“Poor Jane. . . ,” he says. “She’s having a baby. Maybe one like you.”
Not another baby. And how could a Tennessee have one like me? And even if it looks like me, it would be like my sister. It would never breed true.
Chapter Fifteen
It’s time for a talk—one of those heart-to-heart talks (that’s what they call it) the Hoots always give, with strawberries, one by one, the little sweet kind. And lots of pats. And, “Have I considered my future?” or, “Have I considered their side of the question?” kinds of things.
Right after Bob stumbles out, the Hoot comes. I don’t have a minute to think about anything. He rolls in on a fancy stool. He has a short crop pole. He rolls himself over to my only good chair—where I am.
At first Lily looks as if she hardly dares move, but then she gets off her bed and moves her chair close to her bars and sits.
“You, my favorite,” the Hoot says. “My sturdy. My steady.” He holds out a strawberry, but I don’t let him put it directly into my mouth. I take it with my fingers. Of course, maybe I shouldn’t let him give me any treats at all, but I don’t think about that until I’ve already taken it.
He leans his head back and actually bares his neck to me. I’m tempted, but he’d be faster with his leap-and-choke back at me, even with his neck like this. His legs are braced around the legs of the stool, as if ready. Maybe that’s what he wants me to do, so he can finish me off.
I think this might be the same Hoot I bucked off and that my father and Bob hate so much. He is dressed in a head guards’ uniform, and he has champion ribbons. I should stop taking treats. But I haven’t had strawberries for a long time.
“Remember when you were little?” he says. (Strawberry. Strawberry.) “How we came every month with new toys? We patted you and fed you treats by hand? Remember? And your mother sat beside you, and patted you, too, so you wouldn’t get upset? And there was chocolate. Just like this,” and he hands me one of those little one-bites called Kisses, wrapped up in foil. I put it behind me into the chair cushion to save for Lily.
I do remember, and I remember I was always glad to see them. That’s when I got the name Smiley.
He says, “There’s only one question and only one answer. Do you want to live life as a Wild or as a Tame? A civilized champion primate? With plenty of the proper food . . .” (Strawberry. Strawberry.) “ . . . so you’ll grow to your full size and strength? Look at yourself. You’re so thin. Much too thin for one of your type. You must eat and train.
“But, as of now, all new rules with you in mind.” (Strawberry.) “As of this morning, you . . . all of you can mate with whoever you wish. You can take charge of the arenas. You can take charge of your stalls. There will be no solitary and no bits, even for the most intractable of you. You may speak.”
I don’t.
“None more loved than you champions. You know that. We sacrifice every day for you. Did and still do.”
Another chocolate Kiss.
I get up and pace (well, not exactly pace with these hobbles on, more shuffle) from my sink to the bars. I can’t sit still.
I say, “His Excellency The-Ruler-of-Us-All wasn’t fooled by you.”
If I could come up from behind him? Of course that’s impossible. There’s no sneaking up on a creature with prey eyes, but what if Lily could make a loud noise? I turn towards her and try to give a signal, hidden by my body, but she doesn’t understand it.
“The-Ruler-Of-Us-All is being retrained.”
I trust Little Master. He might pretend to be retrained, but he won’t change the side he’s on, which is my side.
The Hoot’s head isn’t moving, but he’s watching me, because one ear faces me as I circle.
“You killed my father.”
“He brought death upon himself. Death is always up to you. You know that.”
“He was tortured. Spiked bits for years at a time. He was driven crazy. You did it.”
“Only those prone to craziness are driven crazy. Your father was brought up in the best of circumstances, just like you were. Everything was done for him that could be done. He won every race. Until suddenly he refused all hosts. Like you, he bucked. He was utterly useless until he came to us to be a guards’ mount. The spiked bit changed his mind . . . and a little while in solitary.”
All of a sudden I’m going to burst. I’m sweating. I can hardly breathe. I know exactly what my father felt when he went crazy. I’ll risk anything. I don’t care. I have to do something.
