The Stranger (5 page)

Here’s another cutting. It contains an interview with one of the American patrol guards on the Mexican border the day of the Breakout.

“It’s all gone to hell. But how can you stop them? There must have been a million men, women and children. And there were kids holding babies in their arms.” The harrowing memories were enough to render the man’sface ugly, and he’d just lit his third cigarette in the ten minutes I’d been speaking with him. “They tore the border fence apart with their bare hands. . . . I mean, what am I supposed to do? Shoot them? Shoot kids and babies, for Chrissakes. All we could do was climb on top of our cruiser as they came by. They weren’t people; they were a whole flood. So we just hung on to the roof light and watched them pour by.”

The flood that engulfed America began that dry-asa-bone May morning. “Refugees sometimes turn into invading armies,” prophesied one commentator, but millions of Americans contributed food parcels and volunteered to help avert a humanitarian disaster. We, as a nation, labored to do the right thing.

Soon every state accepted a given number of refugees. And that flood kept coming. Empty hostels, hotels, army camps, redundant cruise liners were crammed to capacity. You could visit your local supermarket one day, everything normal. The next day you drove into the parking lot and there’d be five hundred Brazilians living in a shanty town of cardboard boxes. It got like that in the city parks. Tents made of sticks and carrier bags became home to millions nationwide. Of course they were all hungry. They all needed clean water. Medicines. Clothes. Shoes. And, goddam, we did do the
right
thing. We did our best to feed them. But there were too many. These half-starved bastards—and I don’t mean that in an insulting way, believe me—filled the streets begging for food. They weren’t violent or intimidating or anything. Of course, hardly any spoke English, and it seemed the only word they did learn was
bread.
So you’d walk downtown and there would be beautiful young Brazilian women or Mexican women (helluva lot of Mexicans seemed to get carried with the northward flow) and they’re all holding out their hands; they’ve got beautiful brown eyes that overflow with pleading, and they’re all saying one word as you pass:

“Bread.”

“Bread.”

“Bread.”

You might give them every penny in your pocket and still know you hadn’t done enough. Because between you and Blockbuster, or Barnes & Noble, or McDonald’s, or wherever the fuck you were going, is another ten thousand people all saying this one stupid word as you pass. Bread, bread, bread, bread . . .

And you find you start getting angry with them, because deep down you’re angry with yourself. It’s human nature to help a person who comes to you for help. Only you can’t do it. You can’t help them all. And this one word comes in a soft pulsing chant as you walk on by.

Bread

Bread

Bread

Bread-bread-bread-bread-bread-bread . . .

As one refugee stops saying it the next starts. Bread, bread, bread . . .

Shit. After that you couldn’t swallow a piece of bread without it sticking in your throat like a stone.

It wasn’t long before the people from South of the Border who became our sudden guests got a new name. Forget refugees. Or the “displaced.” Or even “victims.” They became bread bandits. I don’t think the name started on TV or radio. It was probably some word-of-mouth thing. A kid called a refugee a “bread bandit” one day. Within a week or so the name had spread. It wasn’t intended to be cruel, but it seemed apt. So it stuck. We still use it today. I’ve killed bread bandits.

Diseases often develop in cycles. Good old syphilis is the classic example. It takes years to run its course. Mostly it might disappear for ten years or more and the infected person has no symptoms, nothing. Then back it comes out of the great blue yonder. The sufferer suddenly finds pus squirting from his ears. His hair falls out. His skin gets all blistered and a dirty great crust of scabs forms on his face. Madness gathers up his wits and hurls them from the window.

The funkily named Gantose Syndrome was something like that. When experts told us the condition had run its course what seemed to have happened was that the Gantose bug merely submerged itself into the bones and muscle tissues of the victims, where it mutated into something even more sinister. After the first real heat wave of the year that was enough to knock an elephant off its feet Gantose 2 flared up again.

Here’s another headline:

tet!
USA

This explains everything in the word. Like the surprise attack by the communists in Vietnam, in what were supposed to be safe cities hundreds of miles away from the front line, so America was torched. I mean literally torched. On Sunday, June 1, refugees ran amok in towns and cities across the whole of the U.S.

Afterward, there were all kinds of theories. That it had been a coordinated attack. That the bread bandits all had little radios with them, that the order was broadcast in code and WHAM! They rioted in their millions, turning over cars, looting stores, burning houses, killing American men, women and children with their bare hands.

