Surviving Home

by Angery American

  Here he was over fifty and about to get back in the Army. A grin cut his old face and he shook his head. Reaching out to brace himself on the door he took a deep breath and First Sergeant Linus Mitchell stepped out onto the asphalt of Camp Riley.

  “What are they going to do to him?” Jeff asked as I turned the Suburban off Reggie’s road.

  “Not sure, but I could guess,” I replied. “Look, you know I’m gonna need you to keep this a secret, right?”

  Jeff said, “Hey man, what you’ve done for me, I got no problem keeping my mouth shut.”

  “I get that, but I don’t mean it’s an obligation cause I helped you out. I need you to trust me. This neighborhood’s seen some bad shit, and truth is, the guy who’s supposed to be in charge is refusing to deal with it.”

  “You mean Mark.”

  “Yeah. He’s not a bad guy, but he’s not making the adjustment, you know? That guy’s a murderer and a rapist. We’re not gonna let him run around loose while Mark figures out how to have a trial or something.”

  “I get it, man. You got three girls.”

  “Yeah. That’s it exactly. I’m not some vigilante, Jeff. It’s just—”

  “I get it, Morg. I get it. You can count on me.”

  “Thanks, man.”

  I was heading towards Danny’s house, we were going to need his help with this. At Danny’s, Jeff hopped out and opened the gate and closed it after I pulled through. Danny was in his shop working on a tiller when we pulled up.

  “Yo,” he called out as he walked up.

  “Hey man, what’s up?” I said.

  “Not much, just tuning up the tiller. I’m going to try and till the garden and build a greenhouse over part of it. Hey, Jeff, how’s it going?”

  “SOS man, SOS,” Jeff said.

  I told him what we had in mind and asked if he could come help, and he agreed it was a good idea. I asked if he had any tarpaper and he said he had three or four rolls lying around. We went into the little tin building where he kept the tractor and lawn tools. In one corner was a pallet with a few bundles of shingles and three full rolls and one partial roll of paper. We loaded the paper up into the Suburban while he went in to tell Bobbie he was coming down to help. I pulled the truck up to the walkway and waited for him. He emerged from the house with Bobbie in tow and they climbed into the back seat.

  “You coming to help too?” I asked Bobbie as she climbed in.

  “I’m coming down to help Mel supervise,” she replied with a smile.

  “Oh that’ll certainly help,” I said with a laugh.

  “No shit,” Danny added, and Jeff laughed as we headed for the gate.

  I drove the truck around the back of the house to be closer to the shop, and as soon as I stopped Mel was coming out the back door with the girls in tow. When the girls saw Danny and Bobbie they ran up to them. Mel came up to me while the girls were giving their hugs and said, “You need to go over to Don’s house. His wife came over earlier looking for you.”

  “Is everything alright?”

  “I don’t know, she wouldn’t really say, just that you needed to come over. What’s her name? I can’t remember it.”

  I thought for a moment but couldn’t remember her name. “I can’t remember either. Guess I’ll go over and see what’s up.”

  Jeff asked if I needed him to come and I told him no. He said he was going to dig my rolls of tarpaper out and load them in the back with the others. He said the same thing I was already thinking: that it would be better to build the gabions out at the barricade so we didn’t have to try and move them. Jeff and Danny went out to the woodshed where I told him the rolls were and I hopped the fence that separated Don’s and my yards. His wife saw me coming and had the door open as I came up.

  “Hello, Morgan,” she said.

  “Hi, is everything alright?”

  “Oh, yes, come in, come in,” she held the door, ushering me inside.

  I found Don in a bedroom he used for an office. His radio was set up in there and he was sitting in front of it with his leg propped up. I walked in and sat in a chair beside him. He smiled and said, “Hey, Morgan.”

  “What’s up, Don?”

  “I thought you’d like to hear what’s going on.”

  “What’ve you heard?”

  “It isn’t so much what I have heard as what I haven’t.” He paused, looking over the top of his glasses at me. “I haven’t heard anything from the feds at all, but there is a lot of talk out there about what they’re doing.”

  “Well, what’s Uncle Sugar up to?”

  “From what I’ve heard, they’re moving people, lots of people, no one seems to know where or why, but that’s what they’re doing. The most interesting thing was a guy in up near Fort Bragg talking about a big firefight going on at the base.”

  Skeptical, I asked, “What, they fighting each other?”

  “Don’t know. All I know is what I heard.”

  Taking my hat off, I rubbed my hand through my hair. “You said they were moving people, know anything else on that?”

  “I heard some nutjob saying something about an executive order that gave the postmaster general the right to go out and round people up or some shit. I think he was batshit crazy, but he sure ran off at the mouth about it. Could you imagine the mailman showing up and telling you you had to leave? What would he do, whack you with a magazine if you didn’t?” he laughed.

  “I don’t know, right now about anything is possible I guess. How’s the leg?”

  Don’s face soured and he lifted the stump off the little stool it was resting on. “Okay, I guess.”

