Deprivation

by Roy Freirich

  “This way,” she hisses, between her own gasping breaths. She points them forward, toward a low fence she climbs, quick as a girl, turning to reach for the Boy Sam half-hands and helps over, murmuring uselessly, “Quick, now, easy. Good.”

  The Boy moves with them, crouched low and silent as they rush on through the boatyard between the dark hulls on sawhorses, the yardarms, cable spools, winch hooks.

  Somewhere along the way, Sam realizes, he has become lost, the thought itself so emblematic he wants to laugh—but each breath is too sharp and dear in his lungs, danger too close, his charge too helpless, time too short.

  So why does she slow, shaking her head, stopping? He stops too, and puts a hand out to halt the Boy.

  “We can make it. The marina. Come on . . .” He lifts the silently yielding Boy and looks at Kathy.

  Behind them, having gained the boatyard, the Sleepless are searching, shouting.

  “Sam, we can go right, other side of the yard, into town. Hide until help gets here. They are, right? Getting here?”

  “They’ll find us. We need to keep going.” The moments left to them dwindling, wasted, too soon irrecoverable.

  Confused, she steps closer. “To . . . where?”

  “Off Carratuck. He can’t be here, he can’t . . .” Sam tightens his grip on the Boy, who stares from one to the other. “I can’t let anything happen.”

  Kathy tilts her head at this new pitch of insistence. His look is wild, stubborn past desperation. “Sam? Through the inlet, tonight? You haven’t run the engine in weeks, you don’t even know if—”

  “Come on. We’re going.”

  She reaches a hand to him, slowly, as if not to frighten. “Sam . . .”

  Footsteps sound, too close, behind a row of boats on blocks, ever nearer. Indecipherable whispers, a choked sputtering laugh, hushed too late. Dim forms appear at the end of their row of boats, shouting: “Here! The kid and the quack!”

  Who is more deluded, Sam or their pursuers? Kathy chooses, hissing at Sam: “Go, I can lead them off.”

  He hesitates, paralyzed.

  The men, spreading and moving closer, breathing heavily from the chase.

  Her harsh whisper again: “Go!” She steps back into the shadows, as if from shallows into deeper darkness, submerging, gone.

  “Fuckers! Go back to Bayshore!” her voice rings out, brazen, echoing from aluminum hulls and the high corrugated roof above the dry-docks.

  Another flurry of footsteps turns Sam one way, then the other. No choice, he lunges with the Boy in his arms between two boats, clambering over a trailer as quickly and silently as he can toward where he imagines the marina must be.

  −−−

  Kathy knows the yard’s cyclone fences from her high school days, when kids passed Everclear and sensi and made out behind the clip joints by the fishing pier. Beneath one, she finds a remembered gap where the concrete had to be graded for drainage after Hurricane Francis. She goes to her knees, lays flat and rolls through, ducking behind a dumpster while a group of Fleisher’s vigilantes approaches. Their scuffling steps hesitate, uncertain, before continuing past.

  “Bitch!”

  “Fuck her.”

  “Did, twice, on Calvin’s rig, Junior year.”

  Laughter, fainter.

  She breathes again, peering under the dumpster into the night, black as a blind man’s day.

  24

  By the last hulks of dry-docked boats, over another low fence and into the big gravel wharf before the dock gate, they run stealthily, Sam with a hand on the Boy’s arm to guide him.

  Sam slows them at a body on the ground ahead, a man, groaning. Stuttering from time past, a memory rises up from nowhere, disappears with the echo of someone laughing unkindly. This morning? Days ago?

  And then he sees him: Chief, peeking over a pile of stuff gathered from dock boxes and boats, blocking the gate in a crude fortification. The low oily gleam of the shotgun barrel.

  How have they led each other here? Over these days of moments imagined or remembered, created or relived, vivid as if crossed into the corporeal, all reason has fled.

  “Sam?” Chief calls out, voice ringing off the shut storefronts around the wharf.

  “Yeah, Chief. What’s—”

  Behind him again, the crunch of gravel, rasp of labored breaths, as Sleepless crowd into the square, slowing.

  “Chief,” Sam turns back, “we’re leaving. Don’t let them through, they’re trying to stop us. They want—”

  “Can’t let you. Nobody.”

