Waiting for the Electricity (28 page)

Some people in Georgia say that mountain people are a little crazy because they don’t have access to the medicine that the sea generates. They say if you buy a house in the mountains you must ask, “How are the neighbors? Are they normal or are they crazy?” But they forget that the mountain sheep also has all the medicine anybody requires. Sheep milk contains all the necessary vitamins to stay spiritually and physically healthy and live a long life
.

Mr. Tetley, I looked on the Internet for statistical information about sheep’s milk. That is how I know now America is running out of the sheep. “Sheep numbers are at their lowest in the US, about ten (10) million,” an expert says
.

Ten million is less than one sheep per thirty of your people! Every healthy person requires at least one sheep to maintain proper health. For example, in the state of Georgia, according to US census, there are only 1,300 sheep kept on 106 farms. Clearly, this is not enough. The sheep was man’s best friend much before the dog, even before the Caucasian sheepdog. Also, how will you make drinking vessels without the horn of a sheep? Also, the sheep is not as stupid as many people think. We know it cannot recognize its owners from an upside down position, but is it really in a sheep’s best interest to be upside down? And besides, the owner can’t recognize his own sheep either if the sheep is upside down
.

If we start to apply sheep-marketing techniques over the Internet, we can see how our monthly income can grow. A sheep changed my life and it could change yours. This is an unscripted testimony
.

Mr. Tetley was dubious about my idea of importing Georgian sheep. “Sheep?” he asked. “What about those Georgian liquids you mentioned? Or the airplane parts you showed me on your website?”

“The Russian mafia already has a monopoly on all the liquids. It hasn’t occurred to them yet that America could have a sheep deficit.”

“But Slims, it’s not very realistic. How would you get them over here?”

“The same way we get them to Qatar. By boat. My cousin works in shipping.” I had looked up customs taxes for sheep on the internet but could only find a long sermon about the Lord leading His people into the holy land. “Please understand,” I told both Mr. Tetley and Susan. “I am not some kind of holy shepherd. I do not especially like sheep. The Turks sent in their sheep to our country so that they would pull up the grass by the roots and turn our land into a desert. I am talking purely business here.”

“What would Americans use them for? The wool?” Susan asked.

“The cheese. The vitamins.”

“Who knows anything about sheep cheese?” Mr. Tetley asked.

“You don’t know about sheep cheese?” Susan asked him. “Surely you’ve heard of Roquefort. Pecorino Romano. Manchego?” she asked.

Mr. Tetley turned to me. “Have you considered leather goods?”

“Everyone knows that the Russians already have a monopoly on leather goods.”

“Well, most
Americans
don’t know that,” Mr. Tetley said.

“If you want to raise sheep in America, why don’t you find some Georgians here who already have sheep?” Susan asked.

“If I wanted to
raise
sheep, I would stay home!”

“But what about the fisheries industry? That’s what you have experience in,” Mr. Tetley said.

“You think I am some kind of Zorba the Greek?”

“The real question to consider is where you would find buyers for these sheep,” Susan asked.

“I already considered that. Off the Internet.”

I had added sheep to my website using the same template I had used to sell flags, airplane parts, and green tea. I showed Mr. Tetley and Susan the results:

PRODUCT TYPE
: Livestock

WEIGHT
: 40 kg

BRAND NAME:
Georgian sheep

BREED
: Colchis and Tushetian

PORT ARRIVING FROM
: Batumi

MINIMUM ORDER
: 1000 units

SUPPLY ABILITY
: 150,000 per week

STYLE
: Alive (NOT PACKAGED)

ADD TO SHOPPING CART

“How would you get the sheep to your client if you did manage to get the sheep to this continent?” Mr. Tetley asked.

“I will herd them.”

“Herd them? Why not ship them in a truck or a train?”

“That would not be an enjoyable experience for the sheep! Besides, that is a waste of very valuable resources.”

“Slims, you can’t herd sheep across the country,” Mr. Tetley said. “What about the interstates? You’d need some kind of permit.”

“I will herd them through your great national parks.”

“I don’t believe people are allowed to herd sheep through parklands anymore,” Susan said.

