American Apocalypse Wastelands (14 page)

I told him, “If you want to tour the residential areas, you need to make a left at the light. Then we can do downtown. Not much worth seeing on the outskirts, but we should do a drive-by just to take a look anyways.”

He nodded. “Anything like a machine shop or anything industrial out here?”

“I don't think so. This was a dead town when I was here, and it already looks deader every minute we drive.”

The residential sections weren't much. There was the good neighborhood, the not-so-good, and where the foreigners and blacks lived.

The good neighborhood covered all of three streets. There were a few brick houses, but most of them were frame, with fading paint. At least a third of the houses looked empty. The vandalism looked minor. Most of the places needed extensive yard work. No one was out on the street here. I caught a couple glimpses of people moving around their yards, and one person was actually sitting on the porch in plain view. I waved. He didn't wave back.

The not-so-good area was a little livelier. A couple of kids playing. A woman hanging laundry out to dry. Two guys standing around an old but freshly washed BMW. Windows were open to let in the breeze, if and when it decided to arrive. I could hear music coming out of a few of them. There was a tired, sullen vibe in the air. It wouldn't take much of a spark to create a fire. Domestic disturbances would be the primary call here, if there had been a police force.

The downtown was there in name and material only. A stab had been made at making it shiny again. We were still close to D.C. At the height of the boom, the waters of prosperity must have lapped close enough to here that the speculators and dreamers had hoped to make this a destination town—a Berkeley Springs or a Woodstock.

For a few months in 2005, it looked like it might actually happen. But it didn't. Just like it didn't in a lot of other little towns that had smoked the same brand of “hope-ium.” A lot of bed-and-breakfasts began dying in 2008. Their carcasses littered the landscape up and down the Eastern Seaboard.

The town still had a few open stores: a bar, a lottery ticket and beer store, a used clothing and antiques place, a storefront church. The town hall was closed, and the park in front needed mowing. Cracked sidewalks and a lot of windows boarded or soaped up. No place to get coffee that I could see.

The churches were still in business. The Episcopalian one had a cheery message. The Baptists had a sign advertising their Come to God and Feed More Than Your Soul plan. The Catholic church had a sign listing Mass times. At the bottom an arrow pointed to the location of their food bank.

We drove on, headed toward the land of big boxes. Big Box Land once had a Wal-Mart, a couple of fast-food restaurants, including an upscale one, a couple of car lots, two gas stations, and a Southern States co-op. One gas station was still open.

Everything else was closed—boarded up or just abandoned. The Wal-Mart parking lot already had weeds coming up through the asphalt. The car lots didn't have any weeds. This puzzled me until I realized that all the oil and what have you dripping from the vehicles over the years had effectively sterilized the land.

“Pretty fuckin' sad,” Max said. We had pulled over and sat there, the truck engine idling.

“Yeah, but you know what?”

“What?”

“I don't really remember anymore what it was like. I mean, I do—but it all seems like a dream.”

“Yeah, well, that's because it was.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

We pulled into the diner parking lot. It was busy. This was the only decent place now to buy a meal for six miles. I got out, stretched, and took a look at the vehicles. Nothing unusual. A couple of trucks and a Toyota Camry that had been hit several years ago in the passenger side door. I guessed at the several years because of the rust that was bleeding through. One bicycle and an SUV. Nothing weird in the vibe as I followed Max inside.

Taped to the door was a hand-lettered sign:

Someone had added a Burner logo in pen underneath, but it was crossed out.

As I walked through the door, the odor of grease, meat, and potatoes slapped me upside the head. I like that smell. Also noticeable was the sound of all conversation coming to a halt. We paused in the doorway near the
cash register. We stood there and looked over the crowd while they did the same. There wasn't a welcoming face among them.

The waitress, a tall white woman with pale skin and red hair that was starting to gray, greeted us cheerfully enough. We weren't strangers to her. We were money in her pocket, hopefully.

“How can I help ya'll?” She was a local. If not a local then she had grown up within a hundred miles of here, all those miles in the opposite direction of Northern Virginia.

Max grinned at her. “Yes, ma'am. We would like to get something to eat.”

“Well, help yourself to a table or sit on up here with these no-accounts.” She laughed. “As you can see we have a few open tables.” She waved her hand in the direction of the roped-off section and turned in response to a call of “Shelli, more coffee here, please.”

We took a booth next to a window that allowed us to look out over the parking lot. I looked around. This wasn't a real diner in the sense that it had been here for fifty years. It was a copy of a diner that someone had built in order to cash in on the feel-good, small-town vibes during the boom. The red pleather covering the booth seats had begun to crack. My rip had been patched with duct tape, which would probably outlast the pleather. The ketchup and hot sauce bottles had no caps. I had seen that before. That was to prevent anyone from pocketing them. My guess is they still lost a few bottles. We picked up our menus. Across the top was written Please Ask for Salt and Pepper!

I looked over the menu at Max. “You do take me to all the finer places, big guy.” He ignored me.

The conversations began again, this time at a lower volume and punctuated by sidelong glances at us.

Shelli came back, order pad in hand. “You decide on anything yet?” I ordered coffee and pancakes. Max went with a burger and coffee.

We sat there waiting for our order and checked out our fellow diners while making small talk. There were three men sitting at the counter, with empty stools between them. The one closest to us was wearing a blue blazer over a Polo shirt and a pair of khaki pants. He had on brown-tasseled loafers. A salesman—or, more likely, a former salesman still clinging to his uniform out of habit or wishful thinking.

I had learned to check out people's footwear when Max and I did our stint as officers of the law. Actually, Max had pointed it out to me, and I had worked on it since. The theory was simple. Shoes, more than anything, told you what was really going on with a person. A disconnect between shoes and attitude was always a warning flag. Age was also important.

