Postnuclear Gothic

There’s two ways out of the valley and that’s north and south. If you had nothing much to carry and buckets of rope east and west would work, too, but then it’s just mountains, back and forth and back and forth. South leads to the city where there’s always work. North and then a little east used to lead to a city; it used to lead to many cities. My uncle George says when he was a boy it was one in five people lived in those cities, hugging the coast like a fat concrete belt. He says there still might be people living out there. Bunker descendants that haven’t run out of food or air. Out-of-their-minds Recyclers, fevered but breathing. Mostly it’s a lot of bones.

People go there to Recycle. Sign up through the government and you get two decades of health insurance for you and your family and a sign-on bonus that can clear a lot of debt. Make quota—sometimes it’s steel, cobalt, gold—and anything you find you sell and money’s never a problem at all. Go private and you don’t get those benefits but you can sell what you find. Maybe even make a lot more.

George Recycled three years before I was born, when they thought his little girl had a chance from the expensive new treatment they had to travel to Pittsburgh to get, and, if George was lucky enough, get the family out of our debt cycle. Farm equipment, my dad’s first round of cancer, and old student loans, paused but not dissolved by the war. Eighteen years later and he describes it every dinner.

Tonight he’s all bitter flint ‘cause of Mr. Jon’s visit. I almost didn’t need to eavesdrop to know: Mr. Jon is sorry. The recession means hard times for everyone, he knows, and he knows George, and he knows our family, and he knows what we’ve been through, but, George, he’s really starting to need his money back; since we don’t have the money, because no one has the money, he’s happy to barter using the standard prices of farm goods, and he’s glad we’re paying, we’re always on time, not like those good-for-nothing Zhaos, but, George, no, no, he understands, yes, he knows, George, if it were up to him—no, it’s not personal, George, it’s just that our goods have been coming in under market, which means, technically, we’re not abiding by the agreement terms, and he’d absolutely hate for this to go to the courthouse, wouldn’t that be just tragic for the both of them, losing even more to lawyers’ fees.

“This country builds itself on poor Black bones,” George mutters, corn liquor in the Thermos at his elbow. Haven’t prayed yet and he’s halfway done. “The bigwigs in New Atlanta say we get Recyclers from all thirty-nine states. Tell me now what kind of Recyclers come from all thirty-nine states.”

“There were three Italians on your crew,” I say. Everyone but George is now dead. “And a Korean.”

Minnie shakes her head. George acts like he hasn’t heard. He says the air was nasty up north but the managers in the climate-controlled bunkhouses told them there was nothing to worry about. Half the crew had radiation sickness come winter, and only half of them survived. “Government says it’s ‘the most valuable service’ in the country. Cleaning up for the future and earnin’ a thousand bucks if you hit pay dirt. Oh, yeah? Why don’t you see anyone south of Charleston on these crews?”

“It’s good money,” I say. Real good money. Surest way for money if you’re from a tiny farming town. We talk about it at school. If someone finds enough Recyclables, we could build this place up. If any adults overhear us, they say rebuild, and we’re silent, respectfully, because anyone that remembers the town when it had four stoplights and two blocks of Main Street is a survivor and has seen more than we know and we don’t want a demerit for backtalk. Then we call it build again. What else do you call starting from dust?

Minnie mouths shut up. She takes after Mom, even though they don’t look alike. Minnie’s hair is curly, her skin is two shades darker, and her eyes are light. They believe that handling George is a matter of composure with a heavy dash of silence. No one tells me what Dad did. I’d like to imagine that he pushed back; everyone calls me his shadow, from our black curls to long legs to walnut-brown skin.

“It got us health insurance,” I say.

“Health insurance didn’t do anything but introduce us to doctors who only take cash co-pays and say maybe, if we pay more out-of-pocket, we get another doctor that says, maybe, if we pay more out-of-pocket, then---”

George hacks and spits. His emphysema is worse. Minnie says it’s a miracle cancer hasn’t come for him yet, considering, but only when he’s not around to hear. It’s all but banned in our house, along with survivor. “Then those bloodsuckers wouldn’t be knocking on our door.”

“We’re on a payment plan,” Minnie says.

“‘Til we die.” He stares down at his empty Thermos for two beats, three, and then stands. He pauses at the door. His voice sounds like it’s being dragged through gravel. “I’m gonna get out there and bed down the goats.”

“I brought them in,” I say. Minnie kicks me under the table. “Hey!”

“Willow,” Minnie says. She knows I hate my full name. “Let’s wash up.”

“I bedded the chickens down,” I say, and follow. She’s in no talking mood, but there’s easy harmony in the kitchen. Me prepping, Minnie directing. She washes and I dry. “I overheard the meeting.”

She snorts.

