CivilWarLand in Bad Decline

The collection concludes with a novella, “Bounty,” which takes up about half of the page count of the book. The setting for the novella is a near-future, post-apocalyptic version of America, and begins in the U.S. Northeast. A contagion that causes people to physically mutate, the origin of which is never explained, sends the country into disarray. The country’s populace is thus divided into two groups: “Normals” and “Flaweds.” Flaweds are subject to enslavement. At the outset of the story, Normals are voting as to whether or not to give Flaweds the “right” to procreate. The Normals vote against this.

The novella opens at a themepark-like castle called BountyLand, at which the 30-year-old protagonist and his sister, Connie, work. Wealthy Normals visit BountyLand to experience life during the Middle Ages.

The protagonist and Connie have wound up here after they and their parents fled their home. When the protagonist and Connie were still children, roving gangs moved from house to house, “blockad[ing] the home of any family with a Flawed member” (106). A neighbor kills and cooks the family’s dog and eats in front of them. The gangs have “guns and riding crops and mortars,” along with “a high moral purpose” (106).

After the family members flee their home in Syracuse, New York, they go to a bowling alley, where their mom has stored food and other supplies. Their plan is to get a bus to Indiana. As they leave, a man in a van pulls up beside them. The protagonist’s mom urges their father, who is generally more trusting, to ignore the man. The dad does not. The family gets in the van and the man pulls out a gun and takes the food and money, saying:“I’m sorry for this […] I’m not a bad man. But my Leon. His little ribs are sticking way the hell out” (108).

The mom takes the protagonist and Connie with her, insulting the dad and attempting to hitch a ride. They are picked up by the Winstons (dad included) and the group starts to drive west. The next day, “the Winstons put [the family] out in the middle of nowhere because Mom and Dad rejected the Winstons’ bright idea of a sexual foursome” (109).

The backstory of how the protagonist and Connie wind up at BountyLand takes place in multiple sections interspersed throughout the narrative. Later on in the novella, we learn that after a long period of growing gaunt and nearly freezing/starving to death, the family reaches BountyLand. A guard at the gate asks their income and denies entry. Explosions fill the sky over the castle and the father drags the protagonist and Connie back up to the castle wall, heaving them over. This is the last time either of the children see their parents.

At BountyLand, Connie works as a prostitute. The protagonist, her brother, is not a fan of this. Connie’s date on the evening in question is a Mr. Corbett, “a gigantic bachelor who made his fortune in antiseptic swabs” (90). From his hiding spot in a fake shrub, the protagonist hurls rocks at Corbett. Connie is “mad because of the possible negative impact on her Performance Evaluation” (91).

The protagonist’s role for the evening is “Ribald Highwayman”—he is to “bound in and rob the women of the fake jewelry they receive at Admission, while [he] comically ogl[es] their cleavages” (90). The protagonist, through his rock-throwing, has missed his queue, so he goes “out to the [castle’s] retaining wall and climb[s] into the guard station” (91-92). Past the castle walls are the dispossessed—the extremely poor. The protagonist throws dinner rolls to them.

The next day, the protagonist is paged to Administration, to explain his actions from the night prior. His superiors, Mr. Oberlin and Mr. Albert, ask him why he hit Mr. Corbett in the neck with a rock. The protagonist says he was defending his sister. They show him Connie’s “signed consent form” and then demote him to the position of Table Boy: “[T]he worst Assignment I’ve had since I was six and a Wandering Gypsy” (95). This is also the scene where we learn that the protagonist’s physical mutation is claws, in place of toes. Connie’s mutation is that she has a small, vestigial tail. Flaweds are identified as such by a bracelet that they wear, which they themselves cannot take off.

The protagonist lives in a bunkhouse on the castle grounds with the “lowly Ramirez twins,” whom the protagonist calls “moral but not bright” (98). Highly devout, one of them, Lupe, has a crush on the protagonist, though nothing ever becomes of this. Connie enters, saying that Corbett, her date from the night prior, has “decided to stay, and desires Bookish Queen Mother instead of the scheduled Ferryman’s Mentally Feeble Daughter” (98-99) for their night of sexual role-playing. Connie adds that Corbett is “better than most, in that he’s nonabusive and buys her gifts off the record,” adding that she will “never, ever starv[e] or [be] made a fool of again” (99).

Later that evening, after the protagonist finishes his shift, “the Perimeter Violation Alarm sounds” (100), where a protest group called Austerity sing hymns and “throw buckets of black paint at [their] retaining wall. As usual one of them is dressed as Death Eating Chips” (100). The BountyLand employees respond by using firehoses on the group of protestors.

The protagonist’s next assignment is a SafeOrgy, where “shrink-wrapped Clients are rolling around on a heart-shaped bed with crooner music playing” (102). After this shift, he learns from Mr. Oberlin and Mr. Albert that Connie has been “bought […] out of BountyLand” by Corbett, who has taken her to his estate in Taos, New Mexico. He reads a note from his sister saying that she’s thrilled to be leaving.

Later that night, Doc Spanner, a drunk, shows up to the bunkhouse. Spanner tells the protagonist that Corbett “is a bad egg. When he tires of a woman he sells her to slave traders” (111). Spanner has “every Flawed in [BountyLand] […] within his jurisdiction” (112). The next day, Spanner removes the protagonist’s bracelet, thereby allowing him to appear as a Normal outside castle walls. That night, he leaves BountyLand for good.

His first stop is in the tent town where the dispossessed live. We learn that the 13th Amendment has been repealed and “the Slave Edict” was put into effect, allowing Normals to enslave Flaweds.