  Sam looks back again to see Fleisher has appeared—his absurd surgical mask, the unnatural gleam of his watching eyes. Beside him, a grizzled shark-boater Sam recognizes carries a shotgun casually under an arm, like a parvenu at a skeet shoot. Beside him, Andrew glares triumphantly.

  Sam calls back to the chief, “What are you saying? We need to—”

  “Told you, Sam. My last Navy tour? Typhoon, a shell rolled and blew, engine room flooded. I shut that bulkhead door, Sam. Some drowned inside, but we made it back.”

  Sam blinks at him as it dawns: the Navy episode Chief had once obliquely mentioned, a tragedy that presumably averted a larger one. Chief is back in it now, confronting the hard choices of sacrifice, finding the courage to make them, deep in some rewound drama of heroism.

  “I understand, but this is different.” Sam’s eyes find a haphazard pile of sharp angles—the square metal radios piled up. Commandeered from all the boats?

  Chief tracks his gaze. “Sure, I took ’em. Boats, harbormaster’s. If mainland hears and sends anybody, they’ll get sick too, bring it back to wherever. It’s not drugs or chemicals—DWP said so, your blood tests said so. So it’s a virus.”

  “Chief,” Sam explains, “it isn’t. I can’t find anything—”

  “—can’t let it spread, Sam, I got my girl ashore in college.”

  Fleisher jumps in, louder: “Then let us have the Boy, Chief. Before it’s all too late. You’re tired. Before you lose the ability to reason at all.”

  Chief looks from one to other. Reason? The memory of it is a kind of nostalgia now, as if for love and laughter, for any human kindness.

  Sam lifts an empty hand, as if proof. “Chief, man, there’s no disease here. Blood panels, nothing.” Sam ticks off a finger. “Environmental samples, all in range—”

  Fleisher pretends astonishment. “In range? Of testing by your friendly neighborhood clinic?”

  Sam keeps eyes on Chief, imploring. “Chief, this is just us, giving it to each other—like yawning, laughing, like being afraid. There have been other cases, it’s hysteria. It’ll all go away, always does, it’ll go away if we can just—”

  “—just what? It’s all in our heads, right? So you gave out fake pills? Fuck you, Sam.”

  Astonished gasps spread through the crowd, murmurs of shocked dismay.

  Sam points a finger, glaring. “And they worked.”

  “Not anymore!” a college kid, one of the frat boys, hoots from the back of the crowd.

  “But they did.” Sam nods sideways at Fleisher. “Before he came along.”

  Fleisher calls out, “Chief, you know what to do. You seal the breach, and if the seal leaks, you fix it. You know that.”

  Chief nods. “Yes, yes I do.”

  Fleisher warms to his subject like a method actor to a monologue, finding a chummy, humble timbre, an ingratiating cadence. “But if you let these two go now, how will you ever be sure it wasn’t them? Maybe these are the two that tip it all over, that make it too many to track down and isolate. Low probability? Maybe, maybe not, but a high-impact scenario, way too high, on your watch. Worth the risk?”

  Fleisher’s eyes glisten with cornball ersatz empathy, but he sways ever so slightly, a hand drifting up as if for purchase.

  Sam points a trembling finger
at Fleisher: “He hasn’t slept either. He’s not making any more sense than anyone else. There’s no disease! It feels like one, but it’s just hysteria, mass hysteria, and he’s fueling it with his fear-mongering paranoid nonsense.”

  Fleisher looks around, inviting assent. “A sleep-deprived psychologist’s fantasy, of course.”—the s’s slurring now. He nearly staggers. “What else would he think? My god, has no one looked up this man? No one knows why he’s here, treating hangovers? Maybe he needs to save a boy.” Fleisher nods toward the Boy. “And look, here’s one! Whom we hope will tell us what he knows, where he’s been, what birds or animals he or his family have been in contact with, and where and when. We need to track this thing. Can we really take a chance on so many lives?” Fleisher actually smiles at the Boy, one side of his mouth drooping, ghastly. “You want to help us, don’t you, son?”

