Chapter 2

I'd been alone after the separation, when almost everyone else disappeared overnight. I didn't know if whatever took everyone blew out anything transistorized or if there still was something going on that made transistors not work, but there it was. I didn't know what to do with myself and staying there being a night manager for an empty hotel didn't make a lot of sense. I'd had more than my fair share of getting stubborn diesel tractors to work back on the farm so trying to get a beat-up old diesel-powered delivery van running didn't seem like a long stretch to me.

I got an old semi up and running and took it for a trip to a specialty store, Lehman's in Ohio. On the way back to the Ozarks (where the family farm was) I damned near ran over Carly. I didn't know what surprised me the most, seeing another human being or seeing her on a running two-stroke gasoline engine! She rode that enduro bike down from Alaska over the summer. I'd bet that there was a story or two in there but I never heard about it. We raised a couple of kids and got another big family to join us.

It was getting beyond me and I guess I lost heart. I got so damned depressed that I almost up and let it go. Well, in a way I did. After Carly yelled at me one night after I came home tired as hell and despondent I turned around and walked out. I sat on a rock half the night looking out at a field. I didn't need this shit. I never signed a contract saying I was anyone's slave, servant or hired man. I felt like I had a fist in my guts, a claw in the middle of my back and a band clamp around my head. I had to get out of there before my body gave up and died.

I had one hell of a time getting another diesel tractor cab going, as it had been twelve years since the separation and diesel fuel breaks down into glop. I'd learned to make bio-diesel and went with synthetic engine oil everywhere that I needed oil. I reconditioned a big tow-behind Omron diesel generator and a little one that mounted on a two-wheel frame, loaded up a big dry-van full of the stuff to make bio-diesel and made up a whole lot more too before I left Springfield, Missouri. (The bio-diesel took less room to store than the feed-stocks I'd need to make up the same amount.) Once it was made I dosed it with Sta-Bil to keep it from going bad before I could use it.

I hooked a second dry van behind the first that I'd packed full of stuff that experience had taught me that I'd want or need. Behind that I towed a military 500-gallon water buffalo and then that big Omron diesel generator. Then I broke into a library where I looked at atlases and geography books. I wasn't going to stick around to within three hundred miles of Branson. I figured, what the hell--I might as well go the distance since I had prepared for moving. I looked at the west coast of Mexico for places that didn't get that many hurricanes or tornados. Mazatlan sounded nice when I looked at the temperature averages. The big aerial maps showed orchards and truck gardens south of the city, even though I couldn't tell what was in them. There was a big fishing and shipping port too. It was a huge developed area that had a lot of potential for scavenging.

The drive down was spooky, like a Twilight Zone show because the only thing I saw alive on the whole trip was a skinny steer. I wasn't a very good neighbor. I was getting low on meat so I shot the thing, butchered it and smoked it in a smoke-house I whipped together out of poles and visqueen sheet plastic.

When I finally got to town you couldn't have peeled the smile off my face with a belt sander. I wanted to see what the fields had. They were all isolated on a little peninsula. I drove way out of town and followed the signs to the airport. I kept going south-west on 17 until it turned back north-west. I was glad to see several miles of half-mile-long fields on both sides of the road until it petered out in another subdivision. I turned around and headed back. This time I turned towards the coast for a resort called Estrella Del Mar and another called Hotel Las Villas, off the same frontage road. The first one was way too big to mess with. It was a subdivision, not a resort! The second one made me smile again It was pretty small and looked like they had been still in development when everything stopped. I drove around and carefully looked the place over. I found a generator station that had a big LPG tank outside. My eyes opened wide. I knocked on the tank. It rang like a bell. That was good news! It was empty! That meant that the generator had run until it ran out of fuel. That meant I had a chance of getting it running again. I didn't know it was even possible to make an LPG-fuelled motor run since the separation. This meant (a) I wouldn't have to worry about finding fuel for the generator, and (b) I wouldn't have to spend the rest of my days making bio diesel for the generator!

