Trouble No Man

by Brian Hart

  Karen hung her head and shuffled over to Roy.

  “You think I don’t need a vacation?” Karen said into his chest.

  “I know you do. But let me go first since really you can’t go anyway until Sarah is weaned.”

  “This is the biology of misogyny.”

  “I know. It isn’t fair.” He was a farmer now and like any farmer he had a gift for complaining without actually saying anything. He could complain by just looking at you.

  “You’ve been riding around on your new toy quite a bit,” Karen said. “I know you’re not always working. I see you popping wheelies, ripping around like Steve McQueen, pretending to check the irrigation lines.”

  His new bike was an ancient ’84 XR 500 that in the last century had been built out as a desert racer with an oversized tank and extra lights up front. Roy had bought it for five dollars at an estate sale and limped it home. With the carb and tank cleaned out, a new fuel line and an oil change, the bike was ready to go, pure thumper.

  “I’m a desperado, out riding fences.”

  Karen smiled. The weight she’d gained during her pregnancy was long gone and she was back into her old clothes. Roy wanted to get her new clothes. Her arms were thin, too thin, Roy thought. Everybody was too thin.

  “You can go,” Karen said, as Roy pulled her to him and kissed her. “I’m up next, though. Me and Wiley are going to do something fun without you and your spawn.”

  “OK.”

  “I don’t know what yet, but something.”

  “There’s always Mexico.”

  “Shut your stupid mouth,” she said. “Get out of here. Go.”

  He packed light and, outside of sending Yuri a text to let him know that he was coming, made no plans. It felt good to be back on the Bonneville after the XR but it had been a while so he took it easy. He rode the back way out so he wouldn’t have to go through town and see what else had happened since they’d boarded up the unfinished Jeffersonian Preservation Hall, or go by Barry Miller’s, where it seemed like every other week their neighbor was putting up a new security fence. He had the corny red, white, and gold Jeffersonian flag flying atop his ridiculous supermax-style gate, so you’d know where his allegiance stood or crouched or cowered, whatever his allegiance did.

  The Binghams’ other neighbors, hay farmers mostly, along with their friends from town, Aaron and April, they’d all left. There’d been no goodbye parties, no forwarding addresses. The trucks and lowboy trailers arrived and lifted the houses from their foundations with I-beams and hydraulic jacks and hauled them to Frenchman Lake or one of the other billionaire or militia compounds that had sprouted up near Susanville or Redding. The house movers went about their jobs like insects, dung beetles, slow and steady, somewhat clumsy but ultimately effective. Roy didn’t blame people for selling out, for leaving. Often he wanted to join them. But last week Roy had tracked down Sullivan, the well-driller, and paid him a deposit. Another well, another door opens. Just because everyone thinks one thing doesn’t make it true. If Karen wasn’t ready to quit, neither was he.

  The bike was running rough so he hit high revs in an attempt to burn it clean. He envisioned the combustion chambers, gummy spark plugs. Dust coated his visor and he wiped it clean with the back of his arm, old leathers, dingy gray and cracked.

  The Yuba and the Feather, both dry and loaded with deadfall, were followed by the mud puddle reservoirs, after-party sad, trampled and dusty, denoting dead towns. It would take more than a good winter to fix this. Another summer like the last and Roy figured it was done. They’d have to leave like everyone else. Unless Sullivan found some new pocket of groundwater. A philosophy of wait-and-see that might in the long run kill them.

  Winding through the mountains, clicking through the gears, falling into turns, then he hit a straight stretch and looked around and was suddenly filled with fear because at home he hadn’t been able to admit to himself what exactly was out here, the pure desolation. He’d been so busy working, being a father, keeping the lights on and water pumping, that he’d convinced himself that maybe this whole rickety apparatus would actually hold strong, because it always had before. But from elevation with a long view, he could see that it wouldn’t.

  And it didn’t get any better once he hit the highway. The bike tightened up though, and the jets cleared and it quit popping. He settled in at eighty-five and let it roll. Die-off was apparent on both sides of the road. The border of the Preservation was inconsequential, one side was as trashed as the other. The little towns and off-ramp fuel stops looked like they’d been bombed. Police tape and chain-link barriers and graffiti were the constants. And the tagging wasn’t the usual sort. It was the kind of thing you saw when the National Guard was called in, status reports written on the walls and rooftops four feet tall, so they’d be visible from the air.

