by Burgy, P. J.
“Oh? Me? I’m fine and dandy, just peachy, doing great,” he told her, laughing around his cigarette. He sat up, blowing smoke from his nostrils before taking his cigarette out of his mouth to tap the ash to the ground. “How are you?”
“Just tell me. What’s going on?” She got up and sat next to him, searching for his green eyes to meet hers. When they did, she slid her hand up along his back. “Big Brother.”
“How was Ashley?” He puffed on his cigarette.
“Ash was fine. Gencho. Please,” she said. “Don’t shut me out.”
“I’m not shutting you out, Yusha. I just don’t know what to tell you.” Gencho took another drink from the bottle and set it down. As soon as the glass touched the wooden tabletop, she yanked the bottle away from him. She swung her foot over the bench seat and left the table. He looked up and over at her as though physically wounded, brows furrowed, lips back. “Hey.”
She stood a few feet away, studying the bottle in her hands, turning it around. She lifted her hazel eyes to his face. “Do you remember, when I was fourteen and you caught me trying vodka? It was at Fort Chambers, trading for supplies, some of the kids there saw me and invited me over. Bored, I guess. Stuck inside the walls for too long. Saw this new kid, this rover kid, and decided to see if she was as tough as they heard. Rover kids were supposed to be tough as nails, right?”
He listened to her, almond shaped eyes tracing over her face. “I remember. I remember giving you hell and throwing you back into the Bella, and you throwing a fit at me for it.”
“Do you know why I was so mad at you?”
“Because I embarrassed you in front of those fort kids,” he replied.
“No. Because I was embarrassed in front of you,” she told him. “Because I felt like I let you down. You were so mad at me, threatened to tell Dad but didn’t. And you never kept anything from him. That day, you did. And I just kept seeing that disappointment on your face whenever you looked at me.”
Gencho closed his eyes, taking another drag from his cigarette.
“It took years until I stopped seeing that look on your face. Years. Thought it was over. Thought we were good,” Kara told him, setting the bottle down on the table in front of him. “But I saw it again, you know. When Dad decided he wanted to settle here and retire, and you argued a little but then gave in. Gave up. I saw that look again. When I said I was going to be a runner, take turns with the Reeds.”
“You were only seventeen,” Gencho said, reaching for the bottle. He killed a quarter of the contents in a few seconds, wiping his mouth after. “Kara, why do you want to die so badly?”
He had used her name. She lowered her head.
“I don’t want to die, Gencho,” she said, “I want to live. That’s why I run. Look at you. Look at what you’ve become since we put the Bella in a garage and forgot about her. You’re a mess. You’re killing yourself, slowly, every day. And I don’t know when it happened, but you gave up.”
He lowered his head, began to snicker, and then began to chuckle.
“This isn’t funny,” she said flatly.
“You come back to feel better about yourself, don’t yah? That’s why you always come back, after the run. That’s why you don’t stay with your little boyfriend in Paradise.” His hand lifted to his face to shield his eyes, and Gencho peered at her from between his fingers. “Do you talk like this to Ashley? I don’t think you do. Maybe.”
“Leave Ash out of this.” She folded her arms across her chest.
“You run to Pleasant Tree, only been runnin' solo a month, don’t come back for a few days, so we call over , fuckin' worried sick, Horse's brother still missing, which you got over real fast, by the way, and you’re shacked up with the Mayor’s son. Moved on quick, huh? Thought you’d stay there but back you came, then out you went again. Every time you took more than a day to show up, I was wondering who you were shacking up with.” Gencho began to snicker, straining to hold something inside, leaning forward with the exertion. Hand across his face, Kara could see his grin pulling back into a grimace. “I told, I told Dad, told Tengen, we shouldn’t of let the cat out, she’s gonna come back with kittens.”
He burst out laughing. Gencho let it out openly. She stared at him, eyes narrowed, listening to him laugh and laugh, until he began to cough. He tried to calm himself, slowly, tears running down his face, his cigarette falling out of his mouth and landing on the ground, smoldering in the gravel.
