The Scavengers (7 page)

Dad and I wait while Toad unlocks the large sliding door on the side of the barn. We know what’s coming next, because every single time we help Toad on loading day he does the same thing. Rolling the door open like he is about to reveal the hidden treasures of the Egyptian pharaohs, in his most dramatic voice, he announces, “He-bold! The
Scary Pruner
!”

Inside the barn is a vehicle that looks like a cross between a wooden wagon, a wooden ship, and a wooden jungle gym.

One day when Toad was just a little Hopper, he was exploring a shed behind his father’s barn when he discovered a broken-down old buckboard. At first he just played in it, pretending to be a cowboy. Then when he got older he began fixing it up, replacing broken spokes and rotten planks, regreasing the axles, and putting every angle back in square. When Toad’s father saw how hard he was working he gave him a pair of steer calves and helped Toad train them to yoke up and pull the buckboard up and down the road. After Toad married Arlinda, they decorated the oxen and drove the buckboard in the Nobbern Jamboree Days parade. They had so much fun they did it again, and soon they were appearing in every parade within fifty miles of their farm.

After Declaration Day, there were no more parades. Toad tore his buckboard apart. He reinforced the axles so he could carry more weight. He widened the wheels so they wouldn’t sink in mud. When GreyDevils began showing up, Toad added sharp spikes and barbwire around the sides of the wagon and built spring-loaded “side-whackers” that can pop out and knock a GreyDevil silly. He screwed a wooden chair to the wagon bed so a helper could ride facing backward and guard against attacks from the rear, and built a crow’s nest that stands tall on a column in the middle of the wagon so another helper could ride lookout.

Finally, Toad went through his old shop and gathered up years and years’ worth of leftover paint cans and repainted the entire wagon a whole zoo’s worth of colors. Stripes and swabs of green, red and yellow, but also dollops and smears of pink, fluorescent orange, and lime green. A flurry of fake flames along each sideboard, and shark teeth on the tailgate.

“Wouldn’t it be smarter to paint it gray, or camouflage?” I asked Toad once.

“This is a
shattlebip
!” he said. “And you don’t
hide
a
shattlebip
, you sail it right on out there and make sure people know exactly what you’ve got! And what you’ll give ’em if they try to take it!”

“What I’ve got here,” he said, sweeping one arm toward the transformed buckboard, “is a prairie schooner . . . only scarier.”

“Yes, Toad,” I said. “That’s why you named it the . . .”

“SCARY PRUNER!”

It takes Dad and me all afternoon to help Toad load the
Scary Pruner
. We lug chunks of steel and wheels and pipes and pieces of sheet metal Toad and I have unbolted from old machines or cut from old cars. We tie smaller objects—like most of the things in my pack—to the racks or tuck them in the cubbyholes. I put Porky Pig in a hidden compartment beneath the spring-loaded seat.

I also lug three pails full of potato-sized rocks up into the crow’s nest. Since his last trip to town Toad fitted the
Scary Pruner
with something he calls a “flingshot.” The flingshot is made from half of a fifty-five-gallon drum and parts from an old bicycle, and is mounted on a mast above the crow’s nest. You fill the drum with rocks, then use your hands to turn a set of bicycle pedals that spin the drum. When the drum spins fast enough, the centrifugal force opens a spring-loaded trapdoor and the rocks go flying out in every direction. It worked great in the yard, but we haven’t tried it out on real GreyDevils yet.

When the final item is aboard the
Pruner
, we step outside. Toad pulls the sliding door shut, turns toward the house, and raising his arm like a general ordering a cavalry charge, says, “Foodward!”

I detect the scent of pork chops and deep-fried tilapia. I am hungry,
hungry
.

And then—
flap-flap-WHACK!
—I get hit upside the head with a feather bomb.

Hatchet.

13

THE VICIOUS LITTLE CLUCK MONSTER HAS BEEN WAITING FOR ME,
and distracted by the smell of those pork chops, I let my guard down. He came at me talons first and is now tangled in my hair. Cackling madly, the dang bird flaps and twists until he is snarled right up to my scalp. I grab him by both wings, yank him loose, and fling him as far as I can, but he comes right back, like a demented feather duster strapped to one of Daniel Beard’s killer boomerangs.

I keep ducking and flailing but Hatchet is all over me. He is not a chicken, he is a sewing machine with wings.

