A History of the Future (34 page)

He’s like, “We’ll see about that.” He goes directly for the butt of a pistol that’s jammed in the side of his trousers and he can’t withdraw it. It’s stuck. His cohorts guffaw. When they do, I see they have no front teeth. Finally, he frees up his firearm and draws it out. It’s some kind of homemade piece of junk, like out of a piece of steel pipe, with a crude wood grip and an awkward assembly of levers and springs at the breech end. Meanwhile, I’ve drawn my own pistol, which is an old-times factory-made .38 caliber military revolver, and my heart is sinking as I am about to use it on this pathetic boy. As my gun comes out, his two cohorts rein around and ride off up the road, apparently unequipped with any firearms of their own. The boy doesn’t even look up or see me brandish my weapon, he’s so intent with that piece of junk. He has to pull the hammer contraption back with both hands to set it, like it was a crossbow. I fire into the air just to get his attention. A split second after I do that his gun misfires. The discharge vaporizes one ear of his poor old horse in a little cloud of red mist, and the recoil blows him off his mount in the process. His nag bolts away, screaming and bleeding from the stump of her ear, up the road where the others skulked off. The boy is squirming in pain on the road. He must have landed hard on something. The road is fissured old blacktop that hasn’t been repaired in his lifetime.

Now I dismount to attend to him. As I do that, out comes a dark steel blade that he would have stuck in my liver had I not been lucky to kick it clean out of his hand, and then I was on top of him with my knee in his chest and my hand on his throat. He is fulminating at me, blowing snot on my jacket. I strike him in the head repeatedly until he stops it.

“Keep it up and you’ll get yourself killed for certain,” I say.

“Why don’t you then?” he says, and his voice is all strangled with my hand on his throat.

“Because I don’t want to,” I tell him.

“Why not? It’s your right. Look who’s on top.”

“Is that how it’s done around here?”

“Sure it is,” he says. “Anyway, I don’t care if I live or die.”

“Well you ought to,” I say and cuff him on the head one more time. “What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothin’. If it was me on top I’d kill you.”

“You come at me with one more weapon, I might change my mind.”

He quits struggling and I get off of him. He’s got a pretty bad powder burn on one side of his face. He sits up and spits some blood out of his mouth. Up close, he smells like those pigs back in the Cincinnati stockyards.

I’m like, “You’re a poor excuse for a bandit. Why don’t you take up some other line of work?”

“Like what?”

“Farm. It’s safer.”

He spits. “Person like me can’t get land. It’s all owned by the masters. They run your ass off if they don’t kill you outright. That’s why I’m up to robbing folks.”

I go, “Looks to me like this country is ninety percent empty, woods coming back where the fields used to be, nobody around. I’m telling you, just grab yourself some acres and settle in, raise some chickens and corn.”

“You can’t just set down on a place,” he says. “Them Foxfires’ll get you and put you in their damn army and send you off to fight the niggers.”

“Maybe the army wouldn’t be such a bad place for someone like you.”

He squints up at me like I’m out of my mind. “You’re not from around here, are you?” he says.

“I’m from up in Covington, Kentucky, on the Ohio.”

“You sound like a damn socialist.” He spits again.

“Well, I’m not.”

He’s like, “Just kill me and get it over with.” He squeezes his eyes shut, with blood dribbling down his chin, and waits for the bullet.

“You’re a dandy, you are.”

“I’m sick of it all is what I am.”

“Don’t you have any interest being in this world? It’s a gift, you know.”

“It’s just affliction and a torment,” he says, eyes still shut. “Go ahead. Do me like I would have done you.”

I’m like, “I’ll just be on my way now, if you don’t mind.”

“You a preacher?”

“What if I was?”

“Then I would hate you double,” he says. “They just serve the masters is all. I don’t know what you are, mister, but I’m real sorry I failed to kill you. You want to know a secret? I like that even better than robbing folks. I’ve killed seven men since I took up this career. What do you think of that?”

“Life must be cheap in this part of the country,” I say.

“It ain’t worth nothin’,” he goes. “Guess I’ll be on my way now too.”

When he stands up fully, I doubt he’s over five and a half feet tall. He dusts himself off and picks up his mean little chewed-up-looking hat, which is like a cloth bowl on his head. While he’s doing that, I go get his firearm, which is lying in the road.

“You gawn keep that?” he asks.

“I’m going to throw it in a creek at the first opportunity,” I tell him.

“Why not give it back to me then?” he says. “I’ll just have to make another one.”

“You do that,” I say. “Maybe you’ll get better at it, if someone doesn’t kill you first, and you’ll grow up to be a gunsmith, with an honest trade.”

He just snorts at the idea and begins humping back up the road where his cohorts and his nag ran away. When there’s a hundred yards of space between us I mount up and go on my way. I did throw that pitiful gun away at the first chance I came by. The land there was full of limestone sinkholes, like perfectly round little ponds, from all the caves that ran underground in that part of the country.

