We Are All Crew (22 page)

“The few members of the unenlightened public believe that when the government gives tax breaks to oil companies and undermines alternative energy concerns, they’re protecting the interests of big business.” Her pinkness flashes scarlet. “They don’t know what’s really happening. They can’t see the forest for the trees. They don’t know what oil is. Ever since the Industrial Revolution, we’ve known why it’s such a valuable resource. It’s more important than its ability to drive engines and make plastics. Hell, we have the ability to do that with sunlight now. These crazy spotted-owl porkers will never get it.”

She flushes, embarrassed. “Excuse me,” she says. “Oil is a weapon. It pollutes the air. It kills plants and animals. It’s one of our most effective weapons, as a matter of fact, and it’s my duty to keep wrongheaded people like Doctor Seabrook from trying to bring it down. Think about it. If it wasn’t for fossil fuels polluting the atmosphere, plants and wildlife would flourish! They’d invade the cities and overpopulate the earth! We wouldn’t stand a chance.

“We are a proud agency, Winthrop. We have a long and storied history of success. We have saved this country from the likes of Seabrook, time and time again, for more than two hundred years now. And one of these days this war is going to end.

“Nature wants the United States for itself. It wants the water, it wants the air, and it wants the land. When we try to take the land—which is our God-given right—it fights us. It sends its animals to attack us. It assaults us with storms, floods us, hits us with earthquakes, or tries to burn us up in forest fires. It’s our destiny to control this country and all its resources, regardless of what we’re up against.”

“But, like, won’t that kill the people too, if you destroy the water and air and stuff?” I ask.

“It’s called mutually assured destruction, Winthrop,” she says. “You might have witnessed the concept in microcosm during the Cold War with the Russkies. We can’t weaken. Do you honestly believe that nature, if she really wanted to, couldn’t wipe us all out with a monster volcano, a hurricane, or a great flood? Well, she wouldn’t dare try because of our nuclear deterrent. The stalemate is what’s keeping us alive for the moment. But that won’t last forever.

“Now,” Sweetwater says, “do you see why that boat can never make it to California? It would tip the balance. We have nature on the run, but tree huggers like Seabrook are giving her hope. Nature is warming up the atmosphere, threatening to melt the polar ice caps, hitting us with hurricanes. That boat is a danger, an unwitting capitulation from a peace-mongering pinko. Say Seabrook made it to California, and people actually listened to his nonsense. The trucking industry might just take a hit. That would cripple our air pollution arsenal. Trucks create a significant percentage of the air pollution in this country. We can’t have that curtailed, Winthrop.”

“Uh-huh.” I want this conversation to end. “So why didn’t you just set up a roadblock or drop a bomb or something?”

“We’ve tried. It’s not that simple.”

“Is this like a bin Laden thing?”

“I told you, we’re fighting a war,” Sweetwater said. “You were first spotted aboard the Tamzene on the Allwyn River in Pennsylvania. Remember?”

I barely do. Most of my being at the moment is concentrating on the power button to the bottom right of the TV.

“Do you recall what happened? Three of our boats almost overtook you.”

“There was a big storm.”

She looks at me over the horn-rims.

“I don’t get it.”

“In Pennsylvania, there was a storm. Another storm in Ohio. Bird attacks. Bear attacks. Suicidal frogs getting lodged in our engines. Whenever we’re close, something happens. This Tamzene is clearly very important to our enemy, Winthrop. It recognizes the threat to our arsenal. That’s why we’ve got to find it.”

“Got ya,” I say. “Now can I watch TV?”

She smiles. “In a moment, Winthrop. There’s something I need your help with first, if you don’t mind.”

From nowhere, Sweetwater pulls a remote control and presses a button.

The room changes. On a secret conveyor belt, my recliner turns counterclockwise. The wall slides upward, clearing the way for a window into another room.

It is a room with whitewashed walls and a metal floor. Handcuffed to chairs in the room are Arthur, Seabrook, and Kang.

