An Acquired Taste Page 4

  And, honestly, the dogs were probably better off.

  An old saying goes, “With friends like these, who needs enemies?”

  It was sort of like that. With owners too selfish to share their water and provide their pets food, they were probably doomed anyway.

  At least once they were set free they had a fighting chance.

  Many of the dogs were shot by neighbors looking for a couple of meals.

  Many others, though, made their way out of the city, scared away by the constant gunshots. Once they had more running space they formed packs for self-preservation.

  The packs seldom attacked humans. They didn’t need to. There was plenty of small game, plenty of fish in the streams.

  Those whose hunting skills were lacking learned by watching the others, and some of the best hunters didn’t seem to mind sharing with their canine friends.

  One observing the dogs might liken them to a group of escaped convicts relishing in their sudden freedom. Regardless of any petty differences they may have once had, they were a unit now. They had each other’s backs.

  Not always, but mostly…

  Tillie was traveling by foot from the Atlanta metro area to San Antonio. It was a long way for anyone, but especially so for a diminutive woman like Tillie.

  Walking and running long distances is always harder for short people, who must take more steps to cover the same ground as those with longer legs.

  Normally it’s barely noticeable, but on a trip encompassing more than a thousand miles it made a long trip even longer.

  And she wasn’t as young as she once was.

  Tillie had always been meticulous when it came to personal hygiene. That was next to impossible now, of course, since washing one’s clothing was difficult and of questionable value.

  Typically, one had a choice between doing the laundry using bottled drinking water or using the water from nearby ponds.

  Bottled water was way too precious.

  Pond water left one smelling like pond water no matter how clean the clothes were.

  It was a no win situation.

  But Tillie still tried.

  Since she couldn’t wash her own laundry, she made a point to scrounge for new clothes every time she searched a trailer for water or food.

  There wasn’t always drinking water available. Sometimes just an empty pallet on the trailer where the water used to be.

  And more and more trailers these days were cleaned out of food as well.

  But there were clothes.

  There were always clothes, for Tillie was one of the few who really cared about the way they looked and smelled anymore.

  Most of the others were turning into bears.

  But not Tillie. She had too much self-respect.

  She was on the eastern edge of Louisiana, just a few miles from the Red River, when she stopped at a Walmart trailer with a very small discard pile behind it.

  If it was her lucky day she might find everything she needed: food, water and clothing, and might not have to stop for two or three more days.

  She’d gained a lot of upper body strength since her journey began some six hundred miles before. She could now climb aboard the trailer with ease, even though its deck was slightly higher than her chin.

  She looked around first, was pleased to find half a pallet of water, and placed a case at the end of the trailer.

  Next came a case of Spaghettios and a case of canned tuna. It was getting harder to find both of late.

  Perhaps this was indeed her lucky day.

  She rummaged through the trailer, pulling boxes from pallets and cutting them open with the folding knife she kept on her belt. She was methodical about the process, as was her nature. Most others just ripped the boxes apart, then tossed the items that didn’t appeal to them through the trailer’s door and onto the highway.

  Tillie, meticulous to a fault, carefully inspected the contents of each of the boxes, then closed each box as best she could and placed it neatly to the side.

  At one point she found a box containing novelty t-shirts.

  She held one up and read it.

  SHORT GIRL PROBLEMS:

  I’m Always

  The Last To Know

  It’s Raining

  “Perfect!” she said and tossed the shirt toward the end of the trailer.

  Another shirt read:

  The Best Things

  Come In

  Small Packages

  JEWELRY, CAR KEYS

  AND ME

  Tillie smiled.

  Another keeper.

  Tillie hadn’t been much of a t-shirt wearer before the blackout. She didn’t have anything against them, necessarily. She just went out of her way to dress more fashionably.

  Now, though, t-shirts were her preferred style of dress. They were lightweight, comfortable, and easily discarded when too dirty to wear any longer.

  It was one of many ways she’d changed since the world was brought to its knees. But it wasn’t just her.

  The blackout changed everybody in so many ways.

  After an hour or so she’d finished shopping.

  She’d gathered a total of six new shirts. New panties and socks too and a couple of new bras. That, with the food and water, made the time she’d taken from her journey well worth it.

  As she loaded the goods into her baby stroller and prepared to set out again she thought that maybe her good luck was changing.

  Then she looked out and saw the dog pack ahead of her, on the highways perhaps a quarter mile in front of her.

  And everything changed.

  -10-

  The dogs weren’t doing anything, really. Just milling about, as dogs tend to do. A couple lay in the shade cast by a huge dump truck. One gnawed at something he’d carried out of the forest. Yet another, a young bulldog, chased his tail.

  To any other person walking down the highway the dogs would be viewed with curiosity, perhaps even a bit of humor. But not as a threat.

  Of course, they weren’t Tillie.

  Tillie’s earliest memory of her childhood was of being dragged from her baby stroller and shaken violently like a rag doll, in the jaws of a dog with a troubled past.

