Willing hadn’t the hubris to claim that he’d seen this coming. But something like it, yes. Which was why an assembled knapsack was already tucked under his bed. Its checklist: ID, bottled water, trail mix, first-aid kit, graphene blanket, pocketknife, matches and lighter, gloves, glasscutter, large heavy-duty tarp, cheaper plastic sheeting, duplicate house keys, and toiletries. His mind freed from these essentials, he pulled on two extra sweaters and checked his pocket for the balled-up fleX; its satellite contract was in arrears, but it would work as a flashlight. Ignoring Goog’s incredulous disgust—“What, our in-house clairvoyant is already packed?”—he marched calmly back downstairs to make a formal request.
From gripping Bing’s arm, Sam’s muscles must have stiffened. Slumped against the doorjamb, even Bing had tired of looking terrified. The gun was heavy. Only when Sam spotted Willing advancing did its barrel lift.
Willing stopped mid-flight. “I would like, if it’s all right, to take my bicycle.”
“Tricycle, popsicle,” Luella mumbled, still leashed to the banister. “Icicle, capital. Typical, topical. Tropical, mythical, mystical, mandible …”
“Can’t you shut her up?” Sam pleaded.
“Greater men than I have tried,” Willing said.
“Master bin the ties that bind,” Luella echoed.
“The bike?” Willing pressed gently. “You have the SUV.” It was important to remain unemotional. The man would feel bad, and he wouldn’t like feeling bad, which would make him angry. So all negotiation had to be conducted free of judgment. As if it were the most reasonable thing in the world, to ask a stranger from a few streets over if you could take your own bicycle.
“No,” the redhead said, arms bunched at his mother’s side. “I want his bike.”
Willing settled the boy with a steady gaze that said patiently: a whole bike for a little hamburger and cherry drink is not a fair trade.
“But you never ride one,” his mother said.
“Daddy has a gun,” Jake said. “We can take whatever we feel like. It doesn’t matter if we use it. We could smash the bike up if we want. And maybe I will,” he directed to Willing. “I’ll take your bike and smash it.”
Willing could see the boy’s injunction backfire: look, already, what we are doing to our son.
“Yeah, sure, take the bike,” Sam said.
“Blah, purr, make a tyke,” Luella said.
“Thank you,” Willing said. Permission to be dismissed, sir. He almost saluted.
Upstairs, he found his mother and Esteban in their bedroom, surrounded by a disarray of clothes. “He’s not that big a guy,” Esteban murmured. “I could take him, ningún problema.”
“Doubtless, but someone might get hurt,” his mother said softly. “I can forgive you for not being a hero. I might not forgive you for getting one of the children shot.”
“That pussy’s not going to shoot anybody,” Esteban said.
She turned to Willing. “Are we supposed to be plotting? Coming up with an ingenious ploy to get these people out of our house? That’s what we’d do in a movie.”
“We could set this house on fire, too,” Willing said matter-of-factly. “They would have to leave. But so would we. The fire could get out of control. Then neither family would have a place to live. It would be spiteful. Like what those intruders did to the garden.”
“So, then—what?”
“If we’re seriously letting that cabrón house-jack us out of our own home,” Esteban said, “can’t we hang at Adelphi? Has to be some advantage to your drear job.”
“The shelter’s already at 200 percent capacity,” his mother said. “Other staff have tried to sneak in family. They were fired.”
“This is my fault,” Willing said.
“Lost me there, muchacho,” Esteban said.
“We should have left earlier,” Willing said. “I miscalculated. This city. It’s a complex system, which has entered disequilibrium. It’s unstable. That is why there’s no reason to ‘plot.’ We have to leave anyway. The people downstairs won’t end well. Even if you don’t follow through on Nollie’s threat to close the accounts, they won’t be able to pay the utility bills. The water, gas, and electricity will be cut off. And he’s a computer modeler. He won’t have a clue how to access a gas line illegally, not without blowing up the whole block. Besides—think how easily they can take this house from us. It will be just as easy for someone else to take it away from them.”
