Michael Bunker - WICK

Veronica and Stephen traveled as if under a star.

As darkness began to fall, the crowds thinned. Then, eventually, they disappeared altogether.

It was almost midnight.

Veronica and Stephen cruised along the back country roads that spread across the Pennsylvania countryside like a capillary system, drawing the goods from the richest farms in the world to market.

Every once in a while, they would get off the bikes and walk them for a spell. Or, they would stand and rest for a few moments and look at their surroundings in excitement and wonder.

“These roads once all led to Hershey,” Veronica said. She pointed off in the distance to a skyline that was darkened except for what was illuminated by the moon.

Stephen smacked his lips. “Man! If I only had a Reese’s cup right about now!” He poked her in the ribs.

“Naughty boy. One day, I will show you your Gramam’s recipe for chocolate. It is twice as good!”

Stephen just laughed and they stood with their bikes and looked down the fence lines at the farms along the road.

“These farms are among the most productive in the world, and the most beautiful.” She indicated with her hand to the farms. “And see how the fields spread thick with snow in wide, white blankets?” She pointed with her hand to the thick white swatches of color in front of them. “They look like that most winters. The snow lies there and replenishes the earth. And in spring they turn the pig manure under. Ewww!” She waved her hand in front of her nose. “Then the whole county stinks, but it’s not so bad when they use horse or cow dung.”

“How do you know all this, mom?”

“I learned how to read, boy. You should too.” She looked at him sideways. “You with your video games.” They shared a look and remembered where they were, and what the world was like now.

It wasn’t really hard to do, the remembering, standing there, as they were, in the midst of the wide blue world, the ancient winter of Pennsylvania farmland rising up around them in a glow, their bright yellow suits shimmering with moisture in the moonlight.

“Dude, I saw this interview with Manson once. He said the difference between him and the regular people out there is that—” The tattooed teenager paused and leaned forward. “Give me a loosie.” The other young man handed him a cigarette. He lit his match and fired up the end, and then he indicated to the world with the cigarette. “If the regular guy out there, if he stepped off a bus in Des Moines at 10 p.m. and called his Aunt Gertrude and she wasn’t home…,” The tattooed young fellow blew out smoke in tiny little circles, and coughed. “…and Aunt Gertrude was his only ride, and if he was flat broke, the average guy wouldn’t know what to do with himself. Whereas he—Manson—would dip into an alley and grab a tire iron and he’d be in business.”

Snort. Hmph! The second young man, who was listening to the tattooed young fellow rattle, gave only this harrumphing series of audible gesticulations as retort, and this conversation continued thusly for a while.

The two teens were sitting by the roadside, crouched low to the ground in a ditch. They were part of a militia patrol unit sent forward to scope out the road. Actually, they were scouts for a group of bandits, but they liked to think of themselves as a militia. They’d copped some uniforms, and several of the older bandits had some military experience, so they’d received a little training, but not much. They called themselves the Pennsylvania Anarchists Corps , the PAC, or usually, “The PACK.”

This unit, made up almost entirely of new recruits, orphans, and people forced into duty by the leaders, had been sent forward to make sure the road was safe, but right now the boys were sitting along a ditch. Actually, to be accurate, they were sitting in the ditch and telling stories to one another—trying to impress each other with their toughness, their readiness to do whatever it takes—the way teenaged boys will.

They didn’t notice at first when the two yellow suits rode up on bikes.

Sometimes life can go by like a stream of details in a narrative. Page after page, the stream of time pushes through, gathering force. The details can be like brushwork on a painting, the buildup of the paint. Or like the fingers at the keyboard, the wastebasket full of crumpled ideas. The drink of scotch, the scratch of a head, the scratching out of ideas on pads of paper. The pushing in of soil around the roots. The coming of spring. All this is done in the pursuit of art. Beauty, and Art. Which are to enliven and protect life. Because the point of all this is to enliven and protect life. To live, that is, in the here and the now. To live thoroughly and authentically. To live in nature. To walk out under the stars like Whitman and look up in the silence and take it all in.

Veronica was thinking these things as they pedaled along.

It is really very simple,Veronica thought. The point is to live–and to keep living.

Hear that , she told herself.

The point is… to live.

Veronica and Stephen had no idea what they were riding into because all they could see was white and even more white. Patches of field spread out across their view in the moonlight, enhancing the panorama with its breathless series of farms and fields. It looked like an Amish quilt. The fields of white were intercut with black segmenting lines that ran their way around the edges of the farms. Veronica and Stephen were simply riding along enjoying the cool night air, weaving down another mile of long, thin ribbon.

At first Veronica didn’t even see him. The man simply stepped out into the roadway and held up his hand. It was probably his rifle she saw first. Slung over his shoulder the way it was, it hung across his body, intersecting his torso, pointing up at right angles to the nighttime sky. She had just begun to focus on the rifle when she felt herself motioning to Stephen to stop. She began to search for the pistol she had strapped to her bike.

That’s when a gang of bandits descended on them from all sides.

Calvin Rhodes also cruised along the stream of time. He also drove on his ribbon of highway, stringing up and down the rolling hills and stretching plains and backwood hollers and the ancient farmland of This Great Country (That’s the way he’d always heard it said where he’d grown up. This Great Country .)

The countryside he’d passed through was some of the richest farmland in the world. He passed mile after mile through the Piney Woods, then through the Ozarks, and through West Virginia coal mining country, into Pennsylvania. He drove into that state’s coal country and then dropped southwards along the state’s border, and into what is perhaps the best farmland of all.

But before that—along the way—along the seemingly interminable stretch of highway that is Tennessee, he’d stopped at one of his checkpoints.

“I knew yer daddy. He was a good man.”

That was all the man had said to him. Then the man leaned into the window and shook Calvin’s hand. He told Calvin that now he ought to have enough gas to get him to his next stopover.

“Tell Mr. Wall, when you see him, that Lem said hello.”

Calvin nodded solemnly, and the old man put his foot on the kickboard and made a motion with his arms like he was slinging the truck outward into space, throwing his arms out, as if to say ‘ on your way! ’

Everyone, it seemed, knew Jonathan Wall. Everyone who was helpful at a time like this had read Mr. Wall’s books.

Calvin pulled out along the winding road and out to the county highway, and the adventure continued.