Sharp and Dangerous Virtues Page 5

  “Canada has a rich agricultural heritage,” Chad agreed. “No one’s going to starve when they’ve got Canada.”

  “I hate Canada,” Sharis burst out. “Don’t talk to me about Canada.”

  Chad smiled apologetically at Derk. Whenever he and Sharis had visitors, Chad found himself missing his mother. His mother who kept a pot of soup on the stovetop, who believed, forty-plus years too late, in counterculture, who forbade video games and even resisted a computer in the house until Chad reached middle school and the gifted program made it a requirement. Chad’s brother had it easier, being younger: he even got a cell phone.

  It wasn’t until college that Chad had recognized how sparely his family lived. At his parents’ house the plates didn’t match the bowls, guests drank from decorated plastic cups passed out at ballgames, and the bathroom off their kitchen was a tiled cube with no fan and a door that incompletely closed. Any of these things could have been changed—money was not, was never, the issue—and it struck Chad as he reached adulthood that his mother was indeed a resister. The unmatched dishes were a choice. And Chad’s clothes from Meijer’s and Walmart: a choice again.

  Chad’s mother was a tall blonde with watery eyes. In contrast to Chad’s father, who called himself a “nothing,” she called herself a tikkun olam—a heal-the-world—Jew, and drove Chad and his brother to Hebrew school twice a week and made sure they got through their Bar Mitzvahs. Unlike all the other women in their synagogue, even the fat ones, she had very protuberant teeth. “Didn’t they have braces when you were young?” Chad’s little brother had asked.

  “My teeth work fine,” Chad’s mother said, baring them and chomping. “Like a horse’s.”

  No other Jewish mother Chad knew would compare her own teeth to a horse’s; no other Jewish mother would call the Torah “just a bunch of stories about rescues”; no other mother of any stripe wore shoes patched together with duct tape. His own mother, Chad supposed, had prepared him for the oddness that was Sharis.

  “Zucchini brownie?” Chad said, holding out a plate to Derk. His mother’s recipe, Sharis’s garden.

  HERE WERE SOME Ohio casualties of the Grid:

  Wapakoneta, birthplace of the first man on the moon, where General Theodore Marshall, on the day of the flattening, was observed outside the former Neil Armstrong Heritage Museum lifting his sleeve repeatedly to his eyes.

  West Liberty, with its downtown restaurant famous for pies and potato salad, although the family-owned cave outside town with the white (calcite) formations, Ohio Caverns, was left unbombed and was outfitted, according to rumor, as a shelter for the Gridians in case of armed invasion.

  St. Henry’s, once noted for turkeys shipped as far away as Tel Aviv, Saint Petersburg, and Damascus, was replaced by soybean fields that would be rotated (as were the majority of the Grid fields) with wheat and corn. No one knew what had happened to the turkeys. There were stories of a lavish dinner held in the army tents, the scent of roasting meat overpowering the odor of bombs and burning, although everyone in the battalion denied it.

  Tipp City was leveled, as was Lima (pronounced like the bean, despite the town being named for the city in Peru), Versailles (rhymed with fur tails), and Milan (long i, accent on the first syllable).

  Three people had shot themselves during the reclamation of Utica, leading to a brief (it lasted minutes) armed rebellion and the composition of a song:

  The ghosts of Utica

  Just wanted to be free

  To live their simple lives

  The way it used to be.

  The towns of northern Indiana and Illinois and southern Michigan all had similar stories; the big cities—Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit, Fort Wayne, and Chicago—were spared.

  The Ohio Historical Society had a goal of interviewing every person from Ohio who’d been Gridded. They were making a database. They were proving someone cared.

  IF YOU TOOK a five-pointed star and tilted it slightly to the right, as if it were racing, and centered it over the shield shape of Ohio, the star’s center would be the city of Columbus, the state capital, and Cleveland would sit at the star’s uppermost tip. Dayton would be in the star’s bottom left arm. Dayton’s origin was similarly modest: it had been founded as an investment. At the University of Dayton, where Chad as a tenured history professor taught every third year a two-semester course on Dayton history, the investment angle was always the first thing that he mentioned.

