Chapter Twenty - the Game Begins

They liked my jewelry, said Judy.  The old woman stared at it for a long time, before we went back to meet.
They called me "Sue Deal" as my name to be used when I enter the Navajo land.  They gave me a pendant to bring with me.
 She held out a pendant for Chuy to look at.  He took it slowly.
 ,

Chapter Nineteen - At Hernandez Place

The little homestead got right off called the Hernandez place.  You call things for what they are.

Not much to tell about the next day at the Hernandez place.  There was a lot of weeping, and hugging, and looking mournful; and talking about the damnfool stuff that twenty-year-old girls chat about, I suppose.  And talk.  And talk.  And sleep and eat and talk, and all that.  They didn't come out for that day.  Nobody came by.

Until near sunset, when up comes Chúy, looking like he come down from the mountains.  He stood near the stairs up to the house, slump-shouldered and looking about at the sky like a standing bear.  Whatever he was curious about, it wasn't there.  He walked up the stairs gently, creaking under his weight.  He knocked on the lintel by the red patch.

Judy opened the door, June behind her.  Judy's face lit up - "Chúy!" she called out.  He stepped in, leaned down a bit for a hug.  He smiled at June, hugged her too.  "This is Jesús," explaining to June, hardly necessary.  They settled into the front room.  Judy had hauled a big, overstuffed, oversized chair in for the front room, nearly the size of a loveseat.  Judy gestured to it - "sit down, sit down!"

Chúy looked wistful.  "You went to my home," he said.  "I miss my home.  We shall be returning in a few months, when September comes.  I miss the wildlands.  I miss my friends."

Judy spoke, looking rather regretful.  "Chúy, we are forbidden from entering the Great Valley except when we are on mission to the Navajo.  They have taken the Great Valley back as their land.  They are barring the land from Dawn Mountain to Santa Fé to Pueblo from travelers. Bilgaana who trespass their land will be killed, with no exception.  Even those from the Free Zone may not enter except under certain explicit rules."

Chúy smiled.  "The Navajo are like this, the plague has hurt them badly and they strengthen their borders and bar intruders.  So I expected.  Trust them, even if they do not trust you.  They are hurt terribly again, they have lost many kin, again.  Trust them, they are kind."

Judy warned, "They said they will kill any bilga'ana who trespass their borders.  Do not go there, stay with us.  They might kill you." 

 Chúy's expression showed mild pity for Judy.  "Oh, no, no.  That is my home.  When I go home, the Dine will not be bothered.  Trust me."

Judy said, "The trip down to Farmington was beautiful.  We passed out of the valley over to Pagosa Springs, and there mere many wild animals in the forests, deer and rabbits, even bighorns on the craggy mountains."  "No bears," she smiled and touched her tiny bear necklace.  "Even a puma, resting on a mossy boulder in the forest.   By a little mountain stream.  Spectacular."

Jesús steepled his fingers, as though recalling a long-distant memory.  He sat quietly, and the girls held their tongues while he went deep into his thoughts.    "That's pretty country, sure," he said, as though he was changing the subject entirely.

Chapter 18 - A Day of Quiet

BEN

Ben eased out, looking forward to a long walk down Broadway.  He went off towards the mountains, cut left down 14th street so as to avoid the County Public Health building - one of the last refuges, stinking with the Totenschaum flecking the high-water line of the tsunami of death.  They surged towards refuges, and there they died, dropping like little iron filings aligned with their futile refuge.  Stank.

Broadway was more or less clear - somebody's run a street sweeper up and down the curbs recently, after shooing the cadavers out of the gutters with peaveys and cant dogs, putting them in the middle of the sidewalk to scoop up with the skiploader trailing a big ol' offroad pickup.  Most of the juice had run out and dried up, so there wasn't much spatter, but some of them dried down hard like spilt coffee, and couldn't be moved into position.  Broadway was fairly clear; you could almost forget that the Captain had come calling, except for the ever-present sweet ghastly perfume on the air.

You know how pork chops cooking smell like pork?  And lamb, well, you can't miss the scent of lamb?  Humans have a human smell, one that we're all used to - but when you scent it in droves, like a locker room or a morgue, it's unmistakably.  Then you can't shake it out of your mind when it's there.

Dead folks lying around didn't bother Ben in the slightest.  He had seen the human body in all states of terminal undress - he'd gotten used to it. "Combat Recovery," they called it. Also "Post-Combat Recovery," which meant nary a fucking thing in Vietnam. Like it was a gentleman's duel. There's no such thing as "Post-Combat." Even after you get home. Jaws and bones, brains; you never could retrieve brains, no matter what you tried.  They just spilled all over.

And that was just us guys.  The....Asians, is what he learned to call them, among nice people - the Asians, little ones, old ones, pregnant ones opened up with a shovel.  these here Captain Trips residue, they were tidy and dry, and nix on the blowflies.  No dark veil of flies to open up and show the grislies underneath.  A dead....Asian... was just like some jungle flower or leaf, kind of friendly familiar, because a dead...Asian... was a good Asian, unless they were boobytrapped, which some of the ratfuckers used to do.

Now and then, you run across one where the head come off.  Sometimes the Vietcong had hanged them, and dropped them too far.  Six feet's the magic number to break a neck, but nine feet will yank the fucker right off.

Some of the memories started to drift in around the mask.  That's why he didn't drink any more.  You drink until the memories go away - but they don't.  So better not drink.

He enjoyed his friends who did military service, after Vietnam, but it was kinda like an office job, and you got out all chipper and refreshed.  Nice guys, really are.

Boulder smelled pretty human that morning.  Ben kept up a brisk, martial walk for the two miles down to the University.  The wreckage was appalling - but in a charming way, an alive way.  Bodies, of course - the bleary and the hungover revelers, cheering on the living, and spiraling into a midsummer night's bacchanal for people.

Ben was happy, and aghast too, that people could be so senseless and vulnerable to lay around after the party, pass out out-of-doors.  Virgins.  They didn't scan the rooftops, they didn't look for traps.  The worst thing in their lives was Captain Trips.  Lucky bastards.

Chapter Seventeen

"Anyhow," said Judy, "we've gotten piggish and live in our own filth and dead people.  No wonder the Navajos are so pissed off at us.  It's gross." 

June asked - "Now why do think the Navajos are pissed off?"

"Well, we went on a little expedition down to Farmington, to see how they were doing on the South flank, and they're not too thrilled with yet another screwing from the bilga'ana.  We're staying in touch through a checkpoint down by Alamosa.  If we go west of sight of Shell Mountain, we're marked for death.  And we're on the guest list.  They've been telling us about witches and superstition and bad luck, and all the time we've been making them miserable, and now they're sick of talking with us."

Ben noticed that when the twins talked for a while together, their conversation sped up a little bit, started dropping out little its and bits.  They talked more with their hands, and interrupted and ran over each other's conversations.  Must be a twin thing, thought Ben.  I've heard of twins even having their own language.  These two didn't exactly have their own language.  More at it, they were two brilliant people with their own, sort of mathematical language.

You know like how you can spin mathematics out into a word problem, a paragraph, this train and that train, leaving this station, going here and there, but you can put it all into an equation or a set of mathematical symbols, much shorter?

"Do you notice that you two kinda start - condensing - your language when you talk?"  They both laughed.  Judy said, "Yep.  We just leave out all the extras, and only talk..." "roundaround, we call it - talk with other people, it's 'roundaround' we've called it, because it goes around....and around... and around.  Gets boring." said June.  "They thought we had ADD because we couldn't listen to roundaround for very long without going nuts from boredom." said June.  "No offense intended." said Judy.

 Ben cocked his head back a little, looking at them penetratingly.  These were some highly intelligent people, these two girls.  It was a blessing that they survived and got back together.  They were probably the best hope for rebuilding a sane world that he'd seen.

But they didn't seem weird or special or anything frizzy-haired Los Alamos genius Nutty Professor Jerry Lewis tweaky or such.  Underneath, they were just - girls, familiar one,s like Ben's nieces and cousins and some such.  You didn't have to put on airs or ask them about string theory or phenotypes or anything.  Just young women, caught in this blight that dried up their world and went bang all of a sudden, and they were coping, just like everyone else.

They started into it a little bit.  "Went to Farmington.  Shiprock Chapter House.  They burned our clothes." "Naturally."  "They called the Walking One a witch."  "Gave me the name Sue Dill."  "Obviously an English pronunciation of a Navajo phrase."  "Sudill."  "Wonder what the University has on languages."  "Let's check."  "I made them a deal."  They both glanced at Mr. Sandoval. "Later." "What do they think this Walking One is?" "Not like a real witch - just a whirlwind of chindi that takes form, in a sense."  "Millions of dead."  "Yup."  "They've got our border to the south sealed.  Even we're not welcome without Sudill - me - and the Talisman."  "Let's see."

Judy went over to the bedroom and came back with the turquoise pendant.  "Gold.  They don't use much."  "Wonder why gold on this piece."  "Beautiful turquoise."  June turned it over.  "Mountain lion.  Sudill?"  "No, they said we were watched by something, apparently a mountain lion, as we came down through Aztec.  Didn't sound like Sudill, can't remember."

 They looked at Mr. Sandoval, smiled.  "I feel grubby," said June.  "I've been on the road for a long time.  Do you mind if I go take a bath?"

