by Kit Reed
One of them bumps into a sharp corner that jabs him in a soft part. He yips, “Shit!”
“Quiet, you’ll bring the Deds down on you.”
“Fuck the Deds.”
“Not in this lifetime. Eeeewww.”
“You know what I mean.” Everybody laughs.
“Quiet or you’ll wake the whale.”
“So what is she gonna do, resist transport?”
“Fuck if I know.”
Oh!
Annie sees the future in Kelly’s eyes. They’re coming for me. She whispers, “What are we going to do?”
Patting the gurney, Kelly hisses, “You have to get on.”
“OK,” a man says. “Let’s get to it.”
They leave Annie with no choice. Careful not to disturb the curtain, she eases herself up on the giant gurney.
Someone snags the fabric, getting ready to pull. “This one?”
“It’s gotta be. Look at the size of that thing!”
Annie grimaces. Now what?
Kelly lifts the sheet that Annie replaced after she undid the restraints. Under here.
“Let’s do it. That’s gotta be the whale.”
Kelly’s face crumples but she won’t cry. “Hurry,” she says.
This is how Annie Abercrombie and her best friend Kelly Taylor find themselves in a freight elevator going up and up through the Dedicated Sisters’ installation at Wellmont; they hear the floor indicator ding more than a dozen times as they ascend, yet when the elevator stops at the top they turn out to be emerging at ground level. Peeking through a gap where Kelly’s huge body lifts the sheet without exposing her, Annie can see the horizon in the moonlight. The team rolls them to the end of a loading dock, where for the first time in all the weeks they’ve been here, the girls whose parents turned them over to the Dedicated Sisters for their own good are breathing fresh air.
One of the handlers says, “You know, all the times I’ve been here, it still gives me the creeps.”
Another says, “You gotta be weird to want to stay underground.”
“Or ugly as shit.”
“Man, just line up the truck.”
Before the girls are clear what’s happening, the gurney is rolling off the dock and up a ramp into a Mayflower van, where the male handlers lock the wheels into cleats, give Kelly a condescending pat and close the doors.
For a long time, Kelly doesn’t move and, hidden in the shelter of her friend’s body, Annie doesn’t move. They stay quiet even though it’s clear the team has cleared out and they are alone. The truck lurches forward. They are on the road. OK, Annie thinks, they’re all up there in the cab snorting or whatever, I guess it’s safe. Without speaking—they may have the van bugged—she wiggles to the edge of the giant gurney and slips down. The truck hits a bump and she gasps. She grabs the bed frame to steady herself. She’s never been this shaky. Like a recov- ering invalid, she totters into the circle cast by one of the work lights in the van.
As she does so, somebody gasps. “What have they been doing to you?”
Electrified, Annie whirls. “What,” she cries, squinting into the dim glow cast by the service lights. “What?”
There is a third person in the back of the truck.
“Baby, oh, my sweet girl!”
Interesting what being in a prison, even an expensive prison, does to you. Annie shrinks.
Within seconds, this same person has closed the distance between the girls and the shelter of the cartons where she’d been hiding; her hands are on Annie’s shoulders and within seconds she’s dug into her shoulder bag and produced—a Krispy Kreme doughnut. “You look awful,” she says. “Eat this.”
Annie’s voice rises, quavery and uncertain. “Mom?”
27
“You understand,” Gloria says urgently, “at all costs, we protect the network.”
“Network!”
“You know. Who we are.”
“Which is … ?”
“A conflation of like minds,” Gloria says, leaving Betz to figure out what a conflation is.
“Conflation.” Like I’m going to ask. Well, fuck her. As far as Betz is concerned, school’s out and it’s time for the question period. She and Danny and Dave hopped into the heavy Ne Plus Ultra with this Gloria Katz on faith, like everything between them is understood and nothing has to be explained, which is not the way she’s used to traveling. Dave is at the wheel now and Gloria has taken his place in the back next to Betz, who for a minute there had lapsed, imagining that she and the boy she is now totally in love with could go riding along like this forever. They haven’t talked about it yet but she thinks he is in love with her too. “I bet you spend more time thinking about me than I think about you,” her last boyfriend once said to her, so it may be a gender-based thing. She doesn’t know, but she hopes when this is done Dave will say it was her, Betz, and not Annie, who got him through. She and Dave have come so far together, they’ve been through so much …
Gloria snaps, “Convergence!”
