Carola Dibbell - The Only Ones

“Guy who was the original owner of the Farm? And in case you wondered,” he goes, like I even did, “it’s not a working farm. Never was. Everyone just called it that.” He stamped his boots on the side of the truck, then climbed in. “Dewey Sylvain.” I climbed in too. “A very smart man. A little paranoid at the end,” he starts the motor, “but who could blame him? Set up all kinds of security, alarms, failsafes, firewalls, worms, you name it.” We go down the road, with the rain or snow hitting the windows and roof.

“Plus customized search programs, flag Alerts, buzzing hoo-has — the guy loved a gizmo! Some of this software goes back twenty, thirty years. Still works — well, what’s left of it. My brother Henry used to call it SOTA, when we were kids. State Of The Art. Ha, ha. We weren’t allowed to touch most of it, so now that we bought the goddamn place, we can’t make heads or tails of it. What’s the word, Larraine?”

We had stopped for the gate and he is on the phone. “Oh shit, oh shit. Well! I’m a-turnin’ off my lights.”% Jof an issueaccine Syndrome He turned the truck lights off, said to me, “We do not want to attract attention on the roads tonight,” and drove into a bush. He steered us out. Hit another bush and so on till we got to the road at the end that we had took from the Terminal? Then he stopped the truck, rolled down the window, leaned his head out and listened, and when he finished listening, drove us on this road but the other way from the Terminal, up a hill, or seemed to be a hill, in the dark.

There was a moon in the sky but so many clouds it was hard to see anything, and he drove very slow. He would roll the window down to listen. Once, after he had gone off the regular road to a smaller one, he said, “Better not,” and backed us to the regular road again. “Larraine,” he’s on his Mobile, “I’m on old Route 9. Thought it was safer than the back roads.”

So this is a front road.

By now some clouds have cleared. You could see the moon better and it showed some things alongside this front road, mainly snow and big snow puddles but also a few trees and fences, plus something burnt that I didn’t know what it was.

“Larraine is way up in the hills,” Rauden told me, “but she keeps tabs. Has a very SOTA tracking system. Ha, ha.”

I just look out the window at the snow. He doesn’t notice. He is on the phone.

“Those fucking cretins,” he says, then, “I’ll go the old way, past Hyman’s place.” He drove off this road onto some small road, very dark, where I think he hits a fence and also the wheel with his hand a few times, saying, “Fucking cretins!” till we end up on some other regular road but very soon are on a different road that seems to be wide, though bumpy, with trees very close, and right away he started coughing so hard he had to stop the truck and roll down the window. Then he started sniffing the air. “Oh! Shit!” he said.

Well, it was smoke — I smelled it too. He turned right around and backed us straight off the road into a mess of branches, turned the motor off, and jumped out in the dark. I heard him throwing something on the truck, maybe branches — I’m just sitting there alone till he is back beside me, whispering, “Not a word. Not one fucking word.” And we both sat there in the dark with him putting one puffy finger on his lips, till I heard a sound I never heard before, and it got louder. Then louder. Like rocks that fall, one at a time, but fast, and I could see what looks like lights, but not exactly lights, getting closer. This is through trees in the dark and the lights seem blurry, like little fires? And the fires are bobbing up and down behind the trees with that sound getting louder, till it’s not one at a time but all together, like all the rocks fell down right near me, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, through the trees, and then it’s gone.

But Rauden kept his fingers on his lips. He stayed a long time like that, then got out of the truck and walked a few steps in the dark, listening, both ways. Listen, listen. Now back in his seat. Slammed the wheel a few times with his hand, then said, “You have just had a first-hand sighting of the Knights of fucking Life.” He took a few deep breaths like he had told Delmore to do. It seems to calm him down. “Just a bunch of very foolish local vigilantes who come out of the hills from time to time to burn our farms down.”

Then he yelled again, “FUCKING CRETINS!” And he looked at me.

So I look back, like, cretins. Right. I know exactly what that is. Cretins.

He starts the motor up and is on the phone again. “The Ksatch out for the neck of thePennsylvaniaof9H passed right by the goddamn truck. Yup, torches and horses.”

Man! That was horses?

“Seemed to be coming from — oh, shit, that’s Harold’s. On my way.”

We race down that same dark, bumpy road till we turn down some other regular road that is so open we could see all the way to where a pretty big fire was showing a ways off down a long hill, and we went down that hill to there and could see other fat guys in overalls throwing snow and other things at the fire, and Rauden put the truck under some trees, got a blanket, told me stay underneath and do not move, and he went running to the fire, yelling, “Fucking cretins!”

It was a long time till I saw him again. I just stayed under the blanket and listen to shouts and smelled smoke, till I saw him right by the truck, and he put his head on it and cried. I guarantee I never saw a Tech do that. Then he kicked the truck. He already had one of those metal bottles out when he got in his seat and took quite a few drinks before we headed off to the regular road, or one of them. This time he turned the lights on — I guess whatever he was scared would happen already did. You could see this was a pretty big road, with hills on both sides.

“I mean, shit!” He kept smacking the steering wheel, and the truck would bounce around. “We’re talking cows here. Cows! And, I mean—” he got the bottle from his pocket and waved it around, “—these wussies think they are so fucking hot? They should have seen the nuts who chased us out of Minnesota — one of those godawful End of Days groups from back then — we had to drive halfway cross the country to lose those fucking maniacs — we were in trucks — Henry and me, Dad, old Phil Delize and that whole group — landed at Dewey Sylvain’s door in the middle of the night, Henry and I are little kids in our friggin jammies, Dewey took one look at us all, burst out laughing and said, what a bunch of rubes. That’s how we got our name. You might have heard of us.”

I didn’t. But I don’t say it. I just look out my window. We are passing a fence.

“Bernie!” On the phone again. “I’ll be a little late. Yup, the Ks hit Harold’s. Everyone’s all right. They torched the barn but Harold and Weezie had already moved Daisy and the little Daisies into the big house. I’m going to check in with Walter and Larraine. Bernie came a little later”—What? Oh he is talking to me now—“on the run from Ohio. He was the only one of us who was a bona fide MD — Dad’s group were DVMs — veterinarians, for God’s sake — and Dewey Sylvain with so many goddamn degrees he couldn’t remember them himself. That was the original rubes.”

So let me stop a little minute and say something, because maybe from what I said back at the Farm you think, well this girl have done everything. Well, I did things that night I never did before, and one of them is, I never heard anybody talk as much as this rube talked. I never heard anything like it. Sometimes on the Mobile, sometimes to himself — it’s like he cannot shut himself up.

“Ever see a baby?”

Oh! So he is talking to me this time. I shook my head.