“FETCH ’IM!” hollers Toad, grabbing a broom from the porch and tossing it my way.

“And how in boogety-blazes,” I holler, in between ducking and dancing and grabbing for the broom, “am I supposed to
fetch
a rooster with a broom?”

“No!” says Toad, snatching up the broom as I drop it. “Don’t fetch ’im, FETCH ’im!” And cranking the broom back so far it looks like he’s trying to itch his heel bone, he unleashes a splitting-ax swing and pops that rooster a shot that fetches him—yes, FETCHES ’im—clear across the yard and splat against the trunk of a big pine tree. The bird biffs the bark with a squawk and a burst of feathers and falls to the ground like a rock. Then he shakes his head and scuttles off around behind the machine shed, tut-tut-tutting to himself all the while. He looks like an ugly ball of frayed lint. But Hatchet never stays humble for long. Ten minutes and he’ll be right back to skulking and darting.

You have to understand how embarrassing this rooster business is for me. I am Ford Falcon. I have just pepper-bombed a solar bear. But this blankety-blank rooster gets the better of me. And no matter how hard I fling him or Toad “fetches” him, he always comes cackling back. Somewhere in me I admire him. But most of all I would like to admire him on a big plate surrounded by boiled potatoes and cooked carrots.

Walking into Arlinda’s kitchen is like walking into the boiler room on a steamship. When the government pulled the plug on everyone’s electricity, Arlinda just cleared the newspapers and magazines off the top of her hulking cast iron wood range and fired it up like the old days, and she’s kept the fire stoked pretty much ever since. I don’t know how she does it in there. The sweat pops up on me the minute I cross the threshold.

You don’t want to get in her way. Arlinda is a stout woman with shoulders as wide as a doorway, and she moves around the kitchen slinging pots and pans like she’s driving pirates off a gangplank. But, oh, her cooking. Arlinda makes all of the good stuff: roast beef, pork chops, fried chicken, meat loaf, hamburger hot dish, mountains of mashed potatoes. . . . It’s the kind of food where the only thing you want for dessert is to roll into a corner and sleep it off. But she’s not all steak and spuds. When those fiddleheads come to the table, they’ll be resting on a bed of fluffy rice and drizzled with dark vinegar made from windfall apples. In other words, they’ll look almost good enough to eat.

I help Ma set the table, while Dad and Toad carry in extra chairs from the sitting room. Dookie is supposed to be placing the silverware, but he’s over in the corner playing with a pair of spoons.

Clackety-clackety
, say the spoons.

“
Clackety-clackety!
” says Dookie.

Ma just sighs and gets two more spoons.

As Ma and Arlinda stack the last of the food around the table, Arlinda has me stir the gravy. My stomach growls as I spoon the velvety brown liquid round and round, and if it wasn’t bubbling hot I’d guzzle it straight from the pan. Fat, salt, and mystery brown bits. There was a time people worried about these things, but when you spend entire days grubbing the dirt for chunks of old tin and iron, you don’t worry too much about eating gravy.

When we are all at the table, Toad says, “Let us give thanks.” As I bow my head I sneak a peek at the tabletop and see the fried fish and pork chops, buttered yams, heaps of green beans, fresh biscuits, salad straight from the greenhouse, and a steaming pile of mashed potatoes. Arlinda’s cracked ceramic gravy boat is so full it’s about to slop over. Even the fiddleheads—nestled in a bowl like slimy green sea creatures—don’t look that bad. The whole works is stacked on one of Arlinda’s ironed and embroidered tablecloths, and as I close my eyes and Toad starts in, I can’t help thinking that sometimes I have a good life after all.

Toad’s grace covers all the bases, and takes awhile. About halfway through I get hit in the head by what feels like a small insect. Then it happens again. I crack open one eye and instead of a fly, I see Dookie grinning evilly. He holds one palm out flat before him and just as I see the little white spot, he flicks it and the spot flits across the table, rises over Toad’s bowed head, and starts coming back at me.

It wasn’t enough for Daniel Beard to teach young boys how to make boomerangs that could slice a dog in two; he also included another section on how to make miniature boomerangs. On cold winter nights Toad sits beside the stove and carves them by the jarful. Unfortunately, Dookie knows where Toad keeps the jar, and whenever we visit he grabs a pocketful. The one he just flicked has made a U-turn and is coming straight for me. I duck and my forehead hits the edge of the plate, making it flip up and then crash down on my silverware. Toad stops his praying and all the grown-ups stare at me. I shoot a paint-peeling glare at Dookie, but he has his eyes closed, his head bowed, and his hands folded like an angel.

