Fall or, Dodge in Hell

12

Seventeen years after Richard Forthrast’s death

The ancestral home of the Forthrasts was situated in the northwestern quadrant of Iowa: a two-hundred-mile-wide quadrangle defined by Interstates 80 and 90 to the south and north, and 29 and 35 to the west and east. It was now being displayed in miniature, superimposed on a coffee table in an eating club at Princeton University, visible only to Sophia and to the friends she had shared it with: Phil, Julian, and Anne-Solenne. They could see it as long as they were wearing their glasses.

They were planning a summer road trip. They had worked it out as far as Des Moines by following interstate highways. Now Sophia was proposing a diagonal transit to Sioux City on two-lane roads. The very idea of it had led first to blank stares, then to head scratching, and finally to outright concern among Sophia’s traveling companions. The conversation had stalled entirely, and the plan for their summer adventure had been at risk of collapse, until a solution had taken shape in the agile brain, and sprung from the perfectly sculpted lips, of Sophia’s boyfriend Phil: “Look. I’m just not going to tell my parents—or anyone—that we are temporarily going off grid.”

This had led to a pause as they admired the audacity of it. Sophia decided on the spot not to dump Phil for at least another few weeks. Julian and Anne-Solenne, who had been draped over each other on a couch opposite, disentangled and put their brains in gear. “Well,” said Anne-Solenne, probing the idea for weaknesses, “you’d pretty much have to tell your editor—unless you’re truly shutting everything off. Going actually dark.”

“Sure!” Phil agreed. “You know what I mean.”

“We would all have to align, as far as that goes,” Julian pointed out, “since everyone is going to know we are traveling as a group. I think that my editor would be willing to tell a little white lie for—how long?”

Sophia shrugged. “The roads are decent by the standards of Ameristan. Farmers need roads to move stuff around, so they don’t see them as a government plot—they don’t tear them up on principle, they don’t ANFO the bridges. There are not a lot of roadblocks. So, call it two days, with one night at the farmhouse—which is in a little pocket of blue.” She leaned forward so that she could reach the coffee table to which she’d anchored the virtual map. The four interstates aligned roughly with the table’s edges. To her and Phil, Des Moines was in the near right corner and Sioux City in the far left, next to Anne-Solenne’s knee. “We are crossing diagonally,” she said. “We say goodbye to Phil’s car in Des Moines—”

Phil had pushed his glasses up on his forehead. So he could no longer see the map. He wasn’t paying attention to Sophia. He had got stuck on what Julian had last said. “That’s your editor’s job,” he pointed out. He spread the fingers of his left hand in just the faintest hint of a dismissive gesture, putting Sophia on hold.

“Actually,” Julian said, “I kinda think her job is to do whatever my mom and dad—who pay her to edit for our whole family—want her to do.”

Phil shook his head. “You might as well save some money and just subscribe to an edit stream if that’s how it is.”

Julian was exasperated. “As long as Mom and Dad are paying for my hookup—”

“See, this is why you have to get your own editor.”

The two women exchanged a look, the meaning of which was that Sophia gave Anne-Solenne permission to yell at Sophia’s boyfriend. She did so: “Wake up! Not everyone can afford a cool hipster editor in New York.” She delivered this with the sweet/blunt blend that had caused Sophia to fall platonically in love with her during their freshman year. Together, Sophia and Anne-Solenne were token holders on three different collective PURDAHs, which was a way of saying that their identities had become commingled in ways that could never be undone. Software written by one of those had led to Anne-Solenne’s summer internship in San Francisco. Getting her there was the nominal purpose of the road trip that they were now planning.

“That’s not what I’m suggesting,” Phil said. “Manila, Calcutta, Lagos, all teeming with totally cool native-English-speaking eds who’ll cost less than what you spend on coffee.”

“It’s a sore subject in my family,” Julian said. “There’s a whole subtree of cousins who went off the rails because they went in together on a bad editor who ended up mainlining Byelorussian propaganda into their feeds. We lost a whole branch of the family, basically. So my mom in particular is super sensitive about this.”

This actually shut Phil up long enough for Sophia to lunge forward and put her thumb down on Des Moines. “Assume we solve the problem of getting our families not to lose their shit over the fact that we are venturing off-interstate for two whole days,” she said. “Like I said, we hop out of Phil’s car here, just take overnight bags, leave most of the luggage in it, and tell it to meet us in Sioux City.” For the benefit of those who did not know their Iowa geography, she pointed at same, and Anne-Solenne helpfully positioned her espresso cup on it, near where Iowa, Nebraska, and South Dakota came together. Phil pulled his glasses back down over his eyes so that he could see.

“It’ll get there in just a few hours,” Sophia went on. “After that it can drive around Sioux City at random or hang out in a parking space until we catch up with it. Meanwhile we switch to a rental vehicle that is better suited for local conditions.”

A pause as all imagined local conditions.

“And—what I will euphemistically call local guides?”

“I really don’t think that they are necessary. Not where we’re going. But the rental company won’t let us do a one-way without them.”

