by Kit Reed
“I’m sorry, gotta go. Something’s come up. Something big.”
Her whole body shook with grief. “Bigger than me?”
“Don’t worry, sweetheart, Earl has enough love for both of you.”
“Both of us!”
“Shh shhh, you’re going to love her. Now lie down and get your beauty sleep.”
The air shook with Betty’s outraged cry. “Both!”
“Shh, darlin’ you’re still beautiful, but remember …” With his hands on the ledge, he did a neat lift and sat for a minute, poised on the edge of the stall. Then the Reverend Earl Sharpnack paused, surveying the poor, pretty fat woman that he kept in his power and when he was done the grin he gave her was ugly and voracious. “See, honey, when you’re a man …” He reconsidered and the grin widened. “When you’re a man like me, nothing is ever enough.”
Betty sobbed. “You told me I was …”
“I know, I know, but sometimes things change when you least expect it.”
“Earl!”
There was a silence. Then his voice dropped to a place nobody wants to go, somewhere deep, miserable and dirty and he repeated, as if she was too stupid to get it, “Nothing is ever enough.”
We heard the thud as he swung his legs over and hit the ground. We heard his footsteps crunching away. In the next minute the metal barn door slid open and he was gone. We waited. We didn’t come out until we heard the clang and the click of the lock as he went outside and rolled it shut.
Betty wept silently, but her great shoulders shook so violently that the whole mattress shook and the quilts behind us shook. At a loss for anything to say to her, Zoe and I waited for the crying to stop.
Outside, vehicles were pulling into the circle in front of the barn. We heard shouting as the tractors and farm machinery moved out. Recovering, Betty lifted her great head. The metal structure carried sound and we could hear the crunch of gravel and the slamming of doors. Next we heard an escalating rumble, as if of heavy machinery rolling into place. There was the bleat of a diesel horn: the arrival of a four-axle truck.
My breath stuck in my throat. “What’s going on?”
Grieving, Betty choked out the answer. “He’s bringing in somebody new.”
“Oh, Betty,” Zoe said.
Betty said without explaining, “And all that this implies.”
Zoe patted her hand. “This is so awful.”
She nodded. “I know. Next comes the mobile unit …”
“And he’s awful to you.”
“For the live feed.” She gestured to the flat-screen TV in its baroque gold frame.
“What do you mean, the live feed?”
Betty’s face turned into one of those masks of tragedy you hear about but never see. “I’m not the first queen here,” she said.
Zoe tugged at her. “Get up. Leave the son of a bitch.”
“I can’t.”
“Don’t say that. You can’t stay here and let him …” Zoe and I were trying to help her up. We hoisted her to a sitting position; it’s as far as we got. “Come on. We’ll get you out.”
“I’m done.” Sighing, she sank back. “Save yourselves.”
“Don’t say that! Betty, we’ve got your back.”
“No you don’t. I’ll be OK. Just go.”
“You can’t stay here!” Zoe and I struggled with her. After a brief, futile effort Betty sagged, shaking her head. We pushed and shoved with a growing sense of urgency because even though there was silence outside the building now, the big truck and its cargo were in place. If Betty was right the mobile unit would roll in next to capture the moment, the Reverend Earl would come and then … Then what? I didn’t know. We argued. We begged. We didn’t have much time.
At the end she said, “It’s OK, I’m not going to be around long enough to care. When you get this big, sooner or later your belly piles up on you and you …” She didn’t finish. “Come to think of it, dead doesn’t look half bad.”
“Don’t say that!”
Bitterly, she waved at the blank TV screen. “It’s gotta be better than this.”
I punched her in the arm. “No,” I told her. “Freedom is.”
“Not when you’re starving,” Betty said ominously. Anger was turning her into a new person. “You’ll see.”
Zoe overrode her. “We’ll bring help! We’ll get. Um. The National Guard or something and break you out.”
“I’ll still be hungry all the time.”
“You don’t know that!” But something in her tone alerted me to the implication. Carefully, I put the question. “Do you?”
