So, they were all now to be called settlers because Mike preferred it. Mike reminded everyone that as soon as things were safe, and as soon as order could be restored, the people in the ‘resettlement camp’ would be ‘settled’ on land where they could grow crops and live out their lives in peace. Right, she thought. That’s what they’d all been told. Nobody believed it. No one believed that anyone was going to live long enough to be resettled.
Actually, that part about nobody believing the lies probably wasn’t entirely true. Ignorant hope still thrived in most of the settlers, even the kind of hope that was pie-in-the-sky. Especially that kind. There were many who, with empty heads filled with fairy tales, thought that things were going to get back to normal. Unhappily, despite promises of land and freedom, hundreds of prisoners died every day from disease, hopelessness, and violence.
Yes, there was violence in the camps. This prison camp was no safer than the chaotic world outside the wires. Still, there’d been no wholesale escape attempts or riots. Victim psychology—a communal Stockholm syndrome—convinced the prisoners that inside was better than outside, even if that statement was objectively not true. Natasha had been outside, and it was no picnic, but life in the Carbondale camp was a nightmare that seemed to never end. Violence in the camps was especially common against women. Natasha shook her head when she thought about it. A man had to be either crazy or criminally ignorant willfully to bring his wife or daughters into a refugee camp.
Still, women were not the only victims. Men were also attacked and beaten, sexually assaulted, and even killed. Such things happen in jails. Gangs of miscreants operated freely inside the wired walls of the Carbondale camp.
Natasha had been kept safe, mostly because she never went anywhere without Steve or Cole by her side. She also suspected that Mike had something to do with the gangs leaving her alone. If it were true that he’d put out a do not touch order on her, she hoped he didn’t expect her thanks for it.
The two Warwickians grunted and heaved the torso of a young man onto the growing pile. Sometimes they’d handle the same body twice in the same day, once with the dragging, and again when it came time to stack more bodies into the burn hole itself. For now, they were glad to be done with the burden of that particular moment. Natasha had stopped counting individual bodies, but her mind kept track of the size of the piles. She quickly estimated how much more work was left to do. It always seemed, somehow… endless. She scowled as she heard the thump of another torso plopped into a pile. More fleshy residue now ready to be combed through by the pickers.
Natasha used her forearm to wipe the sweat off her brow. Despite the cold temperatures and the snow on the ground, dragging made you sweat. Sometimes this complicated things, because whenever a rare rest break happened, the sweat would bring on chills, and sometimes the cold would weaken a dragger. Corpses, blood, and waste held diseases that could multiply easily, even in the cold, and sickness often worked to weaken them as well. Dragging duty was not just a ringside ticket to death and decay—sometimes it was a death warrant in and of itself. Natasha personally knew of four draggers—men and women she’d worked with—whose bodies were now either in this pile, or had already been burned into ashes and bone in the bottom of the burn pit.
She looked towards the fence where five guardsmen were overseeing the pickers. It was the picker’s job to go through the piles of the recently deceased and remove any items of value from the corpses. Wedding rings, earrings, jewelry, necklaces, pocketknives, lighters, etc. Pickers sorted all of these things into rubber bins, and hauled them off to the Commander’s office. What he did with the valuables, lowly draggers could not know, but they certainly did speculate. There was no shortage of gossip on the many ways and means available to the Commander for enriching himself with goods looted from the bodies of dead prisoners.
Natasha looked over at Steve and laughed scornfully. She was feeling mean, and when that happened, she usually directed her anger at Steve.
“Why were you stuck with dragger duty, Steve? Isn’t Mike your best friend?”
“Mike doesn’t have friends,” Steve replied. “He has supplicants.”
“So, why do you put up with it? Why be his stooge when he treats you like this?”
“He said he’s teaching me discipline,” Steve answered coolly, and with a hint of irony.
“Discipline? Dragging duty is not discipline, Steve. Dragging duty is just another form of the death penalty.”
“I know,” Steve said. He didn’t look ashamed, and he did not look away. He stared at Natasha and betrayed neither thought nor emotion. “You can’t say that I don’t deserve it though.”
“I don’t understand you,” Natasha said.
“That’s because I’m Russian.”
“So am I,” Natasha replied.
“No you’re not. You speak Russian, Natasha, but you are something else entirely. I can’t say that I’ve figured you out, but you are definitely not Russian.”
“What makes you say that?” she asked.
“Because of this,” he indicated with his hand everything around them. “This dragging of bodies, senseless war, deprivation, tyranny, authoritarianism, duplicity, horror… acquiescence. This is what it is to be Russian down deep in your soul.” He looked back at Natasha, and for the first time that she could remember, he actually smiled. “Everyone from Warwick spokeRussian. But not everyone from Warwickwas Russian.”
“Well, I am Russian,” she said, leaning into the noun. It was all she could say to that.
“No you aren’t, Natasha, but don’t take that truth the wrong way. It’s not an accusation. Perhaps you have the best parts of being Russian somewhere within you. Maybe you have persistence, and optimism, and poetry, and music. Surely, you have pain and suffering. Those things are truly Russian. But the rest of it, the bad parts, those you don’t have.”
Natasha looked at Steve and couldn’t speak for a minute. She looked down at her boots, covered in mud, blood, and guts. Then she looked back up at Steve. “So why did he punish you this way?”
“God? Or Mike?”
“Is there a difference right now?”
“There is a difference, Natasha.”
“Mike.”
“I angered him.”
“What did you do?” Natasha asked. She felt the sweat beginning to cool her body temperature, and she stomped her feet in the snow, hopping up and down a little to get her blood pumping again.
“He wanted me to work with him—to help him take over the camp.”
“He’s already done that. And you wouldn’t help him?”
“No. I refused. He hasn’t done all he wants to do yet. He wants to do more than run things for the people in charge. He wants totake over the camp. He’s going to overthrow the commandant and take control.”
Natasha looked again at the guts on her boots and felt them slip under the soles of her feet as she shifted her weight from side to side. Did it really matter who is in charge? She decided to play along. “How is he going to do that? I mean, these National Guardsmen are military people. They are not a bunch of Russian villagers!”
“He’ll do it. Don’t doubt that. He learned a lot from his failures in Warwick. He’s already triangulated the leadership. It’s as good as done.” Steve stomped his feet and clapped his hands together rapidly. “I’ve had enough of his posturing and manipulation. I told him that he’d have to move forward without me.” He looked around the camp and gestured with his hand as if he were unveiling some exciting prize. “Ergo, I am on dragging duty.”
“Well,” Natasha said, as she walked over to the stack of bodies the pickers had just finished looting, “with friends like Mike, who needs enemies?”
CHAPTER 38
The mysterious activity at Clive’s place seemed particularly fervent that morning. The farm, its winding road lined with traffic whirring out of the complex and onto the grid of curving country roads (headed who knows where,) was abuzz with activity. At the end of a line of m
ilitary-style vehicles pouring out onto the roads, was the command RV. In the cab of the RV, a cowboy and a leprechaun sat intent on the duty at hand.
The RV lumbered forward on the uneven road. It wasn’t much of a road, really, just two dirt slits cut into the field leading out to the county road. From its exhaust pipes, the odd-shaped RV that Clive called ‘Bernice’ emitted two little trails of steamy smoke. One trail rose from each corner of the back of Bernice, and the puffs lifted up along the sides of the vehicle and out into the inky, fluid light of dawn. The rocking of the RV sent the smoke up in minor turbulences, shaking the trails into tiny little spirals. The wheels peeled through the dug-in trench of a road, and the earth, clay-like and primal, clung to the tires in desperation, or hope, or just curiosity. The smoky spirals rose up like dust devils into the cool winter air.
****
Veronica D’Arcy lifted the plastic lid off the coffee can and stuck her nose down into the aroma, bringing it into her body. She already had a fire going in the black, cast-iron stove, and she sat a pot of water on the grill. She thought about how nice it was to ‘have’ coffee, even if it was campfire gritty. She ran her tongue across her teeth, thinking about how, during the long bike ride out of the city, and the excitement thereafter, she had lost all sense of time. At one point, she couldn’t even remember when she’d last brushed her teeth. The loss of that kind of luxury, of some connection to what once was a ‘normal life,’ occurred to her, but she did not feel the worse for the loss. She had, very recently, experienced a world of debris—bricks and stones, wreckage, gaping wounds on corpses, and blood running from limbs, and all of that, but the indignity of perhaps losing herself in the mix was a new concept for her. The loss of connection to a body in time—that was something to consider, so she thought about that.
In this new world, a person grew attuned to smells. The eyes are not the only sense used to determine the truth of things, after all. Before this new world, back in the world of Mad Men commercialism and extraordinary excess, brushing one’s teeth seemed to be a duty. Time was something measured only by a clock on the wall, or the television schedule, or the boss at the office, not by the sunrise or the next meal.
That old world seemed to her to have utterly vaporized. Her old lifestyle was becoming increasingly unimaginable, as if it had only been a dream.
She took a drink of the coffee and really tasted it. It was good because of, not in spite of, the grit. She felt the heat radiate from the stove and was thankful that they were in a secure location. In the old world, security was rarely a consideration because, in the end, it was always someone else’s responsibility. The city. The Mayor. The cops. The government. The President. It was their job to see to security. They existed to keep people from panicking. Insecurity leads to panic, so security was necessary to insure that business could go forward. You need business to flow freely if you are going to feed four-hundred million people on the productive capabilities of only a few thousand. Security is necessary to guarantee the free flow of cheaply made goods at market prices. So what happens when those transient forms of security evaporate?
She heard a sound down the hall and wondered whether it was Stephen.
She’d spent a great deal of time during the past week with Stephen and Calvin, watching them grow together like brothers. Every day, Clive and Red Beard went off to their business, she woke the boys, and they went about making themselves useful. Mostly, they’d spent their time picking through the out-buildings on the farm. Looking in sheds, attics, lofts, nooks and crannies, cupboards, anywhere they could think of, seeking to scavenge anything they thought might be valuable.