  It was true that in 1749 the French declared, by means of mounted plaques, possession of the Ohio River and “all streams that fall into it.” The land that later become Dayton was on one of those contributing streams, so technically one could say that the French first claimed the land that would be Dayton. But the French were hunters and fur trappers, not settlers. No one threatened the natives or the wilderness until transplants from Pennsylvania, baby citizens of a baby country, started canoeing up the Miami River from the Ohio, looking for places to land and stay.

  A number of Indian raids and settler counterraids resulted, culminating in a famous battle where white men’s scalped heads dotted a field like pumpkins. Then a military man known as Mad Anthony Wayne brought up a punishing brigade from Louisville, stunning twelve Indian tribes into submission. The 1795 Greenville Treaty between the Indians and the United States of America effectively ended Native American life in the area. A generation before, few Indians had seen a white man.

  The tribes scattered. Seventeen days after the Greenville Treaty, the parcel of land on which Dayton was built was sold to four investors. The seller was a man named John Symmes, who by some wishful connivance had declared himself the land’s owner. The buyers knew a village would drive up the value of their investment, and announced that their land was available for settlement. A hypothetical village was named Dayton after one of the four investors, General Jonathan Dayton, who never set foot in the area but who had been, nineteen years earlier, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Maybe his name carried some status. The other three investors gave their names to three blazed trees.

  North to south, the Stillwater River empties into the Miami River. Then the Mad River comes in, the three rivers together forming the Great Miami, a river which takes a meandering course to the Ohio River fifty miles south. The Miami River was named for a tribe of Indians; the Stillwater and the Mad, for the qualities of their flow. The surveyors who worked for Dayton and his partners marked their trees at the confluence of the Miami and the Mad. It was a rare settlement that didn’t owe its existence to water.

  Dayton’s first settlers used poles to push their low-sided boats upriver from the Ohio. Rivers then were uncontrolled, wide in places and narrow in others. They had whirlpools and shallows and enough shoreline trees to sometimes meet and make a tunnel. The nineteen men and assorted women and children who made the journey to Dayton were dismayed to find, instead of the rough buildings they expected, nothing but three marked trees.

  “What do you think?” Chad would bellow, his big-man tie swinging. He always wore a tie for this course, sensing that it added to the drama. He rehearsed his speeches, filling them with unexpected or irreverent facts that woke students up; his colleague Ramsey had acidly suggested Chad re-name the course “Dayton: A Celebration.” But Chad couldn’t help himself. “Would you have obeyed those three spots of paint? Would you have left your boat? What do you think of the people who did—were they determined? Docile?” Slight pause. “Where they desperate?”

  You shouldn’t stay here, said the local Indians. Maybe the settlers didn’t want to believe this; maybe they thought that the Indians were up to their usual tricks. In fact, the Indians told the truth. This place won’t be good for you. It floods.

  GENTIA, ONE OF the Gribbles’ neighbors, was telling Sharis about a day years before when she had met her husband’s boss. George was his own boss now: he owned a business that installed and serviced home alarm systems containing small generators. In case Consort crapped out—in case, say, the Dayton nucl
ear plant was bombed—not only would George’s alarm still function, but people’s electricity would function, too. A perfect product for uncertain times, Gentia said.

  Gentia and Sharis were in the kitchen of Sharis’s house; Gentia sat, like Derk had, in the guest seat at the end of the blue table. Their kitchen was like an airport, Sharis often thought, visitors passing through.

  “And I was so nervous,” Gentia said breathlessly, “because I’d never met anyone important, and I was hurrying along in my high-heeled shoes, and you know what George said to me? ‘You’re walking like a fat cow.’”

  “You’re kidding,” Sharis said. George was not small himself.

  “That’s what he said. And that was years ago, when I had a figure.”

  Fat cow. Sharis would never repeat that line. But Gentia, Sharis noticed, repeated it gleefully, a fresh salvo of shots aimed at her husband. Gentia and George had been married for thirty years (Chad and Sharis had been at the anniversary party); they had two grown children, both unmarried.

