When this World is All on Fire
by William Sanders
William Sanders has published many stories in this magazine and elsewhere, as well as numerous novels of SF, fantasy, mystery, and suspense. His newest science fiction novel, J., was published this summer. In his latest tale, he takes a disturbing look at a time...
* * * *
“Squatters,” Jimmy Lonekiller said as he swung the jeep off the narrow old blacktop onto the narrower and older gravel side road. “I can’t believe we got squatters again.”
Sitting beside him, bracing himself against the bumping and bouncing, Sergeant Davis Blackbear said, “Better get used to it. We kick this bunch out, there’ll be more.”
Jimmy Lonekiller nodded. “Guess that’s right,” he said. “They’re not gonna give up, are they?”
He was a husky, dark-skinned young man, and tall for a Cherokee; among the women of the reservation, he was generally considered something of a hunk. His khaki uniform was neat and crisply pressed, despite the oppressive heat. Davis Blackbear, feeling his own shirt wilting and sticking to his skin, wondered how he did it. Maybe fullbloods didn’t sweat as much. Or maybe it was something to do with being young.
Davis said, “Would you? Give up, I mean, if you were in their shoes?”
Jimmy didn’t reply for a moment, being busy fighting the wheel as the jeep slammed over a series of potholes. They were on a really bad stretch now, the road narrowed to a single-lane dirt snaketrack; the overhanging trees on either side, heavy with dust-greyed festoons of kudzu vine, shut out the sun without doing anything much about the heat. This was an out-of-the-way part of the reservation; Davis had had to check the map at the tribal police headquarters to make sure he knew how to get here.
The road began to climb now, up the side of a steep hill. The jeep slowed to not much better than walking speed; the locally distilled alcohol might burn cooler and cleaner than gasoline but it had no power at all. Jimmy Lonekiller spoke then: “Don’t guess I would, you put it that way. Got to go somewhere, poor bastards.”
They were speaking English; Davis was Oklahoma Cherokee, having moved to the North Carolina reservation only a dozen years ago, when he married a Qualla Band woman. He could understand the Eastern dialect fairly well by now, enough for cop purposes anyway, but he still wasn’t up to a real conversation.
“Still,” Jimmy went on, “you got to admit it’s a hell of a thing. Twenty-first century, better than five hundred years after Columbus, and here we are again with white people trying to settle on our land. What little bit we’ve got left,” he said, glancing around at the dusty woods. “There’s gotta be somewhere else they can go.”
“Except,” Davis said, “somebody’s already there too.”
“Probably so,” Jimmy admitted. “Seems like they’re running out of places for people to be.”
He steered the jeep around a rutted hairpin bend, while Davis turned the last phrase over in his mind, enjoying the simple precision of it: running out of places for people to be, that was the exact and very well-put truth. Half of Louisiana and more than half of Florida under water now, the rest of the coastline inundated, Miami and Mobile and Savannah and most of Houston, and, despite great and expensive efforts, New Orleans too.
And lots more land, farther inland, that might as well be submerged for all the good it did anybody: all that once-rich farm country in southern Georgia and Alabama and Mississippi, too hot and dry now to grow anything, harrowed by tornadoes and dust storms, while raging fires destroyed the last remnants of the pine forests and the cypress groves of the dried-up swamplands. Not to mention the quake, last year, shattering Memphis and eastern Arkansas, demolishing the levees and turning the Mississippi loose on what was left of the Delta country. Seemed everybody either had way too much water or not enough.
He’d heard a black preacher, on the radio, declare that it was all God’s judgment on the South because of slavery and racism. But that was bullshit; plenty of other parts of the country were getting it just as bad. Like Manhattan, or San Francisco—and he didn’t even want to think about what it must be like in places like Arizona. And Africa, oh, Jesus. Nobody in the world wanted to think about Africa now.
The road leveled out at the top of the hill and he pointed. “Pull over there. I want to do a quick scout before we drive up.”