It wasn’t quite like that. Everyone agrees now it was that bug in their blood. It burrowed into their brains and made them do that. Just like a man with rabies’ll jump from a window rather than permit a glass of water to come near him. But why did it all happen on that Sunday? The doctor here in Sullivan will tell you it was the heat wave that fired up the dormant bug, pushing it into its next phase of the condition.

Still things don’t add up. A mystery the size of Texas’s still hanging over our heads. Sure there were millions of bread bandits here. To carry on the disease image, they’d infiltrated and infected the entire body of our country from one end to the other. But there still weren’t enough of them to make the whole nation implode. But that’s what happened. Our society, which seemed solid as the rock you stand on, just disintegrated.

One problem was the lack of food. Huge, HUGE problem. Bread bandits looted everything down to the last candy bar from supermarkets. They torched cars on the highways. Roads blocked everywhere, and the image blazing in my mind right now is that big antique vase in a cartoon. The one that gets just a gentle tap and a little crack appears . . . that crack in the china leads to another one, then another, and another, until with a low crick-crack sound the vase becomes a mass of fractures before the whole thing collapses into dust. Our country was like that vase. Suddenly there was no food. Thousands of families were burned from their homes. Bread bandits torched food warehouses. Food couldn’t be delivered to where it was needed through gridlocked roads.

American citizens became refugees, too. Only they headed for cities that had no food either. What takes your breath away was the
SPEED
it all happened. I’m not talking weeks, but four, maybe five, days. Panic buying at service stations meant gasoline vanished. No new stocks could be brought in because roads were a mess of burnt-out trucks. The guys who were to clear the routes into town with bulldozers didn’t show up to man the vehicles because they were working their guts out to find food for their families. Can you blame them? Any more than you can blame the cops for choosing to guard their own homes, rather then standing guard at city hall to stop some bread bandit trashing the Xerox machine? It’s human instinct. Family first.

Freakish things happened. Marines protected an IRS office while bread bandits butchered kids in kindergarten half a mile away. One state governor fled to Hawaii, then flew back again and hanged himself in his office. Another died rescuing patients from a hospital. Bravery, cowardice, confusion, terror, panic—we saw a lifetime’s worth inside a week.

The other Freak Event was Sullivan. Somehow the wild flood that engulfed the nation missed this chunk of suburban life as it sat there on the lake. Life went on as normal. In fact, it became so normal it became a freakshow in its own right.

So there I sat as dusk fell. I wrote down everything I knew on this block of paper. I pushed myself so hard to explain what happened I stopped feeling the pain in my face. The water was still now after the breeze of the day. Bats dipped to take insects from just above the lake. Uphill, electricity still fed the town. People burned more lights than were necessary. But then, nighttime had taken on a more sinister edge of late.

It wasn’t quite dark when I saw the procession of people heading toward my cabin. There must have been twenty of them. I didn’t like what I saw. Because the first person I recognized was the guy who tried to break that log over my head earlier in the day. Crowther’s face wore a grim expression. Anger burned in his eyes.

There was nowhere to run. So I put down my paper and my pencil and went outside to see what they wanted from me.

Six

If looks could kill . . .
That’s a phrase you’ll know well enough. When someone who hates you can’t physically touch you but the look in his eye screams,
I’m going to rip your fucking head off!

Crowther’s hate-shot eyes burned right into mine. The crowd that walked with him were mainly middle-aged or older. This was no lynch mob. They were the ruling committee of Sullivan, who were known as the Caucus. The youngest there was Lynne’s husband. He was thirty-one. I recognized Crowther’s father, looking the picture of misery.

I came down the steps from the cabin’s veranda and waited for them to speak. They’d walked purposefully enough. Now, however, they slowed to a kind of shuffling approach, as if suddenly they no longer wanted to be here. Rose Bertholly had been a corporate lawyer before the fall. She glanced back at the others, took a breath that seemed to say,
Ok, I guess it’s up to me
, then: “Greg. How are you?”

Stupid question. I’d been slammed by a hunk of maple wood.

“How’s your face?” she asked when I didn’t answer.

“OK. Considering.” I looked at Crowther junior. Meanwhile, Crowther senior shuffled his feet in the dirt like he wanted those feet to carry him away.

“I won’t beat about the bush, Greg.”

Nice choice of words, lady lawyer.

“The Caucus met tonight. We discussed Mr. Crowther’s assault on you. We consider it unwarranted. . . .”

That mean he didn’t have a good enough excuse to crack my skull bone?

“It was cowardly, and we deem it a serious infringement of the rule of law in this time of national emergency.”

Well, said, Miss Bertholly. You must have been sharp as a blade in court.