The barns and sheds were old, but not dilapidated or abandoned. The two young men found many handy items in their searches, focusing on multipurpose things that they could easily carry, along with any materials with specific, useful properties. Old rolls of fencing, chicken wire, screws and nails were particularly valuable. Pieces of old rubber inner tube, aluminum flashing, piles of feathers – all of these things were becoming more and more valuable in a world without industrial manufacturing.
In this world, like the last, they found imagination to be a powerful thing. It was a form of training for them to look at a thing and study it, determining what it was, and what it could be in the future.
They sorted these items and prioritized them. Veronica directed them to find, organize, and lay out tools and materials, and she would teach and entertain them while they worked.
Clive and Red Beard were less than open in sharing any future plans, and she didn’t know how long they’d need to stay—to live and prosper—at the farm, so she ran the salvage and re-purposing department like they might be there for the long haul.
“After 9/11,” Veronica had told the boys, “I heard some author on NPR or somewhere discussing the skills people need for survival in the end times. The ability to scrounge was at the top of the list.”
Stephen had caught her looking at him, and he’d smiled the smile of a son who knows all of his mom’s lectures. They’d developed a shorthand way of communicating that rarely required words. He knew then what was coming next.
“Stephen, what do we do?” It was a quiz question. She was testing him.
Stephen had looked at Calvin, and then told his friend what she meant for him to say. “Don’t look at what it is. Look at what it can be.”
“That’s right.” Veronica had said.
“Re-purposing is a talent that can be learned. I’m glad to be a scrounger, but in truth all single mothers, artists, and botanists are scroungers. I just happen to be an artist/botanist/single mom, so that means I’m the best expert there is!” She’d flung her hand outward toward the field, and Calvin had followed her gesture with his eyes…
And farmers, he’d thought. Farmers have to be excellent scroungers. That’s why there are all of these out-buildings full of stuff.
Veronica then told Calvin how she and Stephen used to always search for castaway objects for art projects, or materials for homework assignments, or broken down (but free) furniture that might be fixed up, or neglected plants that could be nursed back to life. “The key is to think about what the thing might do, or become, or adapt to be. An old can might become a small cook stove. A piece of rubber might help you make a slingshot for hunting. Think about the various things you might carry with you in a backpack. Think about things that might have value if you need to cook, to defend yourself, or to use them for barter. Look for value in terms of how it can enhance your life going forward.”
Veronica had rambled on like this, as mothers will, for a while. Stephen eventually had cut his eyes towards Calvin and pulled his finger across his throat, as if to say that he would slice his own throat rather than hear another word. It was all in mock fun. Veronica smiled at this, but paused only long enough to begin again. “And so you need to look for materials that are durable and flexible and serve as tools or anything that can be used to increase comfort…” Blah blah blah.
Stephen hung out his tongue and cocked his head to the side. He held his hand over his head like a pivot and mock swung his head on a rope, as though he would rather take a hanging. Calvin grinned and they all laughed.
****
Now, Veronica stood alone, drinking her coffee. She thought about all of that. She considered that day, the week itself, the trip out of Brooklyn, their newfound home, and the weird duo of Clive and Red Beard, the gracious hosts who had made their farm so welcoming and available. And, the coffee this morning—she thought about that, too. She took a sip, feeling the grit in her teeth. She remembered the broadcast of NPR like it was yesterday. She remembered her son at her feet. She thought about how she once sat and made lists on such mornings of things to do that day. She thought about how Stephen and Calvin told her last night, before they went to bed, that they were going to go on a new scrounging expedition today. “We want to go around the perimeter of the farm,” Stephen had said. They’d completed cataloging all of items found in the barn an
d thought they might find something useful on the far field, adjacent to the next farm over.
Veronica thought of all these things on this morning, how it all had the feeling of normalcy, and how if things could just stay the same, maybe everything would turn out alright.
****
There had been, for most of the week, a preternatural stillness—the kind of stillness that knew ancient stirrings. Not the absence of sirens or the silence of screams; not the sudden awareness of the quiet after closing a door; but a silence that one might feel when standing out under the stars, staring up into the night sky. Such a quiet is not entirely divorced from noise, of course, and this is perhaps especially true in farm country. The silence waxes and wanes with the light in the sky, the pull of the moon. Even the stirring of the livestock is motivated by those gravitational pulls, their motions and life cycles waxing and waning with the moon. The wobbling of the planet against the moon and the sun; all of it works in harmony on some nights.
There had been several such nights recently, disturbed only by the movement of vehicles. She thought of those moments of stillness, when all the forces come into alignment, when the air is just the right temperature, when even the pigs cease their nervous motion, and the farm becomes, briefly, utterly quiet, as if quiet is a state of being and not merely a description of a condition—asif nature has entered her holy moment and taken a vow of silence.
This was such a moment. Veronica sat and held her gritty cup of coffee and looked out over the farm. It was winter, and though it was morning, it was also still night, and quiet.
Wick - The Omnibus Edition Page 50
