The Rackham Files (40 page)

High-tech luxuries like holovision and many medicines will be in short supply for a long time, and as Bay Area suburbs cool down, they become vast junkyards ripe for reckless foragers. City stripping can be downright foolhardy even in some places the bombs missed. Like Milwaukee, where typhus ran its course; and Lexington, where typhoid began in a public shelter and swept the county. I suspect we're through building beehive cities, those great complex organisms that proved so dreadfully vulnerable. If the current plans are any guide, the feds and state officials will rebuild many sites as ring cities surrounding the ruins.

The federal gummint doesn't interfere much with a state's regional decisions now, and since the rural population pulled through in such good shape, the political climate is just what you'd guess: conservative. Kate and I persuaded the McKays to stay on here at the Gallo acreage because that makes us all one household, and taxes are easier on us this way. Currently we're required to pay twenty-four hours of labor into the skills bank every seven days—two twelve-hour days each week. If you think I put my time in as a part-time cop, think again; I cussed and cajoled a wood stove for years, and on the days when I cook for Napa County nabobs, they look forward to gourmet meals. Of
course
I always bring some of it home! Why should a planning commissioner eat better than my wife does?

As for the McKays? Cammie's in school again, training in radiology, which is going to be a crucial skill. Shar is a lab technician in the nearby hospital that used to be a veteran's home and now manufactures its own coarse penicillin. So we don't lack for some basic pharmaceuticals. And Ern, when he isn't engineering the new water-purification plant, is scrounging materials on his own to convert timber by-products into fuel and lubricants. If any one of us becomes a plutocrat during reconstruction, it'll be Ern McKay. I figure he's earned it.

When anyone asks Kate what she does, she says she's my physical therapist; keeps me skinny. God knows that's true enough, and no complaint, but she has a very special talent with little kids. Anyone who thinks a Yountville first-grader can't be adept at postwar survival skills simply hasn't watched her students dress out a chicken, or repair a bike, or create sandals from worn-out tire casings. An intriguing progression of skills there: Kate got some of it from counterculture folks, who got it from travels among the Mexicans, who learned it by rummaging among the castoffs of the rich yanquis.

So it's my wife Kate, more than any of us, who'll be the key to the future of this country. We adults are survivors by definition; our first priority now is to make our next generations expert at pulling through.