“That wouldn’t be so bad, would it? It’d give the animals and the environment a chance to come back. We’d need more Colters then, wouldn’t we? People that could live off the land?” Her face was turned toward him, light on one side, dark on the other, quarter moon. She was right. Back to the Stone Age. More Colters. Live off the land. And get ready for the hostiles, because they were coming and they would just take what they wanted and nobody to stop them.
She was quiet a moment. The car thumped. The night squeezed in. She didn’t know it yet but they were going to have to stay out here all night long, at the campground, where they’d blend in with the others. It would be cramped in the car and she might not like it but that was how it was. There was a blanket in back. He had a couple PowerBars and she always carried a bottle of water in the car. They’d sit there in the dark. They’d get high. And not just on rum and marijuana, but what he had in his shirt pocket, a surprise, first fruit of his poppies, the sap he’d worked into little dried-out balls you could smoke just like that in a pipe you made out of foil and could use once and toss away and nobody the wiser. Then they’d have sex. She’d open up to him—she always opened up to him, hot and greasy and with that smell of her like some animal with its scent glands on display, like a beaver, and it came to him then that that was why it was called beaver. Beaver shot, he said in his head. And then he said it aloud: “Beaver shot.”
“What?”
He didn’t say it again, only thought it: Beaver shot. And money shot, that was when you pulled it out and squirted their beaver or their tits or belly. Spermatized them.
“I said, if the whole corrupt society broke down, that wouldn’t be so bad, would it?”
“No,” he said softly, “no, it wouldn’t.”
Days flipped by, he wasn’t sure how many. She was there in the house, cooking, cleaning, picking lint out of the Rasta dog’s fur and spreading for him every night, and he was out working his plants, slitting the seed pods with a razor and letting the milky stuff drip out till he scraped it off and rolled it into a ball. When he had enough of it, when he was satisfied with the product, he was going to sell it—Cody, Cody was going to help him out on that end because he really couldn’t feature tramping up and down the street looking for heads and freaks and tourists who might or might not be interested—and he was going to take the money and put it in a jar and hide that jar in a secret place so he could be independent of everybody and everything forever. He’d build another bunker, deeper, farther, and he wasn’t ever going to come back.
Problem was, he had a wicked case of poison oak. It was in between his fingers, blisters so big there it hurt to make a fist. And he’d somehow managed to get it on his cock, pissing, most likely, but then you had to piss and to get it out you had to touch yourself and that’s where the poison oak got in. He’d heard that if you ate some of the leaves you’d be immune and he’d tried that when he was twelve or thirteen and all that had happened was he had blisters on his lips and in his mouth and halfway down his throat so he couldn’t even eat for a week, so that, to put it mildly, was bullshit. Anyway, he needed calamine lotion and she’d gone to the store and gotten it for him and now, right now, with the sun straight up overhead, he was skirting the dog-face’s property and heading back to the house to dose himself with it, especially down there where every step chafed him and the itch was a thing you couldn’t scratch because that would only make it worse but he was scratching it anyway and it was bringing tears to his eyes.