“The point is, why spend money armoring against a nonexistent threat?”
Larry nodded. “Doors and windows, of course, that’s a different story, but those are full.”
“Full?” Julian asked.
“Fully armored. As a precaution. In case of stray rounds, accidental discharges. Wouldn’t do you much good in an engagement. But that’s what Tom and Kevin are for.” Larry hooked his thumb back over his shoulder at a pickup truck idling at the edge of the lot. Tom and Kevin were seated in the cab, luxuriating in the A/C. Mounted in the pickup’s open bed was a tripod, currently vacant. A steel locker running athwart the bed, triple padlocked, contained the machine gun that they would take out and mount to the tripod when venturing into regions where an impressive show of force was deemed prudent. Sprawling across the roof of the cab was a streamlined shape that might be mistaken for the world’s most aerodynamic cargo rack until you realized it was actually a fixed-wing drone.
Larry stepped down and opened the driver’s-side door. “Now,” he said, “which one of y’all claims to be able to drive a car?”
Sophia raised her hand as the other three sidled backward. Larry gave a little nod.
“Where are you from?” Sophia asked.
Larry looked a bit startled. “I’m from here.”
“But how far back?”
“As far back as you wanna look. Great-greats came over from Holland. Why do you ask?”
“You said ‘y’all.’”
Larry was confused.
“Never mind. Sorry,” Sophia said. “I’m the driver. I’m the only one who can drive.”
“If you would just show me. Just take it for a spin around the lot,” Larry said.
“I understand. Requirements of insurance,” Sophia said, shoving off against the running board and vaulting into the driver’s seat.
“We don’t got none,” Larry responded. “This is a requirement of us.”
“What was that about?” Anne-Solenne asked, as soon as they were out on the streets of Des Moines, headed west. She was riding shotgun. Phil and Julian were in the backseat gazing at the outskirts of the city, which looked exactly like any other place.
“What?” Sophia asked. It had been a little while since she had driven a car and she was rigid: eyes locked on the tailgate of Tom and Kevin’s truck, hands clenching the steering wheel. Surrounding traffic was at least 95 percent robo-piloted, and giving their little caravan a wide berth since you never knew what a human-piloted car was going to do.
“‘Where are you from? How far back?’ Those weird questions you were asking Larry.”
“Oh. Something I heard from my mom—who heard it from my uncle.”
“Dodge?” Anne-Solenne asked, with the forced casualness that people always affected when uttering that name.
“Yeah. About people who say ‘y’all.’ Or, ‘We don’t got none.’”
“Just sounds like rural America to me.”
“Southern America. It’s totally a Southern way of talking. Iowa is a Northern state. Fought on the Union side in the Civil War. Never had slavery. Settled by Scandinavians. So, either Larry is a migrant from the South—”
“Which he just said he isn’t . . .”
“Or he, or his dad, adopted—affected—Southern stylings. Northerners don’t talk like that, they don’t drawl, they don’t say ‘y’all’ . . .”
“Or put the Stars and Bars on their bumpers,” said Julian, getting into the spirit of things. He extended an arm forth between the front seats and pointed at a Confederate flag sticker on the back of Tom and Kevin’s truck. It was balanced, on the other side of the license plate, by a “Remember Moab” sticker.
“I don’t know, man,” said Phil. “I see that shit all over the place. Always have. It’s a constant.”
“To you,” Sophia agreed. “Point being, it was not like that to my uncle, who lived from the mid-1950s to about seventeen years ago. He saw the change during his lifetime. When he was born, the Civil War was only ninety years in the past—almost within living memory. It would have seemed weird for Northerners to paste the traitors’ flag on their bumper or cop an accent from Alabama. But while he was alive—”
“The cultural border shifted north,” Anne-Solenne said.
The border, of course, was not a line on a map; it couldn’t be, because it did not legally exist, had no official reality. It was a blended zone that straddled that belt of the outer suburbs where Walmarts tended to exist. As they moved outward from the city, vehicles containing nonwhite people found reasons to pull off the street into the parking lots of businesses, parks, schools, or churches. Nothing ever impeded the flow of traffic outward. Vehicles coming the