ON SATURDAY MILES TAKES HIS mother to town on his Kawasaki motorbike. It’s his second trip; he had to pick up Sarah from her stupid sleepover. For some reason he wasn’t supposed to arrive at the Phelps house, so they met downtown. But Saturdays are good for riding. There are more people around that day—the grocery stores are busier, and there’s more traffic—which makes it easier to blend in with the locals.
“We’ll get groceries on the way home,” Miles says over his shoulder and through his bandana.
“Okay,” his mother says, her voice muffled against his back. She hangs on for dear life; Miles knows that she hates the dirt bike, but she’s a businesswoman and not dumb. The bike is the perfect solution for now: It gets close to a hundred miles to a gallon of gas and has knobby, off-road tires for escaping into the woods if needed. A dirt bike and a gun: two things he never would have owned back in the suburbs.
On the highway, the bike leaves a dark stripe in the pale ash. Pumice dust rolls up behind them like a contrail of jet exhaust in the sky. He can only see gray in the little rearview mirror—not that there is much traffic to worry about. Soon the nose of a pickup grows in the oval glass of his mirror, and its rumbling V-8 comes on fast. Miles veers onto the shoulder to let it pass. When the truck streams by, the highway in front is gone—lost in a rolling, gray dust cloud. Disorientation hits—like a pilot losing which way is up—and he concentrates on keeping his handlebars straight. When the air doesn’t clear, he looks straight down beside his right boot and picks up the seam where the shoulder meets the main highway. A line, somewhere between gray and brown—enough to keep them on the road—unwinds ahead. Gradually the wider highway returns to view. Behind, his mother coughs and presses her head tighter against his back.
He takes the back route into town, passing the high school and the entrance to a juvenile lockup. He goes over a railroad crossing and up a grade to the traffic light by the post office, where they pick up their mail once a week.
PLEASE REMOVE DUST MASKS AT THE DOOR, a sign reads. Miles waits on the motorbike while his mother goes in. She’s out in two minutes, thumbing through a handful of letters and clutching a couple of packages—book manuscripts probably—under her other arm.
“Let’s roll,” Miles says. “You can look at that stuff later.”
“‘That stuff’ is how we make a living, thank you very much,” his mother says.
“How you do that is a mystery to me,” Miles says as he stashes her mail in the right-side saddlebag. His mother playfully squeezes his rib cage as they motor off. It’s one more thing they would never have done in the burbs: get his mother to ride on the back of a dirt bike.
The next stop is the library, a modern, one-story building with outthrust roof angles where Nat does her e-mail and internet thing once a week, plus charges Artie’s iPod.
“See you here later,” she says.
Miles nods, then chains the Kawasaki to a bike rack, after which he walks over to the Alternative Education Center. It’s a low brick building open on Saturdays, which only makes sense. And that’s what he likes about the AEC—there are no bells. No principals.
Inside the waiting area the old couch is occupied by two girls, one with a lot of piercings and raccoon-style black eye makeup, the other with a real baby under a small blanket. “Hey,” Miles says.
The young mom smiles tiredly. She’s about Miles’s age and pretty in a skinny, pale kind of way; it’s as if all of her physical powers went into her baby, which makes smacking and sucking noises under the blanket. As she shifts the baby, the white top of one breast curves upward. Miles quickly looks away (the dark-eyed chick gives him a disgusted look). Carrying his packet, he slides past her to the check-in desk.
“Mr. L in?” he asks.
“Sure am!” a man’s voice calls from a cubicle just beyond. A head pops up, bald on top but with a thin gray ponytail behind. “Be with you in a few minutes, Miles.”
The teachers here are cooler than at regular school, too, ones such as Mr. Lewandowski, who didn’t fit into public school—“The Machine,” as Mr. L called it.
Rather than hang with the girls in the lobby, Miles heads to the bathroom, where he takes a long time on the toilet. Afterward he spends time at the sink washing up all over, including his armpits, which were, he has to admit, a tiny bit rank. Clean, he reemerges, ready for a second chance with the girls on the couch. The young mom and her baby are gone, but the pierced girl glares at him as if daring him to say something. He sits down anyway. Looks through a gummy magazine.
“I hate this,” the girl says suddenly.
“What is this?” Miles asks pleasantly.
