Russian Outlaw
/Nate Ferguson
Patsy’s house was surrounded by tumbleweeds. They’d soon start decomposing, leaving behind a
heavy chemical smell and shiny streaks of black material everyone in town called sludge. Patsy’s
mother questioned why she lived in such a godawful place. Nothing good happened there. Patsy was sitting on the front porch swing, overlooking a flamboyance of faded flamin-
gos. Her three children were attempting to catch lizards as she sipped lemonade. Patsy’s straw
hat did its best to keep the sun from further freckling her nose.
“Don’t pull off the tails,” she hollered. “They don’t grow back overnight.”
Vinyl panels at the corners of the ranch house were flapping while several rows of shin-
gles had long since departed. She didn’t have these problems when Benny was around. Her ex-
husband could put anything back together.
Patsy saw a dust plume and hoped it was the postman with her disability check. That al-
ways perked her up. Instead, it was a white van with a satellite dish on top. The van chugged its
way south.
“Bomb run,” one of the neighbor’s kids shouted. Soon, a pack of children, including Pat-
sy’s lot, were on their bikes and heading toward the aircraft boneyard, just off Mesquite Road,
where thousands of retired military airplanes and helicopters were ingesting sand.
Juniper poked her head out of the garage next door and raised her welding visor with a
gloved hand.
“Why don’t they dump the shit in our front yards?” Juniper asked, for the umpteenth
time. “It’d save them some trouble.”
Juniper was lucky, Patsy knew. She still had a husband, a third-generation gas station at-
tendant/jeweler. Juniper had coaxed him into dragging a B-29 bomber nose section across the
desert with the pickup truck so that she could have the makings of a greenhouse. Patsy admired
all the windows, wishing she’d thought of it, although she’d much rather have a husband than a
greenhouse.
Christmas trees, scarecrows and snowmen, while municipal employees pushed the rest around
with bulldozers. Canyons kept the town’s odor contained most of the year. On those really hot
days, rising brown clouds offered regional newspapers the timeless headline, “The Caper Vapor
Strikes Again.”
Behind the supermarket, Patsy found Bixbee, the town’s closest thing to a pharmacist,
holding court in her canvas teepee. As Bixbee was preparing the pills, Patsy stared at a new two-
headed snake tattoo slithering down the woman’s wrist. Bixbee had her hair swaddled in a
bulging scarf.
“I like those red eyes,” Pasty said. She always found something to admire about Bixbee.
“Thanks. It’s a good snake, but not as watchful as I’d hoped.”
“That’s too bad.” Patsy had no idea what Bixbee was talking about. She didn’t know the
first thing about witchcraft or whatever Bixbee was into. For years, Patsy’s church had been try-
ing to summon Bixbee to Sunday service, but she wouldn’t budge and instead retreated to her RV
north of town.
“Any headaches?” Bixbee asked.
“Not lately.” Patsy knew better than to reveal too much to the medical community.
Weren’t their computers all connected? Bixbee had a nursing diploma on her bookshelf. Patsy
wasn’t going to tell her about the sensations of worms crawling under her skin or pterodactyls
flying over her bed at night. No one needed to know that, except maybe Juniper.
The teepee had painted a pointy shadow over the proceedings. Patsy’s eyes darted side to
side. She spoke in a low voice.
“Some TV people are sniffing around.”
she wished them well and invited them back. She’d hunker down in her Suburban when after-
noon thunderstorms spooled up.
She later went to work at the factory braiding parachute cord into survival wristbands and
whatnot. There was pride in that, of course. She was saving lives. But Patsy’s finger joints even-
tually gave out. She’d been on disability ever since.
Mayor Leach told the town repeatedly that if they lived their lives appropriately, they
could become gods of their own worlds. “As if we aren’t already,” Juniper liked to hiss at Patsy.
The parents planted themselves on the landfill’s rim, surrounded by smooth scarlet sand-
stone and parched Utah sky, and looked down upon the scrub oak where the trash would normal-
ly sit, contained by earthen layers and synthetic membranes. Patsy pulled out a tub of fried
chicken from the cooler and her children grabbed at it like Komodo dragons. After lunch, the lit-
tle ones ran into the pit to play king on the mountain.