Jimmy stopped the jeep and Davis climbed out and stood in the middle of the dirt road. “Well,” Jimmy said, getting out too, “I wish somebody else would get the job of running them off now and then.” He gave Davis a mocking look. “It’s what I get, letting myself get partnered with an old ‘breed. Everybody knows why Ridge always puts you in charge of the evictions.”
Davis didn’t rise to the bait; he knew what Jimmy was getting at. It was something of a standing joke among the reservation police that Davis always got any jobs that involved dealing with white people. Captain Ridge claimed it was because of his years of experience on the Tulsa PD, but Jimmy and others claimed it was really because he was quarter-blood and didn’t look all that Indian and therefore might make whites less nervous.
In his own estimation, he didn’t look particularly Indian or white or anything else, just an average-size man with a big bony face and too many wrinkles and dark brown hair that was now getting heavily streaked with gray. He doubted that his appearance inspired much confidence in people of any race.
The dust cloud was beginning to settle over the road behind them. A black-and-white van appeared, moving slowly, and pulled to a stop behind the jeep. Corporal Roy Smoke stuck his head out the window and said, “Here?”
“For now,” Davis told him. “I’m going to go have a look, scope out the scene before we move in. You guys wait here.” He turned. “Jimmy, you come with me.”
* * *
The heat was brutal as they walked down the road, even in the shady patches. At the bottom of the hill, though, Davis led the way off the road and up a dry creek bed, and back in the woods it was a little cooler. Away from the road, there wasn’t enough sunlight for the kudzu vines to take over, and beneath the trees the light was pleasantly soft and green. Still too damn dry, Davis thought, feeling leaves and twigs crunching under his boot soles. Another good reason to get this eviction done quickly; squatters tended to be careless with fire. The last bad woods fire on the reservation, a couple of months ago, had been started by a squatter family trying to cook a stolen hog.
They left the creek bed and walked through the woods, heading roughly eastward. “Hell,” Jimmy murmured, “I know where this is now. They’re on the old Birdshooter place, huh? Shit, nobody’s lived there for years. Too rocky to grow anything, no water since the creek went dry.”
Davis motioned for silence. Moving more slowly now, trying to step quietly though it wasn’t easy in the dry underbrush, they worked their way to the crest of a low ridge. Through the trees, Davis could see a cleared area beyond. Motioning to Jimmy to wait, he moved up to the edge of the woods and paused in the shadow of a half-grown oak, and that was when he heard the singing.
At first he didn’t even recognize it as singing; the sound was so high and clear and true that he took it for some sort of instrument. But after a second he realized it was a human voice, though a voice like none he’d ever heard. He couldn’t make out the words, but the sound alone was enough to make the hair stand up on his arms and neck, and the air suddenly felt cooler under the trees.
It took Davis a moment to get unstuck; he blinked rapidly and took a deep breath. Then, very cautiously, he peered around the trunk of the oak.
The clearing wasn’t very big; wasn’t very clear, either, any more, having been taken over by brush and weeds. In the middle stood the ruins of a small frame house, its windows smashed and its roof fallen in.
Near the wrecked house sat a green pickup truck, its bed covered with a boxy, homemade-looking camper shell—plywood, it looked like from where Davis stood, and painted a dull uneven gray. The truck’s own finish was badly faded and scabbed with rust; the near front fender was crumpled. Davis couldn’t see any license plates.
A kind of lean-to had been erected at the rear of the truck, a sagging blue plastic tarp with guy-ropes tied to trees and bushes. As Davis watched, a lean, long-faced man in bib overalls and a red baseball cap came out from under the tarp and stood looking about.
Then the red-haired girl came around the front of the truck, still singing, the words clear now:
“Oh, when this world is all on fire Where you gonna go? Where you gonna go?”
She was, Davis guessed, maybe twelve or thirteen, though he couldn’t really tell at this distance. Not much of her, anyway; he didn’t figure she’d go over eighty pounds or so. Her light blue dress was short and sleeveless, revealing thin pale arms and legs. All in all, it didn’t seem possible for all that sound to be coming from such a wispy little girl; and yet there was no doubt about it, he could see her mouth moving:
“Oh, when this world is all on fire Where you gonna go?”
