Download an audio version at (www.joshuamalbin.com/soap-and-water).

’Tit Jean had grown up in a town built on the tussocks of the Louisiana bayou, land that since the last Ice Age had been replenished by spring deposits of Mississippi River silt.  By the mid-twentieth century, though, the Mississippi was diked, leveed, and riprapped from mouth nearly to headwaters, and all that silt flushed straight into the Gulf of Mexico.  Meanwhile oil and gas company canals eroded the tussocks and hurricanes blasted them, and ’Tit Jean’s homeland melted away.  The bayou drowned and the fish and shrimp and crawfish that had once used its grasses and tree roots as a nursery disappeared.  He hung on longer than he should have, trying to raise a young family and fishing like his father and grandfather had, because he wanted his own two boys to grow up immersed in Acadian culture.  At last, though, Hurricane Grace washed them out, along with the few of their neighbors stubborn enough to have stayed with them.  They had to move to a FEMA trailer park in Baton Rouge.

Acadians were heavily outnumbered there by English-speaking refugees, white and black.  He’d hated it.  Where once he’d been his own boss, now when he could get a job at all it was always as someone’s lackey, and the money was never good.  His sons were growing up away from the water and although they still understood French when he or his wife Hélène spoke it, more often than not they answered in English.  Guerin, the younger one, even dreamed in English.  ’Tit Jean knew because he sometimes talked in his sleep.

It had always been clear to him that his problems did not matter to politicians, and conversely, because politicians obviously did care about Western violence, he’d assumed it would never be part of his world.  But one day his cousin came to the trailer to visit and started telling him about how they’d closed the border between Nebraska and Colorado.  He wanted ’Tit Jean to spend the last of his insurance settlement to buy a truck with him and drive it back and forth from Omaha to Denver, carrying some of the many items banned because they could be used in weapons: fertilizer, cell phones, nail guns, laptop computers, and so on.  ’Tit Jean had been skeptical, but got more interested when his cousin said that many other Acadians were already doing it.  He’d agreed, taken his family upriver, and become a smuggler.

This was a life much more like the bayou.  Acadians left their wives and young children at home, like they had done to fish, and when it was time for supper they drew together their small and midsized box trucks on the plains, the way they’d once drawn their boats together.  When his boys got older he’d bought his cousin’s half of the truck, and they’d started riding with him.  That was familiar too, it fit into the pattern of his own teenage years working for his father.  They even had a reason to speak French all the time, to talk freely on the CB.  Few GIs could speak it, and even the rare ones who knew Parisian or Quebecois French had a hard time with Cajun accents and rhythms. 

God must not have wanted Acadians to disappear entirely.  Not that ’Tit Jean thought of war as a blessing, but if it had to come it couldn’t have been better timed. 

Today ’Tit Jean was in Denver, handling a referral from a friend and client named Elliott.  The new customer wanted camping things—a sharp knife, waterproof matches, freeze-dried food, propane canisters—and a gun.  Guns were tricky; a lot of Acadians wouldn’t handle them.  While ’Tit Jean wouldn't take the risk of dealing them to Posses, in his opinion Western Territorials were just as American as Coastals and had a right to what safety they could buy.  Besides, guns were very profitable.  He merely insisted on some precautions.  For one thing, he never kept them in the truck.  If GIs searched him and found a few pieces, as had happened four times now, it was easy to say he had them to fight off bandits, and for the right price soldiers could sympathize.  But if they found two cases of AR-15s with auto-sear conversions, there wasn't much worth saying.  On rare occasions it was necessary to transport a lot at once, but usually it was smarter to hide a little here and a little there. 

He also never took orders for them directly on his own cell phone.  In this case Elliott had called Hélène in Omaha this morning, and she’d sent a message to him up the radio chain of trucks, telling him to check the messages in a certain discussion thread of a certain online bulletin board.  Eventually he’d made contact and arranged to meet two people in the ruins between the South Platte and Interstate 25.  He visited a few other Acadians to buy what he didn’t have in stock and headed there in the late afternoon.

Early in the Occupation, guerilla fighters had hidden in the quarter’s warehouses and abandoned railyards, trying to sabotage the freight rails carrying coal into Denver from Wyoming to the north and from the Green River coalfields around Steamboat Springsto the west.  So the Fedshad ordered out all the squatters and the few legal residents and perforated the area with tank shells and helicopter missiles. 

Guerin sat by the passenger door with an unloaded shotgun pointed downward between his knees.  Bertrand, on the middle seat, had driven through the night.  His head rested on the seat back; he was dead asleep with his mouth open.  Guerin took off his belt and fed it through a bracket over Bertrand’s head, then shortened the loop until it was just the distance to Bertrand’s neck.  He’d been playing this same trick for two weeks now.  The next step would be to drop the loop under Bertrand’s chin, so he’d awaken, try to sit up, catch his chin on the belt, and recoil his head into the metal partition behind him.

“Don’t do that,” ’Tit Jean said in French.

Guerin rolled his eyes and took down the belt.  He was ’Tit Jean’s pet and ’Tit Jean suspected he knew it.  He was open and happy and liked coming on the road, probably would be content to do nothing else for the rest of his life.  ’Tit Jean loved Bertrand too, of course, fiercely, but he could never get as comfortable with him.  He took everything ’Tit Jean said seriously, which often made ’Tit Jean self-conscious.  Sometimes he was so deliberate that ’Tit Jean felt like they were making business deals.

There was also the difference that Bertrand didn’t want to be in the truck.  He wanted to be more than a smuggler when he grew up.  ’Tit Jean could understand that.  There had been Acadian kids all around him when he was young who’d wanted to go to college and move away.  He’d encouraged Bertrand to take the test for Nebraska’s honors boarding school, but hadn’t been shocked when he didn’t pass.  Neither he nor Hélène was exceptionally smart, so their children weren’t likely to be either.  It did break his heart, though.  Bertrand had been so devastated at the prospect of regular high school.  ’Tit Jean had bought him books (biology and trigonometry textbooks to start, and the Bible), and said he’d just have to apply to college as a homeschooled kid.  Then of course he’d had to let Guerin drop out of school too when he got old enough to fail the state test.

He parked behind a warehouse that had been a brewpub for a time.  The sign and decorative iron grille had collapsed into a jungle gym of twisted metal, half in and half out of the window frame.  ’Tit Jean took a flashlight from the glove compartment. 

“Don’t do it when I’m gone, either,” he said.  Guerin got out of the cab and Bertrand woke up enough to stretch across the empty seat.  ’Tit Jean closed the door carefully so as not to catch the boy’s feet and went to get the crate with the knife, matches, and food from the cargo bay. 

He descended a few steps to a tiled concrete slab, separated from the river by chains.  The black paint that once prettied them and their posts now seasoned the tiles in little flakes.  A man fished there, leaning his rod over the chains and teasing a fly across the surface of a pool formed by the base of a footbridge and the near, reveted bank.  Four fat trout wavered against the current, ignoring the fly.

’Tit Jean walked up the river, ducked behind the aquarium, and found the Children's Museum.  A pickup was parked on the walk; his customers must be inside.  Leaving the truck out front like that was as bad as a neon sign, but it was too late now to be worth moving it.  He’d just have to hurry.

The Children's Museum, back when its walls were whole, had disguised its architectural blandness with a pyramidal glass entranceway topped with pink-and-white triangular panels.  Every pane of that glass had since broken and the panels had fractured; nothing distracted any longer from the green-gray boxes of the main building.  It looked like wasted space—which made it a good hiding spot.

He crunched through the glass on the entranceway and found his customers, a man and a woman.  The man was average height, thin, and dressed as a Nationalist.  He angled his body aside when ’Tit Jean entered and let the woman come forward, offering her hand.  She was an Easterner.  Only Eastern women wore their shirts untucked like that when they decided to rough it, unable to see the difference between casual and practical.

’Tit Jean took her hand for a moment, long enough to feel her trying to use a solid, masculine grip.

“Four fifty for the gun and cleaning kit, fifty for shells,two fifty for the rest,” he said. He glanced at his watch.  Generally it was safe to spend about fifteen minutes on a sale, the amount of time it took to send a detachment from a local Fed base.  But he had no way of knowing how long that truck had been parked out front.  “Count it now, we are short of time.”

The woman nodded her okay to the price.  ’Tit Jean lit his flashlight and led them into the museum.

The halls were narrow and curved, and doors pierced irregular rooms by the corners.  It was hard to remember the time when places could be made like this, for nothing but middle-class children's play.  Or when such places could be built without windows because the electricity never failed.  Even the shell-holes in the roof only let in enough light to show the gray outlines of things.  Not until the flashlight beam passed over them did they stand out in their bright, peeling, acrylic colors: gnarled trees and toadstools in hollow plastic, kitchens stocked with wooden food, play-pits full of leaking stuffed animals and crumbling rubber balls.  Their feet made shuffling noises on the carpet. 

Ropes climbed into the darkness of a two-story atrium, whispering against each other.  Somewhere above were pigeons; they could be heard cooing and the flashlight revealed their shit crusted to the floor.  A few steps further was the fire truck where ’Tit Jean kept the smaller pieces, the ones for women.  They were in one of the side compartments, underneath a coil of rotten canvas hose.  He opened the panel, retrieved what he wanted, and shut the bin so the smell wouldn't escape, a dusty smell like an old hammock.  The gun was in an unmarked cardboard box; he folded open the top briefly to make sure of the contents—.38 revolver, oil, cloths, rod—then turned to his customers.  The man was already holding out the money in fifty-dollar bills.  'Tit Jean counted it, pocketed it, and led them back to the play kitchen, where he kept boxes of cartridges under the oven.  He gave them one of the proper caliber and passed the light over his watch.

“Five minutes,” he said.  “Drive south, fast.”  Away from both Interstates, he meant, since the Feds on their way, if there were any, would arrive from those and would know what to make of a truck leaving these ruins.

