by Layla Wolfe
Gunther was more pragmatic. “Did you know she had cancer when you got engaged to her?”
I nodded tersely. “Yeah. We thought the, ah, treatment would iron everything out.”
Eloise coached me. “The radiation. The chemo.”
“Yeah,” I admitted. I had rarely discussed Jessica with anyone. I’d thought she would recover, and we could maintain something of a life and family near Philadelphia. She went downhill and died fairly suddenly. I was in constant contact with her parents, her brother, but I was in a combat zone and it wasn’t easy to extract.
Since getting sober, I had really tried not to think about it. My old reaction to any upswelling of emotion would’ve been to grab a drink. Or I would’ve already had one in my hand. Since I did not want to overreach and crash because I’d tried to do too much in recovery, I accepted some weed that Slappy had left at my condo. It was mild enough, I reasoned. Helped blur bad memories, but you weren’t addicted. And of course, I was still taking handfuls of ibuprofen. At least it’s not an opiate.
I was talking to my brothers in arms and I should be able to trust them. “We were taking down al-Masri near Tikrit.”
Gunther nodded. “I remember that. Al-Masri was wearing a suicide vest.”
“Right. Not easy to just abandon everyone and fly back home.” If that sounded like a weak-ass excuse, it was. Even back then, I was overly driven. Wracked with guilt at not being by Jessica’s side at the end, I whipped myself even harder. “It would’ve been a lousy life for a wife. Basically raising kids on her own.”
“You could’ve gotten a civilian assignment,” Gunther said. “Lots of guys get stationed in Frankfurt to be with their wives.”
“But she died,” Eloise pointed out.
I was glad when my phone on the nightstand rang. I picked it up just to avoid responding to Gunther’s truth. I could’ve requested a transfer to somewhere like Frankfurt, a giant party except with wives and kids.
“Slappy!” I cried, turning to the wall. Gunther and Eloise continued to talk—about me, no doubt—in low tones. “What’s shaking, my man?”
Slappy gasped for breath. I couldn’t tell if he was sobbing, in a panic, or running from something. “Cap’n! I just can’t do this anymore. I’m going AWOL!”
“What?” I shouted, scaring silent the gossipers behind me. I’d never heard Slappy speak like that, that I could remember. He always just said fuck the army, and that was the extent of it. Because we agreed on that issue, we stayed friends. But I could not let him throw away his career, his reputation. His country that doesn’t give a fuck, I reminded myself. And having a broken arm probably didn’t lighten his mood. “No, Slappy, no! Where are you?”
“I’m at the High Dive in Fort Carson. I’m telling you, man, I’m never going back!” The High Dive was our watering hole.
“Who’s with you?”
“Tun Tin and ‘Ears’ Watts, but I’m telling you, Cap’n, they can’t talk me out of it. I got a room next door and I’m not returning to base.”
“You’ve got only, what? Three months left of your tour? You can get an Honorable that way, Slappy! Can’t you just hang in there for six more months? Just use fucking birth control so that doesn’t happen to Chloe again under their watch.”
“No, man, no! I can’t hang in there for six fucking months, Town! I’m just a scarred blackened shell of my former self, and they want me to go to Fort Benning and train those POGs, and I can’t! I just can’t.” Here he devolved into that hollow, tearless kind of sobbing, like a collapsed accordion. POG meant Person other than Grunt, and these giddy newbies were sometimes the worst to train, all full of themselves, lacking caution.
“Chloe’s gonna join me here, she’ll get a moving company set up, and we’re going back to Williamsburg. We’re just gonna vanish, poof, like that. Cap’n, what they did to us is unconscionable. Unconscionable.”
I agreed, of course. Forcing a woman to give birth to a deformed child out of some warped idea of pro-life, that was unconscionable. Knowing ahead of time what would happen, Slappy hadn’t even touched the child. He couldn’t bring himself to pick her up. It was like watching a seagull with a broken wing pathetically dying over days, weeks.
