Greasy Lake and Other Stories

On for the Long Haul

There was nothing wrong with his appendix — no stitch in the side, no inflammation, no pain — but Bayard was having it out. For safety’s sake. He’d read an article once about an anthropologist who’d gone to Malaysia to study the social habits of the orangutan and died horribly when her appendix had burst three hundred miles from the nearest hospital; as she lay writhing in her death agony the distraught apes had hauled her halfway up a jack-fruit tree, where she was found several days later by a photographer from Life magazine. The picture — splayed limbs, gouty face, leaves like a mouthful of teeth — was indelible with him. She’d been unprepared, that anthropologist, inattentive to the little details that can make or break you. Bayard was taking no such chances.

At their first meeting, the surgeon had been skeptical. “You’re going to Montana, Mr. Wemp, not Borneo. There are hospitals there, all the modern facilities.”

“It’s got to go, doctor,” Bayard had quietly insisted, looking up with perfect composure from the knot of his folded hands.

“Listen, Mr. Wemp. I’ve got to tell you that every surgical procedure, however routine, involves risk”—the doctor paused to let this sink in—“and I really feel the risks outweigh the gains in this case. All the tests are negative — we have no indication of a potential problem here.”

“But doctor—” Bayard felt himself at a loss for words. How explain to this earnest, assured man with the suntanned wife, the Mercedes, and the house in Malibu that all of Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York — civilization itself — was on the brink of a catastrophe that would make the Dark Ages look like a Sunday-afternoon softball game? How intimate the horrors that lay ahead, the privation, the suffering? He remembered Aesop’s fable about the ant and the grasshopper. Some would be prepared, others would not. “You just don’t understand how isolated I’m going to be,” he said finally.

Isolated, yes. Thirty-five acres in Bounceback, Montana, population thirty-seven. The closest town with a hospital, bank, or restaurant was Missoula, a two-and-a-half-hour drive, an hour of it on washboard dirt. Bayard would have his own well, a cleared acre for vegetable farming, and a four-room cabin with wood stove, electrical generator, and a radiation-proof cellar stocked with a five-year supply of canned and freeze-dried foodstuffs. The whole thing was the brainchild of Sam Arkson, a real-estate developer who specialized in subsistence plots, bomb shelters, and survival homes. Bayard’s firm had done some PR work for one of Arkson’s companies — Thrive, Inc. — and as he looked into the literature of catastrophe, Bayard had found himself growing ever more uncertain about the direction of his own life. Remember the gas crisis? asked one of Arkson’s pamphlets. An inconvenience, right? The have-nots stepping on the haves. But what about the food crisis around the corner? Have you thought about what you’ll do when they close up the supermarkets with a sign that says “Sorry, Temporarily Out of Food”?

Bayard would never forget the day he’d come across that pamphlet. His palms had begun to sweat as he read on, gauging the effect of nuclear war on the food and water supply, thinking of life without toilet paper, toothpaste, or condiments, summoning images of the imminent economic depression, the starving masses, the dark-skinned marauding hordes pouring across our borders from the south to take, take, take with their greedy, desperate, clutching hands. That night he’d gone home in a cold sweat, visions of apocalypse dancing in his head. Fran made him a drink, but he couldn’t taste it. The girls showed him their schoolwork — the sweet, ingenuous loops of their penmanship, the pale watercolors and gold stars — and he felt the tears start up in his eyes. They were doomed, he was doomed, the world sinking like a stone. After they’d gone to bed he slipped out to the kitchen and silently pulled back the refrigerator door. Inside he found a head of deliquescing lettuce, half a gallon of milk, mayonnaise, mustard, chutney, a jar of capers so ancient it might have been unearthed in a tomb, a pint of butter-brickle ice cream, and a single Mexicali Belle TV dinner. The larder yielded two cans of pickled Chinese mushrooms, half a dozen packages of artificial rice pudding, and a lone box of Yodo Crunch cereal, three-quarters empty. He felt sick. Talk about a prolonged siege — they didn’t even have breakfast.

That night his dreams had tentacles. He woke feeling strangled. The coffee was poisonous, the newspaper rife with innuendo, each story, each detail cutting into him with the sharp edge of doom. A major quake was on the way, the hills were on fire, there was murder and mayhem in Hollywood, AIDS was spreading to the heterosexual population, Kaddafi had the bomb. Outside sat the traffic. Three million cars, creeping, spitting, killing the atmosphere, inching toward gridlock. The faces of the drivers were impassive. Shift, lurch, advance, stop, shift, lurch. Didn’t they know the whole world had gone hollow, rotten like a tooth? Didn’t they know they were dead? He looked into their eyes and saw empty sockets, looked into their faces and saw the death’s head. At work it was no better. The secretaries greeted him as if money mattered, as if there were time to breathe, go out to Chan Dara for lunch, and get felt up in the Xerox room; his colleagues were as bland as cue balls, nattering on about baseball, stocks, VCRs, and food processors. He staggered down the hallway as if he’d been hit in the vitals, slamming into the sanctuary of his office like a hunted beast. And there, on his desk, as if it were the bony pointed finger of the Grim Reaper himself, was Arkson’s pamphlet.