“I’m going to pretend it’s the booze talking, Big Brother,” she said.
“Pretend all you like, pussycat.” Gencho started a new bout of laughter, needing to steady himself with a hand splayed across the tabletop. He looked up at her, grin wide, all of his teeth on display save for one. Red in the face with sweat beading on his forehead, he giggled at her. “You started this.”
“I'm not the bad guy here.”
“And I am?”
“I didn't say that.”
“You're thinking it,” he said.
“There’s no bad guy.”
“Someone has to be, right? But not you. No. You're always the good guy in your own story, aren't you? Always making the best choices for everyone else. Always doing what's right, according to you, I mean. It doesn't matter what happens to anyone else, everyone else, around you. As long as you're happy, right? As long as you get what you want, fuck everyone else. Fuck them. Right?” Gencho's sneer was ugly for a few moments before his grin returned. “I know what I'm doing, Yusha. Do you?”
She studied his face, his busted lip, the gap from his missing tooth, his black eye. She squinted, searching for something she found familiar and came up empty handed.
“What happened to you?”
“Ask Dad. Ask Tengen,” he replied, licking his lips, drinking from the bottle after. He had nearly killed it and regarded the little bit left with sad eyes. Eyes of jade found Kara’s once more and he finished off the bottle and slammed it down on the table hard. “They think I’m an embarrassment. You should too. Join the party. Hell, I can’t disagree.”
“But why?” she pleaded with him.
“Because,” he replied, his smile slipping away as quickly as the sweat beads that were breaking and running down along his face. He lifted a hand, wiping at his wet eyes, and cleared his throat, stifling an isolated chuckle. “Because it all went wrong. That’s why.”
“What went wrong?” She went to him, tried to put an arm on him and was immediately shooed away. She straightened up, took a step back and then scoured him with her gaze. “I don’t know how long I’ll be around.”
“I don’t either,” he stated.
“I could leave tomorrow, in a few days, but right now, right now I’m here. So, if you want to talk, want to really talk, and you can put that damn bottle down, I’ll be at the den, in my room.”
“See you.” He waved at her.
“You fooled me pretty good, Gencho Jones. Here I thought you gave a damn about me.” She stormed away, following the same path that Tengen had taken awhile before. She didn’t turn to have a last look at him, preferring to keep going forward.
Of course, it made her angry. How couldn’t it? But then, she hadn’t been surprised either. That fact haunted her more than the maniacal laughter she’d heard coming out of her usually stoic big brother. He wasn’t the one who had the dramatic fits, was he? Not usually. Not until recently. The alcohol had slowly been replacing the man over the last few years and she’d been watching it happen, getting more accustomed to finding him laid out in the grass or sleeping in his shack.
She had been preparing for the day when they pulled his corpse out of the lake because he’d passed out and rolled into the water, too drunk to feel himself drowning. At least he’d have died peacefully, she thought. It didn’t make her feel any better. She wasn’t one to show it when she was upset, not with tears or flushed cheeks, but it was written in her eyes as she walked quickly back toward the gate, rounding the dock at the shore and heading left toward the garage and st
orage shed.
Jensen Hooper waved at her as she passed and she waved back, hiding her pain behind a forced smile.
The storage shed and garage was a single structure, huge with a tall, rounded ceiling. Renshen Bui had designed the thing himself, but he’d needed Gencho to help build it. The frame was solid, the walls were made from painted sheet metal, soldered and bolted together nearly seamlessly. This was the kind of work that Gencho had been known for before he fell into a bottle. The roof was a long arch leading down into lines of gutters that drained to the ground. The inside was lit by hanging, cylindrical lights that were hooked up to the solar panels mounted on the top of the building. Inside, the fort had stashed all kinds of mechanical equipment ranging from small electronics to large appliances that had been brought back from salvage missions.
Some of the stuff was very old, and some was very new. A few citizens still made day runs to the dump a few miles away, and one of those citizens was currently sitting at his workbench, hunched over with a screwdriver in one hand and a silvery metal box in his lap, the top panel of which was open to expose the wiry innards. She couldn’t quite see what Renshen was working on, as he was facing away. He was wearing his ugly plaid work shirt, probably unbuttoned and open in the front, and his faded blue jeans. She stepped into the garage, glancing around at the junk her father had accumulated.