I didn't know Spanish any more than I knew Korean. I knew LPG was LPG in Spanish so the yellow pages might help. They did. Diesgas had a big place, so I dropped off the trailers and headed to their address. Rather than fool around trying to get a little LP gas hauler truck running I hooked up a big tractor-trailer mounted transfer trailer that they'd been feeding off of, made sure I had a coupling hose and drove back to the resort. The electric pump worked and filled the big storage tank in a couple hours. I shut everything down, parked the supply trailer in an employee parking lot and shut down the semi tractor.

I found the electrical cutoff to the city services and pulled it, opened the breakers to everything but the main building and the well then jump-started the generator off of the semi. The engine wound up to speed. I threw in the load. It drew down for a few seconds and came back up. I had power. I went around the building checking everything out. I turned off a bunch of lights and tested a kitchen sink. I had running water. I opened all the breakers for the upper floors. All the doors opened at a push. I supposed that the card-key systems relied on computers, and since the computers were slagged any emergency plans would demand the operators to set up the doors to not lock.

The big kitchen refrigerators and freezers wouldn't work. I shrugged. That would be easy. I'd just have to wire in wall switches in place of the thermostats and just run them for a few hours each day. I could get those done in an afternoon. It would take longer to clean out the coolers and freezers. I'd just taken care of a whole pile of tick items in one afternoon. Next, I wanted to check out the water heater situation, find a place to sleep in the building or pick a villa to live in with the facilities that I wanted, get some laundry done and clean up the kitchen. I wanted to move my stuff in and found a smaller stove station to use, not the eight-burner monster that took pride of place in the resort kitchen. It was almost time for dinner.

After I got my home set up I wanted to find a smaller vehicle to get running--something like a pickup truck or a delivery van. Then I wanted to inspect the crops and look for animal intrusion. I was going to be on the look-out for chickens, pigs and cattle. I'd also have to get a tractor going. Damn. Back to work.

I didn't have to work every day. There was a big container port in town. I'd found out that the paperwork on all international shipping was in English. I wanted to go see what was on the docks. It could be a lot of fun!

I got a load of sheets and pillowcases washing before I attacked the kitchen. There I emptied the shelves of bulging or rusted cans into a couple of gaylords and took them out to the kitchen's loading dock. When I had a load I'd take everything out somewhere and dump them. I made a smoked beef, bean, canned tomato and canned creamed corn casserole and some flatbread to scoop it out. All the beer in the bar had been sitting warm for over ten years. I'd be damned if I'd try it. Instead I picked out a bottle of Merlot. I had survived pretty well. I dried my bedding, did the dishes and went to bed.

The next morning I took a shower, set my pile of dirty clothes in the washing machine and let it go to town. Next I finished up getting the kitchen the way I wanted it. The maintenance house had wall switches, wire nuts, wire and boxes. I replaced the thermostats on one walk-in refrigerator and one walk-in freezer. Everything had dried out so it wasn't a slimy, stinky mess like it could have been. Still, it took plenty of hot water, bleach and brushing to get them clean. They both had thermostats near the doors so I could tell when to turn them off. I finished washing my clothes and did a few more loads of towels, sheets and other stuff. The curtains would need the business but that would take a while. The carpets needed steam-cleaning too. Before I settled on living in the main building I used the main desk map to find the independent villas. I checked out one of each. The manager's suite in the main building was nice so I stayed there. I filled a spa and started it heating, then looked for a tractor to get operational.

Not four hundred feet from the rear of the resort lay a set of buildings that appeared to be there to take care of the truck garden. There was a big machine shed and a packing house. It was there that I found several older tractors I picked what appeared to be the best of them. I got the engine oil drained, the filters replaced, the fuel dumped and the front tires replaced. I'd have to go into town for a new battery. I replaced the coolant in the radiator and greased all the fittings to get it ready. Then I cleaned up and sat in the spa for a while with a bourbon and water. The next day I'd check the yellow pages for an auto museum and go hunting for a pickup. With that thought I fell asleep, once more luxuriating in the smell and feel of clean sheets.

