The Unit (19 page)

For about a week we did that almost every night after dinner, and Dad was stubborn as hell, so I couldn’t quit, either. We sat and we sat and we sat, but I was laughing inside, and I knew he was laughing, too. And then one day Mom finally stood in front of us and asked us what in God’s name was going on, and Dad looked at me and I looked at him, and we laughed our asses off. The look of love he had in his eyes cut right through my anger and I’ll never forget it, all the things about life that were better after that.

And he’s here with me now, doing his quiet thing. I sit three feet away from him and I play the Ignoring Game with him. He’s playing it, too. I listen very hard to make sure he’s breathing, and then I hear his breath. His eyes are closed and his mouth is open. Yeah, he’s good at this game, so I have no choice but to go to that place inside me where I used to go.

I become a rock. A hibernating squirrel. A smartass ghost. I send vibes to him and I think he’s doing the same, because if I ever thought he wasn’t scheming in some way to make me laugh, or to feel better about my life, or to give me orders and commands, then I don’t know what I’d do. I remember every single argument we ever had, before and after we played the Ignoring Game, and I don’t know what the hell I thought I was doing. He’s my father, for Christ’s sake. If we make it out of here, I’ll be my own person, steady in the world, and maybe someday I’ll thank him for that. I’ll leave home, but when I visit, I’ll never go back to the way I was before we played the Ignoring Game. Never. When this is over, I plan to retire from my career of giving him shit. I’d tell him about it now, but he wouldn’t believe me.

I have to prove myself first.

We’re flying over mountains and we bounce into the burned-smelling clouds sometimes. I hope we won’t get sick. I don’t know the terrain. It makes me nervous as hell, and it shows in the waggling way I fly. Old Bill begs from the left seat for fifteen minutes before I let him take a turn at the controls.

“Thanks, kid,” he says. “You don’t know how much I’ve been looking forward to this flight, present company excluded, of course.”

“Shut up and fly.”

I don’t trust him, but it turns out that he’s a good pilot. He’s smooth at the controls and he keeps the plane on a steady course through updrafts and crosswinds. But we don’t fly more than one single mile before he starts giving me shit. He puts his fat finger on the artificial horizon indicator.

“See that instrument right there, the one with the little airplane on it? That’s how I know we’re flying straight and level. And don’t you worry, I’ll keep us out of the trees because I know this country. I know every hill and bump and ditch better than you know the chancres on your boyfriend’s dick.”

“Maybe you should get out and
join
all that nature down there.”

He laughs and keeps trying to show me how a daddy drives his car. Fuck off and die. That’s what I want to say to the old dickhead, but I don’t. He’s right about the flying. He looks at his watch and at the compass and altimeter, and he knows where the mountains are. If I would’ve kept flying, I would’ve ended up with a mountain in the windshield. But I don’t have to take his shit.

“Hey,” I say. “Shut up or I’ll put it down on the road and give you a tune-up.”

I don’t know where I got that “tune-up” shit. I heard it on TV, probably, but it works on Old Bill. It’s a language he understands. And so he does shut up, mostly. He smiles at me and wags his head to his old-fart music. He whistles along with “Free Bird,” which I shouldn’t like because it’s the music of rednecks and Joe Gut Six-Packs, but I kind of
do
like that song. I wouldn’t have figured Bill Senior could keep a tune, but he’s one of those guys who can really whistle. He whistles better than the Lynyrd Skynyrd lead singer sings. It pisses me off. Everything he does pisses me off. I decide to stop thinking of him as Bill Senior. I’ll just call him “BS” from now on.

So BS flies and I let my thoughts wander to the time just after the bombs. The people of Yreka took us in. They barbecued all the fresh meat in town, and we feasted like I’d never feasted before. Then they set us up in tents in store parking lots, and after a few days the local families “adopted” us. They did the decent thing, out of the goodness of their hearts, and made up a blind lottery. Each “unhoused” family was given a number and each local family that was involved drew a number, and that was the way they did it.

We didn’t see the drawing. We used duct tape to put our number on our tent, and then we waited. Our number was 007. They did everything at city hall or somewhere, and we didn’t see it, but it wasn’t long before the locals started showing up, greeting people, taking families out of the tents and into their houses. It was damned nice of them. I’d like to think that we would’ve done the same thing in their shoes, but I’m not so sure. That kind of goodness doesn’t seem to be in the world anymore, but maybe someday it will come back to us.

I was hoping that we’d be adopted by a family with a hot daughter. Can’t blame me for hoping. But that’s not what we got. A retired military guy and his wife drew our number. The man had been a colonel in the army. He was as uptight as Dad, and he was in his seventies, but he was also the nervous type, like I am, with maybe some kind of social anxiety disorder. But he had some good ways to deal with the wobbly-ass world. His hobby was brewing beer. I liked him right away. Gray dude. Gray hair and gray eyes and gray skin, but he took us into his house and gave us mugs of tasty beer at night.

His wife was just plain great. She was one of those old ladies who makes you feel special. She reminded me of my sweet, dead gramma, and I fell for her right away. When I smiled at her corny jokes, I was really smiling. But I don’t want to think about that time anymore, because it’s gone.

Right now my dad is fighting what might be his last battle. And Mel—I have no idea what they did to her, and I don’t want to guess. Maybe she’ll take a gun when I offer one to her, if I ever get another chance. She
needs
to pick up a gun and get to work. The thought crosses my mind that if I give her a weapon, she’ll turn it on herself. But no. She wouldn’t do that.

Me, I’ve been healed for a purpose and a cause, and He has revealed His plan to me, clear as the clearest day. I plan to get a group of people together. Young guys like me who want to make the world a better place, and aren’t afraid to fight. Call it revenge or justice or taking out the garbage, I don’t care. Mob or posse, it doesn’t matter. He has spoken to me, and He told me that I am to be His instrument in this time, His perfect weapon, and He will work His miracles through me. I’ll get Mom settled in Sacramento, and then I’ll get a group of guys together and we’ll do whatever it takes to save Dad and Mel.

But we won’t stop there. We’ll stay in the wild places, fighting to bring goodness back into the world. Maybe we’ll call ourselves marshals, but whatever we call ourselves, we’ll go wherever the assholes live. We won’t steal or kill people who don’t deserve it. We’ll be strong, but nice as anything, like the way I remember my grandfather, who fought in Hue City in Vietnam, but we’ll also be as hard as my grandfather was, and we won’t hesitate to kill the bad people, the people who need to be killed to give goodness and decency a chance. We’ll be the law and we won’t allow ourselves to become assholes. We’ll be everywhere and nowhere, blowing the bad shit right out of the world, and then we’ll settle down and enjoy the peace we’ve brought.

I’ll meet a girl who maybe won’t know about my history, but maybe she will. I’ll buy or build us a place to live and we’ll make love anytime we want, in every room of the house, and I’ll learn how to brew beer and we’ll be good neighbors and we won’t miss church on Sunday morning. Maybe I’ll run for sheriff or mayor, or maybe I’ll get into some kind of business, but I won’t let my work take over my whole life, because family is the thing that matters. We’ll have kids, sons and daughters, and we’ll raise them to be strong and good, so this kind of shit will be less likely to happen again.

Below us the mountains are dropping down into plains. Redding is okay. There isn’t any electricity, but we fly over hotspots of campfires and the light of lanterns and candles glowing through the windows of all those unelectrified houses and hotels. There’s a halo of smoke over the town. It looks like an old town from maybe the early 1800s. I can’t see much, but I can smell the woodsmoke and a hint of something that smells like horses and shit. It might be a safe place, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it isn’t. BS adds some power and climbs higher. I almost decide to take the controls from him, but then Redding is behind us, another mystery.

We fly farther south until we must be over Red Bluff. There isn’t much old-timey sweetness about Red Bluff. It’s on fire. The whole town is burning. We fly over and the thermals take us up to eight thousand feet before BS can take us into cooler air. There isn’t much oxygen up here, but there’s us. Us and the heat and smoke, all that’s left of a sun-dried little town I barely remember seeing from the windows of Dad’s now-dead car.

But then someone outside of town is flashing a light at us, a good, strong light. I take the controls from BS and circle us back down over the southern part of town.

“I wouldn’t do that,” BS says.