For example, here's an obvious one. Say I stop a male, any color, who is fit and in his twenties to forties. He is dressed passably well except for tan lace-up work boots. He will usually be wearing sunglasses, probably Oakleys. If he isn't, good. If he is, I tell him to take them off.

Why? Because nine out of ten times I am dealing with a vet who is armed and has more experience and training in violence than your average civilian. If his boots are scuffed and sun-faded, he is almost certainly a vet. I say
almost
, because I sometimes ran across guys—especially in urban areas—who didn't have the experience but wanted to project the image. You could count
on Homeland Security types to be wearing the same sort of boots, only in black.

Tassel Man's shoes were shined, which told me he had either driven or walked a very short distance to get here. He had a house or decent place to live. He once held middle-class status, and in his mind he still clung to it. He would be armed—I assumed everyone was now—though he didn't carry every day. It was too heavy and uncomfortable. Plus, at least in his worldview, things weren't that bad, and he just knew the old days were coming back. One just had to keep a positive attitude.

The guy next to him was sloppy—sloppy body, sloppy clothes, unshaven face. His Nike running shoes had seen better days. He wore a black nylon holster with a Ruger Blackhawk in it. That was the only point in his favor. Even his hair was sloppy and greasy. He was comfortable on his stool, which indicated he was a local. His left forearm had a tattoo of an eagle.

I watched Shelli, the waitress. Her body language changed subtly around him. She didn't like him.

The third guy was old but alert. I noticed that he was studying us while trying not to be obvious about it. He wore work pants and a clean shirt with a collar. He had on a pair of work boots: Sears brand, old. Sears was gone now, but a few of its products lived on. He wore suspenders and had a Leatherman looped onto a plain wide belt. My guess was he had some heavy iron hanging off the other side. He looked competent. He was wearing a John Deere ball cap.

In a booth in the back was a middle-aged couple. He looked like a math teacher with a bad comb-over. He was also wearing a collared shirt.
This must be the rich people's
diner
, I thought. I didn't really understand then how hard some people clung to the old ways. Partly in denial, partly in the hope that if they acted and dressed as they always had, everything bad would go away. I had no idea about the woman. Her back was to me.

I noticed that the short-order cook kept an eye on us. He'd pop his head up in the window where the completed orders were stacked, look around, and disappear.

There weren't any young people in the diner. In a town like this, the young ones usually bailed as soon as possible, with only a handful staying behind. That flow had reversed a bit in the past few years as some returned to Mom and Dad, broke and towing a couple of grandkids behind them. They didn't have the money to eat out, and most didn't have the skills to create anything to barter with.

When Shelli returned to find out how we were doing, Max asked, “So do you have a mayor or someone in charge here?”

Before she could answer, Sloppy barked out a laugh. “Well, the man who thought he would be king got himself baked like a Purdue roaster right next door to you.”

Shelli frowned, her expression saying,
What an asshole
. Over her shoulder she said, “I think he was talking to me, Gillian Rogers.” She answered Max, “No, sir. We don't even have a sheriff, let alone a mayor.”

“Hell, we don't even have a post office anymore or a fire department. This town ain't much of a town. Shit, we don't even have any good-looking women.” Gil thought this was pretty funny. He held up his hand. “Sorry, sorry. We do. I forgot about that niece of yours, Fred.”

The old guy down from him stood up like he was going to do something, or at least wanted Sloppy to think
he was. “Shut your mouth about my niece, Gil.” Then again maybe he was. Firearms were just as deadly in a sixty-year-old's hands as they were in a twenty-year-old's.

Shelli said sharply, “Enough! Gil, you need to watch your mouth.”

The cook had appeared in the window and was watching intently. I looked at Max. He was sitting sideways in the booth now, watching it all calmly.

Damn
, I thought,
come in for some pancakes and we end up in the dysfunctional family diner
.

Gil held up his hands, “Sorry, sorry. Just funnin' ya'll.” Then he smirked and spun his stool around.

“So there's your answer, mister. Would you two want some more coffee? I'm going to have to charge you for an extra cup. Coffee is getting tough to find in quantity lately.”

“Sure, I would love another cup, ma'am.” We grinned at each other, and she turned and headed behind the counter to get the pot.

Gil spoke into his coffee cup without turning around. “See you got his equipment running just fine in front of Tom's place. Kind of convenient, since the old shithead never would have shared.”

Okay
, I thought,
showtime!
I reached down and slid off the leather thong that held the Ruger by the hammer and started easing out of the booth. Max caught me with a glance and a tiny shake of the head. Then he slid forward and stood up.

Very quietly he said, “Hey, Gil.”

Gil spun around, smirking again. “Just funnin', strang—” He would have finished the
—er
part if Max's open hand hadn't connected with the side of his face. The sound of a nicely landed smack filled the air.

I slid out of the booth and moved to Max's left, leaving him room to work. I was grinning. Gil had just been bitch-slapped. I bet it was the first time he had seen it done outside of cable TV, let alone felt it.

Gil sat there for a second, stunned. His face had gone white, which highlighted the imprint of Max's hand. He touched the side of his face and almost got to his feet, but then decided it wasn't such a good idea. Max looked at him and cocked his head.

“Damn, mister. I was just—”

“I know,” Max cut him off, “You were funnin'. You got something you want to accuse me of?”

Gil shook his head.

“Cause, being that there isn't any law around here, I figure we can settle this ourselves”—he paused and then added—“like men.”

“No, no. I'm good. I was leaving anyway.”

Damn
, I thought,
bitch-slapped again.

He was off the stool, eyes down and moving past me, and out the door in under three seconds.

In the silence that followed his departure, I asked Shelli, “Ma'am? I see he didn't pay his check. You want me to go remind him?”