“Everything,” she mutters.
“Let’s turn that frown upside down!” Miles says. It’s supposed to come out funny—a parody of an overly cheerful host on a kids’ television show—but it clanks.
The girl stares at him. “Are you insane?”
“Ah, I don’t think so,” Miles says. “But you never know.”
That clanks, too. The girl crosses her arms across her chest and looks out the window. Miles is trying to think of something not insane to say when Mr. Lewandowski calls his name.
“Sorry, got to go,” he says to the pierced girl.
She does not reply.
“So, how are things?” Mr. Lewandowski asks. They shake hands, and Miles sits down.
“No problems, really,” Miles says.
Mr. Lewandowski leans back in a creaky chair. “Your stuff is all good—math especially.”
“Thanks.”
They take a few minutes and go through his packet, after which Mr. Lewandowski hands Miles the next one. This school proceeds at the student’s pace; and since Miles is all caught up, they have time to BS about the state of the world. “I try to remain optimistic,” Mr. L says as he kicks back, “because, hey, what’s the alternative?” He laughs.
It takes Miles a second to get the joke.
Back at the library, Miles finds that his mother is still waiting for a computer terminal. She holds up her hands and shrugs, so he skulks along the magazine shelves. He picks up a Fun FAQs About Volcanoes sheet that has been scrawled upon and defaced. It’s good to see that some kids—by the looks of the handwriting—are on guard against stupidity. He glances around the library but sees only adults and little stumblers plus a couple of crying babies.
He scores a well-thumbed Popular Mechanics. He reads and people watches over the top of his magazine. The library patrons have some rough edges; their clothes smell like dogs and wood smoke. A mother and her three squirming kids check out a stack of DVDs. The bestseller display is picked mostly clean. Audio books are mostly gone, too. In the far corner there’s a big-screen television in a small room, with headsets for listening. On the silent screen, a rolling banner beneath two talking heads reads “Climate conditions improving: full summer growing season predicted.” Right. That’s what they said at the beginning of the summer, and barely a seed sprouted. If adults obsessed about the weather before the volcanoes, now the weather report is the only topic. Miles is tempted to listen, but the television room is crowded and warm, and anyway, he has given up on television. There’s no good news, and if there is, who knows if it’s true?
A fat woman gets up from a computer terminal. The librarian calls out, “Natalie?”
His mother hands Miles her purse and the mail for safekeeping, and takes a seat at computer station number four.
The woman librarian glances at the sign-up sheet. “It’s Natalie—?” she asks. She wants a last name.
“Just Natalie,” Miles’s mother says cheerfully, and turns to her work.
The librarian pauses, then moves on. Computer terminals have a one-hour limit, and his mother is just getting up to speed—she types faster than a woodpecker pecks—when the reference librarian returns with the clipboard.
“Excuse me,” the librarian says to Nat.
Miles lowers his magazine.
“Yes?” Nat asks. There’s annoyance in her voice.
“Do you have some form of identification?” the woman asks.
Nat is silent. People turn to stare. “I’m sorry, say again?” Miles’s mother asks the librarian.
“ID,” the librarian repeats. “A driver’s license. Something.”
“And why would I need that?” Nat asks, still keeping her smile, though it has slipped big-time. “I come here all the time.”
“We have … orders. Instructions to serve our local community first. If you live outside of Beltrami County—if you’re traveling through—you’ll have to give up the terminal if there are local people waiting.”
“Who says I live outside the county?” Nat says.
Miles glances around. To the side, a scrawny guy in clothes two sizes too big looks away.
“I’m not at liberty to answer that,” the librarian says. She looks toward the scrawny guy, whose cover is blown.
He swallows. “What she’s saying is you’re either local or you’re not,” the guy says to Miles’s mother. He stays back as if to keep an escape route open behind him.
Nat gives him a glance as if he’s a passing fruit fly. Miles slips behind a row of tall bookshelves—the stacks—and glides up behind the guy. “You got a problem?” Miles says, making his voice low and weird.
The guy flinches and turns to Miles, who puffs himself up as tall as he can. It gives him an inch on the little man.
The guy’s eyes go to Miles’s wind-blown hair, his dusty red bandana. He swallows. “Not really,” he says.