“You think we should leave, but go where?” his mother asked. She was frantic. She would have to calm down. “Grand Man’s practically a hundred! Luella’s a handful at the best of times, and my parents aren’t spring chickens, either!”
“For now, to the encampment,” Willing said. “In Prospect Park. It’s dangerous, but not as dangerous as being isolated. We can barter there. The encampments are self-enclosed economies.”
“Barter with what, for what?” his mother said. “Willing, honestly, sometimes you’re such a know-it-all! When the only thing you’re really proposing is that we all become homeless! I’ve seen enough of it. There’s no romance in it.”
He shouldn’t take her insults personally. “We’ll stay there only as long as it takes to prepare.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake. To prepare. For what, the Rapture? So we can open our arms in a field to await the lord’s redemption, or the landing of an alien space ship?”
They didn’t have time for this. “Take warm clothes,” Willing directed. “Wear multiple layers so you don’t have to carry them. Remember to bring something waterproof. Fill the plastic bottles in the old recycling container with tap water.” (The city hadn’t picked up recycling—a quaint practice—for a year and a half.) “Take ass napkins. Plenty, because we won’t be able to wash them. If you salvage any food from the kitchen, be discreet. Prefer backpacks to luggage. Luggage attracts attention, and it’s too easy to steal. If you have any cash, put some of it—enough to be credible—in your pocket, or an outside compartment of your pack. Put the rest in shoes, underwear, or rolled inside balled pairs of socks. That way, if they ask for our money before we go, we can give them the obvious money. And whatever you do, don’t get mad at Sam and Tanya. The more angrily we behave, the more they’ll feel justified in acting rash. We can’t seem unpredictable. Remember that we were going to have to leave anyway. They’re doing us a favor.”
In the basement storage area, Willing replenished the inflation of the bicycle tires. He grabbed his toolkit, panniers, and some bungee cords, as Lowell railed in the background that “protection of private property is the primary responsibility of the state!” Willing couldn’t help but smile. Some people just couldn’t shift their paradigm.
He was feeling better, after attending to his previous task. He hadn’t checked the rubble behind the furnace for a while, but they were safe. If he said so himself, it was a very good hiding place. Interesting, that his mother never asked about them. She was afraid she’d be arrested. He wondered if they even did that anymore—arrested people.
As he locked the bike to a parking sign outside, Willing saw his grandfather hunch into the basement stairwell. Carter set something on the steps, and stooped over it with his blanket. Looking up, he put a finger to his lips.
It wasn’t clear what Carter was up to, but the crazed expression he’d worn since the fire had grown wilder. Willing didn’t want to attract Sam’s attention, and this wasn’t the time for lecturing his grandfather about complex systems entering disequilibrium. He settled for a fervent head shake to discourage whatever half-baked scheme the old man had concocted, while mouthing NO, DON’T and crossing flattened hands back and forth—universal code for Forget about it! But Willing was merely an underestimated sixteen-year-old grandson, and Carter E. Mandible had been on the brink of killing someone for two solid years.
Darting back to the stairwell, Willing pointed toward the interior: Get back inside. Carter pulled the blanket around his neck and glowered. He wasn’t coming.
Uneasy, Willing joined the assembly in the living room. Sam looked worn out. He wanted them to leave in that ordinary pooped way that you want guests who’ve outstayed their welcome to go—so you can get a start on the kitchen, have a nightcap in peace, watch the news.
“Money,” Sam said. They emptied their decoy pockets.
“House keys,” Sam announced next, extending a basket from the coffee table like a church collection plate. “I don’t want visitors.”
As the evictees lined up in the foyer, Sam did a half-hearted search of their bags, prodding the nose of his weapon into unzipped compartments with the cursory poking of a jaded museum guard. Unfortunately, he did confiscate the partial loaf of bread that Willing’s mother had stashed, despite Tanya’s standing sentinel over the kitchen. But he allowed Kurt to take his saxophone. Having lost all she owned, Jayne had no possessions, and hung back in her blanket by the stairs as the others slumped outside one by one. She must have been trying to stay warm for as long as possible. She’d had a long day.
