they didn’t know half as much as they thought they did. It hadn’t slipped past me that for the first time Sebastian had inserted the word “probably” into his claim that the bamboo was helping rather than hurting.
“That’s all well and good,” I said, “but is anyone planning to fix the royal fuck-up that this bamboo has turned into?” I asked.
“People are working on it. It’s a tough problem, though—the bamboo is engineered to be resistant to herbicides, and even if you can design an effective herbicide, the root systems are engineered to disconnect after a time, so you can only kill a tiny cluster at a time.”
“Wow, look at that girl run!” Colin said, pointing.
Deirdre was sprinting toward us with her head down. Dread, and a little lust, washed over me at the sight of her. She glanced up, spotted us, and immediately slowed to an easy walk. She was wearing plain old shorts and a t-shirt. It was so un-Deirdre-like to see her dressed down. There were more people on the tracks behind her—more refugees fleeing the chaos. We wouldn’t be lonely.
By the time Deirdre reached us she wasn’t even breathing hard.
“So let’s get the fuck out of here,” she said by way of greeting, and walked right past us. We hoisted our packs.
Deirdre. Sophia. It was as if my past was collapsing in on me.
“I’d forgotten how charming she was,” Colin said as we followed her into the narrow tunnel cut in the bamboo. “I don’t understand why you broke up with her.”
Walking on train tracks is a pain in the ass. The gravel in between the railroad ties is rough and uneven, and the nubs of the cut bamboo didn’t help, so your instinct was to walk on the ties. But they’re never evenly spaced, so you’re constantly adjusting the length of your steps. Every so often I would resolve to ignore the ties, pick up my head and just walk, but my gaze kept drifting down, hypnotized by the ties underfoot, and I’d find myself stutter- stepping again.
Within an hour we hit patches where the bamboo was growing back through the tracks, and that added to the challenge. And then there were the insects—sand gnats buzzing in my eyes and ears, little dragon mosquitoes biting my ankles.
“Anybody have insect repellant?” I asked.
“I do,” Sebastian said, reaching to pull his pack off without slowing. But Deirdre beat him to it, tossing a tube over her head without turning. It landed on the tracks in front of Jeannie, who retrieved it, squeezed a blob for herself, and passed it on to me.
“Thanks,” I said. No answer.
For once, I realized it wasn’t hard to understand what Deirdre was feeling. She resented having to ask me for help. She didn’t like asking anyone for help, and our history made it worse. But at the same time, she felt she owed me. So she hated me and felt grateful at the same time.
We hit a steep bend, and suddenly there was Cortez, lounging in the middle of the tracks, his back propped on an enormous pack.
“Ladies. Gentlemen,” Cortez said.
Everyone shouted out and hurried to greet him. More hugs ensued.
“Is Sophia out?” I asked Cortez as I hugged him.
“She’s underground. We’re meeting them about five miles ahead.”
“Hey, I know you,” Deirdre said.
“I worked for you five, six years ago,” Cortez said, shaking her hand. “Good to see you again.”
Deirdre looked off toward the tops of the pine trees. “Shall we onward?” she said. She squeezed past Cortez and walked on. The rest of us followed.
“So what are all those federal troops doing in the city?” I asked Sebastian, since he seemed to know everything.
“The feds are trying to retain control of the country. Remember last year when all U.S. troops were called home from overseas, after Lake Superior was nuked? That was the first step. The fed has decided we’re at the tipping point, and drastic measures need to be taken to keep us from slipping into chaos.”
“To
Sebastian gave him a little grunt of a laugh. “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”
I didn’t like the sound of that at all.
“To your left! Your left!” Cortez called to a ragged group ahead of us. A woman carrying a crying baby glanced back, called out to her group in Spanish. They drifted to the right, letting us pass. The tracks allowed us to walk two abreast, but no more; we had to go single-file when we passed someone.
“Speaking of chaos, did anyone hear about what happened in New York City on Thanksgiving?” Cortez asked.
“What?” Ange said.
“Word spread that the parade down Fifth Avenue was going on, for the first time in six, seven years. Thousands of people showed up—moms brought their kids to show them the big floats, everyone was feeling a little hope, a little lift that things were getting better.”
Cortez bit at one of his fingernails, spit the sliver out. “Then the parade comes. The floats were awful nightmare things, the marchers covered in blood. Some guy was walking holding up a dog’s head with the eyes gouged out. Kids were crying and screaming. The Jumpy-Jumps had put the whole thing together.”
“I don’t believe that,” Colin said .“It sounds like an urban myth. It’s got to be or we would’ve heard about it on TV or the radio.”
“Maybe, but how much of this shit do you think they’re still putting on the air?” Cortez said. “That just helps the Jumpy-Jumps.”
Nobody answered.
We walked in silence, lost in our own thoughts and fears. Colin was half-carrying Jeannie, sweat pouring down his temples. She was awfully pregnant.
They were leaving me even further behind, I realized, moving on to a different phase of life. The grownup phase. I was stuck in perpetual late-adolescence, going over the same ground again and again.
All of us were moving backward, I realized. We were homeless nomads again. Everything we had worked for, all of the progress we’d made had been torn from us in a single afternoon. I didn’t even have a jacket, and I’d worn my old sneakers to the game. It had all been so sudden that I couldn’t wrap my mind around all of the implications.
Up ahead, two people were heading the wrong way on the tracks. Her walk was unmistakable: the quick sway of her narrow hips, the short steps, as if she were walking downhill. The energy of it, the eagerness, despite having just hiked two or three miles through a sewer. She waved, started running toward us. Her husband trotted behind, not looking as eager. Ange shouted her name, then Jeannie. They ran ahead. The three of them met in a triple-hug.
I guess I was expecting Sophia to keep her distance from me, out of respect to her husband, but even while she huddled with Ange and Jeannie she was looking past them. She came right to me and hugged me. “How’re you?” she said in my ear. It felt good to be in her arms. Way too good; I felt a familiar tingle of electricity, a fluttering in my stomach.
“I’m okay,” I said.
“For sure, for sure?”
“For sure, for sure,” I replied, an old island saying we’d made our own, long ago. I let go, drifted back as others greeted her, as she and Jean Paul were introduced to Sebastian.
I was suddenly afraid the feelings I’d had for her so long ago would resurface, along with all that pain. It would be easy to do if Ange and Cortez hooked up. It’s easy to fall into unrequited love if it’s the only kind available. I looked hard at Sophia, testing myself, ready to flee inside myself if I felt those feelings blossom. Not too bad, so far. Maybe the Jasper who’d fallen so hard for Sophia was gone—bludgeoned with a shovel, shattered by a gunshot, choked by a cat fetus.
We camped on a trestle, thirty feet above a sluggish stream—high enough that the bamboo couldn’t reach us. The stream wasn’t moving fast enough to generate any energy, and the sun was down, so we kept our ancient solar blanket and river skimmer packed. Cortez pulled a huge hunk of cooked meat wrapped in a plastic bag out of