“I’ll find a way,” I said. I had seen a documentary about a man who herded sheep through Montana. The whole movie was silent except for when the man called his mama and started crying that some of the sheep had escaped down the mountain. My heart really went out to that man. But that movie must have been made a while ago because when I decided to do more research about herding sheep across America I found some discouraging news about something called the Grizzly Bear Protection Act that had just been passed. It was true: no one was allowed to herd sheep through Montana anymore.

That afternoon, Mr. Tetley wanted to have a meeting with me. “Slims. I am concerned. You came here on the pretext that you were interested in learning fish packaging. If you have stopped attending the internship, I’m going to have to be frank with you, we are going to have to send you back to Georgia. It’s part of the contract.”

“That just takes the cake!” I said, using the new idiom I had learned
recently. “I thought America was a free country! All the time people on TV are yelling, ‘Those terrorists want to take our freedom, our way of life.’ But how are you free if you can’t herd sheep across your own land? It could be a wonderful movement. Sheep Across America! It could bring people together. People could work cooperatively. I’ve been wondering and wondering how you get people to follow the law here. I have been watching and observing and now I finally know. You get the people to follow the law here because of something very terrible. People follow the law here because everyone here has an
inner
policeman.”

I collected my belongings and stomped out of the building into the fog. When I got home Susan was in the kitchen discussing something with Merrick. I was worried that she had already come to send me away but she had just brought her boyfriend’s Shop-Vac for Merrick to borrow. “Check it out, Slims,” Merrick said. “Look how clean the carpet is! It only took like one second.” They were drinking vodka and toasting to the Shop-Vac and the carpet. “Can I make you one, Slims?” Merrick asked.

“Sure,” I said.

Merrick poured some vodka into a metal canister and shook it up with ice. He extracted a green olive from a jar and washed the olive under the tap in the sink. I usually don’t drink vodka, but with that gesture he looked like an elegant person making an elegant drink. He handed the drink to me. I raised my glass and said, “It is good in America that the sister takes care of her brother, bringing this Shop-Vac. But what should be the duty of the brother for the sister? Should we always return to them? Should we always protect them?”

“There is no way my sister would let me protect her,” Merrick said.

I thought of how Juliet was always complaining about being over-protected. Maybe it was time for me to grow up, to move away from my family, to individuate like an American.

I left my drink on the counter because it’s okay to do that in America, and went to my room, looking for my passport. I found the page with the visa and went back to the kitchen. “See my picture?” I said to Merrick. “Do I look like an intimidating Georgian gangster?”

“A gangster? Not really.”

“I know,” I said. “How about now?” I said and put my grandfather’s revolutionary hat on.

Susan squinted. “Kind of.”

I poured more vodka into my glass. “This is to sisters who like their freedom.”

Merrick was now spreading newspapers over the carpet. I think he wanted to finish up his PVC pipe project. Susan had gone into the other room to talk on the phone.

I looked at the expiration date on my visa again. I looked at his car keys on the counter. “Do you have a pen I could borrow?” I asked him.

“Sure,” he said and gave me one from his shirt pocket.

“My friend Vano said he could get me a job in Detroit working in concrete. Do you think it is possible for me to just change the date on my visa and stay here longer?”

“You can’t do that,” Merrick said.

“Why?”

“You can’t just change a date. They have computer records.” I saw that he, too, had an inner policeman. “Slims, Susan told me about the visa issue. We can figure something else out. Maybe you can work with me as a roofer.”

“In Georgian films the roofer is always up on the house making editorial comments! He’s so irritating. I don’t want to be a roofer.”

I took the cap off the pen. I wrote on my hand. “It’s the wrong color. Do you have a black one?”

“Susan!” Merrick called to her. “Your Georgian here is trying to change the date on his visa with a pen.”

I waved my hands. “It was a joke. A joke. You Americans can never understand a joke.”

“What?” Susan said while coming into the kitchen.

“Oh, never mind. He said he was joking.”

“So do you want to use the Shop-Vac for the leaves on the roof?” she asked.

While they were heaving the Shop-Vac up to the roof, I grabbed Susan’s car keys from the counter.

