Nowhere to go & Old Gus speaks

Dan Coffey

Nowhere to go and nothing to do

We didn’t notice any explosions. Our first clue was when the Internet went down. A few minutes later we noticed no cell phone service. There was no reason to panic, it might have been a storm. When we checked the TV, some stations were still on the air. They were playing movies and game shows. But no news.

They say that people ninety miles from the big cities could hear the booms. People in Rockford, Illinois could hear the bombs in Chicago. They were deep, prolonged booms, but not terribly loud at that distance. Those who had been looking in that direction saw flashes, but not everybody was looking that way. Most people were indoors.

It turns out that it wasn’t a big attack, like the one we had all learned to expect from Russia. Only four cities were targeted. LA, New York, Chicago and Washington. Only a few bombs per city. No one knew who was behind it, or whether President Trump was still alive. Many people hoped he wasn’t.

It took a week before regular radio and television broadcasting resumed. Light entertainment predominated. News was a somber affair. White men wearing jacket and tie intoned facts and figures like funeral directors. There was still no report on the status of the President, nor most members of government. By now, cellphone service had resumed in many places, but not all. The Internet was still down.

At night, bands of orange flickered overhead like the northern lights. There was a smell like burning wires. It became very hot for about a week, then smoke filled the sky and the temperature plummeted. Even though it was mid-summer, we had to wear jackets during the day. The plants that had survived the hot spell, soon withered and died in the cold gloom. Farmers threw in the towel.

We who lived in rural America paid the price for having let our towns decline. Now there was no getting away to the city. Gas prices went up by a factor of twenty, and there were road blocks on most major highways, so there was nowhere to go and nothing to do in town.

Those towns big enough to have a Wal Mart didn’t suffer much for the first month, but after that the shelves had been picked clean. Since everything Wal-Mart sells was made in China anyway, and because the prices of those items had doubled during the trade war, people were already used to getting by with less. Now they were going to have to get even more resourceful.

The hunger came on more quickly than anyone realized. After only six weeks, there were food shortages. After eight weeks, people were starting to die. At first it was the young, old, and infirm who succumbed, but after three months, mornings found bodies stacked during the night on almost every street corner.

Nobody was ever certain who had attacked us, or why. The theory most people accepted was that it had started with a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan, and then somehow had spread to Israel, Iran, North Korea, and finally to us. Since no missiles had been fired at us, it was thought that the bombs had already been in place, on the ground, waiting to be detonated at a any date. But as to who put them there or pressed the trigger, no one knew for certain.

After a year, things started to get better. It turns out that almost no on in Washington survived. Leaders from other states were brought in. There was a lot of talk of retaliation, but nothing was ever done because we didn’t know who to invade or bomb. You can’t just bomb everyone. We’ve tried that in the past, and it doesn’t work. Or maybe it gets you where we are today.

Old Gus Speaks was hoping somebody like you would come along. Been waiting a long time. Sit down. We’ve got some talking to do. They say I have brain damage. They say that, at best, I’ve got two more years. What do they know? They might only have six months. Maybe six days. What do they know?

I once dated a girl who was in the Miss America contest. That was back in the fifties. She had a good figure and an even better face. In the “show how smart you are” part of the contest, I thought she stole the show. She talked about Eisenhower warning America to beware of the Military/Industrial Complex.

Nobody had the faintest idea what that girl was talking about. But they gave her polite applause when she was done. She might have won or placed if she’d just kept mum about Eisenhower.

Most of the girls talked about the role of proper nutrition and discipline at home to have a happy family. That’s what people wanted to hear a young woman talk about back then.

As I recall, she later married a guy who owned some hotels in Kansas City and Des Moines. They had the money, so they traveled a lot. I remember hearing that they were killed in an automobile accident in Panama.

I’ve got a lot of stories. Most of them aren’t uplifting. People generally don’t want to hear many of them. Children avoid me. I’ve been told my face is etched in a permanent scowl.

But I’m not angry. No, as dispositions go, I’ m sanguine. That’s an old-fashioned word for mellow. I can take it or leave it, roll with the punches, have my cake and eat it too. I don’t need to be well-liked.

Guy like me doesn’t remember insults, so he can ’t form resentments. Water off a duck’s back. Sure, every once in a while, I lose my cool, grab a gun or a knife and start stalking somebody or other, but most people can outrun me. Then I get thirsty or hungry or tired and can’t remember what all the fuss was about.

The cops in this town know where I live. For a while the doctors had me on lithium, but that just gave me a headache and made me thirsty. Kept me out of trouble because I never felt good enough to leave the house.

Believe it or not, I hope to hook up with a woman again someday. A younger woman. Women my age don’t do much for me. As I recall, they don’t care much for me, either. Maybe one of those third-world women who will take any old geezer provided he can get them far away from where they came from. That’s a service I could provide. She could service me in lots of ways.

Someday it will all be about pooping and peeing and remembering to take your meds. If you don’t take them, it’ s a problem, if you take them twice, it’s a bigger problem. That day hasn’t arrived yet. Until it does, I’m gonna get away with as much as possible.

If I could suddenly get involved in something highly lucrative and slightly illegal, I would, but for the life of me, I don’t have the faintest idea what that might be. You gotta know something about drugs to be a drug dealer. Any idiot can rob a bank, but the payout isn’t big and the risk is astronomical.

I’d risk it all for a big enough payout. Something that would substantially change my life circumstances. Right now I’ve got an application in for the senior center in town. They give you a room and meals for whatever your social security check is. I visited a friend or two there over the years and the place always smells like pee. There’s a big room with a TV and nobody’s really watching it. Some old ladies slumped over in wheelchairs along the wall. Fat nurses talking too loud and trying too hard to be cheerful. That kind of place.

That’s the kind of place that on a really cold winter night, I’d let myself out the side door and wander off into a snowdrift, just to put an end to it. If that’s all I have to look forward to, why not just get it over with?

But if I had a few hundred thousand dollars of cash, I could probably run off to one of those banana republics and do all right.

You say you got to be somewhere else? All right then, been nice talking to you. Good luck young man. From what I’ve seen of this world, you’re gonna need it.