  She never blamed the dog, not really. He’d been rescued from an abuser’s home. He was, in essence, as much a victim as she was. Perhaps more so, for he ultimately had to pay for his misbehavior with his life.

  Tillie had wondered a thousand times what would make a dog behave so, when by all accounts he was otherwise a loving and kind canine companion.

  No one knew. No one could have known. He’d apparently been triggered by the squeaky wheel on Tillie’s stroller. He obviously associated the sound with some type of serious threat from his past. And he responded not out of anger, but rather of fear. Only the dog and his first owner knew what it was about the sound that made the dog lash out.

  It struck Tillie that dogs are not unlike people. That sometimes unseen things within their minds affect the way they think and feel and even behave under certain circumstances.

  At least Tillie knew why she was deathly afraid of dogs.

  Psychiatrists define a phobia as “an unreasonable or irrational fear of something.”

  Some phobias, such as Tillie’s, are the result of a traumatic event at some point in the patient’s past.

  Others are a mystery, borne of chemical imbalances in the brain or other factors. Tillie once asked her doctor about them and he honestly told her, “We just don’t know what causes many of them. If we did they’d be explainable. And they would no longer be phobias.”

  Tillie liked to believe she’d gotten over her fear of dogs. But she was kidding herself. She had made a certain degree of progress. She no longer ran from them, as she did in her youth. She finally realized such action was to her own detriment, since the dogs almost always chased her.

  She eventually learned the best way to ensure her safety and peace of mind was to go out of her way to avoid them.

  She left her fu
lly loaded stroller outside the Walmart truck and crawled inside its cab.

  From the driver’s seat she had a commanding and safe view of the highway in front of her.

  She never took her eyes off the dogs, unless it was to check her mirrors and peek through the driver’s window to the pavement below.

  Just in case they were sneaky enough to catch and keep her attention while others in their pack were surrounding her.

  Such are the thoughts of a person with a phobia of dogs. They’re not always realistic or rational. But they’re always intense and always very very real.

  For hours the dogs stood their ground.

  And Tillie stood vigil.

  At one point she wanted to scream. To cry out. To warn two nomads who were approaching the dog pack.

  She saw them almost immediately after their heads appeared on the horizon, then their bodies slowly joined them.

  She wanted to scream out to them to stop where they were. That there was danger in front of them.

  But they couldn’t possibly have heard her, even if she’d have stepped from her sanctuary and onto the highway, and yelled with all her might.

  They probably would have laughed at her anyway, for she was well aware other people didn’t share her fears.

  Instead, she said a silent prayer for the two men’s safety as they drew closer and closer to the vicious beasts.

  They weren’t vicious at all, of course, to anyone not named Tillie.

  She wanted to scream as she saw one of the men kneel down to pet the bulldog pup, who’d stopped chasing his tail and was now wagging it.

  “No!” she wanted to hollar. “Don’t get close to them! Don’t expose your throat to them!”

  She watched, though, as the man straightened and petted a couple of others.

  Tillie had no way of knowing, but these dogs weren’t feral. They were family pets liberated by their owners because they could no longer feed them. They’d all come from a nearby village, just on the other side of the tree line.

  They were dogs who were learning to fend for themselves, but who were still domesticated.

  Dogs who still craved a pat on the head, a belly rub, a kind word from a human.

  Dogs that would never hurt Tillie in any way.

  But Tillie, because of the damage to her psyche, couldn’t possibly know that.

  The men continued on their way, directly toward Tillie. The bulldog puppy followed them for a time, perhaps hoping they’d take him home and give him a life he missed tremendously.

  Tillie fought the urge to open the window and to lean out and warn the men.

  That one of the devils was following them, perhaps getting ready to pounce.

  She forced herself not to.

  The baby stroller next to the truck caught their attention, and they looked up to the expansive windshield as they walked past.

  The man who petted the puppy caught Tillie’s eye, and he smiled and nodded to her.

  Tillie smiled in return.

  She was glad he’d survived his encounter with the dog pack. There weren’t enough civil people left in the world, she decided.

  A man who nodded and smiled to a stranger was a rare sight indeed.

  She watched in the mirror as the men disappeared from view, and looked toward the dogs again.

  They were still there, still lounging around. Seemingly in no hurry to go anywhere.

  And obviously neither was she.

  She very carefully checked her surroundings to make sure none of the dogs were lying in wait for her.

  Then she climbed down to the pavement and threw a change of clothes, her hygiene kit, a couple of bottles of water and two cans of tuna into the cab.

  All the time she kept a wary eye on the dogs, certain that at any moment they were going to break out in a mad run toward her.

  They didn’t, of course.

  Once back in the cab she looked to the sky and estimated there were only a couple of hours of daylight left.

  She was in for the night.

  She locked the doors and checked out the sleeper cab.

  It, like the trailer behind it, was in relatively good shape. There was a slight smell of human sweat and body odor, but it wasn’t as bad as most rigs were these days.

