The World as We Know It Page 10

  “Leave the chickens,” said the boy in the tricorne hat. The pirates led me back to the rowboat.

  I returned to Esther’s farm, relieved to still have my life, and began treating the infection with the antibiotics I had bartered for. I owed her so much for her generosity. I hadn’t mentioned to the boy the abundance of chickens that roamed free on populated Caribbean islands, but we would be worlds apart by the time he realized he had been duped.

  Esther, being the grandmotherly figure that she was, had been reprimanding me about the disheveled mop on my head since she had taken me into her home. “A man should take pride in his appearance,” she had said as she was stitching up the wounds in my leg. Of course, she came from an era when men donned suits and ties to walk picket lines. I came from an era when they wore jeans and T-shirts to church. In her eyes, God deserved more respect. In ours, He would accept us despite our attire. Perhaps we were both right. After all, we’re born naked.

  I finally gave into her persistence and allowed her to cut all of my hair off. She said that would be adequate payment for the chickens, and that was the only time I saw her laugh during my entire stay with her.

  “I should make a sweater with the leftovers,” she said.

  “I knew there was an ulterior motive.”

  “Now, when I’m done here, you’ll shave that beard.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “See? There’s hope for you yet.”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure, honey,” she said.

  “Do you think you’ll ever see your husband again?”

  She looked at me and thought for a moment, and then she asked, “Do you think you’ll ever see your wife again?”

  “If I make it home.”

  “You aren’t sure that you will?”

  “I’ve got a long road ahead of me,” I said, “and it will only get rougher. My journey has barely begun.”

  “We all have a journey that’s just beginning. I imagine my husband is in about the same place you are. And your wife probably looks upon life much the way I do. She’s just waiting for her love to return. It doesn’t usually help to make plans. The world has a way of changing them without our permission. All we can do is have faith that things will work out in the end.”

  “I’m not so sure about that,” I mumbled, looking over at the child sleeping peacefully nearby. “I lied to that little girl.”

  “What do you mean?” Esther asked.

  “I told her there weren’t bad people anymore.”

  “You’re talking about the pirates?”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe they’re not all bad. They just need someone to show them the way. There’s a bit of evil in all of us.”

  “At least a bit of good in all of us too, though.”

  “I think, yes.”

  “You think she’ll find her parents?” I asked.

  “Well, she’ll have a home here as long as she needs it.”

  That night while the old woman and the child slept, I came across a framed photograph of Esther and a man who I assumed to be her husband. It was a candid shot of the two of them, carefree and happy on the steps outside of an ancient temple with snowcapped mountains poking through the clouds in the background. Hundreds of colorful flags were strung about them. The pair stood out from the crowd in their western garb, but aside from his attire, the man blended in with the locals.

  I dreamed of Maria. I dreamed of fights we’d had at the farm and of fights that had never occurred. I woke up with tears in my eyes, anxious to move on, eager for another change in scenery in the hopes that it might ease my pain.

  Soon, I was headed north again, taking with me a sack of tropical fruits that I was sure to miss again when they were gone in a few days. Esther and the child stood in the doorway waving as I departed on the back of my horse. Nomad and I passed through the settlement toward the ocean, and I could see three boats in the distance, sailing toward the shore.

  7

  MONUMENTS TO PRECEDENTS

  In some weeks, I reached what had been Washington, DC, after brief stays outside the remains of Jacksonville, Savannah, Charleston, Raleigh, and Richmond. It was midsummer, and the heat was brutal. I had been trying not to watch dates too closely. Independence Day came and went without fireworks, and I didn’t know it until days later. Dwelling on the time served no good purpose and would only amplify my anxiety, but I happened to glance at my watch one afternoon, and I realized it was my birthday. It was a milestone I hadn’t thought once about since we had left the city. For the first time in my life, I spent my birthday alone. Well, not entirely alone, but Nomad, as loyal a companion as he was, could not substitute for my family. I remembered the cake that Maria had made for me on my last birthday in our house in the suburbs and the watch she had given me that had come to be torturous.

  “It’s powered by movement,” she had said. “As long as you keep moving, it will always work. Now you don’t have an excuse for coming home late.” Then she kissed me.

  That night, I couldn’t bring myself to stop, and it was then that I saw the lights of fires in the darkness outside of Washington, DC. I thought of a time when Maria’s cousin was flying into St. Louis from DC and Maria had asked me how I planned to pick her up from the airport. Of course, she was asking how we would coordinate the retrieval in the middle of a weekday, but my response was, “Well, I was thinking we could get some ski masks, rent a black van with tinted windows, come to a screeching halt in front of the airport, jump out, throw a shroud over her head, and toss her in the van before speeding off again. Would you like me to call Enterprise and see if that vehicle is available?” My sarcasm was not always well received, but in the months I had been gone, I wondered if she was beginning to miss it.