The next day, the protagonist reaches “the radical Church of Appropriate Humility,” which was once a McDonald’s. Its followers are called Guilters: “Guilters believe in quantifying their pain. Each pain unit is called a Victor, after their Founder, Norm Victor” (122). The protagonist muses:

What a beautiful country this must have been once, when you could hop in a coupe and buy a bag of burgers and drive, drive, drive, stopping to swim in a river or sleep in a grove of trees without worrying about in taking mutagens or having the militia arrest you and send you to the Everglades for eternity (124).

The protagonist next meets a rich man who has made his fortune from “GlamorDivans,” fancy sofas for the exceedingly wealthy. He extols about his work ethic and the long hours he put in to make his fortune. The man employs Flaweds and hires the protagonist to help “drive” his boat. The protagonist, at first, thinks this means steer the boat, but this is incorrect; instead, the protagonist will be pulling the boat all the way to the Eerie Canal, like “a surrogate mule” (129). The protagonist works with Mike and Buddy: “Their Flaws are dental. Buddy was born with no teeth and Mike has twice as many as he needs” (130).

They crew stops one day at “decaying tract houses which now serve as bunkhouses for barge pullers” (131); the next day, they go ashore for dinner and eat raccoon bits served by a woman married to a former toxicologist. They have a daughter, Nellie, and all three family members want the protagonist to be her suitor. The protagonist and Nellie go on a walk, passing by the boyhood home of “America’s Last Star” (140), “Frank Shenarkis” (139). Just after the “national infrastructure collapsed,” Shenarkis, “an overweight Normal, reigned supreme on prime time with his depiction of Snappo the comical Flawed.[…] Snappo’s flaw was that he had a Siamese twin named Tubby growing out of his waist” (140).

The protagonist and Nellie go into the woods and have sex. They then re-initiate sex, this time with Nellie taking off all of the protagonist’s clothes, including his shoes and socks. When she sees that he’s a Flawed, she gets upset. The narrator flees. Back at the Canal, “her folks are standing in front of the barge, along with a shouting mob of townies and a sheriff with a rifle” (142). Nellie accuses the protagonist of raping her. The protagonist again flees, hopping into an open boxcar of a train heading west.

By morning, the protagonist is in Michigan. The train keeps heading west. In Cleveland, the protagonist sees “a mob pursuing a pig past a gutted Wal-Mart” (144), attempting to bludgeon the animal to death. On the sixth day of the train trip, the protagonist is in southern Illinois, and a family gets on, followed by a knife-wielding lunatic. The lunatic attempts to attack the family; the protagonist intercedes, is bitten in the neck by the lunatic, tumbles out of the train, and gets knocked out.

The protagonist next wakes up “strapped to a stretcher propped against a dilapidated wet bar” (148). A mother and her two sons have taken the protagonist in; one of these sons then drives the protagonist to Slavetown, “a fenced-in complex of trailers” on the bank of a river. There, the protagonist is purchased by an exceedingly unpleasant man named Chick Krennup. Krennup keeps the protagonist in a cage, beats him with a rowing oar, and then takes the protagonist, along with his other Flawed slaves, further north in Illinois. Eventually, Krennup decides to sell his slaves at “the Sarcoxie slavemart, a fenced-in mudpatch behind a firebombed Wendy’s” (158).

At the slavemart, the protagonist is purchased by Ned Ventor, who treats his slaves with respect and dignity. Ventor owns a ranch in southern Utah, where he plans to take his slaves. The group reaches a wrecked bridge west of Oklahoma City and must use a small boat, in groups, to cross a span of river. The protagonist and other Flaweds cross first; when they reach the other side, the protagonist flees.

The protagonist wakes up in the middle of a street fair and becomes the property of a man making pancakes, due to regulations mandating “local resale by the finder [of the slave]” (166). The man making pancakes takes the protagonist to Tanner’s, “a brothel in a former Safeway” (166). The owner of Tanner’s has a son, Artie, who is studying Physics and doesn’t believe in slavery. The pancake man and Artie’s dad agree on a price and just as the father, Tanner, tells Artie to go get the protagonist “‘a sexy smock and some baby oil’ […] the lights go out and something blows up and suddenly Flaweds in lingerie are rushing by screaming, and swearing Normals are hopping over fallen beams with their pants around their knees” (170).

The protagonist takes “Artie’s stun gun and make[s] for a hole in the wall” (170).Outside, “a guy in a ski mask is sitting on a parking bumper trying to get a jammed gun to fire and a brother security guard […] with a billy club” (170). The protagonist stuns the guard and is put in a van by the man in the ski mask as “the Safeway collapses” (170).

The man in the ski mask is part of a resistance movement led by a woman named Judith, who pretends to be a Flawed but is actual normal and has a trust fund: “Here’s the thing […] I’m Normal. Never even had a bracelet. […] So I invented a myth and invested in some fake stumps. I stopped being Lynette, a shy debutante with no marital prospects, and became Judith, the one-handed scourge of north Texas” (175).

Judith urges the protagonist to join the cause, but he says no and begins his final leg of the journey to Taos. Once there, he sneaks on to Corbett’s sizable property and reunites with Connie, who is now pregnant. Corbett turns out to be nice to him, offering a job as a groundskeeper. Connie gives birth to a child with “Corbett’s eyes and Connie’s vestigial tail” (179). Soon after, the protagonist joins a local “rebel cell […] a bunch of skinny, dispassionate guys in a leaning barn” (179). The novella concludes with the protagonist knocking on the barn’s door, and the door opening.