Expatriates: A Novel of the Coming Global Collapse

4 SISTERS

Janelle Altmiller was depressed. She had spent the last hour on the Internet, checking on comparable houses for one of her real estate clients. What she found confirmed the continuing deterioration of the real estate market in central Florida. Despite all the talk of “recovery” in the market, prices were still down everywhere she looked. Even more depressing were the huge number of foreclosed properties, and the average time on the market for homes that sold—thirteen months to sell a house in Lake County.

If Janelle and Jake had been forced to rely solely on her property sales commissions, they would have already been bankrupt. Thankfully, Jake had the income from the hardware store that he’d inherited from his late parents. The store was small, and its location at the south end of Tavares was not optimal, but visits from their regular local customers were still fairly steady.

Jake Altmiller’s willingness to go the extra mile for his customers was almost legendary. He would special-order parts from anywhere in the country for just about anything. He even had the knack for sweet-talking manufacturers into providing uncatalogued parts for machinery that were not normally available individually and sold only as assemblies or subassemblies. Jake had also developed extensive contacts with dealers in secondhand equipment and parts, which saved his customers a lot of money.

The other thing that kept the hardware store going was their small assortment of firearms ammunition and gun accessories. While most other hardware stores had dropped firearms from their lines many years ago, Jake had kept this part of the business running. He did so more out of his personal interest in guns and his stubborn nature than with much profit in mind. For his regular customers, Jake would special-order guns at just twenty-five dollars over cost using his Federal Firearms License (FFL). He also served as an FFL transfer dealer for any of his customers who bought guns online through websites like GunBroker.com. His willingness to do so attracted all of the serious gun hobbyists in and around Tavares. The walk-in business and the pace of special orders had gotten frantic after the Newtown massacre in 2012. With calls for bans on manufacture and importation, many American gun owners who previously had little interest suddenly wanted a semiauto rifle and a big pile of spare 30-round magazines.

The biggest customer for Altmiller’s gun department was Tomas Marichal, a former Marine who was semiemployed building custom AR-15 and AR-10 rifles and carbines. Marichal was practically a fixture at Altmiller’s gun counter. Although he ordered a lot of AR-15 and AR-10 lower receivers through Jake’s FFL, Tomas spent most of his time shooting the breeze about guns and telling war stories about his five deployments—three to Iraq and two to Afghanistan. There were times when Marichal waxed on a bit too long, and Jake regretted ever purchasing the pair of tall padded stools in front of the gun counter.

To bolster his business at the store even more, Jake also sold photovoltaic panels and inverters. Although he discovered that some of his “off grid” customers were illicit marijuana growers, which he took steps to “weed out,” the photovoltaic part of the business soon developed its own loyal clientele. Over the past year, Jake had installed twelve photovoltaic panels on the roof of their house and another twenty-four panels on top of the store, more as a demonstration of the capabilities of a PV system than out of any desire to save money on his utility bill or to “go green.”

He chose an OutBack brand inverter that was slightly larger than they needed, in part because he planned to eventually add more photovoltaic panels for the house, and because he wanted to have an inverter with 220-volt AC capability so they could run their well pump. The panels were mounted on racks facing southward at a thirty-degree angle, to roughly match the twenty-eight-degree latitude of Tavares.

Jake Altmiller’s right-hand man at the store was José Valentin. José, a thirty-one-year-old former U.S. Army radio repairman, handled most of the photovoltaic power sales and service issues. He was a third-generation American whose grandparents had been born in Cuba but had emigrated to the United States shortly after Fidel Castro took power. Jose stood only five feet eight inches and had the wiry build of a bantamweight boxer. Since Tomas Marichal was also a Cuban American with prior military service, Valentin often joined in the Bravo Sierra sessions at the gun counter. Because Valentin had served in the Army, and Marichal’s prior service was with the USMC, there was plenty of good-natured interservice rivalry and ribbing between them.

Peter and Rhiannon Jeffords helped run an orphanage in Quinapondan on the southeast coast of Samar Island. Shortly after they arrived from the United States, they had added a breakfast program and after-school ministry for local children. These children all lived with their parents but were so desperately poor that many started the day without breakfast. So in addition to feeding the orphanage residents, they began feeding more than 150 local schoolchildren.

