We Are All Crew (21 page)

She stands over the wounded bird. A bullet has nicked its wing, rendering it flightless, and it tries to hop away from her. She clucks her tongue again.

“Poor thing. Suffer the innocents for the wheels of mankind.”

She raises the gun, points the muzzle at the ground, and fires.

the river

It was as though the river had regained its youth. In its younger days, it had been mighty, wide, and deep. Age upon age of dry seasons had withered it, shrinking it to a mere trickle, a dry bed in some places.

Now, for a purpose it did not entirely understand, it was necessary for the old river to become young again. Sustained cloudbursts soaked the cracked bed, replenishing gullies, pouring down from mountainsides. Before long, the river stretched out to its original banks.

And it carried cargo. Swept along on its now vast waters was what to it was little more than a twig. But the river knew to take great care with this, an unmanned—but man-made—craft. A tall, odd-looking boat, with a strange metallic mushroom attached to it.

It carried the boat around its bends and eased it through its rapids, no matter how playful the river felt.

cougar scouts

The trees glow, as if lit from inside. Every leaf is so sharp it hurts my eyes. There are thousands of them, and they stretch all the way to the horizon, rising and falling over mountain peaks, each one bright as a fluorescent bulb. They throw themselves up to the electric blue sky, which is so phosphorescent that it sweeps through my mind, wiping everything clean. Soon, there’s only the sky and the trees.

“
The Appalachian Mountains
,” says a deep voice that rumbles in through my ears, down my spinal cord, and bleeds into every nerve ending. “
Untouched. Virginal. Beautiful
.”

The scene changes to a close-up of a tree. An eagle perches on a limb. I can make out each of the small fibers in its feathers. Its black eyes look into me just before it raises its wings and takes flight.

“
But unforgiving
,” the voice continues. “
Like the sirens of old, the verdant Appalachians have beguiled men, punished them, and lured them to their doom. Since the beginning of time, nature has stirred unnatural feelings within man. Nature has been his undoing, his weakness. It fills his mind with wonders, but offers no sanctuary. Nature is the enemy of mankind. Its attacks are seldom conventional, always merciless, always devastating
.

“
August, 79 AD. Pompeii, a thriving jewel in the Roman Empire’s crown, was living in a golden age of civilization, until Mount Vesuvius erupted, encasing thousands in molten rock.

“1201 AD. 1.1 million people in Syria and Egypt die in the worst earthquake in recorded history.

“1587. One hundred British men, women, and children settle in Roanoke, Virginia. Three years later, they vanish.

“1887. Nine hundred thousand die when China’s Yellow River bursts through its dams.

“Tsunamis. Droughts. Vicious, killer animals. Disease. Nature has many weapons in her arsenal, deadly and unstoppable. Nature is the enemy of civilization, and civilization is the enemy of nature.”

Blinds slide up the windows, willed by unseen motions. We’re in a darkened parlor somewhere within Locksley Ponds. The last rags of daylight are burning in the sky.

Time and place occur to me in short bursts.

“Please, turn the TV back on again,” I say.

“No,” says the blurry thing standing between me and the TV. “No, Winthrop. Too prolonged an exposure can result in acute addiction and mental incapacitation. Secretary Sweetwater said you’re in need of mild reconditioning, but we want you lucid when your parents arrive. Which means we’re going for a walk. Up now.”

The blurry thing grabs me by the wrists and hoists me out of my chair. We go out into the blinding pink light and march. Soft grass purrs beneath my black wing tips. I throw a look back over my shoulder and see the big yellow mansion receding—and along with it, the TV.

The blurry thing is a man in a black uniform. Somewhere, underneath the big desire to go back and watch more TV, it occurs to me what he is.

“You are the Green Police,” I say.

He smiles. “That’s right.”

We walk on, and everything is dull: the sun leaning on the river, the grass, the trees, the rifle slung across his back, the picture of the snarling cat on his chest.

The snarling cat picture seems important. I can’t imagine why—sure, it would look nice on the TV, but other things would be more impressive on the high-def. Then I recognize it: the patch, the thing in His Eminence’s office.

The man hums:
When the lightning flashes and the thunder rolls, I will not yield. I will stand fast and resolute.

The man is humming the Grizzlies.

