shivs, while the meatbirds are in their rolling jails in the pasture living in fear of nothing if not the goats jumping on the roof. Bonehead book about gardening with chickens set them back two weeks. Rows of bonehead books and magazines, stacks of them, never mind the websites, and what it came down to was fencing and weeding. All you need to know. Vigilance. His inner dirt farmer: You get yerself some wire, some posts, a shovel, and you dig—if not for yer very life—then for yer sorry homespun dinner. Dig, boy, dig.

  Now, taking a break from the digging of cheatgrass from the garden paths, they stand side by side and work the dirt from their hands. She’s seven today, his co-worker, his youngest, and that makes him, what? Old? A middle-aged father of two? There are moments when he feels nothing if not too old. Too old to be figuring out how to keep the daily operations rolling. Head above water. Too old to be complaining about all the work he has to do, and too old to actually manage it, even if he did just shut his mouth and get it done. Feels that way. Head underwater. Too old to keep up with a seven-year-old. Never mind the other one, the mean one, the teenager.

  Three logging trucks, close together, stacked high with saw logs roar by on the county road. The Jeffs have repaired the biofuel plant in town and reopened the Sierra Pacific Mill. The smell of cut timber drifting in from the road is reassuring.

  “Will new trees grow?” the girl asks her father. She has his eyes and is capable of disrupting the space-time continuum if she looks at him too long. At least that’s how it feels.

  “Forests evolve,” the man says. “Remember when we talked about evolution? How time is the most important thing in the world?”

  “We don’t understand what it is,” she says.

  “People say they do,” he says. “I don’t.” For some reason when she repeats what he’s said back to him he likes it less than when her older sister does. She’s a different person and he doesn’t like inculcating them both with the same form of propaganda. It’d be like raising a monocrop, set them up for catastrophe, make them weak.

  “Those trees aren’t like our trees,” the man says. “They don’t need us to take care of them.” After he says it, he realizes how untrue it is. He’ll let it ride. The child is familiar with Northern Spy, York, Cripps Pink, and pie cherry. She’s helped plant, harvest, graft, and stood watch with her family over the fires of the girdle kill.

  “They just need time?” she says.

  “And soil, water, and sunlight.” He gives her a shove. “Chainsaws and skidders don’t do them any favors though, do they?” He watches her eyes as she discovers the holes in what he’s been saying. Do the trees need our help or don’t they? You know, he wants to say, if I told you exactly how the world is, you wouldn’t ever sleep again, so quit looking at me like I’m a liar.

  Just then, the girl’s mother comes out of the house, the older sister closes the door behind them. The screen door doesn’t slam because he’s installed a hydraulic closer/stopper thing. It’d taken him months if not years to get around to it but he’d done it. The teenager hates it. She wants to slam the door, was happier when she could. If it is possible to work yourself out of a job, this was not the place to do it. At night if he can’t sleep he runs through the list of projects that need to be finished before it snows or doesn’t snow, rains or doesn’t rain. Rarely does he go to sleep satisfied. He keeps a notebook in the Shaker cabinet in the kitchen and he gets up and writes down his schemes and his lists multiply in the way rabbits do.

  “They blasted the dams,” the woman shouts from the driveway.

  “What?” the man asks. “Who?”

  “Some guys calling themselves Agua Critical,” the teenager says, serious. “It was on the radio.”

  Stop acting so grown up, he almost says. It’s worse than when you act your age, which is saying something.

  “What dam, Mama?” the younger child asks.

  “Three different ones, including Frenchman’s. They put a dent in the one above Folsom but they say it’s holding for now.”

  “What’s the point of that?” he asks.

  “I don’t know. Piss off the Jeffs,” she says.

  “Other people live here,” the older child says to her mother. “It’s not just the Jeffs.” She still remembers what it was like before the Preservation. The layer hens mob her feet wanting her to toss some scratch and she nudges them away with her foot only to eventually pick one up, the barred rock, reliable layer, a good bird, named Sevilla by the youngest.

  “We live here,” her little sister says.

  He opens the garden gate and herds the girl through and shuts it behind him. The chickens don’t expect anything from him. But death. To them, I am death. To all the animals, I am death. If they know it or not. Makes him think about his place in the world, the reach of comeuppance. Or karma, if you want to burn your palo santo about it. He pops hip joints with D2 steel and tans hides. He has goatskin rugs and rabbit-fur hats. To every season, turn. He catches his daughter under the armpits and chucks her onto his shoulders.

  “We thrive, little one,” he says, squeezing her little calf muscles. “We’re not survivors, we’re champs.”

  “I’m not a monkey,” she says, popping her fist lightly off the top of his freshly shorn head.

  It takes a moment to catch her angle. “Champs, as in champions. Not chimps, as in chimpanzees.”

