A History of the Future (33 page)

“You’ll be traveling as far as Cincinnati with Major John Thomason and his company,” he says. “From there you’ll assume the identity we’ve supplied you with and some printed identification. When you cross the Ohio River you’ll be in enemy territory. You’ll continue to go by your own name, of course, since it would only confuse you to change it, and nobody in Tennessee will know who you are, anyway, but you will have a new biography. When you get to the town of Franklin you’ll report to Hector Tillman, better known as Barefoot Tillman—”

I’m like, “Barefoot?” I couldn’t help laughing. “Excuse me, sir. Is that really someone’s name?”

Albright flashes a momentary smile. Then it’s gone. He’s like, “These are hard-core Appalachian crackers, young man, if I may be blunt. Barefoot Tillman, he’s our man on the inside, all the way and deep. He is a patriot. We trust him absolutely. And so do they. He has been among these extreme Christian reconstructionists since before the real trouble started. He will be your handler on the inside. You will receive your instructions from him. The Foxfire leadership are dangerous people and we knew what they were up to before the”—he made a gesture with his hands as of disposing of something unpleasant—“the trouble our country has been through. They were bent on systematically destroying the government and our institutions. The Foxfire gang effectively had political control of the whole mid-southern region before the war and the oil shocks and they took the opportunity in our moment of weakness to set up exactly the kind of theocratic despotism they have advocated for decades. They are unapologetic white supremacist fanatics who would banish people unlike them and, in fact, have, and, in further fact, will destroy them should they not submit to banishment and have done exactly that. Their leaders claim to speak for God and rule with the authority of God and are not subject to any checks and balances. They have the power of life and death over people with no due process of law. They believe in liquidating homosexuals, Jews, anyone they perceive as foreign, adulterers, blasphemers, and, of course, anyone who opposes their methods and beliefs. They have run most of the African Americans out of the region they control, and killed many, and stolen their property, and have not stopped trying to get rid of those who remain and resist. They are very aggressive and have formed a military. They endeavor to take over southern Ohio and northern Georgia. We oppose them in southern Ohio and are preparing to defend Cincinnati with our military against a siege of that city. They initiated hostilities against the city of Atlanta, or what remains of it, months ago, but so far that place has been successfully defended by the forces under Milton Steptoe, aka Sage, head of state of so-called New Africa. We believe the Foxfire Republic leadership intends to try to control as much of the old lower forty-eight states as they can conquer. They’re refighting the Civil War. They are very determined to win this time and they are quite crazy, in my opinion, the way the Nazis were crazy. The thing is, we’re determined too. We’re determined to not let history run over us and jump feetfirst into a dark age. We intend to keep this government running up here in the Lakes and get the American project going again. I would like to put these dangerous fanatics out of business in a way that the German Nazis should have been put out of business, by striking at the head of this mad beast and decapitating it. Are you following all this, young man?”

“Yessir.”

“Mr. Tillman—and that’s what you will call him—is as close as anyone can be to the leader of the Foxfire Republic, the woman known as Loving Morrow, formerly Caroline Woodfin of Luck, North Carolina, a self-created personality and a danger to the human race. Do you remember television, son?”

“A little.”

“Loving Morrow preached over the airwaves,” he went on. “She had a cable TV station in Nashville and raised enormous sums of money on it from her Foxfire Church of the True Holy Light pulpit. She used that to finance a news operation, which was just nonstop hateful propaganda inveighing against the Wall Street Jews and the Won’t Work Nigger monkeys, as they called them, and the fags, ditto, and also against the federal government, of course. We know a great deal about Loving Morrow. One thing we know is that she has a weakness for young men. And that is why we are sending you down there to kill her.”

President Harvey Albright looked right at me as he said this and I didn’t flinch or make a peep because I knew clear into the center of myself that this was exactly what I was going to do. I also knew that it was at the heart of the training I had received. Odd, isn’t it? To know that your mind has been meddled with and still feel like you have free will?

A New Faith sister brought their food order to the booth. As she leaned forward to slide the plates onto the table, Daniel noticed her shapely figure, her breasts straining against the cotton fabric of her blouse. The emotion it aroused seemed to exhaust him momentarily. When she was gone, he turned his attention to his bowl of steaming soup. He closed his eyes and savored the journey of the warm, smoky-spicy bean mush down his gullet into his belly.

“You were programmed,” Robert said. “We used to do that with computers. You enter a set of coded instructions and the machine just executes them. They used to do that with people too. They called it brainwashing.”

“Brainwashing,” Daniel said. “Yes. They certainly scrubbed it good there on Channel Island.”

Daniel’s Story: In Enemy Territory

Much later that night, after Albright left the house, I had trouble sleeping. The wind banged around outside. Moonlight skittered all over the walls and ceiling as it played among the windblown tree branches through the window. The door to my room opened and Ms. Estridge, Valerie, appeared in a robe, like a vision or a dream. She let the robe slide down her shoulders and fall at her feet. The moonlight flashed over her naked body for a time before she came onto the bed as though she was purposely putting herself on display. I just yielded to her like she was a force of nature. I felt that this was something I must let happen with the greatest urgency, something beyond my own desires and intentions—as you said, programmed into my brain. No words were spoken. She overwhelmed me. It went on a long time, I think, and when it was over I fell asleep immediately. I never got to say good-bye to her, at least in words, and in the morning when the sergeant came to get me she wasn’t anywhere in the house.

