How We Play the Game in Salt Lake and Other Stories

by M. Shayne Bell

  Eloise staggered out from a room at the end of the hall, holding the back of her right wrist. Two company boys shoved her through a door and out of the building. The company doctor met us in the room Eloise had been in. He’d flown down from the station. He hardly ever flew down. “This won’t take long,” he said. “It’s for your safety, sons.”

  He called everybody “son” though he looked so small and scrawny he probably couldn’t father anything.

  “What’s for our safety?” Sam asked.

  “These implants — locators,” he said, holding one up. “Help us find you if you get lost in the pântano.”

  He was going to implant a locator on the back of our wrists.

  “They’re really quite simple,” he went on. “The bottom of each locator is coated with a mild acid that quickly destroys the underlying skin, allowing the locator to replace it. The surrounding skin eventually bonds to the edges of the locator, making it a permanent, if shiny, part of your wrists — quite a comfort, I’m sure, when you’ll be … away from here.”

  Sam and I stared at him.

  “These locators run on minute amounts of power drawn from the natural electrical impulses in your bodies, so they quit functioning if you’re killed or if they’re removed.”

  A warning: don’t cut them off. They’d have a fix on your last location and come looking. The doctor stepped up to a chair. “If one of you’d please sit here and let me disinfect your wrist, we’ll get started.”

  Neither of us moved. Two company boys grabbed my arms and dragged me toward the chair. “Scared of a little pain, Jake?” one sneered. “Don’t worry. We’ll hold you like your mommy used to when the doctor’d give you shots in the ass.”

  “Freeze you,” I said. I broke away, slammed my fist on the guy’s nose, and heard it snap. He fell into the doctor, and they both fell in the chair. Sam kicked the table and knocked down the implanter, scattering locators all across the floor. The other company boys ran in. I knocked one down, but two grabbed my arms and shoved me up against the wall. The guy I’d hit on the nose, his face bloody, kicked me twice in the stomach. Someone hit the back of my head with his club, and I fell to the floor. I couldn’t get up. I started smashing locators with my fist, but I felt a sting in my leg and the room went black.

  I came to, covered with agulhas, lying in mud in the circle of light in front of the company house. On the back of my right wrist, bloody, was a locator. It felt tight in the muscle when I moved my hand. I tried to sit up but then dropped back, dizzy from the drug they’d put me out with.

  “Hey, one of them’s awake,” somebody yelled from back by the company house. I heard steps splashing through the water toward me. I turned to see who was coming, but all I could see were his legs. He kicked Sam in the ribs. Sam rolled over next to me, sprawled an arm across my chest. A company boy crouched down, unbuttoned Sam’s shirt pocket, and pulled out our receipt. “This will cover half the cost of what you two pulled in there,” he said.

  He stood up. “Get out here! These two are waking up.”

  I heard guys running through the water. I tried to sit up, but I couldn’t. I kept blinking, trying to see. Two guys pulled me to my feet, and two others pulled up Sam. They dragged us down the street and into the correction field south of the garbage dump.

  “Put ’em in here.”

  They tore off our shirts and shoes and made us crouch down into narrow metal boxes and clamped our wrists above our heads and our ankles to the floor. Some guy stood to one side and recited legal stuff at us — about how the company was empowered and obligated to keep law and order, about how we’d known this when we’d signed contracts with the company, and how we’d agreed to abide by its rules and regulations and accept its punishments.

  “Let me out!” Sam yelled.

  They were making examples of us: look what happened to Sam and Jake when they tried to get out without a locator. Better get the locators on your wrists. What’s acid eating a little of your skin compared to this?

  I heard the doctor talking: “Hearts are OK — I checked them when they were out. No danger with these two.”

  “Son of a bitch!” I yelled. “You castrated, excised, son of a —”

  They slammed down the box lids and turned on water.

  “Let me out!” Sam yelled.

  We had no light in the boxes. They filled the boxes with so much water I had to tip my head back to keep my nose out. The doctor lifted up the lids and looked at us, then dropped them back down. He and the company boys stood around the boxes, talking.

  “There’s something alive in here!” Sam yelled.

  A company boy laughed.

  “Get it out!”