By two-thirty that afternoon he was perched on a chair in Sam Arkson’s San Diego office, talking hard-core survival with the impresario himself. Arkson sat behind a desk the size of a trampoline, looking alternately youthful and fissured with age — he could have been anywhere from thirty-five to sixty. Aggressively tanned and conscientiously muscled, his hair cut so close to the scalp it might have been painted on, he resembled nothing so much as a professional sweat meister, Vic Tanny fighting the waistline bulge, Jack La Lanne with a Mohawk. He was dressed in fatigues and wore a khaki tie. “So,” he said, leaning back in his chair and sizing up Bayard with a shrewd, unforgiving gaze, “are you on for the long haul or do you just need a security blanket?”

Bayard was acutely conscious of his paunch, the whiteness of his skin, the hair that trailed down his neck in soft, frivolous coils. He felt like a green recruit under the burning gaze of the drill instructor, like an awkward dancer trying out for the wrong role. He coughed into his fist. “The long haul.”

Arkson seemed pleased. “Good,” he said, a faint smile playing across his lips. “I thought at first you might be one of these halfway types that wants a bomb shelter under the patio or something.” He gave Bayard a knowing glace. “They might last a month or two after the blast,” he said, “but what then? And what if it’s not war we’re facing but worldwide economic collapse? Are they going to eat their radiation detectors?”

This was a joke. Bayard laughed nervously. Arkson cut him off with a contemptuous snort and a wave of his hand that consigned all the timid, slipshod, halfway Harrys of the world to an early grave. “No,” he said, “I can see you’re the real thing, a one-hundred-percenter, no finger in the dike for you.” He paused. “You’re a serious person, Bayard, am I right?”

Bayard nodded.

“And you’ve got a family you want to protect?”

Bayard nodded again.

“Okay”—Arkson was on his feet, a packet of brochures in his hand—“we’re going to want to talk hidden location, with the space, seeds, fertilizer, and tools to grow food and the means to hunt it, and we’re going to talk a five-year renewable stockpile of survival rations, medical supplies, and specie — and of course weaponry.

“Weaponry?”

Arkson had looked at him as if he’d just put a bag over his head. “Tell me,” he said, folding his arms so that the biceps swelled beneath his balled fists, “when the bust comes and you’re sitting on the only food supply in the county, you don’t really think your neighbors are going to breeze over for tea and polite chitchat, do you?”

Though Bayard had never handled a gun in his life, he knew the answer: there was a sickness on the earth and he’d have to harden himself to deal with it.

Suddenly Arkson was pointing at the ceiling, as if appealing to a higher authority to back him up. “You know what I’ve got up there on the roof?” he said, looming over Bayard like an inquisitor. Bayard hadn’t the faintest idea.

“A Brantly B2B.”

Bayard gave him a blank look.

“A chopper. Whirlybird. You know: upski-downski. And guess who flies it?” Arkson spread the brochures out on the desk in front of him, tapping a forefinger against the glossy photograph of a helicopter floating in a clear blue sky beneath the rubric ESCAPE CRAFT. “That’s right, friend: me. I fly it. Leave nothing to chance, that’s my motto.” Bayard thumbed through the brochure, saw minijets, hovercraft, Cessnas, seaplanes, and ultralights.

“I can be out of town in ten minutes. Half an hour later I’m in my compound — two hundred fenced acres, three security men, goats, cows, chickens, pigs, corn as high as your chin, wheat, barley, rye, artesian wells, underground gas and water tanks — and an arsenal that could blow away the PLO. Listen,” he said, and his eyes were like a stalking cat’s, “when the shit hits the fan they’ll be eating each other out there.”

Bayard had been impressed. He was also terrified, sick with the knowledge of his own impotence and vulnerability. The blade was poised. It could fall today, tonight, tomorrow. They had to get out. “Fran,” he called as he hurried through the front door, arms laden with glossy brochures, dire broadsides, and assorted survival tomes from Arkson Publications, Ltd. “Fran!”

Fran had always been highstrung — neurotic, actually — and the sort of pure, unrefined paranoia that had suddenly infested Bayard was second nature to her. Still, she would take some persuading — he was talking about uprooting their entire life, after all — and it was up to Bayard to focus that paranoia and bring it to bear on the issue at hand. She came out of the sunroom in a tentlike swimsuit, a large, solid, plain-faced woman in her late thirties, trailing children. She gave him a questioning look while the girls, chanting “Daddy, Daddy,” foamed round his legs. “We’ve got to talk,” was all he could say.

Later, after the children had been put to bed, he began his campaign. “We’re sitting on a powder keg,” he said as she bent over the dishwasher, stacking plates. She looked up, blinking behind the big rectangular frames of her glasses like a frogman coming up for air. “Pardon?”

