“Robbers?”
“We live by our wits,” an older woman said. “You’ve heard of the Destructuralist Movement?”
I had indeed. They believed that there should be no social structure beyond the extended family. Even tribes were too much for them. “Destructuralists tried to burn the Dallas Civic Center.”
“That was us,” the girl said simply.
No wonder they had left Texas. “People were outraged.”
“People are addicted to social structure. Warday has given us a historic opportunity to break the boundaries of social control. To be free.”
“We can’t rebuild the economy without social structure,” Jim said.
The faces around him went hard. I wondered if we might not be arguing for our lives here. I hoped that he realized it. “We don’t need the damn economy,” a man said, his voice full of bitter sarcasm. “The economy’s worse than an addiction, it’s a curse!”
“People are dying because the economy’s in such a mess,” I said. “At the rate of two hundred and fifty thousand a month, to be exact. That’s about eight thousand a day. Nearly a hundred just since we started this conversation.”
“You’re real smart,” the girl said.
“I’m a human being. I love other human beings.”
“People are dying because nature is rebalancing the earth’s ecology.”
“They’re dying because of Warday.”
Another voice intervened: “Rice’s ready!” This was a lean young man with bright gray eyes and a dusting of beard. People lined up before a big stainless-steel pot. They carried their own utensils. Each was given a smallish serving of rice topped with cooked soybeans. I thought of my lunch with Hector Espinoza. In fact, I longed for it. I still do. I would give a lot for another taco as crunchy and perfectly seasoned as that one, full of juice and chicken, just the other side of hot. The rice and soybeans were a pitiful meal. It reminded me of the famine, and made me feel frightened.
The sun was making long shadows when we were finished. I sensed that Jim was as eager as I to get away from this place.
When I die, I want to be given the grace to go for a good reason. I didn’t want to die to serve the frustrations of some very unhappy and confused people.
“We have a vision,” the girl said, “of a true Jeffersonian society in America. This could be a nation of farmers, where everybody is self-sufficient and God-fearing, and the family is the center of things.” Her voice rose. “I had a family, you guys! I had a little girl. She was taken from me by heathens. She was taken for no good reason, and she was killed out in the backyard by people who had decided that my family no longer belonged in Roswell, New Mexico.”
A man put his hand on her shoulder. She turned and kissed him in what seemed to me a private way. “We all lost people,” he said.
“That’s why we come together. This is a family.”
Another voice was raised. “If you’re writers, write that another world like the world we had before Warday is going to mean another war. We have to change. We have to turn aside from the hypnosis of politics and the addiction of vast economic systems that eat this beautiful planet and spit out garbage. We need to turn to one another instead. What counts is the person in bed beside you, and your children, and the people next door. The rest is all addiction and hypnosis and more Wardays.”
My impulse was to try to comfort them, to make all the horror and the suffering of the past few years go away. But I couldn’t do that. All I could do was eat their poor meal and look across their fire at them.
The girl with the gun sighed. “Okay,” she said, “here’s what’s gonna happen.” She nodded at Jim. “You’re gonna go wherever you’re goin’. But you aren’t sending anybody after us, like from Texas.” She put her free hand on my shoulder. “You’re stayin’ here for a while, just to make sure he doesn’t send anybody.”
I felt the blood drain out of my face. I really did not care to end up trapped in the worst place we had thus far encountered. What would they do with me? Lock me up in one of those stifling, filthy, derelict buses?
“Three months,” Jim said.
“Six.”
“Let him go in three months. If you don’t, I’ll assume he’s dead and tell the Texas police where to find you.”
“Four months.”
“Four.”
With that, Jim got up. I was appalled. Apparently he proposed to just leave it like this. I was going to spend four months with this bunch. “I’m triaged,” I shouted. “I gave up precious time with my own family for the book we’re writing. You can’t take even more of my time, not if you love the family the way you say you do.”
“We didn’t invite you here.”
Jim turned without a word and walked to the road. He soon disappeared toward La Mesa. At that moment I hated him.
I screamed after him. I flung my empty plate at his departing shadow.
“You’re lucky it didn’t break,” the girl said. “You’d have to figure out how to mend it. And we don’t have a lot of glue.”
A great woe overcame me. I was facing four pointlessly wasted months. “I swear to you, I’ll keep your secret.”
“The Texans would kill us.”
“I’m not even going in that direction! I’m on my way west.”
“California’s just as dangerous. Radical Destructuralists have been executed there.”
How odd that the terrorists of our time would hate authority but believe in what used to be its core symbol, the family. The old anarchists would have been very confused by these people. But, in a way, they made sense to me. I could understand their dream of a peaceful, agricultural America, where the horizon ended with the next farm.
I could see something more than violence and rage in these people. They weren’t just inept terrorists or starving road people or fanatics. They had their wounds too, like all of us. And because of that, I could make a case for tolerance and understanding.
As soon as night fell, the camp went to sleep. As we have all found out, it takes a high level of nutrition and lots of artificial light to keep human beings awake after sunset. They were still like the rest of us were during the famine—dead to the world as soon as the sun went down.
I heard the wet rhythm of sex in the shadows, and sensed stirring here and there in the silence. Birds made their evening calls as last light disappeared behind the Portrillos. Heat lightning flickered. A young woman’s voice, calm and pure, softened the murmuring of the children with a lullaby:
When Jim woke me in the middle of the night, I was at first astonished. But not enough, fortunately, to cry out. He can move more quietly than a shadow; he learned his moves in Asia. We had gone together in the jungles of hate; escaping this camp of exhausted, sleeping people was not difficult.
“They might have killed us if they’d seen us,” he said, once we were out on the Las Cruces highway.
“I know it,” I said.
Desert nights are always cold, and that one was no exception.
We walked north for hours. No cars passed. Toward morning we came into the little town of Mesquite. A neon sign and three pickup trucks identified an open diner. We had American-style eggs and bacon, and big mugs of coffee.
“Is this New Mexico or Aztlan?” I asked the waitress.
She laughed. “You guys hitching up from ’Cruces?”
“El Paso.”
“Well, you’re out of Aztlan. It peters out between La Mesa and here. Just past where the Japs are doin’ their uranium mining.”