  The gauze was soaked with blood and fluid. I said, “Let me see it, Don.”

  “You don’t need to fool with it, I’m alright.”

  “When was the last time you changed the dressing?” I asked as I knelt down to inspect the leg.

  “Been a day or two I reckon.”

  As I got close to the leg, a faint putrid smell found its way to my nose. I said, “Damn it, Don, you have to change it every day. The doc did a pretty good job, but if you fuck around and let it get infected there isn’t shit we can do about it. Where’s the dressings and stuff the doc gave you?”

  Don fidgeted in his seat, but I gave a look that told him I wasn’t going to let the issue die.

  “Martha, can you bring them bandages in here?” he called out through the open door.

  In a moment, she came in the room carrying the box the doc had given us. “Here it is.”

  “You guys need to change this every day, it’s really important,” I said.

  “Oh, I know Morgan, it’s just there isn’t much in here. If we change it every day we’ll run out pretty quick. We thought we could go a few days in between.”

  “Don’t worry about running out. You can take the old gauze and boil it and reuse it. As for the bandages, I have some and there are other things we can use too. Cut up an old sheet and boil it and use that, hell we can use Maxipads too.”

  “Maxipads!” Don shouted.

  I looked at him and said, “Think about what they do.”

  He just screwed up his face. I pulled on a pair of gloves from the box and started to unwrap the gauze, then removed the bandages. It didn’t look good. In the box there were a couple of Betadine scrubs, and I asked Miss Martha to bring a big bowl of water in. Once I had the water, I used the scrub to clean the stub of the leg. While I’m sure it hurt, Don never complained, though he did tense up a couple of times.

  I made them promise to change the dressing every day and once they promised I headed for the door. I asked Miss Martha about their wood situation. She said they had plenty and not to worry about them. I told her I would check back in a couple of days and headed back to the house. I felt like I was getting t
oo caught up in putting out fires. It’s not that I didn’t want to help folks out, but the big stuff, the long-term stuff, kept getting put off. There was hardly time to even make plans about what we should be doing and preparing for.

  I found Jeff and Danny inside eating lunch and sat down to have a bite myself along with some tea. Mel and Bobbie were sitting in the living room with the girls. Danny asked how Don was and I told him about his leg. He said we needed to keep an eye on him. Then I told them what Don had heard on the radio and we all agreed we needed to keep an eye out. If it were true that they are forcibly relocating people, that could be an issue. Danny asked if I had checked on Miss Janice. I told him I hadn’t and that we needed to. He volunteered to do it later that day. After lunch we headed for the barricade to get to work. Danny found the tools we needed and Jeff had loaded the paper up, so there was nothing left to do but get to work.

  We had assembled four of the gabions when Reggie and Thad showed up. Danny was inside one of the baskets tying the paper to the inside. We had laid the baskets over on their sides to make it easier to get in and out of. Jeff and I were unrolling wire when Thad walked up.

  “Looks pretty good. Gonna take a lot of dirt to fill ‘em though,” Thad said.

  Looking up from the roll I said, “Yeah, that’s gonna suck. Weren’t we talking yesterday about how some of the other folks around here could pitch in?”

  “Yeah, we were,” Reggie said, “but you know and I know that’s gonna take an act of God to organize. I’d rather do it my damn self. Shit, if we had thought of it before, my nephew might still be alive.”

  We nodded at that. Reggie said, “I got an idea that’ll speed it up. I’ll bring my tractor down and we can scoop the dirt up in the bucket and bring it down here and dump it in.”

  Jeff said, “I like the way this guy thinks.”

  The five of us got busy and had assembled enough of them to cover the road in a couple of hours. The two guys that were guarding the barricade were all excited about our little project. After Lance and Reggie’s nephew had been killed, everyone was nervous about being out on security. The logs provide little protection, they were designed to keep cars and trucks out and there were precious few of those around now. I was laying in one of the baskets pushing pieces of tie wire through the paper so Reggie could twist them off when he stuck his head in the end. I said, “What’s up?”

  He stood there for a minute looking at me. I dropped my arms and propped myself up on my elbows. “You alright?”

  Reggie hesitated for a tick and said, “Yeah, your friend there, Thad,” he motioned with his head in Thad’s direction, “he tell you what happened to his family?”

  “No, he didn’t seem to want to talk about it so I left it alone, why?”

  “Jus’ curious. I couldn’t do it. I wanted to, but I couldn’t,” again he hesitated, looking back down the road in the direction of his house, “but he did. I could never have imagined something like that.”

  Now he had my attention. “Like what, you mean kill that kid?”

  “It wasn’t the killing, it’s what he did after.”

  “And what was that, after?”

  Reggie dropped his head slowly shaking it back and forth. “Let’s just say I ain’t gonna have to feed them pigs for a while.”

  I looked at him; for an instant I was confused, then it struck me. “He fed him to the pigs?”