  Nomad decided he was done for the night, and we finally stopped to sleep in the shadowy outskirts of the new settlement. Abandoned cars covered the road around us. The next morning, I awoke to the voices of men outside of my tent. I listened for a moment, but they spoke so quietly that I could not make out the conversation. I was unsure of their intentions, and out there, there would be no witnesses to a crime. The lesson I had learned from the pirates had not yet been lost. Certainly humans can be dangerous creatures—more dangerous and territorial even than an alligator. As a precaution, I racked a shell as quietly as I could before emerging from the tent.

  “That’s cheating,” was the first thing said when they saw me. There were three of them standing around me with bows but no arrows drawn. They looked relaxed.

  “You can’t be too careful,” I said, fearing again that I had lied to the child.

  “Easy to say until your finger slips.”

  For a moment, nothing was said. I eyed the three of them with suspicion as they glared back. Finally, one spoke.

  “Are you going to put the gun away?”

  “I haven’t decided,” I said.

  “We thought you might be hungry. If you prefer, we’ll move on.”

  I paused to look them over. Their attire suggested they were out to hunt, not to rob drifters on the side of the road. I reluctantly slid the gun into its sleeve attached to my saddle.

  “There you go. We’re all friends here.”

  “You guys from DC?”

  “The vicinity. But we don’t call it that anymore.” One of them laughed.

  “What do you call it?”

  They looked at each other for a moment and then looked back at me and shrugged.

  “Well, I’m Aaron,” said one of the men. “And this is Dave and Jake.”

  “Joe.”

  “You hunt, Joe?”

  “When I have to.”

  I was suspicious still. Caught off guard and outnumbered was not a position into which I relished being placed, particularly in an unfamiliar and lawless land. Even if their intentions seemed innocent, I hoped they wouldn’t invite me to join their hunt. Not only would it be an excuse to draw weapons, placing me in an even more vulnerable spot, b
ut it would also certainly expose my weakness in that particular trade. I was still not the best shot with an arrow, and worse at keeping quiet and still. Both the fear of the strangers and my own insecurities left me apprehensive.

  “Why don’t you come along with us?”

  Damn it.

  “I don’t know. I am pretty hungry.”

  “Good, so are we,” said Aaron. “You’ve found the right company. When you hunt with Dave and Jake, you never stay hungry.”

  The pair smiled humbly at the praise.

  “All right,” I said, “I’m in.”

  “That’s the spirit. You can leave the gun.”

  Aaron was right about the skills of his companions. The four of us ate well that morning before we headed toward their home, and the camaraderie brought back sensations of my first days hunting at the farm. That eased my tension, and gradually I began to look at them as friends. There was nothing hostile about them. How primal it is to immediately prepare defense in the presence of a larger, more dominant, or greater number of the same species. In time, I think, that reflex will fade away in humanity. Our capacity for comprehensive reasoning sets us apart from every other creature, and cooperation, as opposed to competition, was clearly in everyone’s best interest.

  The lawless place where we then lived sometimes seemed safer than it ever had with rules. As we strolled into the new city that had grown from what had once been the capital of the United States of America, southwest of the old ghost town with a Blue Ridge Mountain backdrop, I wondered if we would ever again see government and law as we had known them before. And should we? As Thomas Jefferson said, “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.”

  Without government, without modern technology, without many resources beyond the natural earth and the knowledge we had brought with us, we were all forced to start from scratch. For the first time since Europeans had set foot on this continent, it truly was a land of equal opportunity.

  “You’re welcome to stay at my house if you like, Joe,” said Aaron, an offer I, of course, accepted. His home was similar to the one-room cabin that Maria and I called home. It sat among a neighborhood of similar houses where Dave and Jake also lived. Between our kill from that morning and the dishes supplied by the neighbors, nobody went hungry. That was the way things went.

  We reminisced about our former trades, and I found that the professional skills and experience of my new friends had rendered them about as useless as I was after the collapse. Jake wouldn’t exactly say what he did, but he told tales of the military coming into town during the rioting and imposing martial law and a citywide curfew, which only escalated the bedlam.

  “That’s when we knew it was time to get the hell out,” he said. “They blocked the streets with tanks so that nobody could get in or out, at least with a vehicle. Then they turned on us. We had to sneak in at night to collect family members one by one. The ones that were left, anyway. You always assume the government is there to protect you, but when people lose sight of what they’re fighting for, then they’re just fighting.”

  Dave, who had once been an engineer on the DC Metro, had become a facilitator for the clandestine exodus from the old capital. He had acted as a guide for refugees and had helped to establish their new settlement there. That was how he and Jake had met. I suspected his skills in hunting had been particularly useful for sneaking in and out of the city unseen. Or perhaps that was how he had learned those skills—out of necessity.

  Aaron, ironically, had been a lobbyist for rail transportation, a luxury I yearned for. He told a story of the trip that had gotten him hooked as a child—a train ride from New England to Southern California. Day after day, he had watched the scene in the window change as the train passed mountains, deserts, forests, plains, and cities, with a view of those things from a whole different perspective. “You’re closer to the earth in a train,” he said, “like you’re really a part of it all.” From then on, he had wanted to see the world, and by rail was the finest way to do it. That was his passion. Not the politics. But lobbying was more lucrative than engineering and afforded him the stately brick manor in Arlington that he had called home.