The city attorney’s second adopted Guatemalan child was finally big enough to play with
the rest. Patsy thought she looked adorable, all done up in pink and yellow hair thingies.
“I remember when I had my second,” Patsy said over the screams. “Couldn’t wait for him
to see the light of day. They were wrong when they told me each one gets easier.” Patsy, though,
had maintained her youthful figure.
The city attorney’s wife sat quietly and Patsy started to panic under a burning coat of
sheepishness. Did she say something wrong? Was she being unkind to the less fertile?
“It’s all worth it, you know, being a parent,” Patsy went on.
The woman nodded before getting up to leave. “Your hair has a lovely green tint to it.”
“Yes, well, it’s a new thing,” Patsy said. “Glad you like it. Juniper took a seat at the table and looked dehydrated as usual. She tended to drive
everywhere with the windows down. One arm was darker than the other.
“You’re not listening to those damn psychologists again, are you?” Juniper asked, refer-
ring to the child-rearing book Patsy was resting her fingers on.
“Who says I listen?”
Juniper’s face cinched up. “Yeah, well, they’ll turn your mind into mush.”
Patsy’s kids were now beating each other over the head with sticks.
“Our esteemed mayor was talking to the city attorney in the parking lot,” Juniper said, as
she reached for a drumstick. “They were all hush-hush when I walked by. Fucking baboons.”
Juniper’s swearing always caused Patsy to cringe, as if she were dodging spotted bats that
sliced up the evening sky.
“Something don’t exactly smell right,” Juniper continued. “I feel bad things brewing.”
Patsy brushed it off and opened her book. She needed to focus.
A scream left the landfill and headed for the stratosphere. A blond kid had punched a
dark-haired kid. Arms and legs locked and unlocked. Patsy pulled the most injured child from the
wreckage of her family and carried him piggyback off the battlefield.
***
Back at Patsy’s house, an assortment of children busted through the front door as she was ban-
daging a child in the kitchen. She should’ve asked Bixbee for more salve. You can never have
enough salve.
Patsy heard a clank on her sliding glass door and knew, without turning around, that it
was Juniper. The woman’s shriveled arms and aviator sunglasses, perched low on her nose, stole
the menace from the machete she was holding.
Juniper started yelling before Patsy could open the door. “Those people. Those people in
the van. They’re asking about tumbleweeds,” she said. “Imagine that. They come all this way to
look at weeds. I pointed them toward the boneyard, but they just stuck up their noses at me. The
nerve. How could they resist our biggest attraction? That’s high-grade American junk out there.”
“What does this mean?” Patsy asked.
“Hell if I know.”
Patsy thought about upping her children’s share of the medication. That would keep them
out of trouble. After Juniper had left, she said to her oldest, “Maybe you should hang around.
Your snake is shedding.”
***
Patsy’s mother called that Sunday. She lived by a nine-hole golf course in Salvation, some fifteen
miles away. She wouldn’t visit Caper anymore, not even to see the grandchildren; they had to
come to her. And now her mother was starting to sound a lot like Juniper—in both tone and sub-
ject matter—reporting that a hazmat vehicle from Salt Lake City and three black government
SUVs had parked at the corner motel. Salvation had the only available rooms within a two-hour
drive.
“Maybe somebody found uranium,” Patsy said“Don’t sound so chipper. You know what mining did to your father. I want no part of that
racket.”
Over the next few days, Patsy’s mother started calling and calling. More outsiders were
arriving. The RV park was full and so were the campgrounds and the parking lot at the old drive-
in movie theater.
“They’ve never shown this much interest in us,” Patsy said.
“It’s time for you to skedaddle. You’re in a cesspool of cesspools.”
Patsy laughed. “I can’t pick up a family and roll out of town. I have a life here.”
“What life? You can’t wait for Benny forever.”
“Maybe I can.”
Her mother hesitated and took a drink of something, most likely Bud Light. She had a
pantry full of it. “He ain’t coming back. That’s the bottom line. You gotta come to terms over
that. Don’t you see, he knows something you don’t. There’s a whole world out there beyond Ca-
per.”
“I was a good wife.”
“I’m sure you were. But everything runs its course.”
***
Over the next few days, Patsy and Juniper watched trucks spitting pebbles at their mailboxes.
