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oldmanatom) wrote2016-11-14 05:38 pm
Hot Sun, Hard Work [C&D 7. Ash Carson (Caravaneer)]
[Chapter Index]
Why the fuck did I become a caravaneer. [Laughs.] I ask myself that question every day. Why the fuck did I become a caravaneer…well, shit, your guess's probably as good as mine. C'mon, what do you think? Bad childhood? Gambling debt? Too shit-for-brains to do much else? Might be right on that last one, actually.
Ash Carson is a caravaneer—"actually, shit, don't call me that," they say after we start talking. "All I do is run a caravan. 'Caravaneer' makes it sound like some hoitey-toitey big official thing with offices and all that. My outfit's two brahmin and a couple of hard-headed, strong-backed folks carrying stuff from place to place. I mean, we're damn good at carrying stuff, but god, don't call me a caravaneer, please." They laugh. "I'm not ready for that sort of commitment yet."
You're probably looking for some big origin story, right? "Oh, my pa ran a caravan, and his pa before him," and so on and so forth. Nope, nothing like that. Truth is, I got arrested way back for—god, some dumbass thing I did, I can't even really remember what it was—and I got let out on parole, and I spent about a week bouncing around from friend's house to friend's house until one day I woke up and went, "shit, I've gotta get a job today!" That was one of the terms of my parole, was that I get a job within a week of my release, and if I didn't…so I get up and I throw my rags on and run out of my friend's house right as the sun was starting to come up over the mountains, and I hit the pavement all day.
This was in the Hub, right? So I'm going from shop to shop, going, "hey, please, I'm looking for work, do you need some help?" No one. Nothing. I looked all day and there wasn't a single job to be found. I even tried to—god, this is embarrassing—I tried to bribe some people to lie to my PO [parole officer] and be like, "yeah, they work for me," and I couldn't even do that. I mean, y'know, granted, I was offering them twenty caps to break the law, but still! I couldn't pay someone to hire me. Jesus, what a nightmare.
So anyway, it's getting down to the wire, right before I was supposed to check in, and I'm like, "shit, I'm definitely gonna get thrown back in jail," so I sprint back over to my buddy's place and borrow his travelling coat and boots and grab a box and some rope, then I sprint back over to this guy on the outskirts of Downtown and beg him to let me rent out his brahmin for an hour. Guy agrees, and so right as my PO's walking up with this huge grin on her face I'm strapping this tiny ass box to the back of this brahmin and going, "oh, hey there!" [laughs] And I made up some total bullshit story about how I was really turning over a new leaf with this brahmin that I managed to scrape together enough caps to buy, and I was gonna set out and do some good, hard, honest work with ol' Betsy at my side, and things were finally coming together for me, on and on and on. I don't think that woman bought it for a second but hey, as far as she could prove I didn't have anything illegal and I had enough to qualify as a "job," so she couldn't do shit. The look on her face when she walked off! Like I'd pissed in her coffee or something.
And the old guy I rented this brahmin from was standing there watching this whole thing, of course. So when the PO takes off he comes up and he says, completely deadpan, "I gotta buy you a beer after that performance, it's the funniest thing I've seen all week." We got to talking and it turns out that he used to be some small-time caravaneer who ran all up and down along the roads from the Boneyard to Klamath for years and years before finally making enough to retire in the Hub. Go figure, right? And he's like, "listen, you need a real job or else you're gonna end up a raider, in jail again, or dead." Like…shit, when you put it like that…so he offered to set me up with a brahmin and everything and told me to get a couple of guards together, and then he sent me on a few runs for him to see if I'd actually be any good at this.
Turns out I was. Good enough to stay alive and make some money, at least. Eventually I got on steady enough ground to go into business completely for myself and I've just been going since then. I run a lot of the same trails as he did, actually, and I've forged a few of my own as well, especially through the hills way up in the north and along the coast. But I'm staying down south for a while, y'know, waiting out the winter up there. You ever been in rad snow? Awful shit. You can feel it in your bones for weeks after.
What kind of runs do you do?
Nowadays, it's mostly the kind of the general stuff you'd expect a caravan to do—some weapons, some food and drink, some building and crafting supplies, a lot of stuff that seems like junk until someone breaks it down or twists it up or whatever. We used to do a lot of really specialized hauls up and down the NCR, though, like taking ore and scrap from the Redding area to the Hub to get melted down and sold, weapons shipments between smaller settlements, stuff like that. And we got a reputation for it—small outfit, but fair prices and great service. Now that the Crimson Caravan has its hooks in everywhere, though…running a caravan is expensive, always has been. But with that kind of competition? Gets harder every run. It's lucky my crew and I are such hardasses about it, we'll hang in there until McLafferty herself comes down on us. Still, it's tough.
"This one time early on, I got kind of a weird job—woman gave me 500 caps to haul ass up north and deliver this tiny wooden box with some kind of writing carved on it to someone up in Redding within the span of a week, on the condition that I personally carry it, I couldn't strap it on to Betsy or nothing, and I couldn't open it. I was still pretty greenhorn back then, so, y'know, part of me was like, 'something feels off about this,' but that part got shut down real fast by the jingle jangle jingle of a ton of money. We were already headed up that way with some mining supplies, pickaxes and such, and this old lady is giving us almost as much as we're getting paid for that haul just to carry a little box? Hell yeah, sign me up. This was all in the Hub, and right before I was about to leave the city limits I run into my old buddy that got me started, and we're talking for a bit before he looks down and sees what I've got in my hands, and he freezes then looks me dead in the eye and says, 'you gotta throw that out right now.'