  Roy listened to the news on the radio. He knew about the earthquakes, the floods and fires, the running battles with the militias, the attack on Twentynine Palms. His mom and Steve had sold their place in San Diego years ago and moved to a retirement community in Maine, so they were fine. The epicenter was way north of there anyway. Everybody was always blah-blah-blah saying SF was on the chopping block but it had missed them completely.

  He sped by a water tower that had been tipped over and cut in half, maybe to catch the rain that didn’t fall. You could skate that, he thought.

  He’d read that more than fifteen million had already left California. The Midwest was bone dry and fracked out and everybody talked like the East Coast might as well be on the other side of the Gobi. Militias over there, too. Rust Belt Regulars fighting for their own little bit of Preservation. Coast regions of Oregon and Washington and now Alaska were overrun with refugees, but since the political fracture of the Preservation had been compounded by the physical fracture of the earthquake, they didn’t have the infrastructure left to maintain a growing population. Everybody was either federally battled or federally maintained, but how long could that last? Fighting wars on two fronts overseas, not to mention all the new militias and the Jeffersonians at home. It wasn’t that something had to give; it was that it was gone and it wasn’t coming back. Maybe Alaska was the place to be. Maybe it always had been. Canada wasn’t taking anybody else. They’d built their own wall. Do unto others.

  The Bay Bridge was blocked with protesters. Banners were strung from rail to rail but Roy couldn’t read them as far back as he was in the line, a quarter mile at least. He angled out of the traffic jam and drove across the median, over a sidewalk and into a boarded electronics store parking lot and called Yuri. His friend gave him new directions that took him far south but Yuri said it would still be faster.

  Yuri and Sue lived in an affordable housing project that had been carved out of a block of row houses in Daly City. Roy parked among some other motorcycles and scooters at the edge of the courtyard. A small apple orchard surrounded the massive garden in the center of the complex. There were orange trees too, and avocados. Hop vines ran up the walls.

  The door opened before he could knock and Sue greeted him with a big smile. She was a small Chinese woman and she gave him a powerful, lung-cinching hug. Yuri, his old friend, skate trash with a Russian mafia father, clapped him on the back and shoved him inside and put a beer in his hand.

  The living room had two chairs and a couch with a low table in front of it, bookcases against the wall. Efficiency kitchen, but it had a nice view of the courtyard. Roy couldn’t imagine living in an apartment. Where would he piss? Indoors? I don’t think so.

  “Where are your boys?” Roy said.

  “Probably going through your shit,” Yuri said. “Stripping your bike and selling the parts to buy bathtub vodka.”

  “They’re still at school,” Sue said. “Which is where I should be. I told them I’d come back in for a few hours tonight but I’ll be home by the time dinner gets started.” She was younger than her husband but she looked tired, worn down.

  “I’m doing dinner then?” Yur
i said.

  “So smart,” Sue said, and gave her husband a kiss.

  When Roy picked up a twenty-year-old issue of Thrasher from the bookshelf, Yuri told him that his boys, they had three of them—six, nine, and eleven—all skated. They had two more beers while they looked through magazines, held up photos for each other to see.

  “I remember that place,” Yuri said.

  “What about him?” Roy said, holding up the magazine for Yuri to see. It was a photo of his old teammate Rasheed, doing a massive backside 180 kickflip over a dirt-and-boulder parking-lot-to-parking-lot gap.

  “Looks fake,” Yuri said.

  “I saw him do it,” Roy said. “I was there.”

  “No shit?”

  “No shit.”

  “Whatever happened to him?”

  “He died riding his motorcycle.”

  Yuri gave him a sideways look. “I didn’t know. With you?”

  “No. I wasn’t there.”

  “How about the rest of the guys? Nessy and Yano?”

  “Last I saw them was when they came through to skate at my place, years ago. We had fun. Got footage. Shit, they had to help me bury Wiley’s dog, middle a winter. I almost forgot about that. I know that Yano started that XIT shit with Bradford and it took off huge for a while. Nessy is swoosh royalty. Golden ticket. I haven’t heard anything bad so I’m thinking they’re OK.”

