Termination Shock

The Camp on the Brazos

Saskia, whose primary excuse for being a queen was to support philanthropy, had been frog-marched through her share of Third World shantytowns. Most felt ancient. She was fascinated to see a new one budding. For now, the RVs were clean, their tires properly inflated, ready to roll onward as soon as conditions improved. The tents were bright and new, and a festive atmosphere prevailed as most here felt the unity that comes of shared hardship. But what might it look like if people never went home? The tents would deteriorate and be mended with duct tape and blue tarps. The tires of the RVs would go flat and they’d end up on concrete blocks. Proper sewage connections would never be made. The stink would never go away; people would learn to ignore it. None of these people would have legal title to the land they lived on and so they could be evicted at any time, or pushed off by rivals with more muscle. They couldn’t accumulate equity in their homes so they’d have no incentive to make improvements beyond slapdash repairs. They would not be paying taxes so there would not be schools, clinics, vaccinations, social workers. In what would seem like the blink of an eye, the shantytown would be a year old, then ten years, then a hundred. Its origins would be lost to memory, overlooked by historians. It would become something that had always been there.

She didn’t actually think that would happen here. The floodwaters would recede, people would go home. The north bank landowners would evict campers by force if need be. The state police would see to it that the campground on the south bank was returned to normal. All the urine and feces and litter going into the river now would be flushed out into the Gulf of Mexico and the Brazos would go back to being as clean, or as dirty, as it had ever been. But she was willing to bet that in other places within an hour’s drive of Houston, during the last few days, shantytowns—not seen as such by their occupants, of course—had taken root that would still exist generations from now, unless they were forcibly cleared in merciless pogroms. That was the way of most of the world. Texas would be no different. Which was not a judgment upon Texas. It could happen in the Netherlands too.

Lotte, her daughter, kept late hours in the Netherlands and tended to text her when it was early evening here. At that time of day, Cajuns were especially likely to be preparing food. Saskia, who enjoyed cooking, had got into a rhythm during the last couple of days where she would text, send selfies, or (using earphones) just talk on the phone to Lotte while chopping onions or whatever else needed doing.

On the first day of the adventure, distracted Saskia had been brusque with her daughter, who had been in the middle of some interminable teen freakout over a matter that struck Saskia as being of much less significance than crashing a plane and fleeing the scene of the accident while fighting a rearguard action against man-eating beasts.

Lotte had texted:

> I hope you get some vitamin D in Texas, maybe it will improve your disposition!

Saskia had replied that the weather was sunny and that she would probably get plenty of natural vitamin D, even in spite of careful application of sunscreen. This had elicited an eye-roll emoji and an LOL from Lotte.

Puzzled Saskia had even sent her a photo of the label on the sunscreen container, which was touted as a “natural” and “green” product that would not have toxic effects on aquatic life. She thought that this would please Lotte, who could not shut up about environmental politics.

But later Saskia had realized that the “D” was actually short for “dick” and that Lotte had really been suggesting that her mother ought to take advantage of this opportunity, while out of the usual press spotlight and among new friends, to get laid. And that doing so might make Saskia happier and somehow a more easygoing and approachable sort of mom.

Now, this was new. Of course, they had had the obligatory Talk some years ago. But with the usual sense of unbearable tween embarrassment on Lotte’s part. She’d just barely contained her desire to fly out of the room. Since then it had never again come up, until the vitamin D remark. Lotte had never dared to bring up the topic of Saskia’s [nonexistent] sex life, much less make suggestions.

So during much of the subsequent journey down the Brazos, Saskia had been pondering how to handle this overture from her daughter. Saskia had been widowed when her husband had caught COVID while doing volunteer work in a hospital. Since then she had not had sex with anyone. Tabloids were forever claiming that she was getting it on with some tech magnate or Eurotrash princeling, but it was all just fabricated clickbait. It seemed quite striking and revealing to her that her daughter, upon hearing that Mama had crashed a jet and was fleeing the scene in a flotilla of Cajun gator hunters, would—of all things—construe it primarily as an opportunity for her to engage in casual sex. Saskia sat in the boat and watched the Brazos go by, pondering what it meant for her and for Lotte.

