The Old Weird South

by Tim Westover

  #

  The police do show, after all, and there’s no sign of the car that pursued me through the desert. I’m in a hospital bed, my foot propped up and bandaged. I’ve been dreaming about those falcons again, their eyesight, how they’re too far away to hear but still close enough to see us. They’re the fastest birds in the world, I’m thinking, half-awake. Zoom, I’m thinking, zoom. The kid went somewhere. I wonder if I will see him again. Surely, the Californians will know I am here. If they didn’t recognize me earlier, the hospital logs will alert them. A wounded person with the obvious marks of a grove worker—orange-stained hands, dark skin, and this denim shirt? They’ll know. They have people. One of our groves must have slighted them somehow. With Californians, you can never tell; it could have been a murder, sure, or a rape or a kidnapping. One of us might have walked into the wrong grocery store. An apology wouldn’t matter then. The Californians are more than territorial. In late-night meetings at the grove, some have asked aloud if the Californians are even human. My suspicions are confirmed when an old cleaning lady pushes her cart into my room and closes the door. Without speaking, she unhooks my leg from its pedestal and moves me into a wheelchair, raising the left footrest so that my leg lays horizontal to my lap. As she wheels me to the freight elevator, I hear familiar voices asking the nurse about any new patients with gunshot wounds. The elevator door closes, and I allow myself one long exhalation.

  “Are you going to kill me?” I say, still doped into a stupor. When she doesn’t respond, I try to say something about who I am and what I’ll do to her and her family, and it comes out in a garble. I try again. I try to think of something to say. “Zoom,” I say. “Zoom.”

  She nods. Maybe she doesn’t speak English?

  The door opens into a delivery bay, and the old woman steers me into the back of a tractor-trailer. Inside, a weak yellow light shines down on more than a dozen wounded men, all Floridian, some with as little as a bandaged arm and others who may already be dead. The old woman straps me against the wall. I’m staring at her as she closes the trailer door.

  “Thank you,” I say. The old lady just stands there. Her gaze stays with me after the door slams shut. It follows me as the truck begins to move, down the drive and out into the interstate. Part of me thinks she must still be staring, eyes on me from afar.

  Shh. I can feel her now.