Читать книгу Sharp and Dangerous Virtues - Martha Moody - Страница 8

a family and a place

HOWARD, AGE TEN, was doing a report on America’s two greatest natural wonders, the Heartland Grid and the Grand Canyon.

“The Heartland Grid’s not natural, son,” Chad said.

Howard gave his father an incredulous look. “It’s plants,” he said. “It’s how America feeds the world.”

North of Dayton, Ohio, where Chad and Sharis (“It rhymes with Paris,” she said) Gribble and their sons, Howard and Leon, lived, there was a polymer fence close to twenty feet high, a fence that went forever, surrounding a dedicated agricultural area of over fifty thousand square miles. The Grid was roughly the shape of a nine-by-twelve casserole. Intentional villages dotted its landscape, roads crisscrossing it at ten-mile intervals.

“We never fed the world,” Chad said. “We feed ourselves.”

“I have pictures of the Grid,” Howard said, undeterred. “Miss Bishop says her father went there. He was driving a truck and he picked up lettuces. Only one time, but he got to eat there. He said they had delicious coleslaw.”

“I’m sure all their food’s delicious. It couldn’t be fresher.”

“They won’t let you spend the night. They say they have too much work.”

Chad gave a noncommittal grunt. He didn’t believe that too-much-work line, not for one minute. He said, “The Gridians have always been clannish.”

Howard shot Chad a questioning look. “They stick together,” Chad said. “They live in special towns the government built for them. They don’t have visitors or talk with other people. They don’t even mo-com with people who aren’t them.” He searched his mind for an example. “Kind of like the Johnsons”—their next-door neighbors, an older couple with a grown son.

“They’re gone,” Howard said.

“What do you mean they’re gone?”

“The Johnsons moved out. Their house is empty. There’s furniture in there, but no car, and no more Johnsons! The Gilberts are gone, too.” Neighbors down the hill. “Atunde told me and Leon they were leaving. His mom said Atunde wasn’t supposed to tell anyone, but he knew we’d come by wanting to play.”

“When did this happen?”

“I don’t know. A few days ago. The Johnsons went first.”

Good Lord, Chad thought. He had heard of people leaving the city itself, but not suburban neighborhoods like theirs. He felt ill. He thought of the party at their neighbors George and Gentia’s a few weeks before. George had said they were sniggering idiots to stay, and Sharis, Chad’s own wife, had spoken up to say she wasn’t going to teach her kids to flee. “Dayton is our home, and we’re staying,” she had said.

“Have they told you much about the war in school?” Chad asked Howard now.

Howard looked confused. “You mean the trouble up north? Miss Bishop says it’s really far away.”

Chad had had, between the ages of about six and nine, a terrible fear of earthworms, not of the worms themselves but what they did. He imagined them writhing and burrowing underground, riddling the soil with tiny tunnels. A footstep in the wrong place might end up with Chad swallowed by the earth. His relatives would never know what happened.

“I mean the conflict. I mean …” Chad was filled with the prickling dread he used to feel when he was sent into his yard to fetch the paper. Parks and the schoolyard were okay—every square inch had been tested—but how could Chad trust his own lawn? “Want me to draw it for you?”

“Sure!”

“Good,” Chad said, relieved. Calm them both down. “Where’s Leon? Leon should hear this.” Leon was seven and had a personality as spiky as his hair. “What do you mean put my head on my pillow? I put my feet on my pillow!” And that was indeed how Leon slept.

“Leon!” Howard screamed. “Daddy wants you!”

Chad went to the kitchen desk drawer for a piece of paper and an old-fashioned pencil. “What’s up, Daddy-o?” said Leon. He lit up when he saw the paper and pencil in Chad’s hand.

Chad sat down at the big blue kitchen table and pulled out chairs for Howard on one side and Leon on the other. He drew a rounded rectangle wider than it was tall and decorated with appendages—Florida, Maine, Texas. “Okay,” he said. “So here we are”—he put an X denoting Dayton below the protuberance that was Michigan (the one entity he’d drawn accurately, he thought, because it looked like a mitten.) “And this whole country, all the U.S., used to be rich and happy and basically the center of the world.” To the right of his map, Chad drew a stick figure with a big head and smiling face. Not enough. He put a crown on top.