I’ve shuffled around to his back. I’m moving slowly, slower and slower. His ear points at me. He knows exactly where I am. I know he can smell my rage. I just hope he can’t see how much I’m shaking.
It won’t work. Nothing I do can be as fast as he is, but I don’t care.
Except Lily does make a noise. She drops her wash basin on the tiles of her sink area. It clatters so loud it even hurts my ears. The Hoot spooks right off his stool. Flops on the floor. Before he can get back up, I grab his neck from behind. I shake him and shake him. He tries to get his hands around behind to me, but I keep shaking him. It works. He wasn’t ready.
I don’t know if I killed him or not. I don’t wait to find out. I use the white wire he used and make our bars fall. We run, as best I can with hobbles, right past the Sam the Hoot rode in on. He’s standing at parade rest, waiting. He doesn’t move as we go by. I can’t tell his expression, his big black mustache hides his mouth, but he raises his eyebrows, then gives a tiny half-wink.
I pull Lily past the front door—she tries to get away and out, but I’m stronger. I pull her past another front door and then up the stairs to the room where my father was.
I hadn’t thought to go there, I just go. I don’t know why, except where would we head if we’d gone outside? I’d just hobble along and get caught. This seemed safest. And maybe the Hoots will think we’ve gone out. That’s the logical thing to do. There’s white wires all around the whole prison that would have stopped us, anyway.
I think I also had the idea my father would be up here (nobody really said he was dead) and all I had to do was get to him and everything would be all right. He’d know what to do next.
But the room is empty. The cot where my father lay is rumpled. The blanket pulled aside. You can see where his sweat dried all over it. You can see where his head was on the pillow. There’s a bad, sick smell. Like there was before, only worse.
I lose all the angry energy I had. I collapse on the floor, like I did before, when I saw my father’d lost his leg.
Everything is not going to be all right. And whatever we do now, we have to decide it all by ourselves.
Lily gets cold water at the sink for me like Jane did. I watch her walk across the room, and, for the first time, I get a really good look at her legs. She’s pigeon-toed. Nobody bothered to put her in braces, when she was little, to fix it. Nobody cared. I’m getting angry all over again. I slap the floor with my fist and hurt myself. Which is exactly something my father would have done. Lily jumps back, scared of me.
I’m so angry I hardly know what I’m saying or why. Things just pop out. “I know I’m too young for any of that stuff now, but Lily, will you marry me? When I’m old enough? I don’t know the rules. I don’t even know how old that would be, and I don’t even know how old I am.”
“You’re asking that now!” She laughs, like she always does, no matter what or when, and then she says, “Of course I will.”
Then I have my first kiss. A lover’s kind of kiss. It’s maybe the wrong place and time, or maybe we need practice, because it doesn’t feel like much. But Lily looks at me, after, like it doesn’t matter how it was.
I think to try that kissing again, but we’re interrupted by noises outside. There’s only one little window, and we kneel down by it, holding hands, and look out.
Here we are: My father just dead, and I don’t have Little Master, and I don’t have any idea what to do next, but with Lily and me free . . . sort of free and together,
I don’t feel as bad as I ought to feel.
Outside there’s Hoots all over. Some of the mounts are kneeling so the Hoots can sniff the ground, other mounts are trotting around, and the Hoots are lifting their heads and sniffing the air. Hoots’ ears are twisting all around. It won’t take them long to realize we’re still in here, but they won’t know where in here. The bad smell from my father is masking our smell.
We watch for a while, and then we look around to see what’s in the room, which is less even than in our cells downstairs. There’s some spoiled milk. (Lily’s about to throw it out, but I say, “This and my father’s blankets might come in handy to mask our smells.” Lily says, “Phew, I hope not.”) There’s a container of dry cakes that’s never been opened.