  She saw no sign of bedbugs or roaches.

  It wouldn’t be a bad place to spend the night. She’d lost several hours of travel time, but at least she’d get a good night’s sleep and could start fresh tomorrow.

  She went to sleep praying the dogs were gone by then.

  -11-

  R.J.’s first customer came around just two hours after the boy had disappeared around the corner with his bag of jerky.

  And to be honest, R.J. was surprised.

  He’d have bet a substantial amount of money, if money was still worth betting with, that the boy would have eaten the whole bag without sharing it.

  But here was a man, not yet old but fairly well seasoned, who’d gotten word that R.J. had jerky to share with the residents of Victoria Courts.

  “Hello there,” the man started. “I heard you have jerky to sell.”

  “Well, you’re half right, my friend. I have jerky, but it’s not for sale. It’s yours for free if you want some.”

  The man breathed a sigh of relief.

  “That’s good. ‘Cause I ain’t got much to spend.”

  From his pocket he pulled two sad coins. One was a Liberty dime from 1945. The other a wheat stalk penny from 1952.

  Coins these days were valued by their weight alone. Only the dime, because of its silver content, had value. And it wasn’t much.

  The man looked to the former chef, unsure what to say. He’d been hoping to trade his coins for a tiny bit of sustenance… any amount he could get, really.

  To be told he could have some for free seemed to make his day. R.J. could clearly see joy on his face, and wondered how long it had been since he smiled.

  The man licked his lips when R.J. opened a zip lock bag of the stuff and offered the man a handful.

  He didn’t require much coaxing.

  “Oh, this is tasty,” the man said almost immediately.

  Then something seemed to dawn on him. He didn’t know exactly what he was eating.

  “This ain’t human, is it? I understand a few folks out there are desperate enough to eat human, but I ain’t one of them.”

  R.J. smiled warmly and said, “No, sir. I promise it’s not human.”

  But he didn’t elaborate any further until the man finished chewing and swallowing his third piece.

  “What did you think of it?”

  “It was damn good. Thank you. Are you sure you don’t want to sell any of it? I know I ain’t got much now but I can scrounge around and see if I can come up with more.”

  “No sir. It’s not for sale. I’ll give you some, but there are stipulations attached.”

  The man’s whole demeanor changed. He went from a grateful man, glad to finally have some food in his belly, to a suspicious man, wary and worried he was about to be asked for something he didn’t have or didn’t want to do.

  “What do you mean, ‘stipulations’?”

  “First let me ask you a question, sir. You said you liked my jerky?”

  “Yes.”

  “You were worried that it might be human flesh, and I assured you it wasn’t. But would you be surprised if I told you it was made from rats?”

  “Rats? You’re not serious.”

  “Oh, but I am. But before you get repulsed, remember that you yourself said it was very good.”

  “Yes… well, it was very good. I never would have imagined it came from rats. I didn’t know you could make jerky from rats.”

  “Oh, you can make jerky from any kind of meat. And as for the taste, rat meat without seasoning is very unpalatable. It’s the seasonings which make it worth eating.”

  “You said you’d give me some, but that there were stipulations. What did you mean by that?”

  “The city sent m
e out here to help with two problems. First, they know the people in the inner city are desperate for food. They want me to introduce everyone to a new source of protein.

  “The second problem is that the rat population is out of control and will soon be spreading disease if their numbers aren’t thinned dramatically.

  “The jerky, in essence, will help with both problems. It’ll kill two birds with one stone, if you will.”

  “So… what do I have to do to get some jerky?”

  “Each bag of finished jerky contains the meat from about four rats.

  “I will give you four traps. I will show you how to set them and tell you where to set them. I’ll give you some rat bait to put on them that will attract them like candy to children.

  “When you have six dead rats, I want you to bring them to me. I’ll show you how to gut them and skin them. Then I’ll show you how to cook them and season them to make them edible. You and I together will turn them into jerky. We’ll use the jerky to fill up a bag that you can take with you.”

  The man mulled over the proposal, but wasn’t all in quite yet.

  He had some questions to ask first.

  “You said you want me to bring back six rats, but I only get the jerky from four. Is the rest for you?”

  “I catch my own rats and eat my fill from them. The leftover meat from your catch will be set aside and will help to feed others who aren’t in a position to provide their own catch. Say, for example, the elderly or the infirm. And small children.”

  “And you’ll trust me with your traps. Why would you do that? I mean, what if I just kept them and didn’t bring them back?”

  “That’s okay. At some point, I expect you to reason that you can catch and cook more rats by cutting me out of the picture. And that’s fine. If you decide to do that, at least you’ll know how to kill the rats and to cook them.

  “You’ll be one less person the city will have to worry about starving to death on the streets. One more person helping to thin the rat population. And even if you’re not working with me, word will get around about what you’re doing. People will see you killing the rats and will ask you why. You can encourage them to come and see me and to get their own traps. And to learn how to make their own jerky.