  That evening they decide to waste some fuel and go for a drive. The asphalt of the county road is cut with twin crumbling troughs in the southbound lane from the log trucks and tree bark litters the bar ditch. The Jeffs have doubled their security at the roadblocks, and after the first two they decide to turn around and go home. More and more they’re in occupied territory. Stra
ngers in camo with M4s directing traffic.

  The only flood damage they see, outside of the mud and uprooted trees in the fields, is the ruined bridge at Dotta Guidici, and that had been marginal for years. The man makes a note of the salvageable bridge timbers and plots a time when he can return and grab them, who he might call to help. Short list. Chains, cable and clevis, come-along, handyman jack, peavey, saw, unkillable Harbor Freight single-axle trailer. He builds a skyline in his mind.

  “Surface water,” the woman says.

  “What, Mama?” the younger girl says, still looking out the window.

  “The only water that matters is under our feet.”

  “Not the iceberg thing again,” the older child says, tired of all things water. All things: her mother.

  “You can’t dam your way out of a drought,” she says.

  “It worked for a while,” the man says, resisting the urge to make a pun. Dams make him want to pun.

  “I’m tired of everything working for a while,” the woman says. “I want it to work forever. I want these people to stretch their imaginations and try and see the long game.”

  “They can’t see past their dehydrated chicken dinner,” the man says. “You want them to build a coop and raise corn.”

  “The corn died,” the youngest says. “Bugs killed it.”

  “Tough all over,” the man says.

  [15]

  M<55

  CA 94203

  Twinned walls of scarred boulders piled onto the sidewalks funnel them toward the roadblock. He keeps the dog out of sight in the trailer. The codies on guard duty wear black tactical gear and blue dust masks. They have sidearms and ARs, ammo belts and high lace boots. A radio is blasting inside the Red-E-Shed guard shack, half-static, half-Slayer. “South of Heaven,” classic rock. Sodium lights have been twisted onto hog panels with barbed wire. A three-phase diesel generator rumbles in the back of a hard-used City of Sacramento pickup. The man is almost certain they will be turned back but without pause the codies wave him through. They don’t want him here any more than he wants to stay.

  Cars lurch past and there isn’t much of a shoulder. They go slowly and the oncoming headlights make the man’s eyes weary and the night blurs. In the darkness beyond are the lights-out suburbs. The stink of house fires has settled into the ground and is rancid in the air. FEMA zones, once protected, now bankrupt and abandoned. The feds bowed out and the utilities shut down and—with the exception of the militias, the too-dumb-to-go-anywhere crusters, and the truly helpless—the place is now empty.

  His left knee clicks on each rotation of the pedals. First pain like first light. He says hello to the all-day pain. It will move through his body—knees, back, ass, wrists, neck—as the sun moves across the sky. No stopping now. No one to complain to. Let the body complain to the body. Let the mind find comfort in the distraction of the pain.

  In the low hills above the city he stops and lets his sweat dry and within minutes the heavy quiet closes on him and chills his blood. He lets the dog out of the trailer so he can lift a leg but with his hip he squats. When he’s done, he won’t load up so the man puts his feet to the pedals, his hands in the drops. Knee click like a slow jazz finger snap accompanying the dog’s four-step toenail percussion, looks back, hardly limping.

  An hour later, out of the blackness, comes the otherworldly spectacle of scavengers removing a wind tower that they’ve dropped across the road like a lodgepole pine for firewood. Shattered hunks of white plastic and bent metal stump out of the dusty earth. The scrappers stagger in the blue-white flash of the cutting torch, eyes and teeth. The man and his dog go unnoticed as they leave the road. He pushes his rig through the dust in a wide arc to the other side of the hill where he throws his leg over his bike and rolls easy on the blacktop.

  Red moon sliver, inland-bound on empty roads, dry riverbeds, and dustbowl fields. A line of cracked twigs that used to be an orchard. The wind blows hot, even at night. There are houses—he knows there are houses—but no lights. The dog wants to stop and nips at his ankle to tell him so.

  He waters the dog in a sour cream container and has a few swigs himself. Using the edge of his overgrown thumbnail he punctures a dime-size blister on his palm. He lets it drain and as he slowly peels the skin off he thinks: Someday people will look back at this time and it will seem like it all happened over the course of a couple of months or years. They’ll insist on an exact hinge point, a fault line, a political act. But there isn’t a simple explanation, or even a person to blame. The answer is mistakes were made, better luck next time. He feeds the dog the skin from the blister and washes his hands in the dust and gets back on the bike.

  When he comes to an unmarked junction he stops to check the map with his headlamp and he and the dog leave the highway for a ragged two-laner that climbs gradually into the hills.

