This unit, made up almost entirely of new recruits, orphans, and people forced into duty by the leaders, had been sent forward to make sure the road was safe, but right now the boys were sitting along a ditch. Actually, to be accurate, they were sitting in the ditch and telling stories to one another—trying to impress each other with their toughness, their readiness to do whatever it takes—the way teenaged boys will.
They didn’t notice at first when the two yellow suits rode up on bikes.
Sometimes life can go by like a stream of details in a narrative. Page after page, the stream of time pushes through, gathering force. The details can be like brushwork on a painting, the buildup of the paint. Or like the fingers at the keyboard, the wastebasket full of crumpled ideas. The drink of scotch, the scratch of a head, the scratching out of ideas on pads of paper. The pushing in of soil around the roots. The coming of spring. All this is done in the pursuit of art. Beauty, and Art. Which are to enliven and protect life. Because the point of all this is to enliven and protect life. To live, that is, in the here and the now. To live thoroughly and authentically. To live in nature. To walk out under the stars like Whitman and look up in the silence and take it all in.
Veronica was thinking these things as they pedaled along.
It is really very simple,Veronica thought. The point is to live–and to keep living.
Hear that, she told herself.
The point is… to live.
Veronica and Stephen had no idea what they were riding into because all they could see was white and even more white. Patches of field spread out across their view in the moonlight, enhancing the panorama with its breathless series of farms and fields. It looked like an Amish quilt. The fields of white were intercut with black segmenting lines that ran their way around the edges of the farms. Veronica and Stephen were simply riding along enjoying the cool night air, weaving down another mile of long, thin ribbon.
At first Veronica didn’t even see him. The man simply stepped out into the roadway and held up his hand. It was probably his rifle she saw first. Slung over his shoulder the way it was, it hung across his body, intersecting his torso, pointing up at right angles to the nighttime sky. She had just begun to focus on the rifle when she felt herself motioning to Stephen to stop. She began to search for the pistol she had strapped to her bike.
That’s when a gang of bandits descended on them from all sides.
Calvin Rhodes also cruised along the stream of time. He also drove on his ribbon of highway, stringing up and down the rolling hills and stretching plains and backwood hollers and the ancient farmland of This Great Country (That’s the way he’d always heard it said where he’d grown up. This Great Country.)
The countryside he’d passed through was some of the richest farmland in the world. He passed mile after mile through the Piney Woods, then through the Ozarks, and through West Virginia coal mining country, into Pennsylvania. He drove into that state’s coal country and then dropped southwards along the state’s border, and into what is perhaps the best farmland of all.
But before that—along the way—along the seemingly interminable stretch of highway that is Tennessee, he’d stopped at one of his checkpoints.
“I knew yer daddy. He was a good man.”
That was all the man had said to him. Then the man leaned into the window and shook Calvin’s hand. He told Calvin that now he ought to have enough gas to get him to his next stopover.
“Tell Mr. Wall, when you see him, that Lem said hello.”
Calvin nodded solemnly, and the old man put his foot on the kickboard and made a motion with his arms like he was slinging the truck outward into space, throwing his arms out, as if to say ‘on your way!’
Everyone, it seemed, knew Jonathan Wall. Everyone who was helpful at a time like this had read Mr. Wall’s books.
Calvin pulled out along the winding road and out to the county highway, and the adventure continued.
He thought about home as he drove along. He thought about that word. Home. He thought about Texas. Then he thought about his dad. He’d always had a kind of fluid identity. Maybe his dad had passed that on to him. Mostmen are, he thought, fluid beings. They either bend with the times, or they are of the sort that shape them. His mind had wandered, and he wondered whether he was a “home is where you hang your hat” kind of guy. Then he thought again about the man who’d sent him on this journey, Mr. Wall. Jonathan Wall was a man who shaped the times. His name described him more than anything else did. Everyone of any import in this new world knew Jonathan Wall because Mr. Wall was the man who’d said that all of this would happen. He was the man who, in his books, told people to expect it and to prepare.
The rolling hills and the beautiful trees and the quiet of the nighttime sky whizzed by, and they all could have been waves on the ocean for all Calvin noticed them. He was riding on a train of thought down a track.
He watched the road ahead of him the way a person who is getting sleepy watches the road. In a daze. That is perfectly understandable. It is in the nature of things.
Because it was midnight, and Calvinwas, in fact, getting sleepy.
CHAPTER 31
The lamps from Calvin’s old Ford pickup threw a distinct pair of spotlights onto the roadway. They were not centered on the stripe, aiming at some unified middle distance. They simply pointed straight forward out onto the roadway just in front of him, but only just in front. Headlights are one of the things that did, indeed, improve over time.
The Ford’s lights only revealed the world in stages. They lit up each successive field of vision only a slight… bit… further… ahead. Having driven mostly by instinct for an hour, flying mostly blind, Calvin was blurrily staring out into the dark of the night. He was looking into the space that the lamps lit least. They shone out as if they were spotlights on a stage. They pointed downward from the balcony onto the stage of his life, which, right now, was the roadway. Seated in that balcony, he was only a spectator.
In the two globules of light, spread out and amplified by the white of the snow, framing the shot, were two yellow suits fighting for their lives.
They were fighting as if they wanted to live.
Calvin saw them but he did not know, at first, what to make of them. It was a surreal vision. They were off in the further distance, just on the wings of the stage. The scene, gathering light, only came slowly into view. There were two groups of men. Boys, really. Fighting with the suits, trying to get them into several trailers or wagons parked along the road. The yellow suits were struggling to escape from their captors. The taller of the suits was reaching backwards, toward something lying in the road.
Calvin can almost make it out. He can almost see what the thing is laying in the road. It is coming into his headlights. And then he is upon it. The miles and the yards and the feet… and the inches. They all flew by him. He came to a dead, forward, thrusting standstill.