003 - Michiana (a Port 2: Tales From Deck21 story)

SPOILER ALERT - Only read after reading Port: The First Tessa Germaine Joint - https://www.amazon.com/Port-First-Tessa-Germaine-Joint-ebook/dp/B07TM3K78S/

This is the first of a series of stories that take place in the world we left at the conclusion of Port. See https://marcalanbaker1.wixsite.com/worldofport/post/002-the-world-of-port for more information about collaborating. And as always, comments welcome. This is an early draft so looking for feedback. Eventually, I'll compile the best of the Deck21 stories into an anthology - Port 2: Tales from Deck21

Michiana

1

We, the people of Michiana, were largely untouched by the events of Deck21. We were and are a small cluster of communities straddling the Indiana-Michigan state line: Benton Harbor, Mishawaka, Niles, Elkhart, Buchanan, Goshen, Dowagiac and South Bend among others.

We had our heyday when it meant something to have a proper river like the St. Joseph and a point of interest along the Chicago to Detroit corridor. Our glimmer of self-importance hung on into the first quarter of the 21st century as our football team, Notre Dame, and the first ever gay Vice Presidential candidate, Mayor Pete, kept us on the map. But as ND fell in the polls and gay Pete lost his candidacy, our automotive junkyard of cities acquired a final coat of rust; our tires flat and our engines silent.

Hard to explain how we mobilized so quickly but it was like Deck21 was a can of WD-40 that lubricated our old tinman of a body. We deserve a pat on the back for how quickly we locked up and patrolled our borders in those days after Deck21. State Senator Wojochowski ought to be given a lot of the credit but we all played a part. She said we’d get swarms from the South Side of Chicago and from them Lake People in Southwestern Michigan, the former running from the violence of an unregulated free-for-all and the latter looking to stock up on essentials to carry them through the winter.

So we put checkpoints on the main thoroughfares, bottling up Exits 72, 77, 82, 92 and 96 from the toll road and interstates 2, 20, 31, 331, Capital and 9 from the West and North. We manned each checkpoint with a few armed boys, mostly part-time Indiana State guardsmen, and strung three or four Humvees (manufactured locally with pride) across the road to keep the immigrants out. A station wagon with a family of four would exit the off-ramp from the toll road, see a couple bodies in full riot gear with automatic rifles slung across their chests motioning for them to turn around, and the station wagon would come to a stop, buck over the median strip and cut bait back to the toll road. Timid soccer moms could find easier means of getting their juice boxes and beef jerky further on down the road.

Composed mainly of poor and not-as-poor, we lost some of our wealthier members in Granger but our hospital care givers, our Applebee’s waitresses, our tire replacement mechs and our bowling alley lane attendants kept on keeping on. The ND college students that left the Friday before holiday break never came back, their Irish fight song gone, the echoes cheering her name silent.

Those that remained got along, cooperated. Neighbors don’t turn on each other unless they have a reason to be afraid, afraid maybe they’d lose their shit or their families or the roof over their heads. But we’d make sure no one took from us again. Wasn’t reason to be afraid of our own people. Our lawnmowers were no better than your’n and it was January so wasn’t nothing to mow anyhow. Your wife weren’t no better than ours. Maybe we liked her ass better but maybe she talked all the time. No sense in taking her if the trade didn’t even out.

We were used to being shit upon. Even after automotive went away at the end of the 20th century, we clung to recreational vehicles – a specialty that our Mexicans and Amish could whip out like nobody’s business. But by the spring of 2009, practically the entire industry disappeared, leaving thousands of RV workers in Elkhart and the surrounding area out of work. Comedian Jon Stewart, host of the Daily Show, made fun of us, condensed our pathos to a quip: “Look at these poor schmucks in Elkhart, Indiana. Imagine your main industry combines the slowdown of the auto market with the plunging values in the housing sector.”

Obama come to town around that time, during some push to get his budget approved in his first year, summed up the town’s plight dramatically: “[This] area has lost jobs faster than anywhere else in the United States of America, with an unemployment rate of over 15 percent when it was 4.7 percent just last year... We’re talking about people who have lost their livelihood and don’t know what will take its place... That’s what those numbers and statistics mean. That is the true measure of this economic crisis.”

And that whole attention grab was a high point for us – 40 years ago. Being so used to it, we thought maybe we got tired of playing by the rules. We had a sense that no one was around to slap our hands if we made up our own rules. So we shut the town down and made it our own.

