Survivor, Page 21

  We’re on the back porch of a Casa Castile going sixty miles an hour through the Nebraska night down Interstate 80. A Casa Castile has cut-glass sconces on every wall and gold-plated fixtures in the bathroom, but no power or water. Everything is beautiful but none of it works.

  “No electricity and no running water,” Adam says. “It’s just like when we were kids.”

  We’re sitting on the back porch with our legs hanging over the edge and the pavement rushing under. The stinking diesel exhaust from the truck eddies around us.

  In the Creedish church district, I tell Adam, people lived simple, fulfilling lives. We were a steadfast and proud people. Our air and water were clean. Our days were useful. Our nights were absolute. That’s what I remember.

  That’s why I don’t want to go back.

  Nothing will be there except the Tender Branson Sensitive Materials Sanitary Landfill. How it will look, the stored-up years of pornography from all over the country sent here to rot, I don’t want to see firsthand. The agent showed me the receipts. Tons of smut, dump trucks and hoppers full, garbage trucks and boxcars full of smut, were arriving there every month, where bulldozers spread it three feet deep across all twenty thousand acres.

  I don’t want to see that. I don’t want Adam to see that, but Adam still has his gun, and I don’t have Fertility here to tell me if it’s loaded or not. Besides, I’m pretty used to getting told what to do. Where to go. How to act.

  My new job is to follow Adam.

  So we’re going back to the church district. In Grand Island, we’ll steal a car, Adam says. We’ll get to the valley just around sunrise, Adam predicts. It’s just a matter of hours. We’ll be getting home on a Sunday morning.

  Both of us looking out into the dark behind us and everything we’ve lost so far, Adam says, “What else do you remember?”

  Everything in the church district was always clean. The roads were always in good repair. The summers were long and mild with rain every ten days. I remember the winters were peaceful and serene. I remember sorting seed we picked from marigolds and sunflowers. I remember splitting wood.

  Adam asks, “Do you remember my wife?”

  Not really.

  “She wasn’t much to remember,” Adam says. The gun’s in his hands on his lap or I wouldn’t be sitting here. “She was a Biddy Gleason. We should’ve been very happy together.”

  Until someone called the government and started the investigation.

  “We should’ve bred a dozen children and made money hand over fist,” Adam said.

  Until the county sheriff was there asking about documentation for every child.

  “We should’ve gotten old on that farm with every year just like the year before it.”

  Until the FBI launched its investigation.

  “We should both have been church elders some day,” Adam says.

  Until the Deliverance.

  “Until the Deliverance.”

  I remember life was calm and peaceful in the district valley. The cows and chickens all running free. The laundry hanging outside to dry. The smell of hay in the barn. Apple pies cooling on every windowsill. I remember it was a perfect way of life.

  Adam looks at me and shakes his head.

  He says, “That’s how stupid you are.”

  How Adam looks in the dark is how I’d look if none of this chaos had ever happened to me. Adam is what Fertility would call a control group of me. If I’d never been baptized and sent into the outside world, if I’d never been famous and blown out of proportion, that would be me with Adam’s simple blue eyes and clean blond hair. My shoulders would be squared and regular-sized. My manicured hands with clear polish on the nails would be his strong hands. My chapped lips would be like his. My back would be straight. My heart would be his heart.

  Adam looks out into the dark and says, “I destroyed them.”

  The Creedish survivors.

  “No,” Adam says. “All of them. The entire district colony. I called the police. I left the valley one night and walked until I found a telephone.”

  There were birds in every Creedish tree, I remember. And we caught crawdads by tying a lump of bacon fat to a string and dropping it into the creek. When we pulled it out, the fat would be covered with crawdads.

  “I must have pressed zero on the telephone,” Adam says, “but I asked for the sheriff. I told someone who answered that only one out of every twenty Creedish children had a valid birth certificate. I told him the Creedish hid their children from the government.”

  The horses, I remember. We had teams of horses to plow with and pull buggies.

  And we called them by their color because it was a sin to give an animal a name.

  “I told them the Creedish abused their children and didn’t pay taxes on most of their income,” Adam says. “I told them the Creedish were lazy and shiftless. I told them, to Creedish parents, their children were their income. Their children were chattel.”

  The icicles hanging on houses, I remember. The pumpkins. The harvest bonfires.

  “I started the investigation,” Adam says.

  The singing in church, I remember. The quilting. The barn raisings.

  “I left the colony that night and never went back,” Adam says.

  Being cherished and cared for, I remember.

  “We never had any horses. The couple chickens and pigs we had were just for show,” Adam says. “You were always in school. You just remember what they taught you Creedish life was like a hundred years ago. Hell, a century ago everybody had horses.”

  Being happy and belonging, I remember.

  Adam says, “There were no black Creedish. The Creedish elders were a pack of racist, sexist white slavers.”

  I remember feeling safe.

  Adam says, “Everything you remember is wrong.”

  Being valued and loved, I remember.

  “You remember a lie,” Adam says. “You were bred and trained and sold.”

  And he wasn’t.