Every so often—not in the first year or two of widowhood, but since then—she had asked herself in a theoretical way whether she would ever have sex again. There was no reason not to. Even if the story got out, the Netherlands was famously liberal about such things. Even the most hard-bitten Bible-pounders among her subjects would probably just set their jaws and look the other way. Many might even feel a sense of relief. But Saskia had written sex off as being just too complicated to be worth it. With so many other things to worry about, it was enormously simplifying for her to never think about that. It was a whole portion of her life she’d been able to push indefinitely into the future. She rather suspected that menopause had recently fired a couple of shots across her bow and it had led her to wonder how she might feel after that—whether she’d want to pursue anything romantic beyond some pro forma arrangement just for the cameras.

But it now occurred to her that prolonged celibacy might elicit more gossip than just having a normal sex life. She began to look at the people around her in a new light. People such as Willem and Fenna and Amelia. Of course, these weren’t potential sex partners. But it did occur to her to wonder if, when they were in the back of the plane, or having a drink together after work, they speculated among themselves as to whether, at any point in the remainder of her natural life span, Saskia was going to get some. She wondered if, were she to show interest in some man, they would be horrified—which had always been her assumption—or—and here was the new idea—would they instead give huge sighs of relief.

So much for Saskia. As for Lotte: years had passed since the Talk. An eternity for someone of Lotte’s age, the blink of an eye for Saskia. Lotte—who would be the next queen—had perhaps been wondering whether being a celibate nun for the Netherlands might be in the cards for her. Lotte most definitely was not interested in flying airplanes, or some of the more classic avocations of royals such as fancy horse riding. There was no question that she was interested in boys. As any sane person would be, Lotte was ambivalent about the prospect of becoming the queen. Saskia knew she’d looked to the example of Prince Harry and his American wife, Meghan, who had simply walked away, renounced their titles, and moved to the West Coast to live like normal humans. Lotte was perhaps wondering if the punishingly austere approach to romantic life exhibited by Saskia during her widowhood was somehow going to be the expectation for her.

The royal line could terminate at any point. The monarchy could fade into history. The decision might be Lotte’s to make. Could it be that Saskia needed to go out and get laid as an act of self-sacrifice to perpetuate the House of Orange? Not to produce an heir (which she’d already accomplished) but to prevent that heir from bailing out?

Yes. That was the ticket. If Saskia let Lotte know that she had done someone and liked it, it would be something that she was doing not just because she was horny (though, to be honest, she was that) but out of a sense of duty to the royal line and to the office to which she had devoted her life.

Best of all, it could begin to pay dividends long before anything actually happened. Lotte’s crack about getting some had been an opening on her part—a bid to connect with her mother, woman to woman. There weren’t that many levels on which they could really have a relationship. Obviously they were mother and daughter and they would always have that. But in terms of things that they had in common, ways they could relate to each other, there wasn’t much there. Saskia dared to convince herself that Lotte wasn’t sexually active yet. She’d prefer she weren’t. But girls that age had sex all the time, and so it was a thing that Saskia and Lotte could conceivably have in common and bond over. Politics was off the table—Lotte would be horrified and furious when she found out what her mother was up to in Texas—but maybe as that door was closing this other one could open.

> Relaxing day so far

she texted on the second day of the Brazos journey. Then:

> No D yet.

After several minutes’ delay during which she could see that Lotte had typed and apparently decided not to send several messages, Lotte came back with

> How’s the scenery?

which actually made Saskia laugh out loud.

> Looking around . . .

And she did. But there were no realistic prospects on the boat. Alastair was apparently straight and single. But she wasn’t feeling anything for him and it would have been excessively complicated.

> The valley is warm and lush but . . .

she began typing, then blushed and deleted it. Lotte wanted to change the subject anyway.

