Fall or, Dodge in Hell

“I don’t know, man,” said Phil. “I see that shit all over the place. Always have. It’s a constant.”

“To you,” Sophia agreed. “Point being, it was not like that to my uncle, who lived from the mid-1950s to about seventeen years ago. He saw the change during his lifetime. When he was born, the Civil War was only ninety years in the past—almost within living memory. It would have seemed weird for Northerners to paste the traitors’ flag on their bumper or cop an accent from Alabama. But while he was alive—”

“The cultural border shifted north,” Anne-Solenne said.

The border, of course, was not a line on a map; it couldn’t be, because it did not legally exist, had no official reality. It was a blended zone that straddled that belt of the outer suburbs where Walmarts tended to exist. As they moved outward from the city, vehicles containing nonwhite people found reasons to pull off the street into the parking lots of businesses, parks, schools, or churches. Nothing ever impeded the flow of traffic outward. Vehicles coming the other way, inbound from the country, were rarely if ever stopped Checkpoint Charlie–style. But they were sure as hell scrutinized. Nothing came in from that direction without being seen and scanned by a hundred cameras. Vehicles that were hard to see into, because of darkly tinted glass or no glass at all, tended to get pulled over by peace officers who expressed polite curiosity about how many people were in the back and what they were carrying. It was all so understated that an inattentive observer might not have noticed it. Had Uncle Dodge been somehow resurrected and joined them on this drive, he might have seen very little overt change from how it had looked in his day. But, gray and blurred as it might have been, the border, staked out by Walmarts and truck stops, was as real as anything from Cold War Berlin.

But nothing really happened; there was no one moment when they definitely crossed over into Ameristan. The closest thing to a formal ceremony was when Tom pulled over onto the gravel shoulder of a two-lane road between cornfields and turned on his four-ways. Sophia followed suit. Kevin got out of the passenger side, ambled back, and yanked off the truck’s license plate—which was evidently held on with magnets. He then went round in back of the Land Cruiser and collected its plate, then gave the back of the vehicle a companionable slap. He tossed both plates—now stuck together by the magnets—into the back of the pickup. Then the caravan was back on the road.

“When in Rome,” Julian said.

They picked up speed on a decently paved two-lane highway, navigating a few bends that took them down to a bridge across a motionless brown river. Then they climbed up into flat farmland. Sophia dropped back a little in case Tom hit the brakes, and Tom didn’t seem to mind. Conversation halted. The others flipped their glasses down and lost themselves in stories or games. Left alone behind the wheel, Sophia kept the conversation going in her head for a while. But there was nothing to sustain it. The occasional fiberglass statue of a political leader, erected by a farmer in the front yard of an isolated house, or a makeshift billboard railing against contraception. Not so much different from what Dodge might have seen. About an hour out of Des Moines, they did pass by a tiny sign—Sharpie on plywood—bearing what might have been the burning-cross logo of the Levitican Church. An arrow pointed to the right down a gravel road that seemed to lead nowhere. She recognized it only a fraction of a second before she blew by it, and was left wondering if it had been real. The only other person who seemed to have noticed was Kevin, in the escort truck, who turned his head to the right and scanned the horizon, more curious than alarmed. Then he turned and exchanged words with the driver, Tom. Kevin bent forward for a few seconds. When he sat up straight again, the barrel of an assault rifle came into view, pointed up at the ceiling next to his head. He made some remark to Tom and both of them had a laugh. Tom reached out with his right hand and fiddled with something on the truck’s center console. That fixed-wing drone rose into the air from the pickup’s roof and climbed into the sky. Kevin pulled his glasses down over his eyes—though “goggles” might have been a better term for what he was sporting. They did all the same things as what Sophia and her friends wore. But those were styled as eyeglasses, meant to be small and unobtrusive. Those worn by Tom and Kevin came from a whole different aesthetic universe and Sophia was pretty sure that their advertising copy made frequent use of the words “tactical,” “rugged,” “mil spec,” and “grueling.” What Kevin was presumably seeing through them now was a drone’s-eye view of the surrounding few square miles of landscape. Here, that was pretty much guaranteed to consist of a graph-paper matrix of two-lane roads, some paved and some gravel, dicing the flat green territory up into square-mile production units.