’Tit Jean had grown up in a town built on the tussocks of the Louisiana bayou, land that since the last Ice Age had been replenished by spring deposits of Mississippi River silt.  By the mid-twentieth century, though, the Mississippi was diked, leveed, and riprapped from mouth nearly to headwaters, and all that silt flushed straight into the Gulf of Mexico.  Meanwhile oil and gas company canals eroded the tussocks and hurricanes blasted them, and ’Tit Jean’s homeland melted away.  The bayou drowned and the fish and shrimp and crawfish that had once used its grasses and tree roots as a nursery disappeared.  He hung on longer than he should have, trying to raise a young family and fishing like his father and grandfather had, because he wanted his own two boys to grow up immersed in Acadian culture.  At last, though, Hurricane Grace washed them out, along with the few of their neighbors stubborn enough to have stayed with them.  They had to move to a FEMA trailer park in Baton Rouge.

Acadians were heavily outnumbered there by English-speaking refugees, white and black.  He’d hated it.  Where once he’d been his own boss, now when he could get a job at all it was always as someone’s lackey, and the money was never good.  His sons were growing up away from the water and although they still understood French when he or his wife Hélène spoke it, more often than not they answered in English.  Guerin, the younger one, even dreamed in English.  ’Tit Jean knew because he sometimes talked in his sleep.

It had always been clear to him that his problems did not matter to politicians, and conversely, because politicians obviously did care about Western violence, he’d assumed it would never be part of his world.  But one day his cousin came to the trailer to visit and started telling him about how they’d closed the border between Nebraska and Colorado.  He wanted ’Tit Jean to spend the last of his insurance settlement to buy a truck with him and drive it back and forth from Omaha to Denver, carrying some of the many items banned because they could be used in weapons: fertilizer, cell phones, nail guns, laptop computers, and so on.  ’Tit Jean had been skeptical, but got more interested when his cousin said that many other Acadians were already doing it.  He’d agreed, taken his family upriver, and become a smuggler.

This was a life much more like the bayou.  Acadians left their wives and young children at home, like they had done to fish, and when it was time for supper they drew together their small and midsized box trucks on the plains, the way they’d once drawn their boats together.  When his boys got older he’d bought his cousin’s half of the truck, and they’d started riding with him.  That was familiar too, it fit into the pattern of his own teenage years working for his father.  They even had a reason to speak French all the time, to talk freely on the CB.  Few GIs could speak it, and even the rare ones who knew Parisian or Quebecois French had a hard time with Cajun accents and rhythms. 

God must not have wanted Acadians to disappear entirely.  Not that ’Tit Jean thought of war as a blessing, but if it had to come it couldn’t have been better timed. 

Today ’Tit Jean was in Denver, handling a referral from a friend and client named Elliott.  The new customer wanted camping things—a sharp knife, waterproof matches, freeze-dried food, propane canisters—and a gun.  Guns were tricky; a lot of Acadians wouldn’t handle them.  While ’Tit Jean wouldn't take the risk of dealing them to Posses, in his opinion Western Territorials were just as American as Coastals and had a right to what safety they could buy.  Besides, guns were very profitable.  He merely insisted on some precautions.  For one thing, he never kept them in the truck.  If GIs searched him and found a few pieces, as had happened four times now, it was easy to say he had them to fight off bandits, and for the right price soldiers could sympathize.  But if they found two cases of AR-15s with auto-sear conversions, there wasn't much worth saying.  On rare occasions it was necessary to transport a lot at once, but usually it was smarter to hide a little here and a little there. 

He also never took orders for them directly on his own cell phone.  In this case Elliott had called Hélène in Omaha this morning, and she’d sent a message to him up the radio chain of trucks, telling him to check the messages in a certain discussion thread of a certain online bulletin board.  Eventually he’d made contact and arranged to meet two people in the ruins between the South Platte and Interstate 25.  He visited a few other Acadians to buy what he didn’t have in stock and headed there in the late afternoon.

Early in the Occupation, guerilla fighters had hidden in the quarter’s warehouses and abandoned railyards, trying to sabotage the freight rails carrying coal into Denver from Wyoming to the north and from the Green River coalfields around Steamboat Springsto the west.  So the Fedshad ordered out all the squatters and the few legal residents and perforated the area with tank shells and helicopter missiles. 

Guerin sat by the passenger door with an unloaded shotgun pointed downward between his knees.  Bertrand, on the middle seat, had driven through the night.  His head rested on the seat back; he was dead asleep with his mouth open.  Guerin took off his belt and fed it through a bracket over Bertrand’s head, then shortened the loop until it was just the distance to Bertrand’s neck.  He’d been playing this same trick for two weeks now.  The next step would be to drop the loop under Bertrand’s chin, so he’d awaken, try to sit up, catch his chin on the belt, and recoil his head into the metal partition behind him.

“Don’t do that,” ’Tit Jean said in French.

Guerin rolled his eyes and took down the belt.  He was ’Tit Jean’s pet and ’Tit Jean suspected he knew it.  He was open and happy and liked coming on the road, probably would be content to do nothing else for the rest of his life.  ’Tit Jean loved Bertrand too, of course, fiercely, but he could never get as comfortable with him.  He took everything ’Tit Jean said seriously, which often made ’Tit Jean self-conscious.  Sometimes he was so deliberate that ’Tit Jean felt like they were making business deals.

There was also the difference that Bertrand didn’t want to be in the truck.  He wanted to be more than a smuggler when he grew up.  ’Tit Jean could understand that.  There had been Acadian kids all around him when he was young who’d wanted to go to college and move away.  He’d encouraged Bertrand to take the test for Nebraska’s honors boarding school, but hadn’t been shocked when he didn’t pass.  Neither he nor Hélène was exceptionally smart, so their children weren’t likely to be either.  It did break his heart, though.  Bertrand had been so devastated at the prospect of regular high school.  ’Tit Jean had bought him books (biology and trigonometry textbooks to start, and the Bible), and said he’d just have to apply to college as a homeschooled kid.  Then of course he’d had to let Guerin drop out of school too when he got old enough to fail the state test.

He parked behind a warehouse that had been a brewpub for a time.  The sign and decorative iron grille had collapsed into a jungle gym of twisted metal, half in and half out of the window frame.  ’Tit Jean took a flashlight from the glove compartment. 

“Don’t do it when I’m gone, either,” he said.  Guerin got out of the cab and Bertrand woke up enough to stretch across the empty seat.  ’Tit Jean closed the door carefully so as not to catch the boy’s feet and went to get the crate with the knife, matches, and food from the cargo bay. 

He descended a few steps to a tiled concrete slab, separated from the river by chains.  The black paint that once prettied them and their posts now seasoned the tiles in little flakes.  A man fished there, leaning his rod over the chains and teasing a fly across the surface of a pool formed by the base of a footbridge and the near, reveted bank.  Four fat trout wavered against the current, ignoring the fly.

’Tit Jean walked up the river, ducked behind the aquarium, and found the Children's Museum.  A pickup was parked on the walk; his customers must be inside.  Leaving the truck out front like that was as bad as a neon sign, but it was too late now to be worth moving it.  He’d just have to hurry.

The Children's Museum, back when its walls were whole, had disguised its architectural blandness with a pyramidal glass entranceway topped with pink-and-white triangular panels.  Every pane of that glass had since broken and the panels had fractured; nothing distracted any longer from the green-gray boxes of the main building.  It looked like wasted space—which made it a good hiding spot.

He crunched through the glass on the entranceway and found his customers, a man and a woman.  The man was average height, thin, and dressed as a Nationalist.  He angled his body aside when ’Tit Jean entered and let the woman come forward, offering her hand.  She was an Easterner.  Only Eastern women wore their shirts untucked like that when they decided to rough it, unable to see the difference between casual and practical.

’Tit Jean took her hand for a moment, long enough to feel her trying to use a solid, masculine grip.

“Four fifty for the gun and cleaning kit, fifty for shells,two fifty for the rest,” he said. He glanced at his watch.  Generally it was safe to spend about fifteen minutes on a sale, the amount of time it took to send a detachment from a local Fed base.  But he had no way of knowing how long that truck had been parked out front.  “Count it now, we are short of time.”

The woman nodded her okay to the price.  ’Tit Jean lit his flashlight and led them into the museum.

The halls were narrow and curved, and doors pierced irregular rooms by the corners.  It was hard to remember the time when places could be made like this, for nothing but middle-class children's play.  Or when such places could be built without windows because the electricity never failed.  Even the shell-holes in the roof only let in enough light to show the gray outlines of things.  Not until the flashlight beam passed over them did they stand out in their bright, peeling, acrylic colors: gnarled trees and toadstools in hollow plastic, kitchens stocked with wooden food, play-pits full of leaking stuffed animals and crumbling rubber balls.  Their feet made shuffling noises on the carpet. 

Ropes climbed into the darkness of a two-story atrium, whispering against each other.  Somewhere above were pigeons; they could be heard cooing and the flashlight revealed their shit crusted to the floor.  A few steps further was the fire truck where ’Tit Jean kept the smaller pieces, the ones for women.  They were in one of the side compartments, underneath a coil of rotten canvas hose.  He opened the panel, retrieved what he wanted, and shut the bin so the smell wouldn't escape, a dusty smell like an old hammock.  The gun was in an unmarked cardboard box; he folded open the top briefly to make sure of the contents—.38 revolver, oil, cloths, rod—then turned to his customers.  The man was already holding out the money in fifty-dollar bills.  'Tit Jean counted it, pocketed it, and led them back to the play kitchen, where he kept boxes of cartridges under the oven.  He gave them one of the proper caliber and passed the light over his watch.

“Five minutes,” he said.  “Drive south, fast.”  Away from both Interstates, he meant, since the Feds on their way, if there were any, would arrive from those and would know what to make of a truck leaving these ruins.

To keep up with new chapters as they're published, you can follow me on Twitter (@joshuamalbin), Facebook (www.facebook.com/joshua.malbin), my blog (www.joshuamalbin.com), or sign up for email alerts (http://eepurl.com/f-9tH).