“Are you a fan of the Greatest Band on Earth?” I ask him.

“Excuse me?”

“That song. The Red Grizzlies.”

“What song?”

“The one you’re humming.”

He laughs. “That’s one of the songs the CO taught us in basic. Fancied himself a songwriter. It’s an earworm, I’ll give it that.”

“The CO?”

“Brigadier General Harlan H. Spikes.”

That name sounds familiar. Seems important. But I can’t imagine it being that great on the TV, so I let it go.

“What about that patch?”

He taps the snarling cat face. “This?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, you’ll get one of these one day,” he says. “You get this when you get out of Cougar Scouts.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s like the Boy Scouts, only better. Turn right here, we’re going to go down to the Hero Garden.”

We’re at the top of a rise in the field, looking into a copse of trees.

“How do you get in?”

“My scoutmaster picked me,” he says, puffing out his chest. “That’s how you know you belong. My dad didn’t pull any strings.” He gives me a worried look. “No offense.”

I wave him off. “What is the Cougar Scouts?”

He frowns. “Well, it goes Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts, and then either Eagle Scouts or Cougar Scouts. Unless you bypass that. Like you did.”

“What do you mean?” I say. “I’m not a Cougar Scout.”

“Well, not yet,” he says. “You skipped out on Godspeed Summer Camp, from what I hear.”

I vaguely remember that name. The camp. The camp Arthur and I ran away from just days ago.

The guard shakes his head. “Should have hung around. Godspeed is what some of us call a kitten camp, for guys like you with dads who grease the wheels. But I hear it’s fun. I hear on day five you actually club baby seals. Check this out, Winthrop. This is important.”

I blink. We’re standing inside the trees. Tall concrete columns surround a wide, flat patch of land completely covered in cement. Three rows of statues crisscross it. A path leads out of the trees to the docks, where I can see the Crab Shack and Le Gavroche.

Atop a pedestal in the center, etched onto a stone tablet, are the words:
Vir Apud Gens
.

“What is this place?” I ask.

“It’s the Heroes of Civilization Sculpture Garden,” the guy says. “The secretary had this installed personally.”

We stroll among the rows of statues. One is a likeness of a man in an old-fashioned suit, staring intently at the horizon. Next to him is a big oil derrick, out of which trickles real oil that pools on top of a stone vase of what looks like dying flowers.

Luther B. Robertson, Inventor of the Oil Derrick
, reads the gilt plaque below the statue.

“All these guys were Cougar Scouts,” the guard says. “Anybody who is anybody. The secretary. The president. General Spikes. Your dad.”

His Eminence? An image flashes of an old man in a Cub Scout uniform cradling a tumbler of scotch. But I’m still hollowed from the TV, so the thought falls in on itself until it’s a tiny dot.

The other statues show likenesses of people I’ve never heard of before, with names like James Watt, Anne Gorsuch, and Ronald Reagan. One statue is of three smiling men standing aboard the deck of a ship. It’s labeled:
Dedicated to William Murphy, Joe Hazelwood, Harry Claar, and the rest of the crew of the beloved
Valdez.

I hear a crackling noise, electronic buzzing, and a voice. “Carmison.”

The man holds a black radio to his face. “Copy.”

“We’ve got movement over in the south sector. Would you mind taking a look? Over.”

“I’ve got the kid. Over.”

“We just need you to look, Stu. Leave the kid in the garden for a minute.”

The guard sighs. “Ten-four.” He looks at me. “I need you to do me a favor, Winthrop.”

“What?”

“I need you to sit tight here for just a second, okay? I have to go check something out. Just sit right here.” He points to a stone bench across from the Valdez statue. “I’ll be back in five minutes. Okay?”

“Then can I watch more TV?”

“Yeah. Then you can watch more TV.”

I sit. On the TV, the Valdez guy statue would glow with an inner light. So would His Eminence in a scout uniform. How about that? Well, I guess it makes sense that if great people were part of this group, His Eminence would be too, right? And if I would have stuck around camp, then maybe I would have been part of it too. Somehow, though, that doesn’t seem like a good thing.

“Stubby!” a voice hisses.

Esmerelda creeps out of the woods.

“Hi!” I say. “Hey, you’ve got to see this TV they’ve got here.”