"And I'm like, what? Why? And he tells me—apparently there's some kinda weird…between NCR [the city] and Redding, on that stretch, a number of caravans have gone missing. Like, completely missing, not even bodies or a carcass left to bury them with. Eventually people started noticing that a lot of the ones that go missing have weird jobs sending them north, just like mine. Sounds like a damn ghost story or something, I know, but I argued with my friend for half an hour over it, and just the way this pretty quiet, steady guy got all worked up…I told him fine, you're so worried, I'll go find the woman and talk to her about the job, show you that it's on the level. But I couldn't find her, not even after looking for hours. I talked to people to see if they'd seen her and no one else had, not anyone in that entire town. And while I was looking I was getting this sinking feeling, like this real bad gut feeling about the whole situation, so when folks started saying, "nope, never seen anyone like that come through the Hub," that sealed the deal. We built a fire on the outskirts of town and burned the damn box. Easiest caps I've ever made, though."
The travelling's hard but I love it, for the most part. I've always been bad at staying in one place, so this works for me. Seeing new places, trying new things—I mean sure, there are downsides to it, but for the most part I love it. Really do. Gives me something to do, which is half the battle with staying out of trouble. I'm too damn old to keep ending up in jail all the time.
But what I really like about the job is…everything's on you. The whole thing, all the success and the failure and everything else between that. Because, y'know, at the end of the day, it's a dog-eat-dog world. You either make the sale, or you don't. If you do, congratulations, you get to eat tonight. If you don't? Well, fuck, better hope you have some Cram left over. The rush of it all is exciting—at least until you get home to an empty table and an empty stomach. Keeps you on your toes. Is that scary? Sure it is, especially when it's your neck on the chopping block and you and your crew haven't eaten anything substantial in days. But part of me likes it, likes the control. I don't answer to anyone anymore, at least when it comes to running my crew. For one of the first times in my life I call the shots, I make the decisions, me doing well or doing badly rests on my own choices and not someone else's. It's a lot of responsibility but it's a rush too, at least when you get it right.
And that's true still, how much I like seeing everything I see, being in the driver's seat, it's all been true since the beginning. But things change, of course. Nowadays, I got someone who's just—head over heels for me. And I'm the same for her. You don't meet a lot of people out here who you can trust with a hundred caps, let alone your life, but her? Shit. I'd walk over five miles of radioactive barrels for her and I know she'd do the same for me. How many people you know who would do that for you?
Get this—one time we were in a bar, you know, having a good time, and this jackass comes up and says to her all that, y'know, hey babe, your dress looks real nice tonight, the light makes you look like an angel, all that sort of shit. So I go, hey, who the hell are you, and he's all, "fuck off pipsqueak, I wasn't talking to you." I got so mad! And I was about to ask this asshole who the hell he was, some sloppy drunk fuckwit coming up and interrupting our date, but her, she—[laughs]—she just hauls off and cracks this guy right in the nose. No warning, nothing. And he buckles over yelling and shouting about what a bitch she is, how dare she do that, and she says, "I'm busy on a date with someone who isn't a dick, so beat it."
Holy shit, right? I knew then that she was a keeper. I'd do anything for her. Anything she wanted. There's maybe three people I've ever met who've really had my best interests at heart when they tell me something, and the other two are my guards. I've had friends and all, or people I'd call friends, at least, but these folks are something else entirely. I'd die for them. Hell, I'd live for them.
And it makes me wonder. Or worry, I guess. A lot of folks in the business eventually settle down, pick whichever town they like the best and put down roots there with their family. I never really thought about that before I met my girl, and before I got real close with my crew, but now…I mean, it's dangerous on the road. That's a given. It's dangerous not on the road, too, but it's a different set of dangers. And with how all the independent outfits are scrambling for runs now, there's a real edge to it—there just aren't enough runs for how many people are trying to get their hands on them. But now I've got people that I don't want hurt, and that I don't want to get a letter or news from some old grizzly stranger about how they found me dead in a forest, robbed of everything except my underwear. I've got people looking to me, counting on me to be the ones handing them enough money to keep them and theirs going. So that's tough. I love the work still but I'm looking at it differently now.
Do you think you're ever going to stop caravaning?
Oh lord, I don't know. [laughs] I'd have to have a plan for my future to be able to answer that question. I mean, christ, the only reason I got into it was because I was rushing around looking for something to hold off my PO with, I'm guessing that says a lot about my planning skills. But I've thought about it, sure. With all the people in my life now I'm thinking about it more. My girl's a miner up in the hills east of Redding, and I've talked about it some with her and with my crew. Talked about…I don't know, getting a big chunk of land, building some houses, and farming or ranching or something like that.
[They pause.] Part of me wonders if I'll ever be able to stay in one place that long, though. Buying land, setting up a home like that, you get stuck there, in a way. Having a place to call home in the first place means you've got anchors somewhere—it can be a steadying thing, but it also keeps you from moving, too. And putting down roots means that you start having to rub shoulders with the locals, because now you're a local, and let me tell you, that usually doesn't go well for me. So, no, I don't know if I'm ever going to stop caravaning, at least right now. But I'm thinking on it. We'll see, I suppose.