IT WAS 120 DEGREES ON God’s great Earth today, a sobering temperature, so scorching that three minutes under God’s great sun would leave an exposed arm or forehead raw-steak red. That’s why God created air-conditioning, of course, and to power those compressors, God made the juice, and to extract the juice God created fracking, and to frack the Earth God begat the Joshua Extractor. As Pastor Roger walked around the monstrous vehicle—the size of a six-story office building on half-tracks, ladders affixed to the sides that climbed up so high into the blinding sun that Pastor Roger could not see where they bowed in at the first platform. The Joshua’s superstructure rested on a girded-steel glacis plate forty feet above ground level. Below the telescopic kelly, drill pipe, and casing was a red blowout protector, and hanging between the treads, like the glistening testicles of a Minotaur, was the massive oiled bit, a two-meter-wide toothed and barbed bulb that could cut through granite at a rate of eight feet per minute.
God’s vision was great, Pastor Roger reflected, so he sent this shining steed of capitalism to help the Pepper Sisters extract the blessed juice. The pastor stood in the shade, listening to an engineer describe how the Joshua could roll over a shale oil field, drop the bit, wait a few days, release the derrick, casing, and traveling block, after which it was a simple matter of pumping and gathering. Then the Joshua could move on to the next site. The sight of the Joshua lumbering over the horizon, why, it had to be among the most inspiring of God’s creations. It could block out the sun; its sound was like thunder and waves crashing, its power like that of an approaching tornado. The massive 46,000-horsepower, 14-cylinder diesel engine could shatter windows and rattle houses miles from its path.
How could this be wrong? How could God have created something this great and unleash it upon the earth if it were not his vision? This was a weapon in his divine hand.
An elevator rises through the middle of the beast, but Pastor Roger preferred to climb the outside, to feel for himself the immensity and grandeur.
But it was hot, the ladder’s metal scorching to the touch. He spit once in each hand, asked God to help him deal with the pain, and started his ascent, up past the oily-smelling guts of the beast, up, up, up to the chapel in the sky from which the foreman could survey this earthly kingdom. He climbed and felt the hot wind carry him, lifting him up forty feet from the earth, to the first platform, where he stepped on the grooved steel and walked around a motor room to the elevator to continue the rise to the top.
The television crew—a cameraman and boom mic operator—waited for him on the bridge of the earth vessel along with its six crew members, who stood awkwardly, unsure of how to act before the cameras. Finally, the elevator door opened and Steven Shopper emerged.
“Good, good, now you all do whatever you would be doing if the pastor weren’t here. He’s going to offer his blessing, and we’ll get some footage for the news.”
The elevator door opened again and Pastor Roger stepped out, clapped his hands once, and took a deep breath.
“Lovely, lovely”—he smiled at the crew—“great to see you!” And he pumped his fist.
In the distance, he could see the abandoned exurbs with their unfinished ranch houses, now inhabited by the godless progressives who respected neither private property nor God’s laws. With the Joshua crew surrounding him, Pastor Roger blessed the Joshua Extractor, thanked the Pepper Sisters for their vision and the members of Freedom Prairie Church for their support, and thanked God for giving them this Earth and the tools to extract the juice upon which they all suckle.
God, we acknowledge that the Earth and all that is in
it belongs to you.
The Earth is the Lord’s in all its fullness.
Who may ascent into the hill of the Lord?
Or who may stand in his holy place?
He who has clean hands and a pure heart,
Who has not lifted up his soul to an idol,
Nor sworn deceitfully.
He urged the foreman and his crew aboard the Joshua Extractor to be bold and brave and fearless, to brush aide all who would stand in the way of God’s will. He asked the crew to bow down before him, to feel the laying on of his hands. He wept as they looked at one another, the men unsure of the meaning of this prayer. All they had been told was that the pastor would be coming up to offer a blessing. Later, on the KIK News feed of Pastor Roger blessing the Joshua, the men seemed bewildered as the pastor prayed for them.
FRANNY AND GINNY AWOKE A few miles outside of L.A. and had been complaining every quarter mile since, angrily demanding an explanation of what was going on as regularly as the appearance of the oncoming traffic. Arthur had forgotten how noisy his children could be and for a few moments considered turning around and heading back to his mother-in-law’s house to deposit them and good riddance. But he recalled that Pastor Roger would only support him if he could reconcile with his wife and children. Well, he was two-thirds of the way there. He just had to get his brood to Nevada, where Pastor Roger was bivouacked supervising some fight against communists or something, and then his wife would turn up and they would all sit down with Pastor Roger and he would sew them all back up into one happy family. Oh, it would never quite be the way it had been, living in New York, summering in the Hamptons, that had been quite a sweet ride, but living in some nice Dallas suburb, Parker or Highland Park, and perhaps managing some of Freedom Prairie’s substantial assets, though even going to work for the Pepper Sisters would be a fine place to start his comeback. In time, the family could even return to New York. Isn’t that what disgraced financiers did?
“Will you two just shut up?” he shouted for the twenty-fifth time since leaving L.A. County.
He had reneged on the waffles promise but now had no choice but to stop and feed the girls, who refused any number of fast-food options, citing their unhealthy ingredients and statistics on teen obesity. He finally found them organic turkey jerky and single-serving soy milk cartons in a gas-station convenience annex. At least he couldn’t be accused of actually starving his children.
“Mom is never going to take you back,” Franny told him. “She hates you.”
“We’ll see about that,” Arthur said.
“She says you’re a criminal,” Ginny said.
“Well, one person’s criminal is another person’s Sheriff of Nottingham,” Arthur said.
“You mean Robin Hood?”
“Right, Robin Hood.”
“So you stole from the rich and gave to the poor?” Ginny asked.
“Well, I stole from the rich AND the poor—NO, I didn’t steal. I was making the economy more efficient, performing a function, until the government, the progressives, cracked down on me.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Because they hate success. They want everyone to be poor.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“Yes it does, now shut up.”
They drove through the hot desert. Arthur had to call Steven Shopper to arrange for temporary credit relief so he could pass the credit checks. Finally, the girls fell asleep again as they crossed into Nevada.
STEVEN SHOPPER STUDIED ARTHUR AND his daughters, the grit and filth of five hundred miles of road staining them so that they looked practically subprime. This would not do. Arthur was happy to be issued fresh khakis and a clean button-up shirt, but the girls objected to the taffeta dresses, complaining the outfits were too girly-girl, until leggings and skirts that appealed to them were produced.
“And your wife?” Shopper asked, after they stepped outside the trailer so the girls could change.
“Oh, she should be turning up at any minute.”
“Any minute?”
“She’s coming separately.”
“What?”
“Well, she’s going to follow. That’s what I mean.”
“Follow you? Do you mean she’s in pursuit?”
Arthur shrugged.
Shopper was concerned. “This isn’t what Pastor Roger intended. For you to, um, abduct your children, if that’s what you’ve done.”
“Come on,” Arthur said. “I had to do it. I mean, Ginny was attacked by a coyote. Whose fault is that? I’m trying to work with you.”
“The pastor has been generous with both his time and spirit. He’s arranged for the removal of the monitoring anklet. And he has been more than fair in terms of easing your passage, but he won’t have a home-wrecking philanderer in his flock.”
“She’ll be here,” Arthur said.
Franny and Ginny were seated at a Formica table, eating dry, frosted cornflakes from bowls. The trailer they were in was like a bus, only without the driver’s seat. Instead, there was a tinted window that looked out on several other trailers, and beyond them the Joshua Extractor, casting a shadow that left most of the trailers in the shade.
“This is cool, isn’t it?” Arthur feigned enthusiasm. “Look at that, it’s like the Statue of Liberty.”
“Not really,” both girls said.
There was a bathroom with a shower, and beyond that a bedroom with a queen-size bed. Arthur walked around the narrow kitchen, opening cabinets, finding water bottles, crackers, potato chips, soap.
“Well, it beats being eaten by dogs,” Arthur said. “And that’s what living with your momma led to.”
“Where are we?” asked Ginny.
“We’re waiting for Pastor Roger—and for your mom,” Arthur explained.
“Aren’t you going to jail?”
“Well, as I told you, probably not, because to some people, including Pastor Roger, I’m a hero. You should be proud of your daddy. What I did helped make this”—he pointed at the Joshua—“made this possible. Or sort of. Now, I’m going to take a quick nap, get rested for Pastor Roger. You two rest up here.”
Arthur walked to the back of the trailer and lay down on the hard foam. As he fell into a light, unrestful sleep, he thought about how close he was to rebuilding his life, to vindication.