“What the hell is that?” Sam asked as Nollie reached the doorway. The carton looked much too heavy for a woman on the cusp of seventy-five.
“Foul matter,” Nollie said.
“Howl fatter,” Luella said behind her. “Prowl patter. Mewl fitter, cowl tatter, whole sitter. Peter Piper picked a bowl of beer batter …”
“Someone get that hag out of this house,” Sam growled. Unwrapping his wife’s reins from her hitching post, GGM tugged Luella out the door.
“Manuscripts, of my books,” Nollie explained. “They may or may not be worth something to anyone else, but they are worth something to me.”
Sam opened the flaps, and sure enough, the box brimmed with rubber-banded printouts. “Jesus, it takes all kinds, doesn’t it?”
Sam now hung on to Bing with the habitual clutch of a parent hauling his kid on errands, and Jake looked jealous. Carrying her second son’s coat and backpack, Avery wasn’t leaving without her youngest. Otherwise, they were down to Willing and Jayne when Sam surveyed the stragglers sharply. “Hey, where’s that surly codger who threatened to stage a sit-in?”
Willing’s gaze was drawn to a motion behind their captor. To cover the telltale glance, he supposed hastily, “Carter—my grandfather must be in the bathroom.”
Looming on the stoop in the open doorway, Carter raised both hands high behind Sam’s back. As his blanket flew backwards, he plunged a gleaming foot-long implement into the interloper’s shoulder. Sam bellowed. With a concurrent whoop, Jayne flapped her own blanket over Tanya and Ellie’s heads, trapping the younger woman’s arms, wrapped around the girl. The gun went off. Bing howled.
Yanking the foreign object from his right shoulder, Sam reeled to train the handgun on his assailant. After hurling herself onto the floor, Tanya kicked Jayne off and thrashed from the blanket. She swept up Ellie and retreated behind her husband. Avery rushed to her son to examine his foot. The tussle was over in seconds.
“What the fuck is this?” Sam brandished the two-pronged silver weapon, which came to two delicate points, now dark and wet. It was an elegant utensil, whose exquisite design he didn’t seem in the mood to admire.
“Asparagus tongs,” Carter declared unapologetically, eyes wide and black. He nodded at the gun. “Go ahead. Make my day.”
“Darling, begging for suicide-by-creep is not what that expression means!” Jayne cried, picking herself up. “It’s only funny if you’re Dirty Harry with a Magnum, not an old man with asparagus tongs!”
“Out, all of you, now.” Sam jerked the gun.
“You shot through the toe of my son’s shoe,” Avery chided. “His foot will freeze out there. At least let me get another pair from downstairs.”
“No more Mister Nice Guy. Go.” Sam’s shoulder was bleeding, and he didn’t seem like one of those mythical hard-asses oblivious to pain.
Jayne, Avery, Bing, and Willing filed out to join the rest on the sidewalk, where they could hear the click of the lock on their own front door and the rattle of its chain being secured. The same sounds soon emitted from the entrance to the basement.
“Dad, I know you meant well,” Avery said, arm around her whimpering youngest, whose left tennis shoe flapped open. “But that derring-do was dangerous. It’s a miracle the bullet missed Bing’s foot, and his toes look burned.”
“Asparagus tongs?” Nollie said. “Carter, how about a fucking knife?”
“All the knives in the silver service are blunt, and the wife was in the kitchen.” Carter picked his blanket off the ground and shook it out snappily. “At least I tried something.”
Jayne adjusted her husband’s battle robes around his neck. Their exploit had accomplished nothing, yet maybe it was worth the risk: both grandparents stood proudly upright, looking years younger in the glow of the streetlamp. Whereas Esteban was muttering to Willing’s mother, “I’d have flattened that tonto with a shovel, but I was ordered not to.”
“Never mind a knife, why not a hammer?” Nollie badgered her brother. “There’s a toolbox in the basement, and our friend Sam there gave you the idea on a plate!” (It was impossible to envision Carter Mandible crushing Sam’s skull with a hammer. Funny—Willing could readily picture Nollie doing it.)