In the end, I talked Slappy down off his cliff—I hoped. Like with Jessica, I could not tear myself away from my present situation to drive to Fort Carson and shake some sense into Slappy. The incident reminded me how fragile we all are, how close to the breaking point. It jolted my elation over bonding with Linus. Linus wasn’t a cure-all pill, but I had to rely on the faith I did have in him.
I was discovering that my joy lay in serving and loving others. I was doing a service to my brothers in arms by letting them blow off steam at my condo. I’d developed deep, lasting bonds with them, as I would with Linus. I had to hope the happiness I felt with Linus wasn’t just oxytocin but a sign of something higher than me.
Unlike my zealous parents, I couldn’t pretend to have a faith that didn’t exist. But I had to stay true to the allegiance I did have to those around me.
Chapter Five
Heaven
People were screaming.
A woman screamed at a man.
A woman screamed at a man?
This was such an unusual thing to hear, I sat bolt upright. I regretted it, because my back door throbbed something fierce. A slicing pain seared my gash. I still wore the nurse’s costume, but it was in disarray. I slid my hand between my legs and fingered slickness all over. Familiar with this, I knew some man had taken me while I was blacked out.
And where in heaven was I? At that point, I didn’t know Byron had lifted me out of the road. I remembered weaving, wobbling, the solid white line between my feet. Now I was in a darkened room, only able to make out some implements . . . a mop, a broom, a weed whacker.
I was in a tool shed?
“You don’t just fucking take a drive to Dildoland and come back with a whore!” bellowed some woman.
“I can do whatever I want!” shouted some man, who I later identified as Byron Riddlesberger. “You have no say over what men in this club do!”
A new woman shrieked. “We have say if we withhold sex and cooking from you, don’t we? You’re not gonna handcuff us to the stove.”
“Oh yeah, Orchid?” Byron shot back. “We’ll see about that, with your attitude!”
At the time, I assumed I was in some other polyg community. Had I somehow made it to Avalanche? I didn’t recognize any of the voices, and Byron had called it a “club.” I tried to stand, grabbing onto a broom handle for support, and nearly collapsed again when a stabbing pain shot up my leg. This in turn reminded me of my poor shoulder, wrenched in some type of “nursing” accident.
The original woman kept screaming. “You’re not stopping me from opening that damned closet! I know you’ve got some poor chick in there—”
“Kelsey, no!” bellowed Byron. There was some shuffling and groaning from the other side of the door, so I helped Kelsey out. I found the doorknob and turned it.
Byron nearly closed the door again when he shoved Kelsey against it. I staggered my way out, though, with the help of the second woman, Orchid. I was now unfettered in a free world—or so I thought. I clung to Orchid out of habit, assuming her to be the new Brighten of my new town.
“Let…me…go!” growled Kelsey, shoving back hard against the biker.
For that’s what Byron was, a member of a biker gang. I could tell by his black leather vest, a cut they called it. The top rocker of his three-piece back patch told me his club was called The Friends of Distinction, defined by the profile of a cigar store Indian. The bottom rocker told me we were currently in Flagstaff, Arizona. I later found out the 1% diamond patch meant they were the one percent of motorcyclists who did not abide by laws, making them outlaws.
I knew my brother Arkie had joined a gang in Arizona, and that Flagstaff was in Arizona, so I cried out, “Do you know Arkie?”
That seemed to shut everyone up. Orchid released me, holding me at
arm’s length. She was a fine woman with pencil-straight platinum hair and an enviable pointed nose. The only item that would mark her as a club whore was her dog collar. I was used to that sort of marking, so I held onto her forearms.
“Who’s Arkie?”
Byron butted in then. “That’s her brother,” he shouted, tearing my hand from Orchid’s arm and gripping me tight. “Right?”
“Right. Arkie Larimore.”
“I know him. He’s a hang-around here in Flag. That’s why I was keeping you safeguarded in that room until we found him.” Okay, if that’s what he wanted to call it, “safeguarded.”
Orchid said, “Yeah, but . . . are you a nurse? Did you take too many of your own drugs?”
“I told you,” bellowed Byron, “I picked her up from the highway where she was passed out, after I delivered that puppy. She’s from that whacked-out polyg community in the mountains up there.”