> Tell the Texans that if they stopped burning so much oil maybe the hurricanes would leave them alone!

Saskia sighed, finding this so much less interesting than what they had been talking about.

It was late the following day when they made their last camp on the Brazos and were reunited with Willem. He introduced Saskia to Jules. The young man was so beautiful that Saskia almost laughed in his face. She in turn introduced Jules to the other members of her group, including Fenna, who smiled at Jules with a light in her eyes that made Saskia wonder if they’d somehow crossed paths with each other in the past and were old friends.

But that wasn’t it. They were new friends. They stuck to each other like magnets that have been brought too close together. They ceased to be aware of the existence of other humans.

After night had fallen and the temperature had dropped a few degrees, they laid plans around a line of folding camp tables zip-tied together under a row of pop-up canopies. Some of the Boskeys’ shirttail relatives had showed up with a vast supply of living crayfish, squirming and shifting in mesh sacks. These had been boiled and heaped up on this table a couple of hours ago, bright and steaming, and had been consumed one by one by the two dozen or so people of the caravan as well as a few neighboring campers who had wandered by to say howdy. So they were surrounded by garbage bags stuffed with empty beer bottles and crayfish shells.

Saskia by this point had overheard many of the Cajuns’ conversations about where they would go and what they would do tomorrow. She’d understood less than half of what she’d heard—she continued to find the accent challenging—but she knew the gist of it. They intended to head generally south of the metropolis, into Galveston County, and use their boats to assist flood victims there.

She liked to think that, up until this point, she and the other members of her party had not been a hindrance and might—solely by dint of Willem’s cash-brick—have been of some help. That would clearly stop being the case very soon. They needed to work out a plan to part ways tomorrow that would create the least inconvenience for the Cajuns. As different versions of that plan were evaluated around the table, Saskia was in touch with T.R. via secure text message.

“My friend in Houston,” she announced, looking up from her phone, “proposes that he can meet us tomorrow in a place called Sugar Land if that is not too inconvenient for you all.”

Alastair threw her a private grin. During their time in Texas Saskia had begun to say “you all” as the equivalent of the Dutch “jullie,” but she hadn’t yet begun running it together into “y’all.” Saskia winked back at him.

Heads were nodding around the table. Saskia continued, “I don’t know what Sugar Land is but . . .”

“It’s a suburb southwest of Houston,” Rufus told her. A wry grin came over his face. “They used to call it ‘Hellhole on the Brazos,’ but Sugar Land sounds like a sweeter investment.”

“Why was it a hellhole?”

“Built by convict labor. Legal slavery, after the Civil War. Sugar plantations are so bad, you almost couldn’t have sugar without slaves.”

“What’s there now?”

“Subdivisions. The Brazos runs right through the middle of it. We can get there direct on a boat, or we can drive.”

A man with a thick accent took exception, and for a minute they talked in a way that Saskia couldn’t follow. Willem had brought up a map on his laptop. He and Saskia played a guessing game of trying to match place-names with the word fragments that they managed to fish out of the verbal gumbo. Just north of Sugar Land, in the western suburbs of Houston, the map showed large bodies of water, obviously artificial given that they were neat polygons outlined by roads. They were labeled as reservoirs. And yet on satellite imagery they appeared to be forests, dotted with recreational facilities. Sometimes, it seemed, these parts of the city were wooded parkland and other times they were underwater. Rufus and the Cajuns were talking about “Energy Corridor” and “Buffalo Bayou.” Willem identified these on the map as well—both ran eastward toward downtown. The former was a row of office complexes, including at least one Shell facility. The latter was a natural watercourse that apparently drained those huge park/reservoir zones.

The direction it seemed to be going was that Rufus—as the first Texan to have greeted the Dutch, and taken them under his wing, upon their startling advent in the New World—would take responsibility for getting them to their rendezvous with T.R., so that the Cajuns could go about their business farther south. After which, Rufus—having not only killed Snout but furthermore discharged his hostly obligations—would be free to join up with the Cajuns if he wanted, or to do anything else whatsoever that struck his fancy.