Carter shot back, “At least those silver pincers are a damned sight deadlier than a box of lousy first drafts.”
“How are we going to carry that, Nollie?” Lowell charged. “It’s awkward, and incredibly heavy. You won’t be able to manage that blasted box to the end of the block.”
“Watch me,” Nollie said darkly. It was never wise to question Enola Mandible’s athletic prowess.
“I’ve put up with your egomania my whole life,” Carter told his sister. “But this is the limit. Right now, rescuing originals of your o-o-o-o-oeuvre would be imbecilic enough if you were Tolstoy. But you’re a hack. I read the Times review of The Stringer—‘prose miraculously both pallid and overwritten’—”
“At least a whole o-o-o-o-oeuvre,” Nollie said, “beats a handful of articles about hatchbacks and condominiums—”
“Children!” GGM cried. “Enough! Carter, your sister garnered many fine reviews, and no one publishes multiple novels without drawing the odd stinker. Enola, there’s nothing ignoble about an article about condominiums so long as it’s written with panache. I’ve listened to this scrapping my whole life, and I shouldn’t have to put up with playground fisticuffs at my age.”
“Still, if we’re too weighed down, Nollie,” Willing’s mother said, “we’ll be marks. This time of night, gangs rove all over this neighborhood.”
“I guess if anyone gives us trouble,” Avery said, “we can always threaten them with foul matter.”
It wasn’t fair. They were picking on Nollie because they couldn’t take their frustration out on Sam and Tanya, or the Federal Reserve, or the president.
“I’ll carry it for now,” Esteban offered begrudgingly, though he was already burdened by the largest backpack. “But keep an eye out for a Dumpster.”
“No,” Willing said. He took the box from Nollie. It was staggeringly heavy; maybe his great-aunt really was fit. He fished a sheet of plastic from his pack and wrapped the box, to protect it from the chill mist. He rested the carton on the back of the bike and lashed it to the rack with bungee cords.
“Willing,” Carter said, fetching the box he’d left in the basement stairwell. “Do you think you could manage this, too?”
Banded with another bungee cord, the silver service fit neatly in one pannier. Though precious metal would have value as barter, Willing had already consigned one sentimental attachment to functional currency. So he vowed not to trade those engraved utensils for transient food and shelter unless their lives depended on it. That set of silver was their inheritance. Sam and Tanya had the sofa. The Mandible estate, the fabled appointments of Bountiful House, came down to this one box.
It was only three or so miles to Prospect Park, but the journey took hours. Kurt took responsibility for Luella at first, but Florence had to admit he was too gentle. When Luella lunged in the wrong direction, he wouldn’t jerk the leash with enough brutality to get her to heel. When she sat on the sidewalk and refused to get up, he stood over her reasoning and offering incentives, a rational appeal that didn’t work with small children, either. Esteban took over, and slung her over his shoulder. But she struggled, kicking and biting, until he dropped her in disgust. Florence’s mother was better at managing her than the men. She employed the steady, stolid, unrelenting resolution with which women had pursued their purposes for centuries. As for Florence’s father, for the time being he didn’t voice his grief over having lost their house, or having lost her house, either. All he did declare, more than once and with vehemence, was that he was “not minding Luella for one more minute.”
Grand Man might have been in fine fettle for a virtual centenarian, but his energy was spent, after the fire, and a harrowing second ejection from his sole safe haven. He had to take frequent breaks, leaning against a parking meter, or resting on the rim of an overflowing public trashcan (garbage collection having grown intermittent at best). His cane helped, but he was as handicapped by bewilderment as by old age. It must have been jarring to go from debonair, high-stakes mover and shaker in Manhattan publishing, to retired eminence gris cum day trader in the plushest assisted-living facility in the country, to exiled nonentity shuffling along the dark, litter-strewn streets of East Flatbush. Yet however fiercely Florence summoned sympathy, it was exasperating to walk this slowly.