Chad’s father had been an upright, even boring, man, an auditor for American National Bank. But every morning before he went to work he waited with Chad and his brother at the school bus stop and a weird merriment exuded from him. It was only then that Chad’s father used The Voice.

“Oh, oh, you boys you are zee terror.”

Or: “Your boos driver, she look like a beeg potato.”

What Chad remembered most fondly of his father was The Voice. Chad hoped his own boys remembered him by his drawings.

“So that was then,” Chad said, waving at the stick man with the crown. “But then the U.S. got into wars, and then the economy went bad, and then the weather got all crazy—for example, you didn’t have hurricanes come inland like we do now—and there were new pests that ate crops, and before you knew it, it was the Short Times.” He drew an arrow from the figure with the crown to another figure below it, this one slumped and mournful. He sprinkled some tears down the page and put an upside-down crown at the figure’s feet. Howard and Leon laughed in delight.

Chad felt a pang at making jokes about these things. “But it was really bad, the Short Times,” he said. “It went on for years. People didn’t have enough food, and they got tickets for gas and electricity, and the health system got overwhelmed, and … Up in what used to be your mom’s old town there was an outbreak of rabies. You know about rabies?” Leon shook his head. “It’s a disease,” Chad said.

“From raccoons?” Howard asked, sounding pleased.

“Exactly.” To brighten the mood Chad started drawing a raccoon. “People were looking in the dump for food, and the raccoons that lived there bit them.”

Leon said, “That looks like a cat.”

“I made the legs too long.”

“Give him big teeth for biting.”

Chad did. Leon giggled.

“But it wasn’t funny, really,” Chad said. “It was terrible. I mean, I was a kid and I wasn’t worried, it was normal life, and then my parents died.” He immediately regretted mentioning this, but Leon seemed unperturbed.

“From raccoons?” Howard asked, his voice anxious.

“No, not from raccoons,” Chad said. “From pneumonia. Infections in their lungs. Don’t worry, that wouldn’t happen now. We have better antibiotics.”

Chad’s father, in fact, had died over thirteen years before, in February, two months before the announcement of the Grid. Chad’s mother died a month later. They were both fifty-four. People died then, during the Short Times. Doctors saw diseases they’d only read about: tuberculosis, measles, cholera. For people with only National Health Care, like Chad’s parents, there were shortages of antibiotics. Chad felt a certain gratitude for the timing of his parents’ deaths. Most people who’d had friends and relatives die during the Short Times found comfort in their loved ones’ unknowing. A death before the Grid was an innocent death.

“At any rate, it was bad,” Chad said, putting a big X over the raccoon. “People were desperate. This was the early thirties, and there were all sorts of ideas about how to get more food—that’s when people stopped eating meat, for one thing—and then the government destroyed a couple towns in Oregon”—he went back to his map of the U.S., drew a star near the left upper corner—“to set up this enormous farm and, well, that farm was terrifically productive, so the government looked for place to make a humongous farm.”

“And we have the best land right here in Ohio!” Howard cried. Chad wondered if he’d heard this from Miss Bishop.

“Can I go?” Leon said. “This is not what I’d call interesting.”

“No, Leon, you should hear this.” Chad turned to Howard. “Yes, Ohio has great land, flat and fertile and all that, but also this part of the country … The towns were dying and a lot of the land was owned by foreign companies, and the U.S. wanted to kick them out.” He drew a quick stick finger with one leg up, kicking. “See, Leon? See the man kicking? At any rate, parts of Ohio and Indiana and Illinois were what they picked for the big farm. And a little bit of Michigan.” Chad shaded the area. “So they moved all the people out of the towns, and the air force came in with these new disappearance bombs, bombs that basically turned things into dust …”

“What kind of things?” Leon asked. “People?”

“No, not people.”

“Raccoons?”

“No, Leon, nothing living, bombs that turned buildings into dust, okay? Just buildings. At any rate, then the government brought in soil people and irrigation people and road people and they built the Grid. A little over a year later we had food. It was amazing, really. You had to admire the technology.” He drew another stick figure, this one beaming. “That’s the woman who was president then. Brandee Cooper from Colorado, woman of action.” He added some hair.

“Char,” Howard said, using the latest complimentary term. Leon had lost interest. He had scooted his chair back and was bent over picking at a scab on his knee.

