During-the-Event

by Roger Wall

  Whatever happened didn’t really matter. She was gone and, if pregnant, had taken part of me along with her. I began to feel as though she had tricked me.

  I could have walked around the lake until I came to White Earth Bay. It would have taken days, maybe weeks, but I could have done it. I chose not to. The thought of returning saddened me. Dread of the place filled me. Too much misfortune had occurred there. It wasn’t a place to make a home, despite the garden and cave. Nola had caused the valley to be discovered, and now it was ruined. I’d never again be safe there. I never wanted to go back. I would set out alone to find my father’s homeland.

  If Mexico was now part of the continental government, as Nola said it was, perhaps my father had been allowed to return. Maybe he wasn’t from the Sierra Madre Occidental, but the Tarahumara might know where I could look for him. And if they didn’t, I could ask them to take me in. I didn’t want to work a garden alone until I was an old man and had to lower myself into a hole and wait to die. I headed south. I had nothing to lose.

  At first I followed the Little Missouri River upstream, with as much food as I could carry in the deerskin lashed to my back with the yellow rope. Sometimes I walked through fields of dry grass along the shore. Other times I had to climb around a bluff and track the river from a distance until the river bank reemerged with the path. The river was muddy, but I drank it anyway. There were plenty of walleye to catch. Eventually, I came to a bridge where a road ran straight south. The river flowed east. I gambled that I’d be able to find water and gather edible plants, that my supply of dried corn and venison would last until I got somewhere, and that I wouldn’t be killed if I encountered people. From time to time along the side of this road were rusted signs with the number 85 in faded black. There were other signs, too, names of empty towns of which I’d never heard.

  I found a bicycle at an abandoned farm whose land was eroded and dried out. The house didn’t smell bad, and the beds were made up. I stayed there while I taught myself to ride the bike. Cycling was much faster than walking, and I could see why the stranger had preferred traveling in this way. I stuck to road 85 and headed south through dry grasslands, which looked as though they were recovering from fire. I risked pedaling throughout the day, despite the afternoon heat and my worry of encountering government agents. I never saw anyone. At least the breeze the bicycle generated cooled me some.

  Then, I saw a herd of animals. At first I didn’t know what they were. I figured they were wild, but then I saw a truck with a trailer and several men on horses. They wore tan pants and shirts and hats. Their faces were different colors: brown, white, and black. I wasn’t afraid because they seemed to be farmers. One of them, a man with a white face, rode to the highway and looked me up and down. He asked what tribe I was from. “Tarahumara,” I said. And why not? Maybe some of my father’s Indian blood was Tarahumara. “Right on, brother, we’re Oglala Sioux.”

  This man’s name was Willy. His tribe grazed a large herd of goats between their reservation and the Oglala and Thunder Basin grasslands. Because these areas had once been parks, the forage was still good. The government hadn’t bothered to close down the reservation, Willy told me.

  “It wasn’t a question of sovereignty. Government has never had a problem with exterminating Indians, whether through outright slaughter or a proxy war conducted by the breweries and distilleries. Turned out we were pretty damn good goat herders. Guess we adapted some of the old ways. And then there was the amnesty.”

  This was the first I had heard of the amnesty. Nola hadn’t told me about it, perhaps because she wanted to control my choices and persuade me to come to the Center with her. Or maybe she didn’t even know about it, because it wouldn’t have concerned her.

  “Supposedly, government needs everybody, now,” Willy said. “No reprisals if you present yourself. Food, shelter, job, reproduction. That’s what they say.” What he said did seem to agree with what Nola had told me: there was now a population shortage after the government killed too many people.

  “New people have been showing up at the reservation. Some claim a percentage of Sioux in their lineage, but honestly, we accept anyone who wants to work. Can’t really say what’s happening farther south where you’re going. The southwest was headed for decimation from the beginning. The heat—you only have so many layers of clothes you can take off.”

  The Oglala had crops, too, and hunted on the open prairie and fished in a lake they kept stocked with catfish. They fueled their old trucks with oil pressed from corn. They delivered goats to a market south of them, in Fort Collins, in former Colorado.

  They hadn’t heard of my father and didn’t know about the Tarahumara but were interested in the blue booklet. They asked me to join their tribe. When I declined, they convinced me to stay with them until the peak of the warm season had passed. They taught me how to watch the goats and shoot a rifle, though the dogs kept the coyotes away at night and I never had to kill one.

  I studied old maps of the states that used to make up the continent. In the workshop a woman helped me build a cart to haul food and water and adjusted the gear ratio on my bike so it would be more suitable for climbing hills. She gave me a spare pump to keep the tires full so the wheels would roll faster. After a couple of months of tending goats, I loaded the bike and cart in the back of a truck and rode with Willy to Fort Collins to deliver a trailer full of goats to the slaughterhouse.

  Willy told me to stick to the mountains as much as possible. Their valleys would be cooler than open plains, despite the die-offs of trees from pests and forest fires, and there’d be a greater chance of predictable and unpolluted water, he said. He showed me a network of roads down the Rockies and through a patchwork of forests. This route would be less populated, he assured me, with fewer government patrols.