Goog kept complaining his pack was too heavy, and Bing wouldn’t stop crying; the flapping of his left sole on the concrete must have been getting on everyone’s nerves. Avery kept stopping to use their only fleX under contract to try to reach Savannah, who alone of the kids had kept her own fleX paid up. But the calls went to voicemail. On her husband’s insistence, Avery dialed 911 to report the house-jacking, but a recording about a high volume of calls repeatedly suggested she try again later. Lowell railed with establishmentarian outrage, whereas Kurt probably counted himself fortunate for having put off a move to the Prospect Park encampments this long. The mizzle thickened to a drizzle, and the damp cold was miserable.
Wheeling his bike at the rear, Willing shot frequent glances over his shoulder. It was no longer an hour at which sensible people went for a walk. As Linden Boulevard swished with occasional cars streaking through the area as fast as possible, their only company was huddles of lone homeless people—fellow homeless people—scowling protectively, their supermarket carts having grown more enticing than wallets. Florence jumped at the scuttle of mangy, malevolent strays. It was irksome to have to credit her son for the foresight, when she’d thought giving Milo away to Brendan’s family was deranged. But sure enough, few people could cover pet food anymore. Cats and dogs had been released by the thousands to fend for themselves.
Florence should have been seething, but she couldn’t afford to seethe. Instead she focused on getting their company through the night. Willing had a tarp; she’d found another, left behind by that useless outfit that waterproofed the basement. They had a few blankets. If they could all sardine onto one tarp, and sandwich under the second, they might stay dry; body heat should keep them warm. She’d rescued bags of peanuts and raisins from the pantry, and hoped the city had the sense to supply water in the park. This was the way poor people thought. The long view was a defining feature of prosperity. The destitute planned a single step ahead.
At last, after they’d climbed the long hill on East Drive inside the park, they reached an access point. In the sulking glow of the city’s ambient light, the sweep of Long Meadow quilted below. It was a sorry version of the promised land: edge to edge across what was once the site of picnics and games of ultimate Frisbee, a patchwork of plastic tarpaulins, planks, pressboard, Sheetrock, and corrugated iron, many of the materials for these improvised dwellings salvaged from the abandoned construction sites that hulked across all five boroughs. The patter of rain on the metal panels was almost peaceful.
Presumably, to wake in a bad mood, Lowell would have to have slept first. He’d positioned himself on their improvised pallet-for-thirteen next to Avery, but she kept the two boys on her other side, which left him snug against Nollie. Intimate proximity to an elderly woman who, like the rest of them, granted, hadn’t bathed in days was noxious. And she snored. In the light of day, too, it became apparent why this patch on the edge of the encampment was available. They were under a tree, at least a handy anchor for leashing Luella. But branches had dripped on his forehead even after the rain stopped. Their communal bedroll was laid over a barren depression, without a blade of grass for cushion. The dip collected water, so the tarps were now sloppy with mud, which had crept up the cuffs of his only pair of trousers. He hadn’t been up for brushing with bottled water at 3 a.m. in a shantytown, and his sticky teeth emitted a sour tang.
As he struggled upright, Lowell panicked when at first he couldn’t find his shoes. Good God—in this glass-strewn rubble, merely having your shoes stolen could mark you as done for. Probably a good idea to keep them on all night, though the crud between his toes would fester. His clothes were rank and damp, his unshaven chin itchy, his hair lank. The line between owners of swank Washington townhouses and denizens of his sister-in-law’s Fort Greene shelter was perhaps thinner than he’d previously appreciated.
Putting Lowell’s nose further out of joint, his smarty-pants nephew had already disappeared, absconding with their party’s only paid-up fleX. Lowell was determined to pursue the return of Florence’s property through proper channels, and internet access would be a start. Her ownership of the house was a matter of public record. He was incensed by how readily the rest of this crowd gave up on standard procedure. It was when you neither believed in systems, nor employed the tools of systems, that systems broke down for good. Look at what had driven inflation, far more than monetary policy: the self-fulfilling social assumption that the dollar was worthless and would be only more worthless tomorrow. The world has a confounding way of fashioning itself in the form of your imaginings. Act as if a city is lawless, and lawless it becomes.
He would have to write this down.