They look miserable. Their jaws are slack, and each of them has little crimson half-moons scattered up their arms and on their cheeks. Next to them—towering over them, actually—is a box made of black metal.

Tears sting my eyes. I want to go to them, but I feel so hollowed out and weak it’s difficult to move.

“You know Arthur’s dad is NSA, right?” I say.

“NSA?” she laughs. “We know all about your friend. The NSA are glorified postmen, Winthrop. He won’t be missed. Now listen, we need your help. We’re going to try one last time to find out from these Greenpeace wannabes where the heck they hid the Tamzene. I know it’s painful, but if you catch them in a lie, speak up, all right?”

I stare into the other room, wishing against everything that I was somewhere else, that I’d never left camp, that Arthur and I could have just gone on and joined whatever stupid club His Eminence had me set for.

“Of course,” Sweetwater adds. She seems to grow taller as she leans over my chair. “If you happen to know where the boat is yourself, why, you could tell me. Then we won’t release what’s in that box.”

I look into the knowing slits she has for eyes.

“Do we understand each other?” she asks. She gives me one more look and leaves the room.

A moment later she’s in the white room with two armed guards in black uniforms. She stands in front of Kang and chuckles.

“Gentlemen,” she says to the guards, knifing Kang with her eyes. “This is a historic day. More than two hundred years ago, when this great war of ours was in its infancy, our forefathers realized that one way we could demoralize those pesky early environmentalists, the Native Americans, was to rob them of adequate footwear. So they systematically destroyed the Milliconquit tribe—which was what some scholars called the Shoe Salesman tribe.”

Kang’s face hardens. It grows tighter and tighter until tears bulge from his eyes.

“Took some doing too,” Sweetwater continues. “But that was nothing a little smallpox couldn’t fix. But I digress. Today we finish the job. Even though our friend Jorge here is only a faux Milliconquit.”

Kang opens his mouth. “I,” says the nasally voice I’d heard in the woods, “am a Milliconquit. My name is Kang.”

“Well,” Sweetwater laughs, “now you’ll die like a Milliconquit.”

“My name is Kang,” he says again, this time his voice thundering. “I am a Milliconquit. Your people tried to kill the Milliconquit, but we survived. We hid ourselves among your people. We hid ourselves in the cities. We married you, and you bore our children.”

Kang looks at Arthur. Tears are slipping down Kang’s cheeks now. Arthur smiles. “I was born in Arizona. I lived in a little town in a little white house with a normal little white picket fence and lived a normal little life. And yes, I grew up as Jorge Zuniga, a normal little Latin American kid. I was nothing special. I took a normal little job as a normal computer programmer. But then I started researching who I was, and I learned that through my veins courses the blood of a great and powerful tribe, and I knew that I was Kang. I knew I was a Milliconquit. And I know there are others like me. And they’re coming for you. I am Kang, the Milliconquit.”

I hear what sounds like a bumblebee. It rumbles lazily somewhere outside. I glance behind me, out the tall windows that were hiding behind the blinds while I blindly watched TV. I look past the boats and the Crab Shack and the other building with the French name. Nothing but the moon glinting off the river and casting shadows through the trees.

“Yes, yes,” Sweetwater says. “We know all about you, Mr. Zuniga.” But she doesn’t seem quite as sure of herself. She glances quickly at the officers behind her. “He went off his nut, dontchaknow. Had a nice job in Flagstaff—data entry. Then one day he shows up wearing no shirt and a big headdress full of feathers he probably bought at the Halloween shop. We are what we are, Mr. Zuniga. And I hate to break it to you, but you’re no Indian shoe salesman.”

“Oh, but I am,” Kang says. “As my father was before me.”

“A corpse,” Sweetwater says. “That’s what you’re going to be.” She goes to the metal container and places her hand on top of it. “Before we leave you alone with our furry little friends here, do you have any last requests?” she asked.

The buzzing noise grows louder. I crane my neck. I can see a faint light glowing around the bend in the river.