She realizes with a start that for a second there she forgot what they’re supposed to be doing. Dutifully, she brings Gloria back to the point. “I thought you were an underground railroad.”
“That too,” Gloria says. The SUV is aimed south on a tribal road that three suburban kids who are not from around here would never have found unaided. They have been going ever since the moon rose, with Gloria unfolding details on a need-to-know basis.
“Railroad.” She knows perfectly well what an underground railroad is, but Gloria’s so hung up on her big words that Betz needs to shake something out of her that makes sense. “Moving what to where?”
“Not things. People.”
“Who?”
“Depends,” Gloria says impatiently. She is done explaining. “OK, are you with us?”
“Why is that so important?”
“I need to make sure before you meet the others.”
Conflation. Betz is hung up on it. They are rolling along so smoothly that she’s lost track of where they are going. “The others?”
“Well. One other. For now, anyway.”
“Just one? I thought you were going to get us …”
“Help. The network is small, the thread is too thin to see with the naked eye but it is stronger than spun platinum.” Gloria’s talking in figures, and it isn’t helping.
“Fine, but what’s a conflation?”
“Trust me. It’s a survival thing.” The fit, spunky woman with the gaudy hair may not look her age, but she looks exhausted. In this half-light, the lines in her face are deep and harshly drawn. Now a sigh comes out like a little groan which she covers by saying brightly, “Anyway, you’re going to love Ahmed.”
“Who?”
“My new man. He’s a mullah.”
Eeeewww, Betz thinks. Gross. She’s too old to have a boyfriend. This makes her feel so guilty that she rummages for the right thing to say. “Mullah,” she says politely, pulling it out like a bright handkerchief.
“That’s an Arab thing, right?”
“Muslim.”
“So, your. Um. This guy’s a Muslim and you’re …”
“Jewish. Why do you. think I’m so hip to what’s going on out there? Face it, we’ve been through hard times but the Jews have done very well in America. We’re smart, most of us, and we work hard and we prosper, we are very careful about certain things. We save up for a happy old age, which is why we were first to buy into those high-class, low-maintenance condos and the first in line to tour Europe and take long Caribbean cruises, we pioneered those wedding-anniversary trips to Europe, and that’s why we were the first to suspect …” Gloria’s voice trails off. She chokes.
“Suspect what?”
Gloria raises her hand and shakes her head like one of those people who doesn’t want you to pat them on the back.
If the woman sits there without breathing much longer, Betz thinks, she’s going to die on them, and then what? Like a paramedic with the paddles, she applies a
jolt. “So, about this word ichthus.”
“I’ll explain later.”
“And that drawing on the bark I gave you. Is it a fish or what?”
“Later,” Gloria says. With a little heave of her narrow shoulders, she takes up the thought and spins it out to the end they both know is coming. “We were first in on package tours, a lot of them thanks to the kids, you know, birthday presents, we were in the front ranks down in beach front Miami, sweetie, those hotels are gorgeous, but listen, we may be tired from living our lives and bringing up our families, we know we deserve a rest but we are not stupid. We know when we’re not .wanted. Take it from a mother, a mother always knows.”
Betz murmurs, “Not always.” In the way the world is and the shitty things you can do to your children when you think you’re helping them, her mother doesn’t have a clue.
But Gloria doesn’t hear; she goes on, “When you’re in the front ranks you are also the first to notice, for instance, who goes to Paris or Sun City, and the first to wonder why some of them never came back … Oh shit, don’t make me spell it all out.”
“It’s OK, you don’t have to.”
“It’s a pilot program, if we get moving in time we can still stop it.”
“Program!”
“They’re calling it Solutions.”
“That’s terrible.”
“Don’t worry,” Gloria says. “We’re cool. In France during World War Two, they called it the Resistance. Vive—”
But Betz is still trying to make the pieces match. “OK, so, your boyfriend’s a mullah and the monks and the nuns are …”
“They’re in it too.”
“But they’re Catholics. And you’re Jewish.”
“Yep. Jewish. And ichthus is a Christian thing. Plus, some of us aren’t anything. God doesn’t care. We’re all in this together.”
“You haven’t told us what this is. Like, are you an army or what? Some kind of political thing?”
“Too late for politics, kid. It isn’t even a revolution. It’s just …” She stares into her hands. “When things are bad, the good guys have to hang together.”
Betz counts to twenty and when it’s clear that Gloria isn’t going to go on she says, “So. Um. What are you going to do?”
Gloria laughs. “Why honey, anything we can.” She raises her voice. “Yo, Dave. That’s it up ahead. Hang a right at that trading post. There, see the totem pole?”
“Where are we going?”
“Ahmed, remember?” Gloria raises her voice. “Danny boy, are you with me?”
“I think he’s asleep, but sure.”
“Dave. Dave Berman, are you with me!”
“If you say so.”
“Not good enough! Are you really, truly, terminally with me?”
Dave says smartly, “Yes Ma’am.”
“Fine,” she says. “When we get there, you kids wait in the car. Be ready to roll the minute I call the shot. Here!”
The SUV makes a sharp turn off the road onto a gravel track that takes them to the door of a Wide Load trailer that looks solidly planted. Adobe steps lead up to the metal front door, where a yellow bulb glows under a little porch roof. The door pops open even before the car comes to a stop. Gloria jumps out with a bright laugh. “You kids wait here,” she says over her shoulder. Lifting her head with a little toss to fluff her hair, she runs up the steps like a girl. “And remember what I told you.”
. “You know this is crazy,” Betz says, “riding into the sunset in this old lady’s car.”
“She doesn’t look old.”
“I’ve seen her up close, and she is.” She shudders as the rest of her life opens in front of her. “Girls know.”
“OK, yeah, it’s definitely crazy,” Dave says.
“She could take us anywhere!”
“Not while I’m driving, but, yeah. I suppose.” They are talking in low voices to keep from waking Danny, whose cheek is pasted to the front window with a little patch of drool.
“I mean, this could be dangerous.”
“Rule One. The person with the car has the power.”
“I don’t know.” Betz leans forward so Dave will hear her, murmuring. Understanding, he shifts in his seat and turns back to catch what she has to say. For the first time, their faces are this close. The darkness makes a circle around them: just the two of us. Weird as it is, it’s like being alone with him. “She left the keys. Should we just go?”
“And do what?”
“Oh. Right. Fucking desert.”
“You’ve got it. The desert is where we are.” He sighs. “OK, Betzy, this is weird, but it’s probably our best shot.”
“It isn’t just the underground railroad thing, is it.” Betz can hear her own voice drop at the end. This is not a question, it’s a statement.
“In fact, it may be our only shot.”
“Dave?”
“OK, real truth? While you were dinging around in the parking lot with this Gloria Katz I went to get my wallet out of the Saturn. Car’s been stolen.”
“Oooooh maaaan.”
“Is that all you can say?”
“Dave, it’s only a car!”
Mistake. Dave lapses and won’t speak to her.
“The car isn’t everything,” Betz says under her breath but hell, she has a brother, so she knows. Other things may matter to real people, but to a guy just out of high school, it is. Moodily, she rolls back the door and gets out, shivering because in these parts the strong midday sunlight can kill you but nights in the desert are cold. If Dave follows, maybe she can apologize, like having your car stolen really is the worst thing in the world. Then he’ll see that she is shivering and put his arm around her to help fight off the chill. But Dave is fixed behind the wheel, aggressively zoning out. Right, he isn’t speaking to her. All this, Betz thinks, looking at the dot her shadow makes in this boundless desert, and all he can think about is his stupid car.
