Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America by Brian Francis Slattery

Author:Brian Francis Slattery
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2008-10-14T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER VIII.

The NEW SIOUX in repose; seven days of light;

the crossing of the PACIFIC and the

PURCHASE of MANHATTAN.

The hills of Wisconsin push themselves out of the planet’s hide and break into crags that betray bedrock from the Driftless Area to Devil’s Lake. At the army plant five miles south of Baraboo, generations of grasses are burying spent ammunition under layers of their dead, already talking about winter, when ice will freeze the lakes, bring down the limbs of trees, and paint a slick skin on the scrap animals in Dr. Evermor’s empire of metal: hordes of iron insects stamping in the dirt; flocks of giant birds with feathers made from scissors; an avian symphony of aluminum and steel, with gargantuan basses that taper with grace into the heads of auks, a battalion of beaks fluting into trumpets, bodies swelling into timpani, splitting into harps, xylophones, and strings, all led by a rusty bug-eyed ostrich conducting his brethren in a clanking, buzzing elegy for the end of industry. All still standing, standing still, though the sculptor is gone. The storm he’d been waiting for showed up at last almost a year ago, a boiling darkness pregnant with electricity, and the man kissed his wife, climbed into the tower of one of his creations, flung his arms wide, and waited; and lightning forked from the sky, sparked around him, and carried him off.

Robert Blackfeather Sherman leans back in a wooden chair in the patched, veiny shade of a tree that’s lost half itsleaves; arms folded, smoking a long pipe that needles out from under his wide Stetson, sends threads of smoke into the branches above him. His horse, a mangy thing with bullet scars in its flanks, rips out grass to the roots with thick teeth; his gun, an antique M-16 for which he casts the bullets himself, angles within reach, a leather cap tied over the barrel to keep the dirt out. The sun is not yet down, but his wife is already sleeping in their tent, pitched under a tree that will fend off some of the rain when it comes. Soon his unborn son will wake up in her womb; he’s convinced the fetus is nocturnal, that it sings to him from the uterus and affects his dreams. Sherman has a bit of Crazy Horse in him, his men say, the way he listens to what his sleeping brain tells him. But it hasn’t led them astray yet. It was his dreams that told them to abandon the Pine Ridge Reservation, the vinyl-and-brick houses, the naked sheet rock, the graffiti and the gravestones. They saw the announcements that the government was going under on grainy televisions, partied in bars and in their homes, serious revelry that ended with houses on fire; chickens beheaded, plucked, and eaten; people dancing in the dust of the Dakota roads to radios skanking out Burning Spear while others lay on the ground laughing about just how Marcus Garvey’s words had come to pass. That

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