As I continued on into the town limits, the two of us continued to discuss, or more accurately, wonder aloud, what those in power had planned for us peons.
“You think the president will use an executive order to halt guns sales?” Mike asked, knowing I paid more attention to the purely political side of things than he did.
“Not yet. Too many Republicans still holding onto their base, and him doing so would upset the applecart for when the Pres and his crowd need to get emergency appropriations through.”
“So, no gun grab yet?”
I shook my head as I stopped at the stop sign.
“Still early days, brother. They’ve only had a few hours to shape the perceptions. Like my good friend Rahm Emmanuel once said, ‘You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is, an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before’. That’s the exact quote, by the way, and even though the first sentence usually sets Conservative heads to spinning, it is the second, explanatory sentence, which makes my skin crawl.”
“Shoot, brother, that’s just diabolical,” Mike agreed. “Let’s just see how much we can do to stave off the wolf at the door.”
“Or the barbarians at the gate,” I whispered under my breath, confident no one else would hear my words.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Because we’d elected to take one vehicle, this allowed Mike to survey the scenery as I drove into town. New Albany was usually a quiet, sleepy little place with a population of just over three thousand people. I had always felt comfortable here, like stepping into a familiar pair of old sneakers, and I knew Mike felt the same. It reminded me of where we grew up, just twenty-five miles away over in Jasper County. New Albany had the obligatory small southern town shops and restaurants, from the Dairy Queen to the Dollar General, along also a few unique stores like the Book Nook and the Country Crochet Corner. I’d spent plenty of time in the former but never set foot in the latter, not only because I lacked the requisite skill, but since my part-time secretary Barbara warned me it was gossip central in there.
“Want to cruise by your office? It’s almost on the way,” Mike suggested. I nodded, and then flipped my blinker to indicate the turn. Actually, I knew it was shorter than taking Main Street to reach our first destination.
My office was located just off the town square in a row of connected buildings constructed sometime in the fifties and later updated to Nixon-era decor. The location was conveniently only a block from the County Courthouse, and my small storefront operation only took up the first floor of the two-story building. I’d paid to replace the glass door with a stout, metal door painted to look like wood, and I was relieved but not surprised to see the door and the narrow window facing out on the street appeared intact. My other neighbor, a title company I sometimes did work for, also looked to be unmolested.
Even better, the modest Urgent Care clinic located to one side looked to be open for business. The Urgent Care clinic was a recent addition, added after the local hospital cut the hours of operation for their Emergency Room. Though owned by the same healthcare conglomerate that ran the hospital, this clinic was somehow cheaper for them than just having the ER stay open a few more hours. I’m sure this made economic sense, but all I knew was the parking just got more complicated in the area.
After making the block, I turned and got a view of the grocery store parking lot and blanched. Even at this early hour, the asphalt slab looked packed with shoppers. By contrast, the two gas stations I could see hardly looked busy at all. People reacted as I’d previously speculated, falling back on the pattern of pre-hurricane preparations.
Pulling into the parking lot of the nearer of the two gas stations, I caught sight of Harry Ludlow, the owner and proprietor of Harry’s Fuel Stop, just unlocking the door to his office adjacent to the retail gas station and convenience store. I gave a wave, and Harry just responded with a nod before he stepped inside.
Harry Ludlow was a spry older man, I guessed to be in his early seventies, with skinny arms and legs on a beer belly making him look extremely unhealthy, but he still had an able wit and a sharp eye. As the local distributor for ExxonMobil, Harry owned or leased a string of gas stations in the area and seemed to be doing okay, even in the generally down economy of the day. Like a lot of the farm and ranch folk in the community, I was a regular customer for his fuel services, and I’d come to know the man a little as we’d exchanged pleasantries over the years. He’d never had reason to use my services, preferring to take his legal work to Hal McCrory, who’d been practicing in this county since Jesus was in short pants, as the saying went. Still, he was glad to take my money and didn’t hold my profession against me.