“Oh, there you are, son. I thought I’d lost you,” Miles’s mother says with very fake cheerfulness.
“I wuz over dere readin’ the magazines,” Miles says. He makes his voice sound like he’s seriously abnormal.
“Good,” she says. “Why don’t you go on back there and sit in a chair until I’m ready, all right?” She uses her talking-to-a-child voice.
“All right, den,” Miles says.
Nat turns back to the librarian; it takes his mother a second to find her groove again—but only a second. “Anyway, do you realize what you’re asking?”
The librarian stares. “Yes. I’m asking for identification.”
“The library is the last place in America where people should be asked for their ID,” Nat says. Her voice rises.
Miles lingers nearby. He’s not at all sure where this is going.
“Well, these are really not my instructions,” the librarian says. “The governor himself—”
“Governor, schmovernor!” Nat says, rising from her chair to her full five feet two inches. “I know a few things about freedom of information. Just because we have an environmental crisis doesn’t mean we have to have a police state!”
The librarian lets out a half hiccup sound; people all around stare, which doesn’t bother Nat. She can do confrontations.
“You show me the rule where I have to show you my ID,” Nat continues, getting up in the librarian’s face. “I want to see it!”
“Excuse me! Excuse me! Is there some trouble here?” a stocky older man says. He’s a shaved-head dude wearing a tie. An in-charge kind of guy.
“Yes, there is,” Nat says.
“I only asked to see her identification,” the woman librarian explains to her boss.
The tie guy pauses. “Technically, we really don’t need to do that,” he says to the librarian.
The woman’s face begins to redden.
“You’re thinking of our community first, which we all appreciate,” he says calmly, and pats her arm. “But we don’t need identification unless she wants to get a library card.”
“She didn’t put down her last name,” the woman librarian says.
The head librarian does not hesitate. “Our patron here—”
“Natalie,” Miles’s mother says.
“—is free to be just ‘Natalie,’” he continues. “We don’t need to know any more about her than that, and she is welcome to use the library and all its resources.”
Miles is impressed. The librarian, behind his lame tie and bald head, is a tough guy. He hasn’t bought into the whole “Travelers” thing, the restricted-movements law.
“We shouldn’t ignore government orders,” the woman librarian says, stiffening her back.
“Of course we shouldn’t,” the older man says. “But the American public library takes its real direction from the United States Constitution, and all the rights and freedoms afforded therein.”
This guy talks like a Founding Father—he should be wearing a white wig—and he’s Miles’s new hero.
After the woman librarian huffs away, Nat goes back to work, and gawkers stop watching, but it’s not much of a victory. Later, on the way out of the library, Miles and his mother get more than their fair share of stares.
“Could you dial it back just a little next time?” Miles murmurs to his mother as he unlocks the chain.
“That was the last straw,” Nat says, getting her back up again. “Imagine! Having to show ID in a library!”
“Yeah, well, the larger idea is not to call attention to ourselves.”
She blinks and turns to him. “Says the son who ain’t right in the head. Where did that come from?”
“It just … came,” Miles says, holding back a grin.
“You scared even me!” his mother said.
Miles kicks over the engine, and they climb aboard. “Hang on,” he says, and she does, tighter than ever.
Their next stop is the walk-up Wells Fargo ATM. Miles stays to the side, out of range of the little video eyeball above the keypad. His mother steps up and does her thing. The machine hums and clicks, and spits out cash.
“I’ve been thinking,” Miles says.
“Worrying, you mean,” his mother says as she tucks away the cash.
“We should stop using these machines,” Miles says.
“I thought the idea was to save our stash at the cabin,” Nat says, throwing a leg over the rear of the Kawasaki.
Bankers are not your friends. People learned that during the Depression. If there’s a chance to steal your money, they will. How do you think they got so much money in the first place? The best way is cash on the barrelhead. And never keep it all in one place.
“Right,” Miles says. “But the more we use a cash card, the more they know we’re here.”
“‘They.’ ‘Them,’” his mother says, mimicking his voice. “Using an ATM is not a crime.”
“No,” Miles says, “but it leaves tracks. Electronic tracks. We’re supposed to be living in Wayzata, not here.”
“There is no ‘here,’” Nat says, poking him playfully in the ribs as she gets on the bike. “We don’t even have an address.”
