Time of Leaders (2015) Part 1 of 11

This story should not be considered a guide either to

foraging or the preparation of foraged products.

Forage at your own risk.

 

All characters and events in this story are fictitious.

Any similarity to actual events or persons, living,

dead or yet to be born is purely coincidental.

 

 

Now that I’m settled, people have approached me and asked how I made it out of ‘there’ and come ‘here’, a Tenger Company compound, and I never thought of where I was as a place to get out of. Perhaps the thought never occurred to me since getting out seemed impossible. There’s also the issue of terms: Out and in. I made it in. There was a lot of out to get out of. It was good to get out of there, though. Tragic things were happening, but toward the end it could be downright idyllic, especially after I met Jade there.

            She would joke, saying that my boss was flirting with me. I told her that was impossible, which probably sounded prudish to streetwise Jade. Nearly every morning she would find a new way to suggest that my boss was slowly charming me into becoming one of her minions. She added details to this fantasy of hers over the course of months, and all along she believed that my boss was definitely a ‘she’.

            Just before that, I didn’t have a job. Very few people did, and I imagine it’s worse there now. The population was a third or even a quarter of what was listed on the sign just east of town. I forget who the mayor was. I voted in every election, as we all did, to get rice, batteries and jugs for carrying water. You could check at City Hall to see who’d won, or find out through the radio, if you had crankability or enough juice in the batteries. What mattered politically, though, were the gang tags all over town: ‘Bob Rules’. That’s what we went by.

            We all lived on rice, canned vegetables and wild assumptions. People assumed that I had marijuana plots all over the place, but it was always lamb’s quarter growing wild. Then they assumed that I was just scrounging, but I was foraging. There’s a difference. I’d head out with a small back pack, avoiding Bess with her fuzzy cap, who assumed that I could help all humankind with my super-dooper reading skills. Maybe I just should have gave in and let her give me what little help she could. I was in a bad way. I understood that if I kept foraging west, I’d be stopped by the city, and further to the north there was a rural area that we jokingly referred to as ‘The Free-Fire Zone’. I was finding more ponds and ditches just north of where I lived, though. More snails, more clean protein.

            On the fateful day when I nearly got shot I made careful plans before I went out, so I wouldn’t keel over before I made it back. I wasn’t starving, I was just malnourished. There was a big plot of wild edible lilies a mile north. I would sight on that, check it out, then go past it to see what else I could find. Then I planned to swing back home, gathering. I found only a few buds in the plot, it being early June, but I wasn’t disappointed. I continued north past a ‘no trespassing’ sign and spotted some nettles there, then, a viable ditch. The sign I disregarded. I assumed that it was from back when the land was owned by the company that had a derelict factory nearby. The ditch looked good and deep, and there was some fresh lamb’s quarter on a ridge the other side of it. I miss lamb’s quarter. I’d steam some up right now if I had it. Tasty, albeit a little grassy. Anyway, that’s when I almost got shot.

            As she came toward over that ridge, all I could see of Jade was her forehead and jaw. And her mouth. And her hands. The rest of her was covered by a white protective suit. She wore the ventilation mask on top of her head and opted for goggles instead. The mask formed a peak on her head, so she looked like a good witch. That was intentional.

She was a good witch, but stern, with a full mouth straight above her somewhat pointy chin. Instead of a wand, she packed what I would refer to later as a blunderbuss. She wouldn’t want to talk about that, except to correct me. It was a shotgun.

            So it was a shotgun that Jade had slung on her back. She told me to stop, and I complied. She asked me what I was doing, and I told her that I was foraging. I pointed to the lamb’s quarter which I had gathered and she asked me if it was marijuana. By this time I realized that if she was going to shoot me there was nothing I could do about it, and the situation was so strange that I actually felt less threatened than I had seconds before. The adrenaline rush was over, and I felt a bit woozy. I babbled that the weeds on the ground were lamb’s quarter, a good source of fiber and folic acid, and that the dandelions all around were chock full of vitamins. I felt good sharing this information with her, and hoped that if she shot me she wouldn’t feel too bad about it. She told me to ‘Sit down, for God’s sake’, which I didn’t know was police procedure, or anything. Going down, I noticed the badge that was pinned to the suit near her left shoulder. I hadn’t noticed it before, since the gun seemed more important. She asked me where I was from in such a tone that she seemed to expect Alpha Centauri or Betelgeuse to be the answer. I hooked a thumb back south; I was a local, not a candidate. Then I could prove it, she said. I fished out my wallet as she told me that Charlie was watching, and if there was trouble, he would come. That if she fired the shotgun, he would come. She was the law there; she was grounds security at the old prison, which was now a routing center, and that I was on the grounds- in ‘The Funnel’. I handed her my driver’s license, and she looked at it. Being in ‘The Funnel’, whatever that was, was something that couldn’t be helped right then, I figured. At that point, she told me that I could get up, so I sat up as straight as I could. She told me that I could ‘well, stand up’, and I kind of blinked, gasped, and raised a hand, indicating that it might happen later; not right then. When I’d made my calculations that morning on how to forage without keeling over, I hadn’t figured extended human contact into the equation.

            She asked if it was my current address on the card. I shook my head, she shook her head, we had a laugh. On my feet now through curiosity, I felt that I had known her for a long time, but I couldn’t remember from where. She handed the card back and asked me if I’d read the no trespassing sign, and I said that I did. She asked me if I could read, and I nodded. She told me that I could go. I asked if I could take the lamb’s quarter with me.