Breathless, she whirls under the moon. The stars are like a thousand halogen lamps, tiny and sharp enough to pierce her to the soul. Overcome by the purity of desert moonlight, she skims the surface of the softly mounded sand, casting around for other buildings, vehicles, any sign of life, but as far as she can tell, there’s nothing in sight but the trailer and the SUV with the sleeping Danny and Annie’s boyfriend Dave. Slowly, she approaches the trailer. Like a small child she puts her feet down one in front of the other carefully, heel/toe, heel/toe, advancing on the shiny mobile home. Once the metal front door closed behind Gloria all the windows closed and now there is no sign of light coming from inside, no movement and no sound. Gloria is in there, that Betz knows. But is she coming out? What if they’re all dead? If she comes out tonight, it will be through that door. Folding up like a collapsible campstool, Betz sits on the step to wait. On any other night she would have knocked, but she is intimidated here. The sky is so big. Everything is so still. Time passes. The cold, clear desert night rises around the little encampment, enclosing them as if in a dome. It’s like sitting at the bottom of a snow globe. The sand spreads around them like artificial snow but to the east, she realizes as she turns slowly, following the horizon line, the surface is not even. Instead it devolves into ripples that turn out to be softly mounded shapes like so many loaves of rising bread.
It isn’t until one of the mounds surges to a sitting position with a yawn like a barking seal that Betz realizes every one of these gentle curves in the earth is a sleeping bag, and furled inside all the sleeping bags are some of the biggest people she’s ever seen. Her breath stops. The great, yawning figure stretches and everything stops. Betz goes rigid, praying that he won’t look her way, but the gigantic sleeper coughs and stretches and settles down again. My God, there are hundreds of them here. Got to tell Danny, she thinks, getting up. Got to tell Dave. Never mind that he isn’t speaking to me. She heads for the car. Dave!
The trailer door pops open. “Where are you going?”
“Gloria!”
“Hell yes, Glo
ria.” The old lady comes down the steps saying in a new, bubbly voice, “And Ahmed.”
An extremely cool guy comes out in a white kaftan and a rolled turban.
“Hi Ahmed.”
Even in the moonlight Betz can see that he is grinning. “And hi to you.”
“Are you really a mullah?”
He bows slightly. “I am. And you must be Betz.”
“Yes, um …” What do you call these people? “Um …”
“Ahmed will do.”
“Ahmed’s ready to take you to your sister.”
Betz says with mixed emotions, “You know where she is?”
“I know where she is being held.” His deep voice amplifies by several decibels. This man could be heard from any turret, no matter how high. “Arise!”
“And you can show us, like on a map?”
Gloria says, “No need. It’s very close.”
“Closer than you think.” Ahmed says for the second time, and louder. “Arise!”
By this time Betz is backing down the path from the trailer to the car, moved along by Gloria and her boyfriend the mullah. Understanding that they’re about to move out, Betz swivels to look at the SUV. Dave has stepped down and the door on Danny’s side is open and Danny has stepped down. Her brother and the person she loves are standing in front of the SUV like lieutenants waiting to be dispatched. “Where? Where are you taking us?”
With an elegant curved gesture Ahmed points and Dave and Danny take the bench seat at the back of the SUV. He turns to Betz, indicating the door with a graceful wave. “Now you.”
“But where are you taking us?”
“Shh,” Gloria says. “It isn’t far.”
“What isn’t?” By this time Betz and Gloria have followed the boys into the back of the SUV.
Ahmed says, “Why, what you are seeking.”
“You’ll see …”
For the third time, Ahmed shouts, “Arise!” Then, with amazing grace in view of the sandals and the kaftan, he surges into the driver’s seat and starts the motor.
Gloria finishes, “It isn’t safe to talk about it till we’re there.”
By this time they are moving and as Ahmed makes a K turn and they head out, Betz sees that to the east of the mobile home, acres of desert are moving too, as all the occupants of the mounded sleeping bags shake them off like outmoded garments and get to their feet, flowing into the road behind the SUV like a slow, faithful army massing for a march to a destination as yet to be revealed.
