Shadowbahn(20)

? ? ?

Nodding at the cover on the wall, Parker asks idly for no real reason, “Yours?”

“No,” says the man in the booth.

“I don’t mean does it belong to you, I mean did you make—”

“Doesn’t belong to me and it’s fifty years old so I don’t think I could have made it.”

“Diploma yours?”

“Yes.”

“Muleshoe, huh?”

“Left California with everyone else,” the other man explains.





snake


Parker nods. “That’s where we’re coming from. . . .”

“Now everyone has left here too,” says the other man.

“Where did they go?”

“Some moved on to other Disunion territory, for all the good it will do them. Smart ones have returned to the States.”

“I heard on the news there’s fighting. . . .”

“Nah, Feds don’t come in unless they need to. They figure sooner or later the Rupture will devour itself like a snaaa . . .” He trails off, transfixed.

? ? ?

Nervous, Parker says, “How’s that?” The man in the booth looks beyond Parker, who follows the line of sight to his Camry and Zema, returning from the restroom. “Oh that’s my sister,” Parker says too quickly, “believe it or . . .” but the man in the booth continues to stare at the Camry, its door open and music playing.

A black pickup truck pulls into the gas station. Its driver, as long and thin as the clerk behind the plexiglas but older, gets out of the pickup and also gawks at the Camry. Parker hasn’t yet gotten the change from his twenty but doesn’t wait, turning as casually as he can manage back to their car, conveying whatever authority he can muster.





siren


The driver of the pickup continues staring. “Don’t suppose,” Parker asks to get his attention, “you can tell my sister and me how far we are from Amarillo?” and the pickup driver turns to him a moment, turns back to the Camry, turns back to Parker. “Sixty miles up the road is Plainview,” he finally answers, “catch Highway 27 north another sixty . . . say . . .”

Slightly disconcerted, Parker says, “Highway 27?” because it so happens that the small highway running through their canyon back home is also 27. A woman gets out of the pickup’s passenger side and slowly ambles up to the Camry like she’s afraid she’ll scare a wild, sleeping animal. When justice is gone, there’s always force, sings the car. Not taking her eyes from the Camry, the woman digs a cell out of her jeans’ front pocket and makes a call. Zema looks at Parker, who looks back at her.

Yet another pickup pulls in, apparently not to get gas but so its Hispanic driver can also approach the Camry, mouth agape. Suddenly, thinks Parker, there’s a lot of f*cking people in Muleshoe. Parker and his sister watch the small crowd gather around their car. “So,” Parker says slowly, turning back to the pickup driver, “sixty miles to Plainview . . .” and now the Camry answers, When force is gone, there’s always while the six-and-a-half-foot astrophysicist emerges from behind the plexiglas. It’s only when the woman from the pickup opens the Camry’s door on Zema’s side and slides into the passenger seat that Parker realizes it’s not his sister or the car they’re looking at, it’s the music they’re listening to.





hush vortex


By the time the brother and sister reach Amarillo two hours later, all the other music but theirs has disappeared from every broadcasting station and radio, from every house and car. All the other music has vanished from the airwaves, vaporized mid-transmission like mist burned away by the sun. Music has gone missing from files and discs and vinyl, from cells and MP3 players and whatever CD players anyone still plays. It’s missing from the confines of every interior, from the expanse of every exterior—all the music but Parker and Zema’s silver Camry hybrid singing, Here come the planes. Behind them, the brother and sister drag the spreading silence as though it’s caught on their back bumper. Thirty-six hours later, by the time they have taken U.S. 83 the length of the Texas northwest and crossed the narrow Oklahoma panhandle into Liberal, Kansas, everyone in the Midwest knows the Camry transports all that remains of American song. On the news, Parker and Zema are the only thing competing with the Towers, tracked with the intense national fascination once reserved for fleeing football stars who kill their wives.





ghost dance (one)


Once long ago, the Badlands were underwater where Wounded Knee Creek and the White and Missouri Rivers converge, now a postaquatic wasteland streaked in shades of night sky and firelight. A century and a quarter ago, the Sioux Nation spilled across fifty thousand square miles of Midwest plains that European descendants were determined to take. As the Sioux’s armies resolved in the shadow of Sitting Bull’s martyrdom to resist, a paiute jesus—called Wovoka by the tribes and Jack Wilson by whites—brought to the Badlands the Ghost Dance.

? ? ?

With the nineteenth century drawing to a close, the dance’s millennial sacrament of movement and music—by which the living and dead, survivor and fallen, awake and dreamer, met at a latitude and longitude beyond topography in a ceremony based entirely on notions of love, peace, and nonviolence, with the conviction that these values would triumph over the ill will of the white government’s approaching soldiers and thereby save the Sioux tribes—electrified Native and European-Americans alike.