The Scavengers (4 page)

I prop Porky up against a root and study him. He’s standing on his hind legs like a human. He’s wearing a bow tie, a red jacket, and that blue-and-white cap. I think he’s supposed to be smiling but his eyes and mouth are open so wide it looks more like he just spied the Big Bad Wolf sneaking into the pigsty. There is a rust spot right where his belly button should be. On the square base of the sculpture a crooked set of raised letters spell out “PORKY.”

I am too old to care much about toys these days, but I am excited about this pig, because I know it’s worth more than any old broken gear or piece of steel.

I pick Porky up again and feel how heavy he is. I imagine how he looked on a toy store shelf when he was brand-new. How his little red jacket must have shined that day! Maybe he was a present for some little girl, and when she unwrapped him she giggled. Maybe she kept Porky on a bookshelf all the way until she was an old lady and then after she died someone cleaned out her house and Porky wound up in a box of junk that got dumped into Goldmine Gully. Then I think of him buried in the dark dirt, packed still and silent in the soil for years and years while the world spun and bubbled with trouble, and suddenly I realize I am clenching Porky tightly in both hands and my whole body feels light and mysterious, as if I have just returned from a trip through time.

I open my hands and look at Porky resting wide-eyed on my palms.
A time machine
, I think. Not a real time machine, of course, but an object that allows me to travel in my head back to a time I never even knew. To a time when things weren’t as tough as they are now. To a time when there was
time
. Time to sit beside a window and read a book in the sunlight, or daydream, or drop pennies one by one into a piggy bank.

And that’s when I realize: maybe that is exactly why Mad Mike is able to sell things like this.

Ma sticks her head out the shack door.

“Tea, Maggie?”

“Yah, sure.”

Ma’s face lights up. “I’ll put the kettle on!”

I walk down to hide the pig in the Ford Falcon. “Meet you at the Shelter Tree!” I holler back at Ma.

“I’ll bring Emily!” she says.

7

ONE DAY WHEN I ASKED MA TO READ
LITTLE HOUSE ON THE
Prairie
to me for probably the forty-seventh time, she reached deep into her pack and drew out a rectangular object wrapped in cloth, which she carefully unwrapped until I saw it was another book. On the cover was the silhouette of a lady’s head. Ma ran her finger along the spine, where I read the title:
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
. Ma sat down, pulled me close, and murmured, “Now you’re going to learn why I love to read.”

It sounded like she meant it more as a wish and a hope than a command.

Emily Dickinson lived in the 1800s. There is a picture of her in the book, and she didn’t look like a big ball of fun, I can tell you that. She looked like someone stole her favorite pen and she was thinking it might be you. Ma told me once that Emily hardly ever came out of her room, and was all pale from never seeing the sun. Kinda weird, that’s for sure. And one of her poems was called “I felt a funeral in my brain.” Like I said:
weird
. But Ma’s wish came true: I
love
when we read Emily together. Her poems—even the weird ones—do something to me. They’re short and some have strange punctuation, but sometimes they make me burn inside like each word is a spark. Sometimes I think it’s odd that words written by a woman as skinny and prim as Emily Dickinson would mean anything to a dirty-fingernailed roughneck girl like me, but they do.

I love to sit with my back against the Shelter Tree, my knees drawn up, and a mug of hot tea cradled in my palms while Ma reads Emily’s poems aloud. We make the tea from things like dried mint leaves and clover blossoms. It tastes okay, but I know Ma would rather be drinking Earl Grey tea. “Nothing goes with a good book like a visit with the Earl,” Ma told me once, clasping her hands together and closing her eyes with a dreamy smile. I had a tiny taste of Earl Grey tea once: when Dad dug up that old toy truck, Dad had Toad use some of the BarterBucks to buy a single packet of Earl Grey in town. For all Ma had ever said about how wonderful that tea was supposed to be, I didn’t really like it. It’s got something called
bergamot
in it, which sounds funny, plus the smell makes me think of old ladies. But Ma says that tea reminds her of thick rugs, marble floors, hushed rooms, cushiony chairs, stacks and stacks of books, and all the quiet time in the world to read them. I guess part of what I felt while holding Porky Pig is what Ma feels when she sips Earl Grey tea. It takes her to another time.

Maybe if that pig is worth enough BarterBucks I can get Ma some more Earl Grey. That would make me happy.

For now though, it’s clover and mint. I blow the steam off my mug and Ma starts in on a poem.

If you were coming in the fall,

I’d brush the summer by

The sun cuts through a hole in the leaves and shines on the page. Emily’s words, all lit up.

With half a smile and half a spurn,

As housewives do a fly.

“Imagine, Maggie!” says Ma, pretending to be horrified. “Giving up summer? Brushing it away like a fly? And miss this sunshine?”

I roll my eyes. “Ma. She’s talking about making time go faster so she can be with someone she loves.”

“Very good, dear,” says Ma. “But is it Emily talking, or the poem talking?”

“Well, it seems like . . . ,” I say, then I kinda bog down.

“Trick question,” says Ma. “When a poem is just right, it’s your own heart you hear talking.”

Ma’s face is lit up now, and it’s not just the sunshine. She looks younger and not so tired. Tea and poetry—and time with me—do this for her.

We laze our way through three more poems. One is about a bird chopping up a worm. It sounds awful but by the end she is talking about butterflies leaping into afternoon like afternoon is a lake, and you can’t believe how beautiful the words are. After that one, Ma closes the book. Ma says it doesn’t do to read poems in gulps. “Think of that first sip of tea,” she says. “How the steam wets the tip of your nose, the scent of it, the freshness of the flavor, the cautious way you tip the cup to your lips to test the temperature . . . and then compare it to that final swallow, the one you tip down your throat after the cup has cooled and the fragrance has faded. After the fourth poem or so, you’re just swallowing cold tea.”

When Ma talks like this, I can imagine her in that cushiony chair in that hushed room with the marble floors. I want that for her so much sometimes it hurts. I’ve grown used to this rough life of ours because it’s mostly all I’ve ever known. And one thing is for sure: living OutBubble is an adventure. Even the digging-in-the-dirt part. But Ma . . . she had a better life once, and she works so hard to keep our family going. One time she read me an Emily poem called “The Wife,” and I didn’t really understand it, but after she finished Ma sat staring into the distance until her tea went cold. I wish I could give her what she wants. Just tea and books and time. Leaning back against the tree again, I close my eyes and let the lines of the last poem float around me like air. I imagine the sound of Emily’s pen on paper, softly scratching. . . .

“WOCKA-SCHNOCKA!”

“DOOKIE!” I screech, and whirl to whack him, but he’s already back around the far side of the tree, where he’s dug an underground hideout deep beneath the exposed roots.

“Now, Maggie . . . ,” says Ma.

“Ma, I’m gonna tan his hide and use him for a trampoline!”

“Now, Maggie . . . ,” says Ma again. It drives me nuts sometimes how much she lets Dookie get away with.

Ma shakes the last drop of tea from her mug and smiles at me like nothing ever happened. “I’d better get dinner going,” she says, and I know poetry time is over.

I wish things were different for Ma.

I wish things were different for Dookie.

Then I take a deep breath and straighten my shoulders. Right now, the best thing the mighty Ford Falcon can do is help Ma make supper.

First though, I pull Dookie from his hideout and give him a thorough noogie rub, just so he doesn’t forget who’s in charge.

8

BEFORE I HELP MA WITH SUPPER, I HAVE TO SEND A MESSAGE TO
Toad. Climbing a short trail to the highest point on Skullduggery Ridge, I arrive at a small clearing. In the middle of the clearing is a tall pole with a small wooden hutch at its base. The top of the hutch is covered with old tar paper to keep the rain out. I open it to reveal a stack of homemade, hand-stitched flags.

I select a green flag and run it up the pole. Then I reach back inside and pull out a pair of binoculars, close the lid, and climb atop the hutch. From here I can see the other half of our world. Unlike the view to the east from my station wagon, on this side the earth slopes away more gently, and instead of rumpling up into hills, it flattens into wide plains. Halfway down to the flatlands, the hillside splits into a long, shallow valley. Right at the end, the valley widens. The wide spot is Hoot Holler.

The Hoppers’ small white house is tucked in the holler like an egg in a basket. Just beyond the house is a red barn surrounded by a handful of sheds and outbuildings. When Toad was a child, the barn was filled with milk cows. Toad still keeps one milk cow and a few pigs, but even when he was a boy he knew he’d rather tinker than be a farmer, so as a young man he started collecting broken-down threshing machines and farm implements and old cars and pretty much any sort of scrap iron or wire or windmills or whatever you had. But after Declaration Day—the day when everyone had to decide if they would stay OutBubble or UnderBubble—he started breaking up his collection and taking it piece by piece to town, where he sells most of it to Freda the blacksmith.

If you had looked down over this country fifty years ago, you would have seen a patchwork of different crops and colors. Now you see only gigantic fields of bright green. That’s because several years before the Great Bubbling, the government announced that in order to make sure the nation always had enough food, it would take over the best farmland. They used a law called eminent domain. Toad calls it “arrogant ptomaine.” Ptomaine is basically bacteria poop.

Once the government had the land, they cleared out every fence and treeline and turned all those little patchwork fields into a few gigantic fields. The government didn’t call them fields. They called them Sustainability Reserves.

The bright green is corn. Nearly glow-in-the-dark green. Greener than caterpillar guts. That corn is not regular old corn. That corn cures cancer and diabetes and baldness and bad skin and arthritis and pretty much whatever ails you. The company that grows it used to guarantee it would help you live to one hundred years or your money back. They don’t make that guarantee anymore. They don’t have to, because they are the only company in the nation allowed to grow corn.

That company used to be called CornCorp. These days it’s called CornVivia. Toad says “Vivia” is supposed to sound friendlier than “Corp.”

And the corn? It has a name, too.

They call it URCorn—as in “your corn.”

I call it
Urp
corn.

Circling my thumb and middle finger into a C shape, I put them into my mouth with the fingertips against my curled tongue, and whistle six notes: three long, three short. Toad taught me how to whistle that way while we were working in the junkyard. It took me a lot of worthless hissing until I got it right, but today the whistle cuts bright and sharp through the air. Now I put the binoculars to my eyes and watch Toad’s house. Soon Toad emerges with his old telescope and for a moment we are staring at each other lens to lens. Then, while I watch, he raises a green flag of his own.

Tomorrow is a load-up day, when Toad prepares to make a trading trip to town. Load-up days are a lot of work, so our whole family will go down to help. The green flags are our way of letting each other know the plan is still on. If we weren’t able to make it, I’d fly a red flag. Through my binoculars, I see Toad wave and return to his house. After lowering the flag and stowing it in the hutch with the binoculars, I head back down to help Ma with the cooking.

The thought of food makes my stomach rumble, even though it will be awhile before we eat. These days—thanks to Toad and Arlinda and all the things they’ve taught us—we’re not so close to starving as we once were. But we still have to forage and raise most of our own food and make just about everything from scratch. Out here, you eat what you have, not what you
want
.

Sometimes when I’m feeling hungry I look down and see all that URCorn and think how strange it is to be surrounded by the thousand-acre fields that feed a Bubble Nation but won’t feed me.

Won’t, and can’t.
Won’t
, because every single stalk of URCorn is protected by a towering BarbaZap electrified security fence. Touch it, and you’re fried.
Can’t
, because if I did get inside that fence and eat the corn, I’d get sick as a dog.

I know. I tried it once. It was on one of our first trips to visit Toad and Arlinda. Down by Toad’s security gate, I spotted a kernel of URCorn in the dust. I picked it up, polished it off, and popped it in my mouth. About twenty minutes later my belly felt like it was being squeezed by a python. Dad noticed me acting funny.

“I don’t feel too good,” I said.

“Did you eat something on the way here?” he asked.

I told him about the corn kernel I found outside the gate.

“URCorn!” he said. “You found it right outside the gate?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Don’t eat that stuff,” he said. “It won’t kill you, and your stomachache will go away soon enough, but it’s not like regular corn.” He walked toward the gate.

“Where are you going, Dad?”

“I’m going to see if there’s more out there. I don’t want your brother getting into any of it.”

He was right. In about ten minutes my stomachache faded.