  I heard Sam thrashing around. Something settled onto my shorts and started crawling up my stomach. Its eight, feathery legs tickled across my skin. I tried to hold myself very still. Whatever was on me had stopped moving and clung to the hair on my chest. After a while, it crawled onto my neck and up under my chin, just at the edge of the water. I couldn’t stand it. I shook it off, and it settled back down onto my stomach and bit me. I could feel it sucking blood through the skin. I thrashed around in the water and tried to shake it off, but I couldn’t. “It bit me!” I yelled. “Get it off.”

  “2:25,” the doctor said. “Write that down.”

  He lifted up the lid. “Just got to get a blood sample,” he said. He drew blood out of my neck. He took blood from Sam after he got bit. “Nothing to worry about, boys,” he said. “You’re just helping me with a little research. Back in an hour to check your blood.”All legal, according to our contracts: criminals could be used in nonlethal scientific experiments. The doctor dropped down the lids, and we heard him and the company boys walk away.

  The doctor checked our blood at three hourly intervals, then drained out the water. He left the lids open, and in the waning red moonlight I could see the bloodsucker. Its head was buried in my skin. The eight spindly arms around its head clung to my belly, and its bloated body had flopped down against my stomach. The doctor looked in at me, then soaked a piece of cotton in alcohol and touched that to the back end of the bloodsucker. The bloodsucker pulled out its head, fast, and the doctor tore it off me, threw it in the mud, and treated the bite. Then he got the bloodsucker off Sam and took care of him. He closed the lids and left us shivering in the wet boxes.

  The help found us sometime before dawn. I heard them chittering. “Lift up the lids,” I said.

  “Jake!” one of them said. “Jake!”

  The lids were locked down. “Wait for us by the house,” I told them. But I didn’t know if they’d wait for us, and we needed them. “Eat the nicoji we left in the freeze-shack,” I told them. “It’s yours.”

  We wouldn’t have frozen it. The company paid only a third of the normal price for packages that came in after the ship had gone — barely enough to cover the cost of plastic wrapping and liquid nitrogen. They claimed it wasn’t fresh. The help ran off.

  It rained most of the day, so it never got too hot in the boxes. The company boys pulled us out that night, after twenty-four hours. Sam and I couldn’t walk. They dropped us in the mud. A company boy threw our gloves, shirts, and shoes in the water beside us and stomped off, splashing water in our faces. I grabbed our gloves and held them on my chest so they wouldn’t get wet inside. After a while I pulled Sam up. “Let’s go,” I said. But we didn’t go home. We staggered down the streets through red moonlight to Raimundo’s house. He’d told us the truth about there being a new company. American Nicoji didn’t put locators on us for our safety, to help us if we got lost. They wanted to keep track of us, keep us from defecting south to the new company.

  Raimundo was gone.

  We decided to sleep in our own house that night and head out in the morning. The help were waiting for us. They hadn’t been able to get the sacks of nicoji down from the hooks, so we still had nicoji to eat. I took down a sack and gave it to the help.

  “And we’ve got this to finish,” Sam
said, picking up the can of peanut butter I’d wrapped in a towel.

  But the towel was covered with ants.

  Sam dropped the towel on the floor. The can was thick with ants. Sam took out his pocketknife, scraped off the top layer of peanut butter where the ants were, and flicked the ants off the sides and bottom of the can. I brushed off the table. We sat and ate the peanut butter with our fingers.

  In the night, the help who had gotten his hand hurt crawled on top of my chest and patted my face till I woke up. “Yeah?” I whispered, trying not to wake Sam. The help held up his hand. “Being better,” it chittered.

  I knew it would be. The help had such fast metabolisms — they healed faster than anything I’d seen.

  “What you want me do nice you?” the help asked.

  “Let me sleep.”

  He patted my face. “What you want most? What you want most, Jake?”

  I closed my eyes. “To go home,” I said.

  He scampered down off my chest and hardly made a noise as he ran out across the straw sleeping mats Sam and I had woven.

  I lay there and thought of home. I remembered one day in particular, the day that started Sam and me toward this place. Sam and I had climbed into a truck with Loryn, my girlfriend, to eat lunch. We’d been running potato harvesters while Loryn drove one of the trucks we dumped the potatoes into. It was a cold day, and the sky was overcast and gray. It looked as if it might snow.

