Leon, you should hear this.” Chad turned to Howard. “Yes, Ohio has great land, flat and fertile and all that, but also this part of the country … The towns were dying and a lot of the land was owned by foreign companies, and the U.S. wanted to kick them out.” He drew a quick stick finger with one leg up, kicking. “See, Leon? See the man kicking? At any rate, parts of Ohio and Indiana and Illinois were what they picked for the big farm. And a little bit of Michigan.” Chad shaded the area. “So they moved all the people out of the towns, and the air force came in with these new disappearance bombs, bombs that basically turned things into dust …”
“What kind of things?” Leon asked. “People?”
“No, not people.”
“Raccoons?”
“No, Leon, nothing living, bombs that turned buildings into dust, okay? Just buildings. At any rate, then the government brought in soil people and irrigation people and road people and they built the Grid. A little over a year later we had food. It was amazing, really. You had to admire the technology.” He drew another stick figure, this one beaming. “That’s the woman who was president then. Brandee Cooper from Colorado, woman of action.” He added some hair.
“Char,” Howard said, using the latest complimentary term. Leon had lost interest. He had scooted his chair back and was bent over picking at a scab on his knee.
“Your mother was from a town up there,” Chad said. “Where the Grid is now. She grew up in one of the towns that was destroyed. They don’t say destroyed, they say reclaimed.”
“Is that why she doesn’t have parents?”
“Everyone has parents,” Chad said. “Even clones have parents. Well, at least one parent. But yes, that’s why your mom doesn’t have parents. They died during the Gridding. They weren’t killed, nothing like that.” He glanced quickly at Leon, the boy still engrossed in his injury: he had managed to free all but the very central portion of his scab. “It was their choice,” Chad said firmly, as if there were no reason to question it. He didn’t want Howard asking more questions. Sharis, years before, had said they should never tell the boys. “And, okay, so now we’re now and the Grid is great, it works, we eat, so everybody wants it.” Under the map, Chad drew a circle and divided it with several diagonals. “That’s a pie, see? The rest of the world wants a piece of that pie. Because they have their own Short Times now.”
Leon briefly examined the scab sitting on his finger, then popped it in his mouth. Chad decided to ignore this.
Howard said, “Atunde said the rest of the world is against us.”
“Not the whole world. Mexico’s on our side. And lots of countries are neutral. Europe, China, Australia. Look.” Chad turned the paper over and drew a big circle. He made some shapes for North and South America on the left and Europe and Africa on the right, letting Asia and Australia disappear over the globe’s right edge. “These places are against us.” He made big scowling faces out of South America and Africa. “They call themselves the Alliance.”
“Bye,” Leon said, jumping from his chair and heading out the back door.
The previous week, Chad and Sharis had attended a party at their neighbors’. People had been drinking and there was lots of loud conversation.
—For graduation! Sending them to Alabama for graduation! Like it’s just a trip.
—And normally she’s very organized, but after her office closed she …
—And the Calmadol! Ten doses a day at least, and now that you can’t get it on your health card, he …”
Sharis’s voice, in Chad’s mind, had been the only clear one. “I’m not going to teach my kids to flee. Dayton is our home and we’re staying.”
—You should hear our neighbor who’s in air force intelligence. There’s a lot of dissention in the Alliance we don’t hear about. He says the Africans hate the Suds.
—You want to be ruled by fear? Wumba Bumba to that African music!
“They aren’t Africans,” Sharis had said. “They’re regular Americans.”
Walking home with Chad, Sharis had spoken again about the Melano custodian in the church in downtown Dayton where she’d stayed the night after the Gridding. “Are you the light man?” she’d asked, and she saw again the worried concern on his face.
The door slammed behind Leon. Chad tried not to wince. “And then,” Chad said to Howard, “and this really, really upset people, Canada went against us. Canada, our neighbor to the north. “Here’s us”—Chad made a rough rectangle—“and here’s Canada.” He filled this in with angry crosshatches. “So that’s how the Alliance can get into Cleveland and threaten to capture the Grid. There’s Lake Erie up here”—this part of the drawing was getting crowded, so Chad did no more than tap the area—“and Cleveland’s on the south side of the lake and Canada is right across the water. So it’s handy for the Alliance to have Canada helping them. You know if our enemies got the Grid it would really change things.” Chad hesitated. “People can’t believe it about Canada,” he said.
Now Howard was looking bored, so Chad sketched another animal to the right of the globe.
“Is that a cow?” Howard said.
“No, no, no,” Chad said. He added a stick figure in a big hat to the back of his animal. “That’s a Canadian Mountie. A policeman on a horse. When I was a kid, my favorite movie was about Mounties.”
“Okay.” Howard bent over and pulled on his shoes, his broad back and wide buttocks facing Chad. Howard’s weight was a comfort to Chad: it would take Howard a long time to starve.
“The Alliance won’t capture the Grid, though, don’t worry,” Chad said. “It’s really well defended. Bristling with missiles.” To the left of the globe, Chad drew some fat arrows pointing upward. He considered these a moment, then found himself doodling wiggly curls all over the paper. What in the world was he drawing? Worms.
Howard stood. “I’m going outside now? I’ve got to help Leon with his fort.” Leon was the brother with ideas. He was also way too skinny.
“Sure.” Chad crumpled the paper. “You’ll need to pick something else, though. As a natural wonder. There’s a reason they call the Grid communities intentional villages. Because the Grid’s not … ”
“I’ll ask Miss Bishop,” Howard said, disappearing out the door.
tuuro and the boy
AT WESTMINSTER PRESBYTERIAN, the church in downtown Dayton where Tuuro worked, the new (five years) pastor liked to call him Our Director, using a hearty, booming voice that made Tuuro squirm inside. Tuuro was in maintenance. Aunt Stella, not Tuuro’s real relative but his godmother or whatever she was, liked to say people could have all the automation and lifestyle control they wanted, but somebody had to sweep the floors. Tuuro swept the floors. He liked his job, the piles of crumbs and lint and plastic children’s rings and bits of straw (straw! where did that come from?) he accumulated at the end of a Sunday. The detritus of the world consoled him with its humble dailiness, and Tuuro enjoyed disposing of it handily, lifting a burden and tossing it away. Once he wrote a ditty about it:
