PROLOGUE
AUGUST 7, 2019
LA CROSSE, WISCONSIN
Jump.
Chickenshit.
Jump off now.
He obeys. When the freight slows just enough, he cinches his backpack tight and, from the deck of the intermodal car—knowing himself as Sammy Squirrel since he hopped out at a rail yard in Portland with a backpack of essentials—launches into the scorch of high noon and lands badly, pitching onto his palms and knees and skidding down the railway berm with the slung weight of the pack driving his face into sharp rocks.
He crawls into weeds, tasting grit and blood. He shucks the pack, topples over, closes his eyes, and grins up. The train hammers east and disappears. Sun flares scrawl Cassie’s name inside his lids.
That’s right. Cassie. Do it for her.
He rises and barefoots away into the heavy Midwest heat, crossing sinkholes, fallen fences, blown trash, guided toward a distant intersection, Texaco, Flying J, Arby’s, Black Jack’s Casino, Adult Video Warehouse, China Buffet. ALL YOU CAN EAT CRAB LEGS. In the Willamette Valley, a herd of sheep pushed down a fence and killed themselves on green alfalfa. They ate until they exploded.
This is how people are.
The human race.
Cassie wants you to stop them.
The intersection growls and gusts. Sammy Squirrel crosses unaware against the DON’T WALK sign, grubby as a bugbear from PROLOGUE
AUGUST 7, 2019
LA CROSSE, WISCONSIN
Jump.
Chickenshit.
Jump off now.
He obeys. When the freight slows just enough, he cinches his backpack tight and, from the deck of the intermodal car—knowing himself as Sammy Squirrel since he hopped out at a rail yard in Portland with a backpack of essentials—launches into the scorch of high noon and lands badly, pitching onto his palms and knees and skidding down the railway berm with the slung weight of the pack driving his face into sharp rocks.
He crawls into weeds, tasting grit and blood. He shucks the pack, topples over, closes his eyes, and grins up. The train hammers east and disappears. Sun flares scrawl Cassie’s name inside his lids.
That’s right. Cassie. Do it for her.
He rises and barefoots away into the heavy Midwest heat, crossing sinkholes, fallen fences, blown trash, guided toward a distant intersection, Texaco, Flying J, Arby’s, Black Jack’s Casino, Adult Video Warehouse, China Buffet. ALL YOU CAN EAT CRAB LEGS. In the Willamette Valley, a herd of sheep pushed down a fence and killed themselves on green alfalfa. They ate until they exploded.
This is how people are.
The human race.
Cassie wants you to stop them.
The intersection growls and gusts. Sammy Squirrel crosses unaware against the DON’T WALK sign, grubby as a bugbear from the roads and rails. Drivers brake and stare. His fresh abrasions gleam, his curly blond hair explodes in crusts and tangles, his dirty T-shirt and cargo shorts hang like shedding skin. When the honking and the glassed-in obscenities begin, the voice commands, Stop them Use the rock. He flinches and walks faster. He flicks up two pairs of two fingers, peace signs, then forms two hands in the shape of a heart. The grin is fixed. It never leaves his sooty, sunburned face.
He tours Arby’s looking for a plug-in, finally spies one beneath a table where a wiry man in western wear works ketchup-dipped fries past sleek blond muttonchops. His hat reads EAT THE WHALES. His shirt reads BUILD THE WALL. Under the table, this man’s tooled boots are shiny.
Stop him. Use the spike.
“The hell you want?”
Peace, Sammy Squirrel’s fingers promise.
Love, his hands frame.
“You come one step closer, Helter Skelter, I’ll snap your filthy neck.”
When the shiny boots have gone, he sloughs his backpack with a puff of railroad smut, crawls beneath the table, and plugs in his phone charger. As his battery gathers from zero, he watches large people angrily overeat piles of meat. When he learned about the exploding sheep he was watching news on the recreation ward TV. This is how people are, the voice told him that night. This is why Cassie died Get a knife. Get a gun. Get a bomb and stop them.
He broke his window. Chickenshit. He jumped and hurt himself landing. He ran and hid. He slept in doorways in Portland for a week, lost his shoes to a drunken man with a knife, ate from the Voodoo Doughnut’s dumpster, got the name Sammy Squirrel for climbing through trees along the Springwater, began to start and tremble when the voice caught up—That man! With the suit and briefcase! Stop him! Push him into traffic!—then met a homeless dude who showed him how to jump a freight and found himself huddled on steel mesh, his fingers locked through it
escaping, he hoped, on a car racketing high across the chalk-blue churn of the Columbia River.