Ameristan couldn’t have had less in common with how it would have been depicted in a movie or video game. Tom and Kevin had perceived or imagined some threat. Its nature was hinted at by the handmade sign they had passed at the crossroads. Maybe these guys also had access to edit streams of geodata showing hot spots of gunfire and of traffic slowdowns that might suggest roadblocks or checkpoints. But whatever they were worried about would have little to no visual signature. There was not going to be a central base, a nerve center with roads and wires converging on it. You could put anything in a barn.

Or maybe Kevin was bored and wanted to exercise the drone.

Their overall course was diagonal, but because of the grid they were always going either north or west. This made sense and worked perfectly in the almost obscenely flat middle part of the state. But the big rivers all ran from very slightly higher ground in the northwest to the very slightly lower southeast. So the caravan’s rectilinear zigzagging caused them to cross and recross rivers, and around the rivers there was some interesting topography, some actual valleys between legit hills, forested country a stain on the land infallibly marking every part of it that was too steep to profitably cultivate. The higher places—worn-down traces of a glacial moraine, she suspected—sprouted wind turbines of the most enormous type. The bigger they were, the slower they turned, which was a good thing for birds. Some didn’t turn at all because, one assumed, they were down for maintenance, or not finished yet. She grew used to them as hours went by.

And that was how the giant Flaming Cross of the Leviticans sneaked up on her, though the people working on it would probably have felt that she sneaked up on them. It wasn’t actually flaming. It wasn’t even capable of flaming yet, because it wasn’t finished. Its general size and shape were not terribly far off from that of a wind turbine. It was sited on the top of what passed for a hill around here—not to catch the wind, but to be seen from a distance as it burned in the night. Anyway, by the time she accepted that she was actually seeing it, the thing was less than a mile away. She could see a clutter of pickup trucks parked around its base and some pop-up canopies sheltering tables where workers could take water breaks. A row of portable toilets stood sentry next to an office trailer.

On an impulse, she opened a voice channel to Tom. In normal circumstances, his edit space and Sophia’s were totally disjoint; they would never encounter each other online, never meet, never see the same news stories. Anything that originated from the likes of Tom would be fastidiously pruned by the algorithms used by Sophia’s editor before human eyes ever reviewed it, and anything that came from Princeton or Seattle would never reach Tom’s feed until it had been bent around into propaganda whose sole function was to make Tom afraid and angry. But for today’s purposes they had a direct channel, unfiltered, unedited. “Hey,” she said, “how do you think those people would feel about our dropping in for a visit? Just, you know, in tourist mode?”

“Copy. Stand by,” Tom returned.

The sound of Sophia’s voice had broken her companions out of their media reverie, and so now came several moments of their pushing up their glasses, being astonished by the spectacle of the cross, talking about it, pulling glasses back down to search for more information.

“There’s a visitor center,” Tom reported. “With changing rooms. Probably easiest unless you want to have all your garments inspected.”

“Well, if there’s a visitor center, they must be okay with visitors,” Sophia said.

Phil, Julian, and Anne-Solenne could not hear Tom’s audio stream and so the changing rooms came as a surprise to them. They were in separate trailers for men and women; all of the Princetonians knew that it would be pointless, and probably inflammatory, to make inquiries about non-gender-binary cases. But the idea of having to don different garments just to set foot on a specific property was new to them.

“If we don’t, they’ll have to stone us to death,” Sophia explained. “And according to their interpretation of Leviticus, the modern equivalent of stoning people is shooting them.”

“Oh, I get it,” Phil said. “Because bullets are like little rocks.”

“Exactly. And a gun is just a modern labor-saving device that makes it easier to throw the little rocks really fast. Basically, to them, every reference to stoning in the Bible is a sort of dog-whistle reference to guns.”

Phil was working it out: “God knew guns would be invented in the future because omniscient, but He couldn’t insert direct references to them in the Bible because that would be a spoiler for the Bronze Age audience. So He used stoning as a placeholder.”

“And our clothing is immodest or something?” Julian asked.