The jukebox in the far left corner, the record players stacked on the wooden shelves, the various DVD and VHS players he had been meddling with in piles all over the cluttered tables, tools scattered across every surface. A bunch of opened batteries of different sizes took up a large part of another table in the corner, bits and pieces of them out in the open until they could be assembled and used. And, there, far to the right, the huge and impressive, heavily armored rover vehicle with small, dark windows and a turret gun mounted on her roof, the Bella. She looked dusty and tired.
“Yer a day late,” Renshen said, his back to her.
“Ran into some complications.”
“What kind'a complications?” he asked, reaching for his smoking soldering iron. He was connecting wires to circuit boards most likely. He was fixing something. She knew that much about what he did. Her father made things work again. That was what he had gotten into doing since he put the Bella in the garage and settled in and taken on that title she hated so much. “Yusha?”
“Red Brethren at the Villa Townhomes,” she replied. “Not their usual stomping ground. They were called there. Had a run-in. I got away.”
“Huh.” He stopped what he was doing, placing the soldering iron back into its nested station. When he turned around to look at her, his brows were furrowed. He stood up, set the opened metal box on the worktable next to the soldering iron, and brushed himself off. “What kinda run-in? What were they doin’ out that way?”
Renshen Bui was taller than Kara and Tengen, shorter than Gencho by a few inches, and much older than any of them, but the man managed to look larger and stronger than all of his children combined. It was the way he carried himself, the heat in his cool gray eyes, that made him look like a warrior, like a wandering old knight in a lawless land. Mighty, but growing tired. Wise and even tempered, but not without a bit of fire still left inside him. His short hair had been going white for years now, his face deeply lined. His nose had been broken in his youth, more than once perhaps. Renshen wasn’t any less muscular than the first time she had seen him, so long ago now, though he did dress less like a rover and more like an old man. He was wearing that ugly plaid shirt over his dirty white tank, and he’d tucked it in and worn his fancy belt that day. His tall boots were scuffed but neatly tied up. He favored his left leg when he stood, leaning to one side, ever so slightly bowlegged.
He bent and wiped his hands on his thighs. His jeans were dirty and the box of clean rags only a yard away from his worktable had gone untouched.
“They’re dead,” she said. “Nothing for your fort to worry about, Mayor.”
“Well, damn it, Yusha, knock off that Mayor business, I’m talking to you. And, what in the hell happened to your face? Didja let one of them get ahold of yah? Get over here, lemme look at yah.” He ushered her over to him and she complied. He took ahold of her jaw, tilted her face to the left and to the right, and grunted. “What did they do to yah?”
“What you see is what they did,” she told him. “I told you, I’m okay. I wanted to come by and see you, but I’m really tired of talking about my face today.”
“You damn well knew I’d ask yah about it when I seen you. I bet Hoop had some words to say,” Renshen muttered, placing his palm on top of Kara’s head and leaning in close. His gold tooth glinted in the light. “Your brothers seen’t you yet?”
“They did.”
His gaze was heavy. “It’s getting’ too close. This is too damn close.”
“It was bound to happen one day. I’m tough though. My Daddy raised me right,” she told him and tried her best to placate him with her most comforting smile. It didn’t seem to be working. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Hell I won’t.”
“I made a mistake and I learned from it.”
“Didja?”
“Yes, Dad.” She took a step back and escaped from his hand. “So. What’re you working on?”
“Huh.” He placed his hands on his sides, glancing over his shoulder to the table. “Oh. This? Found an old DVD player in the junk yard. I can get it workin’ again. Tengen’ll like it, if no one else wants it. Fig’r someone’ll want to watch a movie. This’ll make someone happy. Whaddaya think?”
“Dad, I think everyone in Blue Lagoon has a DVD player now. You can stop.”