We don’t feel like sitting on the bed or touching it, and there’s only one straight-backed chair, the one Jane sat in next to my father, so we go to the window—the air is fresher there—and sit on the floor. We hold hands. Ever since we got free, we’re holding hands just about all the time. She leans her head on my shoulder so her nobody-nothing hair is against my cheek. It’s straight and neither yellow nor brown and not much shine. I don’t care. Who would want everything to be the same? Except I used to.
“I forgot your butterfly clip.”
“But look, I still have your earring.”
“I forgot the chocolate I saved for you. I feel like going back for it.”
“Oh Charley, please don’t. If you do, I’ll never kiss you again.”
“I like your hair. Even without the clip.”
“Who ever heard of a Seattle liking hair like this?”
We sit. I sneak my hand around to feel how breasts feel. She lets me.
After a while she says, “What should we do now?”
“Maybe we can open all the cells and let everybody out.”
“Bob could do that. I wonder where he is? Maybe he’ll come and find us. Maybe we should wait till things calm down. Look outside, there’s a lot fewer Hoots out there now. Look . . . only four.”
I lean towards her to look, and then, without planning to, I practice kissing again. And I practice kissing her cheeks and her neck. And she practices the same on me. Afterwards, we both say, “You,” and, “You,” and then we laugh because we sound so much like Hoots.
I keep wondering how come I can feel so happy when for all I know we’ll be thrown into different cells far from each other and never see each other again.
One thing, though, I know how my father felt about Jane, and I know how that rage felt, how he didn’t care about anything when he got angry. I wish he was here so I could tell him I understand. I guess my feelings show, because Lily says, “What’s the matter?” and I say, “I was thinking about my father, how I never said anything nice to him. Not even once. Not ever!” Then I lie face-down on the floor again, this time Lily cuddling up beside me just as Little Master used to do. I feel bad, but not as bad as I would if she wasn’t here.
Lily keeps saying, “He knew. He must have known.”
“Except for Jane, I was what he cared about the most. I don’t even know why he did, because I was never nice to him.”
“If he cared so much about you, he understood.”
“At least I kissed him—even though he smelled bad, I kissed him—but I don’t think he even knew I did it. He was out of his head.”
“Maybe he did know. Maybe his body knew in some body kind of way.”
It’s getting dark. We hear whistling. It’s mostly coming from in the prison. It’s a friendly sound, us calling out to us.
“Do you know what they’re signaling?” Lily knows more about those things than I do.
“That last was ‘Bye Bye Blackbird,’ but I don’t know why. That song makes me so sad. I don’t know why that either.”
Then somebody right below us in the prison plays a sort of ukelele kind of thing and taps on something and sings without words.
Lily pigeon-toes over to get the dry cakes and a cup of water. There’s only this one cup. It’s just a plain white cup. I hold it out to look at it. I say, “My father drank out of this.”
“Then drink,” Lily says.
We sit by the window and listen. The song stops and the whistlings get to be few and far between, soft and slow. There are lots of other night sounds, bugs and such, and a cool breeze is blowing in. Everything is so nice and everything is awful and scary, too.
I take out my father’s knife (I’ve been wearing it under my shorts) and start working on my hobbles. After a while, Lily works on them, too. We finally cut through.
Afterwards we lean together, and then I ask Lily what I’ve not thought to ask all this time.
“Why were you locked in here? What did you do? It couldn’t have been such a bad thing.”
“It was bad. I worked in food. I. . . .” First she can’t say it, and then she does, all in one bunch. “I poisoned an important Sam. A Tennessee. A champion. He was. . . . I didn’t matter, he mattered. I made him sick. I didn’t kill him, I just tried to. First they put me in solitary, but not for long. I liked it because it got me away from him. Then they brought me here. Blue Bob says I’ve been here about a year.”
“How can you be such a smiley person? You laugh all the time.”