FRANNY AND GINNY FOLLOWED THE outline of the shadow of the Joshua, not feeling the full intensity of the scorching desert heat until they were out of its shadow and picking their way over the desert scrub. They passed the open doors of other trailers, where they saw cameramen and reporters in polo shirts, some with FP logos stitched on the chest. Next to some of the trailers were piles of refuse, empty cereal boxes and milk containers and potato chips mashed into silty sand. The girls passed through the wheeled city as if they were invisible, the Freedom Prairie officials and television reporters and cameramen too busy to notice them. When they reached the edge of the trailer camp they hesitated at the expanse of open desert before them. They followed their line of sight and could see a village of some kind, a strip of houses in the distance, nestled beneath small hills.
They stopped, shading their eyes from the sun. Then, as if having the same thought at the same moment, they set out, right feet first, into the crab-grassed desert, the heat of the ground pressing up through their thin-soled sneakers.
“It’s snowing,” Franny said.
Ginny held her hand out. “This isn’t snow.”
They studied the flakes accumulating on their hands, powdery silver-gray specks soon covering their palms, their arms, their hair.
The ash sprinkled down from the clear sky, trillions of particles, the carbon fallout of vast fires to the east, burning uncontrollably for months. A shift in wind brought the smoke system here, and the flakes were thickening till they partially blocked out the sun and exuded a sickly sweet charcoal smell that left their lungs aching when they inhaled too deeply.
“I don’t like this,” Franny said.
“It’s just ashes. It can’t hurt us.”
The sooty blanket kept their bare arms from burning in the sun, but it also reduced visibility so the girls were quickly lost in the desert. They walked straight, leaning into the hot wind, their steps making impressions in the sulfurous ground that filled rapidly with falling ash.
“Do you think Mom will come?” Franny asked.
“Of course she’ll come,” Ginny said. “You can count on Mom.”
“And Dad?”
“Dad? I don’t know about Dad.”
“Is he a criminal?”
Ginny did not want to answer that one, so she continued walking, patting her dress and watching the gray, powdery residue go up in puffs.
THE BOY PERCHED AT THE top of a hill, at the base of a runty barren tree, was gazing through their solitary pair of binoculars at the security techs, who were themselves gazing back. You’re watching me? Well, I’m watching you, the boy thought. About him were a squad of fellow Gorillas—Emmett and Yuri and Vito—lying belly down on the earth, their desert-hue clothing, stained not by design but by boyhood habit, making them almost invisible against the ashy gray earth.
“We’ve got incoming,” said Tom, picking up two figures in white skirts crossing through the ash-fall.
“Hajis?” asked Emmett, loading a marble into a Wrist-Rocket.
The boy squinted through the lenses, struggling to discern the forms. “No, these are . . . girls.”
“Girl hajis?”
“No, they look like girl girls.”
There was disappointment among the Gorillas that the enemy incursion was not only a pair of females but also, probably, not even an incursion.
“Well, we have to do a full screen anyway,” said Emmett.
The squad crawled backward down the hill and around the ridge to a crag-protected spot from which they could see the enemy approaching.
“They’re kids,” said Tom, “a couple of damn girls, just what we need.”
“Should we send them back?” Emmett asked.
“Let’s see what they want,” said the boy. “Maybe they want to parlay.”
“Surrender is more like it,” said Vito.
“They wouldn’t send little girls,” said Tom, “for anything.”
As the girls drew closer, both now shading their eyes, their faces gray and black from the ash-fall, the boys could clearly see they really were just kids. Like themselves. This was the first time any of them could remember that a couple of kids showed up in Valence without parents.
Tom felt an unwarlike sympathy for these new arrivals. What must they have been through to have arrived here without a vehicle or parents?
The Gorillas stood up, revealed themselves.
“Halt!”
The girls stopped, looking up through the blanket of falling cinder.
“Halt! Where do you think you’re going?”
“We’re lost.”
“Well, you’re in Valence now.”
“Do you have water?”
Emmett said, “Why should we give you—”
Tom interrupted, “Yeah, here,” and held out an aluminum canteen.
The girls each gulped greedily. “We were in a trailer area.”
“You came from enemy territory,” said Emmett. “We need to debrief you.”
Ginny said, “You’re not touching us.” She held up her scarred arm. “I’ve fought a coyote.”
The boys studied the scar, the tooth marks.
“You were attacked by a coyote?”
“By a bunch,” Ginny said. “So don’t think you can mess with me and my sister.”
The boys were unsure; none of them had tangled with a coyote. Tom stepped back to confer with his fellow Gorillas and came to a decision. “We’re going to take you back to see the grown-ups,” he said. “Sargam will know what to do.”
The boys led the way through the gently contoured earth, behind scrub lines and into the narrow ravines that only they knew, the girls scrambling and struggling to keep up. The Gorillas were as proud as if they had captured their first prisoners, and were about to deliver them to the authorities who would extract valuable intel on enemy troop movements.
As they passed from the outer undeveloped reaches of Valence to the irrigated fields of vegetables, the fruit tree orchards, and the chicken and goat coops, the girls were stunned at the lush wonderland they had wandered into. Even the ash-fall appeared to have abated, allowing them a clear view of what seemed an oasis in the middle of this desert. Men and women working in the fields paused at their pulling and planting, trying to figure who these girls belonged to. The dogs ran out barking from the houses, howling out toward the returning boys. As they drew closer to the ranch houses, they could see women working over tables, chopping vegetables. There were large pots on the boil, children playing soccer.
The boys brought the girls to a pretty woman in white who was removing a splinter from a dog’s paw. The woman looked up at the girls and smiled and they smiled back.
“Where are your parents?” Sargam asked.
“Our dad took us and brought us here, well, not here, but over there.” Ginny pointed in the direction they had come. “He said we were going to meet Pastor Roger.”
“How did you end up here?”
“We got lost.”
They had walked across the desert, through the ash, and come upon the boys hiding behind some rocks. They were thirsty, their throats sandpaper rough from inhaling ash, and their eyes stung.
Sargam collected bottles of water for the girls, and a plate of figs, and listened as they laid out a story as bizarre as any she had heard. Their father was some kind of financial criminal—she had heard his name before, she believed—and their mother had taken them to Santa Monica, and he had followed, and, at least to her ears, it sounded as if he had kidnapped them to take them to see Pastor Roger.
The story was complicated and several times Sargam stopped the girls and asked them to back up, but still, she was struggling to put together the whole picture.
“Where’s your mom?” she asked.
“Oh, she’s going to come get us.”
There were already a half-dozen Valence folks waiting for her counsel. She would figure out what to do with the girls later. She saw Vanessa walking by, carrying a bucket of water.
“V, can you take these two, Ginny and Franny, back to your place for a few hours?” she asked. “Tell Bailey to look after them. They came wandering through the desert without any parents but we’re expecting their mom to show up.”
The girls followed Vanessa down the row of houses, past the kids playing soccer and across a field of onions that smelled faintly of wet dirt, to a house where Tom sat on the back step, shaping sticks into arrows.
“You brought ’em here?” the boy said. “Why?”
“Sargam told me to bring ’em.”
Tom looked at the girls. “So I’m stuck with you? Do you play soccer?”
GEMMA DROVE OUTSIDE OF HENDERSON on the way to a place called Valence to get her children back from Arthur. While she empathized with how Anya may have felt about her kids being taken, she resisted drawing any direct parallels between their situations for the simple fact that Arthur was a criminal philanderer, while Richie, seated beside her, picking his nose, was, well, what was he exactly?
Not a failure, nothing that definitive could be said about him. He still had talent, though it was unsteady and too often deployed wastefully, but there were flashes of poetry and insight. Oh, and she had to admit it, she was sweet on him, despite knowing that he was bad for her.
The Prius’s air conditioner barely dried and cooled them, so hot was the sun blasting down on the two-lane. They ran up behind another dilapidated subprime vehicle every mile or so, as families were still trying to make it to Valence despite the fact that the entire community had been ordered to vacate. People helping people was a powerful message, and for thousands who had nothing left to lose, it was the promised land.
Her cell phone rang. She picked it up, taking the wheel with one hand.
“Do you have the girls?” Arthur asked.
“No, you dipshit,” Gemma said. “You took them.”
“Hm,” Arthur said. “Are you sure you don’t have them?”
“Yes, I’m sure,” Gemma said. “Arthur, don’t tell me you’ve lost—”
Arthur hung up.
Gemma turned to Richie. “He’s lost them!”
Jinx immediately leaned forward. “He’s lost Ginny and Franny?”
“Apparently,” Gemma said and began breathing heavily.
“Let me drive,” Richie said.
Gemma pulled over. They paused for a few moments, staring ahead at an old Explorer making its way down the secondary, trailing a puff of road dust and exhaust. They could see plastic bins tied down to the roof, a family’s possessions mounted on the rack. Around them was the same desert they had been driving through for what seemed like forever. There was nothing but hot road cutting through dry country, a million square miles and not a drop to drink.
“We’ll find them,” Richie said.
“He really is an idiot. Who kidnaps children and then loses them?”
Richie smiled. At least he hadn’t managed that particular fuckup.
He pulled back onto the secondary and picked up speed.
JINX WON’T SHUT UP ABOUT Ginny and Franny. Gone. Vanished. All because of an idiot father.
“We’re gonna find them,” I tell her and Gemma.
“It’s an adventure!” says Ronin.
I am about to admonish him for putting too much of a positive spin on a potentially tragic situation. But I reconsider, because he’s right. This is an adventure, or that’s how I have to look at it. These may be the last few days of my life as a father. As soon as Anya secures custody, they could be gone forever, tucked away into sanctuary while I sink with the rest of California. How can I make enough memories to last them a lifetime in just a few days of a road trip? I suppose an adventure, a search for some missing girls, is a potentially richer trove of childhood memories than any trip to Disneyland. We must make do with what we have.
“You know,” I say to Ronin and Jinx, “I want you two to know that this little trip, my taking you with us, is not going to save you forever. I mean your mother will find us and then, well, I have probably hurt my position more by this little operation here.”
“We know,” said Ronin.
“I’m sorry I’m not a better father,” I say, turning to make eye contact with my kids.
“Watch the road!” Ronin shouts, and I turn back just in time to swerve us back into our lane.
“You ARE a good father,” Ronin says. “You try to be.”
“You listen to us,” Jinx says. “Mom doesn’t. She just tells us what to do.”
“We need you,” Ronin says.
I’m about to cry. I can’t imagine these kids being taken away from me. I mash the gas harder. The Prius doesn’t have any more to give.
Gemma’s phone rings; it’s a television reporter who got her phone number through Sargam from Franny.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” Gemma says. “Tell them we’ll be there very soon.”
She puts down her phone. “The girls are fine, they’re in Valence.”
“Let’s go get them!” shouts Jinx.
And off we go.
COMMUNE CAMP UNDER SIEGE; PROGRESSIVES VOW TO STAND GROUND; CULT LEADER: “WE WILL DEFEND OURSELVES.”
The story was being shaped very much in the manner that Pastor Roger and the Pepper Sisters envisioned. A lunatic cult leader convinces a bunch of subprime savages to squat on private property, creating an unsavory, unwashed den of druggie, hippie squalor. This cannot be allowed to stand. State police were arriving, joining the private security forces already deployed by HG Extraction. Reality producers were swarming. Concerned pundits were admonishing. Nothing must stand between the Joshua and its juice. And now that the media narrative was shaping up as People of God versus Atheists, makers versus takers, job creators versus subprimes, the Pepper Sisters would be able to unleash their Valence-clearing operation and wipe away the squalid encampment. Pastor Roger felt it wasn’t only that they were obstructing access to shale oil, it was more importantly the principal of the matter: if these subprimes were allowed to set up their own city, then subprimes everywhere would feel empowered to undermine authority, and then what kind of society would we have? That would be an undermining of the basic foundations of capitalism. The dark forces of progressivism never rested. Pastor Roger from the platform had drawn up charts, mapping the direct lineage from William Jennings Bryan to Theodore Roosevelt to Samuel Gompers to Eugene Debs to Leon Trotsky to Ernst Röhm to Adolf himself. History was very clear on where communalism ended. First, the reestablishment of the minimum wage, and then? The particular object of Pastor Roger’s sermonizing was Sargam, “the She-devil of progressivism,” a leather-clad harlot who came from nowhere to advocate the rise of a new socialist Reich. He warned that we were surrounded by progressives, who controlled the media, entertainment, technology, even the military, the forces of progressivism were so powerful they were crushing the real America. The evidence: the TV cameras seemed to love showing this Madame Trotsky every chance they got. Even now, as he sat in a rocking chair in his tour bus, reading over the income statements from this week’s tithe, he trembled at the thought of this media genic woman who seemed to be on TV even more than he was.
Steven Shopper leaned forward and urged calm. He observed in Pastor Roger an anxiousness he’d never seen before. The pastor was not as steady with his focus on the many, many matters of Freedom Prairie Church, on the finances, the many battles they were fighting on many fronts.
THEY DROVE THROUGH THE MEDIA encampment, Richie slowing down as they passed the Bloomberg satellite truck.
“I could be covering this,” he said.
“Maybe you’re too close to the story,” Gemma suggested.
“Objectivity, or reporting in general, has never been my strength,” Richie said.
He wove around the media vans, the Freedom Prairie trucks, the HG Extraction semis all in a row, left wheels up on the pavement. Dead ahead, state police were standing huddled in the afternoon light, the white flaking ash-fall accumulation atop truck cabs and trailer roofs appearing almost as a beautiful snowfall atop some kind of Dr. Zhivago village.
Richie slowed to a crawl as a security tech waved at them to halt. The tech approached in tandem with a tan-uniformed Nevada State Police officer. The tech was already making a downward-facing circle with his index finger to indicate that Richie should turn around.
He rolled down the window. “Hello there.”
“Nowhere to go,” the officer said. “Road’s closed.”
“We need to get to Valence,” Richie said.
The officer shook his head. “No one’s going to Valence. It’s closed as far as we’re concerned.”
Gemma leaned forward. “My children are in there. I’ve come to get them out.”
The officer read the concern on her face.
“One way or another, I’m going to get my girls,” she said.
The officer looked at Jinx and Ronin in the back, and Richie said, “Those are my kids. I’m just the driver. But, here, my press ID—does that help?”
The officer studied it. “You can drive in, and then you better drive right out. You don’t want to be in there too long.”
He waved them through.
The visibility limited by the cinders, it was slow going across what seemed a no-man’s-land until they saw a few bonfires and the bare outlines of a settlement in the last of the daylight.
DARREN AND THE REST OF the men watched the approaching vehicle, a sedan, the front end casting twin beams closer together than a security-tech SUV. No vehicles had come through in three days, the techs and the cops having shut down Valence in an attempt to restrict supplies and reinforcements coming in from the many well-wishers and supporters that their cause had picked up over the last few weeks. Now they were truly on their own, though a half-dozen reporters, deciding to stick it out with the subprimes, were still inside Valence.
The vehicle, a battered Prius, slowed at the sight of the men waving them down at the head of the off-ramp.
“Hey there,” Darren said. “What can we do for you?”
“I’m looking for my girls,” Gemma said.
Darren knew about the sisters who had shown up out of the desert. Against his advice, Sargam said they could stay, at least until their mother was contacted. And here she was.
“Okay,” Darren said, “keep driving down this road. Stop in at the third house on the first street you come to. Sargam should be in there. But go slow. We got kids running around all over the place.”
Richie put the car back into gear, but before he could press the gas, Darren asked, “Hey, what are they saying about us out there?”
Richie thought about it. “They’re saying . . . well, the TV is saying how you’re trespassing, violating private property, and how the state gave the Pepper Sisters this land.”
Darren shook his head.
Richie continued. “But everywhere you go, you see people with signs that say ‘People Helping People’ or ‘Sargam Forever’ or ‘Valence Rules.’ People know what you’re doing out here, they do.”
Richie steered the car down the off-ramp and stopped at the third house, where four women were sitting on wood and brick benches before a bonfire, knitting in the flickering light. Sargam was framed in the doorway, the flames giving her an orange glow as she studied them.
“Howdy,” Sargam said. “I didn’t think they were letting anyone in—”
As soon as she saw Gemma and Richie get out of the car she knew they weren’t subprimes; their vehicle wasn’t packed with a lifetime’s detritus the way most folks’ were when they rolled in.
Gemma was upon Sargam so quickly that the women around the campfire rose as if to defend her.
“My girls,” Gemma demanded. “Where are they?”
Sargam knew immediately who Gemma was referring to, as did the other women, who sat back down.
“They should be over on the next block, at the end of Las Lomas,” she said and hugged Gemma. “Those are some tough girls. Survived a coyote attack?”
The tale of the little girls coming out of the desert, one of whom had survived a coyote attack, and had the scars to prove it, had spread through Valence. It was taken as a good omen that with the roads closed and the marshals and state police and security techs closing in, two little girls could just walk right in.
“Leave the vehicle at the end of the block,” Sargam said. “It’s a short walk, I’ll take you.”
The figure she cut, the confidence of her stride, the pleasing symmetry of her dark features, the shimmer of her wavy hair reflecting the firelight, rendered her more impressive in person than she seemed on television. As they all followed her down a path through front yards of radish and onion patches, and tomato vines on sticks rising overhead, Richie was surprised at the contradiction between this fertile land and the desert they had just traversed. It was as if someone had figured out how to take what was best about Burning Man, shed all the druggie crap and psychedelic costumes, and somehow make a go of it.
Or was it just his exhaustion—his two days of driving, his intoxication at being with Gemma, his excitement at Gemma getting her kids back?
They saw children playing in the street, riding bicycles and skateboards, the growling sound of bicycles tires on concrete audible before they could see clearly the lithe bodies darting in the half-light of dusk.
“Mommy! Mommy!” From out of the shadows came the two girls in torn dresses, both smiling and dirty-faced but somehow happier than Gemma had ever seen them. “You came!”
She hugged them to her, kissing each on their crowns, and then hugged them again. “You’re both so brave,” she said.
The girls were giggling, and now all three of them were teary. They held each other in silence.
“We made so many new friends,” Ginny said when they released each other.
“Everyone here is nice,” Franny said.
Gemma grabbed them again and hugged them, and turned to Sargam. “Thank you.”
“Thank her. This is Bailey”—and she pointed to a woman with reddish hair.
“Well, then, thank you.”
Gemma looked at Richie, suddenly unsure of what they should do. Were they really just going to get back in the car and drive off? And go where?
Ronin and Jinx had both drifted down the block, to where the rest of the kids had resumed playing a game involving skateboards and bicycles. While Richie could not quite figure out the rules, the sight of the bodies in motion, the aggressive pumping and pedaling and chasing and grabbing, the shriek when a child was caught, the wail of a little boy falling off a skateboard and scraping his knee, he found the savagery of the game reassuring. The contest appeared brutal and complicated but had a certain order to it, in the way bigger kids mainly chased down other bigger kids, while the younger kids were spared the worst of the violence. It dawned on Richie why this was so fascinating: he had not seen kids playing with this kind of abandon since, well, since he received a summons for endangering minors after a football game. This was the kind of play he remembered from his own childhood. There was no cell phone or game console in sight. This was good, clean violence.
He watched, amazed, as Ronin, encouraged by the other kids, jumped on a skateboard and navigated between the patrolling bikers to the opposite curb, where he jumped off. Ronin had divined, on his own, the rules, or at least well enough to jump into a game he had never played before with kids he just met. Richie knew that Ronin’s doing this back home in Pacific Palisades was inconceivable; he would have been too shy, would have made an excuse about not knowing the rules. He would have been afraid of embarrassing himself.
Gemma observed Richie watching his son, and was about to ask what they should do now, when both her girls started jumping up and down, screaming, “Can we stay? Please, please, Mom, please. Can we stay?”
I AM MESMERIZED BY THE sight of my son, who became animated and alive and unaware of himself for maybe the first time in months. And after a few minutes, after Ginny and Franny return to the game, Jinx joins in, and I watch my children play in the dark night in a manner that is at once totally familiar and completely novel. I remember hurried football games and ditch games and capture-the-flag and round-the-block and jailbreak played after dinner on summer nights, the thrill of running in the dark, of hiding in the gloaming. It is novel because I have so rarely seen my children this free.
Gemma and Sargam are talking to each other, Gemma giving Sargam the long story about how we got here, and then they both turn and look at me, and Gemma shrugs to Sargam as if to say, What can I say?
I know before they come over to me that we are spending the night here.
We leave the kids playing their game and wander back with Sargam to the threshold where we first saw her. She leads us to the back of the house, where a communal kitchen is set up, large, scrubbed cylindrical pots are upside down to dry, a few hundred mismatched plates piled on a sturdy plank table, cups and glasses in stacked roller-cases with their tops ripped off. One pot simmers on a fire, and Sargam ladles us out a black bean stew, and as soon as I smell the food I realize how hungry I am.
Gemma and I both sit down on a log bench and spoon the stew into our mouths. The food is earthy and smoky, and while the first bite seems bland, the flavors grow on me, some kind of meat, seasoned with cilantro, onions, chipotle, garlic, and salt, so that after a few mouthfuls, I can’t imagine anything I would rather be eating. We wash it down with cups of water.
“What’s the meat?” I ask Sargam.
“Rabbit, goat, maybe snake,” she says. “Definitely some lobster. Cans of the stuff have been donated—by the pallet.”
“Of course,” I say. “It’s delicious.”
“I take it you two are bedding down together?” Sargam says.
Gemma and I both shrug and nod.
Sargam says that we can sleep in one of the houses on the western edge of Valence, on a street called Temecula. It’s one of the last uninhabited houses. There are spare sleeping bags and bedding, if that’s what we need.
We thank her.
“How long can you hold out?” I ask.
“Forever.”
“But how?”
“People helping people,” she says.
She can see that I’m skeptical. “This isn’t some kind of Masada here,” she says. “We’re not martyrs. We’re families.”
“But, Pastor Roger, HG Extraction, they are an army.”
She looks at me. “I feel like I’m talking to a reporter.”
“You are,” says Gemma.
“Sort of,” I insist.
“He’s a really bad reporter,” Gemma says. “Terrible. Lazy. Can’t get anything right. Always getting sued. Getting sued, in fact, by Pastor Roger.”
Sargam is clearly amused. “Then you can’t be all bad.”
“Oh, he’s not,” laughs Gemma. “I’m sweet on him.”
She winks at me.
I’ve never felt so happy.
“I want to write this story, your story,” I blurt out. I suppose I have been thinking this the whole time, the whole drive out here, but this is the first time I’ve put it into words. Suddenly, an old passion and excitement has reawakened and I feel a sense of mission about my work that I haven’t had in decades. (Or maybe ever.) I want to tell a great story, a true story, an important story—a story that’s messy and beautiful and subversive and uplifting. I now know why I’ve come.
“I’m not a TV reporter,” I say. “I don’t have cameras. I’m not even sure I have a place to publish. I just want to stay here and write about you, and about being here.”
“Will you write the truth?” Sargam asks.
“I don’t know. I’m not sure I know what truth is. I’ll write what I see and feel.”
She smiles. “That’s good enough for me.”
After dinner I call Rajiv, plugging my cell phone into the car charger. He’s on the heli-shuttle home, and I can barely hear him over the whirring of the rotors.
“I’m in Valence,” I say.
“We have two drones overhead and a whole trailer full of terminal guys covering that.”
“But I’m inside. They’re all in their air-conditioned trailer back in Placer. I’m, I just had dinner with Sargam. She’ll let me live here among them, tell their story. Access, Rajiv.”
Rajiv thinks this over. “It is unlikely Sargam would sue you, considering the circumstances.”
“Come on!”
“If only we could remove you and replace you with someone more competent,” Rajiv says.
“A more competent person would never have ended up in this situation.”
“How did you end up there?”
“I’m on the run,” I say.
“From what?”
I’m not exactly sure. “Everything?”
I realize the true value of what I am offering Rajiv and his magazine. “You should be fucking thanking me for calling you first, you ingrate.”
“We do still pay you many thousands of dollars a month.”
Oh, yeah. “Fair point.”
“And until this phone call, well, I don’t need to remind you of exactly why we were doing that.”
“Because of the lawsuits,” I say. “But now I can make it all up to you.”
“We’ll see,” Rajiv says. “Let me run it by Richard. But, yes, proceed.”
AFTER PLAYING THEIR GAME—HELICOPTER, THE kids called it—and then eating their bowls of stew, Ronin headed off with the boys, and Jinx and Ginny and Franny went with Gemma to the house assigned them by Sargam. It was a wreck, of course, but Gemma spread out the sleeping bags in a rear bedroom, rolled up a T-shirt for each to use as a pillow, and the three, exhausted from days of driving and their running and playing, fell asleep as soon as they were horizontal. Gemma walked outside, the faint stirring of a breeze a whisper of relief after the steady all-day heat.
Ronin was crawling along on his belly, following Tom and Juan and Vlad and the rest of the Gorillas on a mission to survey the community’s western flank. They paused at the woman standing in the moonlight, the newcomer, and Ronin admired her too as if he hadn’t just spent two days in a cramped car with her.
None of the boys said it, for that’s not what boys that age talk about, but each thought it: She’s pretty. Quickly, however, they returned to the work at hand, to slither into that cornfield and beyond to scout enemy positions.
Tom once read that superior knowledge of the disposition, strength, and location of a formal enemy’s organized columns was one of the advantages insurgent forces held in an asymmetrical conflict. The Gorillas already possessed superior geographical knowledge, knowing every culvert and ditch and obscured sightline in the two square miles of Valence and throughout the surrounding desert. They had observed the enemy for days, and as they crawled out to undertake even more recon, a few of the boys were voicing complaints about the rigors of the mission.
“My stomach hurts from so much crawling,” said Juan.
Ronin thought the same thing, but found the mission itself exciting. It reminded him of a Call of Duty scenario, only without the cool weapons.
“Then turn around and go home,” said Tom. “We are going to figure out where they are going to come from, and then how to attack them where they are most vulnerable.”
Ronin liked the sound of that. He had already been sworn to secrecy by the rest of the Gorillas, and now he knew why.