“You see the news?”
That was the first thing out of Harry’s mouth as Mike and I entered the front office of the fuel distributor. The place was undecorated except for a few giveaway calendars on the walls and a picture of the local Little League team his company sponsored. The calendars might have been out of date, but I noticed the smiling faces of the kids in the team pictures changed every year since I’d been coming here.
“Yeah, Harry, we heard it on the radio coming in this morning,” I replied. “Sounds like a terrible thing going on out there.” I was careful with my words. I could see emotion on the old man’s liver-spotted face, but I felt unsure of what else to say.
“Terrible,” the old man echoed, seemingly lost in thought for a moment. I wondered who he was thinking about. I could tell something was worrying away at his attention, and then I had an epiphany. Which loved one of his was out there, waiting for the hammer to fall? I didn’t know Harry that well and I knew his wife had passed on some years back, but I recalled he had several children grown and out in the world.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Hardin?” Harry asked, finally focusing on me after his long rumination.
“I need to order five hundred gallons of diesel for the farm, Mr. Ludlow,” I replied crisply, pretending I’d seen nothing out of the ordinary earlier. The man had his pride, if nothing else, and no need to recognize his moment of weakness if he was willing to ignore it as well.
Harry made a noise in the back of his throat. The order wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, and of course I could have simply called in the request. I decided a bit of an explanation was in order, without giving too much information.
“Mike and I needed to pick up an order over at Wilson’s, so I thought I’d take care of two birds with one stone,” I volunteered. “Mike’s wife Marta is out at the farm, so your driver can deliver it even if we’re still stacking boxes.”
“That’s fine. I’ll send Bobby out with the load as soon as he gets in,” Harry replied absently, then quoted me a price without consulting his calculator, then added the minimal delivery charge that made his services preferable to that of his competitors. Harry owned the delivery truck, and he wasn’t trying to make his customers pay for the darned thing every time he dispatched his driver out to make a stop.
I wrote him out a check for the total amount from the farm account, and Harry printed me a receipt and handed me the slip of paper. The old man did it mechanically, as if his thoughts were still miles away. And they were, as it turned out.
“My oldest boy is out there, you know. In Los Angeles. Works for a bank, after he got out of college with one of them finance degrees. I wanted him to find someplace closer to work, but you know kids, right?”
“Yes, sir, I do,” I replied, and I felt my own emotions rise at his casual question. I felt Mike lay his hand on my shoulder. Harry was only a casual acquaintance, and he didn’t know my history any more than I knew his.
“Well, my Joseph, he had a good job in Beaumont for a while, but it didn’t work out,” Harry said haltingly. “He’s a good boy, but…he’s one of them, what’s the polite term for them these days? He’s one of them…homosexuals. We’ve had some hard words about that over the years. But he’s still my boy, and I pray God is looking out for him. I love that
child, and I don’t think I’m ever going to see him again.”
I felt my eyes tear up at the old man’s admission. How many times had he already tried to call his son this morning, I wondered. How many times had he pressed the receiver to his ear, hoping against hope to get through? Thinking about his loss, especially of losing a son, struck a chord deep inside, and I felt my own buried emotions welling up.
In an abstract way, I felt surprised at Harry Ludlow’s candor as he talked about his son. Even in this so-called enlightened era, small town East Texas wasn’t very forgiving of those living an alternate lifestyle. Even admitting your son was one of them ‘them’ was a risky proposition. But I reasoned that if he lived alone and had no one else to talk to, I guessed Mike and I might have been the first people he’d had a chance to unburden himself to so far today. Or maybe he just didn’t care.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Ludlow. I know this must come as some kind of a shock to you. I can understand your pain,” I managed to say without breaking down in tears myself.
“Thank you, son,” the older man murmured, before he continued, his voice stronger. “You think God’s even listening? To me, the way I was raised, the lifestyle Joseph has chosen is a sin, but I try to see beyond that. Does God really judge us for that?”
