The Subprimes (19 page)

Sargam rejected, outright, those inquiries that came in from talent agencies and management companies. She talked to reporters, even encouraged other citizens of Valence to speak to the few who made their way out here from Las Vegas, but she would not make herself a hero, wary lest anyone in the community see her as setting herself apart in any way.

She had known it would come to this, and one evening, as she and Darren were talking in their refurbished house, they discussed the community's options. There was no doubt that HG Extraction, with the full force and weight of the state, would come to move them out. This whole community was but a speed
bump between HG and its precious shale oil. It was dirty the way they used eminent domain to take back the land, paying nothing and driving off a few hundred innocent families, but that's how they operated.

“That's capitalism,” Sargam said. “That's the system we got. The big, the rich, the powerful, they can take whatever they want. There is nothing to stop them.”

She was slipping off her jeans and cotton socks, wiping her feet with a washcloth wet in a bowl.

“It's, like, we're all of us, the millions, the billions who live in the red, subprimes—God I hate that word—but all of us are waiting for something, someone to stand up to them, to say no, enough. You can't just take and take,” Darren said.

“You know who we're waiting for?” Sargam said.

He was standing shirtless in his jeans, resting his butt against the kitchen counter. “Who?”

“We're who we've been waiting for,” Sargam said. “There's no one but us. You and me. All these good people.”

Darren smiled. “I like that. We are who we've been waiting for.”

“It's been said before, but that's what we are. There's no one but us. If we go, all these families are going to go back to living in some Ryanville. Kids hungry. No schools. Dirty. Goddamn, that's no way for families to live, for good people to live. Look, we gave them—no, they gave themselves a chance here, took a ghost town and made a community. And now these cursed Pepper Sisters, who already have so many billions, who see the whole planet as a gigantic pit mine, they want to take this from us too.”

Sargam sat up then. “It's not just the shale oil.”

“What?”

“Why they want to run us off so bad. It's us. They can't stand the idea that people like us could have found a way to live
that's fair, dignified, outside their system. They need to prove, to every subprime out there dreaming of a way out, that there is no way out, that no such freedom exists, no such dignity. So they have to crush us, drive us out. That's what matters to them. We can't go.”

Darren nodded. He knew better than to disagree with Sargam. And he wasn't going anywhere either.

SARGAM COULD TELL JUST WITH
a glance at Vanessa that she had been plucked. The girl was walking with purpose, her gaze intent, even her hips seemed fuller beneath the black sweatpants she was wearing. She couldn't have been more than fifteen, Sargam guessed, but, then, she'd been younger, and it hadn't been with a boy like that Atticus, a good boy with ready smiles and broad shoulders who doted on Vanessa whenever he thought Bailey wasn't watching.

“Vanessa, come here, girl,” Sargam said as Vanessa strode by, a basket full of dishes and cups dangling from her narrow fingers.

The sun was so bright some mornings it was like a third person in the conversation, the stinging rays like the hot breath of the eavesdropper. Vanessa held her other hand up over eyes, the blues of which shone through the little pocket of shadow like something precious lost, then found at the back of a dresser drawer.

“How are you and Atticus doing?”

“Fine, I guess.”

“He seems like a good boy, well-spoken and mannered. And the way he dotes on you, it's wonderful to watch. Reminds me, reminds us all, of something. Well, something maybe we never even had.”

Vanessa was sure she didn't know what Sargam was talking about.

Sargam was so pretty, with her black hair and amber skin, but she wasn't pretty in a mean-girl way, but pretty maybe in the way a favorite teacher could be. You wanted her not just to like you, but to protect you.

“Atticus is really nice,” Vanessa said, hoping she wasn't revealing too much.

“You don't have to be shy with me. I know you two . . . you know,” Sargam said.

Vanessa averted her blue eyes from Sargam, held her hand lower so that Sargam would not see that she didn't want to meet her gaze.