’Tit Jean had grown up in a town built on the tussocks of the Louisiana bayou, land that since the last Ice Age had been replenished by spring deposits of Mississippi River silt.  By the mid-twentieth century, though, the Mississippi was diked, leveed, and riprapped from mouth nearly to headwaters, and all that silt flushed straight into the Gulf of Mexico.  Meanwhile oil and gas company canals eroded the tussocks and hurricanes blasted them, and ’Tit Jean’s homeland melted away.  The bayou drowned and the fish and shrimp and crawfish that had once used its grasses and tree roots as a nursery disappeared.  He hung on longer than he should have, trying to raise a young family and fishing like his father and grandfather had, because he wanted his own two boys to grow up immersed in Acadian culture.  At last, though, Hurricane Grace washed them out, along with the few of their neighbors stubborn enough to have stayed with them.  They had to move to a FEMA trailer park in Baton Rouge.

Acadians were heavily outnumbered there by English-speaking refugees, white and black.  He’d hated it.  Where once he’d been his own boss, now when he could get a job at all it was always as someone’s lackey, and the money was never good.  His sons were growing up away from the water and although they still understood French when he or his wife Hélène spoke it, more often than not they answered in English.  Guerin, the younger one, even dreamed in English.  ’Tit Jean knew because he sometimes talked in his sleep.

It had always been clear to him that his problems did not matter to politicians, and conversely, because politicians obviously did care about Western violence, he’d assumed it would never be part of his world.  But one day his cousin came to the trailer to visit and started telling him about how they’d closed the border between Nebraska and Colorado.  He wanted ’Tit Jean to spend the last of his insurance settlement to buy a truck with him and drive it back and forth from Omaha to Denver, carrying some of the many items banned because they could be used in weapons: fertilizer, cell phones, nail guns, laptop computers, and so on.  ’Tit Jean had been skeptical, but got more interested when his cousin said that many other Acadians were already doing it.  He’d agreed, taken his family upriver, and become a smuggler.

This was a life much more like the bayou.  Acadians left their wives and young children at home, like they had done to fish, and when it was time for supper they drew together their small and midsized box trucks on the plains, the way they’d once drawn their boats together.  When his boys got older he’d bought his cousin’s half of the truck, and they’d started riding with him.  That was familiar too, it fit into the pattern of his own teenage years working for his father.  They even had a reason to speak French all the time, to talk freely on the CB.  Few GIs could speak it, and even the rare ones who knew Parisian or Quebecois French had a hard time with Cajun accents and rhythms. 

God must not have wanted Acadians to disappear entirely.  Not that ’Tit Jean thought of war as a blessing, but if it had to come it couldn’t have been better timed. 

Today ’Tit Jean was in Denver, handling a referral from a friend and client named Elliott.  The new customer wanted camping things—a sharp knife, waterproof matches, freeze-dried food, propane canisters—and a gun.  Guns were tricky; a lot of Acadians wouldn’t handle them.  While ’Tit Jean wouldn't take the risk of dealing them to Posses, in his opinion Western Territorials were just as American as Coastals and had a right to what safety they could buy.  Besides, guns were very profitable.  He merely insisted on some precautions.  For one thing, he never kept them in the truck.  If GIs searched him and found a few pieces, as had happened four times now, it was easy to say he had them to fight off bandits, and for the right price soldiers could sympathize.  But if they found two cases of AR-15s with auto-sear conversions, there wasn't much worth saying.  On rare occasions it was necessary to transport a lot at once, but usually it was smarter to hide a little here and a little there. 

He also never took orders for them directly on his own cell phone.  In this case Elliott had called Hélène in Omaha this morning, and she’d sent a message to him up the radio chain of trucks, telling him to check the messages in a certain discussion thread of a certain online bulletin board.  Eventually he’d made contact and arranged to meet two people in the ruins between the South Platte and Interstate 25.  He visited a few other Acadians to buy what he didn’t have in stock and headed there in the late afternoon.

Early in the Occupation, guerilla fighters had hidden in the quarter’s warehouses and abandoned railyards, trying to sabotage the freight rails carrying coal into Denver from Wyoming to the north and from the Green River coalfields around Steamboat Springsto the west.  So the Fedshad ordered out all the squatters and the few legal residents and perforated the area with tank shells and helicopter missiles. 

Guerin sat by the passenger door with an unloaded shotgun pointed downward between his knees.  Bertrand, on the middle seat, had driven through the night.  His head rested on the seat back; he was dead asleep with his mouth open.  Guerin took off his belt and fed it through a bracket over Bertrand’s head, then shortened the loop until it was just the distance to Bertrand’s neck.  He’d been playing this same trick for two weeks now.  The next step would be to drop the loop under Bertrand’s chin, so he’d awaken, try to sit up, catch his chin on the belt, and recoil his head into the metal partition behind him.

“Don’t do that,” ’Tit Jean said in French.

Guerin rolled his eyes and took down the belt.  He was ’Tit Jean’s pet and ’Tit Jean suspected he knew it.  He was open and happy and liked coming on the road, probably would be content to do nothing else for the rest of his life.  ’Tit Jean loved Bertrand too, of course, fiercely, but he could never get as comfortable with him.  He took everything ’Tit Jean said seriously, which often made ’Tit Jean self-conscious.  Sometimes he was so deliberate that ’Tit Jean felt like they were making business deals.

There was also the difference that Bertrand didn’t want to be in the truck.  He wanted to be more than a smuggler when he grew up.  ’Tit Jean could understand that.  There had been Acadian kids all around him when he was young who’d wanted to go to college and move away.  He’d encouraged Bertrand to take the test for Nebraska’s honors boarding school, but hadn’t been shocked when he didn’t pass.  Neither he nor Hélène was exceptionally smart, so their children weren’t likely to be either.  It did break his heart, though.  Bertrand had been so devastated at the prospect of regular high school.  ’Tit Jean had bought him books (biology and trigonometry textbooks to start, and the Bible), and said he’d just have to apply to college as a homeschooled kid.  Then of course he’d had to let Guerin drop out of school too when he got old enough to fail the state test.

He parked behind a warehouse that had been a brewpub for a time.  The sign and decorative iron grille had collapsed into a jungle gym of twisted metal, half in and half out of the window frame.  ’Tit Jean took a flashlight from the glove compartment. 

“Don’t do it when I’m gone, either,” he said.  Guerin got out of the cab and Bertrand woke up enough to stretch across the empty seat.  ’Tit Jean closed the door carefully so as not to catch the boy’s feet and went to get the crate with the knife, matches, and food from the cargo bay. 

He descended a few steps to a tiled concrete slab, separated from the river by chains.  The black paint that once prettied them and their posts now seasoned the tiles in little flakes.  A man fished there, leaning his rod over the chains and teasing a fly across the surface of a pool formed by the base of a footbridge and the near, reveted bank.  Four fat trout wavered against the current, ignoring the fly.

’Tit Jean walked up the river, ducked behind the aquarium, and found the Children's Museum.  A pickup was parked on the walk; his customers must be inside.  Leaving the truck out front like that was as bad as a neon sign, but it was too late now to be worth moving it.  He’d just have to hurry.

The Children's Museum, back when its walls were whole, had disguised its architectural blandness with a pyramidal glass entranceway topped with pink-and-white triangular panels.  Every pane of that glass had since broken and the panels had fractured; nothing distracted any longer from the green-gray boxes of the main building.  It looked like wasted space—which made it a good hiding spot.

He crunched through the glass on the entranceway and found his customers, a man and a woman.  The man was average height, thin, and dressed as a Nationalist.  He angled his body aside when ’Tit Jean entered and let the woman come forward, offering her hand.  She was an Easterner.  Only Eastern women wore their shirts untucked like that when they decided to rough it, unable to see the difference between casual and practical.

’Tit Jean took her hand for a moment, long enough to feel her trying to use a solid, masculine grip.

“Four fifty for the gun and cleaning kit, fifty for shells,two fifty for the rest,” he said. He glanced at his watch.  Generally it was safe to spend about fifteen minutes on a sale, the amount of time it took to send a detachment from a local Fed base.  But he had no way of knowing how long that truck had been parked out front.  “Count it now, we are short of time.”

The woman nodded her okay to the price.  ’Tit Jean lit his flashlight and led them into the museum.

The halls were narrow and curved, and doors pierced irregular rooms by the corners.  It was hard to remember the time when places could be made like this, for nothing but middle-class children's play.  Or when such places could be built without windows because the electricity never failed.  Even the shell-holes in the roof only let in enough light to show the gray outlines of things.  Not until the flashlight beam passed over them did they stand out in their bright, peeling, acrylic colors: gnarled trees and toadstools in hollow plastic, kitchens stocked with wooden food, play-pits full of leaking stuffed animals and crumbling rubber balls.  Their feet made shuffling noises on the carpet. 

Ropes climbed into the darkness of a two-story atrium, whispering against each other.  Somewhere above were pigeons; they could be heard cooing and the flashlight revealed their shit crusted to the floor.  A few steps further was the fire truck where ’Tit Jean kept the smaller pieces, the ones for women.  They were in one of the side compartments, underneath a coil of rotten canvas hose.  He opened the panel, retrieved what he wanted, and shut the bin so the smell wouldn't escape, a dusty smell like an old hammock.  The gun was in an unmarked cardboard box; he folded open the top briefly to make sure of the contents—.38 revolver, oil, cloths, rod—then turned to his customers.  The man was already holding out the money in fifty-dollar bills.  'Tit Jean counted it, pocketed it, and led them back to the play kitchen, where he kept boxes of cartridges under the oven.  He gave them one of the proper caliber and passed the light over his watch.

“Five minutes,” he said.  “Drive south, fast.”  Away from both Interstates, he meant, since the Feds on their way, if there were any, would arrive from those and would know what to make of a truck leaving these ruins.