The boys crawled through the corn, down a gully, and into a flat-bottomed cement drain with slanted edges. They ran along it for a few hundred feet, until they reached the edge of a field from which they could see the lights of the enemy vehicles, the massing of SUVs parked there in the dark.
“When do you think they’ll come?” Ronin asked.
“Soon,” the boy said. “Very soon.”
I PICK UP MY COMPUTER and dig through my duffel bag for a pack of Cough. I slip out a marijuana cigarette and light it, and immediately I feel a hand on my shoulder.
“Hey!” says the same man who stopped our vehicle on the way in. “That’s against the rules.”
“Rules?” I say.
“No dope smoking,” says the man.
“What are we, in sixth grade?” I say.
“That’s Sargam’s policy, and everyone supports it. We had to keep out the tweakers, otherwise this would be a haven for meth smokers.”
I nod. “Makes sense.” I drop the joint.
He introduces himself, saying, “My name is Darren. I live with Sargam.”
“She’s something.”
“She’s the fucking messiah,” he says, nodding sternly. Then he smiles. “I had you going there, didn’t I?”
I shrug.
We are walking through the tomato vines again, and I ask Darren if they can really hold out indefinitely, as Sargam claims.
“Well, we do have one advantage,” Darren says.
“What’s that?”
“We got nowhere else to go.”
I feel sorry for him for a few seconds before I realize that the same could be said of me.
ARTHUR MACK WAS CONTRITE AS he told Steve Shopper the truth. He had lost the girls. They had vanished.
“They couldn’t have gone far. There’s nothing from this trailer camp the whole twenty miles back to Placer,” Shopper said.
“Well, they’re not here,” Arthur said. “I’ve walked every foot of this place looking, been asking everyone, the security guards, reporters, everyone. They were last seen wandering across no-man’s-land in the direction of that subprime village,” said Arthur.
Shopper immediately sensed the opportunity there and asked if Arthur was sure.
“That’s what some of the security guys said, but there was that heavy ash storm yesterday, so nobody is sure what they were seeing.”
Shopper immediately went to Pastor Roger and told him that Mack’s missing daughters were believed to be in Valence. That would make Sargam a kidnapper, practically a defiler of children—good news that gladdened the pastor’s heart.
In the past few days, dozens of Valences had been springing up in and around cities across America, as subprimes claimed stretches of foreclosed homes for themselves, and defied the orders of police and federal marshals to vacate. Banding together, they were squatting in these abandoned houses, professing to live by the simple credo of people helping people, and hanging up signs that said: “We Are Valence.” They were receiving support from misguided liberals and the progressive media, who could not get enough of this story of nascent communalism. The real story, Pastor Roger lamented, of anarcho-syndicalists seeking to overthrow the government by denying the God-given right of private property, was too often ignored by breathless reporters excited at the simple narrative of subprimes fighting back.
With every appearance on CNN or FOX or KIK-TV, Pastor Roger reminded viewers that this insurgency was proof of the rising wave of progressivism that threatened to swamp our democracy. “Let’s talk about the rapes, the sexual abuse, the pedophilia, the public masturbation, the drug dealing, let’s remember the unsanitary conditions in which children are living, let’s remember what these progressive hellholes really look like and what we are tolerating in letting these subprime, anarchist criminal dens continue to exist.”
Then he added during that evening’s appearances on KIK, “We also know that here, in the heart of the beast, where the Typhoid Mary of this progressive disease is festering, they have taken two little girls hostage, and who knows what may be happening to those poor little angels right now.”
Photos of Ginny and Franny appeared on the screen.
“They were last seen playing in a field near Valence, and we now believe they were abducted by the forces of progressivism. So I shudder, and I have been praying for these two poor little angels, but what could be happening to them in that cesspool of depravity right now? My mind boggles. We have to get in there. Now.”
RAJIV CALLS ME AT SIX a.m., local time. I’ve managed several hours’ sleep on the hard floor, curled up with Gemma for a few blissful minutes before we rolled apart because of the heat and discomfort. The girls and Ronin all seem to be catching up on their sleep.
I pick up the phone, which is vibrating next to me on the shag-carpeted floor.
“You know anything about these girls?” he asks.
“What girls?”
“The two missing girls, Virginia and Frances Mack, they’re the daughters of Mack’s wife. You profiled her.”
“They’re not missing, they’re in the next room, asleep.”
Rajiv tells me that overnight, the story of Virginia and Frances has turned into the biggest story in the country, crowding everything else out of the news cycle, with Republican congressmen taking to the floor to demand an immediate drone strike on Valence and Pastor Roger shedding tears on every morning show as he speculated in detail as to what might be happening to those lost lambs.
The missing girls had given the story a human element that dirty-faced subprime children couldn’t possibly convey. For Virginia and Frances to have fallen into Sargam’s clutches confirmed the deep fears of every law-abiding, God-fearing, bill-paying, 700-plus credit holder.
And I had missed the story, blown it.
“Even a journalist of your incompetence should have a story to file on this. You know the mother.”
I tell him that their mom is right here. I don’t say I’m sort of in bed with her. But I say that we drove out here specifically because the girls had been abducted by Arthur, her criminal future ex-husband, but now they are safely reunited with their mom.
“Can you get an interview with the mom or with the girls or both?”
I tell him that shouldn’t be a problem.
“You realize this is a huge story, a scoop. And you, of all people . . .”
It takes me about an hour to write the single biggest news story of my life, which really isn’t saying much. I send it out after tethering my computer to my phone, but I also know that I will soon be out of juice and unable to file anything further. There are a few other reporters still in Valence, independent correspondents who have elected to stay in the community despite the obvious risks of being the target of an army of police and security officers. One of them has figured out who Ginny and Franny and Gemma are, and has sent a kik-tok, but he didn’t have an interview or the confirmation—or the photo—that I would send of the three of them, standing arm in arm before the battered house where we were taking shelter.
I also add to the story, in the last few graphs, news that was surprising to everyone, including myself: Gemma intended to stay here with the girls. In fact, she felt safer here than in the rest of the country, where coyotes and ex-husbands were prowling around in the night hours.
“I like it here,” she says. “It’s sort of like camping.”
WHAT THE HELL ARE WE doing here? In this oppressive heat, spending an afternoon bending over a berry patch and plucking runty strawberries that taste sweeter than any hypertrophied hothouse berries I’ve ever tasted. Sargam told me that I would have to pitch in, do some actual work, a notion that had remained abstract to me until this morning, when I bent over in the furrowed ground and lifted up a stem to pluck, jumping back in terror at the size of the spider that came scampering out of the tangled shadow. It is the sight of me, so slow and unsteady at this backwork, that convinces those skeptical of my presence that I am not a spy or somehow in cahoots with the Pepper Sisters.
It is so hot, and despite my hat and my sunscreen I can feel that I must be burning. I realize I have spent my whole life avoiding this kind of physical labor, the bending, the reaching, the yanking, and for good reason. It is awful. But I understand that it is the price I must pay to stay here. If I had a skill, then perhaps I could work on engineering, or irrigation, or fertilization, projects that have allowed Valence to survive. But I am only a pair of not-very-skilled hands, so I have nothing to offer but my ability to pick berries, or whatever else needs picking.
Thankfully, the short workday ends just a few hours before the afternoon sun makes this kind of work truly impossible. We rise early, at dawn, work till eleven, and then retreat into shade for a few hours of reading. That is when I can talk to the many citizens of Valence about their lives.
They are, though they did not know it until they turned up here, the logical end products of our unregulated free-enterprise system. The privatization of every government service, from education to food stamps to Temporary Assistance for Needy Families to Medicaid, results in a safety net consisting of a few days of vouchers that buys a family maybe a week before they become destitute and hungry. And remember public libraries? The post office? The National Park Service? Lifeguards? The FDA? So much for the quaint notion that the private sector and charitable organizations would step in when the public sector withdrew. The subprimes residing in Valence turn out to be just a few hundred of the millions driving our rutted and potholed highway system looking for work, and even when they find it, it’s not enough to pay for food for a whole family for a day. Abolishing the minimum wage with the National Right to Work Act took care of that.
As a cynic and malcontent, my one consistent attribute is my inability to get along in most systems, or with most people. And so as I wander Valence, from Las Lomas to Bienvenida, observing, conversing, interviewing, and also trying to find my son, who, in the glimpses I have of him seems to have grown six inches in stature and self-esteem as he roves this postapocalyptic suburbia turned Walden Two with a gang of boys, I am looking for the flaws, of course, and there are plenty: inadequate medical care, unhygienic sanitation, hours of drudgery, slavish, unquestioning devotion to Sargam. I am wary of falling into a Walter Duranty–like fawning over the socialist miracle unfolding here. This is no miracle, certainly, and it is only the hard-hearted cruelty of the rest of the world that makes this simple community of impoverished farmers seem like any kind of oasis. Having a roof, some walls, enough to eat, and a place for your kids to play is heaven when you’ve been sleeping under highway overpasses and goaded daily by the end of a security tech’s cattle prod.
