"Go home, Dorothy," said Opal. "Your technicolor heart's a-bleeding. The Under-Ath don't want nothing from you but your wasted talent."
"Name's Quietly. I don't got much talent to begin with. If the Under-Ath wants it, I'll gladly trade to bring Imani home. I'm good at collecting syllabi."
"Everyone collects something in the Under-Ath," said Opal. "That's the problem, ain't it? Somebody's gotta do without."
"Amen to that," said Dill.
Opal flung out the ropes again. Dill flattened the handpainted cardstock sign. It said You Can't Arrest An Idea. He lifted up his handkerchief and took a chomp out of the corner with glittering sharp teeth that gleamed as he turned. There was something wrong with his neck. It extended too long and wobbled like it had a few extra vertebrae.
The dowel crunched between his molars.
Opal spun around. Pissed. "The hell you doing, Dill?"
Dill's neck stabilized before my eyes, settled down to its proper proportions, and his teeth looked normal and blunt. He let the handkerchief drop back into place. "Just grabbing a bite. Missed breakfast."
"Really? I'd call it theft of company property."
"It was just floating there, Opal. He'll never notice."
"He'll know, Dill."
"Not if nobody don't tell him, he won't," Dill hissed.
"He'll know."
"Then don't say nothing."
Opal dry-spat at him. "Won't need to."
I threaded both arms through my backpack frontways so the jar of Oconee River pressed against my belly. Behind me, Dill's chewing continued. "Where are y'all headed, anyway?"
"Just finishing up our shift, then back to the Foundry for our lunch break," said Dill. "You're welcome to come with. If you're looking for work, you can talk to Stephens."
"Who's Stephens?" I asked.
"The one man in the Under-Ath that pays in whatever currency you need," said Opal. "He's the reason any of us are still here." She tugged back sharply on the harnessed Has-Been. "Word of advice: mind your manners around him. He don't truck with rudeness or bad breeding." Another dagger-look at Dill. "And don't steal his product."
"I didn't!" said Dill.
"Tell him that."
I supposed it wouldn't do no harm to speak with him. I had no other leads. The raft drifted along, collecting more cans from the water. This time, I saw just how hard the Has-Been struggled to keep the smashed beer can in its teeth, writhing against the restraints. The plastic braided rope had rubbed its fur away in patches, leaving bruise-stained skin scaled in red scabs.
* * *
I'd worked up quite an appetite by the time we got to the Foundry, on account of having forgot to pack anything edible for my adventure. We docked the raft beside a thousand other cardboard rafts on a parking lot clear of litter.
Something about all of it made me sick down to the pit of my stomach: endless thirsty asphalt fingers stretching toward the Oconee, the floodlights sapping all the color from your face and arms like an inverse sun. The building squatted between the shell-shocked ghosts of failed coffee shops. Into that building all the foragers streamed, carrying their finds in shrink-wrapped bundles high on their backs like rice-paper sushi rolls. Like sandwiches at a picnic. Like leftover chocolate cake, because damn I was getting hungry, and even garbage looked good if I turned my head sideways and squinted a little.
"Y'all said something about a lunch break?" I asked Dill and Opal. We stowed all the cans into shrink-wrap cocoons on the dock while their poor harnessed Has-Been whimpered and whined and nosed the empty raft.
"After you talk with Stephens. We don't just hand out company lunch to anybody who asks," said Opal.
Together we turtled across asphalt that was somehow summer-hot even beneath that slate-gray sky. There was an old Foundry in the Over-Ath, an ancient factory-turned-restaurant, but nothing like this place. This Foundry demanded all your attention. It practically had its own gravity.
My stomach whined and needled at my gut. Opal looped behind the building to the employee entrance. "Remember: mind your manners. Stephens ain't a man to cross, not in the Under-Ath." She pointed me toward the Manager's Office.
Stephens was so small and skinny you could probably butter biscuits with him if you were short a knife. His suit swallowed him up to the neck, stopped by a slantwise bowtie just below his upturned white collar. He kept twitching and shuddering all over like his skin itched him, and when he moved, his joints squealed like a rusty icebox door. Damp tea bags hung dripping on a tiny clothesline behind his chair. He sipped iced tea from an empty tennis ball tube and read from a newspaper so old that Nixon headlined it.