“No?” Sweetwater says. “Then I’m going to ask you one last time. If you fail to give me the location of the Tamzene, I will open the box. We’ll carpet bomb the area. It’s sloppy, we don’t like to do things this way if we can avoid it, but it’s been done bef—”

Her voice trails off. She looks through the window at something over my shoulder.

On the river, a boat emerges from a clump of trees. The craft is long and thin with a motor sputtering at its rear. The boat is heaped with boxes, and it slices into the moon-soaked shoal toward Locksley Ponds’ docks.

The boat pulls behind the docks, and the driver cuts the engine. He’s a heavyset man in bib overalls. A mop of blond hair glows silver in the moonlight.

It’s the Birmingham Kid.

Sweetwater’s face sags. She steps toward the glass. “Oh dear,” she mumbles. “What’s that asshole doing now?”

Charlie Lee turns toward his pile of boxes, opens one, and plunges his arm into it.

“Stop him,” Sweetwater yells to the guards. One of them turns and jogs out the door.

Something catches Charlie Lee’s eye—something by the dock. He stands and stares at it.

“God is great!” he yells. He stoops and pulls the chord on the engine. It sputters for a moment and then comes to life. Swerving, Charlie Lee aims his boat directly at the Crab Shack restaurant.

“No!” Sweetwater presses herself against the glass window.

Charlie Lee’s boat slices through the water, aimed like a laser at the building. Just before he slams into the side of it, I see the Birmingham Kid raise his arms over his head and catch a glimpse of his howling face.

“God is great! God is . . .”

The Crab Shack explodes into an orange mushroom cloud. Next to it, the building with the French sign on it also bursts into flames. A giant arm of fire reaches up toward the heavens. A thunderclap echoes throughout Locksley Ponds.

In the white room, the lights flicker and die. Pale moonlight casts everything in a silver glow. The guards look rattled, glancing around uncomfortably.

Sweetwater peels herself from the window and turns. Her eyes are wild with fear.

“The animals,” she says. “They’re loose!”

the thought

I never much wondered where thoughts came from. They’re just there. They come from somewhere inside you. They’re part of you. They don’t have sizes or shapes or weight, really—they’re just the electricity buzzing around in your head. I never bothered to ponder exactly where they come from beforehand, or if they arrive from someplace outside of you.

This thought, people, doesn’t seem to come from the usual place. It comes from somewhere outside. I don’t mean to say I’ve been possessed or some nut-job thing like that. But it’s this concrete thing in my head. A voice.

“Hi, Winthrop,” it says.

I’m wondering where it came from, but I’m also kind of busy looking back and forth between the billowing orange fire outside the window and my friends handcuffed in the white room. So I don’t say hi back.

“She left her remote control behind,” the voice says. It’s this deep-throated, dumb-sounding voice. “It’s there on the window ledge.”

I look, and sure enough, Sweetwater has left behind that gray rectangular remote she used to change the room into the mirrored wall.

“The top center button in the remote unlocks the cage,” the voice says amiably. “Why don’t you press it?”

After that thought come others. These hangers-on are all mine, I can tell, and I know >forces of natur

they come from my usual thought place because they’re shapeless.

They divide. TV shows, Red Grizzly songs, the Moms’ little pink pucker marks on the forearms, and the great TV are on one side. On the other, there’s Arthur, Kang, Seabrook, Esmerelda, and the Shrub People.

You make a million choices every day. Most of them are rolls with loaded dice, or you hope you’re playing the video game with the right key code so you can auto the next level even if you lose all your lives.

You go in the third entrance at the front of the Primrose School every day because you always do.

You pick meat or veggies on your pizza because you were wired to do it, because it’s what’s expected of you.

You wear black turtlenecks and listen to the right music because it’s what the guys around you want.

You run away from camp because deep down you think it’s what your father wants.

I’ve never faced this before.

If I don’t press the button, I know they’ll probably fix whatever damage has been done to Locksley Ponds. I’ll watch some more awesome TV, and in a couple of hours His Eminence and the Moms will show up and take me home.