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

“Nice people,” says one of the nuns.

“Charming,” says another.

Then an old man brings us each a cup of cocoa and a questionnaire, which we fill out by candlelight to the sound of coyotes.

In the morning the old man shakes me awake and leads me to Judith’s tent. Judith’s sitting outside, wearing fatigues and hair rollers and sipping coffee.

“Good morning,” she says. “Welcome to freedom. I’d like to take a few minutes to tell you a little about our operation, if I may. Please have a seat.”

I sit at her feet and she gives me a cup of coffee and a sugar packet and some creamer.

“Stole these on a recent raid,” she says. “A little indulgence. In general, however, our resources are rather scarce. So, after a liberation, the rescued Flaweds are basically on their own. Your cavemates of last night, for example, have been sent stumbling out across the canyon in their high heels with five dollars each, regrettably still wearing their habits, because we have no budget for clothing. It kills me, but it’s all we can do to replenish our ammo and buy eggs from sympathetic farmers, much less subsidize jeans for liberated whores. Which brings me to you. I understand that you saved Mitch’s life by stun-gunning a Normal. That was impressive. That took guts. That implies to me that you may be a fantastic potential guerrilla. What do you say? Have you ever considered joining the movement?”

In truth I didn’t even know there was a movement. At Bounty Land we had Maurice Rabb, a malcontent who advocated armed Flawed rebellion. Then one day he tried to burn off his Flawed bracelet and ended up with a scorched wrist and a demotion to Porcine Reproductive Services. I’d often see him in the Birthing Barn, elbow-deep in pig afterbirth, still arguing the merits of a separate Flawed state. I tell her my story. I tell her I’m not joining anything until I find out what happened to Connie.

She removes her stump and hands me a Danish with a perfectly good hand.

“Surprise, surprise,” she says. “Step inside a sec.”

Inside the tent are pictures of Lincoln and Che Guevara and an extra-large Baggie stuffed with spare fake stumps.

“Here’s the thing,” she says. “I’m Normal. Never even had a bracelet. A few years ago I looked at the movement, or what passed for a movement, and said to myself, this is no movement, this is a bunch of uninspired yahoos waiting to be led to the slaughter, except that their moribund leadership couldn’t locate the slaughter if the slaughter sent up flares. So I invented a myth and invested in some fake stumps. I stopped being Lynette, a shy debutante with no marital prospects, and became Judith, the one-handed scourge of north Texas. Now every month or so I disappear and go to the bank in Lubbock and hit my trust fund and come back with a couple grand and a wild story about robbing a convenience store or seducing a senator. Is that wrong? Is a lie told in the service of good still reprehensible? These are the types of questions I ask myself every night as I apply antifungal to my hand, which is prone to infection due to these cheap stumps. But your people respect me. They work hard for me. Some have died for me. For themselves, actually, and for you, and for Connie. Ask yourself this: if you’d go through all you have to save your sister, what would you do to save a million sisters? Imagine a Connie in every town you’ve passed through, Connies of all ages, babies in cribs, bitter crones, pigtailed girls, children yet unborn. You could help give them dignity, a chance at careers, children, homes, husbands, peaceful dotages. Isn’t that something to work towards? Wouldn’t that be a way of honoring Connie’s memory?”

Her memory? I think. She’s not dead. At least I don’t think she’s dead. She may be a high-volume whore in some frontier brothel but she’s not dead.

“I can see in your eyes that you’re still mired down on the petty personal level,” she says.

“I guess so,” I say.

“Regrettable,” she says, then hands me a pocket atlas and a bag of apples and tells me mum’s the word on her stump and waves me out of the tent.

I start walking. I sneak through sleeping Amarillo and swing north through ranch country. I hear freights clanking and barbed wire humming in the wind. I see cows asleep on their feet and families of lunatics living in overturned semis. By Clayton the apples are gone and I hurry through Mt. Dora and Grenville and Capulin with a growling stomach. I eat from Dumpsters, I gnaw flowers, I find a dead deer and stuff my pockets with what I can tear off. There are orange lights in ranch windows and bikes propped against willows. There are well-tended gardens and little dresses on clotheslines and once I hear a man on a ladder say Love me? and a woman in a tire swing answer Always. I wish I was Normal. I wish I lived here and could whistle my kids in from the yard as the rain made sweet homish clangings in my gutters. Instead I shiver behind a former diner and heave rocks at wild dogs and start bits of trash on fire so I can read my atlas. I limp through Raton and Cimarron and Ute Park and my mind starts to slip with hunger and the mountains speak to me in cowboy accents of the ore within them and one morning I straighten up from a gut cramp to find I’m standing in front of a sign, and the sign says: TAOS.

I eat what’s left of the deer, for strength, and start down.

I get directions from some Flaweds baling hay in a meadow. I start up a dirt path. There’s an orchard where they promised an orchard and a stream where they promised a stream. I crawl under some of Corbett’s barbed wire, then walk through his cows and ducks and goats, practicing a little speech as I go: I know you sold her, I’ll say, but I want you to know who it was that you sold. She was funny. She was thoughtful. She loved jigsaw puzzles and could do a one-arm pull-up and once saved a rabbit from a flooded culvert. She could have given you so much if you would’ve been man enough to accept her, but instead you deceived her and used her and turned her out for a lifetime of misery. And you’ll pay. You’re paying already. Because she could be here now, conferring grace on this place and on you, who could have been her savior but instead chose to be her executioner.

After that I don’t know what I’ll do.

The house is huge. I take a deep breath, then hop a redwood fence and land in a bed of tulips. All around my face are colored bobbing pods. There’s a wet bar near a satellite dish and a trampoline near a pool.

Sitting in a rattan chair is Connie, big as a house.

Pregnant.

I look at her. She looks at me. She leaps to her feet and we do a happy little dance around the yard and Corbett steps out from behind a shrub with a croquet mallet and says that what five grand in detective fees couldn’t deliver, destiny has.

Then we have lunch.

Over soup he asks if I want a job in Grounds. I say sure. Next morning he gives me a Walkman and some pruning shears. Soon I’m an old hand. I dust roses and trim shrubs and mow lawns. On my lunch breaks I read. The Bounty-Land library had a few Hardy Boys and a Bible with fallacious pro-slavery sayings of Christ pasted into the Sermon on the Mount, but Corbett’s got everything. I read Epictetus and Frederick Douglass and Bobbo Schmidt, a Flawed Louisiana poet thrown off the Pontchartrain bridge for impregnating his Normal lover. At night Connie and I have long talks, remembering Dad’s aftershave and Mom’s lasagna, the swell of the hill in our yard, the names of neighbors and the voices of friends.

One night I ask her what she sees in Corbett.

“He’s good to me,” she says, eyes down. “I’m safe. It’s not so bad.”

Who am I to judge? She’s here in front of me, not off suffering somewhere, not starving, not in agony, and for that I’m glad.