I sucked on my dry teeth. That tea was the first liquid of any kind I'd seen in the Under-Ath. He glanced at me over cracked spectacles, and a smile poured across his lips like warm honey. Almost pleasant, except that smile squeaked so loud I clenched my jaw.
I thought of Imani—all brine-covered and alone, self-banished to the Under-Ath with no hope of redemption or return. I licked my cracked lips and extended a hand. "Sincere apologies for disturbing your meal," I said. "I've been told you're the man to see about an ocean."
His handshake clung wet and sticky like bubblegum on a hot sidewalk. I wiped my hands against my jeans. "Alexander H. Stephens, Foundry manager. And you are?"
"Quietly Jensen. I'm from the Over-Ath."
He waved me to an extra chair. I unslung my backpack. The Mason jar clinked against the Terrapin can. Stephens eyeballed my bag. "College student?"
"Recent grad," I corrected.
"Naturally. Looking for work? We're always hiring." He poured me some iced tea into a rusty green bean tin. It tasted thin and bitter and very salty and—suddenly spinning and spinning and sixty-two languages, most of them extinct. I let the tea trickle back into the tin unswallowed.
"Dunno," I said neutrally. "Mainly I'm looking for my roommate Imani. She passed this way recently, or so I'm told. She's in the habit of appearing as an ocean as of late."
He flashed a whole top row of ivory teeth probably made from elephants. "I recall the one. She's at the Georgia Theater. Working for me now. Perfectly fair and beneficial to all parties of course, but I'm afraid she's a private ocean now. Not open to the public."
"She'll see me. I'm her best friend." I said it with enough steel in my voice that Stephens set down his tea.
"Apologies. I haven't made myself clear." Big, creaky smile. "The Georgia Theater is private grounds. Off-limits." He took a long, slow sip of salty tea and rolled it around his mouth. "Unless..."
That asshole. I hated having to get along like this. Never could do passive-aggression, not like my mama could. "Unless what?"
"My employees have access, of course," he finished, predictably. A cricket skittered from his right nostril and back into the left one.
"I'm not really looking for work," I said. "With all due respect. I mean, I'm sure your establishment is as fine as they come. It's just not for me."
His lips screeched open again. Something buggy hopped out of his mouth, down the desk, and out the door. "Come with me, young lady. Let me show you a few somethings."
"You lost your cricket," I said.
* * *
For such a short man, Stephens stepped high and long, like his legs had an extra joint in them. I had to scramble to match his pace.
"Here at the Foundry, we harvest locally-sourced desires and store them up for those who need them." Stephens burst through double swinging doors into a warehouse with towering stacked shelves. "All those secret things you crave when nobody is watching." I jogged behind him down the aisle maze, knocking ash off my Crocs. "For example, take a look here. They say football's king in the South, but it's really Religion people crave. I've got rifles engraved with Psalms and gasoline-soaked wooden crosses in size Medium, Large, or Extra Large." His joints screeched and whistled like a bad grocery cart as he pointed things out. "Down that way you'll find homebrew meth wrapped in cellophane, tied up in pretty pink bows. Bric
ks from the Morton Theater. Deeds written to the Creek and the Cherokee. All the Civil War bayonets that never passed through Athens. I've got something for every appetite."
We reached an intersection. Dill was stacking cardstock signs on a pallet.
Stephens creaked to a stop. "Why you working, Dill? Isn't it lunchtime?"
"Just getting in a little overtime." Dill dropped pieces of cardstock on the floor. The one on top said, Love Is Power. "Trying to get ahead while it's quiet in here."
Stephens nabbed the castoff sign and rolled it into a pink tube. "Ain't you getting hungry, though?"
Dill waved him off. "Nah, I'm good." He tried to take the tube back, but Stephens held it to his lips. Little black crickets boiled over his teeth and down the tube, making short work of the cardstock and then skittering back into Stephens's mouth.
"Pack up, Dill," said Stephens. "You're out of work."
"But —"
"Get out. You want to forage? Go out there and keep yourself fed, if you think you can find enough out there without my help. Get."