2

Old Bill Brandemeier called a town hall at the Joyce ACC, where the Irish played ball. Twenty thousand people showed up and that old arena didn’t fit more than ten thousand. But nobody got upset – hot dogs, soda and beer were free til they ran out.

“Who knows how much money Notre Dame made last year?” Bill started his rally with a question. A few of the smarter assess amongst us said stuff like “a shit ton” or “enough to feed the pope.” Bill said they were right. He also asked how many people remember when you could drive down South Bend Avenue and buy a house for $50,000 and have money left over for a solid used car. He said everyone could afford the cute homes and they was mainly safe.

“But all of them homes got gobbled up. Notre Dame paid double and razed them to the ground. Was nothing to do but move on downtown or south side of the city – tenements. Corral us up like pigs so’s the professors and alumni could come watch a football game without having to worry about looking at a neighbor’s yard that had untrimmed bushes or siding that maybe needed a fresh coat.

“But they’re gone. Those profs and them East Coast kids and their fake parents aren’t coming back. It’s time to reclaim what’s ours. We’re Michiana God bless it. We aren’t even a town. We’re just a bunch of mutts that found their way down to the garbage dump, bunch of cities that time forgot. What say we take it back? What say we put Michiana on the map? What say you?”

Cries of “yeah” and “you tell ‘em old Bill” peppered the arena as Bill’s fire and brimstone began. As he grew more animated, the thunder began to shake down from the sky; the echoes woke. By the time he reached his mutts and his garbage dump, we were riled. When he asked us his questions, we were in full-on riot mode, the foam flying from our rabid mouths, our screams rattling the rafters.

But Old Bill Brandemeier wasn’t done yet. He was a crafty old soul and us old-timers tied to Notre Dame were also tied to the Bulls of the ‘90s and some of us still remembered them Bulls. So Old Bill cued the sound guy and he hit play on “Eye in the Sky” by the Alan Parsons Project. Then as the spotlights danced across the court, Bill introduced our starting five, the five people he, Wojochowski and the rest of the council tabbed to lead our rebirth. These five were us, our energy and our anger focused into our representatives – not ineffectual, staid, elected representative Barbie dolls but real “by the people and for the people.” Bill introduced himself, then Wojochowski, Graham Miller, and Violet Williamson – each sprinting out to center court – and concluded with “the man in the middle”, Jumping Jack Crenshaw.

Jumping Jack and his ten gallon hat sauntered out to join the others. He had a shotgun in hand and a pair of pistols on his hips – we didn’t know that gymnasium could get any louder until it did. And that was how Michiana got itself a little red dot on the world map in those days following Deck21. It was just that easy.

3

Many of us read George Orwell’s Animal Farm as children. Some of us made an early connection between “The Five” and Napoleon’s pigs. But whereas a reader of Orwell’s parable could decry the stupidity of the farm animals as the pigs enforced stricter and stricter rules, we, as characters in our own story, did not have a Snowball warning us.

On top of the borders we guarded, we hoarded our food and ensured our sources of water and energy. Violet chaired the committee of engineers and electricians that approved the governance that ruled the hydro-electric power station and sub-stations with a fascist regimentation. Graham was Violet’s counterpart excepting his charge dealt with the flow of water, not electrical current. Again, we allowed iron fists, none of us wanted soft baby hands coddling our lights and liquids.

Security, warmth, water – three of Maslow’s Hierarchy on lock down; the last – food – was in Supermax. “The Five” felt confident that we could control the first three – we had the St. Joseph River to power the dam and irrigate us. Security would be good enough until it wasn’t. But food in January in Northern Indiana – we had what was on our store shelves and in our cupboards that had to hold us until fall harvest. Sure we could kill our dairy cows and egg-bearing chickens but where was the sustainability in that?

The mayor and Old Bill were the administrators that figured we had about a month of rations, two if we ate sensibly and not like the glutinous Midwesterners that ravaged the complex carbs of the pre-Deck21 Caligulan Dorito’s era. But that was just crunching math. It was Jumping Jack Crenshaw and his Clint Eastwood scowl that led the raiding parties like the train robbers of yore.

