Greg Hrbek - Not on Fire, but Burning

A drive this long. Couldn’t make it without music. I am into the old, old stuff. I’m talking the Prophets of Grunge. The things you loved as a boy, you want them around you when you’re an old man. The Marvins, Black River, Dreamgarden. There was a lot of genius in that sound before it became the ear candy of the masses, and my pod is crammed full of it. Enough to get me all the way to Dakota.

I was out here once. I was probably eight or nine. Way before any of this shit came to pass, back when the interstates were free and open roads, my grandpa took me to the Badlands and the Black Hills to see Mount Rushmore. Along the way, we got off the highway and drove a frontage road and turned onto a rural route and there in the middle of a flat green plain was this thing like an empty lot surrounded by a chain-link fence with a sign: NO TRESPASSING — USE OF DEADLY FORCE AUTHORIZED. We walked right up to the fence. “There’s nobody here,” I said.

“They’re underground. Maybe two members of the USAF.”

“Can they see us?”

“Dunno.”

“What’s that,” I said, pointing to a metal dome that looked like the access hatch of a submarine.

“That slides open,” my grandpa said. “Before launch.”

“So the missile is under there.”

“Correct.”

He had a book with maps that showed where all of them were. In the car, on the way west, I paged through it. The black spots symbolizing the silos were everywhere, spread all over the Territories; and in each of those places, buried under the ground and waiting for a time to emerge, was a weapon powerful enough to set an entire city on fire. That day, we made it to Mount Rushmore in time to see them turn on the lights. It was dusk. In the gray-shaded distance, you could just barely make out the outlines of the monument. Then the spotlights came on and the four faces on the mountain took on the complexions of gods.

He is about four hundred miles shy of Dakota, just west of the Quad Cities when a National Guard Humvee overtakes him. He pulls patiently to the shoulder of westbound I-80 and turns down the music and waits while a soldier in desert camouflage approaches the window, cradling his M-16 like a newborn …

“Where you going, sir?”

“Dakota Reservation.” He hands the passport, last stamped at Crossing No. 6, through the window.

“Dakota Res.”

“Yes.”

“Now why the fuck would you wanna go there?”

“I’m adopting a detainee.”

The reservist looks at him. “William Banfelder,” he says, reading from the passport.

“That’s me.”

“You’re seventy years old.”

“Seventy-one.”

“I’m going to have to run you through the system.”

Will smiles.

“Something funny about that?”

“Third time since yesterday. But it’s all right, I understand. I ran convoys in Gulf War III.”

The soldier’s eyes go skeptical. But then he asks Will, in a tone of respect, to sit tight for a minute. Recedes in the side view mirror. On either side of the highway: post-harvest Iowan fields; flat as the world was once believed to be; no less brown and bleak than the deserts of the Middle East. Here and now, on this highway, the sun is ahead of him, lowering in the west, as it often had been on those highways, there and then — when you would blink as you drove into the fire of it, flipping down the tinted lenses of the sunglasses that every merc in-country swore by but seemed only to obscure and blur detail, like an advent of glaucoma, so you felt you weren’t seeing as sharply as necessary, like the time in the Forbidden Zone when you missed something at your ten o’clock which, only after the rocket had buzzed over the port bow of the Suburban, did you realize had been jihadists behind a berm with a shoulder launcher. So if you had been driving one mile per hour faster, if the berm had been ten meters closer … which is why later, drunk in that shithole of a base on the edge of the Zone, you had left that message (“I almost died today, Emm”), knowing she wouldn’t pick up and yet believing that she would call back; and when, day after day, she didn’t, your imagination supposed, The grenade actually hit us and you’re dead and hell is being in this war forever and thinking you can leave whenever you want and in truth you never will …

“Sir, you’re good.”

“Thanks,” Will says, taking his passport.

“You have a weapon?”

Will pulls back the curtain of his jacket. The Glock is holstered left of his heart. The reservist nods, and says: “You be careful out here.”

“I shall.”

“Don’t drive over anything.”

“Roger that.”

“Including roadkill. Other day, at the off-ramp for Iowa City, we found an old TS-50 in a prairie dog.”

And then he’s on his way again. North by northwest. Into the middle of nothing, through the dusty buttes that look so much like that Middle Eastern desert across which, forty years ago, he escorted the supply trucks of the coalition. He has thought long and hard about those days. About what happened over there and about his original intentions, which had been good; and yet what had come to pass — the things he got involved in, the things he did … Well, I have another chance now. Not that I’m trying to erase the past. No, that’s not the point. You hurt people, okay. The point is, can you bring things into balance before time runs out … Sun setting. On the passenger seat lie the papers, approved by Homeland Security and the Internment Authority. The boy’s photo is clipped to one corner. His name is Karim. Twelve years old. Hurricane of black hair; angry accent mark eyebrows. Born in Kerkook, Arabia. Family emigrated legally when he was three. A year later, the attack; and a few months after the attack, after the formal declaration of war, he became one of the million relocated to the wastes of the Territories: Nebraska and Montana and here, Dakota. His family was Sunni, and each member thereof — mother, father, sister — is listed as a casualty of sectarian conflict. Bullshit. A hundred thousand people dead on the reservations in the last seven years. A hundred thousand! Don’t tell me a hundred thousand dead by car bombs and suicide bombs and blood feuds. The whole thing has been systematic. Drone strikes and who knows what else. American government killing its own citizens … He has been eating sandwiches out of a cooler since the Proclamation Line, because highway food gives him the runs. But when he hits Sioux City, what does he see a sign for? A druggie-force craving hits him. Tendersweet Fried Clams and an Orange Sherbet. He curves along the exit, turns at the light, and there it is, all lit up in the gloaming, roof as orange as sherbet, perfect as a mirage: Howard Johnson’s.

Two days before the man arrived to take him away from the camp, six months after his mother and father and sister had been killed when a government drone launched two air-to-surface missiles into his block in the Sunni half of what had once been Mitchell, South Dakota, Karim got high for the last time with Hazem and Yassim in the ruins of the old abandoned palace on North Main. Carefully, he stabbed a needle into the last pea-size ball of opium they’d bought at the souk.

“Faster, Karim.”

“Chill out.”

“You chill out, mozlem.”

He picks up the disposable lighter. Flicks the striking wheel. Holds it a couple of inches below the drug.

The palace is made of corn. Well, not made of it exactly. But covered, outside and in, with multicolored ears of corn. It used to be a tourist attraction. The city would change the corn on the outside every year, make different patterns and patriotic pictures. That was before the government moved the people of Mitchell and built an electrified fence and put people like Karim inside it. By now, the corn has all been pecked away by birds or shot out with bullets. Not much left but bare cobs turned brownish-green. But the letters above the main entrance —MITCHELL CORN PALACE—have not completely faded; and the domes and minarets, painted green and yellow, still reach toward the sky over the plains, giving the building the look of a mosque from the old country.