CivilWarLand in Bad Decline

by George Saunders

  We often wonder if he and Mom made it, and if so where they live.

  We pull all the next day through a region of discolored reeds. At dinnertime we decide to eat ashore. You can get lard cubes or bundles of spiced grass at Canalside stands. At a family operation near Lock 32 they serve raccoon on a stick, with a lemon slice. Where they get lemons in this day and age I have no idea. Lowlifes are lined up behind the stand, hoping to suck a discarded rind. Raccoon bits are laid out on a card table. The vendor guarantees low heavy-metal content in the flesh. I ask how he can be so sure and he says he used to be a toxicologist. His wife confirms this and goes on and on about the number of skylights they used to have in their den. He produces a fading photo of himself holding a cage of lab rats. Meanwhile their daughter’s giving me crazy eyes while skinning raccoons. The toxicologist sees me looking. He says a beautiful woman is a joy forever. He says a dad can’t be too choosy these days. Anybody Normal who’ll treat a woman reasonably well is a catch. He says it’s amazing how quickly moral standards eroded once the culture collapsed. He says: Look at your marriage rate. He says: A young fellow these days doesn’t think family, he thinks pokey-pokey continually.

  When he says “pokey-pokey,” his daughter crinkles up her eyes at me.

  “Best raccoon in New York State,” the mother says. The daughter nods and takes off her filthy jacket and reclines and stretches in a provocative way, managing to continue skinning raccoons. The paws go in a cardboard box. Likewise the heads. The pelts are piled neatly on the towpath for later sale to furriers.

  “So,” the mother says. “That’s a nice shirt you have on.”

  “You’re traveling as part of your job?” the father says hopefully.

  “Not exactly,” I say. “I’m going to visit my sister.”

  “He’s going home,” the mother says. “Isn’t that nice? A family boy. A family boy returning home after some kind of success. You have nice clothes. Your mother will be pleased.”

  “A young man out in the world, making the grade,” the father says. “Such a young man was I, back in the toxicology days.”

  “Where will you stay tonight?” the mother says. “Probably a hotel. A very nice one?”

  “They stay on their boat, dodo,” the father says.

  “This may sound nervy ” the mother says, “but we would be pleased to have you stay with us. Why not sleep on dry land?”

  “Don’t push him,” the father says. “Let him decide.”

  “I’m not pushing,” the mother says. “I’m inviting.”

  “He’s not interested,” the father says. “Can you blame him? We’ve failed to provide her with decent clothes. What man would want her?”

  “She’s desirable,” the mother says. “But you’re right. It’s all a matter of presentation. Do you see the form on him? Nice clothing does that. Highlights those good strong muscles. A healthy kid.”

  “Yum,” the daughter says.

  “Appearing wanton won’t help,” the mother says.

  “It might,” the father says.

  “You’ll stay?” the mother says. “One night? Please? Who wants to sleep on a smelly old boat when he can have some good home cooking and play some cards?”

  “Why insult him by calling his boat smelly?” the father says.

  “Oh God,” the mother says. “Did I ever not mean that.”

  “Spend some time!” the father says. “Why rush across the country without absorbing the local flavor? Nellie will take you to see the Boyhood Home of Frank Shenarkis.”

  “Boy will I,” Nellie says, and licks her lips. Dad nudges Mom in the ribs.

  “Just so a man cares for her and respects her in the proper fashion,” he says. “That’s all I want for my little sweetie pie.”

  “Take a walk, you two,” the mother says. “Why the heck not? Get better acquainted. Make hay while the sun’s still shining and all.”

  So we go for a walk.

  The Boyhood Home is a pastel ranch on a street of pastel ranches. It’s hard to believe America’s Last Star was raised here. Just after the collapse of the national infrastructure, Shenarkis, an overweight Normal, reigned supreme on prime time with his depiction of Snappo the comical Flawed. Three times a week the entire nation tuned in. Snappo’s Flaw was that he had a Siamese twin named Tubby growing out of his waist. Shenarkis, a master ventriloquist, handcrafted Tubby from polyurethane and then made a fortune kowtowing to the least common denominator. Every week Snappo and Tubby vied in vain for the love of Carmen Entwhistle, the Normal knockout who employed them to maintain her grounds. Snappo was always either getting tangled up in her vines or knocking something irreplaceable into the pool. He was a fool who knew it. He was gentle and acquiescent and mispronounced many words. All intelligent Flaweds hated him for selling us so short. Carmen came to like him for his simplicity. At the end of each episode they hugged. Whenever they hugged, Tubby would roll his eyes suggestively at Snappo. Sometimes the hugging went on and on. Finally around the time of the Detroit purges the feds yanked the show off the air because of the Flawed/Normal sexual overtones.