  “It’s hard to say what you’ll encounter. I don’t know about the southwest, or the tribes there. But I guess if you show up, they’ll probably take you in, if anyone’s left. Try to get to the Utes in southern Colorado. They’ll know what lies ahead.”

  Willy let me keep the maps, and I pedaled south. The route had many long climbs up to passes followed by terrorizing descents for which the bike’s brakes barely slowed me. The cart clattered and bounced and made cornering dangerous. I had the benefit of the fat reserve I had built up while with the Oglala, and plenty of dried goat, corn meal, and sunflower seeds, which after a time I dreaded eating. Water was mostly not a problem, although some of it had to be bad—diarrhea hit me a few times and left me weak and sad.

  I arrived at the lands of the Ute at night. The bright red sign of the casino alerted me to their home. I spent several nights there. Not in the casino itself but outside a house of one of the workers, a card dealer. He offered me a job, which I refused. The casino had remained a destination because of the energy workers. First it had been the natural gas miners, and now it was the solar people. I had seen acres of the panels wherever overhead wires crossed the highway, which they did every so often.

  The Ute were not of much help. They of course were kind hosts and gave me big jugs of water and plenty of canned food, which made my cart heavy and difficult to pull, but they offered little advice about the route to Mexico. They said there was a lot of Indian land but not that many Indians; after the amnesty, the survivors had migrated to energy, mining, and water preserves, where there were jobs, food, and water. They laughed at my goal, to reach the Tarahumara, and told me that I’d probably die instead. Their word of caution: “Avoid what used to be Arizona as much as possible. It’s really hot, even in winter.” (Winter was their word for the cool season.) “And stock up on water every chance you get, even if it’s brown.”

  Thomas, the casino worker with whom I stayed, said: “If you’re going to Mexico, go to Baja. It’s paradise. Beautiful beaches. Tasty fish. Rest there until you’re ready to head inland.”

  “There’s a road?” I asked.

  “Sure, why not?” he said. “There’re always roads, aren’t t
here?”

  I pedaled through the nights. When the moon waxed, I traveled far. When it waned, I covered fewer kilometers. In the mountains, where the nights were cool, pedaling kept me warm. During the day I rested under a nylon tarp that was slowly deteriorating from the sun. I held onto the hot metal tubes of the bicycle as I lay on the warm ground. This made me want to hold Nola. Sometimes I thought how I had touched three humans in my life, Nola, the stranger, and Otis. All in different ways.

  Some nights I saw other Overlooked. If they were on foot, they scurried off into bushes or hid behind a tree or ran toward the horizon until I passed. A few were on bicycles. We stopped and exchanged greetings, sometimes food or water. One man asked me if I had heard about the amnesty. He wanted to turn himself in because he was tired of the heat and living in a dry world. He wanted air conditioning and cold water. But like me he was suspicious, and at the end of our conversation we both got on our bikes and headed in opposite directions.

  Other nights I heard the hum and vibration of trucks passing on the road above my camp. If there was adequate moonlight, I could see images painted on the sides of the trucks: vegetables, fruits, and animals. These caravans of food were accompanied by military patrols. I don’t know whom they thought was going to attack the trucks, especially in the empty lands that I pedaled through, but their guns were ready. Could they have seen me, lying on the ground under my tarp? Or would they have passed before my disruption in the landscape registered in their minds?

  I pedaled west, taking a route above the Colorado River as I tried to avoid the heat and dryness of Arizona. Whenever I saw a patch of green in the distance, I’d pedal toward it, if there were a road. Green represented irrigation or a spring, even an unattended one. I became sick of the blue sky. It never changed unless there was a dust storm, and then I couldn’t breathe. Sometimes I’d look to the horizon and be thankful for a tan sky, even if it meant trouble was on its way.

  The only persons I saw while crossing through Navajo lands were two men in a car. They were going home after a month in Las Vegas on a project to convert hotels to dormitories for energy workers. Las Vegas was the center of energy production in the southwest, nuclear but a lot of solar, too, though that tended to be more dispersed, they said. They filled one of my jugs of water.

  The Kaibab Indians, just south of the old Utah border, were not hopeful about my plans to follow the Colorado down through the desert to former Mexico. They thought everyone I had met along the way, starting with the Sioux, had made a mistake in advising me. The Sioux shouldn’t have let me continue south, they said. The blue booklet about the Tarahumara was old. They doubted this group of people still existed. Lack of water and heat, as simple as that. Even if they were exceptional, they couldn’t conquer these elements, which were more powerful than earth, wind, and fire.

  I rested with them and studied maps, yet the maps yielded no secrets. They advised me how to skirt Las Vegas and find route 95, which ran south to where I could cross into former Mexico and then on to Sonora and into Chihuahua. The border, they assured me, would present no problems if I survived to cross it. The language would be different once I arrived, although probably the people who were still living also spoke English, but perhaps with a different accent. Along the way, seek out the Hualapi and Colorados, if any are left; they would help you, they said.