The first targets were the independent farmers and co-ops in the surrounding communities. Jack and his surgical team of four or five would drive a couple of dry tankers out to the siloed corn and grain compounds north of Rochester and west of Huntington. A couple of masked gunmen would rouse the surprised night-gowned proprietors and “convince” them to enter their biometrics into the conveyance system. The team would hook up the tankers to the flex-duct air handlers and smoke cigarettes with Jack while they waited. All were careful to keep their ski masks on while their unlicensed tankers filled. Then back home to unload. They hit eight storage facilities in two nights before Jack decided that word had spread and they’d run into a trap before long.

Jack turned his tactical hit-and-run squad North at that point and skillfully pillaged a couple of perch fisheries off Lake Michigan, a hog farm near Grand Rapids and in a particularly lauded escapade, he relieved a Southwestern Michigan vineyard of 20,000 gallons of chardonnay. Maybe not nutrionally necessary but we figured “escape from reality” had to be somewhere on the Maslow pyramid.

These raids were an important part of our food strategy. The other side of the see-saw was rationing and limiting shrinkage – the term companies colloquially coin for preventable loss of product by deliberate actions to steal, vandalize, waste or abuse.

Examples had to be made early on for us to understand the extreme consequences related to deliberate acts of shrinkage. Those Orwellian pigs didn’t have a “no creature walking on two legs shall shrink” law but Jack did. And Fat Annie Freitag was our introductory object lesson on the topic.

4

Fat Annie was fat because she ate a lot. It wasn’t for us to judge or examine the psycholo-whats and whys of it. Net effect, Fat Annie wanted or needed more than the 2000 calorie per day ration. None of us liked this limitation but we abided by it.

We think she tried to barter for food but she didn’t own anything that anyone wanted. We heard she tried to prostitute herself, but again, she didn’t…

And she wasn’t very adept as a thief. She shoved a frozen Sara Lee coffee cake down the front of her pants and tried to exit the store, right past the rationing officer (a fancy name given to Bonnie, the Kroger’s grocery store manager before Deck21). Bonnie felt goddamn awful for confronting Fat Annie but it was hard not to bust the large fidgety woman with the box-like protuberance across her crotch.

One of Jumping Jack’s hombres picked Fat Annie up from Kroger’s and took her down to the county lock-up on Sample Street. Those of us that saw her there felt a mix of sympathy for her and relief that it wasn’t us. “The Five” convened, this being the first infraction of the shrinkage law, and we heard there was some resistance within the group to their eventual ruling.

In the end, Jack cast the deciding ballot and hauled poor Fat Annie out to the Monroe Street Park where the old Century Center used to sit. Jack announced a time and a bunch of us, those of us with more curiosity than common sense, came on out to crane our necks.

Jack blindfolded Fat Annie then put a bullet in her head. He scowled at those of us standing around, our mouths open like little kids learning about Jesus for the first time. Jack instructed one of his hombres, Lester, to take “that poor girl” away and bury her proper. Which Lester did with the appropriate amount of sobriety. We all went home and hugged our spouses and kids a little longer that night before retiring to bed.

5

We heard Graham left “The Five” after that. He was replaced quickly enough. We think he skipped town but no one knew for sure.

Don’t get us wrong, it wasn’t like they were ruling us with an iron fist. We just had a few rules that were sacrosanct – for survival. We knew of men that still beat their wives and the drug problem on the West Side was still as bad as ever. The city and county law were still running their offices like in the pre-Deck21 days.

Same for businesses. People that could, still ran their companies. People still needed doctors and plumbers and mechanics. But lots of us didn’t have a job to go to any longer. Nobody seemed to care about insurance or accountants or lawyering. And lots of retail stopped mattering, partly because of the throttle on interstate commerce, partly because inflation got away from us – supply dwindled and prices on what remained shot up.

End of the day, though, our values changed. Some called it belt-tightening or a return to family values, but most of us just called it being scared. Life was interrupted on Deck21. It didn’t stop but some stuff stopped, some big stuff like Warner’s streaming service and Uber, and some of the smaller cloud services. Seeing a stalwart like Warner go down shook us but no one died cuz the reboot of “Eight is Enough” went off the air. Same for Uber, we still had Drive and Lyft so riders had options. Losing some of the cloud services – all your docs and messages and pics, gone – scared us more.

So we turned inwards, paid attention to our families, took the kids sledding, put off the purchase of new furniture. We became afraid that the next thing we’d lose would be more personal. Funny how the circle of things you’re scared of losing becomes pretty small when you get down to it. So we supported “The Five” because their values were our values. They were us and we protected our own.