by Lauren Groff
He has to race the silvery swim of his lost air to the surface. There, he gasps and chokes, tears starting to his eyes. Helle comes up, laughing. Her dreadlocks float around her head, weeds themselves.
You’re avoiding me, Bit, she says, her mouth half underwater.
No, he says but can’t look her full in the face. He isn’t avoiding her; he just can’t see the old Helle under the new gloss and glamour of the Outside in her.
She says, no longer laughing, Look at me. It’s just me, Bit.
The other girls are swimming toward them, their heads like a flock of pale ducks over the water. Before they reach Helle, he does look at her. For this one moment, he sees the old Helle, that vulnerable girl more lost, more watchful than even he had been.
At last, the kidlets have turned blue and fled, and only the toughest remain, twelve adolescents—Ados—every one of them Old Arcadia. His best friends shiver in the drizzle next to Bit. Ike, lanky and shining with the same white light as his sister; Cole and Dyllie, with Sweetie’s beautiful face, in shades of pink and brown. They sit together, feigning ease, listening to Helle, who was never known for grand storytelling, fill them in about the Outside: Everyone’s fat and smells like chemicals. They wear stupid buttons all over their jackets and all they talk about is the World’s Fair.
All at once, it seems, his friends are straining to listen. Then he hears, too, and knows that he has been hearing the beat for some time, under the birds, under the wind, under the leaves moving in the trees. Helicopters. Bursting over the treetops, glossy black and taloned, flying low. Bit can see the pilots in earmuffs and the grim men in the doors holding machine guns.
The wind from the blades tosses water in their eyes, sends rocks against their skin. The choppers pass, and the Pond sloshes against the shore. Bit leaps up and races his friends toward Arcadia House, easily outstripping the rest over the mud paths worn into the lawn, though Cole, too, is fast. People clump in the doorways of the Soy Dairy, the Bakery, the Eatery; heads mushroom from the windows and shyly withdraw. A herd of Trippies scatters, leaving their Minders behind. People pour around the Terraces, massing in the circular drive, and Bit hurtles through the sunburnt bodies, pitchforks and shovels, mudded feet and bodily stink and screaming kidlets, the babies wailing from their slings, practically the whole crowded nine hundred Arcadians having left their scattered pursuits to gather here. Bit scans, panicking, for Hannah. When he finds her—hair in twinned crowns around her head, plumper now because of the pills, frowning up at the sky—he is washed with relief. Her apron is smeared with soy; he takes her hand and puts himself between her and the machines. But she is shouting Abe in his ear, and here it is again, the sharp stone in Bit, his guilt; Abe always an afterthought. Bit scans until he sees his father in his wheelchair, on the Arcadia House porch. The thin pale legs in the shorts, the streaky beard. Abe is trapped up on the rain-slick hill. Without Hannah, he would have stayed there. Bit sprints up the Terraces. His father pats his shoulder, says, Good boy, steer me down.
Bit can barely hang on to the wheelchair as they slide on the thin path beside the stairs, his puny hundred pounds no match for Abe’s mass and acceleration, chill mud splattering over Bit’s bare chest and face.
The helicopters vanish over the forest to the north, though they are still loud. Above the noise, Handy is roaring. He has gone half bald since the troubles began and hides his vaster forehead behind a folded bandanna. He stands like an orator on the terrace to address them.
. . . they’re looking for a reason to shut us down, he’s shouting, and we’re so stupid we’re giving it to them. Old bastard Reagan and his war on drugs are fucking here, guys. So what we’re going to do is, we’re going to go pull up that fucking weed and burn it. Now, now, now.
Peaceful Handy, Buddha Handy, furious, his face purple. The charge to the air is electric. Bit finds that he has stepped behind his father’s chair.
But Abe’s shoulder is knotted and shaking under Bit’s hand. His voice rises, and as it does, the world seems to constrict. Fuck, Handy, no consensus? he shouts. No Council of Nine? Just handing out the diktats, yeah?
Handy searches out Abe, and when he finds him, he takes off his glasses and carefully polishes them on the hem of his teeshirt. His movements are slow and deliberate, and in the space he opens with his silence, people begin to murmur, to call to one another. But when Handy puts his glasses on again, it is as if he has miraculously peeled the anger from his skin. His body has softened, his hands have unclenched, his face spreads out in its old magnetic smile, only a gray eyetooth these days to mar it. The change in the bodies around Bit is swift. He can feel the crowd relaxing, the energy unknotting, shifting out toward Handy.
