“Now you know why the fish get so fat these days,” I told Ben. “So you’re telling me the Caucus master plan is that we all sit tight here waiting for the government to announce that society is back to normal?”
“There’s no point in doing anything rash.”
I nodded across the lake at the distant hills. “You mean nothing rash like going out there and finding out for ourselves whether the country’s getting back on its feet again?”
“You know it’s too dangerous to leave the island.”
“You mean guys have left, but they never came back?”
“Sure, so why risk it?”
“Why risk it?” I hooked more wood-this time it was a window frame-and pulled it out of the water. “I figure we should satisfy ourselves that America, probably the whole world, has bellied up good and hard; then we can stop this pretense that one day the radio and TV stations will come back on air, and that the president’s going to announce everything’s hunky dory.”
“You don’t think it’s going to happen, Greg?”
“Do I hell. There is no president anymore. There is no government. They’re all dead.”
So we carried on. Ben being bright-eyed and optimistic. Me? Well, I was cynical as hell. Our nation, and every other nation, without doubt, was well and truly busted. Only the men and women of Sullivan, population 4800, were still locked down with a tungstenhard case of denial. USA’s A-OK? No way, amigo. USA’s DOA.
I liked Ben. He was one of the few guys in the town I could talk with. He was a year older than me at twenty. He liked the same music. He had the same sense of humor. When I first met him he seemed one of those super-intelligent people who towered over you and made you feel prickly, as if he were going to put you down the first time you opened your mouth and let slip you’re no Einstein. The first time we met was when the Caucus ordered him to show me ’round the island. I’d have been in Sullivan just a week at that point.
“Of course ‘island’ is a misnomer,” he’d told me as he drove through town in a Ford.
Misnomer? Christ, what kind of guy uses the word misnomer? I decided this bright-eyed student type with arms and a neck as thin as wires would only be my best buddy when hell developed icicles. And did you see that? I told myself as he fiddled with the car’s CD player. His hands shook like someone was running a couple of hundred volts through him. He could hardly push the buttons. His jerky fingers were all over the damn place. If he aimed to pick his nose he’d wind up with his finger in an eye. Probably not even his own.
“Calling Sullivan an island is a misnomer,” he was saying while prodding the buttons. “You probably saw as you came in, it’s connected by a narrow strip of land to the mainland. The only road into Sullivan runs along that. If anything, Sullivan is shaped like a frying pan, with the handle forming the isthmus connecting us to the mainland. Across there is the Crowther distribution center. All those warehouses used to supply Lewis-that’s the big town, over the lake. You see, in years gone by it was easier to transport food, gasoline and general goods into Sullivan by railroad, than ship them across the lake. The terrain around here’s pretty bad for a decent road system… across there is the power plant. There, the building with the tall silver chimney. We’re so isolated we’ve got our own generators.”
“They still work?”
“Absolutely. Years ago they found pockets of orimulsion under the island.”
“Orimulsion?” That was a new one on me; sounded like something to do with house paint.
“Orimulsion.” He tried flicking a bug away from his face. Those trembling fingers fluttered with the speed of batwings. “Orimulsion is a naturally occurring gas that’s highly inflammable. It’s no good for domestic use. Too corrosive. It’d rot your stove to crud inside twelve months. But it’s great for industrial use. What they did was bore down into the orimulsion pocket, then simply build the power plant over the top of it. That gas is good for twenty years yet.” The bug buzzed back and his damn fluttery fingers jerked up. He was steering with one hand now, and boy, those shakes. The car started flipping side-to-side on the street. A couple of kids on bicycles were pedaling the other way. “The Caucus… that’s the committee that governs Sullivan… they ruled that in order to eke out the orimulsion stock we shouldn’t squander electricity, so…” He tried flicking the insect from his face, only those trembling fingers were going all over the place. He even knocked the rearview mirror. And, Christ, those kids. They were going to be road meat in ten seconds flat. I flicked the bug against the windshield, where I crushed it under my knuckle.
“Good shot,” he said, then carried on, happily talking about what a brilliant job his hometown was making of what must have been the biggest disaster this side of Noah’s flood. “So they decided to ration electricity to six hours a day, running from six in the evening until midnight. You see, dark evenings are bad for morale, so if we keep the power going for lighting and home entertainment people can watch movies on tape and disk and so on.”
At last his trembling finger hit the play button. At that moment electric guitar sounds soared from the speakers. A driving bass pumped loud enough to shake the car.
“Hendrix!” He nodded to the rhythm as he drove. “This is gold.. . pure gold.”
We drove out of town and past fields where cows chewed their cud. He waved to a woman walking her dog. A rat-sized thing on the end of a leash that wore a tartan coat.
“That’s Miss Bertholly. She’s a big cheese on the Caucus.” He looked at me. “She’s a real iceberg in pants; don’t let her order you ’round.”
Then he flashed me a wide friendly grin. Something gave way inside me. I don’t know what. Because for the last few days I’d been wearing a face engraved out of granite, or as good as. I’d not cracked a single smile since I’d buried my sister and mom out on the bluff. Suddenly I felt this big object moving through me and didn’t know what the hell it was. Then it came out, and I was making this weird braying sound.
Jesus. I looked at myself in the rearview mirror that Ben’s jerky hand had knocked to face me. There I was with my black hair sticking up in wild spikes, my dark eyes glistening, and I realized I was laughing. It wasn’t as if Ben had said the wittiest line in the world. But it uncorked a hell of a lot of emotion pent up inside me. Now I was laughing so hard I thought my guts would rip out through my skin.
Ben looked at me with a grin. Before you knew it, he was laughing, too.
So roaring like a pair of madmen we cruised around the island that wasn’t really an island, while all the time Hendrix’s guitar blazed from the speakers like the cosmos itself had found its own voice and begun to sing.
After that I’d go out for a beer or two with Ben, or we’d hang out with a few like-minded souls.
Ben had one of these brains that people describe as lively and inquiring. He’d been hot as biology student. For months he speculated about the real cause of the “disease” that infected the bread bandits.
Often he’d air his ideas as I made my daily round, using a hook on the end of a twenty-foot pole to haul driftwood from the lake. I’d leave it there on the shore in piles, then either me or old Mr. Locksley would roll up in the truck and haul it back to my cabin, where I’d cut it up for firewood.
“Greg,” Ben once said to me, “you know that scientists never did find bacteria or a virus that could be attributed to the disease?”
“What?” I said, half listening as I hauled branches out of the water. “You mean old Jumpy?”
“Jumpy.” He grinned. “That’s it, give a terrible disease a comical name and it doesn’t seem half so bad, does it?”