“We’re all sinners, Mr. Ludlow,” Mike said softly, finally joining the conversation. “God still loves us. Whether what Joseph does, or the way he lives his life, is a sin is for God to decide. All you can do is keep praying and leave it in His hands.”
With that final bit of comfort shared, Mike and I managed a few more pleasantries and withdrew from the grieving father. Without saying another word, I handed Mike my keys and slumped over to the passenger side and crawled into my truck. While Mike drove, I tried a few numbers on my phone, first trying Nikki and getting a busy signal. Next I tried her husband Patrick, and got the same annoying, pulsing beep.
I sat there staring at my phone and thought about all the people, like Mr. Ludlow, who were trying to reach loved ones and failing. Either the cellular phone system was overloaded, the cell tower was no longer in service, or the person on the end was no longer among the living. Probably all three in many cases.
“No luck?” Mike inquired.
“Nope,” I shook my head, then mimed throwing my cell phone out the window. “Nikki said she was waiting on Pat. You know the county is probably lining up the first responders in anticipation of Austin coming apart at the seams. They’ll need all the paramedics they can get to patch up all the burns those suburbanites are going to get trying to make their own lattes.”
As he thought of the self-entitled, annoying people who called the state’s capitol home, Mike gave a belly laugh that sounded real rather than forced. In truth, we both figured the state’s three other major population centers of Houston, San Antonio, or Mike’s own Dallas-Fort Worth megaplex would face even worse disruptions. That is, if our grim calculations came to pass.
“We’ll have to see what happens,” was all Mike managed to say before he was wheeling the truck into the parking lot of Wilson’s Feed and Seed.
That’s not what Felix Wilson called his store, but for some reason, Mike and I always called it that. Short and to the point. I saw the nearly empty parking lot and before I even exited the truck, I decided this had been a good idea. We wanted no part of any place with crowds, not with the herd stirring.
Unlike many people who considered themselves preppers, I disliked the term ‘sheeple’. The connotation might have been somewhat appropriate, but the idea was somewhat misleading. Sheeple sounds soft and cuddly, but panicked people were anything but. Ever see a soccer riot? Many people had the idea of preparing for bad weather, or stocking up for a hard freeze, but they only acted at the last minute and this often resulted in frayed tempers, intemperate language and sometimes, outright violence. Scared and desperate people weren’t sheep. If hit with the correct triggers, they became as vicious as a pack of raptors, and I didn’t need any of that today.
“List?” Mike queried, breaking me out of my dark musings.
“Yeah,” I grunted, removing the typewritten list from the back of the clipboard as I exited the truck. Mr. Wilson wasn’t in yet this early, but his right-hand man, Bud Collier, was there to collect my order. This order might have been a little larger than we usually picked up, but I made sure it was in the ballpark and never bought the last of any one item.
I’d been training Mr. Wilson, and Bud, over the last few years as I spaced out my requests for certain brands of ‘organic’ oats, wheat, and a variety of grains I deemed necessary for our signature Angus beef. The meat really did taste better, in my humble opinion, but that wasn’t the main reason I requested those brands. No, I spent hours researching the different producers, finding out which ones were packaged without the use of industrial herbicides and insecticides that ruined the end products for human consumption. Over time, I’d convinced Mr. Wilson to begin carrying these brands and he even managed to sell more than a few bags to some of the other small cattle ranchers in the area.
That was one of my secrets. Sure, we could feed some to the cows, but I planned to preserve over half of the grains in the massive bulk food storage bins we already owned. With the appropriate grinders, we could make our own flour, oatmeal, and corn meal. The packages came in fifty and hundred pound bags, and all of it except the chicken feed could still be washed and cleaned up enough for people to safely eat. I guess you could do the same for the chicken feed, but with the variety of ingredients, I decided it wasn’t worth the effort for the time being. We’d have to get mighty hungry to be that desperate.