  We walk through the Home hand in hand. We see the actual Tubby in a display case in the master bedroom, as well as the complicated harness system used to conjoin Tubby to Snappo. We hear a tape of Shenarkis doing Tubby’s voice. It’s an extremely frank Boyhood Home, in that they’ve documented Shenarkis’s addiction-related demise and suicide. In his sister’s room they’ve got the actual suit he was wearing when he wrapped his mouth around an exhaust pipe in despair over his cancellation. Nellie trembles at the photographs of his bloated corpse at Boca Raton. I pull her close. Over the PA comes Frank’s familiar voice singing his theme, “Two Heads and Hearts Falling for You, Dear.” I can’t concentrate. She smells too good. Her lower back is too rock-hard.

  Finally they shut down the Home for the night.

  “I never liked his dumb show,” Nellie says as we leave. “Dad said he got what he deserved for making Flaweds look halfway intelligent. But I did like the one where he thought the trombone was a scientific instrument. That one I liked because he was such a butthole.”

  “I know what you mean,” I say.

  At this point I’d say anything. Her brown arms are hot. Our palms have a little river between them. She keeps veering into me with her muscular hip.

  “Through the woods?” she says.

  “Is it a shortcut?” I say.

  “Nope,” she says.

  Ten steps in she pulls her blouse over her head. Her chest is sun-dappled and her pit hair is blond. It all happens too fast to follow. Her breath thunders in my ear. She mounts me and screams with her mouth on mine. I feel a pebble being driven into my rear but I don’t care.

  Afterwards she immediately says I’m the best she’s ever had. She says our kids will be darling. She says she wants me again, only naked. She pulls off my shirt. I basically lie there like a flounder on a shore. So far letting her do what she wants has been rewarding. My shoes come off. Then my socks.

  She stands up naked and starts wailing at the sight of my claws.

  “Jesus Christ!” she screams. “I just boinked a Flawed, Dad!”

  I pick up my clothes and run through the woods. Acorns lodge in my heels. Manly fluids sail off me. In spite of the fact that she was repulsed by the real me, I find myself thinking in wonder of her breasts and the ripples in her belly. I’d gladly marry her. Doing that every night would be a reason for living. But apart from the fact that I disgust her, I’m a fugitive. I’ve violated Disclosure of Flaws legislation. I long to hold her tight and say: You took my virginity and made me forget my Flaw. Let me stay. I’ll tape my claws, or file them down daily. We could adopt. But what’s the use? I saw the look in her eyes. For the first time in years I’m truly ashamed of my claws. How I hate them. Oh for a pliers and the resolve to pluck them out once and for all.

  I sneak back to the Canal. Her folks are standing in front of the barge, along with a shouting mob of townies and a sherif
f with a rifle.

  “The way I see it,” her father says, “we’re entitled to whatever’s on that barge.”

  “Oh no you don’t,” Buddy says, almost in tears. “This barge belongs to Mr. Blay.”

  “Take what you want, folks,” the sheriff says. “I have no abiding love for Flaweds.”

  “Blay’s not Flawed, sir,” Mike pleads. “He’s Normal as the day is long, and a nice, nice man. Fax him. Ask him. Please. I beg you.”

  “He hires Flaweds,” the sheriff says. “He hires Flaweds who haven’t been fitted with bracelets and go around raping Normals.”

  Rape? I think. Rape? But I don’t budge. I like Blay but no way I’m getting lynched for a bargeful of GlamorDivans.

  The mob strips the barge clean. Buddy and Mike weep. I feel so bad. Poor Blay. No wonder Normals don’t trust us. We’re always screwing them over.

