“Oh, Jesus Christ, Ben! I can’t watch this.”
Ben cocked his .45 and shot the animal. The cow’s legs buckled and she fell to the ground, quivering and dying.
“You son of a bitch!” Jerre cursed him.
When Ben replied, his voice was bland. “Welcome to the Safeway, dear.”
She stood glaring at him, rage in her eyes.
“Can you drive a tractor?” Ben asked.
No reply.
“All right, then stay here. I’ve got to crank one of those tractors in the shed.”
“Why?” she asked, her voice shaky.
“To drag the cow over there,” he pointed. “We’ve got to hoist it up, cut its throat, bleed it, then butcher it.”
“Gross,” she said. “The absolute, bottomless pits, man!”
The gross, absolute, bottomless pits left Jerre that evening, while Ben was grilling the thick steaks.
“Make mine rare, Ben,” she said. “And I mean, really rare. That smells so good!” Then, at his smile, she laughed. “O.K., Ben, so I got my first lesson in what’s in store for me. But, Ben—I’d never seen anything like that before. Lord, I’d sure never seen the
They were grilling the steaks in the back yard of a farmhouse. Here, as in so many homes Ben had stayed in, from Louisiana to Chicago, to the east, then down through the country to Virginia, there were no bodies, no signs of any trouble.
“Most people haven’t,” he told her. “You’d be surprised at the number of people—grown men and women— who don’t have the vaguest idea how to even cut up a chicken for frying.”
“I used to love fried chicken and mashed potatoes and gravy. Mamma used to…” She looked away from Ben, sudden tears in her young eyes.
Eyes that would, Ben felt, grow much older, very quickly, if she was to survive on the road. “You believe in God, Jerre?”
She wiped her eyes and nodded. “Yes, sure. But after all this”—she waved a hand—“it makes a person wonder.”
“Maybe He decided to give a few of us a second chance.”
“I don’t understand, Ben. If that’s the case, why did He let so many bad people live?”
“I can’t answer that, babe. I was simply putting forth a theory, that’s all. No proof to back it—none at all.”
“How will people like me survive, Ben? I mean, you told me you haven’t hunted for sport in years… yet, all this seems as natural to you as breathing. All that training you had in the service, I guess. But… people like me, who have never fired a gun, never butchered an animal, how will we make it in a world that has come down to this: dog eat dog and the strongest survive? I’m lucky, and I know it more and more each day. I found you and you’re going to teach me as much as you can. But the others—what about them?”
“People are tougher than even they suspect,” Ben said. “I think we all have a… hidden reserve in us; a well of strength that only surfaces in some sort of catastrophe. I also believe that in the long run, good will defeat evil.”
She thought about that for a time. “You mean, even if we have to return to the caves for a time?”
“You could say that. Sure. That’s what we’ve done, in fact, in essence.” He grinned to soften the seriousness of her mood. “Dad raised us to be resourceful, but to be kind to those less fortunate, not to be mean to others.” He thought of his brother in Chicago. “Maybe Carl forgot what Dad taught us.”
He turned the steaks and was lost in his own thoughts. As always, the recorder was on. At first it had spooked Jerre, her every word being recorded. But she had quickly grown accustomed to it. She had said, “I guess all writers are kind of nuts.”
She brought him back to the present. “Maybe your brother did, Ben. Forget, I mean. But you’re only looking at the bad he is doing, or contemplating doing. I don’t agree with what he’s doing, but every coin has two sides. Look at the other side.
“Maybe your brother got tired of not being able to walk down the street at night without fear of being mugged, or his wife and daughter being raped. Maybe he got tired of seeing criminals and thugs and street punks being treated like they were something special instead of what they are: just sorry bastards. Maybe he got tired of seeing his taxes go to support criminals instead of their victims. It’s a long list, Ben, and you know it as well as I. Criminals being provided extensive law libraries so they can look for a loophole to get out of prison. I think that’s wrong. I’m no screaming liberal, Ben. I think if you do the crime, you’ve got to be prepared to do the time.
“We had a professor at school who used to rap with us a lot. He was a history professor, and he really had his shit all together. I hadn’t thought about him until you told me your political philosophy a couple of days ago. You know, when I asked if you were a Democrat or a Republican. You said you were forty percent conservative, thirty percent liberal, ten percent evolutionary anarchist, and twenty percent revolutionary anarchist. That’s just about what Professor Hawkins used to say.
“He said that someday, in the near future, he believed, if the courts didn’t stop pampering criminals, and return to the public their right to defend themselves, the citizens were going to take matters into their own hands and start dealing with punks in a very swift and hard fashion, and to hell with the judicial system. He said it started back in the late seventies with neighborhood watch programs and citizens’ patrols and what have you. And he said it was a disgrace the courts had let the law-abiding, tax-paying citizens down so rudely, and, he said, so arrogantly.
“I asked him what he meant by arrogantly, and he said, ‘by putting the rights of criminals ahead of the rights of the law-abiding citizens.’
“He said a lot more, but I’ve never been able to forget that part.”
Wise beyond her years, Ben thought.
“Oh,” she said, “one more thing: he said rich or poor, for our judicial to work, the laws have to be the same. And he said it would probably take a revolution to accomplish that. And he said we had too many laws on the books and too many loopholes.”
“You agree with that, Jerre?”
“Yes. I didn’t agree wholeheartedly at the time, but I do now.”
“I think you’ll make it, Jerre.”
She looked at him in the light from the lantern, then touched his arm. “Yeah, so do I, Ben.”
Jerre rose to walk into the kitchen, where she was baking potatoes in the butane stove. Ben watched her go, thinking: not long, now. A few more days, maybe a week, and she’ll be gone. We’ll find a group of young people and there will be some handsome young fellow, and she’ll go with him.
And will you be jealous? he asked himself, a half-smile on his lips.
“Yes,” he spoke softly to the night. “Yes, I will.”
The first time Ben allowed Jerre to fire the .22 mag, he had stepped off twenty-five feet from a huge cardboard box and told her to blast away at it. She missed the box with all nine rounds.
“It might help,” Ben said dryly, “if you would open your eyes.”
“This thing is so loud!”
“Reload it,” was his command.
She dropped the pistol three times during the reloading process. Ben said nothing; he let her find her own way. She could do nothing but improve—damned sure couldn’t get any worse. Each time she dropped the weapon Ben picked it up, checking for barrel blockage. What he did not need was a young lady with some fingers blown off. Or a hand.
Jerre practiced for an hour the first day. By the end of that time, she could hit the box five out of nine times.
“It’s hopeless,” she said, disappointment on her face.
“I think you did very well. You’ll get better.”
They drove through the outskirts of Petersburg. And it was there Ben found the first organization geared toward rebuilding. But neither Ben nor Jerre wanted any part of this group. The leader was a Fundamentalist preacher (Ben didn’t ask of what) who reminded Ben of a certain member of the old Moral Majority (title self-