I was down to a reserve of about one hundred and twenty gallons of bio diesel. I started another sixty gallon batch before I left for the city. I didn't find any museo de auto or anything like that, but I did find antiguos. How the hell did they get camiones for trucks, now I ask you? Without that bi-lingual dictionary I would have been screwed. I found a little brown ford pickup that was up on axle blocks, thank God, so I didn't have to find tires for it. The seals hadn't let go but the insulation on the spark plug wires was shot. That was an easy fix. Fresh oil, fresh gas, a flushed and refilled radiator and a jump got it running. My batting average was pretty good. I made careful notes as to where I was and took the semi- tractor down to the shipyards to find a flat-bed trailer with ramps. I got the pickup on the flat-bed and took it all over to a place that did truck repair, or at least that's what I hoped the yellow pages said.

Yep. Big truck repair, plus field tractors and commercial trucks. I managed to wedge a big battery into the pickup's battery tray, strapped it down and hooked it up. A half hour after I added the acid it was ready to rock. I knew that I'd be back to that place. I also brought back a couple of big batteries for the Cummins LPG engine that drove the resort generator.

I called that a day. I started another batch of bio diesel working, had a sandwich and went to bed.

I spent some time in the morning putting together a yeast starter. I put a bowl of warm water, flour and sugar in a warm spot and hoped a 'good' wild yeast would take up home. I stored the current batch of bio diesel and started another, then took the pickup down to the docks where I looked for a ship's chandler to try and find dry baking supplies like dry milk, dry eggs, butter buds and dry buttermilk. I didn't have much luck the first day. I did find the bills of lading for a trans-modal dock full of trailers ready to pick up. It was fun digging through them. It was a variant on dry-van bingo without having to use a pry-bar. I went back to the resort to have lunch, then filled the back of the pickup with cleaned out trash cans to go fresh produce hunting. I found avocado, cocoanut, plantains and finger banana. I found what had been a truck garden and had reseeded the hell out of itself. I dug a couple handfuls of garlic, a few onions and a few grandfather potatoes. I found a few cucumbers and some celery. It was too early for the citrus and other fruit. Within a month I'd be canning again. I supposed that I needed cans, lids and the tools. I'd get there.

I had a very nice salad with fried plantains for dinner.

Come morning I took the pickup to town to find big grocery stores. I thought that it would be possible to find flour, rice, corn meal and masa that had been stored in the middle of pallets, hence might still be good. I found a few candidates and brought back twenty pound bags of corn meal and masa to work with. I made some bread with the sourdough starter and it tasted all right. It smelled wonderful! I made a hot mash out of some of the corn meal and put it out where I'd seen some of the fields eaten down. Whatever I discovered that proved edible went into the freezer to keep. I was surprised that I found cafeteria-sized jugs of catsup and mustard that were still good. With some horseradish to mix with some catsup I'd have tartar sauce. After lunch I went back to the grocery stores to see what else I could salvage. A few spices seemed okay and all the canned cocoa powder was good. So was the corn starch. I got a lot of instant coffee too. The honey was crystallized in the jars but a warming in hot water would fix that right up. The brown sugar bags were solid bricks. Again, I had an answer for that. I got everything put away and had dinner. I missed music. I'd have to make my own.

It must have been after eight in the morning after the separation occurred because almost all the fishing fleet were tied up at the dock. Some were in pretty damned sad shape but a few with enclosed wheel houses and inboard engines seemed to have weathered the years pretty well. I looked them over pretty carefully. If they didn't have stainless steel props and shafts then everything below the water line would be gone. (as far as metal was concerned.) I found a 38-foot boat with a dip net. Over the course of a week I replaced the batteries, replaced the oil, replaced the diesel, replaced the belts and replaced the filters. I wasn't too surprised to get the engine to start and run, but I was surprised to get it to move, then figured out how to operate the winch, boom and net. I took the "Merry Mary" out for an afternoon to see if anything was out there. Yup, there was! I headed for the pier after one dip of the net. I must have accidentally found a trench. I had what I figured to be over forty pounds of fish and shrimp in a two-meter net. I made good time getting back to the dock because I'd been stupid and hadn't brought any ice. I tied off, killed the engine, got the catch in three coolers, rinsed down the deck and headed for home. As soon as I made it in I headed the shrimp, pulled off the legs and boiled a few pounds in salt water. The rest went into the freezer on trays. When they were frozen I'd bag them. The fish weren't much so I ground them up with the shrimp heads, mixed in some flour and made bait for the next time. That got stored in the freezer, too. The shrimp were good but they'd be better with tartar sauce. I'd go looking for horseradish root the next morning. I needed vinegar for cerviche and a pasta maker to make things like pasta, lasagna and stuffed ravioli. It had been a good day. I went to bed satisfied.