“L. A., the whole West Coast. It’s the first place the Russians’ll hit — if the quake doesn’t drop us into the ocean first. Or the banks go under. You’ve read about the S&Ls, right?”

She looked alarmed. But, then, she alarmed easily. Chronically overprotected as a child, cloistered in a parochial school run along the lines of a medieval nunnery, and then consigned to a Catholic girls’ college that made it look liberal, she believed with all her heart in the venality of man and the perfidy and rottenness of the world. On the rare occasions when she left the house she clutched her purse like a fullback going through a gap in the line, saw all pedestrians — even white-haired grandmothers — as potential muggers, and dodged Asians, Latinos, Pakistanis, and Iranians as if they were the hordes of Genghis Khan. “What in God’s name are you talking about?” she said.

“I”m talking about Montana.”

“Montana?”

At this point Bayard had simply fetched his trove of doom literature and spread it across the kitchen table. “Read,” he said, knowing full well the books and pamphlets could speak far more eloquently than he. In the morning he’d found her hunched over the table still, the ashtray full beside her, a copy of Doom Newsletter in her hand, Panic in the Streets and How to Kill, volumes I–IV, face down beside a steaming coffee mug. “But what about the girls?” she said. “What about school, ballet lessons, tennis, swimming?”

Melissa was nine, Marcia seven. The move to the hinterlands would be disruptive for them, maybe traumatic — Bayard didn’t deny it — but then, so would nuclear holocaust. “Ballet lessons?” he echoed. “What good do you think ballet lessons are going to be when maniacs are breaking down the door?” And then, more gently: “Look, Fran, it’s going to be hard for all of us, but I just don’t see how we can stay here now that our eyes have been opened — it’s like sitting on the edge of a volcano or something.”

She was weakening, he could feel it. When he got home from the office she was sunk into the sofa, her eyes darting across the page before her like frightened animals. Arkson had called. Four times. “Mrs. Wemp, Fran,” he’d shouted over the wire as if the barbarians were at the gate, “you’ve got to listen to me. I have a place for you. Nobody’ll find you. You’ll live forever. Sell that deathtrap and get out now before it’s too late!” Toward the end of the week she went through an entire day without changing out of her nightgown. Bayard pressed his advantage. He sent the girls to the babysitter and took the day off from work to ply her with pamphlets, rhetoric and incontrovertible truths, and statistics on everything from the rising crime rate to nuclear kill ratios. As dusk fell that evening, the last choked rays of sunlight irradiating the smog till it looked like mustard gas coming in over the trenches, she capitulated. In a voice weak with terror and exhaustion, she called him into the bedroom, where she lay still as a corpse. “All right,” she croaked. “Let’s get out.”

After Fran, the surgeon was easy. For fifteen minutes Bayard had quietly persisted while the doctor demurred. Finally, throwing his trump card, the surgeon leaned forward and said: “You’re aware your insurance won’t cover this, Mr. Wemp?”

Bayard had smiled. “No problem,” he said. “I’ll pay cash.”

Two months later he and Fran sported matching abdominal scars, wore new flannel shirts and down vests, talked knowledge-ably of seed sets, fertilizer, and weed killer, and resided in the distant rugged reaches of the glorious Treasure State, some four hundred miles from ground zero of the nearest likely site of atomic devastation. The cabin was a good deal smaller than what they were used to, but then, they were used to luxury condominiums, and the cabin sacrificed luxury — comfort, even — for utility. Its exterior was simulated log, designed to make the place look like a trapper’s cabin to the average marauder, but the walls were reinforced with steel plates to a thickness that would withstand bazooka or antitank gun. In the basement, which featured four-foot-thick concrete walls and lead shielding, was the larder. Ranks of hermetically sealed canisters mounted the right-hand wall, each with a reassuring shelf life of ten years or more: bulk grains, wild rice, textured vegetable protein, yogurt powder, matzo meal, hardtack, lentils, bran, Metamucil. Lining the opposite wall, precisely stacked, labeled and alphabetized, were the freeze-dried entrées, from abbacchio alla cacciatora and boeuf bourguignonne to shrimp Creole, turkey Tetrazzini, and ziti alla romana. Bayard took comfort in their very names, as a novice might take comfort in the names of the saints: Just In Case freeze-dried linguine with white clam sauce, tomato crystals from Lazarus Foods, canned truffles from Gourmets for Tomorrow, and Arkson’s own Stash Brand generic foodstuffs, big plain-labeled cans that read CATSUP, SAUERKRAUT, DETERGENT, LARD. In the evenings, when the house was as quiet as the far side of the moon, Bayard would slip down into the shelter, pull the airtight door closed behind him, and spend hours contemplating the breadth, variety, and nutritional range of his cache. Sinking back in a padded armchair, his heartbeat decelerating, breathing slowed to a whisper, he would feel the calm of the womb descend on him. Then he knew the pleasures of the miser, the hoarder, the burrowing squirrel, and he felt as free from care as if he were wafting to and fro in the dark amniotic sea whence he sprang.

