The Fires of Orc

Perhaps home is not a place

but simply an irrevocable condition.

James Baldwin

The people of Tequisquiapan outfitted me for travel with an old saddleback into which were sewn a pound of old silver coins. “You might need them,” said old Marisol, the town’s venerable matriarch. The bag was stuffed with several pounds of dried fruit and smoked meat. In a separate shoulder bag I carried a half-gallon of water. Across my back I wore a bedroll with several garments including a leather jacket wrapped in a thick cotton blanket. I chose my sixteen most precious books and packed them tightly in an old suitcase. I was as prepared as one could be.

I was not quite sixty and still scrappy enough for an old man from the old world. I was fit to travel but it would be a journey unlike any I had ever taken and I can’t say I didn’t set out with a measure of apprehension.

I left Tequis in the company of a trade caravan. I was personally chaperoned by Miguel, a trader I had known for a decade. He visited Tequis several times a year and traveled with his compatriots up and down the Pacific coast and inland to communities like ours. He graciously loaded my suitcase of books on his wagon, one of six in our traveling party, and he gave me a mount from his string of lean horses. I rode a small Appaloosa, roughly.

The casual talk of traders in a group of a dozen was the soundtrack of the first day. Jokes and whistles and the laughter of trail-toughened men recalled images of men in all times. In the first day I had traveled further from Tequis than I had been since before the fires. We rode slowly, down rutted dirt roads, occasionally veering onto the vestiges of a disused highway, snaking our way westward, creeping down from the high plateau covering twenty miles on the average day, sometimes more.

We stopped each night and made camp around a fire. We hobbled the horses and gathered them in the morning. The Appaloosa could cover half a mile hobbled and bringing him back to his labors, away from the sour grass of wild Mexico, was a trick left to Miguel and other able horsemen.

The first city of the old world on our route to the ocean was León, home to almost two million people before the fires. We approached the edge of the village, a mile outside of the heart of Old León, a few hours after sunrise. Miguel signaled for the caravan to stop and we dismounted. The Appaloosa skittered nervously.

“Old gringo,” said Miguel, “You stay here and don’t talk to nobody.”

I did as he bade me. I reclined in the shade under a wagon, resting on one elbow with my well-worn copy of Walden. I was joined shortly by a dark-skinned girl, perhaps fifteen, who stooped and crawled under the wagon.

“What you read, old guero?” she asked.

I flipped over the cover of Walden, knowing she couldn’t read.

“Is a good book?”

“One of the best,” I told her.

“Where you go now?” she asked.

“A very long way away. Probably a month from here on a boat.”

She smiled. “I never go on a boat.”

She drew herself up against me and laid down, her black hair shining against the dusty ground.

“You take me with you,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” I answered. “I don’t think you can go with us.”

“No you take me,” she insisted, pulling herself up to lean against my shoulder, her young breasts barely covered by a white cotton blouse. “You take me. I be your girl. I go with you. Make you happy every day.”

Miguel returned suddenly with the other traders and shooed the girl away.

“No, old gringo,” he said. “You don’t want that one. Too much sick.”

The girl cursed at him, spitting on the ground. I watched her stomp away.

“Sick?” I asked.

“Yes, sick from here,” said Miguel. “Sick from the mens here. Sick from the food. No good for you.”

I stood near the wagon as men began unloading parcels and cases – textiles, dried fruits and corn, leather goods and more. Other men began loading other parcels and cases on the wagons in a line, passing from man to man a load of unmarked trade goods. Most precious of all was six barrels of coffee beans, gently jostled into place and tied off to the wagon walls.

Within an hour we were on the move.

“We don’t stay here,” Miguel told me. “Bad men if we stay too long, they maybe come.”

“Bad men?” I asked. “Will they not just follow us?”

“No,” said Miguel. “They don’t follow. They stay at the old city. They sick too, but dangerous. Better we don’t stay too long, so we go.”

The travel had been mostly level from Tequis to León. From there we began to travel downhill, gently at first, dropping several hundred feet over the next three days before arriving at one of the many townships surrounding Old Guadalajara.

The colony of Milagro was built on the northern bank of Lake Chapala, a short day’s ride to the old city. The residents of Milagro guarded their walled community with armed men stationed at minarets that ran along a quarter-mile barrier built of wood and old corrugated steel. Rolled razor wire ran along the length of the colony’s perimeter on three sides. The entire colony was impregnable on three sides with the lake at its back. The single land approach to town was a narrow defile staked on each side by tilting wooden pikes. A rolling steel gate manned by armed youth in combat uniforms permitted entrance to traders and wayfarers only after a thorough search of person and cargo. It took a half-hour at the gate for our caravan to be admitted to humble, cautious Milagro.

“Here we stay a night,” said Miguel. “Come on, old gringo. We find some food, some fun.”

Milagro had a school for children from age five to fourteen – nine grades of instruction that included reading and writing, arithmetic and geometry, various themes on horticulture and forestry, animal husbandry, and the basics of electrical and hydraulic engineering. Milagrans were an advanced people, with a working fish farm, several acres of fruit and vegetable crops, a dairy, a small granary, two restaurants, a bar and nightclub, and a clean, bright infirmary.

Miguel and the other traders took me to El Nopal, the fancier of Milagro’s two restaurants. I don’t know what was traded for the feast we procured but it must have been quite a sum. We stuffed ourselves on beef ribs and tilapia with beans and rice, fresh pineapple and avocados all wrapped in soft flour tortillas. We drank hot coffee with thick, rich milk and sugary syrup rendered from aloe vera. It was meal unlike any I had eaten since before the fires.