Next stop is the grocery store on the south side of town. Miles chains the Kawasaki to a light pole and goes in with his mother, if only to get his fair share of doom and gloom. The grocery store—the biggest in town—has lots of empty shelves. COMING SOON! and SHIPMENT DELAYED stickers decorate the open spaces. Other shelves have cleverly arranged cans of corn and boxes of cereal to disguise the fact that the space is less than half full. But there is way more food here than there was in Minneapolis.
An old man and his wife drift along the aisle, with a few scattered cans in the bottom of their grocery cart. “Never thought I’d see the day,” he mutters.
“Yes, dear,” she says automatically.
“You’d think we were in Russia,” he says.
“Yes, dear.”
“This is what happens when the Democrats take over,” he says.
“You can’t blame Democrats for the volcanoes, dear,” she says pleasantly.
The produce section is vacant except for red potatoes and some rubbery-looking cucumbers. LIMIT: TEN POUNDS POTATOES PER WEEK! MUST SHOW COUPON! a sign reads over the potatoes. Nat gestures, and Miles lifts a sack into their cart. In Dairy Products there is not a lot of milk but plenty of butter and cheese; in the meat section there is pork but very little beef.
“I could go for a major steak,” Nat says, “a sixteen-ounce prime rib au jus.”
“I thought you were a vegetarian,” Miles says. “You and Goat Girl.”
“Sarah,” his mother says, then adds, “Hey, I’m only human. Just having a flashback to my unhealthy days as a carnivore.”
“Some meat wouldn’t hurt you,” Miles said.
“I think it actually might,” she says. “My stomach would freak.”
“What else is on our list?” Miles says as they keep moving through the half-empty store.
“Romaine lettuce. Strawberries. Kiwis. Mangoes. Peaches,” his mother says, pretending to look at a list.
“Yeah, right,” Miles says, and steers them toward the checkout.
“Fresh produce is what I miss the most,” Nat says. “What I wouldn’t give for a big green salad with tomatoes.”
“Next summer we’ll grow our own,” Miles said.
His mother bites her lip and leans briefly against him. “With any luck, we’ll be home next summer,” she says, “and the sun will shine again. We’re gonna garden. We’re gonna downsize. We’re gonna totally change our lifestyle.”
“You, garden?” Miles asks. “Yeah, right.”
“I’m serious,” his mother says.
He drapes one arm briefly over her shoulder and gives her a hug. Then he places their groceries—potatoes, a couple of onions, a few cucumbers, four cans of corn, and a bag of white rice—on the conveyor belt. Which is dead, of course. Like everything, electricity is rationed; coal-burning power plants have been shut down altogether, which is not the worst thing in the world.
“Find everything you need?” the checkout clerk says cheerfully.
“I guess,” Nat says with glance to Miles; he can barely keep from laughing as he slides the groceries forward.
“How are you folks today?” a voice booms. It’s an overly friendly manager-type; he looks them up and down.
“Just great, eh?” Nat says. She has mastered the northern Minnesota speech pattern, with a dash of Canadian thrown in.
“Find everything you need?” he asks. It must be the required cheerful question.
“Any news on fresh produce?” Nat asks. “When we might see some lettuce?”
His toothy smile slips a bit. “I get my information from the government, same as you,” he says. “As our governor says, ‘Stay put and stay calm.’”
“Just curious,” Nat says.
“You folks have a nice day,” he says.
Once outside, Miles looks over his shoulder at the hulking, big-box grocery store. “Stay put and trust the government—yeah, right,” he says.
Natalie shrugs. “The government is not always the problem.”
“If we had stayed put in the suburbs, we’d be really hungry by now—or maybe beaten up like that family down the street.”
“You don’t know that!” Nat says sharply.
“My point exactly,” Miles says.
They stuff the groceries into his mother’s backpack and head toward home—with one more stop to make.
Three miles west of town, Miles downshifts for an intersection and a ramshackle country store. Once a gas station, it’s now a flea market, used car lot, used everything place called Old But Gold. Dusty cars, many almost new, sit in rows, along with a lineup of racy-looking, late-model snowmobiles. Behind them are lines of sawhorse tables filled with junk: old lamps, tools, saws. A couple of large, scruffy guys sit in chairs out front, in the sun.