The easiest way to make this rendezvous in Sugar Land would be to just blast straight down the Brazos tomorrow on a proper boat—not a slow-moving pontoon—and look for a place where they could get out and hike up the riverbank to whatever passed for dry land at the moment. The alternative, supported by Rufus, was to drive. But as to that there was much disagreement. Could Sugar Land even be reached by a wheeled vehicle? Opinions differed. Saskia, unable to follow much of what was being said, had to observe it as an anthropologist or even a primatologist. It was like any other meeting, be it of European Union bureaucrats in Brussels or members of the Dutch royal household, which was to say that it was at least as much about social dominance and hierarchy as about boats and trucks. Those who didn’t like to play the game excused themselves or pushed their chairs back and dissolved into the twilight world of social media. The others engaged in this contest, which was not in any way disrespectful but was nonetheless a kind of struggle that, once begun, must be resolved. Rufus, in an understated but firm way, not lacking in deadpan humor, wanted it understood that boats were not the be-all and end-all. The Cajuns—some of them, anyway—were watercraft fundamentalists. Saskia, queen of one of the world’s boatiest nations, saw in it a parable of climate change. These Cajuns had come down out of French Canada and spent the next quarter of a millennium dwelling in swamps and navigating around bayous: marginal places overlooked, or looked down on, by the drylanders in their concrete-and-steel fastnesses. But now the water was advancing upon the dry land. Their time had come. They were just slightly annoyed with Rufus’s dogged insistence that wheeled vehicles had not become a thing of the past just because of a little rain, his patient reminders that Houston was crisscrossed with immense freeways on stilts, his pointing out that he’d mounted a snorkel on his truck that made it capable of driving through chest-deep water without stalling the engine.

It all got resolved, in the end, the only way such arguments could be resolved without anyone’s losing face: through a sort of competition. Tomorrow the four Dutch and the one Scottish visitor would be conveyed swiftly down the river on a boat while Rufus tried to keep up with them in his truck, going roughly parallel to the Brazos on Interstate 10, and carrying the baggage. Rufus’s trailer would later be towed out of here behind a Boskey vehicle and they’d look for a safe place to park it near their projected theater of operations. Once Rufus had seen the foreigners delivered to Sugar Land, he could retrieve his trailer and then ponder what to do with the remainder of his allotted life span. It was this last detail that seemed to be of paramount concern to Mary Boskey. She and Saskia had somehow wordlessly arrived at a shared understanding that someone now needed to keep an eye on Rufus and make sure that in the post-Snout phase of his life he didn’t go off the deep end.

> WHO IS THE HOTTIE!?!?

Lotte wanted to know after Saskia had sent her a selfie with the mound of crayfish in the background. Saskia scrolled back and examined it and saw Jules in the background making eyes at Fenna.

> He’s taken.

> Aww.

> By Fenna.

> AWESOME

Then, later, after a few more selfies:

> OMG Surinamese guy on the left. Your age.

Saskia looked at the selfie, puzzled. Then she understood.

> Not Surinamese. They don’t exist here.

> He seems fit for a guy that age.

> You mean, a senior citizen like me?

An exchange of emojis followed, reflecting embarrassment and apologies accepted.

“My daughter thought you were Surinamese,” she said to Rufus later. The man was obviously an introvert, not fully comfortable with the hyper-gregarious Boskeys. Saskia exchanged a glance with Mary, a few yards away, who seemed glad to see that Rufus had company.

Rufus had never heard the term.

“Like Amelia,” Saskia explained. She nodded over toward her acting security chief. As usual the poor woman was on the phone, looking preoccupied and tense, with frequent glances toward Saskia. She beckoned Willem over and they huddled on the edge of the bonfire’s circle of smoky, bug-strewn light.

Rufus nodded. “Something gone wrong, or is that just how her job is?”