“Your mother was from a town up there,” Chad said. “Where the Grid is now. She grew up in one of the towns that was destroyed. They don’t say destroyed, they say reclaimed.”

“Is that why she doesn’t have parents?”

“Everyone has parents,” Chad said. “Even clones have parents. Well, at least one parent. But yes, that’s why your mom doesn’t have parents. They died during the Gridding. They weren’t killed, nothing like that.” He glanced quickly at Leon, the boy still engrossed in his injury: he had managed to free all but the very central portion of his scab. “It was their choice,” Chad said firmly, as if there were no reason to question it. He didn’t want Howard asking more questions. Sharis, years before, had said they should never tell the boys. “And, okay, so now we’re now and the Grid is great, it works, we eat, so everybody wants it.” Under the map, Chad drew a circle and divided it with several diagonals. “That’s a pie, see? The rest of the world wants a piece of that pie. Because they have their own Short Times now.”

Leon briefly examined the scab sitting on his finger, then popped it in his mouth. Chad decided to ignore this.

Howard said, “Atunde said the rest of the world is against us.”

“Not the whole world. Mexico’s on our side. And lots of countries are neutral. Europe, China, Australia. Look.” Chad turned the paper over and drew a big circle. He made some shapes for North and South America on the left and Europe and Africa on the right, letting Asia and Australia disappear over the globe’s right edge. “These places are against us.” He made big scowling faces out of South America and Africa. “They call themselves the Alliance.”

“Bye,” Leon said, jumping from his chair and heading out the back door.

The previous week, Chad and Sharis had attended a party at their neighbors’. People had been drinking and there was lots of loud conversation.

—For graduation! Sending them to Alabama for graduation! Like it’s just a trip.

—And normally she’s very organized, but after her office closed she …

—And the Calmadol! Ten doses a day at least, and now that you can’t get it on your health card, he …”

Sharis’s voice, in Chad’s mind, had been the only clear one. “I’m not going to teach my kids to flee. Dayton is our home and we’re staying.”

—You should hear our neighbor who’s in air force intelligence. There’s a lot of dissention in the Alliance we don’t hear about. He says the Africans hate the Suds.

—You want to be ruled by fear? Wumba Bumba to that African music!

“They aren’t Africans,” Sharis had said. “They’re regular Americans.”

Walking home with Chad, Sharis had spoken again about the Melano custodian in the church in downtown Dayton where she’d stayed the night after the Gridding. “Are you the light man?” she’d asked, and she saw again the worried concern on his face.

The door slammed behind Leon. Chad tried not to wince. “And then,” Chad said to Howard, “and this really, really upset people, Canada went against us. Canada, our neighbor to the north. “Here’s us”—Chad made a rough rectangle—“and here’s Canada.” He filled this in with angry crosshatches. “So that’s how the Alliance can get into Cleveland and threaten to capture the Grid. There’s Lake Erie up here”—this part of the drawing was getting crowded, so Chad did no more than tap the area—“and Cleveland’s on the south side of the lake and Canada is right across the water. So it’s handy for the Alliance to have Canada helping them. You know if our enemies got the Grid it would really change things.” Chad hesitated. “People can’t believe it about Canada,” he said.

Now Howard was looking bored, so Chad sketched another animal to the right of the globe.

“Is that a cow?” Howard said.

“No, no, no,” Chad said. He added a stick figure in a big hat to the back of his animal. “That’s a Canadian Mountie. A policeman on a horse. When I was a kid, my favorite movie was about Mounties.”

“Okay.” Howard bent over and pulled on his shoes, his broad back and wide buttocks facing Chad. Howard’s weight was a comfort to Chad: it would take Howard a long time to starve.

“The Alliance won’t capture the Grid, though, don’t worry,” Chad said. “It’s really well defended. Bristling with missiles.” To the left of the globe, Chad drew some fat arrows pointing upward. He considered these a moment, then found himself doodling wiggly curls all over the paper. What in the world was he drawing? Worms.

Howard stood. “I’m going outside now? I’ve got to help Leon with his fort.” Leon was the brother with ideas. He was also way too skinny.

“Sure.” Chad crumpled the paper. “You’ll need to pick something else, though. As a natural wonder. There’s a reason they call the Grid communities intentional villages. Because the Grid’s not … ”

“I’ll ask Miss Bishop,” Howard said, disappearing out the door.