“Hell yes I know. Hungry all the time,” Betty said. Then she put down her hole card. “And who do you think you’re kidding, big guy? So will you!”
Zoe grabbed my wrist. My love lifted her voice like a first-grade teacher fishing for the correct answer. “So will we—what?”
“Be hungry. Admit it, aren’t you both hungry right now?”
We didn’t answer right away. It was terrible. She was right. “How.” Now that it was out there. I had a hard time going on. “How do you know?”
“Earl told me. Back when I thought he loved me, he told me everything. He’d brag and I’d praise him and we would cuddle and he’d talk, and talk … Accidentally, it came out. The truth about his great discovery,” Betty said, “his big secret, you know?”
“His secret?”
“The secret that makes all of this run. Get it? It’s in the formula. You know.” In the next second angry, betrayed Betty answered all the questions that had been hounding me. In a single sentence she turned on the man who had ruined her, growling: “The hunger that feeds on itself.”
Everything snapped into place. The hunger that feeds on itself. “The hunger that feeds on itself!”
Betty caught my little grunt of recognition. “Get it? It’s built into the formula.”
“The formula!” Zoe went on slowly, like a first-grader sounding out the words. “The formula that we’ve been taking every day.”
“How else do you think he keeps everything going? How do you think he got so rich?”
The hunger that feeds on itself. My belly went into spasm. It seemed so simple. I barked, “Then we destroy the formula.”
“Too late,” Betty said. “We’re all addicted now.”
Zoe lifted her head with a strange, driven look. “All those poor, helpless people!”
I cut to the chase. “Addicted!”
Our big friend nodded. “Get it? You thought you were hungry before you got here and they made you start taking it. You didn’t know what hungry was. One dose and you knew, admit it. That’s us, guys. Starved for life.” Angry now, Betty lifted her hand to her eyes like the figure on a war monument, looking for the enemy. This is how she finished it. Us, our beliefs and our illusions. Me in this place. Earl Sharpnack, I will finish you. “It’s in the herbs.”
29
“Mom, what’s going on?”
Even in this light poor Annie looks so nearly transparent that Marg Abercrombie wants to pull her daughter onto her lap and love her and rock her until she gets strong, but they have all come too far for that. It’s clear that Annie’s stint with the Dedicated Sisters has been hard on her, and this alone leaves Marg feeling responsible and guilty. It would be hypocritical to put her arms around Annie in the old way. It would be fatuous to imagine Annie would be glad. In fact, thank you, Annie can take care of herself. In spite of all the wrongs her parents and the Dedicated Sisters have done her, Annie is a stronger person now. It’s clear from the steady voice and the new, confident set of her head. She carries herself with dignity. The best thing Marg can do is treat her—not like an adult, exactly, because she’s still young—but with respect. Marg answers, “We’re waiting for something, I think.”
Annie’s changed and Marg herself has changed, she thinks, at least a little bit. All this time on the road has left her tanned and a little trimmer than she was the last time she took one of those long, judgment
al looks at herself in a mirror. When she raises her forearms she sees the bony ridge and the outlines of her muscles instead of flab, which is all she used to see. She may look just as bad to Ralph because of the not-having-a-face-lift, but she no longer gives a fuck. She is a better person now. She’s driven hyper-highways across all these Southern and Southwestern states and come up against wildly different people in a dozen cities and towns in a dozen prickly confrontations and tough moments and survived; she set out looking for her daughter and she has by God done what she vowed to do. She’s found her and for now, at least, this is better than enough. For the first time since the year she got pregnant with Annie and lost her figure, Marg Abercrombie feels good about herself. Good enough to do what she came for. She can rescue Annie and her plump friend from this tight place.
She thinks.
It is tense inside the truck.
Nobody says much. They are waiting for the back doors to swing open so they can see what they’ve been delivered here to confront.
