World Made by Hand

Five

In a world that had become a salvage operation, the general supply evolved into Union Grove’s leading industry. When every last useful thing in town had been stripped from the Kmart and the United Auto, the CVS drugstore, and other trading establishments of the bygone national chain-store economy, daily life became a perpetual flea market centered on the old town dump, which had been capped over in the 1990s. The general was run at first as a public cooperative, under the illusion that the ongoing catastrophes would ebb and normality would return. But the flu and the bombing of Washington put an end to that illusion, and the general eventually came under the management of Wayne Karp and his gang of former motorheads.

In the old days, Wayne Karp worked as a trucker for the Holland and Vesey paper mill in Glens Falls. Sometimes he hauled loads of pulpwood down from Saranac. Sometimes he took giant rolls of machine-finished magazine paper from the H & V plant to the big web-offset printing operation in Schenectady where regional editions of Newsweek were run off. In his leisure time, Karp was addicted to sporting entertainments that required gasoline engines: motorcycling, motorboating, snowmobiling, off-roading, jetskiing, and watching NASCAR racing on television. He couldn’t relax unless an engine was roaring somewhere near his head. He lived four miles outside Union Grove in a former trailer park near the general supply along with about a hundred like-minded former motorheads, greasers, bikers, quasi-criminals and their families who had drifted in over the years.

In normal times, Wayne Karp would have passed through life as just another lumpen American Dreamer, a hardworking con sumer of shoddy products, chemically tweaked foods, and rude popular entertainments, a taxpayer subject to the ordinary restrictions of the social contract. But in the new era, he blossomed into a local kingpin.

He was married for some years to a barmaid from a now defunct tavern called Waterhole No. 3, which occupied the even longer defunct Boston and Maine train station. The barmaid earlier had a son out of wedlock with a guard from Comstock State Prison up at the northern end of Washington County. The guard ended up incarcerated in his own joint for selling heroin to the inmates. Wayne Karp raised the child. This stepson ended up in Comstock himself at age nineteen for stabbing to death another teenage boy one summer night at the quarry outside town where kids gathered to drink and hook up with girls. His was one of the last cases tried in the county criminal courts. A month later, flu swept through Comstock prison and killed seventy percent of the inmates, including the stepson and his natural father. Wayne’s wife died under mysterious circumstances a year later. By then the justice system had ground to a halt like so many things that had once seemed woven into the fabric of regular life. The rumor was that Wayne strangled her in their trailer. He had more or less bragged about it openly. The phrase with his bare hands always seemed to crop up whenever you heard someone whispering about it.

As well as taking over the general supply, Wayne Karp had for a while organized the drug trade in Washington County, meaning marijuana-because manufactured pharmaceuticals, and anything linked to them, like methedrine made out of cooked cough syrup residue, had ceased to exist. At the onset of the hard times quite a few people had begun growing pot, to have something to trade, to simply survive. It was a form of currency, like eggs. After a while, if Wayne Karp learned that you were growing, he would demand an exclusive “contract” on your crop on terms very favorable to himself. Those who resisted or cheated had unpleasant things happen to them. But after a few short years, Wayne lost control of the dope trade. So many people were growing so much weed that the stuff became valueless as a means of exchange, no matter how the traffic was organized. Wayne himself was even growing it in quantity, queering his own market. Then, it started showing up wild all over the place, in the hedgerows and roadsides. I had sowed plenty of seeds myself up along the old railroad tracks by the river. It was a hardy and potent low-growing, shaggy Afghani strain of cannabis that was now naturalized in our corner of the world like the orange daylily. It put out buds the size of plums.

Since then, several farmers around the county had taken up cultivating opium poppies, a venture promoted by Dr. Copeland, who made his own laudanum, tincture of opium, for use in surgery and other medical emergencies, since it was no longer possible to get advanced pharmaceutical painkillers. He also made a kind of sedative tea from boiling the seedpods. Lately he’d been working on a procedure for refining morphine. People wanted him to be well supplied. He made sure, in turn, that our dentist, Larry Prager, had plenty. Nobody had dared burgle Jerry Copeland’s lab for laudanum out of fear that someday they might be lying on a stretcher with a compound fracture of the femur in need of a potent analgesic.

We regarded opium as a godsend. It did not develop into an illicit trade, though. There was no legal prohibition, no police running around trying to suppress drugs, driving up the price artificially, and no marketing system. There were no distant markets to send it to because shipping anything was slow at best and often unreliable, and travel was something you just didn’t do anymore. Anybody could grow their own poppies or buy raw opium paste from one of the growers. Farmers made more money growing raspberries or asparagus. They grew poppies as a public service. A few people took to smoking opium, but those with an extremely apathetic attitude toward survival tended not to last long in the new disposition of things.

So, Wayne Karp turned the focus of his energies to running the general supply. He had a large crew out there systematically digging up the old landfill and sorting out valuables, especially glass, plastic containers, pipes, hinges, screws and nails, anything that could be reused. He sent other crews around the countryside to disassemble abandoned houses for their materials. Back in the glory days of the suburban expansion, many split-level houses had been built on roadside out-parcels far away from the towns, the stores, and the jobs. The people who built them expected to be able to drive cars everywhere to work and meet their daily needs forever. Now, with the population so far down, and many empty houses in town itself, and the oil gone, and no ability to drive heroic distances, these buildings had no value except for salvage.