Phew! I stank. I showered, stripped the bed and washed everything. I made another batch of bio-diesel and went looking for a ship's chandler again. I found one! I stripped his dry stores for all he had, and took the stores of survival cookies as well. That gave me enough to bake with for decades if I wasn't wasteful. I wired up the thermostat replacement circuits for the other two walk-in freezers and got them cleaned out. I made a note to myself to get all the big coolers and freezers put on timers rather than to rely on my goofy memory to turn the chillers on and off.

I was harvesting and canning every day. I kept setting out pans of warm corn meal mush every morning. I saw sharp little hooves in the dirt. I either had goats or pigs. Either way I pushed myself a little extra each day to put up a pen to hold them. Either way I'd have meat animals. I remembered mom's lesson to label each and every jar with its contents and date of canning. I made a lot of spaghetti sauce, a lot of basil pesto, a lot of parsley pesto and a lot of oregano pesto. There were a lot of grape vines, a lot of citrus fruit, a lot of black olives and a lot of tree-borne fruit, such as apples, cherries, apricots, peaches and pears. The fruit I preserved in sugar syrup, as I did a lot of the citrus. It wouldn't taste fresh but it would taste good. The apples and pears likewise were jarred in sugar syrup with cinnamon. The apricots, peaches and plums I played with until I got a decent canned result out of them. I had to half-crush the grapes and lay them out in the sun to get raisins. I used open trays on the packing building roof. There were big screens stacked up there to keep the birds off.

The root vegetables were set aside in sand piles (In a root cellar, of course). I gathered garlic and onions, then dried them. I had melons until I couldn't eat melon any more. The squash were set aside for later, like the root vegetables.

I continued with my inventory of the containerized freight. I had to hit a jackpot sometime.

I trapped four feral pigs--three sows and a boar. I fed them a lot of what I didn't or couldn't preserve. I used the big kitchen sausage grinder to mix seafood with warm cornmeal mash for them. I never got a complaint.

I lied.

Even the pigs complained when I tried to add some of the old beer to their feed. I ended up pouring it all out over the compost pile.

Later in the season I put out mash again to see what I might lure in. I got guinea hens. Their eggs weren't that big but they were edible. I fed them daily, watered them and planted bushes for them to sleep in. I sure did a little happy dance when they decided to stay in one of the orchards.

I couldn't believe it. I found two big intermodal transport containers full of fifty gallon drums. They contained hard red wheat under dry nitrogen. They were still in the hulls, so they were intended to be seed. I had no idea if they'd sprout but they'd make ideal feed and bread flour. I brought the grain trailers back to the farm and started the next phase--I looked for grain mills. I had an idea on how to glean the hulls from the wheat but I'd need electrical power at the farm. I thought about how to do that.

The harvest was pretty well over. I drove around with paper pouches and a crayon collecting seed for the next year.

I didn't know if I'd find any cattle or goats on the hoof to butcher, but the fish were another story. I built a smoke-house to preserve my catch.

Finding hardwood, or even corn-cobs, was a bitch. I had to travel up into, then over the mountains to find trees that weren't pine or evergreen to smoke with. I waited until the fall when the rains came to harvest firewood. I cleaned out the orchards, taking fruit trees that had died for smoking wood a well.

While I was camping out and cutting wood I was found by a herd of goats. They were after me for food, so I cut the firewood trip short, gathered all the goats that I could and took them home. They made quite a mess of the trailer before I got a pen together for them. After that I kept them in a real big fenced pen with well-watered forage. They were odd beasts. If I'd sit in their compound and take a nap on a lawn chair. I'd wake up surrounded by snoozing goats. As soon as I got up they'd bound away. They were strange, half-domesticated critters.