Of course, such contentment doesn’t come cheap. The whole package — land, cabin, four-wheel-drive vehicle, arms and munitions, foodstuffs, and silver bars, De Beers diamonds, and cowrie shells for barter — had cost nearly half a million. Arkson, whose corporate diversity put him in a league with Gulf & Western, had been able to provide everything, lock, stock, and barrel, right down to the church-key opener in the kitchen drawer and the reusable toilet paper in the bathroom. There were radiation suits, flannels, and thermal underwear from Arkson Outfitters, and weapons — including a pair of Russian-made AK 47s smuggled out of Afghanistan and an Israeli grenade launcher — from Arkson Munitions. In the driveway, from Arkson Motors, Domestic and Import, was the four-wheel-drive Norwegian-made Olfputt TC 17, which would run on anything handy, from paint thinner to rubbing alcohol, climb the north face of the Eiger in an ice storm, and pull a plow through frame-deep mud. The cabin’s bookshelves were mostly given over to the how-to, survival, and self-help tomes in which Arkson Publications specialized, but there were reprints of selected classics—Journal of the Plague Year, Hiroshima, and Down and Out in London and Paris—as well. Arkson made an itemized list, tallied the whole thing up, and presented the bill to Bayard and Fran in the San Diego office.

Fran was so wrought up at this point she barely gave it a glance. She kept looking over her shoulder at the door as if in expectation of the first frenzied pillagers, and then she would glance down at the open neck of her purse and the.22-caliber Beretta Arkson had just handed her (“My gift to you, Fran,” he’d said; “learn to use it”). Bayard himself was distracted. He tried to look judicious, tried to focus on the sheet of paper before him with the knowing look one puts on for garage mechanics presenting the bill for arcane mechanical procedures and labor at the rate of a hundred and twenty dollars an hour, but he couldn’t. What did it matter? Until he was ensconced in his cabin he was like a crab without its shell. “Seems fair,” he murmured.

Arkson had come round the desk to perch on the near edge and take his hand. “No bargain rate for survival, Bayard,” he said, “no fire sales. If the price seems steep, just think of it this way: Would you put a price on your life? Or the lives of your wife and children?” He’d paused to give Bayard a saintly look, the look of the young Redeemer stepping through the doors of the temple. “Just be thankful that you two had the financial resources — and the foresight — to protect yourself.”

Bayard had looked down at the big veiny tanned hand clutching his own and shaken it mechanically. He felt numb. The past few weeks had been hellish, what with packing up, supervising the movers, and making last-minute trips to the mall for things like thread, Band-Aids, and dental noss — not to mention agonizing over the sale of the house, anticipating Fran’s starts and rushes of panic, and turning in his resignation at the Hooper-Munson Co., where he’d put in fourteen years and worked himself up to Senior Vice President in Charge of Reversing Negative Corporate Image. Without Arkson it would have been impossible. He’d soothed Fran, driven the children to school, called the movers, cleaners, and painters, and then gone to work on Bayard’s assets with the single-mindedness of a general marshaling troops. Arkson Realty had put the condo on the market and found a buyer for the summer place in Big Bear, and Arkson, Arkson, and Arkson, Brokers, had unloaded Bayard’s holdings on the stock exchange with a barely significant loss. When combined with Fran’s inheritance and the money Bayard had put away for the girls’ education, the amount realized would meet Thrive, Inc.’s price and then some. It was all for the best, Arkson kept telling him, all for the best. If Bayard had second thoughts about leaving his job and dropping out of society, he could put them out of his mind: society, as he’d known it, wouldn’t last out the year. And as far as money was concerned, well, they’d be living cheaply from here on out.

“Fran,” Arkson was saying, taking her hand now too and linking the three of them as if he were a revivalist leading them forward to the purifying waters, “Bayard. .” He paused again, overcome with emotion. “Feel lucky.”

Now, two months later, Bayard could stand on the front porch of his cabin, survey the solitary expanse of his property with its budding aspen and cottonwood and glossy conifers, and take Arkson’s parting benediction to heart. He did feel lucky. Oh, perhaps on reflection he could see that Arkson had shaved him on one item or another, and that the doom merchant had kindled a blaze under him and Fran that put them right in the palm of his hand, but Bayard had no regrets. He felt secure, truly secure, for the first time in his adult life, and he bent contentedly to ax or hoe, glad to have escaped the Gomorrah of the city. For her part, Fran seemed to have adjusted well too. The physical environment beyond the walls of her domain had never much interested her, and so it was principally a matter of adjusting to one set of rooms as opposed to another. Most important, though, she seemed more relaxed. In the morning, she would lead the girls through their geography or arithmetic, then read, sew, or nap in the early afternoon. Later she would walk round the yard — something she rarely did in Los Angeles — or work in the flower garden she’d planted outside the front door. At night, there was television, the signals called down to earth from the heavens by means of the satellite dish Arkson had providently included in the package.

