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

I get up and start jogging towards the trees.

Gene begs me to come back and swears that if it weren’t for his aching goiters he’d teach me a lesson about ingratitude by beating my brains out. I cut across a granite ledge and drop into a canebrake. I hear Gene shouting to Ventor. Then there’s a gunshot and some dirt kicks up at my feet and a little pine splinters to my left.

Free again, for what it’s worth.

That night I sleep in a ditch. I dream that Mom’s stroking my hair while reading me a comic book. I wake at dawn in the middle of a street market. There are jugglers and men expertly carving up big dogs and a few feet away from me a tall balding Normal selling pancakes from a cart. A couple of militia teens walk by with an entourage of eight Flaweds and a weeping Normal farmer.

“What did he do, boys?” asks the pancake guy. “If you don’t mind me asking.”

“Educated his Flaweds,” says one of the teens. “Let them read whatever they liked. Now they’re so educated they don’t listen for shit and we have to keep whacking them.”

“Yeah,” says the other. “They want to debate every little point.”

“No we don’t,” says a Flawed geezer, who promptly gets a gun butt in the midriff.

“So we burned down his farm,” says the first teen.

“Do I ever endorse the wisdom of that decision,” says the pancake guy. “You fellows are awfully youthful to be so insightful.”

“You should have seen Todd pouring gas on the beets,” says the first teen.

“I couldn’t believe how hard you kicked that one kitchen chick who was shrieking while crawling away,” says Todd.

“Chick was like shrieking at me,” says the first teen.

“Then she bites his leg,” Todd says. “I was like: Brad’s hating this. He thinks this sucks.”

“I was hating it,” says Brad. “I did think it sucked.”

“And yet you responded with remarkable restraint, by merely kicking her?” the pancake guy says. “I find that really, you know, great.”

“We were going to respond by doing her in the barn,” Brad says.

“But then the lieutenant comes up and goes no, because she’s a virgin,” Todd says. “I was like: dang.”

“I was like that too,” says Brad. “I was like: dang.”

“We were both like: dang,” says Todd.

“So we went out and wasted all the cows,” says Brad.

“Your delts looked so killer when you were slitting their udders,” says Todd.

“I’ll bet your delts looked killer as all get-out,” says the pancake guy.

“Then asswipe here started the barn on fire when he was supposed to be flamethrowing the ducks,” says Brad. “Lieutenant was pissed. Asswipe freaked.”

“I didn’t freak, I was bummed,” says Todd. “I was bummed because the lieutenant thought I was a dick.”

“You were a dick,” says Brad. “You were a dick and you freaked.”

“For my part,” the pancake guy says, “I doubt very much that you were either an asswipe or a dick, nor do you strike me as the type of boy inclined to freak, not that I’m trying to be difficult or contradict anyone.”

Then he tosses a pan of hot grease into the ditch and steps square on my chest and I start screaming bloody murder.

Brad puts his gun in my ear and drags me out.

“Congrats, dude,” he says to the pancake guy. “You just copped a free slave.”

“But I don’t want a slave,” says the pancake guy. “I can’t afford one. I can barely keep myself in batter as it is.”

“Tough bones,” says Todd. “The regs require local resale by the finder. And that’s you.”

“God forbid I should appear neurotic or recalcitrant, boys,” the pancake guy says, “but I have no idea where one sells a runaway slave.”

“Try Tanner’s,” Todd says.

“Tanner’s is a hoot,” says Brad.

“Ooh la la,” says Todd.

Tanner’s is a brothel in a former Safeway. A wiry Normal in a jogging suit is counting crates of condoms in what used to be Produce.

“Don’t tell me,” he says. “You’re in the mood for love.”

“Actually I’d like to sell this Flawed,” the pancake guy says, blushing.

“New flesh, Artie,” the wiry guy says, and a pudge with a stun gun steps out from behind the crates. “What do you think, son? Think he’d make a good addition to Staff?”

“You know exactly what I think, Dad,” says Artie. “I think that it’s not very nice, forcing someone to become a prostitute against their will.”

“Artie, sweet Jesus, why refer to our people as prostitutes?” the father says. “That’s not a fun term. That’s not a term that makes people want to let their hair down. That’s a sad term. That’s a term that, if anything, makes people want to put their hair back up, which means I eventually close up shop and you hustle your ass home from college sans degree. Sheesh. My son the philosophical sourpuss. Looks down his nose at my line of work but sucks up the tuition like it’s going out of style. Would it violate your principles too much to keep an eye on this guy for a few minutes, O Pure One? Think you could fucking manage that?”

“Fine, Dad,” Artie says. “Whatever.”

“We’ll be in my office talking price,” the father says, and steers the pancake guy into a former walk-in freezer now wood-paneled and decorated with framed posters of sweaty nude Flaweds sucking their fingers.

“Boy, I don’t envy you,” Artie says. “If you think Dad’s mean to me, you should see how mean he is to his whores. I mean his Personal Pleasure Associates. PPAs. You should see how mad he’ll get if he comes back here and finds you talking to me. He doesn’t go for the idea of his whores chatting with Normals. I mean, if you want to pretend to groan in ecstasy or compliment some John’s pecker, that’s fine, but just talking for the sake of talking, no, he doesn’t go for that. Which is exactly why I’m taking Physics at the community college. I’m getting out of the family business. Physics is hard. Really hard. But it’s not at all hard compared to helping Dad beat the snot out of some PPA for accidentally calling an AR a John. Dad makes us call them ARs. Affection Recipients. Are you going to be one of the PPAs who dresses up like a girl? Or one who gets gagged and bound? Do you know yet? I guess you wouldn’t. I hope you’re neither. You seem like a nice guy, so I’ll go out on a limb and say I hope you’re just a regular old whore.”

“Thanks,” I say.

“This one time Mack in Security had to stun-gun this AR for getting too rough with this fragile PPA named Kurt,” he says. “Mack told the AR, he said, look pal, you want to get rough, go to the Rough Room, there’s no need to brutalize a tiny PPA like Kurt. But by that time the AR had a big old hole in his neck courtesy of Mack and had forgotten all about Kurt. You’d be amazed what a big old hole in your neck will do to your sex drive. My point is, did Mack ever catch it from Dad on that one! You should have seen Dad burning a corresponding hole in Mack’s neck while I held poor Mack down. Did I like doing that? Of course not. But what was I supposed to do, contradict Dad in front of Mack? To tell you the truth, Dad scares me. I wouldn’t be surprised if someday he didn’t hold me down and burn a hole in my neck. Gosh, we probably shouldn’t be going on and on like this. If Dad comes back and hears us, you’ll get the pipefitters’ convention for sure. So we’d better stop talking.”

“Fine,” I say.

“Last year at the pipefitters’ convention Dad made this PPA named Earl wear a poodle suit,” he says. “That was one room I did not want to go into, except I had to, because Earl had forgotten his fake bone even though it was clearly marked on the Work Order. Last thing I wanted to see was Earl in a poodle suit going woof woof woof under a big pile of naked pipefitters, but I had my instructions from Dad, the heathen. After I dropped off Earl’s bone I went back to my room and studied Bernoulli’s equation while sobbing quietly. People look at me and think, he’s lucky, his dad’s Max Tanner the rich pimp, but I tell you it’s no picnic. Sometimes after writing a poem about the beauty of the stars I have to go around and change all the sheets. You think that’s uplifting? You think that kind of activity nourishes your sublime nature? Well it doesn’t, believe me.”