  Reggie nodded. “I’ve been around them pigs since the day they was born, but they didn’t hesitate. He cut him open an’ when they smelled the blood an guts they went right to it. Gawd, it was awful.” Reggie stood up, hands on his hips and looked over at Thad. “That man right there scares the shit outta me.”

  I climbed out of the basket and stood beside him. “Well, at least he’s on our side.”

  “Huh, no shit.”

  With all the baskets assembled, we gathered around the back of the truck and were shooting the shit. I told everyone what Don said about people being forcibly relocated. Jeff laughed it off and Danny said they could have his asshole but nothing else. That got Jeff and I laughing until Thad cut us off.

  He said, “Don’t laugh.”

  I looked at him. “Don’t laugh about it. Best thing to do, if you see a damn mailman, you shoot his ass on sight.”

  Suddenly, all the funny was gone.

  “Why’s that?” Danny asked.

  “It was a mailman that came to my house, him and a DHS security man.” Thad looked off to the southwest. “They killed Anita and Tony.”

  We all looked around at one another, everyone except Thad; his gaze was fixed out there somewhere.

  When it was clear he wasn’t going to say any more, Danny spoke up. “Hey, why don’t we have a fish fry at my house tonight?”

  That brought Thad back around. “Fish fry? You got fish?”

  Danny smiled. “Yeah, but we got to catch ‘em first.”

  “And that isn’t hard either,” I offered.

  We all agreed a fish fry would be a nice diversion. Danny had a small pond at his place and it was full of blue gill. The girls had spent many an evening out there with bread balls and cane poles catching fish. But before we could run off to play we had to finish the task at hand.

  We set the baskets up just behind the log barricades in a staggered line. The first one was set at the edge of the road and the next one was set just in front and beside it. The third was set just behind and beside the second. This overlapping provided complete coverage, ensuring that a bullet couldn’t find its way between two of the baskets. Doing it this way required more gabions than just setting them side by side, but it created a much more robust defense.

  We had to assemble three more to complete the position and by then it was starting to get late in the afternoon. Everyone started to drift off towards their houses, agreeing to meet back at Danny’s in an hour. Danny rode back to the house with me. Coming through the front door, we were met with an incredible smell.

  “Damn, what the hell are y’all cooking?” Danny called out as he headed for the kitchen.

  I followed him in and saw a big pot sitting on the stove just as Mel answered, “Beans.”

  We told them what we had in mind, the fish fry, and they were immediately excited. It was something we used to do a lot during speck season. Mel and Bobbie went about whipping up some cornbread real quick. The stove was already on so it wasn’t a big deal to throw the oven over the burner and get it heating while they mixed it up. I went and rounded up the girls, telling them we were going down to Danny and Bobbie’s for a fish fry and that they had to catch the fish. That got them excited and there was a sudden flurry of bodies running around the house getting ready to leave.

  Since there was no bread for bread balls, Danny broke out a can of corn. We’d set some aside for bait and use the rest for dinner. Danny kept several little cane poles on the rack that held his canoe beside the pond and it didn’t take long before the girls were all catching fish. The fish bit as soon as a hook hit the water. It was all Thad, Danny, Jeff and I could do to keep the hooks baited and take the fish off; none of the girls were into that, though I was sure that would change.

  There were nine people to feed, but we culled some of the smaller fish, which were many, and that told us that the pond could keep producing for some time. When the fish finally stopped biting we had twenty-one nice bluegills. Mel and Bobbie were inside getting things ready. We were going to cook the fish on Danny’s turkey fryer using a Dutch oven filled with oil. As was the tradition, the menfolk would cook the fish. Normally we would fillet the fish, but things being what they were I wasn’t about to waste any meat so we simply scaled and gutted them and cut off the heads. Thad said he preferred them this way, he liked the tails turning all crispy.

  Taylor and Lee Ann went inside with their mom and Bobbie while Little B
it came out to help, touching the eyes and poking the guts as they were pulled out. With the four of us working it didn’t take long before all the fish were ready for the oil. Danny already had it set up with the burner going and the oil heating when I carried the bowl of fish over. He had set it beside the picnic table and had all the stuff to season the fish set out on the table.

  Thad said that he loved to fry fish and told us we wouldn’t be disappointed if we let him take over. Not being one to hold a working man back, we stepped back. Thad went in the house and came back out with a couple of bottles of spices and a paper bag. He poured cornmeal and some flour in the bag and seasoned it, then added the fish one at a time and shook them in the mix before taking them out and lowering them by their tails into the hot oil.

  The look on his face was hilarious; his lips were pressed together as if he was whistling, though no sound came out. “Ohhh, this is gonna be good!” he proclaimed after lowering the fifth fish into the oil. The rest of us started to laugh. Danny had set out camp chairs and we were sitting around shooting the shit. It was another one of those instances of normality, if you didn’t add in the all the rifles leaning around the picnic table and the fact that we all wore pistols. I got out of my chair and went to the truck, returning with the bottle of whiskey we had started on the other night. Danny went in the shop and came back with some Dixie cups, the little one you see in people’s bathrooms, and I poured shots for each of us.