Martin
Maple City Dispatch: stories from the former “Fence Capital of the World,” Adrian, MI
by Nathaniel Berry
Martin lives with his wife, Rosie, and nine-month old son, Jacob, out on Carleton Road, past where the blacktop ends and the road turns to dust. Martin is a manager for a chemical company that props up something like a third of the economy in the county. Rosie works at the nursing home, where they’ve paired down the staff to three twelve-hour shifts a day. They have a quarantine wing, extra space they hope they don’t need. Martin’s son has more hair on his head than his father does, now. Martin has almost died a couple of times at work: he slipped on a chemical spill and endured a concussion right before his wedding, and, another time, a pressurized vat exploded, propelling its steel lid into his shoulder. But the job pays well enough, and it gives him a lot of PPE: full and half-faced respirators, unlimited gloves, and, recently, a bonus—a t-shirt that says Essential on the front.
I drive out to Martin’s place the night before I leave town again. I half-expect him to be in crisis, because he was always the youngest of us, always a little more scared of the dark on sleepovers and camp-out nights. He is the only friend I have who never moved away from Adrian.
In the basement, Martin shows me where the new floor is going to go, where the doors will be hung, where walls will be put up. Down here is his bug-out bag, and the one he made for Rosie with the things she’ll need to take care of the kid. Martin made his own right before he got married—a black backpack with loops and carabiners, stuffed to the seams with the essentials of rural survival: MREs (the kind of imperishable, packaged meals soldiers survive on in the field), various tools and knives, a first-aid kit, adhesive moleskins for preventing blisters, two crinkly heat-trapping space blankets. He had ammunition, too—about fifty 9mm rounds for the semi-automatic handgun he carries inside his waistband. He brought this, along with the centrepieces and garlands, in his truck to the fairground which it was out job to prepare for his wedding reception.
Martin had always seemed like someone who was going to become a prepper—even at the young age when I first met him (he was six, I think, and I was eight) he dreamed closer to violence than I ever did. He played with toy guns, something I wasn’t allowed to play with. He went Up North with his dad every November form hunting season—he got to hold and shoot real guns, a prospect that simultaneously disgusted and excited me. He wore a lot of camo, always did, he liked knives and collected them—dark serrated combat knives from trueswords.com and rusty, garage sale rejects eagerly sold to children for lawn-mowing money. By the time we were teenagers, Martin and I (and really all our friends) had eager premonitions of the undead horde, the alien invasion: any attack that would drag the carnage and certainty of our video game worlds into our real life, and obliterate the mundane tyranny of high school.
When the Apocalypse happens, we’ll go Up North, Martin said, on a night we were tenting in someone’s backyard. We can stay at my dad’s place, and hunt deer. There’s enough food up there that we could live up there forever, a small group of us. We could defend it pretty easily. At the time, we could imagine it so clearly that we could almost remembered it: our parents whisked away, (not dead, particularly, just vanished) and the long road North, just us, armed to the teeth, ready to rescue grateful women and kill craven, unspeakable monsters. I spent every day in high school, praying for an invasion of Orcs or Goblins or something to derail me from the track that runs from ordinary life, through high school, to death in the hospital.
Martin’s basement stocked with ammunition—four-hundred rounds of .223 and .308, three or four boxes of 12 gauge; there’s electrolyte solutions in grey bottles, cardboard crates of MREs. The basement is bare concrete and white cinder blocks; Rosie wants him to refinish the basement, so that he can play Call of Duty down there and not wake her or the baby.
I have a drink with Martin on the back porch, in deck-chairs arranged six feet apart. Martin has a collection of old Scotch, a thing that only married men have. Martin has a mortgaged ranch house on three acres. He has an old dog and a new dog. He has two pear trees in the back yard, flowering, white and green. He has a garage for his grandfather’s 92 Camaro, white and red, custom floor-mats with his grandfather and grandmother’s names printed on them. His basement has a new Radon Mitigation system. He tells me he’s considering refinancing his mortgage to pay someone to dig up the drain field for his septic. Martin’s plans belong to a stranger’s life; a rooted, adult world that I can only imagine, like the life of someone in another century—it’s only the food and the ammunition that I can even begin to understand.
You’re the first person who’s been out to visit in more than a month, he says, and I am suddenly sick and guilty because I don’t see him or call him enough and, also, maybe by being here at all I’m not being cautious enough and I’m putting his life and the lives of his family members at risk.
Well, I say, you’ve got a good place if you have to be quarantined. And you’ve got enough supplies in the basement to get you through this.
Martin looks surprised, confused. No, he says, I’m saving those for a real emergency.