  For the most part I followed their advice. But I ran out of water and detoured west to Nipton—an abandoned community with a still-working well. A dirt road with a washboard surface led south through the Mojave. I thought it would take me to Mexico. Perhaps I was delirious from dehydration by then. The road ended at a track running southwest–northeast. I set off toward the southwest. Deserted buildings dotted the way. Stores had been emptied of supplies. Water faucets offered only the creaking of their handles but no water. This part of the trip was necessary, perhaps the last efforts of the singing wolves to prepare me to leave the realm of their protection before I entered the providence of George and Alice. If I hadn’t taken this route, I would never have met George and Alice and surely would have died.

  I nearly did die. As I was coasting down the San Gorgonio pass that morning, from the high desert to the valley floor, a blast of wind made me lose control. The bike and cart overturned, and I hit the ground. I don’t know how long I was unconscious. When I awoke, the long blades of wind turbines were slicing thick, dusty air. Their violent humming sounded like a storm. My head throbbed. I was afraid to move. This is where I’ll die, I thought, far from home, where Otis’s spirit can’t find me.

  After a while, I heard the crunch of gravel, a metal door opening, footsteps on the pavement. A man bent over me. He wore a cowboy hat like the one Otis used to wear, although Otis’s was more creased and beat up, with frayed holes in the crown. The man had white hair and skin that was dark red from the sun. This, as it turned out, was George. Once he determined that I could move all my limbs, he helped me to his truck and drove me to the wind farm in the Coachella Valley.

  I had to stay in bed for a few days. My head had split open on the pavement, but the blood loss and gash—a long line of stitches—weren’t as worrisome as the headache, which persisted for days and left me confused. A bruised hip and backache made me limp for several weeks, during which time I mostly slept and ate the light meals that Alice delivered to my house.

  Once all my pain was gone and I had started spending the day talking to Alice in the kitchen, George called me into his office.

  “Here’s the situation, Perry,” he said, using the nickname he had given me. “I need a gardener. We’re trying to get some vegetables started, add some variety to our meals. Sunlight isn’t a problem, obviously, and neither is water, really. We’re generating enough power to drain the rest of the aquifer. It’s just that no one so far seems to have a green thumb, except Alice, but she doesn’t have time to cook and garden.”

  I looked at my thumbs, which were brown like the rest of my skin.

  “It’s an expression,” George said, “you know, about one’s ability to grow plants?”

  “I can grow plants,” I admitted.

  “Okay, then what do you say? If you don’t want to be the gardener, I can try to find a place for you on a service team. We’re full up right now at the wind farm. I might have to send you up to Nuevo Sacramento for a time. They always need workers, especially ones adapted to the heat.”

  “A production preserve.”

  “Central Valley ag. Old corporate farms, not bad.”

  “I’m not living on a production preserve.”

  “Or I could send you down to Angeles del Este. They always need factory workers. We send them energy.”

  “I’m not working in a factory.”

  “Then it’s settled. You’re my gardener. I’ll have to enter you into the system, of course. And someone from Demographics will have to interview you, take some DNA. You’ll still have to fulfill your national reproductive service obligation.”

  “I think I already did that.”

  “When?”

  “A while ago, in my valley.”

  “You don’t look old enough.”

  “Seventeen or eighteen, Nola said.”

  “Okay. You fooled me. Pregnancy confirmed?”

  “I don’t know. We weren’t together for very long.”

  “Well, in any case, whatever you did probably wasn’t official. I’ll note it nonetheless. Maybe buy you some time to find someone you like, so you can avoid a government selection. Nola, huh? Nola what?”

  “Just Nola. She was from the Center.”

  “Oh, a high-class girl. You’ve had some luck, then.”

  “She took my blood, too.”

  “Then maybe the government already knows about you. I can check.”

  A gardener. Work that I knew, though I wasn’t thinking about work just yet. My mind was still somewhere between White Earth River and the wind farm, moments of my life replaying themselves like one of Nola’s short videos on her device. The
hope of reaching Mexico had faded when I crashed, but had it died? Could I fix my broken bike and pedal through a desert until I found people? George didn’t seem to be giving me many choices. Perhaps if I left he’d call an agent.

  A few nights later George asked me to take a walk with him. He wanted to discuss expanding the garden, he said. As we moved away from the light of the kitchen, he filled a tiny pipe from a leather pouch. He lit the pipe with a match and drew on the stem. He held the smoke in his lungs and then exhaled in a long, steady breath. The wind chimes that Alice had hung in the garden, perhaps to scare off crows, rang in the faint breeze. We reached the end of the garden, where its fence met the open desert. George still hadn’t spoken and neither had I. He leaned against a fence post and looked out into the desert. Shrubs and jackrabbits were out there, I knew. I gazed up at the stars. Finally, he spoke: “Well, Perry, you’re in the database.”

  “Nola,” I said.

  “Yep. Ordered up your whole story.”

  “She told me right before she left me. A Scout had been looking for her.”

  “Not surprising. Most Overlooked would kill an elite, if they had the chance. Government probably thought she was endangered.”

  “I wasn’t a threat.”

  “Course you weren’t, Perry.”

  “But that’s how people saw me.”