  There’s nothing to do. I could kick myself. I had sure transport west. I had a fat paycheck coming. I’ve let Connie down for a meaningless romp. I start walking. Far off I hear a train whistle. Then I hear bloodhounds. I run like hell through the woods and then along the tracks. A freight pulls through going slow and I run beside it. Holy cow, I think, I’m jumping a freight. I’m in a boxcar that smells like hay. I’m flying by a dark field full of baying dogs. The air smells like water and stars shine in the black Canal as we fly across a bridge.

  Next morning lake Ontario’s out the open door. The beach is littered with seagull corpses, which people are scooping up like mad for dinner. Fishmongers on the shore shriek at consumer advocates passing out pamphlets about the hazards of eating lake fish. It’s Dunkirk, then Westfield, then Erie, then Girard. I lie in front of the open door, and as in a dream, the nation unfolds before me. You can imagine a hill, but an imagined hill is not actual, no clover smell rolls off it, no ugly dog chases a boy down it into a yard where a father is scratching himself before a chessboard set up across a birdbath. You can imagine sleeping Ashtabula but no justice is done the earnest faces manning the security bonfire at the crossroads. Here a drunk shouts advice to a tree, here a fire burns in a field of alfalfa, here the train whistle echoes back from a wall on which is scrawled: Die Earnest Pricks. Near Cleveland I see a mob pursuing a pig past a gutted Wal-Mart. Finally the pig’s exhausted and stands heaving on a berm. The mob seems unsure how to proceed. Then some go-getter shows up with a crowbar. The pig takes a whack in the head, then discovers new energy and trots off again with the mob in pursuit. Fortunately at this point the train rounds a bend.

  For hours we head west, through Sandusky, Port Clinton, then Toledo, where in a public park militiamen hold back the dispossessed with firearms while emptying Hefty bags of bread crusts into a fountain for public consumption. We pass through Angola and Elkhart, through fields of torched corn, then Chicago, racked with plague, where corpses are piled high in vacant lots beside the tracks and Comiskey is now an open-air penitentiary, then across the plains, where solitary people dressed in sacks wander across the horizon, reminding me of my own cursed family. Sweet-smelling dust fills the car. The nation goes on forever. I never knew. When old people said plenty, bounty, lush harvests, I put it down to senile nostalgia. But here are miles and miles of fields and homes. Nice homes. Once it was one family per. Once the fields were thick with food. Now city men assigned residence by the government sit smoking in the yards as we pass, looking out with hate on the domain of hayseeds, and the land lies fallow.

  On the morning of the sixth day a family gets on in a hop-smelling southern Illinois town. The bearded dad offers me sunflower seeds and briefs me on his child-rearing philosophy. Discipline and other forms of negativity are shunned. Bedtimes don’t exist. Face wiping is discouraged. At night the children charge around nude and screaming until they drop in their tracks, ostensibly feeling good about themselves.

  “We ran the last true farm,” one of the kids screams at me.

  “Until the government put us out,” the wife says softly. She’s pretty the way a simple white house in a field is pretty.

  “Now we’re on the fucking lam,” says a toddler. Both parents smile fondly.

  “We’re knowing America viscerally,” says an older girl while digging at her crotch with her thumb.

  “Indeed,” the dad says. “My kids are at home on the American road.”

  “It’s good for them not to be so staid,” the mom says. “Get out and breathe the air.”

  “Live the life that’s being lived,” the dad says.

  “Abandon the routines that conspire to force us into complacency,” says the mom halfheartedly.

  “Think of the memories they’re accumulating,” the dad says.

  “Still, it wasn’t a bad farm,” the mom says.

  “Darn it,” the dad says. “Negativity, Ellie. Nip it in the bud. Remember? Forging self-love by creating a positive environment. Remember? They took our home but they can’t break our spirit?”

  “Sorry,” the mom says. “I forgot. I mean, it was positive, because I was saying how much I liked our farm.”

  “Never mind,” the dad says. “I love you so much.”

  Still, he looks tense. He goes to the door and hanging his feet out tries to teach the kids “This Land Is Your Land.” The kids are busy leaning out of the speeding boxcar and lofting spit at little houses along the tracks.