“I like prison. They didn’t even pole me. They don’t kill, you know, at least not straight out. They didn’t know what to do with me—except give me a talking-to every now and then. Blue Bob looked after me. I was never as happy as I was here. Bob brought me treats and books. He brought me my butterfly hair clip. He was the nicest to me anybody ever was. Better than my mother. She was a Tennessee. She had good feet, not like mine, but she never had much speed. She might have had some good offspring, but after me they gave up on her. I ruined what little status she had. I got to stay with her longer than most because I wasn’t important enough to be taken away for any kind of training. I never even got imprinted. I don’t know what that’s like. I always wondered.”
“It’s like this,” I say, and stroke her neck and shoulder. I put my finger in her ears and in her mouth. I move her arm and hand wherever I want them to be. “All this and more,” I say, and touch her breast again. “In fact, no place is left out, but I’ll leave out some.” Then I kiss her neck.
“You silly.”
“I wonder, even more, how come you’re such a smiley person?”
Then I wonder if there’s a comb around here. I want to comb her hair and put that hair clip in it. Which I don’t even have.
“What’s wrong now?”
“I’m thinking about your hair clip.”
We spend the night cuddled up together just as if she was my Little Master.
Chapter Sixteen
First thing in the morning, there’s a loud crackling, spitting sound. It’s got to be the white wires—all sparking at once. I’m still half-asleep. Even so, I know what it is. I worry about all of us down in the cells below. I dream we’ve all lost our legs, and then I think, if none of us had legs, everybody’d be crawling around on their bellies, and we wouldn’t have to be mounts. Then I think how that would be just the way my father wanted it, every creature equal, like he always said. Then I wake up all the way, and I think, more likely everybody in prison is dead now, except for us up here.
I realize (for the ten thousandth time) how much I depend on Little Master to hear and smell and tell me what’s going on. He’d know. He can even smell if a death is new or old. By myself, and with just Lily, I can’t tell anything.
Lily and I hold each other and wait and listen. I can feel how Lily is all stiff. It’s like hugging a bundle of sticks. I guess I’m like that, too.
Then we hear the sounds of us outside our window. (We’re quiet out there, but you can hear soft talking.) More and more of us. We jump up to look, and there we are. The prison bars must have dropped, all at the same time, and the prison front doors opened, and here we are, coming out. It’s a big prison even if it’s mostly only one-story high. It goes on and on,
curling back and forth in a snaky shape.
Our kind is wandering around looking dazed, wondering what to do. Like, is this the revolution right now, or what? And if it is, what are we supposed to do? They need somebody like my father to start them off. I have a good, big, booming voice. I could lead. I’ll bet they’d follow. But where to? Maybe it doesn’t matter. We’d just go. I can see it, everybody behind me, and me trotting out pretty fast—me with my mustache and my silks. My father didn’t want to lead, but he did it anyway. I do. I want to.
Here come the Hoots. Mounted. I thought maybe they wouldn’t be anymore, especially if they let everybody out, but how would they get here if not on us? They’d just crawl around not far from their burrows. They always say, “If not for you, we’d have to duck into a hole and freeze up and wait or die.” And that’s true.
The Hoots come trotting—all in rows and all dressed up. I think again how good they look and how I’d like to be one of those Sams they’re mounted on, going tramp, tramp, tramp with their metal-soled boots, but then I remember that I really wouldn’t like it.
Except these Sams have their bits and headstalls hanging around their necks, as if for everyone to see how free they are and how they must have chosen this job. I would like it if I could choose to be there and no bit.
Behind the Hoots there’s a little bunch of us—six of us marching together, and with our primate kind of instruments. I’d like to be part of that, too, but I don’t know how to play anything. They wouldn’t let me learn things like that because I’m a racing Seattle and too important. They all stop, and then the musicians begin to play. Their instruments are brassy and shiny, and the sound is brassy and shiny, too. (Not a Hoot kind of sound.) The sun is just coming up from behind the hills. They were all in shadow, and then suddenly—well, sort of suddenly—the sun pops around the jagged part of the mountain top, and they’re in sunshine. The music stops.
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