So what it comes down to, for me, as I wander and process what I am seeing and hearing, is this: Is Sargam for real? Is she a genuine leader who has started a true populist movement that has a chance to survive whatever brutality the Pepper Sisters can unleash in the name of upholding their legal rights as the beneficiaries of a questionable enactment of eminent domain?
I mean, is Sargam even real? Or is she the inverse of Pastor Roger? Beautiful, spiritual, egalitarian, radical, redistributionist, she is like the monstrous, collective dream–leader of secular liberals everywhere. How could someone like this just show up? She has no past, she comes from nowhere—and becomes in just a few months a national figure so compelling that the most powerful capitalist forces on Earth are aligning to destroy her? The last time a political figure appeared seemingly out of nowhere to mesmerize the population, he ended up steering nothing more than a slightly less aggressively capitalist course, so that even while he was still in office there were populist uprisings—various Occupy movements—on behalf of a cohort similar to the subprimes. Was Sargam different? Was she the real thing, a true outsider who believed in nothing more than People Helping People?
“This is in some ways like a cult,” I tell Gemma.
“It is a cult, in that you have to believe, but she makes it easy,” Gemma says. “She’s not asking for anything from anyone. She’s just trying to help folks get along.”
“Did you know what life was really like—before?” I ask.
Gemma shakes her head. “I thought about it, but in the same way you watch people on TV who are starving, or read some awful account of children who are locked up in basements. You know it’s awful, and you feel bad, but it seems like something far away. Maybe it’s me, maybe it’s a flaw in me, but I was somehow able to live in relative calm even knowing things like that were going on.”
I think I have that same capacity. That’s how I lived all these years, wrote so many stories that were essentially apologias for a system that fed on human dignity, and never wondered at the morality or decency of it. I am selfish. I think I always knew that, but only now do I understand that our only way out is if each of us becomes an unselfish version of ourselves. It is going to be a few billion individual decisions, repeated and reaffirmed every day, that will change us, change the planet. Not some great decision by a great leader, or a great law passed by a great Congress, none of which exist.
And I know that sanctuary, if I didn’t already suspect this, is just another word for surrender.
“Sargam is a solution,” I tell Gemma. “She may not be the best solution, but she is the only one I can see. People helping people is the first step toward wherever we have to go. To freedom.”
“Meanwhile,” Gemma said, “does freedom have to be so filthy? I’m going to dump a few buckets of cold water on my kids.”
“Could you dump one on mine as well?”
HOW CAN THOSE PAGAN SUBPRIMES stand it out here, in this heat, this dust, this ash, this smoke, this hell? Pastor Roger wondered. If we can’t extract God’s juice here, from this godforsaken patch, then from where could we squeeze the fruit of his loins? We have to grope, to grope down into the earth, to lay man’s hands upon the unspeakable, unseeable foundations, the heart, the guts, the snaking intestines of the world. And once immersed, we have to squeeze, squeeze, squeeze!
As soon as the governor gives the order, then we will squeeze them out.
Pastor Roger gave his daily radio prayer and podcast, distributed to millions of devout Freedom Prairie disciples. As always, he thanked the Pepper Sisters, and reminded listeners of the many hundreds of millions of dollars they were spending to further the cause of Christianity and Prosperity, not just by endowing Bob Jones University, not just by creating the largest and most successful for-profit Christian university system in the world with Pepper College, but also by endowing the Pepper Center for Geological Studies at Harvard and the Pepper Petroleum Institute at Stanford. Secular humanism, Pastor Roger reminded his followers, was another word for progressivism. Liberal arts was socialism. Art was a hobby for women. Young Christian men and women should learn applicable skills to avoid idleness.
He called his wife every morning and evening. Clarissa, a chunky blonde with a vibrant, rich mane of yellow hair, could take the platform herself when Pastor Roger was away on mission. She could tend the flock at Freedom Prairie, deliver a stem-winder of a sermon, cry a Jordan River of tears, and extract a tithe nearly on par with the pastor himself. Still, she wondered how long he would have to stay in this desert camp outside Placer.
“When God wills it we will unleash the Joshua!” he told her. “His kingdom will come.”
He blessed her and told her he had business to attend to.
Steven Shopper had brought Arthur Mack to meet with him on his tour bus, and he studied the energy trader carefully.
Arthur was smiling broadly, leaning forward on the tuck-and-roll banquette as if awaiting good news.
“Your daughters are with their mother,” said Pastor Roger. “And she, she is in the thrall of a false idol.”
“A wrinkle in the plan?”
“More than a wrinkle,” Pastor Roger said. “It is a stain, a dark stain on a pristine white sheet.”
Pastor Roger and Steven Shopper had already concluded that Arthur Mack, despite his unjust persecution and heroic martyrdom on the wheel of the global progressive movement, did not have the commensurate personal virtue. Why, he was contributing numbers—his own offspring!—to the enemy rather than rallying Christians to the cause.
“It is not our mission to nurture the unclean,” Steven Shopper said in a soft voice.
“I can still be of use,” Arthur said, panic entering his voice. “I can help you trade the juice, I can hedge the juice.”
But Arthur Mack was the vestige of an old news cycle, superseded by the whales and now by Sargam and Valence. He was no longer a useful example of the progressive agenda victimizing a legitimate businessman. He was just another deadbeat dad.
“Mr. Shopper will show you out,” Pastor Roger said, turning his back.
And thus Arthur was cast out of the tour bus to wander in the desert, where he offered himself to every media outlet he encountered. The name Arthur Mack was familiar to reporters and producers, but it carried with it no particular titillation, not enough certainly to encourage anyone to offer a helicopter flight or even a car ride in exchange for an interview.
THE JOSHUA LUMBERED FORWARD, A fortress of steel and concrete and polymer and rubber, a beautiful monstrosity and a tribute to God’s ingenuity. It shook the ground for a radius of a half mile, the wobble beneath its feet like thunder captured, bottled underground, and then released to roar back up to the sky. The powerful turbines emitted their own heat that made turning toward the sun seem almost a relief. From where the Pepper Sisters sat, in an air-conditioned black SUV, bottles of iced tea in hand, the Joshua resembled the I-beam-and-girder skeleton of a skyscraper in progress. Though they owned it, every bolt and button and knob, from afar the Joshua seemed a force beyond man’s control, beyond even God’s will. It was like a giant robot. If you gave it arms that swayed at its sides, it would be like a gigantic metal zombie astride the country. Its slow progress made it even more mesmerizing—it moved no faster than a man walking at a brisk pace, and for an object so gigantic, that progress seemed both pitifully meager and utterly unstoppable.
Dottie Pepper sipped from her iced tea. “My my, Dorrie, it’s quite a contraption.”
“Indeed,” Dorrie said. “But, darling, is it a hybrid? What about the emissions?”
Both women started laughing and told the driver to take them back to Pastor Roger’s camp.
Pastor Roger welcomed the Peppers, apologized for the state of his immaculate tour bus, and took knees with them as soon as they entered to pray for the well-being of the Joshua and the slaying of progressivism.
“We don’t like how this is playing,” said Dorrie Pepper.
“That woman Sargam is on every channel,” said Dottie.
Pastor Roger urged calm. “She will be forgotten, as every story is. This will become yesterday’s story as soon as we evict them from what is rightfully—and legally—yours.”
“Yes, but these squatting camps, these Valences everywhere,” Dorrie said.
“Terrorists, Muslims, hippies—they are a law-enforcement issue,” said Pastor Roger. “Remember Occupy? Of course not. Because it’s been forgotten.”
“But this woman, she is something different,” Dottie said.
“She’s a leader,” Dorrie said. “Trouble.”
“I’m on the phone with the governor every few hours,” Pastor Roger said. “He is very sympathetic. He wants nothing more than to restore law and order. As soon as we get the call, we can take possession of your property.”
“We can’t have children injured,” said Dottie. “And the operation has to be done in the dark, like with Occupy; they can’t film at night.”
“Why, Dottie, I’ve never known you to take such an active hand in logistics,” Pastor Roger said. “We don’t want violence, we don’t want any injury, we—you—simply want what is your God-given right. The law, God’s law, is on our side. This is a holy fight.”
“Let’s offer them safe passage,” Dottie said. “Let’s promise them forty acres and a mule if they just load up their Jed Clampett mobiles and ride off.”
“That would be succumbing to blackmail,” Pastor Roger said in medium-high dudgeon. “That would send the message to every subprime that they should squat and wait for their handout. Why not just bring back the entitlement state? Give them all free health care?”
Dorrie shook her head. “Now, Pastor, don’t get all apocalyptic on us. We’re just trying to be discreet.”