“I'm saying,” Sargam said, “that you're going to need to take some precautions, to take care that you don't get with child.”

Vanessa blushed, her skin pinkening and then going vermillion around the freckles on her forehead.

“Don't be bothered, darling,” Sargam said. “I'm not judging you or lecturing you. You're young, who knows what you can be, what you can do. You don't need a baby now.”

Vanessa looked away, then the slackness of her features tightened and her expression became pinched. “What am I gonna do, huh? I'm living in this, this, whatever this is, and I don't have anywhere to go or anything to do, and yeah, maybe I got a guy and I like him and we have some fun, but don't tell me I'm saving myself for anything or that I got any future or anything like that, because I've seen what's out there.”

Sargam held out her arms and pulled Vanessa toward her. “Girl, I'm not saying don't have some fun, but I'm telling you to make sure you get some protection. We can get you something, you know, for that.”

Vanessa smiled. “Oh, okay, for that. I'll come by later.”

“No, tell that boy of yours, Atticus, to come by; he should be taking some responsibility.”

IT'S GONNA BE A WAR,
thought Tom. We've got hundreds of men, strong ones, like my dad, and they will fight and fight and fight for us because we're right. The boy was walking along the rows of sedge and onion, beneath the stumpy juts of dried cypress, and up a hill to where all the other boys would gather in the afternoon. Tom considered what a battle might mean. He had seen movies and TV shows, the bombed-out cities, the bundled-up old women pushing carts, the girl running naked down a dirt road, the soldiers wearing night-vision goggles searching through a house for the terrorist, and he had trouble transposing that to this little elbow of the world and to the people he knew. They had no tanks, no airplanes, no bombs, there was just his dad and Sargam and Atticus and a few more men and boys who would be armed with nothing more than righteousness, and was that really enough?

The grown-ups talked about nonviolent resistance. But he was a boy, and caught up in the excitement of conflict and the thrill of potential combat. He had been watching the preparations, the supplies laid in, the gas masks and chemical suits, the food and water that were being stored in every home as Sargam warned they would soon be cut off from the outside world. The boy found in this great excitement and understood that he was seeing things that he would never have seen back in Riverside. Like every boy, he was in a hurry to jump his boyhood self and land squarely in manhood. This great upheaval set to occur seemed to provide precisely that possibility. All that time riding in the rear passenger seat of the battered Flex when Tom felt he had not grown or learned a damn thing, and here he was, on the cusp of real, live war.

He saw Emmett and Yuri and Vito and Ted and Juan, seated in a circle under the shade of a skinny pilitas sage. They had with them the usual writst-rockets and baseball bats. Yuri, the luckiest among them, was the owner of a Crossman pump-action pellet gun. Tom sat down. They shared what they knew, what their parents had been doing, preparing in their own small ways for how they envisioned the cataclysm would go down. They agreed to meet up by the shade tree every afternoon of the war, and they talked about what they would do if they came upon an enemy soldier in their midst.

This last question was the most vexing: What would the enemy look like? Would they be American soldiers? Or cops? Or security techs? Or some combination?

“What did it matter?” the boys said. “When has a uniform ever been good news?”

But armed only with slingshots and BB guns, how would they be able to tangle with Kevlar-coated gladiators sent to uproot them?

Yuri had the answer. They would turn their weaknesses into their strengths. He talked to them about “gorilla warfare,” about insurgency, about how a few kids with slingshots had driven the United States out of Iraq—or something like that—and though he didn't know the correct spelling of the term, what he was proposing was radical. Boys with rocks against men with guns, drones, gas, and grenades.

He proposed they gather here, and use their size and the knowledge of the trails leading to various parts of Valence to stage strikes against the enemy, sneak attacks using wrist-rockets, rocks, and a pellet gun that would stun and weaken the enemy, would—he searched for the word.

“Immoralize him!”

The boys liked the sound of Gorilla Warfare.

They would be the Gorillas.