“Yeah. I know,” I say. “But maybe that’s the trouble with the world.”

“Okay then. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

He sits his old ass back in his seat and crosses his arms. I take us down to three thousand feet AGL and we take a look. It’s two hours until sunrise, and we can’t see very much, but the person on the ground keeps flashing that light at us. It probably isn’t the time or place to be curious, but I take us down to two thousand feet. I’m thinking that maybe there’s some kind of order down there. People who are official, and only not self-elected assholes. Maybe the National Guard is down there, finally helping the people who need helping and killing the ones that need killing. But then a brighter light locks onto us and I see a shitload of flashes on the ground and bullets reach up into the sky. Big bullets. I take us into the thermal again to get us back to a safe altitude. We take the elevator of heat and destruction back up into the sky and I know I won’t be indulging my curiosity about the good of man anytime soon.

Farther south we drone through the long, flat grind of the Central Valley. I get a cramp in my leg, so I let BS fly again. No lights. No cars are moving, but sometimes I can see reflections from their dead headlights. Sometimes when the moon almost manages to break through, I see the cars and trucks lined up like some kind of museum exhibit, or some kind of advertisement for alternative energy.

We get down into the long, open places. Rice fields and the marshlands that the environmentalists restored and the edges of the Sacramento Delta. The dim moonlight shines against all that standing water.

I remember flying over this country when I was first learning to fly. I was flying only to build up hours and I took Candi with me, my first real girlfriend, and she thought it was a beautiful place. As we flew over the wetlands, birds rose up from the water like we were in Africa or something. I kept us high enough to avoid a bird strike and Candi leaned over to look out my side of the aircraft and her breasts brushed against me. I was in heaven then, and she was the hottest thing I’d ever seen and done and I remember wishing the flight school’s old Cessna 152 had an autopilot.

But now isn’t a good time to have a raging hard-on memory. It takes less time to travel the length of the Central Valley than I’m used to. Cruising above Interstate 5 at 130 knots. The Cessna 182 is a faster bird than the flight school’s old 152, and I like it. There isn’t any other air traffic, needless to say. No left-lane hogs or traffic jams down below. I take the controls from BS and he falls asleep in about ten seconds, flat. I fly and fly and fly. I try not to think. We finally fly over the farm towns north of Sacramento. Marysville and Olivehurst. I see a random sheen of light from a community swimming pool. Rooftops seem to be flat in the night. There isn’t any electricity, but I take us higher because of the power lines I know are strung all around here.

The sky is gray at first light. I fly over grazing land, and there are shapes down there. Cattle, their hides rotten. There’s smoke rising in the distance. We get to the outskirts of downtown Sac, but that can’t be right. Fires are burning everywhere and it takes a second for my brain to figure out what my eyes are seeing.

I fly over maybe a half mile of fire, then I get to a place where there’s nothing left to burn. There’s a black hole where the Capitol Mall should be. Nothing. No streetlights or neon or random city lights. It’s darker down there than it was in the mountains, and it smells like burned meat and plastic, then it smells like roadkill and old charcoal at the bottom of a barbecue.

I fly a long circle around the place we once called downtown. The sun slides above the rim of the Sierras and I can see better. The bomb made a huge hole in the ground. It probably didn’t go off high above the city like the bombs we dropped on Japan. It must’ve gone off right on the ground and it made big crater that makes an almost perfect bowl in the ground. It looks like something from a disaster movie, and I don’t want to believe it’s real. It’s a Hollywood set, a practical joke, an advertisement, or a sick antiwar protest. But it’s not. I waggle my wings and go into a tight turn and Mom wakes up. She yawns and takes a look. She looks for second then jerks up straight in her seat.

“Oh
no
.”

It’s just about the biggest understatement I’ve ever heard, but she says it in the sharp, hissing voice she uses when the shit hits the fan, using the voice that always freaked me out when I was a kid. The voice I heard once when we were driving cross-country at night, and I was maybe nine years old and drowsy, and a car crash happened right in front of us, and Dad slammed on the brakes and swerved and we slid off the road and headed toward oncoming traffic and we didn’t know if we’d make it, and Mom said exactly that same thing.