“Be careful,” Nat says.
“Hey, these are my peeps,” Miles says. “Butch and his dad, Albert.” He lowers his dusty bandana as he walks forward.
“Howdy, Miles,” Albert says, and raises his chin once. His son, Butch, a younger but dustier version, nods as well. Miles has hung out here more than once; he likes to look over the old equipment and old tools. Talk to guys. Learn stuff that he’s never heard about in regular school or in his alternative school packets.
“How’s biz today?” Miles asks.
“Like tits on a boar,” the old man says. “Meaning, none. What can I do you for?”
“My radiator is a little low,” Miles says with a nod toward his motorbike.
“That so?” the old man says; he strokes his chin.
“Yep,” Miles says. “You wouldn’t have some antifreeze?”
“Antifreeze,” the father says with the same emphasis. He and Butch glance sideways at each other. “Might,” the old man says.
“But it’s pricier all the time,” Butch adds.
“Like how much?” Miles asks.
“Today, twenty bucks a gallon,” Butch replies.
“Ouch!” Miles says, then adds, “But what can you do?” He says it with a theatrical sigh—as if they’re all in this together.
“Roll your bike up to the gate, and Butch will take it from there,” the old man says.
Miles signals to his mother, who steps away from the Kawasaki. Miles rolls the motorbike forward, then hands it off to Butch, who unlocks a padlock on a heavy chain. “Wait outside,” he says, never fully turning his back to Miles.
“Sure,” Miles says cheerfully, and goes to hang out with Nat. They look over the snowmobiles. Behind the board fence there is clattering—then the clank of a nozzle on a gas tank rim.
“Nice day anyway,” Butch’s dad says, glancing up at the pale sky.
On the way home, Nat is on her high horse again. “Twenty bucks for one gallon of gas! That’s highway robbery—literally.”
“We’re lucky we can get it at all,” Miles says.
Suddenly, Miles stares intently ahead. Orange traffic cones line the highway, and two sheriff’s cars grow from the haze. Their noses are toed in toward the centerline—a funnel-like traffic stop. Two big pickups are paused; an officer is looking at one driver’s license while another is holding a short hose and a siphon. A third officer waves a dusty car with a Blue Star sticker past the checkpoint.
“What is this?” his mother calls over Miles’s shoulder with alarm. “It’s not one of those ‘locals only’ things?”
“No. We’re fine. Just be cool,” Miles says. He slows into first gear as he approaches the law enforcement cars. A deputy waves them forward into the neck of the funnel, all the while giving the motorbike a close look.
“Don’t say anything!” Miles murmurs, and pulls over an instant before the deputy holds up his hand.
“Hey, officer,” Miles says cheerfully.
“Howdy.”
“Everything okay today?” Miles asks.
“No real problems. Just checking for off-road diesel.”
They glance toward the guy standing beside his big Dodge pickup; he doesn’t look happy. “No diesel fuel here,” Miles says, and raps the little tank below the seat.
“You live nearby?” the deputy asks.
Miles feels his mother tense up. “Yeah. Just off County Road 7. We’re makin’ our weekly grocery run.”
“No lettuce again!” Nat says in a whiny voice.
The deputy gives them one more look up and down; his gaze ends up on the Kawasaki. “Be careful on that thing. The dust on the highway gets greasy.”
“Will do,” Miles says, and accelerates away.
After a block he feels his mother turn to look behind, then back to the front. “Why did you stop?” she hisses.
“He was going to wave us in,” Miles calls back to her, “so I wanted to make the first move. It’s like in poker: Whoever makes the first big move controls the game.”
“My son, the poker player,” Nat mutters.
Miles laughs and speeds along.
“And what did he mean by ‘off-road’ diesel?” his mother asks.
“It’s fuel that farmers get at a big discount for their tractors,” Miles replies. “Same fuel that any truck or car with a diesel motor can use, except that it has a red dye in it.”
“So they were taking samples from those pickups and checking the color?”
Miles nods. “And if it comes up red, you got some explaining to do.”
“How do you know all this stuff?” she asks as they motor along.
Miles shrugs. “It’s sort of a guy thing.”
“Well, enough with the guy stuff. Just get me home,” she says, and holds him tighter from behind.