We started to Cincinnati that morning, an infantry company of 120 men, officers mounted. I was permitted to ride, too, but I received many a resentful glance from the men marching. I was in civilian clothing, good clothing. Over the days to come we passed through Flint, a ghost town, Ann Arbor, where the big university was all closed up, Toledo and Columbus, everything smaller, reduced, struggling. Cincinnati’s riverfront was alive, at least. The vast parking lots between the ball parks had been turned into a stockyard and several new concerns had been built for salting pork and making sausage. They were brewing beer too. Many were employed at these operations and lived close by in the blocks behind the vacant district of skyscraper buildings in the old row-house district. But the city was very much compressed, as were all the places I had been to over the months, into the habitable precincts of its old center, with everything beyond a half mile walk from the riverfront empty and deserted. Many had died in the epidemics there and malaria was now also a seasonal visitor.

From down in the stockyards, across the Ohio, you could see some fortifications over on the Kentucky side and soldiers slouching on the parapets with rifles. Nobody was shooting at anybody yet, but Kentucky was a Foxfire Republic state and there was a sharp feeling of animosity in the air, like something could bust out at any moment. Cincinnati had its garrison, too, between a swathe of disintegrating elevated highway and the river, east of the stockyards. The prevailing winds prevented the place from being overwhelmed by the odor of hundreds of confined pigs. Fort Schenck was very much a makeshift establishment, still under construction. Some two thousand soldiers were billeted there in tents, shacks, and half-finished barracks. After a month living with at least some electricity it was back to candlelight for me.

But I wasn’t there long. They took me across the river the second night about ten miles downstream from Fort Schenck where a little creek called Rapid Run spills into the Ohio. The Kentucky side was just some farms with the old Cincinnati airport behind them. It hadn’t been used for over a decade. Nobody was around. The bank across the river down there was known by the federals to be unguarded. I was rowed across in a pilot gig with a Lieutenant Ainsley. There was just a sliver of moon above the horizon. A horse was waiting for me on the other side. Kentucky had its share of federal sympathizers, people who objected to the Foxfire methods and religious persecution and didn’t like being pushed around. My horse was furnished by two men, not young, dressed in town clothes. No one told me, but I got the feeling they were lawyers. Lieutenant Ainsley gave them a pouch that contained hard money. The horse was a chestnut gelding named Ike. He was tacked up with an unmarked military saddle on him. I was also given a money pouch. Not a large amount, because the Foxfire region was said to be infested with bandits and pickers, but enough to cover my meals and lodging, if I could find any, in the two weeks it would take me to get to my destination, Franklin, Tennessee, a town south of Nashville, now the Foxfire capital. These transactions on the Kentucky side were completed very quickly and all these men were strangers to me so, having no further business, I just thanked them, mounted, and rode off.

I had memorized the route during my training. I was not carrying any maps, which might suggest I was a spy. I had a compass and a few documents: false identification that indicated I was a merchant of Covington, along with bills of lading and promissory notes pertaining to fictitious business I had in Franklin, in case I met up with any Foxfire military along the way.

I soon made my way beyond the abandoned housing tracts south of the airport and followed a set of back roads through deeply forested, crinkled hills to Big Bone Lick, where I caught up again with the south-turning Ohio River. I slept out that first night in a cemetery, in warm weather, and had plenty of rations for my breakfast and some oats for Ike, who I’d hobbled inside the cemetery fence with me. The next two days I made excellent progress to Frankfort, Kentucky. It rained hard there and I stayed inside the Meeting House Tavern where I put up for an extra night. That was the first place on my journey I encountered a painted image of Loving Morrow, set up like a little shrine on a table in the common room, with Foxfire flags, some old plastic flowers, and a statuette of Jesus Christ. The painting was done by an obvious amateur who depicted the Leading Light of the Foxfire Republic, as she called herself, with a sort of golden halo, as if she were a saint. The artist had put a slightly mad look in her eyes. Her figure was pictured as very generously filling her robes, such as to be an object of desire. Her physical presence was not a small part of her appeal, I was given to understand. Anyway, the food was very good there. I got a plate of fried chicken and three ears of sweet corn. It was that time of year.

Aside from a little rain the first week of my journey was easy. The route I passed along was sparsely inhabited between the towns, almost like a wilderness, and many of those towns were reduced to very meager terms. At one crude tavern at Campbellsville, I overheard talk of “confiscations, tithings, and oppression,” and I believe they were referring to their own Foxfire government; the Brunswick stew I was served there fetched up on me afterward. Two days farther down the road I met bandits coming through a rocky defile outside of Horse Cave, Kentucky, about a day’s ride from the Tennessee border. I was walking Ike to take in the rugged scenery when I heard hoofbeats. They rode up behind me and I reined Ike around to face them. I believe they were all younger than me. The youngest reminded me of Evan, which sent a pang of remorse through me because I would have to defend myself if it came to it. They were a scruffy-looking bunch in country clothes and mean little hats, and one rode a mule. The youngest rode up closer to me on his squatty swayback nag with just a blanket for a saddle and a rope bridle.

I’m like, “You’re following a little close, aren’t you?”

He was apparently their spokesman. He might not have been older than sixteen, with peach-fuzz whiskers. “That’s a nice horse you got, mister,” he goes. The other two looked blank, slack-jawed, like they might be drunk. Their heads appeared a little lopsided too. We all just swapped eyeballs for a long moment, one to the next.

“If you’re in hurry, pass on by,” I say.

“How much you take for him?” the young leader says.

“He’s not for sale.”

He goes, “We got something in trade I expect you can’t resist.”

“What would that be?”

“A five-minute head start,” he says. “On foot.” And then he busts up laughing.

I’m like, “I don’t think so.”