  “That’s one way,” Yuri said.

  “It’s too easy to say everything’s fucked, you know? Or all my friends are gone. Or we’re all doomed.”

  “I wasn’t saying that,” Yuri said, grinning. “I was just surprised by your fucking optimism.”

  When Yuri’s boys came in from school they stacked their boards behind the door and took off their tattered shoes, came into the living room shoving and gave Roy the stink eye. They all had long hair and torn clothing and looked to be about five minutes from being feral, mini-Genghis Khans returning from ruling the steppe, Mad Maxicans. Roy liked them instantly, the future. When they saw his helmet and asked about his bike, he took them outside and gave them all rides on the back and even let Oscar, the oldest, try to ride it by himself but he dumped it and chewed up his knee and Yuri said that was enough. He’d just gotten the cast off his arm two weeks ago. Before that it had been stitches. Before that it had been food poisoning. Before that a broken leg. Before that appendicitis. Before that he had been born premature. The future needed health care.

  Sue taught biology at the community school that was integrated into the apartment complex. Yuri was on staff as a plumber. There wasn’t room for Roy in the apartment but there was an outside sleeping area for guests and, after a dinner of roasted beets, farmed crawdads, and brown rice, Roy picked a hammock and sacked out to the sounds of sirens and helicopters and woke before dawn to the burbling of the drip irrigation in the garden.

  Yuri kicked his hammock a few minutes later. Roy got dressed and followed him out of the apartment complex. They walked down the hill to a coffee truck and then wandered through the streets until they were looking out to the ocean where the kelp boats were busy taking their hauls.

  “They’re like the snails people buy to keep their aquariums clean.” Yuri tipped his coffee at Roy. “Human condition is what that is. The bed we made.”

  Roy leaned back on a bench and took in the air. “Do you eat it, the kelp and shit?”

  “Yeah, all the time.”

  “Not bad?”

  Yuri smiled and scratched his head, his face settling into a grimace, gray stubble and laugh lines. Old friend. “It’s patriotic. That’s what they say. Just like a victory garden.” He took a slug of his coffee. “You know that the oil companies hold all of the undersea cables now.”

  “I heard. Ransomed access.”

  “Your Wi-Fi is gonna get slow.”

  “Any slower and it’ll be dead.” Roy had the lid off of his coffee, smelling the steam. “Where did the big wave hit?”

  “North of here, Jedidiah. Smacked into the redwoods.”

  “Did you feel the quake?”

  “Yeah, you?”

  “No.”

  “So listen, there’s an apartment opening up. I think we can get you in. Sue has some pull. So do I.”

  “What would we do with our animals?”

  “You might be able to bring some of them. The chickens.”

  “There’s a guy drilling wells up by us, has a kid working for him that’s the same age as Wiley, smart as hell, like a little engineer. They’ve had some success, where no one else has. I paid ’em a deposit. We’re on the list. We hit water, we’ll be set.”

  “If,” Yuri said.

  “When. Not if.” Roy couldn’t remember the last time he’d had coffee that wasn’t brewed in their kitchen, let alone arrived in a to-go cup. Sometimes they didn’t have coffee at all, for weeks. “Maybe you should move up there with us.”

  “No school. No hospital. No work. Lousy with militia fuckbags.” Yuri stood and walked to the edge of the sidewalk. Gulls turned at the edge of the cliffs. “You saw my kids. They need medical help, like every other day.”

  “There’s plenty of work at my place,” Roy said. “Just none that pays. None that gets you an apartment.”

  “Don’t give me that company-man shit. Where’s Wiley going to school? And when Sarah gets older, what then?”

  “There’s an online thing. It’s not bad.”

  “Until BP and Shell don’t get their payola and the Internet goes down for good. Then your dumbass becomes what, Professor Dumbass? Professor Dial-up?”

  “Fuck, I don’t know. Do something. Like you were saying, we all have to do something.”

  “I was just asking. Sue and I talked last night and—I was just asking.”

  “I appreciate it but we aren’t going anywhere. I don’t trust cities anymore. I don’t trust people in general.”