He smiled, kindly.  "Of course.  I have things to do with the bearings on my pickup.  I've been meaning to get to it already.  I should like to take my leave."  They protested, as etiquette would demand; he insisted.  It was nice to use manners for a change.  Demeanor and etiquette seem to hold us together through bad times, and we've been blown to flinders for weeks. 

Chapter Sixteen - First Day Home.

First Day Home.

Breakfast with Mr. Sandoval turned out to be just like being home.  For the first time since the pandemic, the girls sat, eating ravenously, with no place to get to, no place they had to be.

Mr. Sandoval politely suggested he should get along, made up all sorts of lame excuses where he had to go, chores he had to do, those things that guests say when they can't tell if it's time to get along.  The girls shushed him - he was delighted.  He had been pretty lonely for company, himself.

The sunlight poured warm and bright into the little front room of the cottage and scattered through the house.  The little kitchen was bathed in golden sunshine.

There was a long side veranda on the south, put in so as to block the high summer sun from baking the windows, but allowing low winter light to slant in.  The kitchen looked off to the south.  It was a big lot; the neighbors were down a bit at least fifty yards.  Nice and open and sunny.  And springtime.

Spring and summer raise the green out west, up through the gold and blue landscape that's always there year-through.  Red's not too common - you see it in the streaks of rust where volcanoes have thrown up red iron dust and rock, here and there.  But red, living red, is the color of Spring in the West.  It's in flowers, and it fades down in the baking heat of the summer.  But the whole beauty of the Western sky and plains opened up and washed the kitchen through and through.

"You sure picked a beauty of a house," said June.  "How'd you pick this one?"

"It was FOR SALE, sign out in front," and Judy and Ben smiled a little, seeing how the real estate market was fairly slow these days.  "No, really." Judy said, a little cross.

"It was closed up, it was empty when Captain Trips came on to town, at least a few months." Judy went on, and their smiles slowly faded.  "Meaning the last inhabitants were well when they left.  Probably some college couple after graduation.  No beds, no dressers, no clothes, no crib, no baby's toys."  That put a shudder into Ben.

"It actually took a while to find this house.  I marked it when I chose it."  Ben noticed that there were a few splashes of crimson paint on the house near the front door, like paintballs.  He'd been meaning to ask if Judy wanted it painted over.

"There's been no death in this house - no unnatural death," she went on.  Captain Trips passed by this address.  "And all the furnishings, all the bedding and utensils, are clean, brand-new.  We've gotten so used to corpses, and treading over stains and marks and dried-up crud that we've just gotten used to the idea that Death owns this town.  We ought to be stopping that habit."

"You know, I didn't think of it as such, but me too," said June.  "All the stuff I collected was new - I passed over some really nice-looking things because I didn't know if they were...I dunno..."

"Yeah, it sounds a little superstitious.  We know that we're immune to the virus - we call it flu, but its symptomatology is a little irregular - there's a profound neck swelling associated with this infection...."

"Maldición escrófula." said Ben.   "It was an epidemic long ago.  It was treated with a brew of alcabar, altamisa  and cottonwood bark.  Altamisa por el alto abeto, y alcabar fresca, y corteza de álamo, o toque de rey, cura de la escrófula.  Wow, that's an oldie.  I'll bet you girls never even met a curandera from the old school...  That's curandera lore.  That scrofula's not been seen for two, three hundred years.  Used to have a blessing on día de San Blas to ward it off."

Ben stared off down onto the plains, a thousand yards away, musing.  "You know, I'd never thought I'd remember that stuff, but talking with you kids, the old stuff comes back easy." 

Chapter Fifteen - North Platte and the Blue Time

North Platte

She stopped off in North Platte to rest a bit, stretch out, maybe even stay for a day.  She started a campfire out in the town pan-flat Centennial Park, across the river and not too far from the interstate.  She rustled up a butane stove and tank - she kept her travel one stowed.

There were a few folks here and there, they knew how to behave.  She'd invite one or two, here and there, who stopped by at an interested but respectful distance.  They were flatland Westerners; they knew how to behave, courteous.

Had about fifteen or twenty come by; that's about a quarter of the town.  The sun set slowly, slowly over the flat horizon, giving its goodbye in a green flash, and the Blue Light time come up like gangbusters.

Some deer, and of course some steak for the weary traveler.  Company was checked out at a little outpost on Blue Sky Highway south of the river; unwanted guests were waved off.

Finishing up a truly great evening meal, and most of the folks seemed to be making it through the die-off just right.  Not too many deadizens in downtown, they were mostly cleaned up.  Made for good nitrogen for the soil, phosphate too.  Like all the Civil War battlefields - a century and a half later, and they still put up a good crop of green.

