We drove something like a hundred miles back south again, a hundred miles east, then north and west again: four hundred extra miles, just to go right round the place we met those guys in the Viking helmets. But of course we didn’t know who their friends were. It wasn’t so scary when we were still heading back south, because that’s what they’d told us to do, but once we’d turned west, we worried all the time that any one of those cold-eyed people out there watching us pass might be a Norseman too. I mean, look at us, our old truck piled up with everything we could cram on it! We stuck out like a goddam turkey in a field of ducks.
Once we had to stop to charge up in a little prairie charge station. A farmer was there as well, leaning on his truck while it powered up, watching us, and from time to time muttering to his cristal.
CHAPTER 21
Slaymaker invited Holly and Richard to have lunch with him and his wife Eve on their ranch. He sent a car, which took them to what was in fact an entire valley, with cattle grazing on lush pastures between forested slopes that climbed on either side up to bare rocky ridges. Everything was immaculate, the fences and gates were brand new, the trees gold and red – if any trees had rotted they must have been speedily removed – and the house with its many beautifully made timber outbuildings sat beside a stream of clear mountain water, surrounded by pristine lawns. There were various discreet servants hovering around, but Eve Slaymaker herself had made the salads, and the senator was outside at the barbecue. It was a mild, bright late autumn day.
Richard was struck immediately by the size of Stephen Slaymaker. Physically the senator stood only an inch or so taller than Richard himself but there was something about the way Slaymaker carried himself that made him large. Every single ounce of him was fully present in the world, while Richard’s own presence was much more provisional and sometimes little more than an answering machine, minding his calls while he attended to business in some interior realm.
‘Great to meet you, Rick!’ Predictably, Slaymaker’s handshake was firm enough to be painful. ‘Gives me a chance to apologize for taking up so much of your beautiful wife’s time.’
Eve was also tall, but slightly built – ‘willowy’ was a word often applied to her – and a combination of her famous bone structure and a certain fragility that seemed to radiate from her made Rich-ard think of fine porcelain. Under the surface, though, he sensed she was every bit as tough as her husband. She’d been a movie actress, and there was something very actorly about her now as she touched his cheek with her own beautifully scented one, and murmured, ‘Lovely to see you, Rick. I do sympathize. I never get to see Steve, either.’
‘So...er...this is meat from your own herd, is it?’ Holly asked.
She felt oddly diffident in this new environment. It seemed she didn’t know Slaymaker as well as she’d imagined. In a work meeting, she knew him well enough to tell him off and even tease him, but now she found herself falling back on small talk. She felt as if she’d assembled him up to now from a few lines of dialogue, like a character in a novel or a play.
‘That’s right. I have a guy come out to kill them when the time comes. I don’t like slaughterhouses. We’ve got a great cook, and he fixes the burgers in batches and freezes them for us.’
They ate at a table on the lawn laid out with a checkered cloth. There was beer, and wine made from the Slaymakers’ own grapes. The senator asked Richard where he grew up (a small town in upstate New York) and then came a question Richard had not been looking forward to.
‘Holly tells me you teach a bit of school, but your real work is writing books?’
Writing. Surrounded by friends raised to be impressed by culture, he was proud of his many well-received books. But now, when he thought of the kind of effort involved in accumulating the wealth that was all round him, he wondered how he could describe his days at home, his cups of coffee, his walks in the forest, his breaks for lunch in front of the broadscreen as even being work at all.
‘That’s right. I enjoy the teaching well enough but yeah, insofar as I’ve got ambitions to make a mark in the world, they’re kind of centered on my writing.’
‘What do you write about?’
‘Well, various things, but right now I’m working on a chapter about Anglo-Saxon poetry.’
The senator’s blue eyes were fixed on his face. It was quite apparent that he had very little idea what Richard was talking about, but it was also clear that he’d persist until he’d understood. As for Richard, he felt as if he just admitted to spending most of his time masturbating.
‘Do you mean poetry from Anglo people round the world?’ asked Eve. ‘Like Australians, and British people?’
‘No, no. Actual Anglo-Saxon poetry. Poetry from the beginnings of the English language.’
Stephen Slaymaker nodded. ‘I don’t believe I’ve ever seen any of that. I guess it must be kind of hard to read?’
‘Oh, por cierto. It’s another language entirely, but it’s the ancestor of the language we speak.’
‘Is that so?’
The senator’s education, Richard knew, had finished when he was sixteen, and it was obvious that up to now he’d not given any thought to the origins of the English language, any more than Richard had given thought to things he must know about, like the price of tires, the best places to locate distribution centers, the optimum time to replace trucks. And, although Slaymaker’s gaze was entirely friendly and interested, Richard felt reproached by it. The real purpose of intelligence was to solve problems and make things happen, it suddenly seemed to him. There really was something masturbatory about purely intellectual activity.
‘Can you say something in Anglo-Saxon?’ asked Eve.
‘Sure he can,’ Holly said, looking across at Richard with an obvious pride that startled and melted him. ‘My husband’s a total freak. He’s a fluent speaker of a language that’s had no native speakers for something like two thousand years.’
