Mad Boys (28 page)

I couldn’t bear the tension. “They’ll be here,” I said.

“You bet,” said Ike.

“Do you think they’ll kill us?” I asked.

“Not if we pray.”

“You—pray?” I almost laughed. Back in Valley of Fires, Ike, like many ranch boys, had been forced to go to church, but he never gave any indication that his religious upbringing had took. Now I could see that it had.

“It can’t hurt,” he said.

So we held hands and prayed silently. I moved my lips but didn’t actually mouth any words, because I couldn’t think of anything to say. Finally, a prayer came to mind; I whisper-thought: “Well, Lord/Lords, my friend here believes in You, so maybe there is a You. Irregardless, praise the Lord/Lords.”

Ike filled me in on the news from Valley of Fires. The Autodidact and Mary Jane had come back from their honeymoon early after I’d disappeared. They were feeling glum, thinking I’d run off because they’d gotten married. Good, I thought. Meanwhile, Grandma Clements was in the hospital with a stroke. Bad. But she recovered. Good.

Ike told me about coming to rescue me. He’d hopped a train with ATV, his horse, then ridden to what appeared to be a box canyon, but in fact it opened into a cave. He’d walked the horse through the cave about a quarter mile and came out under a security fence within the MZ. He didn’t get very far. Some government troops were waiting for him at the end of the cave, and they’d brought him to the village.

“How did you know I’d be here?” I asked.

“The note.”

“What note?”

“The note you left under my saddle.”

“I didn’t send any note.”

“Did so. ‘Help! I’m a prisoner. Come alone.’ There was a map, too, and the note was signed in blood, ‘Your Brother.’
”

“This is news to me,” I said.

“If you didn’t write it, who did?” Ike was angry.

“The Director, or maybe Xiphi. Maybe even the Alien himself,” I said, and I tried to explain, telling him about Xi, Spree, Luck, Phi, VRN, and the Children of the Cacti. He didn’t believe a word I said.

“Web, you’re sick; your brain has turned to a cow patty. You should be committed.”

I got mad. “I am committed, so are you—we’re committed to the rebels, or they’ll kill us.”

“They’ll never break me, never,” he said. “They killed Zando, my guardian angel. I heard his last screams.”

Before we had a chance to set things straight between us, something else happened that really disturbed Ike and poisoned him forever against the rebels. Dinner was served. Turned out it was ATV, his pinto horse. They cut up steaks from a hindquarter and barbecued them over open coals. First Ike cried softly and then he started to carry on, screaming and yelling swears. The rebels soldiers took him away, tied him to a tree, and gagged him. To tell you the truth, I was hungry so I ate some of the horse. It wasn’t bad. It tasted like a beef cow who had been exercising regularly with Cynthia Kerluk.

That night it rained. We slept in tents. I could hear Ike still outside tied to his tree, crying. He’d been sent to rescue me, and then I’d been sent to rescue him. Now we were both prisoners. An evil power was at work, but I was too tired at the time to think too far down the road about it.

That next day a soldier gave a speech in Souvien to all of us captives gathered in a circle around the camp fire. Just when I wished I knew what he was saying, other soldiers arrived in the camp, and were greeted with hoots and hollers and given pats on the back by the others. One of the other soldiers was Siena. She walked toward me and said, “Stand.” Something about her tone, not mean but commanding, made me jump to attention. “I have been assigned to be your translator,” she said in a military voice, and then her voice softened. “Have a cigarette, Web.”

VRN supplied food and arms to both the rebels and the government, as per the contract between the two parties, but cigarettes, because they were not good for health, were not allowed in the MZ. But Siena had brought a suitcase full. She’d picked them up from some drug runners in the desert. For the next hour, boys and rebel soldiers sat around and smoked, except for Ike, who sulked alone.

A routine soon set in. We boys worked every morning doing all the camp details (“details” is what they call a chore in the army), so the soldiers could goof off or fight. I dug slit trenches, sewed tent tears, and washed pots and pans for Carlos and Potzo, our cooks. In the afternoon, we were brought together in a circle for classes. For a joke, Ike called our daily gatherings the circle jerk. The Souvien soldiers didn’t get it. Recruits from the Souvz gang of New York got it, but they didn’t laugh. Ike had to spend another night tied to a tree.