She talked about the Decision out by Big Springs - North, or South?  Almost all the folks around knew that Mother Abagail was there, they'd dreamed of her, and even a few had known their family and their spread.  Some of them come up the I-80, and folks put a little waystation there for the travelers, but no passage - they'd have to go up State Route 25 out of Oglala, by the reservoir, to get to Hemingford.

Over the last couple of days, she was having a new part to the dreams that came in, other than the screaming nightmares of corpses and zombies.  Mother Abagail sort of "broadcast" across the continent; the Walkin' Dude, too.  But after coming west up out of Iowa, there was just a blue diamond down at the foot of the Rockies, just a blue diamond, nothing else.  It wasn't good or bad, as much as it was urgent.  Mother Abagail made for a respite and retreat, but the Blue Diamond at the Root of the Mountains was - compelling.

[to be continued]

Chapter Fourteen - the Crossroads

University

She was sorta glad to leave the tiresome academic world of UC behind.  It was a thrill for the academic challenge; by there was a bad tendency for people to achieve success by climbing up each other's back, not by making actual accomplishments.

She heard the word "Hispanic" more than she cared to.  It seemed to be a word that turned certain people's minds into mush.  Mom was out of an ancient (and a little bit arrogant) line that traced back to Seville.  They learned Spanish and Ladino at home, the Spanish being the refined patois of the cultured in the Western Hemisphere - Mexico City, Buenos Aires, the cultural centers - and Ladino, the little local American dialect still living in the Rockies, which was unbearably quaint to the ear of the cultured, the Colonial Williamsburg of the New World, a relic of the days of settlement in the 1500's.

"Growing up Hispanic" meant Mom and Dad making them read Cervantes, Tomás de Iriarte and the poetry of José de Espronceda; and then bulling into Cantar de Mio Cid; and of course, Maimonides, Saint Isidore and Averroes. There was a faint whiff of pitying contempt for the Anglo/Vikings, who lived in mud huts with their pigs, took forever to grow a culture and literature and a questionable sense of values.  They never quite even standardized their language until a few hundred years ago. The intellectuals survived through Latin, which, (ahem) grew in exile on the Iberian peninsula, to bring forth a rich culture and aesthetic, rooted in its Latin heritage, growing forth from the taproots of Roman values and ethics and poetry in an unbroken line, unto the adventurers who came to the uttermost West. Mom and the family always referred to Cervantes as "Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra;" they had Saavedras in the family lineage, although likely unrelated. That was the world that Judy and June grew up in - along with high country travel and hunting.

But in Chicago, she was lumped into a cluster of unconnected and unrelated folks, held together by their (or their ancestors') ability to speak Spanish.  They were Hispano Students.  June, at first, had hopes that they would form an intellectual literature group, a study group; she would love to work people through El Cid.

 It was equally baffling - to see how the Hispanic Students Group behaved on its own, or how it was dragged about like puppets for a cultural diversity show by the Administration.

Many students were Hispanic without the slightest clue as to what their identity meant.  Some of them didn't even speak Spanish, and they refused to learn it saying it was a "slave language."  She nearly slapped the girl who told her that in a superior, condescending tone.  Some of the classes on "Hispanic culture" were no different - just a mix of resentment, nonsense and bad history.

Her sense from birth was that Spain was the last healthy and vital branch of the Roman culture, leavened with Aristotelian thought through the Moors and Maimonides; and when the Enlightenment dimmed by the vicious Reconquista, that sapling branch of survivors fled to the New World to weave a rich tapestry of identity, culture and justice.  They had not arrived at the promised land, no, no more than had the suicidal European cultures.  But if the world was to grow up, and have a culture of reason, sophistication and beauty, it could not stray far from its vital lineage that left Andalusia for the West.

They would use the word "Reconquista" and bite their lips like Ché and mouth all sorts of nonsense; which is good, in a way.  Part of college, it seems, is to be exposed to new ideas, and fervently adopt the silliest of them while growing up and learning. 

The Administration was loathesomely cynical and self-centered in its use of the Hispano groups as a puppet show.  There were, of course, endless outreach efforts - universities can make themselves feel less elitist when they reach out.  And on one of the endless bus rides to the Brown Down Town to make a cheery speech about how we are all together, June felt desperately lonely and sad, even dripping a tear or two, which brought the bogus empathy of António, a phonio bullshit artist from Puerto Rico, with a few intervening generations on Yale and the Hamptons and Harvard and Wall Street.  António had more personalities than his parents had houses; but none of them was really a home.

António was hooked in with the B-school at UC.  His big act of rebellion would be whether he got his MBA in Chicago, or back East.  He already had an AMG Mercedes with ¡Viva la Raza! frames on his custom plates.

If there was any time for Captain Trips to start ringing doorbells, June figured it was as good as any.

[continued]