I headed out several times to get firewood. I cut and split it, then filled several small barns. There might be times that I needed it and wouldn't be able to get out.

The shrimp were easily caught on the grassy flats. There were tuna out there but I didn't know how to catch them. I tried chumming them with shrimp bait and some blood bait that I'd gotten from some rabbits. I caught a few and made tuna leather (jerky) and used hot pepper powder with olive oil for blackened tuna in a cast iron pan on a hot fire. Damn, that was good.

I shot ducks coming in to feed over the inland ponds once in a while. I cooked them in garlic and onions.

It was simple to catch shrimp. I'd go out, bait the field, wait a half hour and start bringing up nets full of product. With the reduced stress on the fishing grounds it was almost automatic. They were easy to smoke even though it was tedious to head, de-vein and shell them.

I got sick for about a week. Without anyone around to tell me how many days I was out of it I couldn't confirm what I thought. I managed to get food to the critters each day and collapse back into bed. Later I wondered how the hell I caught a flu if nobody else was around to give it to me!

You miss the little things that you don't have. I missed eggs and butter. It dawned on me that butter was out there all this time but under a different name. It was called Ghee and a lot of stores carried it on their international shelves. I tried some, hoping that it wasn't rancid, and got a pleasant surprise. I had butter for my toast and baking again! I kept all I could find in a walk-in cooler, even though it had lasted that long on the grocery store's shelves. I started collecting a few eggs from several of the laying guinea hens. I got a few surprises until I started marking the brood eggs so that I wouldn't take them. Later, when the flock was on the increase, I took a few older hens for dinners.

I bolted a backhoe attachment to the tractor, then dug two ditches between the resort and the farm. One protected a water line while the other got a 110-volt sixty amp sealed power line. I got water running in the barn and fed the breaker panel in the machine shed from the resort's generator.

I went exploring for an English language book store and a music store that sold instruments. I found a guitar that I liked and started coating it in lemon oil three times a day. After a week and a half it stopped absorbing oil. I went through hell finding a set of nylon strings that wouldn't break as soon as I got it tuned. I was happy to be playing again, even though I wasn't very good. For all I knew I was the best on the planet!

I was feeling better. It took me almost a month to get back to normal. I made the rounds, making sure that all my fuel supplies were all right. I refilled the LPG bulk tank from the carrier., then used a dip pipette to test all my diesel storage tanks, checking the clarity and color of my stored fuel. I was doing all right on gasoline, as the decomposed stuff sank to the bottom and I pulled from the top of the bulk tanks.

Satisfied that everything was running on an even keel I explored more of the town. (City, really. It's last population figures before the separation counted over a third of a million residents.) I had a long-term need to find out where I could refill my LPG bulk tanker. I figured that the source would be near the docks somewhere but I hadn't spotted any of the big, spherical bulk tanks. I just kept driving around and marking off areas of the city that I'd covered on a map that I kept in the truck cab. It took a long time. Whenever I spotted something interesting I either wrote down the address on my clip-board or investigated it directly. That's how I picked up a medic kit with a surgical stapler, in case I whacked myself and had to get the bleeding stopped.

I sat on the beach and played most evenings. Once I was surprised to find a little girl coming out of the beach scrub to sit and listen. She was naked as a jaybird and tanned all over. I couldn't tell if she was Mexican or European. Her hair was a black tangled mess. She must have been six or seven years old. I did my best to just keep playing--from then on I made it a point to play every day. I found a Beatles song book and learned to play most of the songs from it. Soon I brought her a take-away tray dinner each night. After a while she lost some of her fear and picked through what I brought, eating what she liked. Soon after I brought dinners for both of us, to show her that it was all edible. She didn't like the flat-bread at first but learned to use it as a spoon. She always disappeared after dark.

I sewed up a shoulder bag with a long flap and a shoulder strap out of canvas for her. I put a steel cup, a knife and a spoon in it, along with a little box of salt. I gave it to her one night along with a seven by seven foot piece of canvas to use as a shelter or a wrap at night. I didn't like the thought of her naked and shivering in the dark.