The soldiers would never even see them, swinging through branches down trails they didn't even know existed, until the Gorillas were upon them, teeth gnashing, claws grasping, tearing their hearts out.

They had to gather equipment, water, food, knives, rocks, enough to survive out here for weeks if they had to, so that while their parents were engaging the enemy from the front, they would be attacking where he was weakest, in the rear.

The Gorillas!

THERE WOULD BE NO ACTUAL
winning, Sargam knew, there would only be a moment that might look like winning that had to be fixed in people's minds. Eventually, the weight of the forces coming to bear against Valence would be too great. There was no way that a few hundred families in a forgotten property development who happened to be situated above a few million tons of shale could triumph over centuries of capitalism.

The media were gathering, eager for a showdown between the telegenic warrior momma of the have-nots and Pastor Roger and the Pepper Sisters. Pastor Roger was on all the networks, intoning in his soft, mellifluous voice the spiritual mission of the Pepper Sisters, and the socialist, progressive dystopia that would ensue if Valence was allowed to continue eking out its existence.

“People helping people?” Pastor Roger would ask. “I don't hear any inch of room in there for God. This is secularism run amok, the gravest threat to God's fabric since Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler and Osama bin Laden themselves.”

His position was simple: we can't have a socialist enclave in the middle of America, a town of God-hating progressives who don't believe in private property or the individual's right to exploit that property.

“Where would it end?” Pastor Roger solemnly queried. “Could the socialist dictator come to your house and tell you how to arrange your furniture, tell you not to build a modest six-thousand-square-foot home on your blessed plot, tell you to put illegal solar panels on your roof?”

This was a holy battle, Pastor Roger preached, prophesying that as soon as the legal system allowed, the Pepper Sisters would begin moving their extraction equipment into Valence and break ground on what would be a vastly profitable shale oil field. “Isn't that what God intends? And I will be atop the first truck, blessing the drill bits.”

While Pastor Roger always appeared in his climate-controlled studio in his vast domed football stadium, Sargam did her interviews standing against white Sheetrock or framed by the vegetables growing behind the tract rows. When asked what gave her and the people of Valence the right to violate a court order and stand in the way of American energy independence—which had been achieved, by the way, a decade ago; the U.S. was now the world's leading energy exporter—she would respond that she was only doing what the folks of Valence wanted. “We've been running for so long,” she said, “in ragged vehicles, sleeping under overpasses, on the side of roads, told to move on from every faucet and tap and bathroom, and denied every service, and so we finally find a place and we make a home of it—”

An interviewer cuts in. “As subprimes, you had no choice but—”

“We don't use that term here,” Sargam said. “We don't judge a person by his or her credit score. We've made our home here, using that simple credo, and we don't need credit or cell phones or the Internet, not if we have each other, and that's what the one percenters can't stand, that a fulfilling life is possible without any of that stuff. But it is, and we are living it.”

She came across as thoughtful and pretty, and despite the media's attempts to ferret out her “story,” there was no story to be found. She had simply appeared, as if from nowhere, in her white leathers on a motorcycle. There was no record or photographic image of her from before, no credit history at all, which further fueled Pastor Roger's rants about Sargam—the foreign name itself was suspect—being some sort of sleeper progressive, a socialist plant from abroad who would undermine America's strength by denying her energy independence.

“I've lived and seen enough to know,” Sargam would say when pressed about her past.

To her people, she projected a steady confidence. They would prevail, this was not a last stand, but rather a beginning of a new way of living. If all those millions could just see what a difference people helping people made, then they all had a chance. If that seed could be sown, then anything was possible. But lying quietly on her bedroll, with Darren snoring beside her, she would consider the most likely outcome: an army of security techs, a battalion of bulldozers, and a squadron of drones driving them off, and in the fog of tear gas there might be nothing for television viewers to see, beyond a demolished, abandoned exurb. She knew she must never show this fear or doubt but convey complete faith that the great arc of history would bend toward something like freedom.