’Tit Jean had grown up in a town built on the tussocks of the Louisiana bayou, land that since the last Ice Age had been replenished by spring deposits of Mississippi River silt.  By the mid-twentieth century, though, the Mississippi was diked, leveed, and riprapped from mouth nearly to headwaters, and all that silt flushed straight into the Gulf of Mexico.  Meanwhile oil and gas company canals eroded the tussocks and hurricanes blasted them, and ’Tit Jean’s homeland melted away.  The bayou drowned and the fish and shrimp and crawfish that had once used its grasses and tree roots as a nursery disappeared.  He hung on longer than he should have, trying to raise a young family and fishing like his father and grandfather had, because he wanted his own two boys to grow up immersed in Acadian culture.  At last, though, Hurricane Grace washed them out, along with the few of their neighbors stubborn enough to have stayed with them.  They had to move to a FEMA trailer park in Baton Rouge.

Acadians were heavily outnumbered there by English-speaking refugees, white and black.  He’d hated it.  Where once he’d been his own boss, now when he could get a job at all it was always as someone’s lackey, and the money was never good.  His sons were growing up away from the water and although they still understood French when he or his wife Hélène spoke it, more often than not they answered in English.  Guerin, the younger one, even dreamed in English.  ’Tit Jean knew because he sometimes talked in his sleep.

It had always been clear to him that his problems did not matter to politicians, and conversely, because politicians obviously did care about Western violence, he’d assumed it would never be part of his world.  But one day his cousin came to the trailer to visit and started telling him about how they’d closed the border between Nebraska and Colorado.  He wanted ’Tit Jean to spend the last of his insurance settlement to buy a truck with him and drive it back and forth from Omaha to Denver, carrying some of the many items banned because they could be used in weapons: fertilizer, cell phones, nail guns, laptop computers, and so on.  ’Tit Jean had been skeptical, but got more interested when his cousin said that many other Acadians were already doing it.  He’d agreed, taken his family upriver, and become a smuggler.

This was a life much more like the bayou.  Acadians left their wives and young children at home, like they had done to fish, and when it was time for supper they drew together their small and midsized box trucks on the plains, the way they’d once drawn their boats together.  When his boys got older he’d bought his cousin’s half of the truck, and they’d started riding with him.  That was familiar too, it fit into the pattern of his own teenage years working for his father.  They even had a reason to speak French all the time, to talk freely on the CB.  Few GIs could speak it, and even the rare ones who knew Parisian or Quebecois French had a hard time with Cajun accents and rhythms. 

God must not have wanted Acadians to disappear entirely.  Not that ’Tit Jean thought of war as a blessing, but if it had to come it couldn’t have been better timed. 

Today ’Tit Jean was in Denver, handling a referral from a friend and client named Elliott.  The new customer wanted camping things—a sharp knife, waterproof matches, freeze-dried food, propane canisters—and a gun.  Guns were tricky; a lot of Acadians wouldn’t handle them.  While ’Tit Jean wouldn't take the risk of dealing them to Posses, in his opinion Western Territorials were just as American as Coastals and had a right to what safety they could buy.  Besides, guns were very profitable.  He merely insisted on some precautions.  For one thing, he never kept them in the truck.  If GIs searched him and found a few pieces, as had happened four times now, it was easy to say he had them to fight off bandits, and for the right price soldiers could sympathize.  But if they found two cases of AR-15s with auto-sear conversions, there wasn't much worth saying.  On rare occasions it was necessary to transport a lot at once, but usually it was smarter to hide a little here and a little there. 

He also never took orders for them directly on his own cell phone.  In this case Elliott had called Hélène in Omaha this morning, and she’d sent a message to him up the radio chain of trucks, telling him to check the messages in a certain discussion thread of a certain online bulletin board.  Eventually he’d made contact and arranged to meet two people in the ruins between the South Platte and Interstate 25.  He visited a few other Acadians to buy what he didn’t have in stock and headed there in the late afternoon.

Early in the Occupation, guerilla fighters had hidden in the quarter’s warehouses and abandoned railyards, trying to sabotage the freight rails carrying coal into Denver from Wyoming to the north and from the Green River coalfields around Steamboat Springsto the west.  So the Fedshad ordered out all the squatters and the few legal residents and perforated the area with tank shells and helicopter missiles. 

Guerin sat by the passenger door with an unloaded shotgun pointed downward between his knees.  Bertrand, on the middle seat, had driven through the night.  His head rested on the seat back; he was dead asleep with his mouth open.  Guerin took off his belt and fed it through a bracket over Bertrand’s head, then shortened the loop until it was just the distance to Bertrand’s neck.  He’d been playing this same trick for two weeks now.  The next step would be to drop the loop under Bertrand’s chin, so he’d awaken, try to sit up, catch his chin on the belt, and recoil his head into the metal partition behind him.

“Don’t do that,” ’Tit Jean said in French.

Guerin rolled his eyes and took down the belt.  He was ’Tit Jean’s pet and ’Tit Jean suspected he knew it.  He was open and happy and liked coming on the road, probably would be content to do nothing else for the rest of his life.  ’Tit Jean loved Bertrand too, of course, fiercely, but he could never get as comfortable with him.  He took everything ’Tit Jean said seriously, which often made ’Tit Jean self-conscious.  Sometimes he was so deliberate that ’Tit Jean felt like they were making business deals.

There was also the difference that Bertrand didn’t want to be in the truck.  He wanted to be more than a smuggler when he grew up.  ’Tit Jean could understand that.  There had been Acadian kids all around him when he was young who’d wanted to go to college and move away.  He’d encouraged Bertrand to take the test for Nebraska’s honors boarding school, but hadn’t been shocked when he didn’t pass.  Neither he nor Hélène was exceptionally smart, so their children weren’t likely to be either.  It did break his heart, though.  Bertrand had been so devastated at the prospect of regular high school.  ’Tit Jean had bought him books (biology and trigonometry textbooks to start, and the Bible), and said he’d just have to apply to college as a homeschooled kid.  Then of course he’d had to let Guerin drop out of school too when he got old enough to fail the state test.

He parked behind a warehouse that had been a brewpub for a time.  The sign and decorative iron grille had collapsed into a jungle gym of twisted metal, half in and half out of the window frame.  ’Tit Jean took a flashlight from the glove compartment. 

“Don’t do it when I’m gone, either,” he said.  Guerin got out of the cab and Bertrand woke up enough to stretch across the empty seat.  ’Tit Jean closed the door carefully so as not to catch the boy’s feet and went to get the crate with the knife, matches, and food from the cargo bay. 

He descended a few steps to a tiled concrete slab, separated from the river by chains.  The black paint that once prettied them and their posts now seasoned the tiles in little flakes.  A man fished there, leaning his rod over the chains and teasing a fly across the surface of a pool formed by the base of a footbridge and the near, reveted bank.  Four fat trout wavered against the current, ignoring the fly.

’Tit Jean walked up the river, ducked behind the aquarium, and found the Children's Museum.  A pickup was parked on the walk; his customers must be inside.  Leaving the truck out front like that was as bad as a neon sign, but it was too late now to be worth moving it.  He’d just have to hurry.

The Children's Museum, back when its walls were whole, had disguised its architectural blandness with a pyramidal glass entranceway topped with pink-and-white triangular panels.  Every pane of that glass had since broken and the panels had fractured; nothing distracted any longer from the green-gray boxes of the main building.  It looked like wasted space—which made it a good hiding spot.

He crunched through the glass on the entranceway and found his customers, a man and a woman.  The man was average height, thin, and dressed as a Nationalist.  He angled his body aside when ’Tit Jean entered and let the woman come forward, offering her hand.  She was an Easterner.  Only Eastern women wore their shirts untucked like that when they decided to rough it, unable to see the difference between casual and practical.

’Tit Jean took her hand for a moment, long enough to feel her trying to use a solid, masculine grip.

“Four fifty for the gun and cleaning kit, fifty for shells,two fifty for the rest,” he said. He glanced at his watch.  Generally it was safe to spend about fifteen minutes on a sale, the amount of time it took to send a detachment from a local Fed base.  But he had no way of knowing how long that truck had been parked out front.  “Count it now, we are short of time.”

The woman nodded her okay to the price.  ’Tit Jean lit his flashlight and led them into the museum.

The halls were narrow and curved, and doors pierced irregular rooms by the corners.  It was hard to remember the time when places could be made like this, for nothing but middle-class children's play.  Or when such places could be built without windows because the electricity never failed.  Even the shell-holes in the roof only let in enough light to show the gray outlines of things.  Not until the flashlight beam passed over them did they stand out in their bright, peeling, acrylic colors: gnarled trees and toadstools in hollow plastic, kitchens stocked with wooden food, play-pits full of leaking stuffed animals and crumbling rubber balls.  Their feet made shuffling noises on the carpet. 

Ropes climbed into the darkness of a two-story atrium, whispering against each other.  Somewhere above were pigeons; they could be heard cooing and the flashlight revealed their shit crusted to the floor.  A few steps further was the fire truck where ’Tit Jean kept the smaller pieces, the ones for women.  They were in one of the side compartments, underneath a coil of rotten canvas hose.  He opened the panel, retrieved what he wanted, and shut the bin so the smell wouldn't escape, a dusty smell like an old hammock.  The gun was in an unmarked cardboard box; he folded open the top briefly to make sure of the contents—.38 revolver, oil, cloths, rod—then turned to his customers.  The man was already holding out the money in fifty-dollar bills.  'Tit Jean counted it, pocketed it, and led them back to the play kitchen, where he kept boxes of cartridges under the oven.  He gave them one of the proper caliber and passed the light over his watch.

“Five minutes,” he said.  “Drive south, fast.”  Away from both Interstates, he meant, since the Feds on their way, if there were any, would arrive from those and would know what to make of a truck leaving these ruins.

To keep up with new chapters as they're published, you can follow me on Twitter (@joshuamalbin), Facebook (www.facebook.com/joshua.malbin), my blog (www.joshuamalbin.com), or sign up for email alerts (http://eepurl.com/f-9tH).