I never locked any of the doors so it shouldn't have surprised me to find her sitting on the carpet, just inside the door I usually used. She was watching me. She never made a sound. I waved to her and said "Hello". She half-waved back. She opened her mouth but never said a word. I wondered if she'd ever learned to talk.

I made us some fried fish from what I had in the freezer and gave it to her on a tortilla with a kitchen towel. I sat a few feet from her and ate mine as she explored her lunch. I made her another which she quickly polished off. I twisted a couple of bananas off of a bunch for her dessert. Soon she became drowsy from her full belly. I gestured to one of the couches in the front desk area. I mimed going to sleep with my hands beside my head but she'd never seen that before. I shrugged and laid down on another couch to take a nap. I woke up to see the other couch was empty. I looked outside the window to see her pissing in the road. I sighed. I guessed that I was doing all right with a feral child.

When she came back in I had my guitar in hand. I was going to sing a little to see what she'd do. I started in with an old Roy Orbison goodie.

Sweet dreams baby Sweet dreams baby Sweet dreams baby How long must I dream

Dream baby got me dreaming sweet dream the whole day through Dream baby got me dreaming sweet dreams the night time too I love you and I really love you that won't do Dream baby make me stop dreaming you can make my dreams come true

Sweet dreams baby Sweet dreams baby Sweet dreams baby How long must I dream

Dream baby got me dreaming sweet dream the whole day through Dream baby got me dreaming sweet dreams the night time too I love you and I really love you that won't do Dream baby make me stop dreaming you can make my dreams come true

Sweet dreams baby Sweet dreams baby Sweet dreams baby How long must I dream

She listened with her mouth open, amazed at the noises coming out of me.

I smiled. I couldn't help it. I remembered another fun song. I started strumming its funky little refrain, then started singing.

In a little cabaret In a south Texas border town Sat a boy and his guitar And the people came from all around And all the girls From there to Austin Were slippin' away from home And puttin' jewelry and hopped to take the trip To go and listen To the little dark-haired boy who played the Tennessee flat top box And he would play.

Well he couldn't ride or wrangle And he never cared to make it down But give him his guitar And he'd be happy all the time And all the girls From nine to ninety Were snappin' fingers Tappin' toes And beggin' him don't stop And hypnotized And fascinated By the little dark-haired boy who played the Tennessee flat top box And he would play.

Then one day he was gone And no one ever saw him 'round He vanished like the breeze They forgot him in the little town But all the girls Still dreamed about him And hung around The cabaret until the doors were locked And then one day On the hit parade Was the little dark-haired boy who played the Tennessee flat top box And he would play.

The poor thing was sitting by my knee, silently crying. To think, such a thing rocked her world. I slowly reached up and petted her cheek. She flinched and threw herself backwards, then reached up to touch her cheek where I'd petted her.

She followed me around like a shadow after that. She watched me pee and poop in the toilet. If she'd known how I knew that she'd have been taking careful notes. I walked over to a mirror and she followed me. I showed her the image she made. She got the connection. I pointed at my chest and tapped it. "Jim". I pointed at her chest and tapped it. "Smelly".

She tapped my chest. "Him". She tapped her chest. "Melly". Damn. She could mimic and got the connection. She was a bright kid, feral or not.

After a while the fug coming off of her brought me to a decision. I grabbed a bottle of shampoo and a couple of towels, then walked out to the spa. I didn't turn the jets on, but used it like a hot tub. I got into the warm water and waited until she joined me. I washed my hair with the shampoo, then the rest of myself. I gave her the bottle of soap and watched her carefully imitate me. She poured out way too much shampoo, I thought, but with that mop of grease and dirt I figured that it probably wasn't enough. Sure enough, it didn't foam for anything. After the first pass I reached over and washed her hair for her again, making sure to scratch her scalp and get everything out that I could. Her raggedy hair was still a tangled mat and I didn't see much hope in combing it out. I knew that I'd have to resort to scissors but I had to get her trust first. That would wait.