Still things don’t add up. A mystery the size of Texas’s still hanging over our heads. Sure there were millions of bread bandits here. To carry on the disease image, they’d infiltrated and infected the entire body of our country from one end to the other. But there still weren’t enough of them to make the whole nation implode. But that’s what happened. Our society, which seemed solid as the rock you stand on, just disintegrated.
One problem was the lack of food. Huge, HUGE problem. Bread bandits looted everything down to the last candy bar from supermarkets. They torched cars on the highways. Roads blocked everywhere, and the image blazing in my mind right now is that big antique vase in a cartoon. The one that gets just a gentle tap and a little crack appears… that crack in the china leads to another one, then another, and another, until with a low crick-crack sound the vase becomes a mass of fractures before the whole thing collapses into dust. Our country was like that vase. Suddenly there was no food. Thousands of families were burned from their homes. Bread bandits torched food warehouses. Food couldn’t be delivered to where it was needed through gridlocked roads.
American citizens became refugees, too. Only they headed for cities that had no food either. What takes your breath away was the SPEED it all happened. I’m not talking weeks, but four, maybe five, days. Panic buying at service stations meant gasoline vanished. No new stocks could be brought in because roads were a mess of burnt- out trucks. The guys who were to clear the routes into town with bulldozers didn’t show up to man the vehicles because they were working their guts out to find food for their families. Can you blame them? Any more than you can blame the cops for choosing to guard their own homes, rather then standing guard at city hall to stop some bread bandit trashing the Xerox machine? It’s human instinct. Family first.
Freakish things happened. Marines protected an IRS office while bread bandits butchered kids in kindergarten half a mile away. One state governor fled to Hawaii, then flew back again and hanged himself in his office. Another died rescuing patients from a hospital. Bravery, cowardice, confusion, terror, panic-we saw a lifetime’s worth inside a week.
The other Freak Event was Sullivan. Somehow the wild flood that engulfed the nation missed this chunk of suburban life as it sat there on the lake. Life went on as normal. In fact, it became so normal it became a freakshow in its own right.
So there I sat as dusk fell. I wrote down everything I knew on this block of paper. I pushed myself so hard to explain what happened I stopped feeling the pain in my face. The water was still now after the breeze of the day. Bats dipped to take insects from just above the lake. Uphill, electricity still fed the town. People burned more lights than were necessary. But then, nighttime had taken on a more sinister edge of late.
It wasn’t quite dark when I saw the procession of people heading toward my cabin. There must have been twenty of them. I didn’t like what I saw. Because the first person I recognized was the guy who tried to break that log over my head earlier in the day. Crowther’s face wore a grim expression. Anger burned in his eyes.
There was nowhere to run. So I put down my paper and my pencil and went outside to see what they wanted from me.
Six
If looks could kill… That’s a phrase you’ll know well enough. When someone who hates you can’t physically touch you but the look in his eye screams, I’m going to rip your fucking head off!
Crowther’s hate-shot eyes burned right into mine. The crowd that walked with him were mainly middle-aged or older. This was no lynch mob. They were the ruling committee of Sullivan, who were known as the Caucus. The youngest there was Lynne’s husband. He was thirty-one. I recognized Crowther’s father, looking the picture of misery.
I came down the steps from the cabin’s veranda and waited for them to speak. They’d walked purposefully enough. Now, however, they slowed to a kind of shuffling approach, as if suddenly they no longer wanted to be here. Rose Bertholly had been a corporate lawyer before the fall. She glanced back at the others, took a breath that seemed to say, Ok, I guess it’s up to me, then: “Greg. How are you?”
Stupid question. I’d been slammed by a hunk of maple wood.
“How’s your face?” she asked when I didn’t answer.
“OK. Considering.” I looked at Crowther junior. Meanwhile, Crowther senior shuffled his feet in the dirt like he wanted those feet to carry him away.
“I won’t beat about the bush, Greg.”
Nice choice of words, lady lawyer.
“The Caucus met tonight. We discussed Mr. Crowther’s assault on you. We consider it unwarranted…”
That mean he didn’t have a good enough excuse to crack my skull bone?
“It was cowardly, and we deem it a serious infringement of the rule of law in this time of national emergency.”
Well, said, Miss Bertholly. You must have been sharp as a blade in court.
“Greg.” She gave me a look that was seriously lawyer like. “The Caucus has agreed unanimously that Mr. Crowther is guilty of the crime of actual bodily harm against you. We feel very strongly, also, that he shouldn’t go unpunished.” She paused. “How do you respond to that, Greg?”
“My response would be, why do you call me Greg and the guy who tried killing me, Mr. Crowther?” I looked from Crowther junior to Crowther senior. “It seems strange to me. Or is it because I crawled in here on my hands and knees just a few months ago? While the two Mr. Crowthers here are old Sullivan blood and the local neighborhood millionaires?” I jerked my head in the direction of the burnt piece of crap that Lewis had become. “See how much you can buy for a dollar across there.”
“Greg… Mr. Valdiva. I apologize.” Her voice was polite, but the words came out with a glint of ice on them now. “This isn’t a court of law.”
“Isn’t it?”
“I was merely trying to be informal.”
“Oh.”
“I can’t blame you for being angry.”
“Me? Angry?”
“You suffered a physical assault today. It was unprovoked.”
“Assault? If you took the hard end of the wood like I did you’d call it attempted murder.”
“Mr. Valdiva. Mr. Crowther had maybe a few more drinks than he ought. He didn’t mean to-”
I couldn’t stop the snort of pure disbelief shooting out of my nostrils. “Oh, I see. You’re closing ranks. It was just a bit of fun that got out of hand. See?” I tilted my head to the light shining from the cabin so she could see the crazy paving of grazes and bruising. “That’s Crowther’s little bit of fun.”
“Hey, Valdiva.” Now it was old man Crowther’s turn. Disgust came oozing through his voice as he spoke. “Valdiva. My boy would not harm anyone without just cause. He must have been-”
“Jim.” An old man beside Crowther senior held up a hand. “Jim, the Caucus has made its decision. Your son is guilty of assault. There’s no debate about that.”
“The question is,” Miss Bertholly said crisply, “what will the punishment be?”
I shrugged. “OK. So why have you come down here to discuss that?”
There was a pause long enough to hear the cry of night birds shimmering across the water. Those men and women shifted uneasily, as if they heard the sound of ghost children calling to them from the ruins of Lewis.
“Why have the Caucus meet here outside my house? You’ll have made up your damned minds about Crowther anyway. You going to stop ten dollars from his allowance, Mr. Crowther? Are you going to ground him for a week?” This slice of crappola had become a joke. I turned to go inside.
“Mr. Valdiva,” Miss Bertholly said. “We-the Caucus, that is-have also decided that as you are the victim you must decide the punishment.”
“Get away…” I shook my head. “You want me to fix a punishment for Crowther? Why?”
“Because if we chose a punishment you’d only say…” She took a breath and selected more diplomatic words, “If you chose the punishment you would know that an adequate redress had been made.”
“OK.” I nodded. “OK. That sounds fair enough.” I reached back to the veranda rail to grab a coil of rope that hung from a nail there. Underarm, I tossed it at old man Crowther. He caught it as it slapped into his chest.