THE SIGHT OF THE JOSHUA lumbering across the desert at first appeared to Jeb and Darren as a dark silhouette against the sky, an Entlike apparition, only here representing the deviltry of man rather than Tolkien’s wisdom of nature. Though they knew from extensive media coverage its provenance, the sight was still shocking. Soon, the whole community was gathered at the top of the off-ramp, their eyes focused on the horizon line.
Sargam wondered: Would they just roll that monster into Valence, crush anything and anyone in its way, and then start drilling? Was the battle to end that simply? Men and women with linked arms crushed beneath its treads? But surely even the kleptocratic aristocracy would object to crushing women and children.
She was awed at the courage of the many who had stayed with her. Only five or six families had chosen to flee. At meetings every night, Sargam talked about what was at stake.
“This path, this fight, will be harder than anything we have done, than you have done, and I know you have been through so much. Every night spent dirty and hungry in some Ryanville has felt like the absolute limit, beyond what you could take, of what you could see your children going through. What we are asking now is even more suffering than that, but at least I can say we are fighting for a cause. We are sacrificing our comforts, our rest, even, perhaps, our health and our lives, so that we can somehow lessen the suffering of so many. That is what we are doing. We are helping. People helping people.”
She studied her fellow citizens: now strong, fed, rested, not fatigued from months on the road and weary nights in Ryanvilles. They were now proud men and women whose spirits had soared, their body language revealing them to be unafraid of what lay ahead.
Privately, when talking with Sargam, Darren voiced occasional doubts about the wisdom of her leadership. Perhaps they should just surrender, drive away while they still could.
“We have nowhere to go,” Sargam said. “We get run off from each place we set down. If we are going to stand and fight anywhere, it might as well be here, together, for a place we love.”
Still, she worried at the wisdom of this decision, even if in front of the TV cameras or when talking to reporters she never wavered. She had briefed the citizens on nonviolent resistance, passed out the plastic cuffs they would fasten around their arms and each other. She told them what to do when they were arrested. There were several dozen state’s attorneys waiting in Placer to help process the arrested, no matter their credit scores. Many of the fathers and mothers, she knew, could end up in Credit Rehabilitation Centers, yet they were willing to risk debtors’ prison for their cause. Her desire was to live up to their courage.
And at the approach of the Joshua, she could still feel the strongest murmurings of doubt and unease. She turned back toward her people, raised her arms, and said, “There is still time to leave, if that is what you want, but I ask you this: If you leave now, if you run now, when will you stop running?”
I’VE NEVER SEEN MY CHILDREN so engaged—so much like kids. Ronin is gone from first light, playing in the hills with his new friends. When I ask what they have been doing, he tells me they play different games all day, ditch, capture the flag, some soccer, and something they are calling Gorilla. He has never been this long without a game console or cell phone or tablet in his hands. He is rough, scratched, and dirty, his cheeks smudged and elbows scabbed, a feral quality to him that so pleases me.
I know this must end, that this wacky little holiday in the dirt that we’ve been on will conclude, but I would argue—if I weren’t afraid to speak to my ex-wife—that this is ultimately good for Ronin.
And for Jinx too. She is rethinking her opinion of Pastor Roger as she makes friends with people whom Pastor Roger is vowing to drive off or arrest. She insists she is still Christian, but that there are many ways to worship, and she is still figuring out her own. “At Captain’s Club it was much simpler,” she tells me as she puts on her shoes one morning. “At Captain’s Club, if you wanted to go to heaven, if you wanted your family to go to heaven, then you followed Pastor Roger’s instructions. But I don’t see why just being a good person isn’t enough. And if Pastor Roger is so good, why is he so against Sargam, who really is good?”
The evening after the appearance on the horizon of the Joshua, I ask Sargam about her past. She talks about the many foster homes, the abusive foster parents, fleeing when she was a teenager, surviving on the road as a young woman, wandering from Ryanville to Ryanville. It is the same story that has been reported by the media, who harp on the fact that there is no record of Sargam anywhere. She has never revealed her given name. And, most suspicious of all, she has no credit score.
“I’m flawed. By Pastor Roger’s standards I’m a harlot. I did what I had to do to survive,” she tells me.
“Then what gives you the moral authority to lead all these people?”
“We are doing what is right. That’s the easy part. But why me, you ask? Maybe it’s because I have nowhere else to go. I come from subprime, I am subprime. I’m not someone who grew up poor, escaped her origins, went to college, joined the elite. I am still subprime. That’s what gives me the authority.
“We got played by Washington, by Wall Street, by big oil and the Pepper Sisters. For too long—forever it feels like—we’ve only magnified our powerlessness by running away. Through bubble after bubble, through the planet heating, burning, flooding, becoming more toxic, for years we’ve lived with that. Now we have to say ‘Enough! It starts here.’”
“But do you advocate the overthrow of the United States of America?” I ask.
She laughs. “As if that were possible. No, we want nothing more than to be able to stay here, in our community, a community that was abandoned and that we remade as a home. Our issues are entirely local.”
“And all those other Valences, the thousands, soon maybe millions of people, who are squatting, refusing to move on, trying to build communities. Do you speak for them?”
“My only wish for them,” Sargam says, “is that they don’t happen to be squatting above a shale oil deposit.”
But here is what I notice again: Sargam does emit a certain energy. I guess I would call it a glow, a soothing glow. She’s a beautiful woman, initially sexually attractive, though she quickly transcends that and makes you forget it. But there it remains, thrumming in the background, an insistent, steady appeal that keeps you watching and listening. I’ve never seen a politician quite like her.
I’ve been around cult leaders and swamis and self-help telemarketers and even Pastor Roger, and I know that Sargam is different from any huckster I’ve ever encountered.
Jesus Christ, listen to me. Am I losing my cynicism, my natural suspicion of everything and everyone? I don’t think so, but what I am witnessing, in Sargam’s leadership, in her gentle appeal, her calm approach, her steady character, is as shocking to me as it is unlikely. For the first time in my life I may have found someone I believe in.
TOM AND RONIN STAKED OUT the highest ground they could find, the tufted mounds to the eastern fringes of Valence from which they took turns watching the Joshua as it crawled into position. Both boys were speechless at the sight of the monstrous machine, and frightened by what they were beholding, yet neither would admit his anxiety to the other.
Both boys knew they had no more chance of changing the course of this colossal contraption than they would of changing the weather. But Tom had an idea.
“Inside the machine is a man,” he said, “a man who breathes air and bleeds blood, just like us.”
Ronin liked the sound of this speech, which Tom was patching together from pep talks delivered in old movies.
“He feels pain, just as we do. He feels fear, just as we do.”
“He has to take a crap sometimes,” Ronin said, giggling, “just like we do!”
Both boys started laughing, and they crawled back down the mound toward the houses at the edge of Valence. Their fathers, who had already vowed nonviolent resistance, planned to lay down on the off-ramp into Valence before the tracks of the enemy. The boys found such passive resistance unacceptable to their testosterone-driven sensibilities. These were young men, just noticing their first sprigs of pubic hair, their first ejaculations, their first distorted sense of how to be a man.
I SWEEP THE FLOOR OF the ranch house, the broom’s soft yellow whisks pushing dust out the open cavity where a sliding window was supposed to hang, so that the motes puff out and up into a brown curl. Gemma is preparing for her daily run, pulling on yellowed sneakers, wrapping a bandana over her sunburned forehead. She is beautiful, my Gemma, and I wonder: If she weren’t here, would I still be bivouacked in this utopian work camp? I can’t answer that, of course, but I do know that Valence is a wonderful place to be in love. We are surrounded by good, sweet people, all of whom are engaged in a great struggle, so every action feels meaningful. Our love, set against the backdrop of a town under siege, the high drama of it all would bring out the romantic in the most cynical.
These are, I believe, the happiest days of my life, the mornings spent toiling in the fields, the afternoons spent writing about Sargam and Valence, the evenings with Gemma, with Franny and Ginny and Ronin and Jinx; we are like a postapocalyptic Brady Bunch, filthy instead of squeaky clean, our ranch house missing doors, fixtures, and windows, adrift in an abandoned exurbia, but we are happy.
“We’re like a family,” Jinx says as she attempts to untangle her hair before the cracked mirror we’ve set up on the kitchen counter. She says this absentmindedly, not considering the weight of the statement.
But Gemma and I are both feeling the same thing, great joy and hope in this moment.
We are a family.
THE RUMBLE WAKES US BEFORE dawn. I climb out of my sleeping bag, straighten myself, and check the bedroom only to find Ronin already gone. The girls are all up and rubbing their eyes.
“Is it an earthquake?” Franny asks.
I shepherd the three of them into the living room. They huddle next to Gemma as I pull on my shoes and pants.