13

It’s like any place else,” Phil confirmed, three weeks later, as they watched his car drive out of the lot and pull into traffic on Fleur Drive. A pair of driverless trucks politely adjusted their speed to give it a gap to merge into. The four of them were sweating in the greenhouse summer of central Iowa. Overnight bags were suspended from index fingers instead of slung over shoulders. They jockeyed languidly to catch stray breezes. Planes whined overhead coming in to land. This was not the shaded and air-conditioned comfort of the airport’s car rental center, but an outlying lot catering to basically anyone who intended to venture more than a couple of miles from an interstate highway.

“You can set your bags down and they will be as safe as if they were locked up in a bank vault,” said Larry, the manager on duty, using a thumb to shift the strap on his shoulder and expose a sweat-darkened stripe of T-shirt. Dangling from the strap was an assault rifle, poised in such a way that its muzzle was usually aimed at the ground. Which seemed dangerous; but Larry for his part was aghast at his four young customers’ unwillingness to let their bags out of their grasp and clearly imagined that wherever they came from, no property was safe.

Sophia had her glasses up on her forehead. She was tempted to flip them down and see if they could face-rec this Larry and if so find out who his editor was—or more likely what edit stream he subscribed to and what particular flavor of post-reality it was pumping into his mind. But Larry didn’t have his glasses down and so it would have been somewhat impolite.

He turned away and led them across heat-softened asphalt toward an old vehicle that Sophia recognized vaguely as a Land Cruiser or Land Rover or one of those: boxy, upright, of a general design that was four or five decades old. But it was clean, well cared for, beaded with rinse water from the car wash. It had been modded in various ways that Larry wanted them to notice and to appreciate. He stepped up onto a running board, carefully adjusting the angle of his assault rifle so it wouldn’t bang into the side of the vehicle, and patted the roof, which was covered in bright yellow composite.

“Kevlar,” he announced. “Now. Contrary to the scare propaganda you have probably been fed, celebratory fire is overrated as far as danger. A descending round has lost most of its energy. Terminal velocity is much less than muzzle velocity. So you don’t need full armor on the roof. This will do you fine.”

“Is there a lot of celebratory fire where we are going?” Julian asked.

“No. Iowans are stoic,” Phil answered in the unduly confident tones of one who was just reading about it.

“That’s not the point Larry’s making,” said Sophia. “The point is, why spend money armoring against a nonexistent threat?”

Larry nodded. “Doors and windows, of course, that’s a different story, but those are full.”

“Full?” Julian asked.

“Fully armored. As a precaution. In case of stray rounds, accidental discharges. Wouldn’t do you much good in an engagement. But that’s what Tom and Kevin are for.” Larry hooked his thumb back over his shoulder at a pickup truck idling at the edge of the lot. Tom and Kevin were seated in the cab, luxuriating in the A/C. Mounted in the pickup’s open bed was a tripod, currently vacant. A steel locker running athwart the bed, triple padlocked, contained the machine gun that they would take out and mount to the tripod when venturing into regions where an impressive show of force was deemed prudent. Sprawling across the roof of the cab was a streamlined shape that might be mistaken for the world’s most aerodynamic cargo rack until you realized it was actually a fixed-wing drone.

Larry stepped down and opened the driver’s-side door. “Now,” he said, “which one of y’all claims to be able to drive a car?”

Sophia raised her hand as the other three sidled backward. Larry gave a little nod.

“Where are you from?” Sophia asked.

Larry looked a bit startled. “I’m from here.”

“But how far back?”

“As far back as you wanna look. Great-greats came over from Holland. Why do you ask?”

“You said ‘y’all.’”

Larry was confused.

“Never mind. Sorry,” Sophia said. “I’m the driver. I’m the only one who can drive.”

“If you would just show me. Just take it for a spin around the lot,” Larry said.

“I understand. Requirements of insurance,” Sophia said, shoving off against the running board and vaulting into the driver’s seat.

“We don’t got none,” Larry responded. “This is a requirement of us.”

“What was that about?” Anne-Solenne asked, as soon as they were out on the streets of Des Moines, headed west. She was riding shotgun. Phil and Julian were in the backseat gazing at the outskirts of the city, which looked exactly like any other place.

“What?” Sophia asked. It had been a little while since she had driven a car and she was rigid: eyes locked on the tailgate of Tom and Kevin’s truck, hands clenching the steering wheel. Surrounding traffic was at least 95 percent robo-piloted, and giving their little caravan a wide berth since you never knew what a human-piloted car was going to do.

“‘Where are you from? How far back?’ Those weird questions you were asking Larry.”

“Oh. Something I heard from my mom—who heard it from my uncle.”

“Dodge?” Anne-Solenne asked, with the forced casualness that people always affected when uttering that name.

“Yeah. About people who say ‘y’all.’ Or, ‘We don’t got none.’”

“Just sounds like rural America to me.”

“Southern America. It’s totally a Southern way of talking. Iowa is a Northern state. Fought on the Union side in the Civil War. Never had slavery. Settled by Scandinavians. So, either Larry is a migrant from the South—”

“Which he just said he isn’t …”

“Or he, or his dad, adopted—affected—Southern stylings. Northerners don’t talk like that, they don’t drawl, they don’t say ‘y’all’ …”

“Or put the Stars and Bars on their bumpers,” said Julian, getting into the spirit of things. He extended an arm forth between the front seats and pointed at a Confederate flag sticker on the back of Tom and Kevin’s truck. It was balanced, on the other side of the license plate, by a “Remember Moab” sticker.

“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.