The Subprimes (25 page)

Pastor Roger gave his daily radio prayer and podcast, distributed to millions of devout Freedom Prairie disciples. As always, he thanked the Pepper Sisters, and reminded listeners
of the many hundreds of millions of dollars they were spending to further the cause of Christianity and Prosperity, not just by endowing Bob Jones University, not just by creating the largest and most successful for-profit Christian university system in the world with Pepper College, but also by endowing the Pepper Center for Geological Studies at Harvard and the Pepper Petroleum Institute at Stanford. Secular humanism, Pastor Roger reminded his followers, was another word for progressivism. Liberal arts was socialism. Art was a hobby for women. Young Christian men and women should learn applicable skills to avoid idleness.

He called his wife every morning and evening. Clarissa, a chunky blonde with a vibrant, rich mane of yellow hair, could take the platform herself when Pastor Roger was away on mission. She could tend the flock at Freedom Prairie, deliver a stem-winder of a sermon, cry a Jordan River of tears, and extract a tithe nearly on par with the pastor himself. Still, she wondered how long he would have to stay in this desert camp outside Placer.

“When God wills it we will unleash the Joshua!” he told her. “His kingdom will come.”

He blessed her and told her he had business to attend to.

Steven Shopper had brought Arthur Mack to meet with him on his tour bus, and he studied the energy trader carefully.

Arthur was smiling broadly, leaning forward on the tuck-and-roll banquette as if awaiting good news.

“Your daughters are with their mother,” said Pastor Roger. “And she, she is in the thrall of a false idol.”

“A wrinkle in the plan?”

“More than a wrinkle,” Pastor Roger said. “It is a stain, a dark stain on a pristine white sheet.”

Pastor Roger and Steven Shopper had already concluded that Arthur Mack, despite his unjust persecution and heroic
martyrdom on the wheel of the global progressive movement, did not have the commensurate personal virtue. Why, he was contributing numbers—his own offspring!—to the enemy rather than rallying Christians to the cause.

“It is not our mission to nurture the unclean,” Steven Shopper said in a soft voice.

“I can still be of use,” Arthur said, panic entering his voice. “I can help you trade the juice, I can hedge the juice.”

But Arthur Mack was the vestige of an old news cycle, superseded by the whales and now by Sargam and Valence. He was no longer a useful example of the progressive agenda victimizing a legitimate businessman. He was just another deadbeat dad.

“Mr. Shopper will show you out,” Pastor Roger said, turning his back.

And thus Arthur was cast out of the tour bus to wander in the desert, where he offered himself to every media outlet he encountered. The name Arthur Mack was familiar to reporters and producers, but it carried with it no particular titillation, not enough certainly to encourage anyone to offer a helicopter flight or even a car ride in exchange for an interview.

THE JOSHUA LUMBERED FORWARD, A
fortress of steel and concrete and polymer and rubber, a beautiful monstrosity and a tribute to God's ingenuity. It shook the ground for a radius of a half mile, the wobble beneath its feet like thunder captured, bottled underground, and then released to roar back up to the sky. The powerful turbines emitted their own heat that made turning toward the sun seem almost a relief. From where the Pepper Sisters sat, in an air-conditioned black SUV, bottles of iced tea in hand, the Joshua resembled the I-beam-and-girder skeleton of a skyscraper in progress. Though they owned it,
every bolt and button and knob, from afar the Joshua seemed a force beyond man's control, beyond even God's will. It was like a giant robot. If you gave it arms that swayed at its sides, it would be like a gigantic metal zombie astride the country. Its slow progress made it even more mesmerizing—it moved no faster than a man walking at a brisk pace, and for an object so gigantic, that progress seemed both pitifully meager and utterly unstoppable.

Dottie Pepper sipped from her iced tea. “My my, Dorrie, it's quite a contraption.”

“Indeed,” Dorrie said. “But, darling, is it a hybrid? What about the emissions?”

Both women started laughing and told the driver to take them back to Pastor Roger's camp.

Pastor Roger welcomed the Peppers, apologized for the state of his immaculate tour bus, and took knees with them as soon as they entered to pray for the well-being of the Joshua and the slaying of progressivism.

“We don't like how this is playing,” said Dorrie Pepper.

“That woman Sargam is on every channel,” said Dottie.

Pastor Roger urged calm. “She will be forgotten, as every story is. This will become yesterday's story as soon as we evict them from what is rightfully—and legally—yours.”

“Yes, but these squatting camps, these Valences everywhere,” Dorrie said.

“Terrorists, Muslims, hippies—they are a law-enforcement issue,” said Pastor Roger. “Remember Occupy? Of course not. Because it's been forgotten.”

“But this woman, she is something different,” Dottie said.

“She's a leader,” Dorrie said. “Trouble.”

“I'm on the phone with the governor every few hours,” Pastor Roger said. “He is very sympathetic. He wants nothing more
than to restore law and order. As soon as we get the call, we can take possession of your property.”

“We can't have children injured,” said Dottie. “And the operation has to be done in the dark, like with Occupy; they can't film at night.”

“Why, Dottie, I've never known you to take such an active hand in logistics,” Pastor Roger said. “We don't want violence, we don't want any injury, we—you—simply want what is your God-given right. The law, God's law, is on our side. This is a holy fight.”

“Let's offer them safe passage,” Dottie said. “Let's promise them forty acres and a mule if they just load up their Jed Clampett mobiles and ride off.”

“That would be succumbing to blackmail,” Pastor Roger said in medium-high dudgeon. “That would send the message to every subprime that they should squat and wait for their handout. Why not just bring back the entitlement state? Give them all free health care?”

Dorrie shook her head. “Now, Pastor, don't get all apocalyptic on us. We're just trying to be discreet.”

THE SIGHT OF THE JOSHUA
lumbering across the desert at first appeared to Jeb and Darren as a dark silhouette against the sky, an Entlike apparition, only here representing the deviltry of man rather than Tolkien's wisdom of nature. Though they knew from extensive media coverage its provenance, the sight was still shocking. Soon, the whole community was gathered at the top of the off-ramp, their eyes focused on the horizon line.

Sargam wondered: Would they just roll that monster into Valence, crush anything and anyone in its way, and then start drilling? Was the battle to end that simply? Men and women with
linked arms crushed beneath its treads? But surely even the kleptocratic aristocracy would object to crushing women and children.

She was awed at the courage of the many who had stayed with her. Only five or six families had chosen to flee. At meetings every night, Sargam talked about what was at stake.

“This path, this fight, will be harder than anything we have done, than you have done, and I know you have been through so much. Every night spent dirty and hungry in some Ryanville has felt like the absolute limit, beyond what you could take, of what you could see your children going through. What we are asking now is even more suffering than that, but at least I can say we are fighting for a cause. We are sacrificing our comforts, our rest, even, perhaps, our health and our lives, so that we can somehow lessen the suffering of so many. That is what we are doing. We are helping. People helping people.”

She studied her fellow citizens: now strong, fed, rested, not fatigued from months on the road and weary nights in Ryanvilles. They were now proud men and women whose spirits had soared, their body language revealing them to be unafraid of what lay ahead.

Privately, when talking with Sargam, Darren voiced occasional doubts about the wisdom of her leadership. Perhaps they should just surrender, drive away while they still could.

“We have nowhere to go,” Sargam said. “We get run off from each place we set down. If we are going to stand and fight anywhere, it might as well be here, together, for a place we love.”

Still, she worried at the wisdom of this decision, even if in front of the TV cameras or when talking to reporters she never wavered. She had briefed the citizens on nonviolent resistance, passed out the plastic cuffs they would fasten around their arms and each other. She told them what to do when they were arrested. There were several dozen state's attorneys waiting
in Placer to help process the arrested, no matter their credit scores. Many of the fathers and mothers, she knew, could end up in Credit Rehabilitation Centers, yet they were willing to risk debtors' prison for their cause. Her desire was to live up to their courage.