“Would we really lose the house?”

The window outside shows mostly dark. Once upon a time, George says, people in this country paid money for the dark. The Ridgewood family farm shines unnaturally about a mile away. Their boy Tom came back from Recycling with enough money to set them up with solar panels and a solar well and electric fence. I see a bobbing splotch of orange that must be Uncle George, but he’s going up the hill, and the goats are right by the house.

“He’s so drunk he’s turned around,” I say. “Look, Min. Up there are the graves.”

But Minnie shakes her head. “I think he knows that.”

She and Mom are really two peas in a pod, the way they can just shut you up with a quiet word. Could Mom do that? Maybe not. Mom’s been dead so long it’s hard to know. I look out at the night, which really just means staring at the Ridgewood farm. I can see their windows. I squint and there’s maybe someone standing out on their porch, small as an ant. Just standing around. You’re a fool to do that down here. You never know who’s got goggles and slinking up and down the country roads.

“If I went Recycling,” I say, “we could have light like Tom.”

Minnie lathers up the pan and scrapes it with steel wool. She rinses four times and scrubs again, runs her hand across it to find all the gritty bits we can’t see in the candle shadows.

“I’d make quota,” I say.

“George doesn’t like that kind of talk.”

I all but grab the pot out of her hands. “And you? What do you think?”

“I think I’m working on something,” she says, just when I think she’s going to fully ice me out. She passes me the scrap bucket. “You might as well check the goats out there. Maybe you missed some.”

***

The next month, Minnie turns eighteen, and she sets out on her first day as an adult to tea with the Johnsons toting two bottles of home-brewed mead. She graduated high school with Darryl Johnson, whose daddy used to help with the apple harvest, before it got too cold for the trees. Darryl’s older sister is married with two kids, which is good for the family but bad for him, because nobody splits up uncontaminated land. If all goes well, he’ll be my brother-in-law within the week.

I comb Minnie’s hair. I’ll braid it and wrap it in a bandanna, tight. This way her curls will be shiny and clean after the ride. It feels like I should say something, like something Mom would say. My best is a weak, “Do you love him?”

She takes half a braid to respond. “He’s big and strong.”

“We could buy a horse for that.”

“We’ll get a lot more done with three people.”

“We have three people.”

I tie the last knot in her bandanna. She feels for it, tests it. Leaves the room like I never said anything. While she and George leave, I milk the goats first, facing the road until they’re just pinpricks fading into morning fog. I mend the chicken fence. I weed the beans, squash, and corn. I check the fish traps in the creek. Everything takes twice as long and is half as fun. George comes back with our rations pickup: Spam, Velveeta, salt and sugar, the bag of mixed cans.

“Hey there, champ,” he says. He avoids calling me Will. My dad’s name was William, from a whole line of Williams, first son to first son, stretching back to my great-great-great-grandfather, who found Philly just as free as everyone said, but too crowded for clean air. He planted us on this land, nestled near the mountains, saving us from nuclear destruction and sticking all his descendants with my name. Minnie was the eldest first girl in a long time. I was always going to be Will, no matter what.

Today’s mixed bag has four cans of spinach; crushed, diced, and whole tomatoes; fruit cocktail, cherry pie filling. Good enough for stew when it gets cold. The fruit will go to the pigs. A mixed bag is cheap, one ration chip, fallout overstock with a best-by date over twenty years ago. I like saving the labels that are still pretty: a woman in braids, a red-tinted farm, a smiling green man.

“We used to toss that junk,” George says. “Ads were junk. Mail was junk. People used to get rid of things because they had so many.” He picks up the fruit cocktail. “They boycotted these companies ‘cause they bankrupted other places just so we could have more cans to pick from.”

“I’m taking this to the pantry,” I say.

Come dinner and George is still on the porch, cradling the Dole can, looking at nothing. “You know that old story,” he says. I don’t. I take a leaf out of Minnie’s book and just wait. “You ever find a public library, ask for Exit West by Mohsin Hamid. Great book. Two-thirds in, there’s this passage about this little white lady who grows up in California. She never leaves her neighborhood, but everyone she knows does, and then she’s seventy and can’t even recognize her city by the bones, and she feels so homesick, like she’s somehow from another world. It ends with, ‘We are all refugees through time.’”

I don’t know what to say. “Is the book about the war?”

“They’re all about war.”

“I don’t even know where you would find a public library,” I say. George makes a huh-huh noise like a deflating balloon and heaves himself up. We eat early dinner, biscuits with gravy. He doesn’t say a word. I thought I’d appreciate the silence, but it bears down on the both of us, somehow worse than hearing about how white Tony once touched a piece of metal that was so irradiated he turned red instantly. Black Tony made it back home. He kissed his mom and bought an electric fence and died on his wedding day.