“You wish.” He chuckled, a raspy sound. Renshen looked back over at her with those gray eyes and he offered her his signature smile. It wasn’t really a smile. He didn’t smile with his lips. No, the smile was in his eyes. She couldn’t help but smile back at him. He tapped the side of the DVD player he’d been working on. “This ain’t just any normal DVD player, it’s a blu-ray.”
“I don’t know what that is, Dad.”
“Special. For special kinds’a DVDs. Some of them ones we found before don’t work in the old style, but this machine’ll run ‘em. You can see one of movies we been wantin’ to see,” he told her, the excitement in his voice becoming noticeable. “That one with the cartoon dinosaurs. You been wantin’ to see that, ‘member? We can watch it now.”
“When I was eight, Dad. When I was eight, I wanted to see the movie with the cartoon dinosaurs.” She smirked, turning away from him. “But, yeah, you fix it. We’ll watch it, okay?”
“Yep.” He nodded to her, and then lit up like a beacon. He went to the shiny red jukebox in the left corner and patted the glass top, staring back at Kara. He had painted it up again, made it look almost as good as new, save for the glass window that had taken some damage. “Oh! I got this baby to work. When you were out, I got her up’n’runnin’. You want me to turn her on? Wanna listen to some music? It’s the stuff I listened to when I was a kid.”
“Maybe some other time, Dad.” She swayed in place. “I was going to meet Tengen for lunch, maybe say Hi to a few people, check the radio office for any calls, you know? See if there’s any runs that need done. Not sure how long I’ll be in Blue Lagoon…”
“Well, then you gotta listen to some music with me, girl. Get over here.” He gestured at her, summoning her over with a few waves of his hand. When she didn’t come over right away, he did it again. “Come on. The records are still good.”
“Gencho would really enjoy it, I think. You found that jukebox with him, didn’t you? Don’t you want him to be here when you play it?” she asked.
“Gencho wouldn’ ‘preciate it,” he said, turning on the jukebox. It began to hum, whirl, and whisper as it warmed up. Renshen pressed the side of his face to the cracked glass faceplate and smiled, listening to the inner workings of the machine as it revved up and came to life. The round tubes of white glass arching from bottom to top,
over the glass window, and back down to the floor again lit up and began to cycle through the color pallet. He looked in at the playlists and began to turn the dials to flip through the pages inside.
“He might,” she said.
“You seen your brother, Yusha?” Renshen asked her, torn away from his precious jukebox for long enough to squint at her. “I’m sure yah been to see him, out on the grass again with a black eye and a tooth missin’. Swear to God, he’s broken. He don’t even ‘member Becky, I’ll bet you the moon. I got her workin’, and he forgot about her.”
She blinked, brows raising. “You named the jukebox Becky?”
“Seemed a pretty name, I dunno,” Renshen said, shrugging. “Com'on, listen to some tunes with yer old dad. He ain't gettin' any younger.”
“Yeah, sure. I’ll listen to Becky with you, Dad.” She relented and joined him next to the jukebox. She watched him fiddle with the knobs and controls and saw the little arm grab a record and drop it into place. When the music started to play, she found herself smiling again. It was old rock’n’roll, like the kind Renshen would play in the Bella on long trips. He was bobbing his head to the beat, eyes on Kara as he tapped his foot. She laughed softly, hands on her hips. “Sounds great.”
“Hell yeah, it sounds great. I sure did a bang-up job,” Renshen stated.
“You sure did, pops.”
“It’s a good day then.”
“Oh, I guess I do have some bad news for you,” she said, suddenly remembering something. She feigned a big frown and clenched her jaw, hands in her pockets.
“Huh?”
She sighed. “They didn’t have any bacon at Pleasant Tree.”
“What!” He stomped his foot, his mood ruined by the news. He spoke over the sound of the music, his voice growing louder as he went on. “Oh, I’ma ‘bout to get on that radio and ream that damn pig huggin’ low down swindler a new one, you can count on that! He’s owed me bacon for three months now! They got twenty hogs; they can spare one! Greedy lil’ liar, son-of-a-gun.”