“Greg.” She gave me a look that was seriously lawyer like. “The Caucus has agreed unanimously that Mr. Crowther is guilty of the crime of actual bodily harm against you. We feel very strongly, also, that he shouldn’t go unpunished.” She paused. “How do you respond to that, Greg?”

“My response would be, why do you call me Greg and the guy who tried killing me, Mr. Crowther?” I looked from Crowther junior to Crowther senior. “It seems strange to me. Or is it because I crawled in here on my hands and knees just a few months ago? While the two Mr. Crowthers here are old Sullivan blood and the local neighborhood millionaires?” I jerked my head in the direction of the burnt piece of crap that Lewis had become. “See how much you can buy for a dollar across there.”

“Greg . . . Mr. Valdiva. I apologize.” Her voice was polite, but the words came out with a glint of ice on them now. “This isn’t a court of law.”

“Isn’t it?”

“I was merely trying to be informal.”

“Oh.”

“I can’t blame you for being angry.”

“Me? Angry?”

“You suffered a physical assault today. It was unprovoked.”

“Assault? If you took the hard end of the wood like I did you’d call it attempted murder.”

“Mr. Valdiva. Mr. Crowther had maybe a few more drinks than he ought. He didn’t mean to—”

I couldn’t stop the snort of pure disbelief shooting out of my nostrils. “Oh, I see. You’re closing ranks. It was just a bit of fun that got out of hand. See?” I tilted my head to the light shining from the cabin so she could see the crazy paving of grazes and bruising. “That’s Crowther’s little bit of fun.”

“Hey, Valdiva.” Now it was old man Crowther’s turn. Disgust came oozing through his voice as he spoke. “Valdiva. My boy would not harm anyone without just cause. He must have been—”

“Jim.” An old man beside Crowther senior held up a hand. “Jim, the Caucus has made its decision. Your son is guilty of assault. There’s no debate about that.”

“The question is,” Miss Bertholly said crisply, “what will the punishment be?”

I shrugged. “OK. So why have you come down here to discuss that?”

There was a pause long enough to hear the cry of night birds shimmering across the water. Those men and women shifted uneasily, as if they heard the sound of ghost children calling to them from the ruins of Lewis.

“Why have the Caucus meet here outside my house? You’ll have made up your damned minds about Crowther anyway. You going to stop ten dollars from his allowance, Mr. Crowther? Are you going to ground him for a week?” This slice of crappola had become a joke. I turned to go inside.

“Mr. Valdiva,” Miss Bertholly said. “We—the Caucus, that is—have also decided that as you are the victim you must decide the punishment.”

“Get away . . .” I shook my head. “You want me to fix a punishment for Crowther? Why?”

“Because if we chose a punishment you’d only say . . .” She took a breath and selected more diplomatic words, “If you chose the punishment you would know that an adequate redress had been made.”

“OK.” I nodded. “OK. That sounds fair enough.” I reached back to the veranda rail to grab a coil of rope that hung from a nail there. Underarm, I tossed it at old man Crowther. He caught it as it slapped into his chest.

“I’ve decided the punishment,” I told them. “Hang him.”

There was a silence you could have carved with a blade. Even the call of the night birds died. All I could hear was the lap of water out there in the darkness.

“There’s a lighting rig down at the jetty. It’s a good ten feet tall. You can string him up from that.”

Jesus, their faces. They looked as if I’d thrown a hand grenade at them. Crowther junior had arrived with a look of defiance pasted across his face. Now his eyes seemed to race from one person to another, finishing with a pleading look at his father. I looked into the eyes of the others there, especially into the eyes of Miss Bertholly the lawyer.

“What did he say? Dad, what did Valdiva say?” Crowther’s voice came stammering out of his mouth. “Dad?” His eyes had morphed into big rolling white balls that locked tight onto the rope in his father’s hands.
“Dad? D-der-does he want to hang me?”

Gritting my teeth, I lunged forward to snatch the rope from the old man’s hands. “Go home,” I told them, angry. “Go home; it’s late.”

With the rope in my hand I went back to the cabin, punched open the door, then crashed it shut behind me.

I stood there with the door pressed shut by my back. Jesus . . . my hands were trembling. Sweat poured down my face, its salt getting onto my tongue. I balled my hand and rubbed it across my mouth with the back of my fist.

“Christ. Idiots . . . You crazy idiots . . .” I looked at the rope as if it had burst into a mass of bloody tumors, then threw it from me. Because I’d read that look in their eyes. They’d have gone along with what I’d asked for. They were going to hang Crowther junior, the poor bastard.

Sweet Jesus Christ.

What was happening with these people?