The one problem was the girls. At first they’d been excited, the whole thing a lark, a vacation in the woods, but as the weeks wore on they became increasingly withdrawn, secretive, and, as Bayard suspected, depressed. Marcia missed Mrs. Sturdivant, her second-grade teacher; Melissa missed her best friend Nicole, Disneyland, Baskin and Robbins, and the beach, in that order. Bayard saw the pale, sad ovals of their faces framed in the gloom of the back bedroom as they hovered over twice-used coloring books, and he felt as if a stake had been driven through his heart. “Don’t worry,” Fran said, “give them time. They’ll make the adjustment.” Bayard hoped so. Because there was no way they were going back to the city.

One afternoon — it was mid-June, already hot, a light breeze discovering dust and tossing it on the hoods and windshields of the cars parked along the street — Bayard was in the lot outside Chuck’s Wagon in downtown Bounceback, loading groceries into the back of the Olfputt, when he glanced up to see two men stepping out of a white Mercedes with California plates. One of them was Arkson, in his business khakis and tie. The other — tall and red-faced, skinny as a refugee in faded green jumpsuit and work boots — Bayard had never seen before. Both men stretched themselves, and then the stranger put his hands on his hips and slowly revolved a full three hundred and sixty degrees, his steady, expressionless gaze taking in the gas station, saloon, feed store, and half-deserted streets as if he’d come to seize them for nonpayment of taxes. Bayard could barely contain himself. “Sam!” he called. “Sam Arkson!” And then he was in motion, taking the lot in six animated strides, his hand outstretched in greeting.

At first Arkson didn’t seem to recognize him. He’d taken the stranger’s arm and was pointing toward the mountains like a tour guide when Bayard called out his name. Half turning, as if at some minor disturbance, Arkson gave him a preoccupied look, then swung back to say something under his breath to his companion. By then Bayard was on him, pumping his hand. “Good to see you, Sam.”

Arkson shook numbly. “You too,” he murmured, avoiding Bayard’s eyes.

There was an awkward silence. Arkson looked constipated. The stranger — his face was so red he could have been apoplectic, terminally sunburned, drunk — glared at Bayard as if they’d just exchanged insults. Bayard’s gaze shifted uneasily from the stranger’s eyes to the soiled yellow beret that lay across his head like a cheese omelet and then back again to Arkson. “I just wanted to tell you how well we’re doing, Sam,” he stammered, “and. . and to thank you — I mean it, really — for everything you’ve done for us.”

Arkson brightened immediately. If a moment earlier he’d looked like a prisoner in the dock, hangdog and tentative, now he seemed his old self. He smiled, ducked his head, and held up his palm in humble acknowledgment. Then, running his fingers over the stubble of his crown, he stepped back a pace and introduced the ectomorphic stranger. “Rayfield Cullum,” he said, “Bayard Wemp.”

“Glad to meet you,” Bayard said, extending his hand.

The stranger’s hands never left his pockets. He stared at Bayard a moment out of his deepset yellow eyes, then turned his head to spit in the dirt. Bayard’s hand dropped like a stone.

“I’d say you two have something in common,” Arkson said mysteriously. And then, leaning forward and dropping his voice: “Rayfield and I are just ironing out the details on the plot next to yours. He wants in this week — tomorrow, if not sooner.” Arkson laughed. The stranger’s eyes lifted to engage Bayard’s; his face remained expressionless.

Bayard was taken by surprise. “Plot?” he repeated.

“East and south,” Arkson said, nodding. “You’ll be neighbors. I’ve got a retired couple coming in the end of the month from Saratoga Springs — they’ll be purchasing the same package as yours directly to the north of you, by that little lake.”

“Package?” Bayard was incredulous. “What is this, Levittown, Montana, or something?”

“Heh-heh, very funny, Bayard.” Arkson had put on his serious look, life and death, the world’s a jungle, La Lanne admonishing his audience over the perils of flab. “The crunch comes, Bayard,” he said, “you could support fifty people on those thirty-five acres, what with the game in those woods and the fertility of that soil. You know it as well as I do.”

Now Cullum spoke for the first time, his voice a high, nagging rasp, like static. “Arkson,” he said, driving nails into the first syllable, “I ain’t got all day.”

It was then that Melissa, giggling like a machine and with a pair of ice-cream cones thrust up like torches over her head, came tearing around the side of the building, her sister in pursuit. Marcia was not giggling. She was crying in frustration, wailing as if her heart had been torn out, and cutting the air with a stick. “Melissa!” Bayard shouted, but it was too late. Her skinny brown legs got tangled and she pitched forward into Cullum, who was just then swiveling his head round at the commotion. There was the scrape of sneakers on gravel, the glare of the sun poised motionless overhead, and then the wet, rich, fecal smear of chocolate-fudge ice cream — four scoops — on the seat of Cullum’s jumpsuit. Cullum’s knee buckled under the impact, and he jumped back as if he’d been struck by a snake. “Godamnit!” he roared, and Bayard could see that his hands were shaking. “Goddamnit to hell!”

