Listen to a podcast of Ryan Ridge’s “After Fall.”
The stop sign at the lip of the cul-de-sac had been graffitied. It read: Don’t Stop. So we didn’t. We continued past burnt out sedans, the remains of SUVs, and on to the former Dodge City country club. There was smoke in the air and the evening sky looked dead. Behind the pro shop, Uncle Lester pissed next to a busted Coke machine while I hot-wired a golf cart. We rode down the overgrown fairways, through the sand-less sand traps, over the dead greens. On the back nine we came to the edge of an artificial pond and saw a fat man in a football jersey baptizing a golden retriever. Uncle Lester sprang from the golf cart and insisted he be baptized too. Afterward, shivering, he regretted it.
After Fall
One evening, paratroopers landed and patrolled the cold neighborhood. They went from house to rotting house in riot gear, smoking and laughing, having themselves a riot. They carried Tiki torches and whiskey pouches, belts equipped with horrible-looking hatchets, hand grenades. Indoors, we remained indoors through this, watching through cracks in boarded up windows.
Dad had been acting strange ever since he got tazered in the bread line. All afternoon he’d been attempting to dry hump a loose coil protruding from a cushion in the dilapidated love seat. Finally, Uncle Lester had had enough. He flicked Dad hard in the back of his head. “Come on, Don,” he said. “Act reasonable.”
We were reasonable people, historically speaking.
Now we were sitting in the living room, bemoaning the death of the American dream. “Tragic, isn’t it?” Uncle Lester said. He was reclining in the frayed La-Z-Boy, an empty tobacco pipe clenched between his chapped lips.
I agreed. It was tragic.
Dad sat solo on the love seat, fingering the loose coil, muttering something incoherent about women.
The women? Who knew where our women had gone – off chasing buffalo we assumed, rabbits perhaps. We were pretty sure they’d bring us something good, but it could be days, weeks, months even.
Uncle Lester said: “Maybe we should move to Canada. Do they have a Canadian dream? If so, I bet that one isn’t dead.”
“All the dreams are dying these days,” I said.
“Here’s the thing about Canada…” Dad said, but never finished the sentence. Come to think of it, he hasn’t strung together too many complete sentences lately. In a meeker world, we’d be getting him to a hospital, but in this place we cross our fingers and hope. If we pray, it’s Dad’s idea.
“All right,” Uncle Lester said. “Go ahead. Finish whatever you were saying about goddamn Canadians.”
“Canadians?” Dad said. “Where?”
The doorbell rang.
“I’ll get it,” I said.
I opened the front door to find a little girl in a green-striped smock, holding a bullwhip and a box of cookies. “Cookies?” she said, and cracked her whip.
“Okay,” I said. “Easy with that thing. How much?”
“Twenty bucks,” she said. “Or ten Ameros.”
“A box?” I said. “That’s steep.”
“No, a cookie,” she said. “Get real. Times are tough, mister.”
“Tell me about it,” I said. “You better try two streets over. They’re crawling in it over there.”
“Already tried,” she said, “but the soldiers wouldn’t let me through the checkpoint. They said the last time they let a Girl Scout in the neighborhood was the last time they let a Girl Scout in the neighborhood.”
“Why?” I said.
“Terrorists,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Makes sense.”
“Are you a terrorist, mister?”
“No,” I said. “I’m a pacifist. That’s the opposite of a terrorist.”
“I know what that is,” she said. “A lot of good that’s doing you!”
“Hey, Gandhi led a nation out of Imperialism by sitting down,” I said.
“Ha,” she said. “Check the scoreboard. That was a hundred years ago.”
“Martin Luther King said, ‘The arc of the Moral Universe is long, but bends towards justice’,” I said.
“Hmm,” she said. “I wouldn’t call what happened in Memphis justice.”
“Me neither,” I said.
Indoors, I could hear them piping the opening bars of the Canadian National Anthem. A dove glided past in slow motion, majestic, then shit on the hood of Dad’s ancient Thunderbird and disappeared into the night.
“So do you want to buy a goddamn cookie or not?” she said.
“Sorry,” I said. “Too rich for my blood.”
“Oh, you’re going to be sorry when I tell my father what you did to me,” she said.
“What did I do to you?”
“You spanked me and made me call you daddy! My father, he’s the assistant DA, you know.”
“I didn’t, and I didn’t touch you.”
“Tell it to the judge. They’ll probably castrate you.”
“On second thought,” I said, tossing her my last contraband Andrew Jackson, “give me a Tagalong.”
“Out of Tagalongs,” she said.
“Give me a Thin Mint,” I said.
“Out of Thin Mints,” she said.
“Just tell me what you have left,” I said.
“One Samoa, two Trefoils. Two for one on the Trefoils. They’re kinda smashed together.”
“I’ll take the Samoa,” I said.
She handed it over. “Fine,” she said, pocketing the money.
“Fine,” I said, palming the cookie.
And then she was gone and nothing was fine. She sauntered down the cul-de-sac cracking her whip at the overturned mailboxes and I composed myself, took a deep breath, carried the cookie inside.
“Who the hell was that?” Uncle Lester said, pacing the groove in the carpet where the entertainment center used to be. He was taking empty puffs from his empty pipe.
“Girl Scout,” I said.
“Uh-oh,” Dad said, sitting Indian style on the floor where the coffee table used to be.
“Got to watch out for those Girl Scouts,” Uncle Lester said. “They’ll fleece you every time. What did you get?”
“Fleeced,” I said
“But what did you get?” Uncle Lester said.
“A Samoa,” I said.
“How much?” he said.
“All of it,” I said.
“Boy, you did get fleeced,” he said.
Suddenly, like a small miracle, Dad snapped to, and said, “Samoa is an unincorporated territory of the United States located in the South Pacific. People born in American Samoa are considered American nationals, but not U.S. citizens. Samoa Girl Scout cookies are in no way affiliated with the island, but damn if they’re not delicious!”
“Good to have you back, Don,” Uncle Lester said.
“Thanks, Les,” Dad said. “Now, my boy, bring that cookie over here. We’re going to divide it three ways and have ourselves a little Thanksgiving.”
So I did what he said, because dad was the type of guy who when he talked—
The doorbell rang again.
“Don’t answer it,” Dad said. “It’s dinner time.”
“What if it’s the women?” I said.
“It’s not,” Dad said. “Come here, sit, let’s join hands and pray.”
So we sat there on the floor and listened to Dad beg for divine intervention.
It sounded like a reasonable request, and we were reasonable people, historically speaking. We just didn’t know what was hurtling towards us.
They flooded the ghettos with gas. It came down chimneys and up through floors, through the cracks in the boarded windows. The fumes repelled most of us; made some of us nervous and dizzy; made some of us retch and scratch, a lot of us. It made some—the hilarious ones—laugh out loud. It made Melanie McDonald hornier than a devil at a bullfight. We got used to it, continued. Also, it—the gas—attracted certain animals, big ones, mostly buffalo, some bears, an occasional coyote. One evening, out behind the bombed-out supermarket, Aunt Marge and Cobalt Renault crouched with their crossbows and waited. They waited for the sunset to die behind an abandoned car wash and when it died they waited no longer. They overturned a three-wheeled shopping cart and turned their crossbows on a buffalo. Later we turned it into breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Our jaws hurt from all the chewing and our stomachs nearly burst.
About the author:
Ryan Ridge writes and teaches in Southern California. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in 5_Trope, DIAGRAM, elimae, The Mississippi Review, Salt Hill, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere.