  “And you wonder why I want to put cyanide in his coffee. I bet Chad’s never like that, is he? Oh no.” Gentia’s voice was suddenly mocking, “Chad’s a gentleman. But you work. You bring in some cash. And back then I was nothing but a frau. I said to him once: ‘George, you’ve got to treat me with respect.’ You know what he said? ‘Gentia, respect is something you earn.’” Gentia smirked. “So now I’m earning it.”

  Sharis sighed. Thirty years. She looked at George in the backyard helping Leon tie his shoelaces, and tried to imagine him saying such horrible things. Squatting as he was, George was the shape of an egg. Of course, you didn’t know what Gentia had said back, or said before. You never really knew what went on in a family. Belatedly, Gentia’s last comment sunk in. “You’re earning it?” Sharis asked.

  “I’m bringing in the big bucks, baby. I’m selling alarms! You know me, aren’t I a natural salesperson? Everybody wants a system. You know who thought up that antibomb guarantee?” Gentia pointed elaborately to herself. “I know what people want. I do.”

  Sharis nodded. There was something spookily compelling about Gentia, with her sureness and big jewelry and her happy wallowing in the muddy puddle of her marriage. She threw lots of parties, inviting Sharis and Chad as the young people.

  “Listen, it’s an ill wind that blows nobody good. This conflict is a gold mine for us. I tell George every night: I love the threat of war.”

  CHAD WAS SCHEDULED for his Dayton course again this fall. He was adding some information on geography: explaining the three glaciations that, pushing down from Ohio’s northwest corner, had moved like snowplows across the state, flattening the ground and pushing ahead ridges of gravel and stone. The final glaciation, the Wisconsin, occurred some fourteen thousand years ago. The ridges of stone that had been the glaciers’ leading edge were now western Ohio’s modest version of hills. The northwest corner of Ohio had been pressed flat. The glacial melt on its surface formed an ur–Great Lake that stretched a hundred miles west of Lake Erie’s current border, and remains of this lake lived on for thousands of years as the Great Black Swamp. The Great Black Swamp was drained in the late 1800s to provide land for farming. The glacial melt that sank into the earth became the aquifer. Thanks to the glaciers’ heavy scraping, no caves of significance opened to the surface of western Ohio; there were, however, huge caverns filled with water far underground.

  Chad toyed with the idea, that year, of having Dayton speak in the first person. If Dayton could talk—if any loke could talk—what would it say? A novel point of view to pique his students’ interest. Hi, I’m Dayton. I’m glad you’re studying me this year!

  Maybe not. Ramsey would have a field day.

  But words came to Chad unbidden, late one night when he was standing in the kitchen eating ice cream straight from the container. Later he couldn’t fall asleep for hours, because he’d thought he was a Grid supporter. I’ll test it on Sharis, he thought. Because she was from one of the reclaimed towns. Because she’d been there at the Gridding. But for years she hadn’t spoken about that time, and Chad wavered, worried that his words would stir up some silt or sludge inside her.

  Still, he needed her opinion. Sharis didn’t have Chad’s education (Chad had earned his doctorate), but he never doubted that Sharis was as smart as he was. Maybe smarter. Everything she saw or heard, she remembered. The next day he presented his class in the basement, Sharis sitting in the big red leather chair Chad had moved from his parents’ house, Chad pacing in front of her. They’d done tests of Chad’s lectures before. Almost always, Sharis said “Very good!” or “I get it, but …” and produced some minor suggestion.

  Chad said: “I can’t tell you how the Grid has affected me. All my fellow lokes just north of me—Piqua, St. Mary’s, Troy—they went away. I heard about them all the time, their fairs, their factories, their nature centers, their disasters, and then they were simply gone. They were, then they were not. I never dreamed such a thing. It’s as if my celebrated aquifer were shrinking, as if every day, no matter how clear and luminous, runs the risk of cold and clouds. It’s as if a new wide vein has been slipped under my ground, a vein not of chalk or limestone, but of fear. Any day now, people will poke in the ground and hit it. For a loke, what one dreads isn’t change or age or even decrepitude. A loke is like a person: it fears death.”