Siena became my teacher, translating the lessons taught by the rebel instructors into English. The instructors talked endlessly, but the gist went like this. A small group of old families owned everything in Souvien, all the land, all the banks, all the businesses, all the wealth. A few people were very rich, but most were very poor. You were born
in
or you were born
out
. The Souviens had a saying for this pattern: the old in or out. As the rebels saw it, the only way to make Souvien fair for all was with a revolution.

I asked Siena about the soldiers who had been executed the day I had been captured. That was too bad, she said. She explained that because the rebels were on the move, captives couldn’t be cared for in POW camps. They could be converted to the cause, released, or executed. Government soldiers could never be trusted for conversion; if they were released, they would only come back to fight another day; therefore they had to be executed. I followed the logic. Siena then started to give me a lecture on government and revolution.

At first the things she said didn’t make a lot of sense to me, but after a couple of weeks, I began to see things the rebel way. It wasn’t right that most of the people should be miserable and a few should have everything. Since there was no way the rich were going to give up their wealth and power, the rebels had to revolt. It was better to start over. Blow everything up and rebuild the society from the smithereens. All this appealed to my need to hate. The rebels, in their tirades against the government, gave me a group deserving of my hate and a good reason to hate. The rebels also promised that the purpose of my hate was to give me strength to kill my enemies. After the revolution, they assured me that my hate would be turned inside out, and I could love. Another plus: I liked the rebel life-style—sleeping outdoors, rah-rah around camp fires, guns, irregular hours, even speech-making.

Ike was stubborn. No matter how well Siena or the other instructors or I argued, he wouldn’t listen. At first he argued back, but we just laughed at him and he got frustrated. Then he wouldn’t argue at all, but he wouldn’t give in either. He would just sit there in the circle jerk with his arms folded. Finally, he wouldn’t even look at us, and he acted as if he didn’t know we were there. I worked like a dog trying to learn the Souvien language by studying it in my spare time, but Ike didn’t even try. Eventually, he retreated completely into his own self. It was scary to see him like that. Siena said that by accident Ike had taught himself to meditate. Which wasn’t all that bad. It was just that Ike was meditating about the wrong things.

Except for those first few days when they tied him to a tree and ate his horse, Ike was treated like everyone else. He slept in the same tents, wore the same desert-camouflage uniforms, went to the same camp meetings, and pooped in the same slit trenches, so I couldn’t understand why he was so full of consternation. Potzo said he was jealous, because Siena liked me more than him.

Ike and I grew so far apart that we hardly had anything to do with one another. I talked to him only when I had to, and he didn’t talk to me at all. After a while, I hardly noticed he was around. The other boys and I were becoming soldiers in the rebel army, and we were pretty busy. Also, we were constantly on the move, and our units were almost never in the same area at once. Several hundred men would be spread out over many miles, keeping in touch through code calls over the radio. When you’re a guerrilla army fighting a government force that depends on tanks and artillery, rule one is stay in terrain where tanks get bogged down. Rule two is never bunch up, because one artillery barrage could wipe you out. I learned these things in my military training.

Being a soldier was very interesting. I practiced shooting automatic weapons and mortars. I was issued a R.O.C.K 99 machine gun, and I studied tactics such as fields of fire, hit-and-run attacks, and night fighting. Siena taught me hand-to-hand combat; I learned how to sneak up on somebody and twist a wire around their neck to kill them so they wouldn’t make a sound. I was looking for a chance to try out these new tricks, but the rebels wouldn’t let me take part in actual combat. They didn’t trust me, because I was an American and a boy. I had to prove myself. Siena told me to bide my time.

