“I know,” I said. “And as bad as that is, there’s
more.”
“Who needs more? That’s enough!” She began to eat the bean salad. It looked good, but I thought I might be about to ruin it for her.
“There’s cholera spreading in southern Mississippi and Louisiana,” I said. “I heard about it on the radio yesterday. There are too many poor people-illiterate, jobless, homeless, without decent
sanitation or clean water. They have plenty of water down there, but a lot of it is polluted. And you know that drug that makes people want to set fires?”
She nodded, chewing.
“It’s spreading again. It was on the east coast. Now it’s in Chicago. The reports say that it makes watching a fire better than sex. I don’t know whether the reporters are condemning it or advertising it.” I drew a deep breath. “Tornadoes are smashing hell out of Alabama, Kentucky, Tennessee, and two or three other states. Three hundred people dead so far. And there’s a blizzard freezing the northern midwest, killing even more people. In New York and New Jersey, a measles epidemic is killing people.
Measles!”
“I heard about the measles,” Joanne said. “Strange.
Even if people can’t afford immunizations, measles shouldn’t kill.”
“Those people are half dead already,” I told her.
“They’ve come through the winter cold, hungry, already sick with other diseases. And, no, of course they can’t afford immunizations. We’re lucky our parents found the money to pay for all our immunizations. If we have kids, I don’t see how we’ll be able to do even that for them.
“I know, I know.” She sounded almost bored.
“Things are bad. My mother is hoping this new guy, President Donner, will start to get us back to normal.”
“Normal,” I muttered. “I wonder what that is. Do you agree with your mother?”
“No. Donner hasn’t got a chance. I think he would fix things if he could, but Harry says his ideas are scary.
Harry says he’ll set the country back a hundred years.”
“My father says something like that. I’m surprised that Harry agrees.”
“He would. His own father thinks Donner is God.
Harry wouldn’t agree with him on anything.”
I laughed, distracted, thinking about Harry’s battles with his father. Neighborhood fireworks— plenty of flash, but no real fire.
“Why do you want to talk about this stuff,” Joanne asked, bringing me back to the real fire. “We can’t do anything about it.”
“We have to.”
“Have to what? We’re 15! What can we do?”
“We can get ready. That’s what we’ve got to do now.
Get ready for what’s going to happen, get ready to survive it, get ready to make a life afterward. Get focused on arranging to survive so that we can do more than just get batted around by crazy people, desperate people, thugs, and leaders who don’t know what they’re doing!”
She just stared at me. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I was rolling— too fast, maybe. “I’m talking about this place, Jo, this cul-de-sac with a wall around it. I’m talking about the day a big gang of those hungry, desperate, crazy people outside decide to come in.
I’m talking about what we’ve got to do before that happens so that we can survive and rebuild— or at least survive and escape to be something other than beggars.”
“Someone’s going to just smash in our wall and come in?”
“More likely blast it down, or blast the gate open. It’s going to happen some day. You know that as well as I do.”
“Oh, no I don’t,” she protested. She sat up straight, almost stiff, her lunch forgotten for the moment. I bit into a piece of acorn bread that was full of dried fruit and nuts. It’s a favorite of mine, but I managed to chew and swallow without tasting it.
“Jo, we’re in for trouble. You’ve already admitted that.”
“Sure,” she said. “More shootings, more breakins.
That’s what I meant.”
“And that’s what will happen for a while. I wish I could guess how long. We’ll be hit and hit and hit, then the big hit will come. And if we’re not ready for it, it will be like Jericho.”
She held herself rigid, rejecting. “You don’t know that! You can’t read the future. No one can.”
“You can,” I said, “if you want to. It’s scary, but once you get past the fear, it’s easy. In L.A. some walled communities bigger and stronger than this one just aren’t there any more. Nothing left but ruins, rats, and squatters. What happened to them can happen to us. We’ll die in here unless we get busy now and work out ways to survive.”
“If you think that, why don’t you tell your parents?
Warn them and see what they say.”