Melissa lay sprawled in the dirt. Stricken face, a thin wash of red on her scraped knee. Bayard was already bending roughly for her, angry, an apology on his lips, when Cullum took a step forward and kicked her twice in the ribs. “Little shit,” he hissed, his face twisted with lunatic fury, and then Arkson had his broad arms around him, pulling him back like a handler with an attack dog.

Melissa’s mouth was working in shock, the first hurt breathless shriek caught in her throat; Marcia stood white-faced behind them; Cullum was spitting out curses and dancing in Arkson’s arms. Bayard might have lifted his daughter from the dirt and pressed her to him, he might have protested, threatened, waved his fist at this rabid dog with the red face, but he didn’t. No. Before he could think he was on Cullum, catching him in the center of that flaming face with a fist like a knob of bone. Once, twice, zeroing in on the wicked little dog eyes and the fleshy dollop of the nose, butter, margarine, wet clay, something giving with a crack, and then a glancing blow off the side of the head. He felt Cullum’s workboots flailing for his groin as he stumbled forward under his own momentum, and then Arkson was driving him up against the Mercedes and shouting something in his face. Suddenly freed, Cullum came at him, beret askew, blood bright in his nostrils, but Arkson was there, pinning Bayard to the car and shooting out an arm to catch hold of the skinny man’s shirt. “Daddy!” Melissa shrieked, the syllables broken with shock and hurt.

“You son of a bitch!” Bayard shouted.

“All right now, knock it off, will you?” Arkson held them at arm’s length like a pair of fighting cocks. “It’s just a misunderstanding, that’s all.”

Bleeding, shrunk into his jumpsuit like a withered tortoise, Cullum held Bayard’s gaze and dropped his voice to a hiss. “I’ll kill you,” he said.

Fran was aghast. “Is he dangerous?” she said, turning to peer over her spectacles at Bayard and the girls as they sat at the kitchen table. She was pouring wine vinegar from a three-gallon jug into a bowl of cucumber spears. Awkwardly. “I mean, he sounds like he escaped from a mental ward or something.”

Bayard shrugged. He could still taste the tinny aftershock the incident had left in the back of his throat. A fight. He’d been involved in a fight. Though he hadn’t struck anyone in anger since elementary school, hadn’t even come close, he’d reacted instinctively in defense of his children. He sipped his gimlet and felt a glow of satisfaction.

“This is the man we’re going to have next door to us?” Fran set the bowl on the table beside a platter of reconstituted stir-fried vegetables and defrosted tofu. The girls were subdued, staring down their straws into glasses of chocolate milk. “Well?” Fran’s eyes searched him as she sat down across the table. “Do you think I can have any peace of mind with this sort of. . of violence and lawlessness on my doorstep? Is this what we left the city for?”

Bayard speared a square of tofu and fed it into his mouth. “It’s hardly on our doorstep, Fran,” he said, gesturing with his fork. “Besides, I can handle him, no problem.”

A week passed. Then two. Bayard saw no more of Arkson, or of Cullum, and the incident began to fade from his mind. Perhaps Cullum had soured on the deal and gone off somewhere else — or back to the hole he’d crawled out of. And what if he did move in? Arkson was right: there was so much land between them they might never lay eyes on one another, let alone compete for resources. At any rate, Bayard was too busy to worry about it. Mornings, it was second-grade geography and fourth-grade history, which meant relearning his state capitals and trying to keep his de Sotos, Coronados, and Cabeza de Vacas straight. Afternoons, he kept busy with various home-improvement projects — constructing a lopsided playhouse for the girls, fencing his vegetable garden against the mysterious agent that masticated everything he planted right down to the root, splitting and stacking wood, fumbling over the instructions for the prefab aluminum toolshed he’d mail-ordered from the Arkson Outfitters catalogue. Every third day he drove into Bounceback for groceries (he and Fran had decided to go easy on the self-subsistence business until such time as society collapsed and made it imperative) and on weekends the family would make the long trek down to Missoula for a restaurant meal and a movie. It was on one of these occasions that they bought the rabbits.

Bayard was coming out of the hardware store with a box of two-penny nails, a set of socket wrenches, and a hacksaw when he spotted Fran and the girls across the street, huddled over a man who seemed to be part of the sidewalk. The man, Bayard saw as he crossed the street to join them, was long-haired, bearded, and dirty. He had a burlap sack beside him, and the sack was moving. “Here, here,” said the man, grinning up at them, and then he plunged his hand into the bag and drew out a rabbit by the ears. The animal’s paws were bound with rubber bands, its fur was rat-colored. “This one here’s named Duke,” the man said, grinning. “He’s trained.

Long-whiskered, long-eared, and long-legged, it looked more like a newborn mule than a rabbit. As the man dangled it before the girls, its paws futilely kicking and eyes big with terror, Bayard almost expected it to bray. “Good eatin’, friend,” the man said, giving Bayard a shrewd look.

“Daddy,” Melissa gasped, “can we buy him? Can we?”