The voice had followed him.
If you’re going to be such a chickenshit, just jump.
He waits and waits for the battery. At six percent, he gets on the Arby’s Wi-Fi and text messages his mother.
Hope all is good
Seven percent becomes eight percent on the cracked and dusty Samsung.
Cuz I’m doing good too
Becomes nine percent. His empty stomach snarls.
Don’t worry
A droopy girl about his age in an Arby’s uniform comes out to watch him peel a french fry off the floor. He shows her peacefingers, love hands. While she blushes, he fits the french fry through his rigid grin and chews it.
Becomes eleven percent.
Love to everyone
Drains back to eight percent.
He is staring across the intersection toward Black Jack’s Casino when the Arby’s girl comes back. This time she wears latex gloves and holds a spray bottle.
“Sir, I’m sorry, but you have to leave.”
The phone pings: Where are you?
The Arby’s girl goes away, looking over her shoulder. He taps fast on his phone surface.
Don’t worry I’m good
“Him.”
A security guard with a black beard lumbers ahead of the girl with the spray bottle.
“Him, right there.”
“Hey.” The guard’s approaching steps rip the sticky floor. “Hey, you. You were told to leave.”
His hands jump. Peace! Love!
“Out.”
Ping: You are not safe
Ping: You need your medications
Ping: Please tell us where you are
He sees his own grin in the cracked phone. Five percent. He has no idea where he is. Over him the security guy snatches the girl’s spray bottle and seethes. “Leave now.” Then the bottle is cut loose, chemical blasts against the side of his face, down his chest, over his hands protecting his phone. When the spray stops, his face burns, his fingers drip.
“Don’t pretend you don’t hear me, asshole.”
It’s not that. He doesn’t speak anymore. Back when, as it started, he had been feeling unlike himself already, angry and exhausted, nothing to say. But then came the October dawn when he had awakened to pounding and screaming on his mom’s back door. He had opened it to see his neighbor and his almost-girlfriend Cassie with her black bubbled skin and behind her the hillside on fire and the entire sky full of smoke. Her horses! Her horses! He hadn’t known how to help her—called 911 and stood there shaking while she screamed. After Cassie’s funeral, he had begun stealing things and failing school. He had obeyed a nagging voice and let a different neighbor’s horses go. He had walked through Best Buy unplugging everything. He had climbed the water tower with spray paint and written DON’T LOOK UP HERE THE PROBLEM IS IN YOUR HEAD. Next, he had lit his mom’s garage on fire, destroyed her car and her boyfriend’s motorcycle. They call it back-burn, the voice had whispered to him, over and over. Little fires stop big ones. He remembers woofing single words of explanation to his mom—all the family he had—while she cried and slapped his face for grinning. “I don’t know you!” she had wailed, erasing his name.
Another spray in the face. “Out.”
Sammy Squirrel aligns his hands so that the letters on his knuckles can be read clearly. Back when, one afternoon after she showed him how to ride a horse, Cassie had inked the letters upside down, skipping one knuckle: I AM NICE. “Cuz lately maybe sometimes you scare people,” she had said.
The guard’s angry swipe rips the charger cord from the phone. Its plug with a tail of broken cord slings across the floor and
disappears beneath a different table.
“Get out.”
Peace!
“Get a job, jerkoff.”
Love!
Then he is outside under the searing sun, clutching his draining phone and ruined charger. His backpack lands with a thump at his feet. The guard points toward the intersection.
“All the way to the end of the property. The sidewalk.”
Beneath the roar of accelerating traffic his phone vibrates in his hand.
At three percent: We love you!
He glances back at Arby’s. The guard sustains his menacing glare-and-point. The girl sprays down the open door, chasing dribbles with a cloth. Sullen diners cram trash and waddle out.
Stop them. For Cassie. Stop them.
He zips open his backpack, reaches under his wadded bedspread, past the sharp granite chunk and the railroad spike he has collected, under the cafeteria fork and the jagged broken highway reflector, to reach the only weapon he believes Cassie would want him to use.
Chickenshit.
He kneels in the path of customers on the blistering sidewalk. He opens a plastic case the size of a book.
Loser.
Get a knife, get a gun, get a bomb.
His grin grinds. His wild blond mop falls forward. In a flurry of elbows he draws in colored chalk with all his might.
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