While George cleans up, I hustle in the goats. The house and farm looks like it always has, clapboard with a barn once painted red, but I get this burning feeling in my stomach like I don’t know this place at all. This is my house, and it can’t be.

I tell no one about the feeling, not even to Minnie. It’s easy to talk less and less. Darryl is big and strong and crafty---he learned welding basics from a passing uncle. His mom was from Vietnam, like Mom’s parents, but she lived until last year and passed down things, bits of language and baked-bone stock and bean sprout salad.

The two of them patch up the barn, mend fences, figure out how to raise the soy yield. The same, year after year. It’s almost a relief when my niece is born, but it feels the same: changing her diaper, bouncing her, bringing her to Minnie to nurse. The baby is named Wilhemina because my family are a bunch of sick fucks with a penchant for tradition and too much humor for their own damn good. She’s immediately called Mina. I rock her on the porch with George in the brief lazy time while dinner is bubbling and there isn’t enough sunlight to work. We’re waiting on Minnie and Darryl to come home. This morning, they filled out the wagon with four nanny goats, three chickens, and a couple cases of corn liquor, and headed north to find Mr. Jon. He rejected last month’s payments. Called our produce middling and our meat stringy. He wants to up the price again, but we can’t pay.

“Old miners in these valleys, they used to mine for coal,” George says. “Got lung disease, all of ‘em, and still their sons kept coming, ‘cause they could make good money until the day they died.”

“It must have been really good money,” I say. I’m thinking, living for at least twenty years? What a deal. George’s generation lived through a big fat dose of radiation during the war. George got it double when he Recycled. None of them will push sixty. My generation is supposed to be better, because we didn’t breathe any bombed air, but we eat food grown in post-radiation soil, drink from the same streams. “Sounds valuable.”

“Life is valuable.” He hacks and coughs. He won’t see a doctor. Says his lungs are just trying to clear out junk. “Think about why they’re payin’ you to do something so damn valuable instead of doin’ it themselves.”

In the distance, a shambling speck that must be Minnie and Darryl break through the ashy air. Neither George or I say a word as they get bigger and bigger and finally pull up. It’s like before we see their faces we already know: Mr. Jon didn’t like this month’s payment. Minnie’s plan didn’t work.

***

A week later, I fill my pack with my binos, hardtack, my iPod, my digi-diary, spare clothes, a knife, and fourteen ration chips. Twenty-eight dollars are pinned to the inside of my shirt. George and Minnie take me to the station. Darryl straps Mina to his chest and starts the chores. There is nothing to say, so I don’t.

At first light, it’s only the drivers there, a group of about seven men sitting around a small fire on old tires, chunks of rubble worn smooth, the odd cracked plastic chair. They say it’s a miracle there’s still most of an asphalt lot. That sixty percent of the town was intact after the war. Sometimes I think George is right and surviving is no miracle at all.

Minnie volunteers to find me a seat on the northbound bus and heads for the men. She keeps her back straight and shoulders stiff. I wonder how much she compares me to Dad.

George cracks open his Thermos. In the morning, he calls it lemonade. “You know that old story.”

“You know I don’t.”

“It’s this planet. It’s got three suns so there’s never night. No one knows what ‘night’ is, they don’t even have a word for it. Except about once every two thousand years the planet’s in the right position for an eclipse and it all goes dark and no one knows what it means and everyone dies.”

“Why does everyone die?”

“Think about it. Something happens that you’ve never seen—that you have no words for—and everybody around you doesn’t have words for it, either. Say you never saw the dark. Say you never knew what it was like to not have light and then the sky went black.”

“The first bomb,” I say.

“Quiet, I’m telling this story. Anyways, the story starts on these guys who’ve dug up the soil and found that every two thousand years there’s this layer of dust and ash and they’re standin’ around, pokin’ it and scratchin’ their bellies and talking about maybe what it could possibly mean, as the last sun sets and the screaming starts.”

Minnie slips a ticket for Pittsburgh in my hand. I hadn’t heard her come back. “Isaac Asimov. I read it once. Very sad.”

One of the men at the fire stands up and scratches his ass. His old man-grunt bellow across the parking lot. “Pittsburgh, all aboard!”

Minnie hugs me. “Be safe,” she says tightly, and I grip her harder. I want to tell her not to worry. I’ll make quota and then some. I’m Little Will who always has another idea. I’ll make it. They have suits for the Recyclers now and I won’t get sick. Maybe she hears me, wordless as I am, because she kisses the top of my head.

“It doesn’t take two thousand years here,” George mumbles. “Don’t even need to dig to see the burn.” He hugs me too. “Godspeed, kid. I’m askin’ all the ancestors I know to look out for you.”