  “That’s too bad. I took the day off so we could hang.”

  “I trust you, man, and Sue. But I don’t know anybody else around here. And at this point, I don’t think I even want to.”

  “What do you want to do today, then? Dig a bunker? Stockpile ammo? Lithograph some fucking pamphlets?”

  “No. I need to get some clothes for Karen and the girls.”

  “Little Roy on the prairie. Get me some candy in town, Pa.”

  “Fuck off. Sue can tell me where to go, can’t she?”

  “I’ll go with you. What the fuck else are we gonna do? Skate? Get drunk?”

  “After we go shopping, sure.”

  Roy only stayed two nights. It was the last time he’d see Yuri and Sue, their boys, the last time he’d see SF. If he’d known, maybe he would’ve stayed a bit longer. They had gone skating, though, borrowed Oscar’s board, which was how Roy liked to remember Yuri—standing on the deck at the deep end at some graffiti wasteland hotel pool, a beer in his hand, calling Roy a pussy.

  “Get it,” he’d said. “Get in there and get some, you broke-down, goat-farming, militia-ass motherfucker.”

  Going up the coast, Roy had to cut inland where the road had been lost. Yuri had told him as much, and Roy had seen it on the news already, but riding toward it he couldn’t quite comprehend the scale. Whole stretches of the coast had been evacuated, mile after mile of real estate swallowed by the tide. He twisted the throttle and ran fast east, sang Youth Brigade, and we’ll sink with California when it falls into the sea.

  [33]

  M<55

  OR 9XXXX

  He doesn’t bother stowing his sleeping bag, just drapes it over the trailer and moves quietly out of camp. He’s sick. The diarrhea started as soon as they left the hot springs, now with the muscle aches in his neck and lower back, hips. He wonders how Sol is faring. The militiamen are still sleeping. They have colorful tents like they’re at base camp or in a scout group. The dog stays close as the man coasts by the two vehicles parked in the trees. The sun has yet to light the treetops, never mind the quick-charge solar cells on the militia rigs.
The wind is cold and the man’s hands ache on the grips. He rounds a corner and is surprised to see Printz standing in the middle of the road.

  “Morning,” Printz says. “I figured you’d be along.” He slings his rifle over his shoulder and hangs his thumbs in his chest pack.

  “We’ll wait for you down the road, how’s that?”

  “I don’t think so. There’s some people we’re gonna meet today and I want the dog there in case someone else knows we’re coming.” Printz takes out the small black folder where he keeps his maps. “I’ll tell you a secret. If the Jeffs take control again, they’ll just hand over everything to whoever asks, the feds or the chinks. They don’t care which. Their organization is compromised.” He flips through the pages, searching for the one he wants. “And I’ll tell you right now, if they catch you, they won’t ask you to work with them, be part of the team, because I’ll make sure they find out you were with us and they’ll kill you, brother. No question.” Printz keeps flipping through the maps.

  “Who pays for this shit?”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  Once Printz settles on a map, he slides his finger over the stacked-up topo lines, smiles. “It’s gonna be a tough one today. Look at this. We drive up here and then we have to hoof it to the top. Rough country.” He traces a circle with his finger.

  The man releases his grip on the handlebars and lets his hands fall to his sides. The bike rests against his leg. “What if I say no?”

  “Now, c’mon. We all like you. We’re friends, right?”

  “I don’t have a choice but to be your friend, do I?”

  “No, you don’t.” Printz laughs and jostles the man by the shoulder. “You’ll be a good soldier someday. I know it.” The man is surprised by Printz’s strength, by his own weakness, his age. His skin hurts like he has the flu.

  Printz stows his map folder and swings his weapon forward and rests his right hand on the butt. “When I was a kid, my parents grew tomatoes. They had greenhouses, like fifty of them. This was no back-porch operation, they had lots of people, illegals mostly, wetbacks, to be honest, working for them, trucks and trailers, greenhouses, warehouses bigger than airplane hangars. I’m telling you, they grew tomatoes. I’d ride in the trucks to the processing plant sometimes. It was in another town, maybe two hours from where we lived.” The man waits silently for Printz to go on. He needs to go and squat in the bushes again.