It might have been the influence of the vodka—I should have just had a beer—but I prefer to think it was the influence of the wide-sky euphoria of the American landscape. I left Charlie sleeping on the sofa, and I left the didgeridoo with its last dabs to the walkabout patterns of Merrick’s new life, and I walked down the stairs swiveling Susan’s boyfriend’s car keys around my wrist.

“Where are you going, Slims?” Merrick called after me.

“Cigarettes!” I said. I was not
stealing
the Crown Victoria. I was borrowing it. After all, Susan’s boyfriend had borrowed Merrick’s truck for over a month. And I had to get to my friend Vano in Detroit before Mr. Tetley or Susan stopped me and forced me to go back to Georgia or the fish factory. I taped Zuka’s icon of Queen Tamar—my mojo—to the dashboard in order to not feel isolated, anticipating the vast prairie land of America.

When I started my drive it was too dark to see very well, so I can’t describe that part, except by brief compendium: darkness and taillights. I drove by braille, navigating according to the reflectors in the center divide.

For seven hours, I drove past farmlands, over bridges, and into corporate lands whose economy, like my own, I had heard was dependent upon the nut. I drove through gristled, raw, granite mountains and past snow, rock, and sky before arriving at the dirty and famous gambling towns of Nevada. I stopped in Reno and lost thirty-five dollars in seven minutes.

Leaving Reno I slid along highway turf, which was as smooth as an oil slick on the surface of the Black Sea, or perhaps the Texas steppe. I rolled down the window and the air smelled of tar and broken buses. Lanes of red taillights amassed in front of me, the traffic flexing and releasing its grip. I drove the American highway, my arm out the window, careening around the curves like a spring let loose in a cartoon that kept making the sound
boing boing
. This was America going 130 kilometers an hour—if only those Georgian minibus drivers could see me now! Malkhazi! I want to show you this. The way you were bragging in Beshumi at your favorite tea stop about keeping the needle shaking at 100 kilometers an hour! The highway system of
America! It’s like the beloved American woodsman poet Robert Frost: many paths diverging all over the place, except here all of them are taken. I started to imagine myself as an anthropologist of American culture, a Georgian folk hero, belonging to the city of Detroit, the mayor giving me the key. I could invite Zaliko and his archaeologist friends could come over and we could dig up the city and make historical proclamations about it.

Nevada, when I squinted my eyes, looked like the Ural Mountains—the flat expanse of dry, dull earth on the outskirts of a factory mining town where it is impossible to tell the difference between the flats people live in and their summer vacation houses across the street, and where there are always explosions on the horizon; whether it’s a thunderstorm or someone mining in a mountain, who knows?

Road signs, green with white reflector letters, told me that Independence Pass was up ahead but no service was available. Which was fine, because I had no need of any services—at least not just then.

An hour later, I stopped at a mini-mart for oranges, bananas, bottles of water, and also to buy an audiocassette sung by a trucker—the latter in order to get the proper feeling. I heard the villagers talking about fishing equipment and storm weather. Seeing them leaning against the counter like that, I realized I didn’t need to be in a hurry anymore, and bought a powdered sweetie roll and cup of coffee.

Back in the car I listened to the song by the trucker. It sounded to me like an ode to beer. But the words of the song made me feel sad because he was all alone in his truck. It reminded me of the way I used to feel as a boy in the village when I would stare up at balconies, of the first time I saw Tamriko as a young girl, her head wrapped in a black shawl lowering her eyes at me, laughing behind her hands as the white lace curtains blew through the open window. I suddenly felt a deep illogical love for my country, as for a troubled, rebel child whom Georgian mothers sigh over at night but love the most. As we say in Georgia, a mother will understand what her dumb child says. I turned off the music.

The regions I had come upon were so remote. I was really far
away from anything! Snow decorated the scrub brushes and little hills. The vast blue sky grained-up when I stared at it too hard. The entire country of Georgia could fit between each farmhouse, though they were more like small shacks. I never imagined how many Americans lived in tin huts and mobile homes, town after town of them. The mountains started to get violent and scuffed around the edges as if kicked by the boot of an angry farmer. Mile after mile of nothing but spare branch, scattered snow, and foothill.