Byron was a freaky character. His eyes were puffy slits, his ratty hair combed over his ears. His moustache was thin as the soup made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had starved to death—as Brighten used to say about me when I didn’t eat.
I dared to ask, “You guys aren’t polyg?”
All three of them looked shocked, probably for different reasons. They stumbled over each other to protest my labeling them.
Byron overrode the women to blurt, “Hell no! Kelsey here’s my property. This other bitch is just a club whore.”
Kelsey had to admit, “Yeah. He’s my man.”
Orchid stuck her thumbs in her back jeans pockets and declared, “Hell yeah. I’d rather be a sweetbutt than married to this poor excuse for a cesspool. I put out for guys who treat women with respect, not lock them in a fucking closet and rape them.”
I was surprised she said “rape” aloud. In Cornucopia we all danced around the facts. We said Orson had “used” us when the facts were, he’d drugged us and anally raped us with objects more suited for chicken farming or mining
Byron sliced his arm through the air. “Ain’t no raping of any kind gone on anywhere.”
Kelsey took her husband’s side. “Yeah, Orchid. Where’d you get this idea from, anyway? Byron’s been with me since he got back from Utah.”
Orchid pointed at the ground. “With a fucking comatose nurse in his sidecar.”
All heck broke loose then.
“He didn’t drug her!” yelled Kelsey. She was a sassy horse-riding woman with a Texas twang.
“She was like that when I found her!”
“I’m not really a nurse,” I tried to protest.
Orchid shouted, “Why don’t we ask her if she was raped. She’d remember!”
The rumble went silent, like someone hitting “pause” on a party scene. Everyone stared at me, enormous expectations coloring their faces.
“I, ah,” I said. I smoothed down the nurse’s skirt, which by now was covered in highway filth and footprints. “When I just now woke up, I do believe there was some, ah, substance on my, ah, gash. Yes, there was. Is.”
Kelsey just hauled her leather vest off and nailed her slimy husband with an open-handed slap. It resounded up and down the dark hallway. In turn, Byron grabbed both her wrists and slammed her against the wall. I began to shrink toward a light at the end of the enclosure that seemed to promise freedom. Town means freedom kept repeating in my head like an earworm.
“Come on,” said Orchid, catching my hand in hers.
She didn’t need to convince me, and we both headed toward the light.
The last thing I saw was my savior Byron cracking his wife across the face, and not with an open hand but his fist.
I was confused. This man had most probably saved my life when I had a fit in the middle of a highway. Now it appeared he’d used me and was beating up his wife for it.
As it turned out, I’d been in the back hallway of a bar. Front windows lit up the interior of polished wood and pool tables. A neon sign on the wall behind the bar said “It’s 5:00 somewhere.” A metal sign like a license plate said “Alcohol. Because no great story ever started when someone ate a salad.” A bartender with a cut patch that declared he was a “PROSPECT” wiped glasses clean.
I asked him, “Do you know Arkie?”
He just screwed up his face at me and turned his back.
“Do you know Arkie?” I asked Orchid.
She pulled me to take a barstool next to her and snapped her fingers at the prospect. “Hey! You! Dipshit motherfucker! Two Coors, and I don’t want to tell you again!”
I was shocked at the new set of rules that governed Flagstaff. The Prospect lifted his lip into a sneer, but he poured us two cold ones. I gratefully gulped mine. I did not want to come out of the coma that had delivered me from Orson Ream. But had it deposited me into a realm that was just as heinous?
“I’ve never heard of an Arkie,” said Orchid, foam on her upper lip.
“Byron claims he’s part of your . . . club.”
She shrugged, gulping her beer almost as fast as me. “He could be around. I don’t know everyone’s name. They use street names. How long ago do you think he joined?”
“Well, I heard about it when I went into the mountains. So, eight years.”
“Eight years?” Orchid shrieked. “I’m sure I would’ve heard of him by now. You were up in that fundy polyg community? Were you married to anyone?”
“Yes,” I said, emotion draining from my voice. “I was his servant. He made me wear this costume.”
Orchid’s upper lip recoiled. “Eyew. So, like, just for fun?”
“His fun.”