The man was down on his knees, fumbling in the sack. A moment later he extracted a second rabbit, as lanky, brown, and sickly-looking as the first. “This one’s Lennie. He’s trained too.”

“Can we, Daddy?” Marcia chimed in, tugging at his pant leg.

Bayard looked at Fran. The girls held their breath. “Five bucks,” the man said.

Down the street sat the Olfputt, gleaming like a gigantic toaster oven. Two women, a man in a cowboy hat, and a boy Melissa’s age stood staring at it in awe and bewilderment. Bayard jingled the change in his pocket, hesitating. “For both,” the man said.

Initially, the rabbits had seemed a good idea. Bayard was no psychologist, but he could see that these gangling flat-footed rodents, with their multiplicity of needs, with their twitching noses and grateful mouths, might help draw the girls out of themselves. He was right. From the moment they’d hustled the rabbits into the car, cut their bonds, and pressed them to their scrawny chests while Fran fretted over ticks, tularemia, and relapsing fever, the girls were absorbed with them. They fed them grass, lettuce, and the neat little pellets of rabbit food that so much resembled the neat little pellets the animals excreted. They cuddled, dressed, and brushed them. They helped Bayard construct a pair of interlocking chicken-wire cages and selected the tree from which they would hang, their thin serious faces compressed with concern over weasels, foxes, coons, coyotes. Melissa devoted less time to tormenting her sister and bemoaning the absence of her school friends; Marcia seemed less withdrawn.

For his part, Bayard too found the new pets compelling. They thumped their feet joyously when he approached their cages with lettuce or parsley, and as they nuzzled his fingers he gazed out over his cleared acre to the trees beyond and thought how this was only the beginning. He would have goats, chickens, pigs, maybe even a cow or a horse. The way he saw it, a pet today was meat on the hoof tomorrow. Hadn’t they eaten horses during the First World War? Mules, oxen, dogs? Not to mention rabbits. Of course, these particular rabbits were an exception. Though in theory they were to be skinned, stewed, and eaten in time of distress, though they represented a hedge against hard times and a life-sustaining stock of protein, Bayard looked into their quiet, moist eyes and knew he would eat lentils first.

The following week Bayard took the family into Missoula for a double sci-fi/horror feature (which only helped confirm him in his conviction that the world was disintegrating) and dinner at the local Chinese restaurant. It was after dark when they got home and the Olfputt’s headlights swung into the yard to illuminate two tiny figures hanging like wash from the simulated beam that ran the length of the front porch. Melissa spotted them first. “What’s that?” she said.

“Where?”

“There, up on the porch.”

By the time Bayard saw them it was too late. Fran had seen them too — disheveled ears and limp paws, the puny little carcasses twisting slowly round their monofilament nooses — and worse, the seven-year-old, rousing herself from sleep, had caught a nightmarish glimpse of them before he could flick off the lights. “My God,” Fran whispered. They sat there a moment, the dark suffocating, no gleam of light for miles. Then Marcia began to whimper and Melissa called out his name sharply, as if in accusation, as if he alone were responsible for all the hurts and pertersions of the world.

Bayard felt he was sinking. Pork fried rice and duck sauce tore at the pit of his stomach with a hellish insistence, Fran was hyper-ventilating, and the girls’ lamentations rose in intensity from piteous bewildered bleats to the caterwauling of demons. Frightened, angry, uncomprehending, he sat there in utter blackness, his hands trembling on the wheel. When finally he turned on the parking lights and pushed open the door, Fran clutched his arm with the grip of a madwoman. “Don’t go out there,” she hissed.

“Don’t be silly,” Bayard said.

“No,” she sobbed, clawing at him as if she were drowning. Her eyes raged at him in the dim light, the girls were weeping and moaning, and then she was pressing something into his hand, heavy, cold, instrument of death. “Take this.”

Six or seven pickups were parked outside the T&T Cocktail Bar when Bayard rolled into downtown Bounceback. It was half past eleven, still hot, the town’s solitary street light glowing like a myopic eye. As he crossed the street to the telephone outside Chuck’s Wagon, Bayard could make out a number of shadowy figures in broad-brimmed hats milling around in front of the bar. There was a murmur of disembodied voices, the nagging whine of a country fiddle, stars overhead, the glow of cigarettes below. Drunks, he thought, hurrying past them. Their lives wouldn’t be worth a carton of crushed eggs when the ax fell.

Bayard stalked up to the phone, tore the receiver from its cradle, and savagely dialed the number he’d scribbled across a paper napkin. He was angry, keyed up, hot with outrage. He glistened to the phone ring once, twice, three times, as he cursed under his breath. This was too much. His wife was sick with fear, his children were traumatized, and all he’d worked for — security, self-sufficiency, peace of mind — was threatened. He’d had to prowl round his own home like a criminal, clutching a gun he didn’t know how to use, jumping at his own shadow. Each bush was an assassin, each pocket of shadow a crouching adversary, the very trees turned against him. Finally, while Fran and the girls huddled in the locked car, he’d cut down Lennie and Duke, bundled the lifeless bodies in a towel, and hid them out back. Then Fran, her face like a sack of flour, had made him turn on all the lights till the house blazed like a stage set, insisting that he search the closets, poke the muzzle of the gun under the beds, and throw back the doors of the kitchen cabinets like an undercover cop busting drug peddlers. When he’d balked at this last precaution — the cabinets couldn’t have concealed anything bigger than a basset hound — she’d reminded him of how they’d found Charlie Manson under the kitchen sink. “All right,” he’d said after searching the basement, “there’s nobody here. It’s okay.”