‘Okay, here goes,’ Richard said. He cleared his throat and recited a few lines from Beowulf.
Stephen and Eve Slaymaker clapped when he had done.
‘You know what,’ the senator said, ‘I liked that. I like the sound of it. It sounds strong. But it’s kind of hard to believe it’s English. I don’t believe I got a single word.’
‘I was telling you about a King called Scyld Scefing. Or Shield Sheafson, as some people translate it. I told you how well he’d done for himself, abandoned by his own parents as a child, but still managing to become a great and powerful leader, who smashed the mead-benches of his rivals, terrified their soldiers and forced them to pay him tribute. “Þæt wæs god cyning,” I said at the end, which means: That was a good king!’
The two of them laughed and clapped again.
‘He sounds like one tough guy,’ Slaymaker said.
And just like you, Richard thought, realizing now why he’d chosen that passage. Exactly like you. I could be sitting in front of King Scyld right now.
Eve asked Holly about her family. Holly told her that her parents were both librarians who’d lived all their lives in a city called Reading, which wasn’t far from London. She knew from experience that librarians in a city that no American had ever heard of were not a very promising start for a conversation, so she threw in something else that might be a little more controversial.
‘And they were both passionate socialists,’ she said with a smile.
The senator took this in for a second or so, his blue eyes fixed on her face.
‘That’s kind of an exotic animal,’ he said. ‘So, they believed...?’
‘They were the real deal. They believed that all the means of production should be taken over by the government – factories, farms, banks – and the wealth they produced should be shared out according to people’s needs.’
‘You see, I’ve never got that,’ Slaymaker said. ‘I’ve heard of it, but I’ve just never got it at all. I guess I can see how it might look kind of fair on paper, but I’ve never been able to see ho
w anyone might think it would actually work.’
‘Why not?’ Richard smiled. The conversation had moved to territory where he felt at home.
‘Well, because it means stopping people from doing what people naturally do: looking after themselves and their own people, and it means taking away all the incentives to work hard and figure out better ways of doing things. You’d need so many laws and bureaucrats in a system like that, so many cops snooping around to keep people working for the government and to stop them working for themselves. No disrespect to your mom and dad, Holly, I’m sure they were good people, but it kind of seems obvious to me that something like that must end in tyranny, just like it really did back in the day. And then what would be the point? You’d have all those cops and bureaucrats ordering you about, but you still wouldn’t get the fairness that you were hoping for in the first place.’ He looked at Richard and Holly in turn. ‘Am I missing something? Can either of you guys set me straight?’
‘There are some pretty tyrannical capitalist societies too, Steve,’ Holly pointed out. ‘Our own Tyranny here was capitalist. Those tyrants started out as billionaires.’
‘Any system will lead to tyranny, won’t it,’ Richard said, ‘if it concentrates power too much in too few hands?’
The senator leant toward him slightly, giving him once again that exceptionally focused attention which Holly had described to him, the kind of concentration most people can summon up only briefly in an emergency.
‘In fact,’ Richard said, ‘I reckon that every society that’s ever existed that might very roughly be described as free, or as a democracy, has run on a mixture of the market principle and the collective principle, each one providing some kind of check on the other.’
Eve Slaymaker laughed. ‘You better watch this guy, Steve. Sounds like he lines up with Gray Jenny!’
‘I do,’ Richard said, ‘I vote Unity. I’m not going to lie. But my point is that every more or less democratic government is to some degree socialist. I mean, look at your plans, Senator, the ones Holly’s helping you with. You want this demographic shift to happen, but you’re not leaving it to the market, are you? I mean, the market would do it, given time – a shift northwards has been happening for several generations without being government policy – but you reckon that to leave it to the market would be too slow, and create too many losers, and maybe divide our country so much as to break it in two. So you want the federal government to step in, subsidize housing projects up in the north to create new towns, and provide special assistance to move for people who’ve lost all their money. All of which is fine. But it’s collective action, which is essentially the thing Holly’s parents are in favor of.’
Slaymaker laughed. ‘So what you’re saying is, I’m a socialist? Well, that’s a new one, I must say.’
After they’d eaten, the Slaymakers took Holly and Richard riding, Eve picking out horses for them from the nine or ten in their stables. They headed up the slope across the stream from the ranch, with five big lurcher dogs bounding around them. Holly loved riding – she would unwind at weekends at a local stable whenever she had the time – and she was very confident on a horse, just like the senator. Richard had ridden enough times to know what he was doing, but was nothing like as confident as her, and Eve too was competent, but not really a natural rider. Pretty soon, Holly and the senator were some way out in front, while Richard and Eve followed after.
They didn’t talk much. Eve didn’t project herself in the way her husband did, and Richard couldn’t quite work out who she was exactly, or what they might have in common. Insofar as he had the measure of her at all, she struck him as the type of person he’d normally have nothing to say to. But at one point, they both stopped on a small ridge to admire the view behind them and see how far they’d climbed. As they were about to set off again, they looked up at the other two ahead of them: the senator half-turning in the saddle to call something out to Holly, Holly shouting something back. And right there, of course, was their natural subject of conversation. That was the thing they had in common.