  We pulled off our gloves and hats and opened our sacks. We had the same things for lunch: roast beef sandwiches, potato chips, apples, hot chocolate. Loryn sat in the middle. “Hitachi Farms got their last spuds in at 11:00,” she said. She heard things like that in the pits when she dumped her potatoes.

  “Beat us again,” Sam said.

  “They beat everybody, again,” Loryn said. “CitiCorp and UIF don’t expect to get done till next week. They’re hoping for snow.”

  The potatoes wouldn’t freeze under a blanket of snow. They could still be dug.

  “We’ll finish today,” I said.

  We worked for Westinghouse Farms. In the spring, we’d tried to get on with Hitachi, but the Supreme Court had struck down Idaho’s intrastate labor laws and Hitachi had brought in cheap contract labor from California and didn’t hire local help. All the corporate farms were watching Hitachi’s profit margin. If it was good enough, every farm would switch to contract labor, and Sam and Loryn and I’d either be out of work or we’d have to sign five-year contracts with one of the agricultural labor pools and forget doing anything else. You couldn’t get ahead on contract labor. You’d have to sign up for another five-year stint, then another and another till you died. So every Idaho farmhand worked hard, trying to make our farms beat Hitachi.

  From where Loryn had parked the pickup, we could look down over the dry farms to Alma, the county seat, built on bluffs above the Snake River. The clouds above the city had broken, and Alma looked blessed in the light, the white houses and churches shining, surrounded by dark fields. But the clouds closed up again, and it started to snow. The snowflakes melted on the windshield, the hood of the truck, and the ground. I downed the rest of my hot chocolate, shoved my half-eaten sandwich back in my sack, and looked at Sam. He had two more bites of his sandwich to go. Loryn just held hers. “Trouble,” she said.

  I looked up from pulling on my gloves. A Westinghouse pickup pulled to a stop in front of the truck. Sam and I climbed out. Loryn slid over behind the wheel. Floyd Johnson, one of the foremen, climbed out of the pickup. So did Doug Phillips, from Hitachi. Loryn climbed down from the cab when she saw Doug Phillips. The other drivers got out of their trucks and hurried over.

  “Hitachi bought us out,” Floyd said. No explanation. We’d had no hint Westinghouse was selling out.

  “I hope I can welcome you into Hitachi,” Phillips said. “We got Hitachi equipment and teams headed here to finish digging these spuds, but we could use all of you running the old Westinghouse equipment. Just go down to the pits first and sign the contracts we got waiting there.”

  “Five years?” I asked.

  “Standard.”

  I looked at Sam and Loryn.

  “We’ll take everybody but you, Sam,” Phillips said.

  Because Sam had sent away for a copy of Corporate Feudalism after the county library wouldn’t order it in. It was all I could figure. The book said we were no better off than feudal serfs who gradually — and probably without realizing it at first, if ever — gave up their freedoms in return for physical protection. Relatively recently, our ancestors had once again given up the freedom to control their lives — had let corporations in effect buy them — this time in return for economic well-being. Corporations now had the land and the wealth and hence the power, and most men and women had become merely productive or unproductive units tallied in offices continents away. We were serfs, again, serving a corporate aristocracy. The first serfs cast off their chains after a thousand years of wearing them. When would we find the courage and vision to cast off ours, the book asked. Sam had passed that book around to too many people, and when Westinghouse found out about it they’d nearly fired him. Now Hitachi wouldn’t take him.

  “You’ll all get paid for the work you’ve done here,” Floyd said.

  Loryn, Sam, and I drove back into Alma. Loryn and I wouldn’t sign Hitachi’s contracts, and none of us knew what we were going to do. We passed the Hitachi equipment and workers headed for our fields. One of their harvesters got caught in a rut in the muddy road and veered into our truck. We skidded off the road into a ditch. The cab filled with freezing water, and we couldn’t open the doors because the ditch banks were snug against the truck. I held my breath and tried to kick out the windshield, but it wouldn’t break though I kicked it, and kicked it, and kicked it — I sat up. It was still night. I’d gone to sleep and started dreaming. We hadn’t been forced into a ditch to drown. Sam and I ended up here. Loryn got work with a feed supply franchise, but it didn’t pay much and in her last letter she said she might be getting a new job. She hadn’t said what. I wondered what she was doing. My stomach felt tight like it always did when I thought about signing contracts with labor pools.

