Damon Knight - Orbit 18

We never thought in all those years we had heard about Simon Red Bulldozer that he would not have kept his blade in working order. He reached out to his blade lever and pulled it, and nothing happened. We saw him panic then, and the contest was going to Mary Margaret when . . .

The black plastic of the steering wheel showered up in her face. I heard the shot at the same time and dropped to the ground. I saw Mary Margaret holding her eyes with both hands.

Simon Red Bulldozer must not have heard the shot above the roaring of his engine, because he lurched the bulldozer ahead and started pulling the road-grader back over the line.

It was Elmo John Deere doing the shooting. I had my carbine off my shoulder and was firing by the time I knew where to shoot.

Elmo must have been drunk. He was trying to kill an opponent who had bested him in a fair fight.

I shot him in the leg, just above the knee, and ended his Pulling days forever. I aimed at his head then, but he dropped his rifle and screamed so I didn’t shoot him again. If I had, I would have killed him.

It took all the Fossil Creek People to keep his sons from killing me. There was a judgment, of course, and I was let go free.

That was the last Sun Dance they had. The Fossil Creek People separated. Elmo’s people split off from them, and then went bitter crazy. The Fossil Creek People even steal from them, now, when they have anything worth stealing.

The Pulls ended, too. People said if they were going to cause so much blood, they could do without them. It was bad business. Some people stopped stealing machines and cars and plates, and started bartering for food and trading horses.

The old ways are dying. I have seen them come to an end in my time, and everything is getting worthless. People are getting lazy. There isn’t anything worth doing. I sit on this hill over the Red River and smoke with Fred-in-the-Hollow and sometimes we get drunk.

Mary Margaret sometimes gets drunk with us.

She lost one of her eyes that day at the Pulls. It was hit by splinters from the steering wheel. Me and Freddy took her back to her people in her truck. That was six years ago. Once, years ago, I went past the place where we held the last Sun Dance. Her road-grader was already a rust pile of junk with everything stripped off it.

I still love Mary Margaret Road-Grader, yes. She started things. Women have come into other ceremonies now, and in the councils.

I still love Mary Margaret, but it’s not the same love I had for her that day at the last Sun Dance, watching her work the pedals and the levers, her hair flying, her feet moving like birds across the cab.

I love her. She has grown a little fat. She loves me, though.

We have each other, we have the village, we have cattle, we have this hill over the river where we smoke and get drunk.

But the rest of the world has changed.

All this, all the old ways . . . gone.

The world has turned bitter and sour in my mouth. It is no good, the taste of ashes is in the wind. The old times are gone.

The family that lays together stays together.

The fiery solar disc above me was so bright that I could not sensitively perceive its true shape, ascertain its mass, or follow the flow of its flaring streamers. Reflexively, my eyes avoided the furnace-eye of yellow-white energy, and it could have been blazing at ceiling height or millions of miles high, it mattered not. For a very few minutes, I could watch the great sphere edge up over the rooftops in the morning, and watch it sink behind the smooth mountains at dusk, and at these times it appeared perfectly circular.

My putative sire told me that our planet’s axis angle changed slightly during the winter months, so that, even though the fiery sun-plate was closer to us, the actual heat and light were reduced. And this is what I told my three putative offspring. But oh, how I wished the earth were green again! And how I longed for warm weather. The drought line began to move ominously north in the year 1950, and had crept up our peninsula at about thirty miles a year. In the fall of 1980 we cut down all fifty-seven trees on our 100-by-200-foot lot and sawed them into firewood lengths. We salvaged every twig, branch, and the smaller limbs as kindling, and worked hard with two-man saws, sawing the heavy trunks into two-foot lengths. There was widespread theft of wood that year, as well as theft of bushes and shrubs, and we installed an eight-foot chain-link fence at staggering cost to our credit lines. But then, all our neighbors had metal fences, and most had Dobermans, mastiffs, or shepherds as guard dogs. We all put up extra floodlights at first, but this was long before the power plants stopped functioning. We stacked the garage to the rafters with logs, and our four BMWs sat outside, three rusted and dry-rotted, and one running fairly well on a fifty-gallon charcoal burner conversion. At $7.50 a gallon, few of us could afford gasoline.

We burned all fifty-seven trees in two fireplaces during the winter of 1980. The temperature ranged from 37° below zero to about 40° Fahrenheit from October through March. We wore woolen jumpsuits, extra socks, even ski masks, and the five of us slept together for added warmth. Now, in December 1986, we still slept together, but the need for body warmth was waning in relation to the strength of incestuous sexual attractions. After all, when a healthy thirty-year-old man shares a king-sized mattress with a healthy thirty-year-old woman he loves, plus two strong sons, ages sixteen and seventeen, and a beautiful fifteen-year-old daughter, things are bound to happen. We brought our two sheepdogs in one bitter cold night, brushed and curried and perfumed them carefully, and slept with them. They were docile, pliant, and heavy, and I had a bone-hard erection sleeping humped against one of them. My daughter grew soft and sweet, and she seemed to luxuriate against my erections, like a cat being stroked. This disturbed me in some ways, but I was secretly pleased and aroused also.

None of us had bathed for weeks, it was just too goddam cold to get undressed, and besides, no water was allocated for bathing. Oil ran out in 1977, natural gas in 1978, and most of the coal was gone by summer 1980. Municipal water supplies were cut off the same year, and electricity seeped feebly through the utility systems for a few straggling months, the lights glowing dim and yellow, then dying out. So we were like primitive Eskimos, striving to survive in a poorly heated rancher with thirty-five hundred square feet of floor space.

The very night we slept with the dogs, two large eucalyptus bushes were stolen from our backyard, the roots carefully dug out, every tendril and runner preserved, two clusters of fuel for somebody. I didn’t suspect any of our close neighbors of the theft, but somebody went to a hell of a lot of trouble, scaling at least two eight-foot fences and digging in the frozen ground. Fuel was indeed more precious than food for us. In the front yard, we had pruned the holly bushes down to about two feet in height and used some of the branches for fuel, and we had carefully removed ten vertical two-by-fours from the attic framing, leaving some thirty-six-inch centers where the building codes required eighteen. I counted ninty-two of these six-foot-high boards in the attic and wondered how many I could remove before the roof threatened to fall in—Christ, what a strange thing to have to worry about!

The day suddenly turned leaden-gray, somber, quiet, funereal, and the snow began to fall. The temperature was 14° F. at 2 p.m., and every snowflake struck, cartwheeled, and, mercifully, began to cover the vistas of hard red earth, slashlike eroded gullies, rocks, glass, bricks, feces, ashes—anything that wouldn’t bum was left on the ground, like so much gravel scattered on a porcelain floor. And on this now whitening vista, the rows of large houses stood out, like blocks on a board, like chessmen or Monopoly pieces: the Waggoners’ handsome white French Provincial, the Caseys’ mansard-roofed place, the outré five-level split the Browns built lovingly in 1965—row upon row of once fashionable homes that had stood on thick green carpets of zoysia and fescue and bermuda, and dotted with cedars and firs and pines. The scene was like a Dali painting, with incongruous, compelling foreground figures placed on a zoom-lens desert of stunning perspective-depth.