Judging by what I saw on my journey from the federal states, the Foxfire Republic was even more deeply impoverished and run-down than the north. Some towns had nobody whatsoever in them. One evening by the fireside of a crossroads tavern in Owen’s Chapel, I heard talk for the first time of a smallpox visitation that passed over the region a few years back. They had new diseases that had never been seen there before. Snail fever, dengue, whipworm, black jaundice, sand fly rot, chagas, yellow fever, and malaria, on top of all the other sorts of epidemic flu plus the encephalitis and meningitis that was everywhere.

I finally came into Nashville on a hot morning late in August. The very center of the town around the north side of the old statehouse had mostly been parking lots when the collapse happened. Men were at work erecting buildings of two and three stories in red brick that they salvaged from elsewhere in the deserted quarters of the city. Many strangely shaped skyscrapers loomed balefully over the blocks between the old capitol and the Cumberland River. They were empty now. The glass had been removed, starting from the lower floors. The sort of office work they were built for no longer existed and they contained a lot of material that nobody manufactured anymore. You could imagine the work of careful disassembly going on for decades, centuries. I know from my history classes people were still pulling marble off the ancient Roman monuments a thousand years after the empire fell. The smallpox outbreak had devastated Nashville. The survivors fled, and the Foxfire government had moved to Franklin, some twenty miles south. Nashville was the headquarters of the Foxfire military these days. In the distance on a grassy mall down the statehouse hill, a company of foot soldiers drilled. Their drumbeats and shouts carried in the still air. Their formations were slapdash. They didn’t seem like a match for the federals back at Fort Schenck. Officers on horseback came and went. Their uniform jackets looked homemade, as if they were trying out all different styles, which is to say they were hardly uniforms. I got a meal of fried potatoes and ham at the makeshift outdoor market that operated next to the statehouse, patronized almost entirely by workmen and soldiers. I saw very few women in the city passing through that day. I didn’t want to linger where so many soldiers casually gathered.

I got to Franklin in the early evening. I came in straight from the north on old State Highway 31. The asphalt pavements were stripped off the surface starting some five miles out from town, and a gravel road was laid the rest of the way, which was well maintained, excellent for horses and wagons. Closer to the old center, the highway eventually became Main Street and I had to wait my turn to pass through a gate manned by soldiers, who were checking cargoes and persons wanting to enter. There was considerable traffic with wagons backed up from that point, most of them commercial but some military. They were especially on the lookout for people who showed signs of ill health. The gatehouse was a substantial, handsome structure of red brick that made a graceful arch over the street with offices on each side for the soldiers to do their business and congregate and a room in the arch itself, where a soldier sat in a window with binoculars surveying the procession down the road. It was clearly built to impress, to send the message that Franklin was a special place, exclusive, orderly and well protected. The soldiers manning the gate wore gray tunics that all did look the same and hats with the brim tacked up on one side, giving them a dashing air. I dismounted and felt nervous waiting. My sidearm was stashed in my blanket roll but, when my turn came, they barely searched my person or asked more than my name and my business in town, which they recorded in a ledger and then said I could go in.

Friday evenings in Franklin was the time of the week when people of the Foxfire capital did their shopping and put themselves on display, a time of socializing in public. Now, the most amazing thing happened. Around eight o’clock, as the sun sank below the little hills to the west, electric streetlights flickered on as well as the lights in buildings around town. The storefront windows and rooms in the second and third stories came alive. Many people were out on the sidewalks, a good number of them in fancy town clothes. A lot of these were government employees. They paused to clap their hands, applauding the amazing display of electric power, like a little ceremony, and then went back to their business promenading or visiting the shops along the street. One of the larger emporiums in the center of the business district was called Walmart. I dimly remember the name from the commercial folklore of the old times. It occupied a building that had once been a movie theater. As far as I could tell it was just a glorified dry goods operation. Pairs of soldiers mounted on fine horses surveyed the scene on street corners. Now and then, a fine open carriage came along the street with a prosperous couple or a family, as children were a sign of high status in these days of frequent epidemics. I admit that I was thrilled to find myself in this busy, bright place, though I would learn a lot about its dark side.

The original old heart of town, where activity now concentrated, was a set of ten blocks disposed around a broad traffic circle with a square rose garden set within it and an obelisk in the middle. A lot of new construction was evident. Since the Foxfire government relocated from Nashville and extended its administrative tentacles far and wide, the wealth from its territories flowed into Franklin. Much of the town had been relegated to parking lots in the old times. The lots were being filled in now and the work was impressive. The new buildings were made in the traditional style of the region, using red bricks and wood trim painted white, sometimes with black shutters, which gave you the odd impression of being somewhere that was neither exactly the past nor the present. The buildings that most stood out were the awkward and ugly things left over from the twentieth century, buildings that looked like machines, or packing crates, or spaceships, and were built with materials that aged badly. These were being torn down, to great public approval. Of all the strange sights my first night in Franklin, the most startling was the glimpse of a big black automobile rolling past a cross street two blocks off the town center. It was there for a moment, and then it was gone, like a phantom. I had not seen a car in motion since I was a young child.

I found a stable for Ike on South Margin Street and proceeded according to my instructions to the Yancey Hotel on Church Street, a new establishment named after the Confederate “fire-eater” politician. The big, four-story place was busy and bright, and when I signed the register the clerk, a slight fellow my age with a concave chest, asked how things were up in Covington.