Fine, old buddy, Handy says in his concert-loud voice. You’re right. Soon as the Council of Nine was voted in, I got left to do the more spiritual guiding. But, listen, I got a personal stake in all this. When Titus’s dad sold us this place for a buck, it was my name they put on the deed. Martin “Handy” Friis, that gorgeous Norwegian surname Astrid gave me when we were hitched. Deed’s in the Library, go look it up. So, you know, they’re not going to arrest all nine hundred beatniks, they’ll be arresting me. And, if you’ll remember, I’ve already done time for you all.
He looks from one face to the next. When his glance falls on Abe again, measuring how his words are going over, Bit feels hollow with collective guilt. Five years earlier, the Feds had found a cottage industry of shrooms out of Arcadia and arrested Handy. It was only Harold with his Harvard Law degree who had gotten Handy out.
Let me tell you, Handy says. Even seven months in the hooch is no cakewalk. And so, I respectfully beg of you, beautiful Free People, to do me a solid and go out with me into the woods, and pull up all the hemp that we got growing out there, though it may hurt your souls to see all that good stuff go to waste. Consider it a way to save your old spiritual teacher a shiv in the ribs.
He has won them all over again. It is always so easy for Handy; there is a switch inside him that he can flick on and off. Arcadia laughs. Loudest of all are the Newbies, thrilled to get a glimpse of the legendary Handy, so rarely seen these days. Surrounding him are the old stalwarts, still in love with him, and, closer still, his family. Lila and Hiero chuckle beside Fiona, a woman now, her head against Handy’s legs. Ike is puffed with pride. Leif, alien-blank, stands with the Circenses Singers, Erik is away at college. Only Helle sits gravely on the stone terrace wall, looking up at her father, her face still, her long pale mouth a line.
Wrapped again in Arcadia’s adoration, Handy begins to organize the pull and burn.
Abe spins a wheel to face Bit and Hannah. In a tight voice he says, Stone Family meeting. Now.
In Abe and Hannah’s room on the first floor of Arcadia House, Hannah shuts the window. The Tutorials have resumed in the courtyard: little Peter is repeating something in Hebrew to his tutor, Theo, five feet away. Theo seems harmless, but it is hard to know these days who is on whose side. In the swelter of the close, dim room, the stink of Arcadia House rises to them: sweat, onion, jizz, cheap incense.
Oh, dear, Hannah says. Eau de three hundred bodies.
Bit laughs, but Abe says, We don’t have time for jokes. Hannah raises an eyebrow and opens an orange from the nightstand, a treat saved from dinner a few days ago. The spritz from the skin is immediate relief.
What’s going on? Bit says. He bites a hangnail, calming with the taste of blood.
His parents look at him. Handsome Abe, Hannah golden with her early tan. We should keep him out of it, Abe, she says. He’s still a kid, he just turned fourteen last week. She takes Bit’s hand from his mouth, kisses it, and holds it to keep him from chewing. Her fingers have acid from the orange still on them, and he is glad for the sting.
We need him, Hannah, Abe says. And it’s not as if I haven’t smelled it already on his breath.
Hannah sighs and her hand tightens around Bit’s, and it is all he can do to prevent himself from crawling into her lap.
Please, Bit says, just tell me.
Abe says, Sorry to have to bring you into all of this, but Handy’s minions are out there destroying our next year of groceries. Back in the winter, some of us in the Biz Unit decided to invest in some high-grade marijuana seeds, ready for Cockaigne Day in July. Arcadians who left have agreed to sell to the Outside for us. The Great Pot Plot, we call it.
Bit says nothing, but his disappointment in his parents wings itself, a trapped bird, around the room.
Listen, Hannah says. We know it’s wrong.
Well, Abe says. Debatable. It’s just not legal.
We had to weigh evils, Hannah says. We would never do it if we weren’t so poor. We owe for seed for two years. And there are all the new fucking projects that Handy greenlighted, Astrid’s Midwifery School down at the satellite in Tennessee, the stupid Circenses tour. I mean, Jesus, Handy, put your own house in order first. We owe too much. We’ll starve if we don’t do this, she says, and Hannah’s callused hands clutch the sheet she’s sitting on.