  The Boy cringes behind Sam, and suddenly everything happens too fast, sped up like a jerky home movie reel, grainy and veering: Fleisher nods to the local. The local lifts his shotgun and aims at Sam. Shh-click: he cocks his trigger, but there’s no evil leer, no sadist’s grin; this one is frightened and in over his head, but in for a dollar too, in front of his cronies.

  Sam’s hands flutter upward. “Chief—”

  Fleisher shouts, “Shoot!”

  The local shark-boater sharpens his aim, and starts to squeeze the trigger, but Chief shoots him first, the Bellini barely kicking, quick and accurate. The man falls in a spray of blood and the chunky, sharp report seems to register an infinitesimal beat later, with another louder blast from the shotgun wildly fired by the local on his dying way down. A choked cry fades as another boater falls, spinning.

  Shouts ring out, hoarse and shrill as boaters now gather in the shadows opposite the square:

  “Fuck! Let’s get the boats! He’s out! Now—”

  “He can’t—”

  A group of a dozen or so surge forward, then hesitate, losing their nerve, running into each other, shoving.

  Sam grabs the Boy and moves them sideways, crouching. Where is there to run? Who’s on what side? Agendas seem to have crossed, shifted, died in the blur of fatigue.

  Fleisher shouts again, pointing, “The Boy!”

  Chief yells at Sam, “Quick, now, back here! We’ll hold them!” and lights a Molotov to hold off the others.

  Sam lifts the Boy and swings him up in an awkward clutch as he rushes forward, but the Molotov sloshes and spills, igniting Chief’s sleeve. Chief hesitates, slapping at it, and the bottle explodes with a thick grunting sound, turning him into a bleeding, spinning torch. A gout of flame goes flying, a lit blot of fuel, and splatters the dock behind him, igniting the last-resort gasoline trail he spilled along the ramp, down to the float, to one boat after another—charter fishing rig, luxury sloop, weekender.

  Sam goes to his knees and bends himself over the Boy against the blast of murderous heat. He turns his head sideways, wincing. Between the blurs of running Sleepless, he sees the chief kneeling in a shroud of flame, swaying to finally topple, consumed.

  In berth after berth along the float, furled sails burst into fire with a spitting, flapping noise, and then a series of explosions as tanks go up screeching, the air itself deafening, concussed, burning. The marina has become an inferno, consumed by fire crackling in antic, joyous fury as Sleepless run screaming in the chaos.

  Through the smoke, Sam glimpses the burning spars and the hull of his erstwhile home, lost, and he lifts the Boy and plunges back through the square, backhanding a Sleepless in their way, shoving another away. A thought of Kathy, quick, flashing. Gone to a girlfriend’s couch, one of the local waitresses, or a B & B hostess, he’s met them. She knows her way. The chief, he—

  From behind them, Fleisher cries out, “The Boy! Stop them!”

  Sam veers left along the side of the boatyard, tracking the low silhouette of the boardwalk toward the beach. Dark squares of unlit homes, motels. Grip of the Boy’s hands, his breath hot and rushed as they run without destination through the night reeking of cinders and ash.

  25

  In Cort’s waking dream, Tay has led her miles away and back again to this damp shed on a stretch of night beach, as if for the first time. Hers are the eyes of someone dazed into clarity by a life divided into before and after.

  “Shhh,” he says softly, as if she has stirred or begun to say something herself, but why when the sweat of their bodies and their hot, wet breaths have said everything so completely, again and again?

  But again his lips part around a sound like the one after a cherished secret is told: “Shhh.”

  “What—” His hand slips again over her mouth, and now she hears it, half-hidden in the rhythm of the surf, the Sleepless returning, shouting to one another, voices vibrant with youth and alcohol and menace:

  “Must be around here, check it—”

  “Already looked, okay?”

  “Look again, dipstick.”

  Cort and Tay struggle, yanking zippers, fumbling blindly with buttons and twisting to straighten clothes. His hand, hard now, grips her wrist as he shrugs the tarp off and sliding stiffly away, and pulls her upward. Her shin bangs on the rail and she stumbles over and down, pushed.

  They hesitate, breathlessly listening for a pause in the spill and gush of the ocean to reveal a laugh, a footstep, a taunt.