At least the kid wouldn’t have traveled far, since he’d left his bike—looped with a lock and laden with that cockamamie box of manuscripts and the incongruous silver service hidden in a saddlebag. Nollie stood watch. What did you want to bet that she was defending the printout primarily, and the silver only as an afterthought?
Before, to Lowell’s amazement, going to work, Florence distributed a niggardly handful of peanuts apiece as “breakfast,” apologizing that there were no more raisins, because she’d come upon Bing polishing off the bag. Everyone picked on that boy. It wasn’t his fault that he was young, growing, and hungry. Kurt said some self-appointed bouncer had already threatened their company with expulsion—from a shantytown!—because Luella’s “night terrors” had kept nearby squatters awake. With Douglas’s permission, Kurt volunteered his only spare pair of socks for a gag. Generous, yes. Nevertheless, Lowell was flummoxed by why the tenant, in arrears for a second year, was still this family’s problem. Apparently you have to keep taking care of people solely because you’ve been taking care of them. By inference, you shouldn’t take care of anybody, because if you did you’d never get rid of them.
Grabbing some ass napkins, Lowell sought local inquiry.
“How do you do?” he introduced himself formally to their nearest neighbor—a grizzled, filthy old lady. But pots and pans dangling from hooks on a crude but sturdy wooden structure suggested established residence. Queasy about a handshake, he settled for a nod. “Lowell Stackhouse, professor of economics, Georgetown University.”
She smiled wryly. “Professor emeritus, I presume? Deirdre Hesham, air traffic controller. I took early retirement myself.”
Because she knew the word emeritus, he inspected her more closely; the “old lady” couldn’t have been fifty. “I gather air travel has halved,” he commiserated.
“Worse than halved,” she said. “But now that they’ve decided folks like me are expendable, I wouldn’t get on so much as a hop to Hartford if I were you.”
He explained that he was new here, and tried to describe his mission with discretion.
“Don’t go near the porta potties,” Ellen warned. “They haven’t exchanged them for a year. Try the woods that way—though watch your step. You won’t be the first, if you get my drift.”
Once he returned distastefully from a sea of the one thing worse than mud, Lowell mourned the loss of his fleX: he had nothing to read, and couldn’t bury himself in his treatise (which should have been backed up on multiple servers—but Lowell had finally parsed this era’s crucial distinction between should and would; he’d only rest easy when he laid eyes on the text). When Florence returned from Adelphi much too early that afternoon, the excitement was welcome.
“What happened?” Esteban reached toward but did not touch a red streak along Florence’s jaw, the center of which was blistered.
“I was lucky to be wearing the bandana,” Florence said shakily, touching its brown singe around her left ear, “or he’d have set fire to my hair. As it is, only a few escaped strands burned off. Smelled terrible.”
She backtracked: undeterred by Adelphi staff’s standard no-room-at-the-inn, to gain admittance an obstreperous white guy had held Florence hostage with a blow torch—“the upscale stainless-steel kind—that you use to caramelize crème brûleé.” To demonstrate he had enough butane to be dangerous, he’d turned it on.
“You are not going back there,” Esteban said.
“But I bring in our only paycheck,” Florence said weakly.
“Ever,” Esteban said.
“He’s right. You’ve done your part, Mom.” Willing had reappeared. With an obscure glance at Nollie, he announced, “We’ve reached the Final Chapter.”
What an insufferable twit. Rounding up his cousins and elders, the kid called a group meeting around the tree. For reasons beyond his uncle, this sixteen-year-old punk was now their Dear Leader. Any day now the boy would start buzz-cutting his hair above the ears, drinking loads of cognac, and executing his relatives.
“I got us protection,” Willing said, keeping his voice low. In the cover of his apostles, the boy withdrew an object from his jacket halfway. Metal caught the sun. Oh, for Christ’s sake.
“How did you get that?” Florence asked, aghast. Only yesterday she would have asked why. “Did you steal it? Like everything else?”
Something dense passed between mother and son that piqued Lowell’s curiosity.
“He thinks he’s so careless,” Goog grumbled to his brother.