“You coming drinking now, old gringo?” Miguel nudged.

“Happily,” I said.

We drank mescal and reeled drunkenly in the music and warm night air. I watched the younger patrons dance the night away, saw couples embrace and young men puff their chests. For that one night Milagro was home.

We woke in the morning on our bedrolls beneath the wagons.

“We go now, old gringo,” said Miguel. “You sure you go to San Diego? Maybe stay here.”

“Thank you, no,” I said. “I’m in this trip until the end.”

“Okay gringo. Let’s take you home.”

On the ride out from Milagro I spied rows of men and women nearly broken by labor, begrimed and stooped, bent in the fields. They looked nothing like the townsfolk with whom I’d passed an evening. They were, to all appearances, barely human. I asked Miguel, “Who are they?”

“Esclavos,” he said.

“Slaves?” I asked, hoping I had misunderstood.

“Yes. Slaves. They do the work and the peoples in the town, they live off them.”

“Where do they come from, the slaves?” I asked.

“The young men, the soldiers, they find them. They bring them here and make them slaves. That’s how Milagro is so much rich. Slave dies, get another slave. Smart business.”

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

A week later found us on the shores of Puerto Vallarta. The ocean was so much bigger than I remembered. The sheer enormity of the Pacific, its loud crash on the battered shores recalled a time I had almost forgotten. We met a party of sailing men who we joined, doubling our ranks before setting out to sea.

The new traders spoke a curiously twisted Portuñol that I could not quite understand. I managed to make myself understood, but most of their banter was lost on me. We boarded a forty-foot former fishing vessel, it’s hold converted to cargo storage and at high tide we turned westward out of the port and into the open water. We chugged northward the rest of that day and overnight. Traveling at fifteen knots an hour we moved up the coast, never losing sight of land.

We stopped a half-dozen times along the way up the western coast of Old Mexico, before entering the Sea of Cortez. The next seven hundred miles passed quickly. The boat picked up speed in the smooth gulf waters and we made only three stops – first at La Paz on the Baja side, then at the outskirts of Los Mochis, and finally at a trading post serving the vicinity of Obregon. Thereafter we were at sea for a day-and-a-half, arriving early one evening at the top of the gulf, off-loading the boat in a tiny colony near the mouth of the Colorado River. A long slog through silt and filth took us to a road leading to Mexicali on the border of the former United States. I was almost home.

It was a hundred twenty miles from Mexicali to San Diego and they were the worst miles of my journey. The desert was brutally hot and dry and to save the horses we traveled no more than fifteen miles a day for the first three days. We climbed the mountains along the old interstate and crested the peak on the fourth day. From there it was downhill and speedy travel. A rare rain came one afternoon, not heavy, just enough to cool the horses. I saw the ghostly outline of San Diego six weeks after leaving Tequis.

We rode with the destroyed city in the distance for an hour. Miguel noticed me wiping tears from my face and he motioned to the caravan to stop. We stood the horses and broke for lunch. I sat alone on a rock a few yards from the tradesmen who talked and laughed under the shade of a wagon piled high with assorted goods.

Miguel broke from the crowd and came to sit next to me.

“You know,” he said, “home is not a place. Home is persons. You go where you came from and the persons are gone – it’s just a place. You only can find what is not there no more. No more persons, no more memories.”

We watched the other men and sat in the sun not talking for half an hour. In time I gathered my will.

“We should go,” I said.

“Okay, old gringo. We go now.”

The next morning we arrived at New Pacifica, a young colony established just a few years before. The water was once again safe to drink. Wildlife had returned to the area and the burnt crust of the earth yielded healthy crops. All around was black and death, but the bustling little colony had heart.

Miguel took me to the Friendship Inn, a crooked old hovel left over from the old world. I met the original Landlord and his son, then just a youth, and took quarters with no expected date of checkout.

“You sure you stay?” asked Miguel the following morning.

“I’m staying,” I said. “Maybe home is wherever you are when you run out of options. Thank you, my friend.”

“I see you in a few months,” he said. “You can go back, you know.”

“I know.”

And here I remain, now twenty years later. I am once again a San Diegan, nearly so anyway. All these years, fifty since the fires, and right back where I began, I am now an old man telling himself a story, not reading Joyce, wasting a day near the end of life. The original Landlord died a decade ago and I now live under his son’s roof. What rent he takes from me probably doesn’t cover the cost of my lodging. He keeps me out of kindness, perhaps, or maybe oversight.

I still see Miguel a few times a year when he passes through. He is now a grey-headed man in his fifties. He has a wife and children back in Tequis. We meet and catch up, share news from all over. He reminds me from time to time that I am always welcome back in Tequis.

“We’re thinking of starting a new school,” he told me recently.

I was tempted, but here is where I will end my days. I’m far too old to make the journey back anyway. The world will soon get on without me and this is how it will end. But I am consumed sometimes wondering how it all got to be like this. I imagine how it might have been, what could have come from our former greatness if we had not fiddled it all away.

Would it have ended thus if Markus had never decided to run? What if I had never decided to try my hand at political strategy? Would the fires have come all the same? I wonder. I can’t say for sure but I still feel the fate of the old world was decided one night in 2028, the night Lydia died… the night I killed her.