  I’m sure all of my questions must have seemed like an interrogation as I probed to learn the dark secrets that had powered the political machine, but he took it all with humor. It wasn’t as though I could blow any whistle. “Ultimately,” he said, “it was all about money. Big government was always in collusion with big business. It’s just the way it was. Not always in the best interests of the American people, but it was profitable.” He told us about secret meetings with congressmen behind closed doors, anonymous campaign contributions, media manipulation, and envelopes passed under the table. “One on one,” he said, “it didn’t feel like what we called ‘corruption.’ We thought of it as ‘collaboration.’”

  Things usually look different from a macro perspective.

  His stories were like a blend of The Godfather and House of Cards. The definitions of honor and patriotism were bent to align with business interests. Aaron had operated that way simply because everyone else had. There had been no other way to compete or to be heard. He had believed in his cause, but every industry from tobacco to renewable energy had implemented the same tactics regardless of their ethics. Even the best ideas would have been doomed in the marketplace if their representatives hadn’t been willing to make the necessary sacrifices, which sometimes included their integrity.

  Gerald Ford said, “A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.” We had lost the corruption inherent in such a massive organization. What had come about in the new city, and I can’t imagine a more appropriate place for such a thing to have had its genesis, was a new form of peacekeeping that didn’t allow an opportunity for rampant immorality. It was explained to me as simply “the ethical way.” There wasn’t a word for it. The community had democratically selected a council based on virtues, not on politics or campaigning, to simplify the important decisions. When there was misconduct significant enough to warrant attention, which was rare, the council would determine the appropriate resolution and always leave an opportunity for the community as a whole to reject the decision and propose an alternate. That rarely came in the form of punishment. As we had learned, punishment seldom solved a problem. That should have been evident by the percentage of repeat offenders in our archaic “correctional system.”

  “The idea now is to focus on why the offense was committed rather than to avenge the victim,” Aaron said. “Then we make an effort to correct the problem and help the offender to understand why his or her action was unacceptable without being patronizing. I don’t know what it’s like where you came from, but violent crime is almost unheard of here. For one, most of the social failures that bred that kind of behavior are long gone, and now we pay more attention to people as individuals. Usually, we can catch flaws early before a person reaches such a state of desperation that they feel hurting another is the only way out.”

  It was my first evening with them. We had been talking awhile around a fire, and as Aaron spoke, I suddenly realized that Nomad was no longer in sight. He had been tied up near Aaron’s home, no more than fifty feet from where we were all seated.

  “Where’s my horse?” I interrupted him. I had been listening with such fascination that I had ignored my periphery. I stood to look around. Nobody else had noticed either, and their puzzled gazes met me with silence.

  “My horse,” I repeated.

  I began to pace, looking into the dark distance.

  “You all right, Joe?” Dave asked.

  “My horse was tied up over there. He’s not there anymore.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. He doesn’t wander off, and it was a tight knot.”

  “He must be around then.”

  “I have to find him,” I said, growing frantic. I had a terrible feeling. I gra
bbed a flaming branch from the fire.

  The three rose to follow and we spread in a search. It was so dark that I could hardly see what was ahead or remember where I had already been as I wound through paths between cabins and trees and tramped through tall grass.

  “Nomad!” I yelled at the top of my lungs. “Come here, boy!”

  Nothing.

  “Come on! Where are you?”

  I felt my eyes watering.

  “Try to keep it down, Joe,” Aaron called as he began to move farther away. “People are sleeping.”

  “I don’t care! I have to find him!”

  I began to panic. It was late in the evening, and most everyone was already in bed. Fires had died down. Everything was black and profiled by the moonlight. I saw the glow of the other torches in the distance.

  “Anyone see anything?” I yelled.

  “Nothing,” Jake called back.

  “Keep looking.”

  Tears of dread ran down my cheeks. Nomad was my only companion on the road and my only connection to home that I had to cling to. I would be lost without him. The horse had become the closest thing to family I had known in months. He would never leave me, I knew, which terrified me even more. He had not caught a wind of inspiration and run off on his own accord. Someone had taken him. I was sure of it.

  We were reaching the outskirts of the village, and I could see the tree line in the distance when I heard Nomad’s neigh. I knew it instinctively. “Here!” I yelled, breaking into a sprint in the direction of the sound. I saw his silhouette in the moonlight, and then I saw a man tugging the reins against Nomad’s will. He became more forceful when he saw me approaching.

  “Drop it!” I screamed at him. “I’ll kill you!”

  I charged at him with every intention of fulfilling the promise, the ground cover crunching beneath my feet. My skin grew hot with rage, and my vision blurred. The man released the reins and tried to run as I rushed upon him, but there was no escaping for him. I ran past my horse, drawing my knife to take the life of the thief, and I tackled him to the ground. He slid through the dirt and leaves face down as I grabbed one arm, twisting it behind his back, and slipped the knife around to his throat.