“I bought it,” Willing said.
“But we’ve got so little money—” Florence began.
“With something of value,” Willing said. “Which rules out dollars, doesn’t it.”
Florence murmured, “The goblets,” whatever that meant.
“We have one left,” Willing said. “But don’t say the G-word aloud in this place. Even in a whisper.”
As Lowell couldn’t imagine why saying “goblets” could be perilous in a public park, he assumed the boy meant G-as-in-gun. The coyness was absurd. It was widely known that encampments like this were armed to the teeth. “You know how to work that?” he charged.
“I read up,” Willing said pleasantly. “It’s not complicated. That’s why stupid people have been getting their way with these things for centuries.”
“Wouldn’t want to fault your research,” Esteban said. “But if anybody’s packing in this party—no offense, it should be a grown man.”
“Whoever carries has to be Willing to use it.” The kid did have a knack for delivering punch lines with a straight face.
“You could be a danger to yourself—” Carter said.
“This is a distraction,” Willing cut him off. “Stories like ours—and worse—are all over the web. I think we got off lightly. The administration’s expression civil unrest is misleadingly mild. We’re not talking widespread insomnia. And the ‘unrest’ is mostly in big cities like New York. We have to get out.”
“Where’s any better, in your expert opinion?” Lowell sneered.
“Gloversville, obviously.”
“Oh, yeah?” Goog said. “Who died and left you president of the world?”
Willing ignored his cousin, as usual. “There’s food, shelter, and a well. I talked to Jarred. He’s short of labor he can trust. It’s easy to find people desperate for a job. But food is at a premium. Employees get tempted to steal. Organized crime is heavily into the agricultural black market. He’d welcome us all, if we’re willing to work. That would include standing armed guard over the fields at night. Thieves are harvesting whole crops while farmers sleep. Jarred has room for us, too. The Mexican migrant workers who’ve been squatting over the last two winters have moved on.”
“If Gloversville is such an oasis,” Esteban said, “why would they leave?”
“To go back to Mexico, of course,” Willing said. “Mexico signed on to the bancor. It picked up a lot of the trade that the States has lost. The economy is booming.”
“He’s right,” Carter said. “Though it’s hard to sort fact from fiction lately—”
“Dad, enough! Give it a rest!” Avery and Florence said at once.
“I was only saying!” Carter snapped. “TV news, webzines, they’re in rare accord: immigration’s reversed. Mexico’s established a huge military presence at the border. Nationals are being let back in, but white Americans are universally denied visas—even temporary tourist visas. Illegal immigrants from El Norte are being deported in droves.”
“Gosh,” Nollie said. “Hispanics are undocumented. Whites are illegal.”
“Hypocrites,” Avery muttered.
“I don’t call it hypocrisy,” Esteban said. “I call it payback.”
“Except the Mexican border police are giving third-, even second-generation Lats a hard time, too,” Carter warned.
“Do you have a Mexican passport?” Willing asked.
“Why would I?” Esteban said. “Any more than you would?”
“That’s too bad,” Willing said. “It would now be much more valuable than one from the American State Department.”
“That’s a turnabout I could drink to,” Esteban said. “About time you honks find out how it feels when folks who happen to be born in a place lord their precious passport over you like they’re anointed. Man, at the border right now, I’d laugh my head off.”
“Can we please get back to what we’re going to do?” Jayne implored.
Willing gestured to the encampment. “We’re luckier than most of these people. We have somewhere to go. We have only one problem: how to get there.”
“We should sneak back and swipe the Jaunt,” Avery said. “They only took my one key fob.”
“No,” Lowell confessed morosely. “They were way ahead of you. They demanded mine, too, and the spare.”
“I’ve tallied our cash,” Willing said. “We can’t afford a single bus or train ticket to upstate New York. And even if we had the money—according to InnerTube, Port Authority, Grand Central, and Penn Station are mobbed. We’re not the only ones who’ve figured out it’s time to go.”
“So what are you proposing?” Lowell said. “That we all pile onto your bicycle, like one of those 1950s stunts with phone booths?” (The taunt fell flat. Willing wouldn’t know what a phone booth was.)