Most were military and, like the media, avoided the boneyard and drove straight into town. The outsiders took over the picnic benches that surrounded the landfill, drank bottled water and ate
packaged food. All that was left of the community, it seemed, was church.
One afternoon, Patsy went running for Juniper’s garage in a panic. “Bixbee’s teepee is
gone. And so is Bixbee. What am I going to do without my pills?”
“She’s a jackrabbit. She’ll turn up when this thing ends,” Juniper said. “In the meantime,
I’m going to sharpen my machete. You best arm yourself as well.”
Patsy didn’t know what to say.
***
As Patsy sat at the only stoplight in Caper, she watched a tumbleweed bounce off her hood, then
roll toward the bowling alley. It vacillated against the front door as if it wanted in.
Halfway down the street, she saw the mayor’s silver Mercedes parked outside city hall.
The seat of city government was located in the attic of a hardware store. She’d only been to “the
office” once, back when she was put on leave from the fruit stand and reassigned to the factory.
She remembered the mayor’s fat hands resting on a mahogany desk, sensing the power he held.
She drove on to the supermarket where a quarter of the town had congregated in the park-
ing lot. She was craving Fruit Loops and avoided conversation. She was afraid the outsiders had
cleaned out the store. Wearing a flowery sundress and cowboy boots, she made her way for the
front door only to get stopped by a familiar man in a military surplus trench coat.
Raymond had drifted into town, a tumbleweed himself, with not much more than a Cali-
fornia ID card. The guys at the gas station let him sleep in the back office and later discovered that he had a talent for welding steel and shaping aluminum, which proved indispensable in the
shop. He was also the town’s sculptor and his abstract creations sourced from the boneyard were
all over town, always signed with a spray-painted “R,” encircled like a registered trademark
symbol. His orange survival wristband was rotating around his outstretched hand.
When she said hello, Raymond’s eyes widened. She could tell that he was more agitated
than usual. His head sprung forward. Patsy couldn’t get her hands over her ears fast enough.
“It’s all going down, man. It’s all going down. They’re killing us. Those sludge fucks.
Sludge fucks!”
Raymond kept yelling and Patsy kept walking. Bless him, bless him. He’s a genius.
***
When Patsy arrived at home with a gallon of milk and three boxes of cereal, there was a note
taped to her back door in Juniper’s blocky handwriting: “Turn On the Damn Boob Tube!”
Patsy couldn’t handle TV news. Instead, she walked next door. She found Juniper in her
garage, hunched over and sweaty as she pumped up a dune buggy tire.
“They’re coming for us. Legions of them,” Juniper said. “We...”
They both instinctively crouched under the wale of an overflying helicopter.
“The Russians are behind it,” Juniper said. “I know it.”
“You’re always blaming the Russians.”
But this time it was too much for Patsy to take. She backed away and retraced her steps
through smatterings of sludge.
Where was Bixbee?
***
Patsy found a flyer taped to her front door, asking her to submit to a voluntary medical exam.
The next thing she knew, she was at the school gym behind a curtain. Face masks and clipboards
brought a degree of formality and seriousness she hadn’t experienced since her divorce hearing.
She told them about her family’s cancer history and her occasional skin rashes. But, no, she cer-
tainly didn’t have memory problems.
“You’re not going to be sticking us with needles, are you?” Patsy asked the doctor with a
crew cut. “If there’s one thing we have in common, it’s sensitive skin.”
Everything she said led to more inquiries. Oddly, they wanted to know if she’d ever in-
cinerated tumbleweeds in her yard. Silly question. Who hadn’t?
***
Patsy’s cat disappeared for a full day and when she came back, clumps of fur were missing from
her abdomen. It was like that now. The researchers didn’t ask anymore. They took what they
wanted. They did leave, though, cases of bottled water along with a stack of military MRE’s on
her front porch. Juniper traded her Mexican-style chicken stew for Patsy’s pad Thai.
At an evening community meeting, Patsy felt the ground shifting underneath her metal
seat; fluorescent light seeped into her skull. The tension was too much. She wanted to run.
“Our mayor looks weathered and beaten. Remember when he got lost in the slot
canyons?” Juniper asked. “He has no sense of direction.” She said the last part almost loud
enough for the mayor to hear.