“Well, let’s get you cleaned up. Take a shower, everything. I have a room upstairs.”
We took two fresh beers with us.
Orchid yammered, “This is a pretty cool club, if you don’t take into account Byron and a couple of others who don’t respect women. I carry pepper spray in my bra in case one of those jagovs gets too handsy with me. Looks like you’re about my size. I can find a spare pair of jeans for you.”
Jeans! I hadn’t worn jeans since high school. I was beginning to think I might be able to hang there until I found Arkie. Maybe street names explained it. Maybe no one knew him as Arkie.
The luxurious hot shower couldn’t last long enough for me. It was a shared bathroom with plenty of razors, different shampoos, and handwashed bras hanging from towel racks. Orchid said sweetbutts were supposed to have their own private floor in this Victorian building, but patch holders often violated that trust. In all, it sounded a lot like Cornucopia, difference being that women could talk back to men. When the hot water started running out, I stood naked before the sink and gulped the rest of the beer.
I could live like this.
Lights like a pinball machine still flashed in my skull, remnants of the fit, I supposed. A few thousand new muscles ached, and I observed the bloom of purple-yellow bruising on my shoulder. But still. It could be worse. Orson could never find me there. I had no cellphone. Afton had no doubt gone blathering she’d seen me by the side of the highway but there was no way in heck anyone would discern I’d been picked up by a biker from Flagstaff. I combed my hair slowly, almost taking pleasure in it, before rolling it into a bun and piercing it with a hairpin.
Orchid brought me fresh clothes that mostly fit. I had underwear, heavenly undies! The pants were a bit like I was waiting for a flood, and my rack seemed bigger than hers because the buttons on the bodice of the shirt were sort of stretched. But she loaned me a sports bra that reined it all in fairly well, and when I was done, I felt like a 1960s housewife.
Orchid sat on a mattress across from me, smoking a marijuana pipe. She offered me some, but I turned it down. Marijuana had never helped me forget where or who I was. Instead, I accepted some whiskey in a coffee mug.
“They let you drink in that joint?” she croaked, holding in the smoke.
“Oh, sure,” I said happily, as though already recalling a sunny childhood. “It’s one of the original nineteenth century t
enets they reinstated. Cornucopia is straight Brighamite all the way. Men are required to have at least three wives to become exalted, to live as gods in the afterlife.”
Orchid made a raspberry. “Typical. How convenient for them.”
“Yes, I didn’t grow up there. I was sent there when I was eighteen. It’s hard for outsiders to grasp the justifications and, well . . . “
“Excuses?”
I smiled. “Yes, excuses they make for various things.”
“So you’re a Morbot.”
I’d heard that term before. “Yes,” I admitted, “I guess you could say that. I do what my husband tells me. I do postmortems on chickens. I’m—I was—a model farm wife, a one-woman production line. I swore his mother had been terrified by a candy box when with child, because he wanted me to wear these wide-brimmed straw hats covered with blue flowers. Like a real Navajo, I learned to clean and filet fish while he observed. I was his property, like Kelsey just said about Byron. I did what he told me.”
Orchid exhaled a thin stream of smoke. “So, you never had a regular job?”
“Not outside the walls, no. Do you?”
“Shit yeah I do. I’m a waitress at a nice Italian joint about ten blocks from here. I have to get dressed up, wear a uniform.”
That sounded fun to me. “I wanted to become a lawyer. But they choose your path for you, even the men. Well, not many men make it there to adulthood. They drop them off in the desert to wander, because we don’t need more men. Competition, you know.”
The more I told Orchid, the stranger my life of the past decade sounded.
She squinted at her pipe’s bowl. “Once you find your brother, you gonna become a lawyer?”
I had to scoff at that. “Well. If he’s a member of a biker gang I doubt he’s very rich. I’ll probably have to work, like you.”
“And go to school. And don’t call it a biker gang. It’s a club. A one percent club.”
“One percent club,” I echoed. “Are they all as . . . unkind as Byron?”
Orchid laughed now. “Unkind? That’s the worst thing you can think to say about that cretin? Let’s put it this way. He runs a puppy mill.”
