commentators thought that this would do much good. When the governor threatened to petition the president to send in federal troops, Julio just laughed. This had been an all but empty threat for years; our federal troops were fighting in China and elsewhere for foreign masters.
But while the city and state forces had seriously underestimated the power of the reconquista forces—they seemed totally surprised by the amount of armor and artillery brought north from Old Mexico (some of which I’d seen parked under camouflage nets in the huge cemetery across from Emilio’s compound)—at the same time, Emilio’s and his spanic allies’ forces were obviously being surprised by blacks rising up in South Central, by Asians fighting in the western suburbs, by the mercenaries hired by the wealthy in Beverly Hills, Bel Air, the Mulholland highlands, and elsewhere, and by a score of other fighting cadres aligned with neither the state of California nor the forces of Nuevo Mexico. Because of this, the simple reconquista-versus–California National Guard battle over the future of Los Angeles almost immediately turned into a twenty-sided brawl. Los Angeles was becoming a purely Hobbesian state… every man pitted against every other man.
When I mentioned this to Julio and Perdita, they understood and agreed immediately. They’d both read Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. So much for my lifelong assumptions about truck drivers and their levels of education.
And speaking of education, Val is receiving an interesting one on this truckers’ convoy.
After his first night and day of being almost catatonic—and I’ll write more about that later—I saw Val begin to pay serious attention to his surroundings and the people in them.
During our two nights camped with scores of other eighteen-wheelers’ convoys in the desert outside the walled-off but still beckoning lights of Las Vegas, I noticed Val’s avid—almost hungry—interest in what the men and women around the campfires had to say. Poor Val… by law and by Department of Education fiat, he’s had to celebrate “diversity” (for diversity’s sake alone) almost every hour in school since his first day in kindergarten in Denver almost a dozen years ago. But he’d never really experienced diversity until this convoy. Val has grown up in two cities, Denver and Los Angeles, where neighborhoods are racial, ethnic, linguistic, and (more and more) religious fiefdoms, each sparring and warring for a larger share of some theoretical cake in an endless zero-sum game of politics, gangs, and outright warfare.
But during these five days and nights he’s seen and listened to “Gauge” Devereaux, a black man from the South who says openly that the return to the epithet “nigger” is a statement of failure by his race and the nation at large. Devereaux has been driving his big rig for thirty-eight years and has no plans to stop now just because the cities he delivers to have become separated by wider and wider tracts of chaos.
Val’s listened to the fireside stories of Henry Big Horse Begay, a Navajo who—with his wife, Laurette—has been driving his rig for twenty-six years and who defies any bureaucrat or army or roadside bandit to stop him. Henry laughs openly—his one missing top tooth making the others seem all the whiter—at the irony that the white men who put his people on reservations are having their Manifest Destiny rolled back like a cheap carpet, but I’m convinced that there is absolutely no malice in the man. He’s simply a student of history.
—It happens to every race and group and nation, Henry Big Horse Begay says, still laughing. The days of greatness roll in like some great, undeserved tide, are smugly celebrated by the lucky peoples—even as mine once did—as if they had earned it, which they had not, and then the tide ebbs and the nations and tribes and peoples find themselves standing there dumb and dumbfounded on the dry and garbage- strewn beach.
Strange to hear an ocean metaphor from a man who grew up in the deserts of Arizona.
Val listens to others like Julio and Perdita, who grew up in the teeming eastern cities but who had found happiness only on the open highways—or what is left of them—and to spanics such as the Valdezes, who were born in Mexico but who have driven American Interstates since the 1980s and who refuse allegiance to any clan or gang or nation that defines itself at the expense of outsiders. And then there are the Ellises, Jan and Bob and their three kids—the children being “cab schooled,” as Jan likes to say. They’re from the South, they’re evangelicals, but they’re also witty, clever, soft-spoken, open-minded (they say they consider proselytizing an intrusion on others and don’t flaunt their faith), and the three kids—according to Val, who spent a long afternoon with them—know more geography, history, astronomy, literature, and basic science than any of Val’s fellow high school juniors.
I sensed that Val was most interested in Cooper Jakes (called Old Jakes Brakes by the other truckers for some impenetrable reason)—an ancient philosopher more ancient and wise than I, easily in his 80s if not 90s, but also as thin, tough, resilient, and seemingly immortal as gristle. Cooper Jakes’s silhouette makes up in white beard what he lacks in body fat, and, in the tradition of all great prophets, his prodigious eyebrows are jet black. Those brows can, in an instant, become as cocked and intimidating as two aimed pistol muzzles. When he is angry, Cooper Jakes reminds me of Ahab.
But most of the time, Cooper is in a relaxed and humorous (however sardonic, especially on such subjects as politics and religion) mood. The old man has been driving large rigs (he says) since he was seventeen years old. He’s never had a wife, family, or home (he says) and has never wanted one. His cab has been his ark— his words—through all the “floods of shit” that have been dropped on America by a pissed-off God in his lifetime.
Val can’t seem to get enough of the old reprobate’s barbed but almost iambic commentaries. I watch Val’s gleaming eyes across the campfire and think of young Prince Hal in Eastcheap’s Boar’s-Head Tavern at the rhetorical feet of Falstaff. (I was one of those scholars who infinitely preferred Falstaff—a source of wit not only in himself but in others and a potential Aristotle/Socrates tutor of the true humanities to the young prince in training—to the wordy killing-machine-cum-lying-politician that Henry V became in Shakespeare’s work, however moving the much-trotted-out “band of brothers” St. Crispin’s Day speech may be.)
But I digress.
Val actually said something to me yesterday in a tone devoid of the contempt, guardedness, and sarcasm that have ruled all his speech in my presence for the last four years or so.
—I could be a trucker, Grandpa.
I said nothing at the time but I came close to weeping to hear those few unguarded words slip out. (Including, I admit, the childish “Grandpa” that I’ve missed so very much.) Val has not spoken of being or becoming anything—other than his unconscious but continuous attempt at becoming a black-hole source of disillusionment so unrelenting as to approach pure nihilism—since he was twelve years old.
Before I become too sentimental, I need to remind myself here that it is likely that my grandson killed someone last week. Or at least tried to kill someone.
He seemed almost in shock that last Friday night in Los Angeles when he saw the photograph of his dead friend William Coyne on the 3DHD screen. The only thing I could get out of him about the attack on Advisor Omura in the first forty-eight hours of our flight was his repeated statement—I was with those idiot fuckers, but I didn’t shoot at Omura, Leonard. I swear it.
But Val never said clearly that he hadn’t shot someone, and the few times I brought up the Coyne boy’s name, Val’s violent reaction—his gaze dropping, his head snapping to look in another direction, his entire body stiffening—suggested to me that something had happened between the two adolescents on that last night in Los Angeles.
Whatever the source of the trauma in L.A., Val dealt with it by sleeping most of the time we weren’t stopped for rest during those first few days or nights. Because of the way he slept—twitching, shaking—I thought he might be using flashback, but a cursory search of his duffel bag while he slept didn’t turn up any vials of the drug.
It did turn up a black pistol which I considered confiscating but decided to leave in his duffel. We might need it before this trip is over.
When Val was awake during the daylight hours on the third through fifth days of our exile, I listened in as he quizzed Julio and Perdita on the security details of our convoy.