That seemed to set off the crowd. Patsy heard the words “conspiracy” and “chemical
weapons” and “human guinea pigs.” She was getting seriously worried now. The mayor rose
amidst the tension and gripped the podium with those fat hands.
“There’s something I must tell you. It’s best that you hear it from me.” He took a drink
from a root beer can. “The governor wants us out. The town, they said, is no longer safe. We did
everything we could do, but we need to clear out and abandon our homes. I know this is a lot to
take in. Any questions?”
Juniper stood up. “They can’t take our property without giving us something for it. This
is the U.S.A., last time I checked.”
“They’re not taking our properties,” the mayor said. “It’s an evacuation order.”
Patsy couldn’t think of anything to ask. She was never good at that.
Grumbles took over. Hands went up. Then came shouting. The crowd quieted when Mil-
ton, the hardware/clothing store owner, started waving his arms.
“And you’re telling us now? How long did you know about this? I’ve got inventory. I
can’t just pack up everything overnight.”
“I’m sorry,” said the mayor.
“What about our jobs?” asked Felix, the factory foreman. “I thought business was good.”
“It was good, until this happened.”
That’s when Patsy saw Raymond slink through the side door in his trench coat. The door
slammed shut behind him. Heads turned. Eyes grew. Patsy’s seat hardened.
“I warned you all about these mother fuckers,” he said. “Are you listening now? Christ,
what does it take? Sludge fucks!”
On that note, the meeting was over, fast like an old Western gunfight, Patsy thought.
Her legs had gone to sleep and she couldn’t move.
With all this attention, why hadn’t Benny called to check on the kids?
***
The town was packing up—some in the middle of the night. A short-order cook was heading
back to Vegas while an elderly couple was off to St. George to be with family. Everyone, except
Patsy, had something else to fall back on, something to pursue, something to rekindle.
Bulldozers started tearing up the park and there was police tape around the playground
equipment. Patsy felt violated and left for dead. She had only Juniper to talk to, besides her chil-
dren, of course. It was becoming harder to keep them calm. Bixbee was long gone and Patsy was
running out of pills. She thought about dying her hair black; black as sludge.
***
Patsy awoke early to find two soldiers in her front yard attempting to untie the tire swing. There
was something about their relaxed swagger, and total disregard for private property, that created a burning sensation within her. She felt every bit as betrayed as the day her husband told her,
with an unflinching mustache, “My destiny ain’t here.” Then he headed southwest and followed
the Extraterrestrial Highway right out of her life.
“Children, you stay inside.” She glanced at her half-empty pill bottle, then charged out
the front door in her pajamas.
“Hey there, hey there,” Patsy said. “That’s ours.”
The soldiers turned and Patsy was horrified that one of them appeared to be female. How
could a woman disrupt another woman’s family life? The soldier’s wraparound sunglasses rose
on her nose, but she remained silent.
“We need to remove this,” the man said. “It’s contaminated. You’ve got sludge sitting in
the bottom of it.”
“So that’s what this is about?”
“It’s toxic, ma’am,” he added.
Patsy could tell he was a sergeant from the three angled stripes, but his authority and
swollen biceps didn’t deter her. This whole thing was going too far. She threw a gaze at them,
powerful enough to set plastic flamingos on fire. Patsy grabbed the rope and with vigor not felt
nor expressed since she was a teenager, pulled her quivering legs up and threaded the empty
hole.
“Ma’am, you can’t do this. It’s for your own safety,” the woman said in her husky army
voice.
Patsy laughed.
“You’ve got about three seconds and I’m calling the police,” the sergeant said.
“Call them. Call everybody. Bring in the navy. I don’t care.”
The woman soldier put her hands on Patsy’s shoulders and Patsy felt her back spasm.
Patsy gave the ground a swift push. The soldiers jumped back to escape her flying appendages,
lost balance and fell on top of each other.
“Jesus Christ,” the sergeant yelled. “Jesus Christ.”