            “Wait,” she said. “You eat those.”

            I nodded and began to pick them up.

            “You didn’t get them there, did you?” She pointed toward the factory just east of us. I shook my head.

            “Good,” she said. “They’ve got leaking barrels there.” She patted her shoulder. “Thus the suit.”

            We nodded to each other and I began to turn away with my weeds.

            “I’m glad this ended ok.”

            I stopped. “Me too. Bob…”

“Because Bob…” she said…

            I nodded… “Bob…”

            She finished the statement.

            “Bob wouldn’t like it.”

            She headed back up the ridge.

            “Jinx! You owe me a Coke.”

 

The next day I planned a scouting mission up the hill south of my squat, and I was able to get past Bess with her fuzzy cap and clipboard, and headed west down the main drag. Walking past Rooster’s Restaurant, I noted, subconsciously, that it was open, which was rare. Then I heard some booming. Then it was more like banging. There hadn’t been many cars on the road, using up that gallon of gas they’d gotten for Christmas. So I looked over at the windows of Rooster’s, and it was the short cropped wavy hair. The chin and mouth I could see through reflections. I only knew of Jade as the one with the blunderbuss, now she was beckoning. Tinted glasses and a brush mustache to the left of her. She, lifting the familiar red and white checked tray toward me. A benediction. I trusted her. A pretty woman bestowing fries, and all I needed to do was walk in and take them. And no gun this time. What was the catch?

            When I made it to the table, introductions were exchanged. My full name is two first names. Call me the last name. People think it’s the first. I reached out my wiry arm to them, (from their perspective, perhaps scrawny), for handshakes. Charlie made a space for me as a fresh tray of curly fries was delivered to the table for me. Jade’s tray was for demonstration purposes only. Well, I was stunned. I took a nibble of fries and refused the soft drink. “I can’t…” I informed them, meaning that in my undernourished state, several tablespoons of refined sugar would be beneficial for two seconds, at most.

            “But you remember,” Jade told me, “I owe you a Coke. And they only have the 24 ounce. It’s legal now.”

            Clearly she was a regular there, on the days when deliveries came in. A soft drink was brought to me, sealed and with a straw. I took a sip and things looked brighter and sharper. Jade looked at me and I exhaled a bit loudly, she thought it was just from the chill of the drink. She’d smiled, and her eyes had lengthened. Charlie was chuckling, engaged in the process, professionally, with that brush mustache. Then Jade spoke on the periphery.

            “…sorry about that mix-up in the funnel…”

            “Don’t say sorry,” Charlie growled. “He shoulda known where he was,” he half-sang. He caught me in a sideways glance and shrugged. I nodded and had curly fry two; a hot clump.

“I’m glad that it didn’t go bad, though,” he added, then to Jade, “This guy can read a sign.”

            Jade was trying to read something in my face.

            “He can read that big regulation sign sign at the gate of the routing center. At a glance. Right?”

            I gestured with fry three, half agreeing with Charlie. Jade calmly scrutinized me, like I was a rat that had just made it through a particularly complicated maze. I self-consciously munched on that fry. She put an elbow on the table and pressed the short hair atop her head aside. Charlie continued to bait me with my talents.

            “I’ll bet you that he could read that sign upside down. Right, Professor?”

That was my nickname on the block. Jade mouthed: “You’re embarrassing him.” I told them that I was reading it upside down for awhile. Her lips went embarrassed tight.

            “It’s all good,” I quickly told her. “I pass by that old factory a lot. I know some of the things that go on in there.” I ate another curly fry; my fourth, and I was full.

            Jade leaned back and nodded, and the assignments changed. I still wasn’t sure that Jade and Charlie weren’t a couple; vegetable garden with alarm light in the front yard, white elephant bingo on Wednesdays. Charlie cleared his throat.

            “What you were in is what we call ‘The Funnel’. Factory land borders it on the southeast. Candidates cross the wash where they can, and then Bob’s here to the south and it’s flak-jacket country to the north. They decide to go through the city, and try for the bridge. So they usually go right for Quarrytown, and the routing center. We post Jade  in that funnel to tell ‘em they can go anywhere they wish, but that we find it hard to conduct business even a mile west into the city. Right?”

            Jade gave a qualified shrug. She’d been keeping my tray in the corner of her eye, and it was still basically full. The rat wasn’t finishing his kibble. Another swing of her head to the wait counter produced a waitress with a wax paper bag.

            “I have other forage prospects,” I told them. “Up the highway south. I think there might be some wild grape up there.”

            Jade smirked and I could see Charlie’s mustache change shape to my immediate right. I added that I could smell them ripening from where we were, which brought an involuntary snort from Jade.

            “That’s state property too. It’s posted.”

            I nodded to Charlie. “But not patrolled.”

            “I don’t want to get your hopes up,” he said. “And I’m sorry, but I have to talk about reading again, and all that entails.” Jade sniffed.

            So she had found something in me that she devalued? She said later that what she first saw in me was confidence. I would joke that it was the fourth curly fry in a holding pattern at the base of my esophagus, having found the stomach full. Confidence? Only in the prospect of unripe wild grape. With every sip of my Coke, tears came to my eyes. It wasn’t confidence in the scrounging/foraging issue. That was pride. She sniffed at reading, but she didn’t. She had skills there which were considered ‘average’. I was fooled along with her and everyone else.