“I know all about the TV, Winthrop. I need you to listen.”

“Okay. Why are you whispering?”

“Shhhh. Look. The’ve got the Doc, Kang, and Arthur locked up on the west side of the mansion.”

“Did you know they think Kang isn’t an Indian, but a Mexican?”

“
Keep your voice down!
Listen to me. I’m not who you think I am. I’m AICO.”

“What’s that? Did you know my dad was a Cougar Scout? And I’m going to be one too.”

She grabs my face between her palms, and her green eyes look into mine. “They scrambled your brain, stubby. I need you to listen to me.”

I move my jaw to kiss her, but she pushes me back. “Listen to me. I’m an AICO agent. Secretary Sweetwater is guilty of murder. I have proof. And we need to spring Kang, Arthur, and the Doc, or they’re next. Do you understand me?” The words slip from her mouth like hailstones into a pond.

“Harlan Spikes . . . was a Cougar Scout. Isn’t that the guy the Birmingham Kid talked about?”

She grimaces, a terrible twist of a smile. “I know all about Harlan Spikes. I need you to promise me something, stubby. Don’t watch any more of that TV, okay? It’s a mega high-def. It’s an addictive TV, Winthrop. They use it to control people’s minds. They introduce it when they need a docile populace. It’s illegal. Don’t watch it, Winthrop. Shut your eyes and think about something else.”

“The Grizzlies?”

“If you have to . . . shit.”

Esmerelda is gone. I hear her hiss into the leaves.

“Winthrop?” the guard says. He’s standing next to me, gun slung over his shoulders.

“TV?” I ask.

The guard laughs. “A little more,” he says. “But too much will rot your brain.”

the war

“What people don’t know, Winthrop,” Sweetwater says, “in fact, what 98.2 percent of the population doesn’t know, according to our most recent research, is that this nation is at war.”

We’re sitting in the room with the TV. She makes me take breaks every couple of hours. I hate these breaks. For most of the day, my head has been filled with this awesome history lesson—all about how settlers battled bears and crocodiles, how we dump drums of sludge in the ocean to kill sharks, how after Hurricane Katrina we carpet bombed the Galapagos Islands and killed twenty sea turtles.

“Sure they know,” I say, “we’re at war with . . .” but the name of the most recent one I occasionally catch glimpses of on Fox News escapes me. Something ending in –stan.

“Not that war, Winthrop,” she says, her small face beams behind the horn-rims. “Wars like those are largely unimportant skirmishes, you’ll find out. They’re launched as distractions. We’ve been fighting the war I’m talking about for more than two hundred years. Now, this is something you’d learn after becoming a Cougar Scout, dontchaknow. But you’re a legacy, and you have a right to know. I’m sure your father would approve my telling you.

“Did you ever notice how geese fly in perfect formation?” she says. But I’m only partly listening. I want to tell her that by the location of the sliver of moon just over the river, I can tell that it’s getting close to nine p.m., and
Sniper Dude X
might literally blow my mind broadcasted on the giant TV just over her shoulder. I want to be there for the mushroom cloud.

“Geese fly in V shapes,” she goes on, “because they were drilled to do it. Ants march in straight columns. Bee hives are geometrically perfect fortresses. Nature isn’t just a wild collection of animals and plants and rocks that’s there to be pretty for you. There’s something intelligent behind it. Something organized. And it wants us all dead.”

“Uh-huh.”

Her delicate little hand grabs my arm.

“This is information the vast majority of the general public does not know, Winthrop. Only we select few. It’s certainly something small-minded environmentalists like your psychotic friend Doctor Seabrooy wore in the �

k will never understand. Men of his ilk believe everybody should be driving hybrid cars, cuddling little fuzzy things, and making love to trees. Their kind doesn’t understand the war. But a few enlightened souls—myself, your father—know the stakes.”

“Can I watch some more TV?” I ask.

“We’re at war, Winthrop,” Sweetwater says, “with what romantics like Doctor Seabrook like to call the
.

“People like Seabrook don’t get it,” Sweetwater mutters, gazing out the window. “They think we should just ride around in horse-drawn carriages eating twigs and berries. Thank God our forefathers weren’t fooled. They knew the beasts and the weather and the forests wanted to wipe them out. They knew nature is the enemy of man.