“Not at all.” Sophia reached out as if to grab Julian by the scruff of the neck. Instead of which, she flipped the collar of his T-shirt inside out so that she could read the tag. “Mostly cotton but with some spandex. To make it stretchy I guess. If you wore this up there, they would have to stone—i.e., shoot—you.”

“They have something against spandex?”

“Against mixing fibers.” Sophia pointed to a sign mounted to the wall above a table on which a display of neatly folded white paper bunny suits had been laid out, in a range of sizes. The sign was a quote from the Bible, set in Comic Sans:

Ye shal kepe mine ordinances. Thou shalt not let thy cattel gendre with others of divers kindes. Thou shalt not sowe thy field with mingled sede neither shal a garment of divers things, as of linen and wollen come upon thee.

—Leviticus 19:19

Phil couldn’t get past the first bit. “Is that a proscription of bestiality between different kinds of animals?”

“Ssh,” said Anne-Solenne, for sitting nearby was an Iowan lady of perhaps sixty, monitoring a table of cookies and coffee, free but, in classic Midwest passive-aggressive style, with a jar for suggested donations.

“I guess they were anti-mule. Look. Point being we can either strip down and have her read all the labels on our garments, which is gross, or just change into the bunny suits.”

“What about him?” Julian asked, gesturing toward Tom, who was emerging from the men’s toilet. Then, realizing he had been a little rude, he turned to address Tom directly. “Tom, are you going to change clothes?”

“No need,” Tom said, and went into a curious routine of patting himself in various places. All of his garb was Tactical, Mil Spec, Rugged, and Grueling, even down to suspenders and socks. All of the tags were on the outside—not concealed in collars and waistbands, as was the normal practice. Which wasn’t obvious because the tags were tactical camo, olive drab or what have you, so that they wouldn’t stand out in a faraway sniper’s scope like stars in the night sky.

The Princetonians now all felt at liberty to approach and examine. The lettering and logos on the tags were subdued tactical colors and difficult to read until you got close. But all of them—along with the manufacturers’ logos and the incomprehensible laundry glyphs—bore a symbol consisting of a block letter L with a crossbar near the top and flames coming out of it. “It’s just easier to wear Levitican-approved shit,” he explained, “’cause of where I go in the line of duty sometimes.”

“So you don’t believe it?” Phil asked.

“Oh, fuck no,” said Tom. “But they do. And it’s real good clothing. Tactical.”

They changed into bunny suits—but not before the cookie warden had beckoned Sophia and Anne-Solenne over to the refreshment table and asked them sotto voce whether it was, for either of them, That Time of the Month. Both answered in the negative and exchanged a look meaning Let’s just not even go there. Later they could consult Leviticus as to what limits and penalties might apply to women who were on the rag.

“Oh, the KKK Libel. Good question. Glad you asked. That is one of the greatest misconceptions,” said Ted, Son of Aaron (as he was identified on the name tag clipped to his 100 percent cotton tactical bib overalls). He removed his gleaming white hard hat as if the mere mention of the KKK Libel had put him at risk of blowing his stack. The warm summer breeze streamed through his thinning gray hair and might have evaporated a small fraction of the sweat streaming over his scalp. After a moment he glanced up as if checking the sky for an angry Jehovah. But nothing was there except blue sky strewn with fluffy clouds and the steel crossbar of a two-hundred-foot-tall cross. Not currently flaming. The pipefitters had not finished the work needed to conduct natural gas out to its system of burners. “My wife’ll skin me,” he remarked, “if we don’t get under cover. Let’s duck in here so I can set y’all straight.”

“Why will she skin you?” Anne-Solenne asked curiously as they followed Ted into the shade of a pop-up canopy. Julian got distracted en route by three lambs gamboling in a makeshift chicken-wire pen.

“Melanoma,” Ted answered. “Have to go into Iowa City.” This remark was mumbled in a distracted way as he was getting a voice call, faintly and tinnily audible to them on the flip-up earplugs cantilevered out from the bows of his safety glasses. He indexed those down into his ears and answered the call, excusing himself with a nod and donning his hard hat as he stepped out into the sun and ambled over toward the livestock pen. His duties as Son of Aaron apparently encompassed not just construction management but inspection of sacrificial lambs.