  Chad raised his eyebrows and looked hopefully at Sharis. She shook her head and blinked and looked away. It works, Chad thought, delighted.

  wanted

  NO ONE CAME anymore. No families appeared in the parking lot, children tumbling from the cars and screaming; no solitary birdwatchers worshipped in the Church of the Woods; no school buses disgorged their loads and waited, their drivers lingering at their vehicles like coachmen near their steeds. Charles and Diana, Aullwood Audubon Nature Center’s two full-time paid employees, had spent the summer almost totally alone. Charles hadn’t escorted a morning nature walk for days, although in the past he had guided groups of up to thirty. The two interns, fresh out of college, had been yanked by their families to safer jobs in Virginia and Wisconsin. The hyper-oldie guide who liked to dither about watching Prince Charles marry the real Princess Diana had transported herself to Florida. The gift shop volunteers hadn’t shown up for weeks, and even Edna, the only volunteer who dusted, no longer bothered to message that she wasn’t coming. Charles suspected that Aullwood’s peculiar position—just south of the watchtowers and electrical fencing of the Grid, just west of the old Dayton airport (which saw a lot of military use these days), just north of I-70—gave it a sinister air. If it lay five miles in any direction but south, the nature center would be inside the Grid.

  Charles had an apartment on the property, above the turtle exhibit in the Education Building, but where Diana spent her nights he wasn’t quite sure. For several days, he was certain, she hadn’t left the nature center grounds. She had told him she hated going back to her apartment, on the electric robo-tram that was always empty, past the closed houses and the unmowed lawns of northern Dayton. It was the middle of a heat wave, the planes droning over them, and Diana, the titular nature center director (chosen over Charles, and he was bitter about this), who had a categorical if not particularly scientific mind, was much better than Charles at identifying the aircraft. Several afternoons they lay on the flat rocks of the amphitheater and watched the planes pass overhead. There’s a C-16, she’d say. That’s an F-24, or a Scorpion (a new sort of bomber), or a Turkish Delight. “My,” Charles might say, shaking his head, lifting his shirt to scratch his belly, “a woman who knows her machinery.” He knew most males would at least pretend an interest in the planes, but he knew by chirp and feather and flight pattern every bird that cut the nature center’s airy way. Birders thought he was a wonder; he didn’t care what other people thought.

  One afternoon—a Thursday? He’d lost track of the days—Charles fell asleep on a bed of moss under a tree, and when he woke up and staggered along the creek bed toward
the Education Building, he happened upon Diana by the stream, pulling her cotton shirt over her head with a single hand, her back twisting in a disturbingly erotic way. He said, “What are you doing?”

  Diana didn’t seem surprised to hear him. She unlatched her bra and dropped it on the ground. “It’s a nature center,” she said, coyly yet firmly, dropping her shorts and unpeeling her underpants, “and I’m hot.” Smiling and totally naked, she turned to face him.

  Charles felt his penis swell. “What could be more natural?” he said.

  “Exactly.” Diana nodded approvingly, like a teacher. She brushed a dried leaf out of Charles’s beard. She’d been a teacher, Charles knew. She’d been a teacher, then some sort of counselor for people considering cloning (he didn’t understand this, exactly; she’d worked for a doctor), then she’d had a bad experience and returned to college for a Masters in business. When they first met, five years before, she’d been hired on as the coordinator of investments. Her being a businesswoman repelled him. Despite her wild head of hair he’d thought of her as asexual; no sparks had ever flown. But now he saw her delicately upturned breasts and pink nipples, her modest tuft of pubic hair (reminding him of the hopeful crest of the pileated woodpecker, one of his favorite birds, not, unfortunately, spotted at Aullwood since 2024—the Grid had had some devastating effects on birds), and her overabundant hips, really quite triangular, spreading from a small waist. She smiled, turned, and slowly approached the creek, bending over to splash her face with water, displaying herself just as a female wolf would, her buttocks dappled with leaf-shadow, her pink cleft beckoning him in that animal way, and it was no surprise to either of them when he stripped off his clothes and came behind her, slipping into her right there on the stream bank as she moaned and maneuvered herself to lean against the log which had, in the old days, been the forest’s lure to adventurous children to cross the stream and come inside.