  Sam was gone. I heard someone in the freeze-shack, so I stumbled out there, rubbing my eyes, blinking in the light when I opened the door and walked in. Sam looked up and smiled. He was sitting on the floor, getting ready to drain the liquid nitrogen from the freezer. “Just in time,” he said. “I need help with this nozzle.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Packing up everything we’ve paid for.”

  I laughed. We hadn’t talked about going to the new company to check it out, but we hadn’t needed to. We were going, and we both knew it, hurricane season or not. We’d head south as far as we could without upsetting American Nicoji, then we’d cut out the locators and head for the new town. If we didn’t like what we saw, we could always come back, face the correction fields and fines.

  Sam had me hold a wrench clamped on the bolt below the nozzle so the hose on the nitrogen can wouldn’t turn while he screwed the nozzle in place. Once done, he pulled the drain lever, and we sat on the ground with the can between us, listening to the nitrogen hiss into it.

  “I dreamt it was snowing,” I said.

  “Here?”

  “Back home.”

  We looked at each other.

  “You scared?” I asked.

  “Just about hurricanes. I can take the rest.”

  Hurricanes scared us. One had slammed into the coast three hundred miles north of the company town two years ago, and we’d had waves forty feet high. The company had evacuated us up to the station. I did not like to think how high the waves would get under the storm itself.

  “We might have the help for company,” Sam said. The help always left us at the start of hurricane season. They’d go south with us as long as we went south, but if we turned north, east, or west it was good-bye for three months. We thought they probably went to the mesão to wait out
the storms. Now we’d find out if that was true.

  “I want to chance it,” Sam said.

  So did I. “Where are the help?” I asked. We needed them to carry stuff down to the raft.

  “I shooed them out before I turned on the light,” Sam said.

  I hurried outside and looked around. I couldn’t see any help, so I took down a sack of nicoji and scattered nicoji over the ground. The help immediately came out of the shadows. I let them eat, then Sam and I handed them our nets, fish trap, cooking gear, and clothes. They chittered off through the trees, happy to be going, happy we were going in the dark. And they’d be happy we were going south. They couldn’t carry the heavy stuff — the plastic and the cans of liquid nitrogen and the waterproof chest — so Sam and I ended up carrying those and the medkit and guns. I wrapped my picture of Loryn in a scrap of plastic and put it in my pocket. Sam got the mirror and shower curtain from the bathroom. We had to take everything with us when we left or expect it to be gone when we got back, so it didn’t look odd for us to pack up everything we owned. Anybody who watched us would think we were just heading out again to catch nicoji, but with luck Sam and I were saying good-bye to this place and that did not make me feel sad.

  I took a plastic bag we’d gotten in Vattani’s and walked behind the freeze-shack to pick a bagful of alma leaves. Alma was a pungent little plant Sam and I grew on the wood slats of the freeze-shack’s back wall. The leaves were an almost-black dark green, as long and wide as my fingers. We always took a bagful with us into the pântano and dried them on the raft. The Brazis had convinced us to do this: they thought the leaves were rich in iron and vitamins. We’d crumple the dry leaves over our beans and rice and give them a kind of nutty taste. I filled the bag with alma leaves and turned to see what was left of the orchard we’d tried to grow.

  The mango tree was still alive, waist-high now. The company had given us a mango once at Christmastime, and we’d planted the seed. The apples were all dead. They’d been our biggest failure. The help loved to chew on the saplings. We couldn’t stay up all night to make them stop, so we’d given up on apples. The two avocados were nearly as high as my head, so I started to think maybe Sam was right and we’d planted them too close together. But we were Idaho farm boys — what did we know about avocados? The Brazis couldn’t tell us how to plant them. They were city boys used to buying avocados in a feria, so Sam and I just stuck the seeds in the ground as far apart as looked right to us and hoped for the best. Now we might never know how they’d turn out.