Leaving Tawrny’s and the cool palm of the AC, the evening heat claps around you. You walk the three miles back to where you’re staying, past the elementary school, shut down as budget cuts grip the state. Garbage service stopped last month, and there’s trash piling up everywhere, scattered in the streets and drenched in the setting sun’s final fiery rays.
The old Walmart doesn’t have its lettering or its little sunburst logo anymore. What it has are cars and trucks parked haphazard, paying no mind to the paint carving up the lot, folks mostly being polite and trying not to block anyone else in. A couple of women push shopping carts of scavenged essentials toward the front entrance. Crows circle the building and never stop cawing. They alight on the rim of the roof in pairs and triads, watching for food scraps or chipmunks. Because of the heat, someone has pried the glass doors of the store open and pointed huge fans outward, a setup meant to suck out the hot air. There was enough juice from the solar panels to keep the lights on, but not enough to power the AC. When you were still living in the trailer, the power was blinking in and out every few days as grids buckled. You make your way into the store, where the air is at least a few degrees cooler. At the checkout counter by the entrance, the “neighborhood watch” fellas recognize you, nod, and let you pass. Then you’re into what was once the Home and Fashion sections. Some folks have nice big tents and others have used the aluminum shelving, tarps, rugs, and linens to create private spaces. Others have simply pulled mattresses or sleeping bags into cluttered corners and put up handwritten signs with their surnames to mark their space. Neighborhood watch tries to keep order and adjudicate disputes, but there’ve been outbursts about folks stealing or jerking off too loud. You pass a family of four wearing VR headsets they hastily charge when the power is working. They all stare silently at whatever hallucination is in front of them.
You make your way back to Sporting Goods and Toys, where Raquel and Toby are reading from a children’s book outside your spot. You have two tents, a bigger one that you and Raquel share, and a little lime-green pup tent for Toby. Just beyond the tents you have a couch, a cookstove, microwave, and a dining room table and chairs arranged on a piece of carpet. You had a small refrigerator, but the power kept going in and out, and after a while it wasn’t worth it. Everyone now keeps their perishables in the walk-in freezer behind the Deli because even with the failures, as long as no one opened the door, it could stay cold long enough. A few guys who had some engineering know-how said that if they could scavenge a dozen home battery systems, they might be able to keep the juice on 24/7, but that was still a project in the making.
“ ‘His eyes snapped open,’ ” Raquel signs the words for Toby while he holds the book, reading the hands of his mother and then off the page, “ ‘and there were these things about himself that he knew, instantly.’ ”
You stand there watching them read. Toby’s hearing aids stopped working a year ago, and you haven’t been able to afford a new pair. You’ve held on to them, hoping you can find someone to repair them, but he’s managing. Worse was his asthma, and when you were close to getting kicked out of the trailer, he finally got an attack so bad, you thought he might die. He was writhing on his bedroom floor, clawing at his throat, eyes bulging, and you and Raquel couldn’t calm him or get him to take a sip of water. She’d wailed and begged you to call an ambulance, but you both knew it was pointless. By the time they got there, it would either be over or Toby really would die, and either way, you’d owe so much money on the bill you’d never get out from under it. You couldn’t live in the trailer anymore. There was this thing called photochemical smog, Raquel said, and it was coming from the plant across the river. Mix that with ragweed season and hay fever, and Toby was lucky to go more than a couple days without his throat swelling shut. That’s when Casey told you about the abandoned Walmart, how people getting booted from their homes were just moving in there and the cops weren’t doing a thing about it.
Toby sees you and sets the book aside. He hops off Raquel’s lap and runs at you full speed, leaping to high-five your outstretched palm. He manages to smack it at the top of his jump, a big goofy grin on his face, missing as many teeth as you, as the babies fall out and the adults push in. He quickly signs: You’re sweaty.
And you sign back, Do you want a hug?
No way.
One hug, Ogre. You snatch him into your sweat-soaked T-shirt. He shrieks and writhes away. When he frees himself, he goes diving into his tent to escape you.
“They got the doors open,” you tell Raquel, who closes the book and sets it on the table. “We’re gonna get more raccoons, probably rats too.”
“It’s too hot with the doors closed,” she says. “They got to do something.”
Toby emerges from his tent, splashing through the toys and books he sleeps with.
Read to me, Dad?
But you have to decline. You tell him you need a shower from the jerry-rigged setups in the Garden section that use sun to heat jugs of water. You’ll go stand under one, depress the lever, and feel the day’s journey wash away. Before you head over, towel in hand, Raquel asks you where you’ve been.
“Possible I might got a line on some work,” you tell her. “Possible.”
You feel better about the Walmart than the trailer you had to yourselves, not only because of Toby’s asthma but because you felt exposed there, not just to photochemical smog but any hard storm or the cruelty of an addict desperate for a score. Then that mythic beast you hear so much about, the economy, falters, and suddenly everyone is scared, and when people are scared they evict and they foreclose. You remember it from when you were a kid, when your mom lost the only piece of property you ever cared about. You remember it from when the pandemic hit, and you got booted from your apartment and spent a year sleeping on Casey’s sticky leather couch. Then the heat descended early in the spring with uninterrupted weeks of searing triple digits. The relentless summer has made people relentless. Not just the folks collapsing from heatstroke, but the break-ins and the muggings, the women assaulted in parking lots, the stabbings, the shootings, the arsons, a new house burning every week with a fire department too stretched to get there before the structure is ashes. Not enough cops left to do anything about it, and so the militias start coming through. You see them in their pickups, flying the Cerberus flag, guns on their laps, pretending to interview crime victims or provide “security” at angry town hall meetings. People are joining up like never before. Better to be the bully than the bullied.
Which is why when you move into the Walmart and find space beside identical twin old-timers you feel a measure of relief. Pierre and Kelly are rusty old fuckers, same squinty eyes and willow-white hair. Same taste in plaid shirts and overalls. One with a handlebar mustache, the other with a long beard. They lived on the same farm in Plainfield since they were children but are now residents of the abandoned Walmart, and the first day your family moved in, Pierre (of the handlebar) whittled Toby a small horse from a block of wood. Then they shared dinner with you, porkchops grilled in the Home and Garden section, with sides of red-skin potatoes and applesauce. Finally, Kelly (of the beard) took you aside and asked, “You got protection?”
“Can’t. My parole.”
“Who gives a rip?” He opened his plaid to show off a fearsome revolver, maybe a .357, in an underarm holster. “Rules are different now, brother.”