George Saunders - CivilWarLand in Bad Decline - Stories and a Novella

His scooter’s hidden under some branches. I climb on. We fly along the side roads. He’s got a sweaty back and a nice touch on the curves. Scrawny subsistence farmers gawk at us and walk away shaking their heads as our dust settles on the brims of their economy hats. Finally we reach the Erie Canal, where two armed Flaweds guard his blue barge.

“Why the weapons, you might ask?” he says. “The common man is my friend. I used to be him. But I’m not him now. You wave some beautiful household furnishings in front of the common man’s nose, there’s no telling what he might do. And these are my GlamorDivans. My body built those ten thousand mud huts. My signature went on the check for the saplings. Anybody fucks with my product, I sadly have to bite their head off. Or rather you do, in my stead. Shoot their heads off, rather. Whatever. Haw!”

“Sir,” I say, “I’ve never driven a boat before.”

“Who’s driving?” he says. “You’re pulling. I apologize. I realize this was mule work in the old days but hey, these are the new days, so we best turn up our collars and deal with what is, what is now, the existing lemons from which lemonade may be made, eh? Ah, it’s exciting to see a rich man in process. You, that is. Don’t think of yourself as a surrogate mule, think of yourself as an entrepreneur of the physical.”

I should have known. Mules are at a premium. Thousands have died of a bone marrow disease. The ones that lived lost the use of their legs. You’ll walk past a field and there’ll be fifteen or twenty of them lying on their sides braying. High-school kids get a kick out of pouring gas on them and lighting them up. It’s a craze. The animal rights people do their best to prop them back up and slap on feed-bags and post antivandalism signs, but no sooner are they back at headquarters than the mules are either toppling over or burning.

“There’s ample grub in the hold,” Blay says warmly. “It’s good food. I’m a man who likes to eat. And here’s two bills. The rest I pay on arrival in Buffalo. Mike and Buddy know the details. Meet Mike and Buddy.”

So I meet Mike and Buddy. Their Flaws are dental. Buddy was born with no teeth and Mike has twice as many as he needs. Both smile at once. It’s disconcerting. I look at the barge.

A nice barge.

Alike and Buddy take a cash advance and go into town to get ripped.

“Truly nice fellows,” Blay says, “albeit none too swift in the head. Between the two of them they have maybe one-third of a brain. Watch them closely. Rarely leave them alone. You’re to be the thinker and planner of the operation. The nerve center. The guru. The Normal.”

“I’ll try,” I say.

“You’ll succeed,” he says. “I can look at you and see a winner. Dream big, win big. Stick with me. Self-actuate. It’s been a pleasure meeting you. See you on the other end. I’ll be the one proffering a huge wad of cash with your name on it.”

He gives me a hug. What a sweet man. He likes me. He trusts me. The way his girth makes him rasp even when he’s standing still is endearing.

I sit on the deck of the barge with a semiautomatic. The water’s brown. As prescribed by federal regs, all inflow pipes are clearly labeled. RAW SEWAGE, says one. VERY POSSIBLY THORIUM, says another. Dusk comes, an early moon pops up over the swaying trees, the barge slips around on its tether like a mild dog happy to be tied, and I help myself to some noodles and milk.

Noodles. Milk.

Freedom, I think: very nice.

In the morning Buddy cooks eggs. They’re good eggs. He gums them. Bits fly all around. Bits get on his chair and the saltshaker. Buddy and Mike fart with impunity, making a big comical show of lifting their butt cheeks. I think about participating to win their respect but then Mike says it’s time to start pulling. We each take a tether. We walk in a row. It’s not easy but it beats toadying to the whining rich. At nine we take a break and apply salve to our shoulders and have some bottled water. Every now and then a kingfisher pulls something out of the muck and looks askance at it and eats it anyway. Along the shore are decaying tract houses which now serve as bunkhouses for barge pullers. At noon we stop at one for lunch. In the yard is a filthy man digging up potatoes with a taped-together hoe.

“Go on in, fellas!” he says. “My wife’s put out a heckuva fine spread today. Mostly it’s just potatoes, but she does great things with a spud. Don’t take my word for it! Go in and see for yourself, by tasting some!”

Inside are nine kids and one other guest and an astounding tableful of potato-centered dishes. She’s carved potatoes into crude figures. She’s baked them and fried them and disguised them with sauce. She’s mashed some of them into pulp and dyed them and spread them across the surface of others. Understandably the kids are husky. Everyone pitches in. The youngest walks along wiping the face of the second youngest as the second youngest carries bucket after bucket of water to the mother, who’s washing and washing potatoes, then pitching them across the kitchen to identical twins, who cut them up while jabbering in pig Latin.

“Nineteen hours a day minimum!” the frazzled dirty father yells to us as he comes in. “It takes everything you’ve got. It absolutely kills you. I’m thirty but I look sixty. But what can you do? If you step off the treadmill for a minute you lose everything you’ve worked for!”

“Honey!” the wife yells from the steamy kitchen. “Stove’s off!”

He grabs a wad of paper and runs in and stokes the stove. Meanwhile the kids are filling our tumblers and dusting off our shoes and toting laundry down to the Canal and hanging the finished laundry on a line that keeps snapping and being mended by a teenage boy who’s wearing a tool belt and shouting orders to everyone at once. The baby starts crying and a limping child grabs a spoon and scoops up some mashed potatoes and pours on a little sugar, then sprints across the room to stuff the mixture in the baby’s mouth.

“Good work, Gretel!” the sweating mother screams from the kitchen. “Now come take this scalding hot tray away!”

The other customer is an old man with a sales case, who flinches every time something crashes to the floor. Whenever the wife rushes by in a frenzy she touches his shoulder and says she’s sorry everything’s so crazy and not very appetizing, and he nods and flinches as something else crashes to the floor and shards of whatever broke fly across the room and the older kids scurry to pick them up before the baby crawls over and puts them in her mouth.

We fill our plates and go out into the yard and sit in relative peace among baskets and baskets of potatoes and piles of car parts and a goat who keeps looking over at us and making a hacking sound. The husband rushes out with a raw potato in his mouth and starts rebuilding an engine.

“If you want something nice, you’ve got to get it for yourself,” he says around the potato. “I want a generator for my family. Lights at night. A fan in the summer. And I’m getting them!”

“Honey!” the wife yells from inside. “Come get the cat off the baby. It’s trying to eat her bib.”

“Coming, sweetie!” the husband yells, and grins and shrugs at us. “It’s always something. But I’ve got to give it everything I got. That’s my mission. My place in life. My calling. I’m no warrior. I’m no lover. I’m a plodding dad, plain and simple. But I love it!”

He sprints towards the house and trips on a bit of fence he’s been mending and falls directly into a rosebush.

“Ah well!” he says as he pulls himself out. “Nobody said it was going to be easy. And this is definitely not easy. Wow. These thorns sure hurt. But hey. You’ve got to get up and keep on going. You snooze, you lose. Ouch. Yikes. Concentrate, concentrate.”