By keeping on the move, we could stay away from the government troops and keep from getting wiped out by them. They couldn’t catch us. Because they were so heavily armed, we couldn’t attack them directly. Since both sides spoiled for a fight, we fought over the village even though there was nothing there of any military value. I began to understand why VRN insisted on DCs. The village and the civilian casualties made the war more interesting for the viewers. We rebels would surprise the enemy, burn a few buildings, and leave. A couple of times we actually occupied the village for a few days until the government opened up on us with their howitzers, and we had to get out of town. Eventually most of the DCs were dead, captured, or converted into fighters. All the animals were killed off, and the buildings were burned or blown up. On the last raid, we went in and found nothing there—no people, no critters, no habitable structures. Nothing was left to fight for in Sorrows.

After Sorrows was destroyed, the government set up a garrison headquarters on the desert floor. They moved all their guns and tanks, not to mention prostitutes, to the garrison. If we’d had long-range artillery, tanks, and an air force, we could have taken the garrison in a day. But with only small arms and mortars, we couldn’t get near it without being cut to pieces. Since we couldn’t deliver a knock-out blow to the government, and since they couldn’t even find us, at least not so they could bring their tanks and artillery into play, nothing much was going on. The war stayed a tie.

I pushed Ike into the background, thinking that he was just a stubborn boy and that soon he’d see that Siena and I were right. And then one day, I happened to find myself alone with him. There was always a space between the camp and the perimeter of defense where guards watched for enemy troops. The new recruits—which by now included more girls besides Siena, some DCs, Souvz from American city gangs as well as boy captives—were allowed to wander in that space. I was taking a walk when I spotted Ike sitting on a log, his face buried in his hands. He was so skinny and pitiful.

I sat down beside him and went into the spiel I’d learned from Siena. “You can join our troop. They’ll take you on, like they took me,” I said.

“I never thought much about the meaning of life before,” Ike said. “I loved my parents, I loved the ranch, I loved my country. I just wanted to raise cows to feed the people. But things have changed. Web, I’ve become a pacifist. I have vowed before God that I will never kill.”

“What if somebody was torturing your mother?”

“My pacifist cause would come first.”

“Suppose there is no God. Who would you vow to then?”

“I’m vowing now before you: I will never kill.”

I didn’t know what to say. I’d never met a pacifist before. I thought that the breed had long ago become extinct. I offered him a cigarette. He turned it down.

“You won’t eat, you won’t think like everybody else, you won’t even smoke. Ike, what are you living on?” I asked.

“My belief in my pacifism—it’s my food, it’s my be-all and end-all,” he said.

For the first time, I understood. Ike was suffering for his cause. I had helped make him suffer. What good was
my
cause if it made my friend suffer? I couldn’t find a way to explain my understanding to Ike, and I couldn’t help him. The moment passed between us without a good word from me.

Without warning, VRN exercised its intervention clause based on low ratings and called for a cease-fire. Each side was ordered to propose a strategy for action at a meeting with VRN producers and the Director. The rebels sent four officers to represent them. Their proposal was to bring in another village from Souvien with a contingent of DCs so that the rebels and the government would have something and somebody to fight over.

The delegation was gone for two days. When they returned, they did not have happy looks on their faces. After the evening mess (which was what we called meals in the military), Siena and I sat around the camp fire smoking, and she gave me the scoop.

“Our proposal was turned down,” she said.

“Why?” I asked. “It would solve VRN’s problem by creating more battles.”

“According to the polls of the sample audience, viewers can only be subjected to a limited number of atrocities to civilians, and then they are turned off. We’re past the quota. Another thing. The polls show that most viewers want to see us lose the war. As a result, the Director ordered us to attack the main garrison in daylight so it will photograph well.”

“But that whole area is mined, we won’t have cover, their tanks will destroy us. It’s suicide to attack,” I said.

“Nonetheless, it is the wish of the Director,” Siena said. “It will be a glorious death. If we take no action, our death will be slow and ignoble, because VRN is going to cut off our supplies. No food, no ammunition. The government will starve us out.”

“It’s hopeless. We might as well surrender and fight the real war in Souvien,” I said.

“No, this is more important for the cause. We need arms and public support, and we need to spread our ideas all over the world. If we surrender, we will dishearten the folks back home. We must fight and die in glory. For the cause. It will be seen by millions on television. Our martyrdom will inspire our people on Souvien to rise up against the oppressors. We will be remembered, as we say in our country,
ad pater nauseum.“