And at the approach of the Joshua, she could still feel the strongest murmurings of doubt and unease. She turned back toward her people, raised her arms, and said, “There is still time to leave, if that is what you want, but I ask you this: If you leave now, if you run now, when will you stop running?”

I'VE NEVER SEEN MY CHILDREN
so engaged—so much like kids. Ronin is gone from first light, playing in the hills with his new friends. When I ask what they have been doing, he tells me they play different games all day, ditch, capture the flag, some soccer, and something they are calling Gorilla. He has never been this long without a game console or cell phone or tablet in his hands. He is rough, scratched, and dirty, his cheeks smudged and elbows scabbed, a feral quality to him that so pleases me.

I know this must end, that this wacky little holiday in the dirt that we've been on will conclude, but I would argue—if I weren't afraid to speak to my ex-wife—that this is ultimately good for Ronin.

And for Jinx too. She is rethinking her opinion of Pastor Roger as she makes friends with people whom Pastor Roger is vowing to drive off or arrest. She insists she is still Christian, but that there are many ways to worship, and she is still figuring out her own. “At Captain's Club it was much simpler,” she tells me as she puts on her shoes one morning. “At Captain's Club, if you wanted to go to heaven, if you wanted your family to go to heaven, then
you followed Pastor Roger's instructions. But I don't see why just being a good person isn't enough. And if Pastor Roger is so good, why is he so against Sargam, who really is good?”

The evening after the appearance on the horizon of the Joshua, I ask Sargam about her past. She talks about the many foster homes, the abusive foster parents, fleeing when she was a teenager, surviving on the road as a young woman, wandering from Ryanville to Ryanville. It is the same story that has been reported by the media, who harp on the fact that there is no record of Sargam anywhere. She has never revealed her given name. And, most suspicious of all, she has no credit score.

“I'm flawed. By Pastor Roger's standards I'm a harlot. I did what I had to do to survive,” she tells me.

“Then what gives you the moral authority to lead all these people?”

“We are doing what is right. That's the easy part. But why me, you ask? Maybe it's because I have nowhere else to go. I come from subprime, I am subprime. I'm not someone who grew up poor, escaped her origins, went to college, joined the elite. I am still subprime. That's what gives me the authority.

“We got played by Washington, by Wall Street, by big oil and the Pepper Sisters. For too long—forever it feels like—we've only magnified our powerlessness by running away. Through bubble after bubble, through the planet heating, burning, flooding, becoming more toxic, for years we've lived with that. Now we have to say ‘Enough! It starts here.'”

“But do you advocate the overthrow of the United States of America?” I ask.

She laughs. “As if that were possible. No, we want nothing more than to be able to stay here, in our community, a community that was abandoned and that we remade as a home. Our issues are entirely local.”

“And all those other Valences, the thousands, soon maybe millions of people, who are squatting, refusing to move on, trying to build communities. Do you speak for them?”

“My only wish for them,” Sargam says, “is that they don't happen to be squatting above a shale oil deposit.”

But here is what I notice again: Sargam does emit a certain energy. I guess I would call it a glow, a soothing glow. She's a beautiful woman, initially sexually attractive, though she quickly transcends that and makes you forget it. But there it remains, thrumming in the background, an insistent, steady appeal that keeps you watching and listening. I've never seen a politician quite like her.

I've been around cult leaders and swamis and self-help telemarketers and even Pastor Roger, and I know that Sargam is different from any huckster I've ever encountered.

Jesus Christ, listen to me. Am I losing my cynicism, my natural suspicion of everything and everyone? I don't think so, but what I am witnessing, in Sargam's leadership, in her gentle appeal, her calm approach, her steady character, is as shocking to me as it is unlikely. For the first time in my life I may have found someone I believe in.

TOM AND RONIN STAKED OUT
the highest ground they could find, the tufted mounds to the eastern fringes of Valence from which they took turns watching the Joshua as it crawled into position. Both boys were speechless at the sight of the monstrous machine, and frightened by what they were beholding, yet neither would admit his anxiety to the other.

Both boys knew they had no more chance of changing the course of this colossal contraption than they would of changing the weather. But Tom had an idea.