A junior crew member bustled in to accommodate the visitors. He pulled a couple of folding chairs off of a stack and set them up at a folding table. This was strewn with printed documents kept from blowing away by rocks and ammunition magazines. He rearranged those to make a bit of space. “Y’all can help yourselves to water and iced tea,” he said, nodding toward a pair of insulated coolers on a smaller table nearby. Until he spoke Sophia had guessed he was in his late twenties, but now she thought eighteen. “I’d fetch it myself but my hands is filthy.” He held them up as proof and flashed a grin that would have been brilliant had his teeth been all present and not brown.

“Thank you so much, we will definitely help ourselves!” Sophia said loudly and distinctly, since the young man had his earplugs in.

“The reference to Iowa City?” Anne-Solenne asked. That was where they had stayed last night, in a boutique hotel next to a tapas bar.

“Where the big hospital is. So, another country to them. But they have to go there when they get sick. Like, to get a melanoma whacked off or whatever. They can’t afford Blue State hotel rooms or food, so they have to camp out on the periphery and cook over propane burners under tarps. Not a fun time.”

Anne-Solenne nodded. “Dentistry,” she said.

“Ted has normal-people teeth because he is old and grew up before this part of the world got Facebooked. After that, the people with education fled to places like Ames, Des Moines, Iowa City. Which includes dentists. A few mainline churches used to run charity dental clinics where you could get a bad tooth pulled, or whatever, but those are being chased away by these people.” Not wanting to be obvious, she glanced over at the gigantic cross. She took a sip of iced tea and grimaced.

“That bad?” Anne-Solenne asked.

“Sweet. Another cultural signifier. When we get to my aunt and uncle’s place they’ll serve it unsweetened, Northern style.”

The two women walked slowly back to the table, taking in the scene. Over by the livestock pen, Ted was explaining something to Julian, who looked dismayed. Most of the space around the site was given over to parking for workers’ pickup trucks. Not a single one had a license plate, but they were decked out with a range of stickers: a mix-and-match of Stars and Bars, Don’t Tread on Me, and what Phil had designated the Full Moab: in the center, REMEMBER or REMEMBER MOAB or simply MOAB, bracketed between a mushroom cloud and a profile silhouette of a man with a bowed head. The latter was a direct cut-and-paste job from the black “Remember POW/MIA” flag, which was also ubiquitous around here even though no American POWs or MIAs had existed for decades.

“Now, let me take the bull by the horns as far as the KKK Libel.” Ted had returned from inspecting the lambs. He set his weary bones down into a folding chair and indicated that the visitors should do likewise. Phil preferred to stand; he unzipped his paper coverall down to his navel, parted it to expose his chest, and stood sideways to them trying to catch the breeze. Sophia cataloged it as a microaggression, the hundredth today, not even worth noticing next to the twenty-story macroaggression that Ted and his crew were building. You couldn’t wear underwear beneath the bunny suit because that would miss the whole point unless your underwear was made of Levitican-certified unmingled fiber, and hers wasn’t, so her bra was down in a locker at the checkpoint and she couldn’t unzip as Phil was doing. She sat down next to Anne-Solenne. Ted’s nervous hands sorted and stacked documents—contracts, by the looks of them—as he calmly dismantled the KKK Libel. “Obviously you are not a white person, at least not one hundred percent,” he said, evaluating Sophia, “and I don’t know about him.” He cast a glance over at Julian, who was down on one knee feeding a handful of grass through the chicken wire to a lamb. Julian was part Chinese. “There’s been all kinds of confusion about the Leviticans.” This was the church of which he was a priest. “Some kind of imagined link to the Ku Klux Klan.”

“Maybe it’s because of the burning crosses,” Phil suggested, deadpan, gazing across a few yards of gravel to the massive concrete foundation from which the cross’s steel verticals erupted. Bracketed neatly to the structural members were the tubes carrying the natural gas from an underground pipeline. The actual burners didn’t start until maybe twenty feet above ground level, maybe because they didn’t want to roast parked vehicles. But there was a connection to an outlying altar, already dark with blood and buzzing with flies, including a sort of open crematorium that looked like it could get pretty hot.