“We’ll have to walk,” Willing said.
“To upper New York State?” Lowell cried.
“It’s a hundred and ninety-four miles by car. Somewhat longer, by back roads. Esteban used to lead treks along the Palisades for a living. He can show us the way.”
“My, I can’t believe Our Lord and King would hand his scepter to someone else,” Lowell said, and Avery kicked him.
“The first part is straight-forward,” Willing said. “Down Flatbush, over the Brooklyn Bridge, up the Westside bikeway to the GW. All these exit routes are getting crowded, so it can be faster to walk than drive. But it’s not like a disaster movie. Zombies aren’t rampaging through the streets. There aren’t any giant lizards on Fifth Avenue. The Empire State Building is still standing. Midtown isn’t on fire.”
“Son,” Douglas said, having sagged onto the pile of backpacks stacked on the tarps. “It took us four hours to go three miles last night. At my age, that’s about as far as I’m good for in a day. Off the top of my head, I reckon that would put us on the road, and preyed upon by the kindness of strangers, for over two months. You younger folks might have a chance. But you’ll never make it to Gloversville with Luella and me in tow. You should leave us behind, you hear? We’ve had our day. It was a good day. Better than yours is likely to be, from where I’m sitting.”
“We’re not leaving you behind,” Willing said firmly. “If it takes two months, so be it.”
“But what about supplies?” Jayne asked. “We barely have enough food to make it through today. If our cash can’t buy a bus ticket …”
“The camps don’t use cash,” Willing said. “It’s all barter, some credit, but you pay your debts with real goods, too. We can’t carry enough provisions for the whole trip. But we can make a start. Because, Avery? People around here are desperate to lock down what little they’ve got left. They have to be able to make shutters.” He pulled a fistful of plastic baggies with Home Depot labels from his backpack. “So guess what’s in short supply?”
Avery smiled. “Hinges.”
The plan was lunatic. Yet Lowell welcomed an excuse to get out of this cesspit, and accompanied Avery and the boys to the nearest supermarket on Third Avenue, where they parlayed a portion of the cash for nonperishables with a high calorie-to-weight ratio: fudge, salami, halvah—the antithesis of the micro-greens and tuna-carpaccio table they’d laid in Georgetown. On their return, Willing had traded hinges for raccoon jerky—a local delicacy.
Meantime, Florence helped Lowell convince Avery to stop leaving messages for Savannah. They shouldn’t deplete the remaining credit on the fleX. Of the three kids, their daughter had demonstrated the keenest aptitude for living on her wits. The girl had friends in Manhattan, and was at the age when she couldn’t abide the company of her parents. They had to have faith, and hope for the best. Avery left Jarred’s address, as well as their whereabouts in Prospect Park—locations bound to put their daughter off reuniting with her family anytime soon.
Sure enough, Savannah fleXted late that afternoon: “im nt gnna liv on any fking farm.”
If this motley Chosen People were to set off on their exodus the very next day, as their underage Moses had commanded, Lowell thought privately that burdening their party with Douglas and Luella was self-destructive. That dapper old geezer and his mad consort would never manage a hike of two hundred miles—sleeping rough, depending on serendipity for sustenance, probably trudging much of the trip on an empty stomach. Fair enough, they were his wife’s grandparents, but condemning the expedition to certain failure merely to express loyalty to elders near death anyway seemed sentimental. They’d be better off leaving the couple at the encampment, since charity often arose more readily among the penniless than among the prosperous. In short order, however, Lowell was relieved to have kept the opinion to himself.
As Willing told it later, in his Oyster Bay heyday the Mandible patriarch had socialized with the hunting and skeet-shooting set, and was no stranger to firearms. In the flicker of their campfire that evening, Douglas had asked to see the protection for their travels that Willing had secured that morning, the better to ensure that his great-grandson understood the safety catch and how to load the weapon. It happened in a trice: Douglas shot his wife in the chest, and himself in the head. At the sound of shots, even Deirdre Hesham opposite simply battened her shutters.