“AMEN!” declares Toad, and then we eat. Arlinda puts extra butter on my serving of fiddleheads and that makes them almost taste okay.

Us safe around this table, filling our bellies, it is easy to pretend that Declaration Day never happened.

14

I HAVE SOME FOGGY MEMORIES OF WHAT I SAW ON TELEVISION IN
the days before Dad brought the red balloon home, but most everything I know about Declaration Day and the Bubbling I’ve learned from conversations between my parents and the Hoppers and the old magazines and newspapers stacked all around Toad and Arlinda’s house. By the time the trouble began most people were using television and wrist readers, but Toad and Arlinda hung in there and got their news the old-fashioned way—so I can still get a pretty good idea of how things happened. There are pictures and stories of floods and hurricanes, fireball lightning storms that set sun-blackening forest fires, tidal waves that roared to shore more often than they used to, and sleeping volcanoes that woke up and blew like never before. Nothing like that happened around here, but we did get parrots, wild hogs, and solar bears . . . and GreyDevils.

The planet got a fever, you could say, and the people caught it. Or, as Toad told me once, in his best Daniel C. Beard voice, “The citizenry waxed distemperous! There was a prevalent feistiness!” You’d think “feistiness” would lead to fighting, and around much of the globe it did. “But weren’t we pretty safe here?” I asked Toad. The magazines described some bombs and strange airplane crashes, and a lot of marches and even a few riots, but nothing like a war. “Yah,” said Toad. “But pen wheople are somfy and coft, feisty stands only one-plus-one steps from fearful, and when people are fearful, you can get them to do things they said they’d never do.” As I heard the word tricks fade by the end of that sentence I realized Toad couldn’t really find a way to make that truth funny.

“All the government needed was one big scary moment,” said Arlinda.

“And they got it,” said Toad.

“Or they
made it happen
,” said Arlinda.

Some of the pictures are black and white, some are in color, and they’re all from different angles, but they all show the same thing: the Statue of Liberty, with a smoking, ragged hole where her arm used to be, and her lamp floating in the harbor. Terrorists, said the government, and many more to come. Toad says the arm rusted off because the government hadn’t kept the statue “up to snuff,” thanks to “cutbacks.” Arlinda believes the government blew the arm off on purpose. “You get people riled up and worried, it’s easier to herd them in the same direction,” she said.

I don’t know if it was knocked off, blown off, or just fell off. But I do know it did what all the natural disasters couldn’t do. It got people thinking the entire country was in danger—not just from radiation and volcanoes and all the strange weather, but from mysterious people from mysterious countries. They demanded that the government do something, and do it quickly. So while crews were still fishing Liberty’s lamp from the drink, the government announced a plan to build safe, secure places—called Bubble Cities—all around the country.

“They called it the ‘Seal Our Nation’ plan!” snorted Arlinda.

“More like
Steal
Our Nation!” snorted Toad.

“Silliest idea ever,” said Arlinda.

“Yah, but silly never stopped ’em,” said Toad.

“Dessert!” says Arlinda, jolting my brain back into the present as she takes an apple pie from the oven. It’s so thick Toad uses a butcher knife to cut the slices. We each dish up a piece, then move to the porch. Toad and Arlinda sit in their rocking chairs. Dad sits next to Ma on a bench, and I lower myself down to sit with my back against the house. Dookie sits cross-legged in the grass. Between bites of pie he’s making faces at a milkweed.

It’s quiet for a while as we dig in. The Hopper house sits on a small rise. From the porch we can see over the security fence and out beyond the Sustainability Reserves to the horizon, where several columns of smoke are visible above the tree line.

“GreyDevils are busy tonight,” says Toad.

They’re out there setting up for another night of bonfiring and slurping PartsWash. Every now and then the smoke burps up all poisonous and black, and you know they’ve pitched in something nasty, like maybe some old vinyl siding they dug up from what was left of some bulldozed house. I hope the GreyDevils gargle PartsWash all night long and get good and wiped out, because tomorrow I have to sit beside Toad on the
Scary Pruner
and drive right through the area where all that smoke is rising. Each black puff is a smoke signal telling me that right now we might be eating warm pie, but there is danger all around.