Dill fled toward the exit, but not quick enough. Stephens unhinged his jaw, and out poured the crickets. Hundreds, thousands, bajillions—a thick black tube of wings and legs and high-pitched whining funneling down the aisles, an insectile river. I turned tail and fled the way I'd come, but there was no escaping, not with all of Stephens's insides swarming about. I stumbled backwards onto a heavy flat sack. It was Stephens's empty skin. It flopped and wiggled after me.
I twisted through the pallet maze in the warehouse. It was garbage top to bottom—stale beer and dishwater and fermented snotty tissues.
"Hey, what's the hurry?" shouted Opal. I skidded to a standstill. Opal leaned out a door, eating paint chips out of a pretzel bag.
"Dill," I gasped. "Crickets!"
She crunched up a whole handful of paint. It coated her gums with rainbow flecks. "It's what he gets, trying to steal from Stephens. Should've waited for lunch."
I didn't get it. At least with the Hypotheticals you knew why they were pissed. "Seems if a man wants to eat himself a protest sign now and then, it don't do any harm. Leastwise it shouldn't cost him his job."
"This isn't the Over-Ath," said Opal. "Nothing here is disposable."
"Except Dill, you mean."
Stephens's joints screeched and squeaked as he strolled up behind me. "Thanks for catching her, Opal. I'll take it from here." His baggy skin slapped along the concrete floor like overlarge trousers. A cricket conga line flowed up from the aisles into his ears, nostrils, eye sockets, and mouth, slowly reinflating him.
He steered me back toward his office with fingers boneless as raw hot dogs. "We all got to depend on each other here, Quincy. You try to break out of your place, and we all die. Do you understand?"
"It's Quietly," I muttered.
In his office, he plucked a damp tea bag from the clothesline. "You must understand. I take breach of contract very seriously."
"Why would I ever work for you, then?" I asked honestly. "Sounds like a lousy deal."
"Because everyone's hungry for something. What're you craving, Quincy?"
The kettle whistled, and he set a cup of tea before me. I thought over that whole warehouse of recycled junk. The religion-laced sports didn't appeal, nor did the protest signs, paint chips, styrofoam, or endlessly resteeped tea bags. It was all garbage. I wanted tacos, or at least a beer. "I just want Imani. Please and thank you."
Stephens swished that salty tea around his mouth. His cheeks pinked, and his creaking joints calmed. "She don't belong to you."
"She's a person. She don't belong to anyone but herself."
Stephens sucked on his teeth. His darting tongue was cricket-black. "Oceans aren't people, Quincy. They're places. First to find 'em gets to keep 'em." He licked brine from the teacup rim in this slow, sensual way that insulted sex and oceans and human tongues.
It made my blood boil clear out of my ears. I channelled my sainted grandmother and honey-coated my anger so it stung like bees. "Excuse me. I recall you now. Alexander Stephens. You used to be the Confederate Vice President." He wilted a snitch beneath the heat of my tone. "Nobody at the University even knows you're an alumnus anymore. They don't teach us that."
I braced for shouting, but instead there was just a slow and creaky frown as all those crickets rearranged his face from the inside. "Be that as it may," said Stephens, "you don't make the rules here, Quincy. Sign up or shut up. You don't get to see her otherwise."
Well, at this point I was fucking sick and tired of people trying to dictate my career path to me. Half demanding I sign away my soul to this man's mining operation, and a whole 'nother peanut gallery telling me I had to become the fucking Pacific Ocean because someone had to do the job, it didn't matter who. They only cared their vacancies got filled, like the sum of all human meaning amounted to finding the nearest pegless hole and pounding your own skull into it. I didn't want to be no dropout or rockstar or foreign ocean. But when given a limited set of terrible options, sometimes you have to settle for rejecting the worst instead of picking the best.
Alexander H. Stephens stuck out his wet bubblegum hand, and I noticed a tiny tattoo on his thumb, a dark whirlpool, a gyre in negative, a sucking wind that never let go of you. Evil wasn't the only thing people tried to bury. Sometimes they wanted to obliterate your goodness, too.
"Name's Quietly," I said, loudly. "I'll see you at the Georgia Theater."
"I'm very sorry to hear that," said Stephens, shaking his head. "Very sorry indeed."
My world exploded into crickets.
