him and hurt? He should have learned from the last time never to believe in a letter.
If you weren’t in a shelter, where did you sleep last night?
—Point-in-Time Homeless Survey
July third. Last day of America’s Big Blowout Birthday Sale! at Freedom City. Isaac had tried to get Barry to simplify the banner to Big 4th of July Sale! but Barry wasn’t interested in advice from a set-up man, not even one with a degree in Library Science. Isaac plugged in the blower and the Air Dancer shimmied upward, its green Elastic Man arms grasping for motorist attention, then he checked the anchors on the fat talons of a twelve-foot-tall, starred-and-striped Bald Eagle. Uncle Sam, straddling a rocket like Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove, took aim at the Endoscopy Center across the road. A squeeze of the Patriotic Elephant’s trunk (Barry didn’t stock a Patriotic Donkey) confirmed it had achieved full inflation. High above the parking lot tableau, the store’s signature, a quarter-acre Old Glory, idly curled and uncurled like a bullwhip about to slap some sense into a small country. Passersby might keep passing by, but none could escape noticing something big was going on at Freedom City.
After installing the patriotic figures, Isaac turned to the birthday cake. It was so out of sync conceptually and categorically. America celebrated with fireworks and corn on the cob, not cake and candles. Besides, the pastel yellow, pink and blue frosting clashed with the primary colors in the rest of the display. His opinion wasn’t welcome on that either.
Isaac unpacked the cake, shipped in a carton so flimsy the cardboard seemed not worth recycling. Its beaten fibers imparted a faint odor of the ocean and off-gassing PVC. He set aside the patch kit and rudimentary instructions smudged onto paper thin enough to roll cigarettes. So what if the cake leaked? You didn’t leave a birthday cake up for weeks like you did a Frosty the Snowman. As he pumped the cheap plastic foot bellows that completed the package, the cake stirred and swelled like a drunk trying to get up from the pavement. Isaac wondered what the makers in Guangdong thought about the country receiving these garish totems. Were they mystified that Americans expended their wealth this way? Did they even understand what a lawn was?
Isaac hurried through setting up the hot dog cooker and table so he could be gone before Mai appeared. She barked at him under normal circumstances and so far the big blowout had been a bust. Who was going to buy a flag or an Uncle Sam the day before the holiday? She was hard on Barry, too. Failure and disappointment confirmed her fatalism; today should give her great satisfaction.
“The cops came by last night. They said they’re canceling the fireworks,” Isaac said to Barry. Barry might know if the police had arrested his neighbors.
Barry didn’t look up from his computer where he constantly price-checked competitors he insisted were false fronts for the foreign manufacturers. “The sheriff has another drone—for wildfires or search and rescue, they say.”
On the screen, a deputy prepared to hurl into the air what looked like an oversized hobby aircraft. “National Geographic did that story a year ago,” Isaac said.
“We don’t get National Geographic.” Barry thought it was global warming propaganda from Washington.
Barry didn’t get the paper, either. He only read to confirm his fears. He acquired his news from prepper newsletters and websites that linked to patriot groups who were anti-everything, from immigrants, vaccines and solar power to Obama, taxes and the Federal Reserve. Isaac shared Barry’s distrust of the government but his unease had nothing to do with politics; it was rooted in everyday experience. Barry was convinced he was on a watch list; Isaac had actually been interviewed by Secret Service agents at the Reagan Library. Funny how flag-wavers were more afraid of their own government than Isaac was. He should write that down.
“Instead of a drone, they call it an unmanned aerial vehicle,” Isaac said. “They say they can search for the color of a lost hiker’s shirt or detect his heat signature through the brush.”
“Yeah, right,” said Barry. “Why did this county get cleared so early to fly them? They got that Bearcat armored vehicle, too. And then they flaunt it. It’s a warning shot!”
Barry thought everything was a warning shot. He obsessed about border-crossing terrorists and military troops on domestic maneuvers, the NSA listening to his conversations and the IRS taking his money. He had Mai’s undocumented relatives sewing the Made in USA custom products in the back room and he rented the farm to tweakers because they paid in cash and didn’t complain about conditions, so Barry had some legitimate worries, but when Freedom City was shut down, it would be by Google spies, FedEx planes and brown-shirted UPS drivers knocking at every door.
Isaac had spent his afternoon failing to locate Wesley Chambers. With Wesley’s bike trailer, he could move his camp in one trip. Now that he’d been discovered, Isaac was anxious to clear out, even if it meant going back to the turmoil along the river, something he could consider only because of Wesley’s company, and then only until he found something off by himself. Isaac didn’t mind living alone. Loneliness only sank in when he was around people.
He returned to camp and packed up with the idea he might talk Barry into hauling his gear to town after the shop closed. Of course Mai would object. She didn’t like Isaac and she figured their little under-the-table empire was better off including only family. It was too early to head for Freedom City so he sat and read for a while. Mike, the hero of the book, had made a dangerous plan to evade pursuing lawmen by jumping bareback and naked into a wild river cauldron that would suck them underground and maybe spit them out again. Either way, dead or alive, Mike would become free. Isaac knew something sad was about to happen to Potatoes the horse but he kept reading. The horse began to swim against the current until Mike turned his head downriver. The horse knew. Or maybe he didn’t, but he was faithful to Mike. The adventure had distracted Isaac but now sorrow overwhelmed him. He wanted the trackers on the ridge to see Mike and capture him before it was too late but they were only visible to each other for one second and what if the trackers looked away just then? Isaac could feel the pages thin in his right hand but he had to stop reading. Mike was selfish. He thought he and Potatoes were one, that the horse cared about his philosophy. The trackers only saw the river and the river didn’t care if they drowned or surfaced again. Isaac cried for the horse and wept for himself and how life was only one second on the river.
Car doors slammed. Isaac couldn’t see them but he knew from the scrabbling in the street the kids with the remote car were back. He couldn’t read now with his brain listening for the whine to start up.
He didn’t want trouble so he tried to wait them out before departing to work. As the shop’s closing time approached, he made his usual preparations to leave camp. A sliver of grass across his duffel’s zipper; a pebble on the cooler lid; the camp stove leaned against a tree at a forty-five-degree angle. Then he marked the relative positions of everything with twigs. At least he’d know if anything had been disturbed. Now it was getting late. He’d have to go. He dropped his bike into low gear and waited for a break in the noise. When it came, he burst out of the trees hunched over and pedaling hard. One boy fingered the controller while the other two crouched over a black car with batwing fenders. Just as Isaac hit the pavement, he heard that revving dentist drill sound as the car reared on two wheels.
“Watch out hobo!” one of them yelled.
“Did you say hobo or homo?” another laughed.
The thing screamed past Isaac’s tires and cut abruptly in front of him, but turning too fast, it rolled with a hard plastic clatter and flipped into the gravel at the road’s edge. Isaac cranked away without looking back. If the car was broken, it would be his fault.
Isaac
