Flashback

Begay didn’t have a TV in the cab either but he kept his pirate radio blaring through the night. Val was used to the officially sanctioned sat radio stations—NPR, CNR, MSBR, VOA—but what Begay called his pirate radio pulled in a lot of unlicensed, fuzzy AM and FM pirate stations that blasted away through the night.

Most of them were right-wing talk radio, outlawed for years, and old Begay seemed to drink the crap up.

Val half dozed to the singsong revival-preacher-sounding right-wing polemics being shouted out by the all-night talk-jockeys, interrupted only by weird call-in programs where the people calling in were crazier and more right-wing than the radio announcers.

“The radio stations and announcers and engineers and shit have to keep moving,” Begay said at one point. “Stay one step ahead of DHS and the other feds.”

Val woke up for a few minutes at that but then started dozing to the rhythms of the radio gabble again.

“… no, we weren’t always like this, friends. Thirty years ago… twenty-five years ago, even… we were still a great nation. A united nation. Fifty full states, fifty stars on the flag. We chose decline, my friends. We chose national bankruptcy and the bankruptcy of forty-seven states to keep the government’s entitlement programs going… seventy-three percent of the population pays no taxes at all, my friends, but still expects cradle-to-grave health care, cradle-to-grave guaranteed employment with a minimum wage of four hundred and eighty dollars an hour, thirty-hour workweeks—when anyone chooses to work in this great, lost, botched, ruined nation of ours… and retirement at age fifty-eight with full Social Security benefits, even though there are now eighteen nonworking retirees in this country—including the eleven million illegal immigrants who’ve just received the most recent amnesty and citizenship—yes, eighteen nonworking retirees for every working American in this country that’s forgotten what hard work really is…”

The voices droned on. Val half slept.

Just a few hours beyond Grand Junction, they ran into one of the reasons that it took twelve hours rather than four to get from Grand Junction to Denver.

Just past an abandoned husk of a mountain town called Glenwood Springs—with food distribution all but broken down except for major cities, little towns across the nation had just dried up, but especially impossible-to-get-to-in-winter mountain towns—there was a twelve-mile stretch of canyon, Begay said, that had been one of the most spectacular dozen or so miles in the entire continental U.S.’s grid of Interstate highways.

No more.

What had been double ribbons of elevated two-lane highways, the westbound lanes rising forty feet above the eastbound lanes for miles and miles, punctuated with lighted and well-ventilated tunnels through stubborn outcroppings of the sheer cliffs that rose more than a thousand feet on either side, slicing the sky into a thin sliver of stars, was now a narrow two-lane gravel road, filled with potholes and hard curves around fallen boulders and tumbled sections of the Interstate itself, where the convoy crept and bounced and jounced along in low gear beside the churning, dam-broke, no-longer-harnessed Colorado River.

But after ninety minutes or so to get through those twelve miles, they were back on battered but serviceable concrete and asphalt again and Begay was shifting up through the gears.

“God, I’d love to learn how to do that,” said Val.

Henry Big Horse Begay looked at him and then back at the road and taillights ahead of them. “What? Shift gears? There’s sixteen forward gears on this lovely baby. Four back. That’s what you want to learn? How to shift and split gears on a big rig?”

“Just how to drive a truck,” said Val. The fatigue and withdrawal were working on him like sodium pentothal. Or just turning him into a baby again, he thought.