The tune was a simple one, an old-fashioned modal-sounding melody line, slow and without a pronounced rhythm. It didn’t matter; nothing mattered but that voice. It soared through the still mountain air like a whippoorwill calling beside a running stream. Davis felt his throat go very tight.
“Run to the mountains to hide your face Never find no hiding place Oh, when this world is all on fire Where you gonna go?”
The man in the baseball cap put his hands on his hips. “Eva May!” he shouted.
The girl stopped singing and turned. Her red hair hung down her back almost to her waist. “Yes, Daddy?” she called.
“Quit the damn fooling around,” the man yelled. His voice was rough, with the practiced anger of the permanently angry man. “Go help your brother with the fire.”
Fire? Davis spotted it then, a thin trace of bluish-white smoke rising from somewhere on the far side of the parked truck. “Shit!” he said soundlessly, and turned and began picking his way back down the brushy slope.
“What’s happening?” Jimmy Lonekiller said as Davis reappeared. “What was that music? Sounded like—”
“Quiet,” Davis said. “Come on. We need to hurry.”
“Go,” Davis said to Jimmy as they turned off the road and up the brush-choked track through the trees. “No use trying to sneak up. They’ve heard us coming by now.”
Sure enough, the squatters were already standing in the middle of the clearing, watching, as the jeep bumped to a stop in front of them. The man in the red baseball cap stood in the middle, his face dark with anger. Beside him stood a washed-out-looking blond woman in a faded flower-print dress, and, next to her, a tall teenage boy wearing ragged jeans and no shirt. The boy’s hair had been cropped down almost flush with his scalp.
The woman was holding a small baby to her chest. Great, Davis thought with a flash of anger, just what a bunch of homeless drifters needed. Running out of places for people to be, but not out of people, hell, no....
The red-haired girl was standing off to one side, arms folded. Close up, Davis revised his estimate of her age; she had to be in her middle to late teens at least. There didn’t appear to be much of a body under that thin blue dress, but it was definitely not that of a child. Her face, as she watched the two men get out of the jeep, was calm and without expression.
The van came rocking and swaying up the trail and stopped behind the jeep. Davis waited while Roy Smoke and the other four men got out—quite a force to evict one raggedy-ass family, but Captain Ridge believed in being careful—and then he walked over to the waiting squatters and said, “Morning. Where you folks from?”
The man in the red baseball cap spat on the ground, not taking his eyes off Davis. “Go to hell, Indian.”
Oh oh. Going to be like that, was it? Davis said formally, “Sir, you’re on Cherokee reservation land. Camping isn’t allowed except by permit and in designated areas. I’ll have to ask you to move out.”
The woman said, “Oh, why can’t you leave us alone? We’re not hurting anybody. You people have all this land, why won’t you share it?”
We tried that, lady, Davis thought, and look where it got us. Aloud he said, “Ma’am, the laws are made by the government of the Cherokee nation. I just enforce them.”
“Nation!” The man snorted. “Bunch of woods niggers, hogging good land while white people starve. You got no right.”
“I’m not here to argue about it,” Davis said. “I’m just here to tell you you’ve got to move on.”
The boy spoke up suddenly. “You planning to make us?”
Davis looked at him. Seventeen or eighteen, he guessed, punk-mean around the eyes and that Johnny Pissoff stance that they seemed to develop at that age; ropy muscles showing under bare white skin, forearms rippling visibly as he clenched both fists.
“Yes,” Davis told him. “If necessary, we’ll move you.”
To the father—he assumed—he added, “I’m hoping you won’t make it necessary. If you like, we’ll give you a hand—”
He didn’t get to finish. That was when the boy came at him, fists up, head hunched down between his shoulders, screaming as he charged: “Redskin motherfu—”
Davis shifted his weight, caught the wild swing in a cross-arm block, grasped the kid’s wrist and elbow and pivoted, all in one smooth motion. The boy yelped in pain as he hit the ground, and then grunted as Jimmy Lonekiller landed on top of him, handcuffs ready.
The man in the red cap had taken a step forward, but he stopped as Roy Smoke moved in front of him and tapped him gently on the chest with his nightstick. “...
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