Bit frowns. What about the Motor Pool? The ceramics? What about Monkeypower? All the food we produce? There has to be some other way.
None of those make nearly enough, Hannah says. Plus with the Trippies and the Hens and all those fucking runaways, we have too many mouths to feed. We had no choice. I’d rather risk jail time than let our babies starve.
Amen to that, Abe says, and there is a look between his parents that makes Bit thrill with embarrassment. Sex is a tornado that suddenly smashed him a year ago. It is a whistle too high for human ears, and he awoke one morning a dog. He finds it everywhere, especially where it dismays him: in the bulging, dripping cheesecloths in the Soy Dairy, enormous mammaries; in the slide of a pitchfork through compost like the half-nasty mechanism of intercourse. It is here, in his father’s flush as he looks at Hannah, her own face lit up with certainty.
We need you right now, Little Bit, Abe says. Your mom and I decided to keep the biggest crop a secret from Titus and Saucy Sally and Hank and Horse. For exactly what happened today.
Even fucking Titus, Hannah says bitterly, and Bit remembers, just after the helicopters, Titus’s face cracking open in its old hopeful beam as he watched Handy speaking.
But, Bit says, I’m just a kid.
You’re a kid who can run, Abe says. Bit tries not to look at his father’s legs and fails; the familiar guilt, sickly, greasy, is heaped on guilt. But Abe is still speaking: . . . get there first and do anything to keep them from finding the plot. Pretend to be coming back from there, saying that you looked and there was nothing. Make a wild moose call or something. Smack them over the head with a rock.
No violence, Hannah says.
There is a shuffling in the hallway, and they stop to listen until whoever it is moves on. Honey, Bit, I can’t force you to do anything you’re uncomfortable with, she whispers. If you say no, I’ll get out there as fast as I can, but I don’t know the secret paths through the woods like you. You’re so fast and quiet. But you have to know about the consequences of getting involved. We could go to jail or get shamed out of Arcadia if we’re caught. It’s your choice. We’ll always love you, no matter what you decide. We respect what your conscience tells you to do.
Her voice, though: the tightness in it. It just kills him. All right, he says.
Abe exhales. All right, he says. It’s the little island in the stream north of Verda’s. She knows all about the Pot Plot, she sympathizes. Go as fast as you can off the path, and when Hannah can hike out there, she’ll take over the watch from you. Ready?
Bit thinks, No.
He says, Ready.
Run, Abe says.
Bit runs. The smoke of the bonfire in the Sheep’s Meadow is already strong. They must have pulled up a patch already. He is beyond the tents that have spread in the past year into the woods, for the people who can’t find cots in the separate encampments; he is beyond the smell of the fields, the loos, the compost heaps. He can hear people crashing through the forest, clumsy ogres. Bit knows the deer paths. He goes, invisibly, beyond where they are. Past the noise, the old watchful silence of the woods presses in on him: he settles into his legs and lets the trees whip by. He startles a crane from a pool, sends the white tails of deer bounding over logs. Miles later he slows and sees the island turtling out of the stream. Only when he has waded through the hip-deep water and has come a few steps in does he see the plot, cleverly hidden on the eastern side of the trees. The helicopters, Hannah had known, would come from the navy base in the west or the army base to the south.
When Bit’s heart has stopped its pounding, he washes the dried mud from his chest and shoulders, finds a bucket tied to a tree, and makes himself useful, watering.
He hides again in a cold pit in the willows and looks back toward Arcadia. He sees nothing, hears nothing but the ordinary sounds of the woods settling after his disturbance. A contrail puffs fat overhead. A muskrat draws two slender lines in the water. After some time he swivels his head and looks toward Verda’s cottage sending up its thin stream of smoke.