* * *
Stephens left me dangling above the river in a wire dog kennel swinging on a pole, counterbalanced at each corner with trash bags full of crushed cans. No lock or even a door, because below me the trash boiled with Has-Beens, probably waiting to eat me. I was too damn hungry to hold the sentiment against them. I would've filled my knotted hungry stomach with anything, even kale or decaf Starbucks or black licorice.
Terrapin and Jittery Joe's knocked on my ribcage through the backpack. My stomach begged me to invite them in. Beer and coffee would make a terrible supper, but a hell of a lot better than nothing. I turned gently in my cage and the whole apparatus swayed dangerously, sending the Has-Beens into a snapping frenzy. Slowly, I finagled my backpack to my frontside.
"You tattled on me," Dill snapped, startling the hell out of me. Turned out the cage next door wasn't so empty. "You cost me my job. Thanks a lot."
"I didn't say nothing to Stephens." I death-gripped the backpack to my chest. Precious cargo. "Can't see how it's any worse out here, though. They don't even have real food, you know."
Dill tossed an empty Diet Cherry Coke can at a Has-Been tugging a half-sunk raft several yards behind it. Its harness had slipped partway off and rubbed chunks of pelt from the beast's flank. "Just look at that critter." It wiggled like a puppy, licking the can round and round in trash-circles.
I didn't mind the Has-Beens after that first shock. They sported too many teeth, maws big enough to grind me up and leave nothing but a Quietly stain on the pavement. But they didn't seem malicious. I didn't hold their hunger against them no more than I'd blame a grizzly. Worlds better than Stephens or the Hypotheticals.
"They're not so bad," I told Dill. "Kinda cute, like this armadillo that built a nest in my recycling bin once."
The Has-Been grunted and spat out the can uneaten. Dill huffed and shifted in his cage, rummaging deeper into the bag he'd pulled open. "Opal and I can't figure out what she's really after. She rarely eats the cans she finds. Ain't you hungry yet?" I noticed his neck had regrown those extra vertebrae since I last saw him. In the swinging kennel, his head bobbled even more, all cartoony.
"Absolutely starving," I said, unzipping the backpack carefully. The whole cage swayed and bobbed, dipping closer to the snapping Has-Beens.
"That's how they get you, you know," Dill continued. "You think you're full of hunger, but that's not really it."
/> "Then what is it, Dill?" I snapped. I'd gone hangry and just about run out of patience.
"It's yearning. For something else. Something you left in the Over-Ath."
That gave me the all-over chills. Brought up bad memories of Imani's last days, smitten to death with a stolen ocean while those Hypotheticals gloated nearby. It seemed like everyone alive bore a yearning that didn't do them no good. I longed for nothing short of Imani herself, but I couldn't compete with an ocean for her affections. Even if I found her, I'd be no closer to what I wanted.
The truth about those forty college degrees? I never wanted to stay in school forever. I just didn't want to graduate from Imani.
"It's going to happen to you too, you know," said Dill. "You'll become just like me. Like them." He nodded down to the monsters in the river, his long bobbling head reaching past the bars now.
My eyes narrowed at him. "Wait a minute. What are you saying?"
"If you don't get fed." His voice had a hollow, stretched-out quality, slow and slurred like a bee-stung tongue. "If you don't eat down your desires. Why we all work for Stephens. Otherwise, the Has-Beens. Everyone else."
I gawped down at the swirling monsters, those warm eyes swallowed up by too much fur and scales. All my Imani-angst washed away in perfect technicolor rage. "Those are human beings you're lashing to your rafts? Those are people? Well, bless your heart."
"Used to go. To protests," Dill said, his whole face bulging and monstrous. "In the Over-Ath. Don't remember. What about. No more. Starving when. I got here. Ate garbage. Anything. Stephens saved me. The signs. I need the signs. Stephens hoards 'em."
"Everyone's hungry for something," I ventured. The Has-Beens. Desperate foragers, diving for anything that settled, yearning for the smallest taste of their desires. "If you don't eat, you turn into one of them?"
Dill's kennel pressed a wire latticework into his spiraling, monstrous bulk. Fur sprouted all over him just as quick as the wire could scrape it off. I winced and felt my neck, counted vertebrae against the growling of my own stomach.
Every River Runs to Salt Page 4