  They sleep in a concrete culvert that passes under the road. It is tall enough for the man to stand up in and the acoustics are familiar and, in a childlike way, welcoming. Others have slept here before them and there is a filthy foam pad but the man doesn’t use it. The dog isn’t so picky. Graffiti tells them to flee if the rains come or you’ll get shot like a cannon onto the rocks. Smiley face. I’m hobo loco because they didn’t come, someone has written. Me 2. Me 3. I’ll take mine on the rocks. I’m thirsty. Jeffersons are fags. Say that to their face. Pussy. My kingdom for some pussy. UR King Pussy. King Dripy Dick. King Butt Fuck.

  In the morning, after they leave the culvert, they only make it a mile or two before the way is severed by hardened mudslides. The man has to disconnect the bike from the trailer and make trips to pack his rig over the jumbled mess.

  They pass through miles and miles of burnt forests. The sun bakes down on the dry slot of the Yuba. Choke on red dirt. Late in the afternoon, they take shelter in the cool stonewall vein of a rail tunnel.

  He must’ve fallen asleep because when he wakes the sun has long since set and the dog is sitting outside in the meager moonlight like a stone lion.

  Bleary eyed and saddle sore, the man gets back on the bike. They pass quietly through two ghost towns, one after the other, never see a light, and later, see roadside camps and flicker fires, and hear voices in the trees. He pushes the pedals down. The dog is in the trailer and the chain creaks under the strain.

  Dawn finds them on ash-swirled blacktop. They’re on what was Preservation land. Burnt and heavily logged forests on either side of the road but the deadfall has been cleared. The chain-sawed eyes of the trees watch them as they pass.

  At noon they come to a holdout compound with razor-wire fences and warning signs, security cams. Without a flag, there’s no telling. The man parks his bike and walks toward the gate and the call box. Then he sees the three gold stars and the arrow. The blood is returning to his hands in a cactus handshake. He massages his finger stump and spits on the fence and calls the dog to his side and helps him back into the trailer. One of the staples is bleeding. He gives the dog a pill wrapped in salami and wipes the wound clean with an alcohol pad before applying the antibiotic ointment.

  His legs go on without explanation, exhausted but emphatically still cranking the pedals, spinning the batter. He is in fact entangled with this thing he sits on and he is going to make it do what he wants. When he has the chance he is going to coast, sink a knee against the top tube and just take it easy, let it roll. With all the weight he’s hauling the climbs feel punchy, even the low graders, and sometimes he has to get off and push. He feels lonely and helpless as he walks.

  The sun has only just fallen when he coasts through a short S-turn, downhill section. At the bottom he’s surprised to find green grass on the northern slope. He pushes the bike from the road into the tall grass and hides it behind some boulders. The dog unloads stiffly from the trailer, panting heartily, eyes narrowed from the heat. He needs sleep but they have water first, and he feeds the dog kibble while he has some salami and bread. There are birds here, unseen, but their chalky shit is on the boulde
rs. The dog finishes its dinner, then settles in to licking its staples.

  “You’d better quit that or I’ll put the lampshade back on. If I had it. Bare-assed baboon,” the man says. “It’ll get better. Don’t worry. Don’t even sweat it, Frankenbutt.” He digs in his tool kit and finds his cable cutters and his multitool and kneels down beside the dog. “Too early for this, isn’t it?” He picks out the smallest wound, nearly healed, and snips the staple right in the center. The dog watches him but doesn’t try to get up as he rolls the staple out of the skin. He drops the two pieces in his palm. “One down,” he says. The dog licks where the staple had been and the man doesn’t stop him.

  He has his back to the road, petting the dog, looking for the birds, when the dog begins to growl. The man scans the trees while he rests his hand on the dog’s head. Then he hears the trucks.

  He can’t see where they park but he listens to the doors close, one two three four. He hisses at the dog to be quiet and then busies himself cramming his sleeping bag into his pannier, but he’s so tired that he’s clumsy and can’t seem to get his hands to work the way he wants.

  Three armed men dressed in camouflage are walking toward the boulders. He can’t tell if they’ve seen him yet.

  When they see him, they stop.

  “We’ve been looking for you,” the one in front says. He has the militia insignia, the three gold stars with the arrow, on his shoulder. He covers the lower receiver on his weapon with one hand and points with the other. “Don’t do anything sketchy, brother, or we’ll punch your ticket.”

  “I’m leaving,” the man says.

  “Not yet.” Another man, clean shaven and with a sharper outfit, digital camo, knee-high snakeboots, comes toward him as if to shake his hand, says, “Stay still.” Then raises a sleek data-sat phone and takes the man’s picture. They wait. A small flock of juncos pass low overhead and their wingbeats sound like horses running far away.