“I don’t think anything has gone wrong in particular. It’s just that there are a lot of nervous people on the other end of the line. Trying to work through all the contingencies.”

“Those people didn’t like it that you went down the river like you did.”

“They didn’t like anything about this.”

Rufus nodded. “So your daughter thinks I look like her? That’s a fine compliment.”

Saskia smiled. “I’m glad you think so! I consider Amelia quite beautiful even though her looks are unusual by Dutch standards.”

Rufus shifted his gaze to Saskia. “Most Dutch look more like you.”

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s not a bad way to look either.”

Saskia swallowed.

“Takes all kinds,” Rufus added. “The reason I look the way I do is because of my great-great-granddad Hopewell, who was an African man. He was a slave owned by Chickasaw Indians.”

“Indians owned slaves?”

Rufus nodded. “Oh yes, ma’am. Lots of ’em. Chickasaws were one of the so-called Five Civilized Tribes, down in the Southeast. They lived like white people. White people had slaves. So they had slaves too. Later the Five Tribes got pushed west across the Mississippi to Oklahoma, which was called Indian Territory in those days. Took their slaves with ’em. Hopewell, he was born into slavery around about 1860. When the Civil War started, a lot of the Five Civilized Tribes supported the Confederacy, because they wanted to keep things like they was. Now, when Juneteenth came—the day the slaves were emancipated—Hopewell’s family took the name Grant.”

“After the general?”

Rufus smiled and nodded.

“So that’s my last name. I’m Rufus Grant. Never properly introduced myself.”

“Got it. Nice to properly meet you.”

“Right back at you. Now, the family kept living where they were, among the Chickasaws. Which was not a good decision. Because, out of all the Five Civilized Tribes, the Chickasaws lived farthest west in what we now call Oklahoma. Which put them right up against the Comancheria. The lands of the Comanches. The most powerful and feared of all the tribes that ever was. And in those days they were still living as they always had. They would raid the farms and ranches of the white people and the Five Tribes. One day in 1868 they raided the Chickasaws, stole their horses, burned everything down. They had a policy, I guess you could say, about captives. Small children, who were more trouble than they were worth, they would just kill. Adults they would kill slowly. But kids in a certain range of ages, maybe seven to twelve, they would take with them and adopt them into the tribe.”

“And Hopewell Grant was eight years old.”

Rufus nodded. “He was eight years old and he was good with horses, which was a useful skill to the Comanches. So they took him off into captivity and later traded him to the Quahadi.”

“Quahadi?”

“A different Comanche band. The most wild, fierce, and free of all of ’em. The last to surrender. But surrender they did, eventually. So in 1875, ol’ Hopewell ended up at Fort Sill. Oklahoma. Not far from the Chickasaw country where he had been born. Of course his whole family had been killed off in that raid, and he had become a true Comanche by that point.”

“Except for . . . the fact that he was Black,” Saskia said.

Rufus shook his head. “Did not matter to the Comanches. Comanches were a movement, not a race. There were white Comanches, Mexican Comanches, Black ones, ones who used to be Caddo or Cheyenne or what have you.”

“When you say he ended up at Fort Sill . . .”

“They were kept sort of as prisoners for a while. The Period of Forced Captivity. But when things settled down the Comanches ended up controlling some land in those parts. Allotments of a hundred sixty acres were given out to them. Many of ’em leased their allotments out to white ranchers, raised cattle and such. Hopewell worked as a cowboy. Married a younger woman round about 1900—we think she was half Comanche and half white. Had a son. My great-grandfather. He grew up on the ranch and enlisted in the army in World War One. They needed men who could wrangle horses, so he did that. Came back, started a family with a woman who looked like him—we think she was Mexican, mostly—and so on and so forth. My grandpa served in World War Two. Came back in one piece, started a family around boomer times, had my dad. Anyway, you get the picture. Up until about World War II we were horse people, but when cavalry became armored cav, that changed. I was a mechanic. Fixed tanks and APCs and such.” He smiled. “It’s all about mobility, see.”