Download e-reader versions at (www.joshuamalbin.com/soap-and-water).

’Tit Jean had grown up in a town built on the tussocks of the Louisiana bayou, land that since the last Ice Age had been replenished by spring deposits of Mississippi River silt.  By the mid-twentieth century, though, the Mississippi was diked, leveed, and riprapped from mouth nearly to headwaters, and all that silt flushed straight into the Gulf of Mexico.  Meanwhile oil and gas company canals eroded the tussocks and hurricanes blasted them, and ’Tit Jean’s homeland melted away.  The bayou drowned and the fish and shrimp and crawfish that had once used its grasses and tree roots as a nursery disappeared.  He hung on longer than he should have, trying to raise a young family and fishing like his father and grandfather had, because he wanted his own two boys to grow up immersed in Acadian culture.  At last, though, Hurricane Grace washed them out, along with the few of their neighbors stubborn enough to have stayed with them.  They had to move to a FEMA trailer park in Baton Rouge.

Acadians were heavily outnumbered there by English-speaking refugees, white and black.  He’d hated it.  Where once he’d been his own boss, now when he could get a job at all it was always as someone’s lackey, and the money was never good.  His sons were growing up away from the water and although they still understood French when he or his wife Hélène spoke it, more often than not they answered in English.  Guerin, the younger one, even dreamed in English.  ’Tit Jean knew because he sometimes talked in his sleep.

It had always been clear to him that his problems did not matter to politicians, and conversely, because politicians obviously did care about Western violence, he’d assumed it would never be part of his world.  But one day his cousin came to the trailer to visit and started telling him about how they’d closed the border between Nebraska and Colorado.  He wanted ’Tit Jean to spend the last of his insurance settlement to buy a truck with him and drive it back and forth from Omaha to Denver, carrying some of the many items banned because they could be used in weapons: fertilizer, cell phones, nail guns, laptop computers, and so on.  ’Tit Jean had been skeptical, but got more interested when his cousin said that many other Acadians were already doing it.  He’d agreed, taken his family upriver, and become a smuggler.

This was a life much more like the bayou.  Acadians left their wives and young children at home, like they had done to fish, and when it was time for supper they drew together their small and midsized box trucks on the plains, the way they’d once drawn their boats together.  When his boys got older he’d bought his cousin’s half of the truck, and they’d started riding with him.  That was familiar too, it fit into the pattern of his own teenage years working for his father.  They even had a reason to speak French all the time, to talk freely on the CB.  Few GIs could speak it, and even the rare ones who knew Parisian or Quebecois French had a hard time with Cajun accents and rhythms. 

God must not have wanted Acadians to disappear entirely.  Not that ’Tit Jean thought of war as a blessing, but if it had to come it couldn’t have been better timed. 

Today ’Tit Jean was in Denver, handling a referral from a friend and client named Elliott.  The new customer wanted camping things—a sharp knife, waterproof matches, freeze-dried food, propane canisters—and a gun.  Guns were tricky; a lot of Acadians wouldn’t handle them.  While ’Tit Jean wouldn't take the risk of dealing them to Posses, in his opinion Western Territorials were just as American as Coastals and had a right to what safety they could buy.  Besides, guns were very profitable.  He merely insisted on some precautions.  For one thing, he never kept them in the truck.  If GIs searched him and found a few pieces, as had happened four times now, it was easy to say he had them to fight off bandits, and for the right price soldiers could sympathize.  But if they found two cases of AR-15s with auto-sear conversions, there wasn't much worth saying.  On rare occasions it was necessary to transport a lot at once, but usually it was smarter to hide a little here and a little there. 

He also never took orders for them directly on his own cell phone.  In this case Elliott had called Hélène in Omaha this morning, and she’d sent a message to him up the radio chain of trucks, telling him to check the messages in a certain discussion thread of a certain online bulletin board.  Eventually he’d made contact and arranged to meet two people in the ruins between the South Platte and Interstate 25.  He visited a few other Acadians to buy what he didn’t have in stock and headed there in the late afternoon.

Early in the Occupation, guerilla fighters had hidden in the quarter’s warehouses and abandoned railyards, trying to sabotage the freight rails carrying coal into Denver from Wyoming to the north and from the Green River coalfields around Steamboat Springsto the west.  So the Fedshad ordered out all the squatters and the few legal residents and perforated the area with tank shells and helicopter missiles. 

Guerin sat by the passenger door with an unloaded shotgun pointed downward between his knees.  Bertrand, on the middle seat, had driven through the night.  His head rested on the seat back; he was dead asleep with his mouth open.  Guerin took off his belt and fed it through a bracket over Bertrand’s head, then shortened the loop until it was just the distance to Bertrand’s neck.  He’d been playing this same trick for two weeks now.  The next step would be to drop the loop under Bertrand’s chin, so he’d awaken, try to sit up, catch his chin on the belt, and recoil his head into the metal partition behind him.

“Don’t do that,” ’Tit Jean said in French.

Guerin rolled his eyes and took down the belt.  He was ’Tit Jean’s pet and ’Tit Jean suspected he knew it.  He was open and happy and liked coming on the road, probably would be content to do nothing else for the rest of his life.  ’Tit Jean loved Bertrand too, of course, fiercely, but he could never get as comfortable with him.  He took everything ’Tit Jean said seriously, which often made ’Tit Jean self-conscious.  Sometimes he was so deliberate that ’Tit Jean felt like they were making business deals.

There was also the difference that Bertrand didn’t want to be in the truck.  He wanted to be more than a smuggler when he grew up.  ’Tit Jean could understand that.  There had been Acadian kids all around him when he was young who’d wanted to go to college and move away.  He’d encouraged Bertrand to take the test for Nebraska’s honors boarding school, but hadn’t been shocked when he didn’t pass.  Neither he nor Hélène was exceptionally smart, so their children weren’t likely to be either.  It did break his heart, though.  Bertrand had been so devastated at the prospect of regular high school.  ’Tit Jean had bought him books (biology and trigonometry textbooks to start, and the Bible), and said he’d just have to apply to college as a homeschooled kid.  Then of course he’d had to let Guerin drop out of school too when he got old enough to fail the state test.

He parked behind a warehouse that had been a brewpub for a time.  The sign and decorative iron grille had collapsed into a jungle gym of twisted metal, half in and half out of the window frame.  ’Tit Jean took a flashlight from the glove compartment. 

“Don’t do it when I’m gone, either,” he said.  Guerin got out of the cab and Bertrand woke up enough to stretch across the empty seat.  ’Tit Jean closed the door carefully so as not to catch the boy’s feet and went to get the crate with the knife, matches, and food from the cargo bay. 

He descended a few steps to a tiled concrete slab, separated from the river by chains.  The black paint that once prettied them and their posts now seasoned the tiles in little flakes.  A man fished there, leaning his rod over the chains and teasing a fly across the surface of a pool formed by the base of a footbridge and the near, reveted bank.  Four fat trout wavered against the current, ignoring the fly.

’Tit Jean walked up the river, ducked behind the aquarium, and found the Children's Museum.  A pickup was parked on the walk; his customers must be inside.  Leaving the truck out front like that was as bad as a neon sign, but it was too late now to be worth moving it.  He’d just have to hurry.

The Children's Museum, back when its walls were whole, had disguised its architectural blandness with a pyramidal glass entranceway topped with pink-and-white triangular panels.  Every pane of that glass had since broken and the panels had fractured; nothing distracted any longer from the green-gray boxes of the main building.  It looked like wasted space—which made it a good hiding spot.

He crunched through the glass on the entranceway and found his customers, a man and a woman.  The man was average height, thin, and dressed as a Nationalist.  He angled his body aside when ’Tit Jean entered and let the woman come forward, offering her hand.  She was an Easterner.  Only Eastern women wore their shirts untucked like that when they decided to rough it, unable to see the difference between casual and practical.

’Tit Jean took her hand for a moment, long enough to feel her trying to use a solid, masculine grip.

“Four fifty for the gun and cleaning kit, fifty for shells,two fifty for the rest,” he said. He glanced at his watch.  Generally it was safe to spend about fifteen minutes on a sale, the amount of time it took to send a detachment from a local Fed base.  But he had no way of knowing how long that truck had been parked out front.  “Count it now, we are short of time.”

The woman nodded her okay to the price.  ’Tit Jean lit his flashlight and led them into the museum.

The halls were narrow and curved, and doors pierced irregular rooms by the corners.  It was hard to remember the time when places could be made like this, for nothing but middle-class children's play.  Or when such places could be built without windows because the electricity never failed.  Even the shell-holes in the roof only let in enough light to show the gray outlines of things.  Not until the flashlight beam passed over them did they stand out in their bright, peeling, acrylic colors: gnarled trees and toadstools in hollow plastic, kitchens stocked with wooden food, play-pits full of leaking stuffed animals and crumbling rubber balls.  Their feet made shuffling noises on the carpet. 

Ropes climbed into the darkness of a two-story atrium, whispering against each other.  Somewhere above were pigeons; they could be heard cooing and the flashlight revealed their shit crusted to the floor.  A few steps further was the fire truck where ’Tit Jean kept the smaller pieces, the ones for women.  They were in one of the side compartments, underneath a coil of rotten canvas hose.  He opened the panel, retrieved what he wanted, and shut the bin so the smell wouldn't escape, a dusty smell like an old hammock.  The gun was in an unmarked cardboard box; he folded open the top briefly to make sure of the contents—.38 revolver, oil, cloths, rod—then turned to his customers.  The man was already holding out the money in fifty-dollar bills.  'Tit Jean counted it, pocketed it, and led them back to the play kitchen, where he kept boxes of cartridges under the oven.  He gave them one of the proper caliber and passed the light over his watch.

“Five minutes,” he said.  “Drive south, fast.”  Away from both Interstates, he meant, since the Feds on their way, if there were any, would arrive from those and would know what to make of a truck leaving these ruins.

’Tit Jean had grown up in a town built on the tussocks of the Louisiana bayou, land that since the last Ice Age had been replenished by spring deposits of Mississippi River silt.  By the mid-twentieth century, though, the Mississippi was diked, leveed, and riprapped from mouth nearly to headwaters, and all that silt flushed straight into the Gulf of Mexico.  Meanwhile oil and gas company canals eroded the tussocks and hurricanes blasted them, and ’Tit Jean’s homeland melted away.  The bayou drowned and the fish and shrimp and crawfish that had once used its grasses and tree roots as a nursery disappeared.  He hung on longer than he should have, trying to raise a young family and fishing like his father and grandfather had, because he wanted his own two boys to grow up immersed in Acadian culture.  At last, though, Hurricane Grace washed them out, along with the few of their neighbors stubborn enough to have stayed with them.  They had to move to a FEMA trailer park in Baton Rouge.

Acadians were heavily outnumbered there by English-speaking refugees, white and black.  He’d hated it.  Where once he’d been his own boss, now when he could get a job at all it was always as someone’s lackey, and the money was never good.  His sons were growing up away from the water and although they still understood French when he or his wife Hélène spoke it, more often than not they answered in English.  Guerin, the younger one, even dreamed in English.  ’Tit Jean knew because he sometimes talked in his sleep.

It had always been clear to him that his problems did not matter to politicians, and conversely, because politicians obviously did care about Western violence, he’d assumed it would never be part of his world.  But one day his cousin came to the trailer to visit and started telling him about how they’d closed the border between Nebraska and Colorado.  He wanted ’Tit Jean to spend the last of his insurance settlement to buy a truck with him and drive it back and forth from Omaha to Denver, carrying some of the many items banned because they could be used in weapons: fertilizer, cell phones, nail guns, laptop computers, and so on.  ’Tit Jean had been skeptical, but got more interested when his cousin said that many other Acadians were already doing it.  He’d agreed, taken his family upriver, and become a smuggler.

This was a life much more like the bayou.  Acadians left their wives and young children at home, like they had done to fish, and when it was time for supper they drew together their small and midsized box trucks on the plains, the way they’d once drawn their boats together.  When his boys got older he’d bought his cousin’s half of the truck, and they’d started riding with him.  That was familiar too, it fit into the pattern of his own teenage years working for his father.  They even had a reason to speak French all the time, to talk freely on the CB.  Few GIs could speak it, and even the rare ones who knew Parisian or Quebecois French had a hard time with Cajun accents and rhythms. 

God must not have wanted Acadians to disappear entirely.  Not that ’Tit Jean thought of war as a blessing, but if it had to come it couldn’t have been better timed. 

Today ’Tit Jean was in Denver, handling a referral from a friend and client named Elliott.  The new customer wanted camping things—a sharp knife, waterproof matches, freeze-dried food, propane canisters—and a gun.  Guns were tricky; a lot of Acadians wouldn’t handle them.  While ’Tit Jean wouldn't take the risk of dealing them to Posses, in his opinion Western Territorials were just as American as Coastals and had a right to what safety they could buy.  Besides, guns were very profitable.  He merely insisted on some precautions.  For one thing, he never kept them in the truck.  If GIs searched him and found a few pieces, as had happened four times now, it was easy to say he had them to fight off bandits, and for the right price soldiers could sympathize.  But if they found two cases of AR-15s with auto-sear conversions, there wasn't much worth saying.  On rare occasions it was necessary to transport a lot at once, but usually it was smarter to hide a little here and a little there. 

He also never took orders for them directly on his own cell phone.  In this case Elliott had called Hélène in Omaha this morning, and she’d sent a message to him up the radio chain of trucks, telling him to check the messages in a certain discussion thread of a certain online bulletin board.  Eventually he’d made contact and arranged to meet two people in the ruins between the South Platte and Interstate 25.  He visited a few other Acadians to buy what he didn’t have in stock and headed there in the late afternoon.

Early in the Occupation, guerilla fighters had hidden in the quarter’s warehouses and abandoned railyards, trying to sabotage the freight rails carrying coal into Denver from Wyoming to the north and from the Green River coalfields around Steamboat Springsto the west.  So the Fedshad ordered out all the squatters and the few legal residents and perforated the area with tank shells and helicopter missiles. 

Guerin sat by the passenger door with an unloaded shotgun pointed downward between his knees.  Bertrand, on the middle seat, had driven through the night.  His head rested on the seat back; he was dead asleep with his mouth open.  Guerin took off his belt and fed it through a bracket over Bertrand’s head, then shortened the loop until it was just the distance to Bertrand’s neck.  He’d been playing this same trick for two weeks now.  The next step would be to drop the loop under Bertrand’s chin, so he’d awaken, try to sit up, catch his chin on the belt, and recoil his head into the metal partition behind him.

“Don’t do that,” ’Tit Jean said in French.

Guerin rolled his eyes and took down the belt.  He was ’Tit Jean’s pet and ’Tit Jean suspected he knew it.  He was open and happy and liked coming on the road, probably would be content to do nothing else for the rest of his life.  ’Tit Jean loved Bertrand too, of course, fiercely, but he could never get as comfortable with him.  He took everything ’Tit Jean said seriously, which often made ’Tit Jean self-conscious.  Sometimes he was so deliberate that ’Tit Jean felt like they were making business deals.

There was also the difference that Bertrand didn’t want to be in the truck.  He wanted to be more than a smuggler when he grew up.  ’Tit Jean could understand that.  There had been Acadian kids all around him when he was young who’d wanted to go to college and move away.  He’d encouraged Bertrand to take the test for Nebraska’s honors boarding school, but hadn’t been shocked when he didn’t pass.  Neither he nor Hélène was exceptionally smart, so their children weren’t likely to be either.  It did break his heart, though.  Bertrand had been so devastated at the prospect of regular high school.  ’Tit Jean had bought him books (biology and trigonometry textbooks to start, and the Bible), and said he’d just have to apply to college as a homeschooled kid.  Then of course he’d had to let Guerin drop out of school too when he got old enough to fail the state test.

He parked behind a warehouse that had been a brewpub for a time.  The sign and decorative iron grille had collapsed into a jungle gym of twisted metal, half in and half out of the window frame.  ’Tit Jean took a flashlight from the glove compartment. 

“Don’t do it when I’m gone, either,” he said.  Guerin got out of the cab and Bertrand woke up enough to stretch across the empty seat.  ’Tit Jean closed the door carefully so as not to catch the boy’s feet and went to get the crate with the knife, matches, and food from the cargo bay. 

He descended a few steps to a tiled concrete slab, separated from the river by chains.  The black paint that once prettied them and their posts now seasoned the tiles in little flakes.  A man fished there, leaning his rod over the chains and teasing a fly across the surface of a pool formed by the base of a footbridge and the near, reveted bank.  Four fat trout wavered against the current, ignoring the fly.

’Tit Jean walked up the river, ducked behind the aquarium, and found the Children's Museum.  A pickup was parked on the walk; his customers must be inside.  Leaving the truck out front like that was as bad as a neon sign, but it was too late now to be worth moving it.  He’d just have to hurry.

The Children's Museum, back when its walls were whole, had disguised its architectural blandness with a pyramidal glass entranceway topped with pink-and-white triangular panels.  Every pane of that glass had since broken and the panels had fractured; nothing distracted any longer from the green-gray boxes of the main building.  It looked like wasted space—which made it a good hiding spot.

He crunched through the glass on the entranceway and found his customers, a man and a woman.  The man was average height, thin, and dressed as a Nationalist.  He angled his body aside when ’Tit Jean entered and let the woman come forward, offering her hand.  She was an Easterner.  Only Eastern women wore their shirts untucked like that when they decided to rough it, unable to see the difference between casual and practical.

’Tit Jean took her hand for a moment, long enough to feel her trying to use a solid, masculine grip.

“Four fifty for the gun and cleaning kit, fifty for shells,two fifty for the rest,” he said. He glanced at his watch.  Generally it was safe to spend about fifteen minutes on a sale, the amount of time it took to send a detachment from a local Fed base.  But he had no way of knowing how long that truck had been parked out front.  “Count it now, we are short of time.”

The woman nodded her okay to the price.  ’Tit Jean lit his flashlight and led them into the museum.

The halls were narrow and curved, and doors pierced irregular rooms by the corners.  It was hard to remember the time when places could be made like this, for nothing but middle-class children's play.  Or when such places could be built without windows because the electricity never failed.  Even the shell-holes in the roof only let in enough light to show the gray outlines of things.  Not until the flashlight beam passed over them did they stand out in their bright, peeling, acrylic colors: gnarled trees and toadstools in hollow plastic, kitchens stocked with wooden food, play-pits full of leaking stuffed animals and crumbling rubber balls.  Their feet made shuffling noises on the carpet. 

Ropes climbed into the darkness of a two-story atrium, whispering against each other.  Somewhere above were pigeons; they could be heard cooing and the flashlight revealed their shit crusted to the floor.  A few steps further was the fire truck where ’Tit Jean kept the smaller pieces, the ones for women.  They were in one of the side compartments, underneath a coil of rotten canvas hose.  He opened the panel, retrieved what he wanted, and shut the bin so the smell wouldn't escape, a dusty smell like an old hammock.  The gun was in an unmarked cardboard box; he folded open the top briefly to make sure of the contents—.38 revolver, oil, cloths, rod—then turned to his customers.  The man was already holding out the money in fifty-dollar bills.  'Tit Jean counted it, pocketed it, and led them back to the play kitchen, where he kept boxes of cartridges under the oven.  He gave them one of the proper caliber and passed the light over his watch.

“Five minutes,” he said.  “Drive south, fast.”  Away from both Interstates, he meant, since the Feds on their way, if there were any, would arrive from those and would know what to make of a truck leaving these ruins.

To keep up with new chapters as they're published, you can follow me on Twitter (@joshuamalbin), Facebook (www.facebook.com/joshua.malbin), my blog (www.joshuamalbin.com), or sign up for email alerts (http://eepurl.com/f-9tH).

’Tit Jean had grown up in a town built on the tussocks of the Louisiana bayou, land that since the last Ice Age had been replenished by spring deposits of Mississippi River silt.  By the mid-twentieth century, though, the Mississippi was diked, leveed, and riprapped from mouth nearly to headwaters, and all that silt flushed straight into the Gulf of Mexico.  Meanwhile oil and gas company canals eroded the tussocks and hurricanes blasted them, and ’Tit Jean’s homeland melted away.  The bayou drowned and the fish and shrimp and crawfish that had once used its grasses and tree roots as a nursery disappeared.  He hung on longer than he should have, trying to raise a young family and fishing like his father and grandfather had, because he wanted his own two boys to grow up immersed in Acadian culture.  At last, though, Hurricane Grace washed them out, along with the few of their neighbors stubborn enough to have stayed with them.  They had to move to a FEMA trailer park in Baton Rouge.

Acadians were heavily outnumbered there by English-speaking refugees, white and black.  He’d hated it.  Where once he’d been his own boss, now when he could get a job at all it was always as someone’s lackey, and the money was never good.  His sons were growing up away from the water and although they still understood French when he or his wife Hélène spoke it, more often than not they answered in English.  Guerin, the younger one, even dreamed in English.  ’Tit Jean knew because he sometimes talked in his sleep.

It had always been clear to him that his problems did not matter to politicians, and conversely, because politicians obviously did care about Western violence, he’d assumed it would never be part of his world.  But one day his cousin came to the trailer to visit and started telling him about how they’d closed the border between Nebraska and Colorado.  He wanted ’Tit Jean to spend the last of his insurance settlement to buy a truck with him and drive it back and forth from Omaha to Denver, carrying some of the many items banned because they could be used in weapons: fertilizer, cell phones, nail guns, laptop computers, and so on.  ’Tit Jean had been skeptical, but got more interested when his cousin said that many other Acadians were already doing it.  He’d agreed, taken his family upriver, and become a smuggler.

This was a life much more like the bayou.  Acadians left their wives and young children at home, like they had done to fish, and when it was time for supper they drew together their small and midsized box trucks on the plains, the way they’d once drawn their boats together.  When his boys got older he’d bought his cousin’s half of the truck, and they’d started riding with him.  That was familiar too, it fit into the pattern of his own teenage years working for his father.  They even had a reason to speak French all the time, to talk freely on the CB.  Few GIs could speak it, and even the rare ones who knew Parisian or Quebecois French had a hard time with Cajun accents and rhythms. 

God must not have wanted Acadians to disappear entirely.  Not that ’Tit Jean thought of war as a blessing, but if it had to come it couldn’t have been better timed. 

Today ’Tit Jean was in Denver, handling a referral from a friend and client named Elliott.  The new customer wanted camping things—a sharp knife, waterproof matches, freeze-dried food, propane canisters—and a gun.  Guns were tricky; a lot of Acadians wouldn’t handle them.  While ’Tit Jean wouldn't take the risk of dealing them to Posses, in his opinion Western Territorials were just as American as Coastals and had a right to what safety they could buy.  Besides, guns were very profitable.  He merely insisted on some precautions.  For one thing, he never kept them in the truck.  If GIs searched him and found a few pieces, as had happened four times now, it was easy to say he had them to fight off bandits, and for the right price soldiers could sympathize.  But if they found two cases of AR-15s with auto-sear conversions, there wasn't much worth saying.  On rare occasions it was necessary to transport a lot at once, but usually it was smarter to hide a little here and a little there. 

He also never took orders for them directly on his own cell phone.  In this case Elliott had called Hélène in Omaha this morning, and she’d sent a message to him up the radio chain of trucks, telling him to check the messages in a certain discussion thread of a certain online bulletin board.  Eventually he’d made contact and arranged to meet two people in the ruins between the South Platte and Interstate 25.  He visited a few other Acadians to buy what he didn’t have in stock and headed there in the late afternoon.

Early in the Occupation, guerilla fighters had hidden in the quarter’s warehouses and abandoned railyards, trying to sabotage the freight rails carrying coal into Denver from Wyoming to the north and from the Green River coalfields around Steamboat Springsto the west.  So the Fedshad ordered out all the squatters and the few legal residents and perforated the area with tank shells and helicopter missiles. 

Guerin sat by the passenger door with an unloaded shotgun pointed downward between his knees.  Bertrand, on the middle seat, had driven through the night.  His head rested on the seat back; he was dead asleep with his mouth open.  Guerin took off his belt and fed it through a bracket over Bertrand’s head, then shortened the loop until it was just the distance to Bertrand’s neck.  He’d been playing this same trick for two weeks now.  The next step would be to drop the loop under Bertrand’s chin, so he’d awaken, try to sit up, catch his chin on the belt, and recoil his head into the metal partition behind him.

“Don’t do that,” ’Tit Jean said in French.

Guerin rolled his eyes and took down the belt.  He was ’Tit Jean’s pet and ’Tit Jean suspected he knew it.  He was open and happy and liked coming on the road, probably would be content to do nothing else for the rest of his life.  ’Tit Jean loved Bertrand too, of course, fiercely, but he could never get as comfortable with him.  He took everything ’Tit Jean said seriously, which often made ’Tit Jean self-conscious.  Sometimes he was so deliberate that ’Tit Jean felt like they were making business deals.

There was also the difference that Bertrand didn’t want to be in the truck.  He wanted to be more than a smuggler when he grew up.  ’Tit Jean could understand that.  There had been Acadian kids all around him when he was young who’d wanted to go to college and move away.  He’d encouraged Bertrand to take the test for Nebraska’s honors boarding school, but hadn’t been shocked when he didn’t pass.  Neither he nor Hélène was exceptionally smart, so their children weren’t likely to be either.  It did break his heart, though.  Bertrand had been so devastated at the prospect of regular high school.  ’Tit Jean had bought him books (biology and trigonometry textbooks to start, and the Bible), and said he’d just have to apply to college as a homeschooled kid.  Then of course he’d had to let Guerin drop out of school too when he got old enough to fail the state test.

He parked behind a warehouse that had been a brewpub for a time.  The sign and decorative iron grille had collapsed into a jungle gym of twisted metal, half in and half out of the window frame.  ’Tit Jean took a flashlight from the glove compartment. 

“Don’t do it when I’m gone, either,” he said.  Guerin got out of the cab and Bertrand woke up enough to stretch across the empty seat.  ’Tit Jean closed the door carefully so as not to catch the boy’s feet and went to get the crate with the knife, matches, and food from the cargo bay. 

He descended a few steps to a tiled concrete slab, separated from the river by chains.  The black paint that once prettied them and their posts now seasoned the tiles in little flakes.  A man fished there, leaning his rod over the chains and teasing a fly across the surface of a pool formed by the base of a footbridge and the near, reveted bank.  Four fat trout wavered against the current, ignoring the fly.

’Tit Jean walked up the river, ducked behind the aquarium, and found the Children's Museum.  A pickup was parked on the walk; his customers must be inside.  Leaving the truck out front like that was as bad as a neon sign, but it was too late now to be worth moving it.  He’d just have to hurry.

The Children's Museum, back when its walls were whole, had disguised its architectural blandness with a pyramidal glass entranceway topped with pink-and-white triangular panels.  Every pane of that glass had since broken and the panels had fractured; nothing distracted any longer from the green-gray boxes of the main building.  It looked like wasted space—which made it a good hiding spot.

He crunched through the glass on the entranceway and found his customers, a man and a woman.  The man was average height, thin, and dressed as a Nationalist.  He angled his body aside when ’Tit Jean entered and let the woman come forward, offering her hand.  She was an Easterner.  Only Eastern women wore their shirts untucked like that when they decided to rough it, unable to see the difference between casual and practical.

’Tit Jean took her hand for a moment, long enough to feel her trying to use a solid, masculine grip.

“Four fifty for the gun and cleaning kit, fifty for shells,two fifty for the rest,” he said. He glanced at his watch.  Generally it was safe to spend about fifteen minutes on a sale, the amount of time it took to send a detachment from a local Fed base.  But he had no way of knowing how long that truck had been parked out front.  “Count it now, we are short of time.”

The woman nodded her okay to the price.  ’Tit Jean lit his flashlight and led them into the museum.

The halls were narrow and curved, and doors pierced irregular rooms by the corners.  It was hard to remember the time when places could be made like this, for nothing but middle-class children's play.  Or when such places could be built without windows because the electricity never failed.  Even the shell-holes in the roof only let in enough light to show the gray outlines of things.  Not until the flashlight beam passed over them did they stand out in their bright, peeling, acrylic colors: gnarled trees and toadstools in hollow plastic, kitchens stocked with wooden food, play-pits full of leaking stuffed animals and crumbling rubber balls.  Their feet made shuffling noises on the carpet. 

Ropes climbed into the darkness of a two-story atrium, whispering against each other.  Somewhere above were pigeons; they could be heard cooing and the flashlight revealed their shit crusted to the floor.  A few steps further was the fire truck where ’Tit Jean kept the smaller pieces, the ones for women.  They were in one of the side compartments, underneath a coil of rotten canvas hose.  He opened the panel, retrieved what he wanted, and shut the bin so the smell wouldn't escape, a dusty smell like an old hammock.  The gun was in an unmarked cardboard box; he folded open the top briefly to make sure of the contents—.38 revolver, oil, cloths, rod—then turned to his customers.  The man was already holding out the money in fifty-dollar bills.  'Tit Jean counted it, pocketed it, and led them back to the play kitchen, where he kept boxes of cartridges under the oven.  He gave them one of the proper caliber and passed the light over his watch.