  Quickly, they move through the door swinging silently open onto the beach, out into darkness nearer the hollow, booming ocean. The night weighs like a pall, windless and heavy, barely lighted by iridescence in the wash of the breakers.

  There was a street once she lived on of houses with fenceless front yards and stunted shrubs beneath metal-framed windows set in blotchy stucco. There was a town and a school with a playing field and trees beyond the cyclone fence they climbed to smoke and dare to pretend to touch each other. There was carpool and homeroom. There was a life once lived by her, but barely.

  Feet heavy in loose sand to the damp, harder stretch along the tide line, they run, dodging kelp and driftwood, through salt mist and spindrift, into the next.

  26

  Beneath the flickering sky, by firelit dunes, Sam and the Boy stay low, running, always. In the blackness, at the corners of Sam’s eyes, afterimages of ephemera float, blotches and streaks of paleness, gone at a glance.

  Behind them, distantly, small lights drift and gleam. Ahead, there’s another bonfire a group of tourists feeds with furniture, books, clothing—like something hungry to consume the last of what we were. Howl of an animal from nowhere, everywhere, rising into a peal of laughter, even less human.

  Sam turns the Boy’s face into his chest, hiding his eyes from vague pallid figures kneeling in a circle, surrounding a naked woman on all fours. In the quivering beams of flashlights, she laughs, gasping, spitting and crying as they use her, whispering curses, chuckling.

  Turn away from it, away, leaving the group in the dark to cross under the boardwalk to a narrow lane.

  They stop between the hunkering shapes of bungalows, crouching low to avoid another flashlight beam leaping out long and snapping back to its origin, yet another group of tourists. The beam tilts and rears and finds a fortyish man in boxer shorts and a ball cap at the group’s center. He laughs, exposing bloody teeth, holding a pill bottle high.

  “Ate ’em all, fuckers!” he shouts, triumphant.

  Again Sam pulls the Boy in, hand hard on the back of his head, his hot breath on his neck, small body shuddering.

  The beam jerks, exposing flashes of gritted-teeth grimaces and limbs yanked back and flung out in clumsy blows that stagger the man to his knees, gasping, until one lands him prone sideways, and his eyes lose their focus and his lips form a dreamy smile. The shadow of an axe or a shovel lifts and falls. The man’s shoulder seems to part, tee shirt gaping to show bright bone white against stringy red as he sighs and rolls onto his back.

  Ag
ain, up and stumbling to carry this helpless creature, half-weightless now, to anywhere away from so much horror, if there is such a place anymore.

  −−−

  Between a dark motel and a row of share houses, Sam flinches back at two figures approaching, but a voice calling, “Doctor Carlson?” slows him—it’s the teenaged girl, her name gone again, who led him to the Boy and his mother’s little rental where he watched the depth of the woman’s despair and her undoing.

  “It’s me, Cort. From . . . yesterday? Was it yesterday?”

  Sam stops and Cort steps closer, her face etched with tear-streaks and too much seen, years older. Closer still, her voice worn: “This is Tay.”

  Sam nods to the teenager with Cort, a handsome, fit kid, white teeth and surfer-tan, a likely enough choice. His eyes dart quickly back to her again. “You okay?”

  She stares at the Boy. And then she slowly steps forward. “It’s you. Hi . . . I met you. In the market? Remember me? Hi . . .”

  Her voice fades into his silence. The Boy gives a nearly imperceptible nod, staring with wide eyes, and Cort’s eyes fill with tears.

  Sam has no words to console her, to keep her from wondering what she always will: what would have happened if she had babysat the Boy and given the mother a break? Would the woman have walked the sandy lanes and the boardwalk to the beach the next day, waded in like anybody else, let the ocean and sky calm her, found some kind of hope again? He shuts the thought away, useless now.

  Tay watches Cort, a quiet waiting in careful attendance, his eyes red-rimmed but calm.

  Cort’s gaze shifts to Sam and her voice cracks with the desperation of her question: “What’s wrong with us? With everyone?”

  “It’s . . .” He hesitates, but belief is all he has, all anybody has. “It’s almost over. We’ll all be asleep soon. Out like lights, like none of it happened. Believe it.”