‘It’s not just a business relationship for him, you know,’ Eve said. ‘He really loves your Holly.’
She glanced at Richard and burst out laughing at the expression on his face. ‘Oh, good Lord, not like that, Rick! That’s not Steve at all. But you probably know we couldn’t have kids. Steve always refused to adopt a child because he didn’t think it would be the same, but he would have loved a son or a daughter to share his business with. And I don’t know why, but I reckon there’s something about your Holly that hits that spot for him. You should hear how he goes on about her: her British accent, how smart she is, the way she stands up to him, the way she can’t be bothered with frills and nonsense, just like him.’
The two up ahead had just realized how far behind them Eve and Richard were, and had pulled up their horses side by side to wait, the dogs milling around them, and both of them beaming down at their slower companions.
‘I make do with the dogs,’ said Eve, ‘but you can see for yourself that, even with the dogs, I have to take second place!’
In the car on the way back, Richard thought about teasing Holly about her daddy-substitute, but it seemed unkind, and he was aware that the jealousy behind this impulse might make his words come out more mean and twisted than he’d intended.
‘He loved your Beowulf recital,’ Holly said.
Richard laughed. ‘He would have absolutely thrived in Beowulf’s world.’
‘Really? Why?’
‘It was the natural element for a guy like him. It wasn’t about fairness back then, it wasn’t about rights. It was about honor, and courage, and a narrow, rigid loyalty. A good king was a “ring-giver”, a man who was generous to those who fought for him. And if that meant smashing up some other king’s drinking halls and forcing him to pay tribute, well, there was no shame in that. In fact, quite the opposite: all the shame would be on the other king for not being strong enough to protect his own.’
They passed a big logging camp with huge robot tree-cutting machines and a gang of foreign workers in yellow overalls who were removing rotting timber to make way for a solar farm. There was a blue sky ahead. Behind, big clouds were forming over the Cascades, seemingly out of nothing, as warm air was forced upwards over the peaks.
‘I was just thinking about that phrase “ring-giver”,’ Richard said. ‘I can’t think of a single society in history that didn’t have an inner circle who got given rings and an outer circle who the rings were taken away from. It’s almost as if you pretty well have to take things from people whose support you don’t need in order to pay off the people who keep you in power.’
‘Like, for instance, you can take things from people you know as a fact won’t vote for you anyway.’
‘Exactly. Or do deals with leaders of other countries. Give them weapons so they can take stuff for you from other people.’
‘And of course sometimes you can plunder the future,’ Holly said.
‘Ha! Now that’s the easiest of all. Stealing from people who don’t yet exist. Living in comfort at their expense. You don’t have to face them and they can’t fight back.’
They were passing through completely cleared forest now, solar panels stretching away in every direction.
‘I can’t help thinking,’ said Richard, ‘that King Scyld would have told Slaymaker he’s got it the wrong way round. He wants to give out rings to the very—’
‘Yup. We’ve spotted that. The answer to it is that he’s not really taking rings from the northern people and giving them to southern people. He’s building a stronger America for everyone, so there’ll be more rings all round.’
Richard pulled a comically unconvinced face. Holly laughed and poked him in the ribs.
‘You can cut that out, compañero. We are way out in front in the polls.’
CHAPTER 22
Rosine Dubois
The trailer park was huge. Rows and rows of identical aluminum trailers
reflecting the big empty sky, with nothing to tell them apart except the numbers. It was the most miserable place I’d ever seen, but we were so relieved to be there that all four of us cried.
We soon found out that even within the park people were divided. Two-thirds or more of the folk there came from the dustbowl, and a third were storm trash like us from the east coast and the south – and I’m saying ‘storm trash’ because that’s what the dustbowl people called us. A lot of them had been farmers, people with their own land, and they thought of us as lazy bums who’d never done anything at all. ‘Why are you guys even up here?’ one dustie kid taunted our boys in school. ‘Weren’t there any more stores left down there for your dad to rob?’
Me and Herb tried to find work. The government people occasionally put a few days our way, stacking shelves, maybe, or making beds in a motel, but we spent many hours just sitting in our trailer and watching the broadscreen. Herb would watch it for hours on end. There were trashy shows on there in the daytime that made me almost throw up, I was so bored of them, but he just sat there and watched them anyway.
I tried to make friends among the people round us. All day, you could hear someone somewhere screaming at their kids to give them some peace, so two or three of us decided to start a little crèche that would meet round one of our trailers. The woman from the trailer next to ours got involved. She and her husband were farmers from California, older people in their late sixties, Tracey and Pete Suarez. The two of them had rigged up a little homemade polytunnel next to their trailer, and had planted winter vegetables and flowers in old cans. They’d been pretty frosty with us at first, but Tracey had a kind face and I persevered with her. When she finally figured out we weren’t like she imagined storm trash to be, she loosened up and we became friends. I told Herb to work on Pete too.
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