“Take them to Sargam’s house,” I tell her. The fallow fields behind it have been designated as the meeting place, relatively sheltered behind two rows of ranch houses. “I’ll be up at the off-ramp.”
“Is this it?” Gemma asks, gathering the girls’ clothes and shoes.
“I don’t know. I need to find Ronin.”
I slip on a hooded sweatshirt, leaving Gemma the big flashlight, and set off down Temecula toward the off-ramp. Other men and women are marching along the street, their beams of light bouncing over the pavement. The ground still shakes, the grumbling growing nearer, and in the distance, toward the eastern horizon, there is a halogen-white light like an artificial dawn, so bright it emits a kind of heat, toward which we walk. A woman begins singing, softly at first, as if she is singing to herself. I can’t hear the words or tune clearly, but then she is joined by a few other voices, first the women and then the men, and then dozens of us, tentatively joining and then raising our voices.
As I went walking I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said “No Trespassing.”
But on the other side it didn’t say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.
In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?
Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me.
Our voices strengthen when we are joined by more fellow citizens, from each of Valence’s streets and cul-de-sacs, the chorus rising and the cheers mounting so that we don’t hear the grumble or the growl of the machines or the vehicles, just the song. And now there are reporters with video cameras trained on us, and news drones scanning us from above, and we link arms, brother and brother and sister and sister, a human chain a dozen wide across the road, marching toward the off-ramp, where we see Sargam standing in white, backlit by the headlights of oncoming security vehicles. The governor, apparently, has acquiesced to Pastor Roger and the Pepper Sisters and ordered the forcible removal of all who oppose the measure to vacate. The security techs and police are coming, their vehicles stretched out for two miles along the expressway. And behind them, clamorously rolling toward Valence, the beastly Joshua.
We are told to take our places on the off-ramp, arms linked, to block the security techs who will attempt to remove us. The plastic cuffs come out, the men and women fasten themselves to one another, and at the end of each row to the guardrails. We are a human wall, seated on the concrete, heads bowed, a phalanx of scruffy, dirty humanity. Still uncuffed, I break off from the human chain, believing somehow that I am supposed to be covering this, despite not having had a charged cell phone or computer for weeks. My communications with my editor, even my pretense that I am here doing a job, has given way. I am reduced to scribbling notes in longhand: my impressions of what I am seeing here, my hurried notations of Sargam’s utterances and sayings, my recollections of my feelings and anxieties about what we are doing here.
Sargam takes her place before her fellow citizens and we wait.
THE NOTICE OF ORDER TO vacate is read out by a Kevlar-helmeted officer in a black uniform and black leather boots. He reads the statement, issued by the governor of Nevada by the powers vested in him, in a disinterested monotone, head bowed in the dozens of lights trained on him. He appears almost sympathetic in the stark light, facing this crowd of seated, chained men and women. But just beyond the luminescent cones stand a few hundred armed, helmeted, riot-geared, baton-wielding techs and cops, awaiting orders to go in and bust heads.
“Will you accede to this request to vacate?” the officer, still reading, asks.
Sargam stands. “We believe that we have established the right to this land, as we made it our home when no one else wanted it. We grew our food here. We built schools here. Free schools. Without vouchers. We are families, men and women and children—you call us subprimes—and we want nothing more than to be left in peace. We do not want to fight—we only ask of the government to be treated as all people should be treated. If this cannot be our home, then let us have a home. Let us be free people, free to travel, free to stop, free to work—”
The officer interrupts her. “So you refuse to vacate?”
“We refuse to be treated as subprimes,” Sargam says. “We are free people. If the government—if the governor—truly serves the people, then he will serve ALL the people, no matter their credit scores. We are all Americans, and we will not be judged on the basis of past credit history.”
“Occupants refuse to vacate,” the officer drones, then walks back to his colleagues and confers with another officer, the two of them gesturing toward the praetorians amassed on the shoulders of the expressway.
The citizens of Valence are seated, arm in arm, ten deep along the off-ramp and in clusters stretching down Bienvenida and into Valence. Men and women are also gathered at key points around the fringes of the community, near the farms, the water pump, the fields, where the children are also gathered.
The officer orders the uniformed columns forward, in a measure intended to intimidate the citizens. The citizens sit and begin singing again.
I stand to the side, resisting the temptation to join Sargam and take up position with the citizens. I need to find my son.
RONIN AND TOM SLIPPED OUT of town, following the culverts they knew so well, and then crawled over the more exposed patch of desert between Valence and the enemy lines. The cops and techs were on the move, clogging the highway into Valence, fortifying themselves on doughnuts and breakfast burritos and coffee for the invasion ahead. The boys lost count at eighty-five black vehicles, their red taillights a blinking line on the highway, the idling vehicles emitting exhaust stench that carried over the desert to where the boys snaked. They were slipping behind enemy lines, as the Gorillas had been preparing to do. Only Ronin and Tom turned out to have the courage to follow through on their plans, and even now, both were consumed by doubts about what they were doing and only barely resisting the urge to turn back.
Yet neither boy was willing to show his weakness to the other, so they both crawled on, elbows and knees in the dirt, under the still-dark sky. They stood when they assessed themselves to be out of sight, and then marched toward the vast shadowy hulk, which was so large it never seemed closer despite their progress.
The Joshua was being minded by its engineers and a security guard sitting in a resin chair facing a high-pressure misting fan. He looked at photos of auto rims on the tablet in his lap, dreaming of shining silver nineteen-inch wheels—while his actual thought was to earn enough money to pay the land lease under his trailer and to keep the air-conditioning on and afford the monthly fee at his kids’ school. The Joshua was so large that its security seemed to hardly be an issue. How could anyone make off with something this large? Did anyone worry about the Rocky Mountains being stolen?
He dozed in his cool column of wind and did not notice two boys hunched low over the dirt, scampering across the scruffy flat, just fifty yards away.
The two lean boys looked up at the Leviathan, their first thoughts being how fucking awesome it was, the dream made real of every boy who ever constructed a tower from Legos or blocks. But this beautiful and powerful creature was the mechanical embodiment of their enemy.
All this machinery, darkly gleaming in places, rough and matted in others, stretching up, up, up, failed to fill the boys with dread, evoking instead all the wonder and fear of a television powered down. This was nothing more than another machine in the OFF position, they reasoned, so why should they be frightened? They stood next to the tread, the gear wheels three times their height, the sweet smell of engine grease coating their nostrils.
“Let’s roll,” Ronin said.
VANESSA GUIDED THE CHILDREN OUT of the fields and toward the three houses that had been converted to classrooms. They were to wait out the siege inside, staying in the shade and near the wet rags and bottles of water stored there in case of tear gas or pepper spray. Some children trembled as they walked. They were used to rising early, with the sun, but not before dawn as they had today. The youngest ones held hands and the oldest tried to comfort them as they shuffled through the onion fields. Once again they were being asked to leave, as each of them had been doing for months and years, as soon as they made a friend. They had been hungry and wandering for so long, that these months in Valence had been a blessing. None of them wanted to go.
They were also mesmerized by Vanessa’s stomach, which was now showing. Her posture had changed, her hips and thighs had spread, and now her midsection protruded with what the oldest told the youngest was a baby. Vanessa smiled at the murmurings of the kids, and put one hand over her stomach. The life ahead of her was unknowable, but she had a sense from her mother’s warnings, and Sargam’s stern, unheeded lectures, that she had complicated her journey, while what everyone around her wanted for her was simplicity. But she wanted complication, wanted the burrs and protrusions that would catch as she fell through this world.
The children came up and touched her belly, asking her what she was going to name the baby. One remarked that she had seen a video of a cat giving birth to kittens and wondered if perhaps Vanessa would have a litter.
Vanessa said she and Atticus did not yet have a name; what she did not say was that her hope was to have her baby in Valence. Her mother, after resigning herself to becoming a grandmother and acknowledging there was no way to fix this situation, actually became excited by the prospect and said this was why they were fighting so hard to stay, so that families would have a place to live secure in the knowledge that their neighbors today would be their neighbors tomorrow.
Jeb and Atticus were gone to resist, and she did not know where her younger brother was, though many of his friends, that band who called themselves the Gorillas, were here. In each child she saw the future for her own unborn child and so now took extra care to make sure that each was tended to and protected and felt safe.
They were ushered into the schoolhouses and urged to sit cross-legged on the floor. Gemma made the rounds, trying to keep the anxiety out of her voice as she reassured them that they would be okay, and asked them if they wanted to sing a song. She began a full-throated “Jimmy Crack Corn,” but only a few of the children picked up the chorus, while most looked about uneasily in the dark classrooms.
A few children were crying, and Franny, Ginny, and Jinx attempted to soothe them. When they heard the first shouts, the massed voices, the screams of “NO! Oh my God, NO!” then a gunshot, all the children began shouting and crying, faces glistening even in the shadows, an awful wailing at the unknown.