Patsy was trying to twist up the rope, as her uncle used to do, and unleash her fury. As the
Earth swung around, Patsy felt a sense of calm. Her shoulders relaxed. Blue sky smeared with
cottonwood branches. As the euphoria was setting in, her flamingos raced by and mixed with
flashes of sunlight. Such beauty. Her fingertips burned and she caught a glimpse of her husband’s
face. It was his idea to buy the house, a solid investment and a good place to raise children, the
way he put it. And yet she was still here. His blue eyes and those elf-like ears dissolved in her
mind.
What had she gotten herself into?
Something sparkled like a fishing lure. Then came a sawing sound. Patsy felt the ground
rise up and smack her on the ass. Her head snapped back. Juniper was standing above her with
the machete.
“What? Why’d you cut me down?” Patsy sputtered.
“Sorry, kitten. I didn’t want them escalating things on you.” Juniper waved her blade at
the unarmed soldiers. “You’ll bring this tire back, won’t you?”
The sergeant nodded.
Even Patsy knew that was a lie.
***
Patsy awoke the next morning to pops and clanks as Juniper and her husband were loading up
the open trailer hitched to their RV. In all her years in Caper, she’d never seen their vehicle move.
“Everything that ain’t tainted, that’s what’s going,” Juniper said.
“Going where?”
“Phoenix. We’ll give civilization a shot. What the hell. You better come with us.”
Patsy rubbed her eyes. Finally, she had a question. “Are the schools any good?” Respon-
sible parents always asked that.
“How should I know? You’re lucky you didn’t end up in jail.”
Patsy had to admit she was right. “It’s too quiet around here.”
“That means it’s time to git. We’re supposed to be out of here within thirty-six hours.”
“That’s not much time.”
“We’ve got some space on the trailer. Load up your bigger things and follow us down,”
Juniper said. “By the way, I heard Bixbee turned up. She’s lying low in ole Mexico.”
Patsy pictured her teepee on a beach with palm trees. She always wished the best for
people.
***
Patsy kicked her boot on the side of the Suburban after the kids, the cat and other cargo had been
loaded, trying to get rid of the last remaining remnants of Caper soil. Today was frightening.
Everything she knew had been uprooted, churned about and lay drying in the sun. That silly
sludge. Who would’ve thought?
She left the flamingos behind. It was peaceful as they drove down No End Road, watch-
ing the sun sink below the mountains to the west. She went by the mayor’s adobe mansion. His
mailbox had been smeared with sludge while hand-molded black spires sat on top like those
hoodoos she’d seen as a child in Bryce Canyon. On the side of the mailbox, Raymond had left
his signature symbol.
In one of the few times Patsy listened to radio news in her life, she heard yet another sto-
ry about Caper.
“It’s an overnight ghost town,” the reporter started out. “The national guard has secured a
perimeter and trapped tens of thousands of tumbleweeds. As we reported last week, the tumble-
weeds were part of an experiment to suck up toxic waste near town. But Tox-Tek Solutions, the
company that was in charge of the project, failed to keep the weeds under control. The chemicals
caused the root systems to weaken, which launched the weeds prematurely. And the city didn’t
notify residents. Once the toxic plants rolled into town, they got trapped and contaminated the
soil. It left townspeople sick. That was the beginning of the end for Caper. Several Tox-Tek ex-
ecutives were arrested on charges of criminal negligence. And two city officials along with an
obscure rancher were arrested on charges of embezzlement, conspiracy and racketeering.”
The reporter then segued to an interview with a Nobel Prize-winning scientist. “Based on
what I’ve seen, the degradation to mental faculties is so great, in some cases, that I’m surprised
they can tie their shoes.”
Patsy shrugged off the last bit. Lies! Lies!
Then the reporter came back with a lighthearted tone. “While many see the tumbleweed
as an iconic symbol of the West, it’s actually an invader. The Russian thistle, which wreaked
havoc on this town, may have arrived in the 1800s after hijacking shipments of flaxseed. This
wind-propelled Siberian pest has been multiplying ever since. Down here, it’s become a Russian
outlaw.”
Jesus, Patsy thought. So the Russians were behind it after all. Juniper was right.
The radio anchor came on next. “Thanks for the report, Chip. That was quite a caper, no
pun intended. Remind us how this town came to be, out there in the Utah desert.”