He has known Verda forever, since he was six. Before he knew these miles of woods like his own small body, he would get lost on his wanders. He met the old woman one night when he was in a snowstorm and dark was falling fast. He had lost a red mitten, and he put both his hands in the remaining one and held it in front of him as if it were a lantern to light his way. But the forest was avid: it wanted, that night, to eat him. Through spindrift he had trudged, through black. At last, he had smelled salvation in woodsmoke and followed it to a stone cottage squatting at the edge of a field. He knocked and knocked. The door fell open to the witch he’d first seen in the dark woods the spring before, the strange dog at her side that Bit had thought was a tamed white doe. Bit had been too tired and too cold to feel fear, until his wet clothes were off and there was a blanket on him, smelling of sun and lavender. Then the witch leaned into her woodstove and the light caught and underlined her sharp nose, her wrinkles, her lank hair, and some spark of a story alit in his head and Bit began to scream. From the hearth, the white beastie watched him, panting in the heat. The witch let Bit scream until he lost his voice, and when he did, she handed him a bowl of soup. It was venison, the first meat he had ever eaten. It tasted like death. He threw it up. He found himself in a truck, and Titus came to the Gatehouse door, Saucy Sally and the baby in the lanternlight behind him. Titus began to cry with relief: Oh, Bit, you’re found, he said, gathering him up in his great heavy arms. We thought you were froze to death. Bit looked back into the night, and the witch put her thumb on his chin. Little Ridley, she said softly. Come back and see your Verda sometime; and she disappeared from the dream he’d thought he was in.
Now he tries to send Verda brainwaves to bring a handful of shortbread and a blanket, but she doesn’t hear or heed his silent calls. He tries not to think of what would happen to him in a jail-type situation. He is so small still; he looks far younger than he is. He has heard bad stories of juvenile hall, filtered up from the runaways, and his mind shies away from ideas of violence and nasty food and never seeing his parents again. In the sky blazes Venus, a calm blue, and Bit thinks of last year’s syzygy, the alignment of planets, how Ollie was so convinced of apocalypse that he spent March in the reinforced tunnel between Arcadia House and the Octagonal Barn. When the anxiety gets to Bit, he rolls a green leaf into a little cigarette and lights it with the matches all Old Arcadia kids keep in plastic bags in their pockets, with Swiss Army knives and some gorp. When he’s calmer, he laughs quietly to himself and startles a chipmunk into a tree.
In the shadows of the trees, it grows cold. Bit’s cutoff jeans have dried on his legs, and he has to clutch his limbs to his torso to keep from shivering. Dusk thickens. The forest breathes in a way he can’t hear when he is amid the clamor of Arcadia. On the path a few hundred yards away there is a rustling, the distinct sound of human steps, and he stands, a rock absurdly heavy in his fist. But it is Hannah. She’s wearing the s
ame ripped-sleeve flannel shirt and cutoff shorts as before but now has a knapsack on her back and her work boots on her feet, as if she were off for an innocent hike.
She presses a finger to her lips and wades across the stream. When she hugs Bit, she must feel how cold his skin is, and she takes off her shirt, baring her bra to the air. She drapes the shirt on him. It holds the warmth of her body in the weave, her bready smell. You’re the best, Little Bit, she whispers. Lila and Hiero weren’t too far away from me on the path, so be careful.
He carries the weight of her hug, a ghost of Hannah, on the run back home. He comes out into the Sheep’s Meadow in the pale twilight just as the gong begins to ring, calling the first shift of Arcadians, the most fragile, the Hens and Trippies and kidlets, to their supper.
Bit wakes, pulsing with dread. From his top bunk, Cole’s hand reaches out and pats him on the chest. Just sheep, Bit’s friend mutters, you’re okay.
Baa baa, murmurs Ike, still asleep in his own bunk.
Bit concentrates on ujjayi breath to calm himself, imagining the windmill in the back of his throat. The same nightmare has circled in Bit since he was little and Handy put actual sheep in the Sheep’s Meadow: not to exploit, he explained, they’re not pets and they won’t be eaten, but for their wool, which they gladly gave and which the Arcadians could sell. The kidlets loved the sheep; the women dreamed of woolen sweaters, lanolin on their chapped hands. Then Tarzan, who appointed himself shepherd, came down dizzy, with great open sores, and Astrid came speeding back from the hospital in Syracuse where the AmbUnit had rushed him, her hair wild, her face frantic. For hours, Abe and Handy and the midwives and Titus, the people who wore power in Arcadia then, conferred. That night, Bit woke to an unfamiliar stink. He crept out of the Children’s Dormitory to follow the acrid smoke. He found a grim group of three in the meadow around a bonfire. When he came closer the fire turned gruesome, the bodies of the sheep in a ziggurat within the flames. Bit watched a lamb’s eyeballs explode. He sat in the darkness, struck frozen until Astrid, who stood apart from Hank and Horse, brought a hand up to push her hair from her face, and her arms were blackened to the elbows with blood.