  No, Adam Branson was a firstborn son. Three minutes, that made all the difference. He would own everything. The barns and chickens and lambs. The peace and security. He would inherit the future, and I would be a labor missionary, mowing the lawn and mowing the lawn, work without end.

  The dark Nebraska night and the road slipping by fast and warm around us. With one good push, I say to myself, I could put Adam Branson out of my life for good.

  “There was hardly anything we ate that we didn’t buy from the outside world,”

  Adam says. “I inherited a farm for raising and selling my children.”

  Adam says, “We didn’t even recycle.”

  So that’s why he called the sheriff?

  “I don’t expect you to understand,” Adam says. “You’re still the eight-year-old sitting in school, sitting in church, believing everything you’re told. You remember pictures in books. They planned how you’d live your whole life. You’re still asleep.”

  And Adam Branson is awake?

  “I woke up the night I made that telephone call. That night I did something that couldn’t be undone,” Adam says.

  And now everybody’s dead.

  “Everybody except you and me.”

  And the only thing left for me to do is kill myself.

  “That’s just what you’ve been trained to do,” Adam says. “That would be the ultimate act of a slave.”

  So what’s left I can do to make my life any different?

  “The only way you’ll ever find your own identity is to do the one thing the Creedish elders trained you most not to do,” Adam says. “Commit the one biggest transgression. The ultimate sin. Turn your back on church doctrine,” Adam says.

  “Even the garden of Eden was just a big fancy cage,” Adam says. “You’ll be a slave the rest of your life unless you bite the apple.”

  I’ve eaten the entire apple. I’ve done everything. I’ve gone on television and denounced the church. I’ve blasphemed in front of millions of people. I’ve
lied and shoplifted and killed, if you count Trevor Hollis. I’ve defiled my body with drugs. I’ve destroyed the Creedish church district valley. I’ve labored every Sunday for the past ten years.

  Adam says, “You’re still a virgin.”

  With one good jump, I tell myself, I could solve all my problems forever.

  “You know, the horizontal bop. Hide the salami. The hot thing. The big O. Getting lucky. Going all the way. Hitting a home run. Scoring big-time. Laying pipe. Plowing a field. Stuffing the muff. Doing the big dirty,” Adam says.

  “Quit trying to fix your life. Deal with your one big issue,” Adam says.

  “Little brother,” Adam says, “we need to get you laid.”

  The Creedish church district is twenty thousand, five hundred and sixty acres, almost the entire valley at the headlands of the Flemming River, west-northwest of Grand Island, Nebraska. From Grand Island, it’s a four-hour car trip. Driving south from Sioux Falls, it’s a nine-hour trip.

  That much of what I know is true.

  The way Adam explained everything else, I still wonder about. Adam said the first step most cultures take to making you a slave is to castrate you. Eunuchs, they’re called. Just short of that, some cultures make it so you don’t enjoy sex so much. They cut off parts. Parts of the clitoris, Adam calls it. Or the foreskin. Then the sensitive parts of you, the parts that you’d enjoy the most, you feel less and less with those parts.

  That’s the whole idea, Adam says.

  We drive west the rest of the night, away from where the sun will come up, trying to outrace it, trying not to see what it’s going to show us when we get home.

  On the dashboard of the car is glued a six-inch plastic statue of a man in Creedish church costume, the baggy pants, the wool coat, the hat. His eyes are glow-in-the-dark plastic. His hands are together in prayer, raised so high and out so far in front he looks about to take a swan dive off the passenger side of the dashboard.

  Fertility told Adam to look for a green late-model Chevy somewhere within two blocks of the truck stop outside Grand Island. She said the keys would be left in it, and the tank would be full of gas. After we left the Casa Castile, it took us about five minutes to find the car.

  Looking at the dashboard statuette in front of him, Adam says, “What the hell is that supposed to be?”

  It’s supposed to be me.

  “It doesn’t look a thing like you.”

  It’s supposed to look really pious.

  “It looks like a devil,” Adam says.

  I drive.

  Adam talks.

  Adam says, the cultures that don’t castrate you to make you a slave, they castrate your mind. They make sex so filthy and evil and dangerous that no matter how good you know it would feel to have sexual relations, you won’t.

  That’s how most religions in the outside world do, Adam says. That’s how the Creedish did it.

  This isn’t anything I want to hear, but when I go to turn on the radio, all the tuning buttons are preset to religious stations. Choir music. Gospel preachers telling me I’m bad and wrong. One station I come across is a familiar voice, the Tender Branson Radio Ministry. Here’s one of a thousand canned radio shows I taped in a studio I don’t remember where.

  The abuse of the Creedish elders was unspeakable, I’m saying on the radio.

  Adam says, “Do you remember what they did to you?”

  From the radio I’m saying, The abuse was never-ending.

  “When you were a kid, I mean,” Adam says.

  Outside, the sun was catching up, making shapes out of the total darkness.

  On the radio, I’m saying, The complete way our minds were controlled we never had a chance. None of us in the outside world would ever want sex. We’d never betray the church. We’d spend our entire lives at work.

  “And if you never have sex,” Adam’s saying, “you never gain a sense of power. You never gain a voice or an identity of your own. Sex is the act that separates us from our parents. Children from adults. It’s by having sex that adolescents first rebel.”

