On the National Radio two years ago, we heard the Surgeon General report on the studies done on survivors of lost expeditions, polar and mountaintop sorties. The thing of it was that you could stay alive a phenomenal length of time on almost nothing if you did almost nothing, counting talking and singing. Which sent communication and melody back into the crapper.
The Surgeon General said you had to be sure whatever food you were after surpassed in calories the effort getting it would burn up. Don’t run after a clump of celery, for example. Chewing celery takes more calories than eating it gives you. But cockroaches, moths and butterflies will come to you and can be caught and ingested with a bonus of calories and protein. Wash the cockroaches if possible, the Surgeon General said.
We were chewing on our rutabagas and radishes when this came out and we considered it all laughable, radical over-science for the ghettos above the Mason-Dixon.
That was in the days of cheese.
Then all the blacks started returning to the South, walking. Five thousand of them came through Maryland, eating three or four swamps around Chesapeake Bay, stripping every leaf, boiling and salting all the greenery in huge iron cauldrons they pulled along on carts.
Those blacks hit Virginia and ate a senator’s cotton plantation. People started shooting at them, and some of the nigs had guns themselves.
It was a bloodbath.
There were rumors that the blacks cooked their own dead and that you could see that’s where their strength was coming from.
When the walking poor of Chicago went through the fields of southern Illinois, over to Kansas, down through Missouri, this sort of thing was avoided. All of America knew about the Virginia horror, and steps were apparently taken among leaders to prevent its recurrence. The radio announcers urged all the walkers to spread out, don’t go in large groups. The vegetation of America would feed everybody if all the Resettlers would spread out.
This was good advice, unless you spread out on somebody’s acres.
The South was filling up with railroad people from the big defunct hives in the North. Theoretically, everybody could have his own hundred-foot-square place. But too many came back to the South. There were five million Resettlers in Atlanta, they say. Atlanta is very sorry that it prospered as a railhead. The mayor, a Puerto Rican with his Chinese wife, abdicated, leaving everything to the wardens and the stateside CIA.
Everybody is quiet. No more music or talking or needless exertion.
Crowds everywhere are immense and docile.
We hear it on the radio.
“They all look at this place covetously, those air-riders,” says Mrs. Neap. “Poor souls.”
You also had the right to kill anybody who jumped off the train into your yard. An old coroner might come by on his bicycle and stare at the body for a while, letting off a few platitudes about the old days. Like as not, a town officer, usually a nig or Vietnamese, appears and digs a hole three feet deep and prods the body over into it. This is slow going because the man will eat every worm, every grub, every spider and juicy root he upturns with his spade.
Even Mrs. Neap’s run-down house probably looks as if it has gunners at it. But it had no protection at all before we got here. I carry a knife.
The direly thin guy six and a half feet tall who melted into the dawn fog with his bow and arrow before anybody got up and returned at evening with almost all his arrows lost and not a goddamn ounce of meat to show — to be fair, four blackbirds and a rabbit smaller than the hunting arrow-wanted you to think he was Slinking Invisible itself on the borders of our landhold, when the truth was he was miles away missing ten-foot shots on trifling birds and sticking his homemade arrows into high limbs where he couldn’t retrieve them.
He calls himself JIM, I mean loud and significantly, like that.
Says he knows the game world. When we walked up on that big wild turkey just before we found Mrs. Neap’s house, I watched that sucker fire off three different arrows at it. The turkey stood there just like the rest of us, unbelieving. At this point I sicked soft-spoken Vince on the turkey. Vince is so patient and soft-spoken, he could talk a snake into leaving his poison behind and pulling up a chair for stud or Go Fish, whatever you wanted to play.
Vince talked the turkey right into his arms.
Then came the last arrow from JIM.
It went through Vince’s hand and into the heart of the turkey.
We didn’t need this. You can’t get medical help. There’s nothing left but home remedies.
We started despising JIM right then and there.
But Vince’s hand healed and is merely unusable instead of gangrenous.
“My God, one of them jumped off,” says Mrs. Neap.
I saw. It was an Oriental.
He is wobbling on the gravel in front of the yard. I pull my knife. This close in to a town you have to perform the law.
But one of the wardens in the air-rider cages shoots at him — then the next one, who has a shotgun, really blasts the gook.
The guy lies down.
I couldn’t tell whether he went to the dirt before or after the gun blast.
Mrs. Neap kneels down with delicate attention to the dead man. With her cracked lens, she seems a benevolent patient scholar.
Mrs. Neap says, “He’s a handsome little man. We don’t need to call the coroner about him. Look at the muscles. He was well fed. I wonder why he come running toward the house. I guess he wanted to end up here. He chose,” says Mrs. Neap.
“I’ll get the bike and tell the coroner,” I say.
“I said not get the coroner. This is my property. Look. His head is across my legal property line,” says Mrs. Neap.
Say I, “Let’s push him back a few feet. Then he’s the city’s. There’s no reason for you to take the responsibility or cost of burying him.”
The old lady is intent. She’d been through the minor Depression in the thirties. She’d seen some things, I guess.
“Have you never?” says Mrs. Neap.
Her spectacles are flaming with the rising sun.
Say I, “Have I never what?” slipping my knife back into my hip scabbard.
“Eaten it?”
“It?”
“Human being.”
“Human being?”
“Neither have I,” says Mrs. Neap. “But I’m so starving, and Orientals are so clean. I used to know Chinese in the Mississippi delta. They were squeaky clean and good-smelling. They didn’t eat much but vegetables. Help me drag him back,” she says.
She didn’t need help.
She has the man under the arms and drags him at top speed over the scrub weeds and onto her lawn. Every now and then she gives me a ferocious look. There is a huge broken-down barbecue pit behind the house. I can see that is her destination.
I go up the front steps and wake up our “family.” Vince is already awake, his hand hanging red and limp. He has watched the whole process since the gook jumped off the train.
JIM is not there. He is out invisible in the woods, taking dramatic inept shots at mountains.
(To complete his history, when we move on, after the end of this, JIM kills a dog and is dressing him out when a landowner comes up on him and shoots him several times with a.22 automatic. JIM strangles the landowner and the two of them die in an epic of trespass.)