“Five minutes,” he said.  “Drive south, fast.”  Away from both Interstates, he meant, since the Feds on their way, if there were any, would arrive from those and would know what to make of a truck leaving these ruins.

’Tit Jean had grown up in a town built on the tussocks of the Louisiana bayou, land that since the last Ice Age had been replenished by spring deposits of Mississippi River silt.  By the mid-twentieth century, though, the Mississippi was diked, leveed, and riprapped from mouth nearly to headwaters, and all that silt flushed straight into the Gulf of Mexico.  Meanwhile oil and gas company canals eroded the tussocks and hurricanes blasted them, and ’Tit Jean’s homeland melted away.  The bayou drowned and the fish and shrimp and crawfish that had once used its grasses and tree roots as a nursery disappeared.  He hung on longer than he should have, trying to raise a young family and fishing like his father and grandfather had, because he wanted his own two boys to grow up immersed in Acadian culture.  At last, though, Hurricane Grace washed them out, along with the few of their neighbors stubborn enough to have stayed with them.  They had to move to a FEMA trailer park in Baton Rouge.

Acadians were heavily outnumbered there by English-speaking refugees, white and black.  He’d hated it.  Where once he’d been his own boss, now when he could get a job at all it was always as someone’s lackey, and the money was never good.  His sons were growing up away from the water and although they still understood French when he or his wife Hélène spoke it, more often than not they answered in English.  Guerin, the younger one, even dreamed in English.  ’Tit Jean knew because he sometimes talked in his sleep.

It had always been clear to him that his problems did not matter to politicians, and conversely, because politicians obviously did care about Western violence, he’d assumed it would never be part of his world.  But one day his cousin came to the trailer to visit and started telling him about how they’d closed the border between Nebraska and Colorado.  He wanted ’Tit Jean to spend the last of his insurance settlement to buy a truck with him and drive it back and forth from Omaha to Denver, carrying some of the many items banned because they could be used in weapons: fertilizer, cell phones, nail guns, laptop computers, and so on.  ’Tit Jean had been skeptical, but got more interested when his cousin said that many other Acadians were already doing it.  He’d agreed, taken his family upriver, and become a smuggler.

This was a life much more like the bayou.  Acadians left their wives and young children at home, like they had done to fish, and when it was time for supper they drew together their small and midsized box trucks on the plains, the way they’d once drawn their boats together.  When his boys got older he’d bought his cousin’s half of the truck, and they’d started riding with him.  That was familiar too, it fit into the pattern of his own teenage years working for his father.  They even had a reason to speak French all the time, to talk freely on the CB.  Few GIs could speak it, and even the rare ones who knew Parisian or Quebecois French had a hard time with Cajun accents and rhythms. 

God must not have wanted Acadians to disappear entirely.  Not that ’Tit Jean thought of war as a blessing, but if it had to come it couldn’t have been better timed. 

Today ’Tit Jean was in Denver, handling a referral from a friend and client named Elliott.  The new customer wanted camping things—a sharp knife, waterproof matches, freeze-dried food, propane canisters—and a gun.  Guns were tricky; a lot of Acadians wouldn’t handle them.  While ’Tit Jean wouldn't take the risk of dealing them to Posses, in his opinion Western Territorials were just as American as Coastals and had a right to what safety they could buy.  Besides, guns were very profitable.  He merely insisted on some precautions.  For one thing, he never kept them in the truck.  If GIs searched him and found a few pieces, as had happened four times now, it was easy to say he had them to fight off bandits, and for the right price soldiers could sympathize.  But if they found two cases of AR-15s with auto-sear conversions, there wasn't much worth saying.  On rare occasions it was necessary to transport a lot at once, but usually it was smarter to hide a little here and a little there. 

He also never took orders for them directly on his own cell phone.  In this case Elliott had called Hélène in Omaha this morning, and she’d sent a message to him up the radio chain of trucks, telling him to check the messages in a certain discussion thread of a certain online bulletin board.  Eventually he’d made contact and arranged to meet two people in the ruins between the South Platte and Interstate 25.  He visited a few other Acadians to buy what he didn’t have in stock and headed there in the late afternoon.

Early in the Occupation, guerilla fighters had hidden in the quarter’s warehouses and abandoned railyards, trying to sabotage the freight rails carrying coal into Denver from Wyoming to the north and from the Green River coalfields around Steamboat Springsto the west.  So the Fedshad ordered out all the squatters and the few legal residents and perforated the area with tank shells and helicopter missiles. 

Guerin sat by the passenger door with an unloaded shotgun pointed downward between his knees.  Bertrand, on the middle seat, had driven through the night.  His head rested on the seat back; he was dead asleep with his mouth open.  Guerin took off his belt and fed it through a bracket over Bertrand’s head, then shortened the loop until it was just the distance to Bertrand’s neck.  He’d been playing this same trick for two weeks now.  The next step would be to drop the loop under Bertrand’s chin, so he’d awaken, try to sit up, catch his chin on the belt, and recoil his head into the metal partition behind him.

“Don’t do that,” ’Tit Jean said in French.

Guerin rolled his eyes and took down the belt.  He was ’Tit Jean’s pet and ’Tit Jean suspected he knew it.  He was open and happy and liked coming on the road, probably would be content to do nothing else for the rest of his life.  ’Tit Jean loved Bertrand too, of course, fiercely, but he could never get as comfortable with him.  He took everything ’Tit Jean said seriously, which often made ’Tit Jean self-conscious.  Sometimes he was so deliberate that ’Tit Jean felt like they were making business deals.

There was also the difference that Bertrand didn’t want to be in the truck.  He wanted to be more than a smuggler when he grew up.  ’Tit Jean could understand that.  There had been Acadian kids all around him when he was young who’d wanted to go to college and move away.  He’d encouraged Bertrand to take the test for Nebraska’s honors boarding school, but hadn’t been shocked when he didn’t pass.  Neither he nor Hélène was exceptionally smart, so their children weren’t likely to be either.  It did break his heart, though.  Bertrand had been so devastated at the prospect of regular high school.  ’Tit Jean had bought him books (biology and trigonometry textbooks to start, and the Bible), and said he’d just have to apply to college as a homeschooled kid.  Then of course he’d had to let Guerin drop out of school too when he got old enough to fail the state test.

He parked behind a warehouse that had been a brewpub for a time.  The sign and decorative iron grille had collapsed into a jungle gym of twisted metal, half in and half out of the window frame.  ’Tit Jean took a flashlight from the glove compartment. 

“Don’t do it when I’m gone, either,” he said.  Guerin got out of the cab and Bertrand woke up enough to stretch across the empty seat.  ’Tit Jean closed the door carefully so as not to catch the boy’s feet and went to get the crate with the knife, matches, and food from the cargo bay. 

He descended a few steps to a tiled concrete slab, separated from the river by chains.  The black paint that once prettied them and their posts now seasoned the tiles in little flakes.  A man fished there, leaning his rod over the chains and teasing a fly across the surface of a pool formed by the base of a footbridge and the near, reveted bank.  Four fat trout wavered against the current, ignoring the fly.

’Tit Jean walked up the river, ducked behind the aquarium, and found the Children's Museum.  A pickup was parked on the walk; his customers must be inside.  Leaving the truck out front like that was as bad as a neon sign, but it was too late now to be worth moving it.  He’d just have to hurry.

The Children's Museum, back when its walls were whole, had disguised its architectural blandness with a pyramidal glass entranceway topped with pink-and-white triangular panels.  Every pane of that glass had since broken and the panels had fractured; nothing distracted any longer from the green-gray boxes of the main building.  It looked like wasted space—which made it a good hiding spot.

He crunched through the glass on the entranceway and found his customers, a man and a woman.  The man was average height, thin, and dressed as a Nationalist.  He angled his body aside when ’Tit Jean entered and let the woman come forward, offering her hand.  She was an Easterner.  Only Eastern women wore their shirts untucked like that when they decided to rough it, unable to see the difference between casual and practical.

’Tit Jean took her hand for a moment, long enough to feel her trying to use a solid, masculine grip.

“Four fifty for the gun and cleaning kit, fifty for shells,two fifty for the rest,” he said. He glanced at his watch.  Generally it was safe to spend about fifteen minutes on a sale, the amount of time it took to send a detachment from a local Fed base.  But he had no way of knowing how long that truck had been parked out front.  “Count it now, we are short of time.”

The woman nodded her okay to the price.  ’Tit Jean lit his flashlight and led them into the museum.

The halls were narrow and curved, and doors pierced irregular rooms by the corners.  It was hard to remember the time when places could be made like this, for nothing but middle-class children's play.  Or when such places could be built without windows because the electricity never failed.  Even the shell-holes in the roof only let in enough light to show the gray outlines of things.  Not until the flashlight beam passed over them did they stand out in their bright, peeling, acrylic colors: gnarled trees and toadstools in hollow plastic, kitchens stocked with wooden food, play-pits full of leaking stuffed animals and crumbling rubber balls.  Their feet made shuffling noises on the carpet. 

Ropes climbed into the darkness of a two-story atrium, whispering against each other.  Somewhere above were pigeons; they could be heard cooing and the flashlight revealed their shit crusted to the floor.  A few steps further was the fire truck where ’Tit Jean kept the smaller pieces, the ones for women.  They were in one of the side compartments, underneath a coil of rotten canvas hose.  He opened the panel, retrieved what he wanted, and shut the bin so the smell wouldn't escape, a dusty smell like an old hammock.  The gun was in an unmarked cardboard box; he folded open the top briefly to make sure of the contents—.38 revolver, oil, cloths, rod—then turned to his customers.  The man was already holding out the money in fifty-dollar bills.  'Tit Jean counted it, pocketed it, and led them back to the play kitchen, where he kept boxes of cartridges under the oven.  He gave them one of the proper caliber and passed the light over his watch.

“Five minutes,” he said.  “Drive south, fast.”  Away from both Interstates, he meant, since the Feds on their way, if there were any, would arrive from those and would know what to make of a truck leaving these ruins.