“It was that maniac, wasn’t it?” Fran whispered, as if afraid she’d be overheard.

“Daddy,” Melissa cried, “where’s Lennie, and. . and Duke?” The last word trailed off in a broken lamentation for the dead, and Bayard felt the anger like a hot nugget inside him.

“I don’t know,” he said, pressing Melissa to him and massaging her thin, quaking little shoulders. “I don’t know.” Through the doorway he could see Marcia sitting in the big armchair, sucking her thumb. Suddenly he became aware of the gun in his hand. He stared down at it for a long moment, and then, almost unconsciously, as if it were a cigarette lighter or a nail clipper, he slipped it into his pocket.

Now he stood outside Chuck’s Wagon, the night breathing down his neck, the telephone receiver pressed to his ear. Four rings, five, six. Suddenly the line engaged and Arkson, his voice shrunk round a kernel of suspicion, answered with a quick tentative “Yeah?”

“Sam? It’s me, Bayard.”

“Who?”

“Bayard Wemp.”

There was a pause. “Oh yeah,” Arkson said finally, “Bayard. What can I do for you? You need anything?”

“No, I just wanted to ask you—”

“Because I know you’re going to be short on hardware for harvesting, canning, and all that, and I’ve got a new line of meat smokers you might want to take a look at—”

“Sam!” Bayard’s voice had gone shrill, and he fought to control it. “I just wanted to ask you about that guy in the beret, you know, the one you had with you up here last month — Cullum?”

There was another pause. Bayard could picture his mentor in a flame-retardant bathrobe, getting ready to turn in on a bed that converted to a life raft in the event that a second flood came over the earth while he lay sleeping. “Uh-huh. Yeah. What about him?”

“Well, did he ever buy the place? I mean, is he up here now?”

“Listen, Bayard, why not let bygones be bygones, huh? Rayfield is no different than you are — except maybe he doesn’t like children, is all. He’s a one-hundred-percenter, Bayard, on for the long haul like you. I’m sure he’s forgot all about that little incident — and so should you.”

Bayard drew a long breath. “I’ve got to know, Sam.”

“It takes all kinds, Bayard.”

“I don’t need advice, Sam. Just information. Look, I can go down to the county assessor’s office in the morning and get what I want. ”

Arkson sighed. “All right,” he said finally. “Yes. He moved in yesterday. ”

When he turned away from the phone, Bayard felt his face go hot. Survival. It was a joke. He owned thirty-five acres of untrammeled Wild West backwoods wilderness land and his only neighbor was a psychopath who kicked children in the stomach and mutilated helpless animals. Well, he wasn’t going to allow it. Society might be heading for collapse, but there were still laws on the books. He’d call the sheriff, take him to court, have him locked up.

He was halfway to his car, just drawing even with the open door of the T&T, when he became aware of a familiar sound off to his left — he turned, recognizing the distinctive high whine of an Olfputt engine. There, sitting at the curb, was an Olfputt pickup, looking like half an MX missile with a raised bed grafted to the rear end. He stopped, puzzled. This was no Ford, no Chevy, no Dodge. The Olfputt was as rare in these parts as a palanquin — he’d never seen one himself till Arkson… Suddenly he began to understand.

The door swung open. Cullum’s face was dark — purple as a birthstain in the faint light. The engine ticked, raced, and then fell back as the car idled. The headlights seemed to clutch at the street. “Hey, hey,” Cullum said. “Mr. Rocky Marciano. Mr. Streetfight.”

Bayard became aware of movement in the shadows around him. The barflies, the cowboys, had gathered silently, watching him. Cullum stood twenty feet away, a rifle dangling at his side. Bayard knew that rifle, just as he’d known the Olfputt. Russian-made, he thought. AK 47. Smuggled out of Afghanistan. He felt Fran’s little pistol against his thigh, weighing him down like a pocketful of change. His teeth were good, his heartbeat strong. He had a five-year supply of food in his basement and a gun in his pocket. Cullum was waiting.

Bayard took a step forward. Cullum spat in the dirt and raised the rifle. Bayard could have gone for his gun, but he didn’t even know how to release the safety catch, let alone aim and fire the thing, and it came to him that even if he did know how to handle it, even if he’d fired it a thousand times at cans, bottles, rocks, and junkyard rats, he would never use it, not if all the hungry hordes of the earth were at his door.

But Cullum would. Oh yes, Cullum would. Cullum was on for the long haul.