  “Nice shot, Josh,” the dad says. “You sure nailed that garage.”

  “Shut up, Dad,” Josh says. “When you talk to me it screws up my concentration.”

  “Sorry, buddy,” the dad says.

  At Springfield a nutty-looking guy in a dirty flannel shirt gets on and immediately divides the boxcar in half with bales. On his cheek is a burned-in crucifix.

  “Some serious privacy’s going to happen here or heads will roll,” he announces. “I’ve had it with interpersonal relationships.” Then he takes out a huge knife and sets it just inside his boundary. Even the wild kids shut up. He stretches out to sleep.

  Once the kids get used to him, however, they resume shrieking. One little guy in coveralls keeps reaching across the border to touch the blade. Mom and Dad seem perplexed. To restrain or not to restrain? The blade looks sharp. But why risk quashing his natural curiosity?

  I stay out of it. Another fifteen minutes and we cross the Mississippi.

  The knife guy wakes up.

  “Touch it again, you’re fucked,” he says to the kid, who’s about five. The kid’s eyes go wide.

  “Just a minute,” the dad says. “That’s my son whose self-worth you’re bandying about. Don’t you remember what a special place the world was when you were tiny?”

  “Don’t jack with me,” the knife guy says, “or I’ll be pleased to cut out and eat your whiny little heart.”

  “Pshaw,” the dad says. “Sticks and stones, my friend. That kind of confrontational attitude does nothing but make me feel a lack of respect for you.”

  “Keep talking, nimrod,” the knife guy says, “and I’ll have me a woman for free and a bunch of brats to toss off a moving train.”

  “Hey now,” the dad says. “Hey now. Is that any way to talk to another human being?”

  “Sam,” the mom says, “maybe we should just drop it. Maybe we should drop it and keep the kids on our side of the bales.”

  “No, Ellie, I don’t think so,” the dad says. “My family is not something to be treated with disrespect.”

  “We don’t want any trouble,” the mom says.

  “No trouble at all,” the knife guy says, then picks up the knife and goes for the dad. I make a grab for his hand and the knife flies out the door. He tackles me and rolls me over and starts biting my neck. He’s strong and stinks and I can feel he wants to kill me.

  Oh God, I think, now I did it, I’m dead.

  “Fellows, fellows,” the dad says. “Violence doesn’t solve problems.”

  “Help him, Sam,” the mom yells. “That nut’s going to murder him.”

  “I’m not sure I can do that,�
� the dad says. “I can’t have the kids see me contradict my own moral system.”

  “Dad,” one kid shouts, “get off your ass!”

  “No,” the dad says gravely. “Someday you’ll understand, and respect me all the more for it.”

  Meanwhile the loony’s biting deep into my neck and I’m starting to see stars. I panic. I thrash. Then we sail out the door and my head hits something metallic and I’m out like a light.

  I wake up strapped to a stretcher propped against a dilapidated wet bar. Out a slit of a window is a duck on a tether near a mildewing empty built-in pool. Across the room a balding little man sits on the edge of a foldout bed, rubbing the feet of a hag sipping broth.

  “Kenny,” she screams, “where are you? I said fish! You call this fish? Is this all the thanks I get, you trying to scrimp on my fish?”

  “He’s an ass, Ma,” says the man on the edge of the bed. “You’d think with all you’ve done for him.”

  In rushes another little balding man, identical to the first.

  “Give her the damn fish, Kenny,” says the man on the bed. “She’s our mother, for crissake. Why try and starve her?”

  “I doubt she’ll starve, Benny,” Kenny says, flinching. “That’s all you two do is eat. Eat and yell at me.”

  From under the bedcover the woman smacks him with a length of wood. When he drops to one knee his brother knees him in the back.

  “Benny, look who’s awake,” the mother says. “Our meal ticket.”

  “Welcome back to the land of the living,” Kenny says kindly from the floor. “You had quite a lump on your noggin when I found you.”

  “Good old Kenny,” Benny says dismissively. “Out wandering the tracks like an idiot.”

  “We know all about you, mister,” the mother says. “We’ve had occasion to see you shoeless, Kenny and Benny and I.”