John Adams - Wastelands 2

She was thinking of starting a decorating business, although she was worried that she didn’t know about some of the stuff decorators did. On TV they were always tearing down walls and redoing fireplaces. So she put it off. Then there was the big Disney World attack where a kazillion people died because of a dirty bomb, and then the economy really tanked. She knew that business was dead and she was going to get laid off, but before that happened, someone torched the furniture place where she was working. Her boyfriend at the time was a cop, so he still had a job, even though half the city was unemployed. She and Franny were all right compared to a lot of people. She didn’t like not having her own money, but she wasn’t exactly having to call her mother in Pennsylvania and eat crow and offer to come home.

So she sat on the balcony of their condo and smoked and looked through her old decorating magazines, and Franny watched television in the room behind her. People started showing up on the sidewalks. They had trash bags full of stuff. Sometimes they were alone; sometimes there would be whole families. Sometimes they’d have cars and they’d sleep in them, but gas was getting to almost ten dollars a gallon, when the gas stations could get it. Pete, the boyfriend, told her that the cops didn’t even patrol much anymore because of the gas problem. More and more of the people on the sidewalk looked to be walking.

“Where are they coming from?” Franny asked.

“Down south. Houston, El Paso, anywhere within a hundred miles of the border,” Pete said. “Border’s gone to shit. Mexico doesn’t have food, but the drug cartels have lots of guns, and they’re coming across to take what they can get. They say it’s like a war zone down there.”

“Why don’t the police take care of them?” Franny asked.

“Well, Francisca,” Pete said—he was good with Franny, Jane had to give him that—“sometimes there are just too many of them for the police down there. And they’ve got kinds of guns that the police aren’t allowed to have.”

“What about you?” Franny asked.

“It’s different up here,” Pete said. “That’s why we’ve got refugees here. Because it’s safe here.”

“They’re not refugees ,” Jane said. Refugees were, like, people in Africa. These were just regular people. Guys in T-shirts with the names of rock bands on them. Women sitting in the front seats of Taurus station wagons, doing their hair in the rearview mirrors. Kids asleep in the back seat or running up and down the street shrieking and playing. Just people.

“Well, what do you want to call them?” Pete asked.

Then the power started going out, more and more often. Pete’s shifts got longer although he didn’t always get paid.

There were gunshots in the street, and Pete told Jane not to sit out on the balcony. He boarded up the French doors and it was as if they were living in a cave. The refugees started thinning out. Jane rarely saw them leaving, but each day there were fewer and fewer of them on the sidewalk. Pete said they were headed north.

Then the fires started on the east side of town. The power went out and stayed out. Pete didn’t come home until the next day, and he slept a couple of hours and then went back out to work. The air tasted of smoke—not the pleasant, clean smell of wood smoke, but a garbagey smoke. Franny complained that it made her sick to her stomach.

After Pete didn’t come home for four days, it was pretty clear to Jane that he wasn’t coming back. Jane put Franny in the car, packed everything she could think of that might be useful. They got about 120 miles away, far enough that the burning city was no longer visible, although the sunset was a vivid and blistering red. Then they ran out of gas, and there was no more to be had.

There were rumors that there was a refugee camp for the homeless outside of Toronto. So they were walking to Detroit.

Franny says, “You can’t leave me! You can’t leave me!”

“Do you want to go scavenge with me?” Jane says.

Franny sobs so hard she seems to be hyperventilating. She grabs her mother’s arms, unable to do anything but hold onto her. Jane peels her off, but Franny keeps grabbing, clutching, sobbing. It’s making Jane crazy. Franny’s fear is contagious, and if she lets it get in her, she’ll be too afraid to do anything. She can feel it deep inside her, that thing that has always threatened her, to give in, to stop doing and pushing and scheming, to become like her useless, useless father puttering around the house vacantly, bottles hidden in the garage, the basement, everywhere.

“GET OFF ME!” she screams at Franny, but Franny is sobbing and clutching.

She slaps Franny. Franny throws up, precious little, water and crackers from breakfast. Then she sits down in the grass, just useless.

Jane marches off into the first house.

She’s lucky. The garage is closed up and there are three cans of soup on a shelf. One of them is cream of mushroom, but luckily, Franny liked cream of mushroom when she found it before. There are also cans of tomato paste, which she ignores, and some dried pasta, but mice have gotten into it.

When she gets outside, some strange guy is standing on the sidewalk, talking to Franny, who’s still sitting on the grass.

For a moment she doesn’t know what to do, clutching the cans of soup against her chest. Some part of her wants to back into the house, go through the dark living room with its mauve carpeting, its shabby blue sofa, photos of school kids and a cross-stitch flower bouquet framed on the wall, back through the little dining room with its border of country geese, unchanged since the eighties. Out the back door and over the fence, an easy moment to abandon the biggest mistake of her life. She’d aborted the first pregnancy, brought home from Pasadena in shame. She’d dug her heels in on the second, it’s-my-body-fuck-you.

Franny laughs. A little nervous and hiccupy from crying, but not really afraid.

“Hey,” Jane yells. “Get away from my daughter!”

She strides across the yard, all motherhood and righteous fury. A skinny, dark-haired guy holds up his hands, palms out, no harm, ma’am.

“It’s okay, Mom,” Franny says.

The guy is smiling. “We’re just talking,” he says. He’s wearing a red plaid flannel shirt and T-shirt and shorts. He’s scraggly, but who isn’t.

“Who the hell are you,” she says.

“My name’s Nate. I’m just heading north. Was looking for a place to camp.”

“He was just hanging with me until you got back,” Franny says.

Nate takes them to his camp—also behind a house. He gets a little fire going, enough to heat the soup. He talks about Alabama, which is where he’s coming from, although he doesn’t have a Southern accent. He makes some excuse about being an army brat. Jane tries to size him up. He tells some story about when two guys stumbled on his camp north of Huntsville, when he was first on the road. About how it scared the shit out of him but about how he’d bluffed them about a buddy of his who was hunting for their dinner but would have heard the racket they made and could be drawing a bead on them right now from the trees, and about how something moved in the trees, some animal, rustling in the leaf litter, and they got spooked. He’s looking at her, trying to impress her, but being polite, which is good with Franny listening. Franny is taken with him, hanging on his every word, flirting a little the way she does. In a year or two, Franny was going to be guy crazy, Jane knew.

“They didn’t know anything about the woods, just two guys up from Biloxi or something, kind of guys who, you know, manage a copy store or a fast-food joint or something, thinking that now that civilization is falling apart they can be like the hero in one of their video games.” He laughs. “I didn’t know what was in the woods, neither. I admit I was kind of scared it was someone who was going to shoot all of us, although it was probably just a sparrow or a squirrel or something. I’m saying stuff over my shoulder to my ‘buddy,’ like, ‘Don’t shoot them or nothing. Just let them go back the way they came.’”