“It has its own sordid history. A rancher back in the 1960s started experimenting with dif-
ferent kinds of non-native crops, most notably caper bushes, in greenhouses. He had some scien-
tific training and freely used chemicals that are illegal in most places. That operation continued
up until recently and employed a third of the town. Tox-Tek was brought in to assist as part of a
cleanup effort, but you know how that turned out. The feds will more than likely designate the
town a Superfund site. It could be unlivable for years.”
“Why didn’t people just leave?” the anchor asked.
“That’s a little complicated as well. The rancher built homes for the residents in exchange
for high-interest-rate mortgages. City fathers looked the other way. Townspeople also had their
hands tied from a religious perspective. The local church, with its own brand of theology, had a
lot of influence.”
“Fascinating,” the anchor said. “We look forward to your next report.”
As Patsy and crew reached the apex of No End Road, she saw a tumbleweed flip onto the
state highway and stop in her lane as if it were taunting her. She floored the Suburban and the weed twitched as her grill tore through it. Part of it exploded on the windshield. Laughter filled
the cavernous vehicle.
“Will we ever go back?” the little one asked.
“I don’t think so, Honey,” Patsy said. “You’ll like it in Phoenix.”
Juniper had scrawled the address of an RV park on a piece of cardboard. She put it next to
the class action lawyer’s business card in the glovebox for safekeeping.
Patsy pulled up to a gas station/rock shop before the sun escaped. Sandstone glowed
crimson as the temperature tumbled.
“Anybody need to use the bathroom?” Patsy asked.
When Patsy opened her car door, an empty pill bottle fell out.
A woman with long, shiny black hair—the kind that belonged in shampoo commercials—
and wearing a turquoise bracelet was behind the counter. Patsy had seen her many times before
and knew from eavesdropping that she’d grown up on the Navajo Nation. A gaunt white man
wearing cowboy boots was putting boxes on the shelves.
“You probably saw me on TV,” Patsy said, flicking her thin hair. She finally had some-
thing to share.
“Yeah, maybe.” The woman shrugged. “I saw a lot of people.”
“That Caper Vapor was no joke,” the man said. “About time they shut it down.”
Patsy felt, once again, under attack. Her town had been excommunicated and condemned,
wasn’t that enough? Did he have to rub it in? With trembling hands, she set a case of bottled wa-
ter on the counter.
“I’ll take three headdresses for my kids, if they ever get out of the restroom,” Patsy said.
“Did they come from your reservation?”
“No, I don’t know where the store owner gets that stuff. Those feathers aren’t real.”
“Oh, well, OK. Never mind.”
Patsy shivered her way back to the car. As she waited for her family, she second-guessed
the idea of going to Phoenix. Where else could they go? Moving in with her mother in Salvation
would be like going to prison. No other ideas surfaced, other than Phoenix. Besides, her furniture
was on Juniper’s trailer.
Her lungs rasped as she took a deep breath. A coughing fit took over. Once she stopped
convulsing, she downed a bottle of water. She felt lightheaded. Different.
She stared off at a darkening horizon. Her mother was right. Benny was gone for good.
He had no intention of returning to Caper and seeing his beautiful children again. All she could
do was wish him well and hope, hope, hope that he’d keep his eyes on those twisty coastal roads,
so unlike the desert. He never belonged here.
The car doors flew open. She glanced at her runny makeup in the rearview mirror and did
a headcount. They were soon venturing south toward their own salvation.
THE END
Author’s Statement: I’ve always been fascinated with small, isolated towns in the American West. I majored in anthropology in college and love to decode the history and modern culture of these communities. The environment also figures heavily in my writing. And when I discovered that a well-recognized symbol of the West isn’t quite what it seems, I had the makings of a short story.
Bio: Nathan Ferguson was a newspaper reporter and editor in Utah, Wyoming and California. As a longtime airplane and glider pilot, he also was an editor for AOPA Pilot, an aviation magazine based in Maryland. He presently lives in Denver, Colorado, and works in digital and content marketing. His short stories have appeared in Pooled Ink, a literary anthology published by Northern Colorado Writers, and Anomaly Literary Journal. His creative nonfiction essays have also appeared in I Learned About Flying From That, an anthology published by Flying Magazine, and Eclectica Magazine. He’s presently working on two novels and a collection of connected short stories.