At thirty-two years old and 135 pounds, Rhiannon’s petite five-feet-three-inch stature had grown plump, though her light brown hair looked the same as it did when she first met Peter. She dressed modestly and never wore any jewelry other than her wedding band. She always felt mismatched when standing next to her husband, who was two years older, six feet three inches, and lean, and had handsome, chiseled features. Aside from a receding hairline—for which he compensated by often letting his dirty-blond hair grow bushy—Peter Jeffords could have had a career in modeling. Peter tended to wear jeans and Ban-Lon short-sleeve shirts in subdued colors. He always carried a CRKT brand B.U.L.L. pocketknife but refused to wear a wristwatch or carry a cell phone.

The Jeffords’ house was a simple nipa hut, locally called a bahay kubo, with only 280 square feet of floor space. It sat on tall, almost stiltlike piers and had a steep-pitched roof that was thatched with a long grass called cogon. The gables were left open for ventilation. The hut was built almost entirely of nipa palm wood, kawayan bamboo, and rattan. (The latter was called yantok by the locals.) There were eight steps up to the high porch. The area beneath the house—the silong—had a table for kitchen chores, but Rhiannon disliked working there because of the pig manure that was underfoot.

Recently, they had learned of a new lighting technique that was being used in many homes in the Manila area to save electricity costs during the day and they decided to use it in their home, too. They took clear, empty one-liter soda bottles and filled them with water and two cap measures of bleach; then they cut holes in their roof in strategic locations. The bottles were then installed so that they were half inside and half outside of the hut. During the day, each bottle provided the equivalent lighting of a 50-watt lightbulb.

The family’s most valuable possession was a dark blue Mitsubishi L300 minivan. It had come to them providentially—a gift from a wealthy friend in New Hampshire who had heard that the Jeffords were in need of transportation on the island. It was one those “God Things”—a wire transfer for twelve thousand dollars arrived just a day after Peter and Rhiannon had prayed together for the first time about their need for a vehicle. Peter often said that the Mitsubishi L300 was too fancy a vehicle for a humble pastor. The modern boxy-looking vehicle seemed incongruous parked beside their modest nipa hut parsonage. The Mitsubishi was just one year old and had only fourteen thousand miles on the odometer when they bought it two years before the Crunch, when their daughter, Sarah, was only five years old.

In the months leading up to the Crunch, and in the first week of the hyperinflation, Rhiannon spent many hours on the phone and on Skype with her older sister, Janelle, who lived in Florida. The sisters had grown up together on a remote cattle ranch outside of Bella Coola, British Columbia. Though they now lived a world apart, they still felt a very close bond. With the unlimited calling provided by Janelle’s voice over IP phone, they were able to talk for about an hour each weekday. It became a daily ritual for Janelle to call at eight A.M.—which was eight P.M. for Rhiannon. They would both do their household cleaning, laundry, and dishwashing while they shared news and stories.

Rhiannon also received care packages from Florida and British Columbia via balikbayan boxes. These two-cubic-foot boxes would take between thirty and sixty days to arrive. Many of these packages containing clothes and other essentials were sent by her brother, Ray McGregor, who lived in Michigan.

Ray was definitely the oddball of the McGregor family. He was a Canadian Army Afghanistan war veteran who had gone on to study military history at Western University in London, Ontario. In his senior year, however, he had dropped out to work on a book about World War II veterans in Michigan.

Often living in a fifth-wheel “toy hauler” camping trailer towed behind his pickup truck, Ray had first lived in Ypsilanti, Michigan, and later relocated near Newberry, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Most recently, he kept his trailer parked on a sprawling farm that belonged to the Harrison family. Four generations of the Harrisons had lived on the farm. Ray had met the Harrisons when he began a series of taped interviews with Bob Harrison, who was a B-24 bomber pilot in World War II.

With the exception of a few of his articles that were published in Military History magazine, Ray was a failure as a writer. He had never found a literary agent who was willing to work with him, and his four uncompleted manuscripts had never been published. He made most of his meager living cutting firewood.

The last e-mail Rhiannon received from Ray before Internet service was disrupted read: