Surfacing - Margaret Atwood [42]
“What would they want up here?” I said.
“A snooping base,” he said, “bird-watchers, binoculars, it all fits. They know this is the kind of place that will be strategically important during the war.”
“What war?” I asked, and Anna said “Here we go.”
“It’s obvious. They’re running out of water, clean water, they’re dirtying up all of theirs, right? Which is what we have a lot of, this country is almost all water if you look at a map. So in a while, I give it ten years, they’ll be up against the wall. They’ll try to swing a deal with the government, get us to give them the water cheap or for nothing in exchange for more soapflakes or something, and the government will give in, they’ll be a bunch of puppets as usual. But by that time the Nationalist Movement will be strong enough so they’ll force the government to back down; riots or kidnappings or something. Then the Yank pigs will send in the Marines, they’ll have to; people in New York and Chicago will be dropping like flies, industry will be stalled, there’ll be a black market in water, they’ll be shipping it in tankers from Alaska. They’ll come in through Quebec, it will have separated by then; the Pepsis will even help them, they’ll be having a good old laugh. They’ll hit the big cities and knock out communications and take over, maybe shoot a few kids, and the Movement guerrillas will go into the bush and start blowing up the water pipelines the Yanks will be building in places like this, to get the water down there.”
He seemed very positive about it, as if it had happened already. I thought about the survival manuals: if the Movement guerillas were anything like David and Joe they would never make it through the winters. They couldn’t get help from the cities, they would be too far, and the people there would be apathetic, they wouldn’t mind another change of flag. If they tried at the outlying farms the farmers would take after them with shotguns. The Americans wouldn’t even have to defoliate the trees, the guerillas would die of starvation and exposure anyway.
“Where will you get food?” I said.
“What do you mean ‘you’?” he said. “I’m just speculating.”
I thought of how it would appear in the history books when it was over: a paragraph with dates and a short summary of what happened. That’s how it was in high school, they taught it neutrally, a long list of wars and treaties and alliances, people taking and losing power over other people; but nobody would ever go into the motives, why they wanted it, whether it was good or bad. They used long words like “demarcation” and “sovereignty,” they wouldn’t say what they meant and you couldn’t ask: in high school the right thing was to stare fixedly at the teacher as though at a movie screen, and it was worse for a girl to ask questions than for a boy. If a boy asked a question the other boys would make derisive sucking noises with their mouths, but if a girl asked one the other girls would say “Think you’re so great” in the washroom afterwards. In the margins around the Treaty of Versailles I drew ornaments, plants with scrolled branches, hearts and stars instead of flowers. I got so I could draw invisibly, my fingers scarcely moving.
The generals and the historic moments looked better framed. If you put your eye down close to the photograph they disintegrated into grey dots.
Anna was squeezed in beside David on the bench, playing with one of his hands while he talked. “Did I ever tell you that you have Murderer’s Thumb?” she said.
“Don’t interrupt,” he said, but when she made a whimpering face he said “Yep, you did, almost every day,” and patted her arm.
“It’s spread flat at the end,” she said, explaining to us.
“I hope you didn’t sell out,” David said to me. I shook my head. “Good girl,” he said, “your heart’s in the right place. And the rest of her too,” he said to Joe, “I like it round and firm and fully packed. Anna, you’re eating too much.”
I washed and Anna dried, as usual. Suddenly Anna said “David is a schmuck. He’s one of the schmuckiest people I know.”
I looked around at