  And if you never have sex, Adam tells me, you never grow beyond everything else your parents taught you. If you never break the rule against sex, you won’t break any other rule.

  On the radio, I say, It’s hard for someone in the outside world to imagine how completely trained we were.

  “The Vietnam War didn’t cause the mess of the 1960s,” Adam says. “Drugs didn’t cause it. Well, only one drug did. It was the birth control pill. For the first time in history, everybody could have all the sex they wanted. Everybody could have that kind of power.”

  Throughout history the most powerful rulers have been sex maniacs. And he asks, does their sex appetite come from having power, or does their will for power come from their sex appetite? “And if you don’t crave sex,” he says, “will you crave power?” No, he says.

  “And instead of electing decent, boring, sexually repressed officials,” he says, “maybe we should find the horniest candidates and maybe they can get some good work done.”

  A sign goes by saying, Tender Branson Sensitive Materials Sanitary Landfill, 10 miles.

  Adam says, “Do you see what I’m getting at?”

  Home is just ten minutes away.

  Adam says, “You must remember what happened.”

  Nothing happened.

  On the radio, I say, It’s impossible to describe how terrible the abuse was.

  More and more along the sides of the road are bits of smut magazines blown off uncovered trucks. Fading full-frontal nude shots of beautiful women wrap themselves around each tree trunk. Rain-soaked men with long purple erections hang limp in the branches. The black boxes of video movies lie in the gravel along the road. A punctured woman made of pink vinyl lies in the weeds with the wind waving her hair and hands after us as we drive past.

  “Sex is not a fearsome and terrible thing,” Adam says.

  On the radio I say, It’s best if I just put the past behind me and move on with my life.

  Up ahead, there’s a point where the trees lining the road stop, and there’s nothing beyond them. The sun is up and overtaking us, and ahead in the distance is nothing but a wasteland.

  A sign goes by saying, Welcome to the Tender Branson Sensitive Materials Sanitary Landfill.

  And we’re home.

  Beyond the sign, the valley stretches out to the horizon, bare, littered, and gray except for the bright yellow of a few bulldozers parked and silent because it’s Sunday.

  There’s not a tree.

  There’s not a bird.

  The only landmark is at the center of the valley, a towering concrete pylon, just a square gray column of concrete rises from the spot where the Creedish meeting house stood with everyone dead inside. Ten years ago. Spreading out on the ground all around us are pictures of men with women, women with women, men with men, men and women with animals and appliances.

  Adam doesn’t say a word.

  From the radio I say, My life is full of joy and love now.

  From the radio I say, I look forward to marrying the woman chosen for me as part of the Genesis Campaign.

  From the radio I say, With the help of my followers I will stem the sex craving that has taken control of the world.

  The road is long and rutted from the rim of the valley toward the concrete pylon at the center. Along both sides as we drive, dildos and magazines and latex vaginas and French ticklers cling together in smoldering heaps, and the smoke from those heaps drifts in a choking haze of dirty white across the road.

  Up ahead, the pylon is larger and larger, sometimes lost behind the smoke of burning pornography, only to reappear, looming.

  From the radio I say, My whole life is for sale at a bookstore near you.

  From the radio I say, With God’s help, I will turn the world away from ever wanting sex.

  Adam turns off the radio.

  Adam says, “I left the valley the night I found out what the elders did to you, to tenders and b
iddies.”

  The smoke settles over the road. It comes into the car and our lungs, acrid and burning our eyes.

  With tears running down each cheek I say, They didn’t do anything.

  Adam coughs, “Admit it.”

  The pylon reappears, closer.

  There’s nothing to admit.

  The smoke obscures everything.

  Then Adam says it. Adam says, “They made you watch.”

  I can’t see anything, but I just keep driving.

  “The night my wife had our first child,” Adam says with the smoke leaving his tears traced down his face in black, “the elders took all the tenders and biddies in the district and made them watch. My wife screamed just the way they told her. She screamed, and the elders preached and wailed how the wages of sex was death. She screamed, and they made childbirth as painful as they could. She screamed, and the baby died. Our child. She screamed and then she died.”

  The first two victims of the Deliverance.

  It was that night Adam walked out of the Creedish church district and made his phone call.

  “The elders made you watch every time anyone in the church district had a child,” Adam says.

  We’re only going twenty or thirty miles an hour, but somewhere lost in the smoke just ahead is the giant concrete pylon of the church memorial.

  I can’t say anything, but I just keep breathing.

  “So of course you’d never want sex. You’d never want sex because every time our mother had another child,” Adam says, “they made you sit there and watch. Because sex to you is just pain and sin and your mother stretched out there screaming.”

  And then he’s said it.

  The smoke is so thick I can’t even see Adam.

  He says, “By now, sex must look like nothing but torture to you.”

  He just spits it out that way.

  Truth, The Fragrance.

  And at that instant the smoke clears.

  And we crash head-on into the concrete wall.

  ∨ Survivor ∧

  Chapter 6

  In the beginning there’s nothing but dust. A fine white talcum powder hangs in the car, mixed with smoke.