This lower cost source of grains made sense for us, and the fact we weren’t buying in bulk from one of the big prepper supply stores meant more layers of protection for my family. I couldn’t swear that the federal government illegally accessed the customer lists for these companies. However, in the event of an emergency, say, for instance, a meteorite impact, I could easily see the feds ordering those records be produced for a variety of reasons. This would not only tell them who was a potential political dissenter, one of those hated survivalists, no less, but also point out a likely source of stored food. In times of famine, everybody hates the hoarder, after all.
So, sourcing our own grains without leaving much of a trail always made me feel better, as well as healthier. We could even make our own corn masa from a recipe using wood ash lye I’d experimented with. All the sudden, I started suffering from a hankering for an order of fresh, hot corn tortillas and honey. I’d only picked at my breakfast earlier, and now I was paying for it.
Getting my head back in the game, I noted when the stacks of sorghum salt blocks came next, neatly stacked up by conscientious stock clerk who worked for Bud and Felix Wilson. Billy Dwyer resembled a grownup version of Eric Cartman, short and stout, but he had none of the South Park character’s snarky attitude. In fact, Billy was a sweet kid in his early twenties with Down Syndrome, and he seemed to relish the work and the interaction with customers. He was also a wizard with that dolly, and soon I noticed the truck seemed to be squatting low from the weight. Shoot, maybe we should have brought two trucks, I grumbled, but in the end, Billy got it all loaded with no space to spare.
“Good job, Billy,” I announced, giving the young man a high five and slipped him the usual ten dollar tip into his hand as part of the process. He’d been shocked the first time I’d done this, but by now he was just giving me that bright smile of his.
“Thank you, Mr. Hardin,” he replied, his voice barely audible. I had a flash of thought, of impending dread, as I thought about Billy and his mother, Sally Dwyer. She was one of my clients, and I knew from preparing her will that the older woman had no living relatives and she worried about Billy’s fate once she was gone. By no means a wealthy woman, she’d wanted to set up her life insurance proceeds to fund a trust to care for her son, but now I wondered what would become of the pair. The world had just become a much scarier place, and I worried h
ow people like Sally and Billy would navigate the coming years.
As I went to pay my bill, I caught a calculating look from Bud as he examined the tightly-packed stake bed of the farm truck. Bud gave me the total and then stuck his oar in the water, asking something a bit out of character for him.
“You stocking up because of them earthquakes?” he bluntly inquired, shifting the ever-present toothpick around in his mouth. Outsiders might see it as some silly country cliché, but I knew Bud was actually trying to quit smoking and had taken to chewing on the wooden pacifiers as a replacement.
“Yeah, Bud, that’s why you see me here instead of over at the Woodshire Brothers,” I popped off. “I wanted to get the last loaf of bread, but Sarge sent me on a supply run for his heifers instead. You know he really runs the place.”
Sarge was my registered and pampered Angus bull, the patriarch of my little cattle operation, and I’d made similar jokes about the bull’s highly-refined tastes over the years. Then I stuck a thumb out at Mike and forced a smile.
“No, I was planning this run before I heard about the quakes,” I lied. “When I knew my brother was going to be in town, I decided to make use of the big oaf.”
“Makes sense,” Bud allowed, “but seriously, iffen you want to stock up on any food, I heard the WalMart over in Jasper is just about as bad.”
“Shoot, Bud, on a good day, I wouldn’t set foot in that place on a bet,” I responded. “Too much of that useless Chinese crap.”
I said it in a careless manner, but my slip was purposeful. I wanted to gauge just how much Bud Collier knew.
“Won’t be for long,” he murmured under his breath. Bingo, I thought to myself. Here’s a man who pays more attention to the news than he wants to let out. I filed that tidbit away as Bud handed me my change. Bud might be a closet prepper, or just a news junkie, but I would watch him more closely going forward.
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