When the diesel horn sounded and the big truck first stopped, the women and the two girls she came to help thought the next thing they were going to hear was the driver’s keys rattling in the back door. Instead they heard people talking outside. Men, they knew, but they couldn’t tell how many and they couldn’t make out what was being said. For several intolerable minutes they heard the rumble of conversation. The men sounded like a convention of bears growling in a low key. Then somebody new walked into the group and the tone changed. Through the layers of insulation they heard him shouting orders. Next—just like men—came the complaints. All Marg and the girls could make out was the tone: the budda-budda-budda of underlings grumbling about the job. Then, as nearly as they could make out, everybody went away. Did everybody on the place clear out or did they post a solitary guard before they left with instructions to shoot anybody who gets out of the van? No way to tell. At least it’s quiet now.
The longer they sit here, the easier it is to forget where they are. For the moment they’re enjoying a kind of amnesty. Marg and the girls are in stasis, halfway between here and there. Nothing much can happen to them until the back doors open.
After a while Kelly says, “The guys don’t know you’re in here with us, do they?”
Marg shakes her head.
“And they don’t know Annie’s in here.”
This surprises her. She looks at Annie. “They don’t?”
“Really. Kelly had the idea, Kelly is so smart.”
Under the daisy-printed tarpaulin, Kelly ripples happily.
This makes Annie grin. “She sneaked me out under the sheet and nobody knew. It was so cool.”
When was the last time she saw Annie smile? Marg meets her daughter’s grin with her own nice smile. “It was extremely cool.” She says to Kelly, “I have a lot to thank you for.”
But Kelly is thinking ahead. Carefully, she lays it out for them. “So nobody knows you’re here. That means you guys can get away before they come back.”
“And leave you here? No way!”
“Way. I’m not gonna make it. Not the way I am.”
“Oh, Kelly, not again. Don’t say that!”
“Face it. No way can I run.”
“If we can figure out how to do this, you’re gonna make it, Kell. If we have to, we’ll steal the truck! Mom, do you know how to drive a truck?”
“I wish. Look. I tried the back doors,” Marg tells them. “Locked from the outside. The whole thing is locked up tight.”
“You tried the windows?”
“Trucks don’t have windows.”
“What about the little thingy where you can spy on the cargo from the front?”
eep your tone light, Marg. Try not to sound desperate. “Honey, when I hid in here it was the first thing I checked.”
“Your cell phone’s dead, right?”
“The last message I got was an error message in Oklahoma City. This whole state is out of range.”
Annie says thoughtfully, “So there’s no getting in touch with—”
“Dad?” She will not let Annie hear her sigh. “I don’t think we need to be in touch with Dad right now.”
“Fuck Dad, I was going to say—”
“Language!”
“—the state police.” In the half-light like this, they could be two grown women talking, not mother/daughter sawing back and forth in the old way. “Like, didn’t the cops or somebody bring you here?”
“Not exactly,” Marg says. Hailed by the only resident of So Low, Arizona willing to talk to her, Marg followed the big woman in carefully done makeup and gaudy colors out of the restaurant and like a child who’s finally found somebody it can trust, climbed into the specially fitted SUV with the HANDICAPPED tag hanging from the rearview mirror. A bumper sticker read, BIG PRIDE. In sketchy terms but with large gestures, Marg’s first real contact filled her in as she drove:
—Yes there’s something going on out there in the desert.
—Everybody’s afraid to talk about it but everybody knows.
—There’s a lot more going on in Arizona than anybody will say. A bunch of us are working together to close in on the place and get the story out.
She said all this and would brook no questions. No matter. Marg didn’t have to ask this big, proud woman why she was involved. She knows from experience that these days, everybody who doesn’t fit the national parameters is at risk. At a gas station plopped down at a crossroads like a plastic toy, her statuesque guide turned Marg over to a fiercely handsome man in work clothes. He gave her a curt nod and shut her into his pickup truck. They rode into the gathering twilight for the better part of an hour. God knows Marg wanted to ask him where he was taking her, but he drove without speaking and the silence weighed her down. Near the end of the trip he turned onto a road where no people came.
Alone on the road, her guide stopped just long enough to wind a turban. As he did so, his sleeve fell back and she saw that his arm was tattooed with what looked like bundles of sticks. Emblem of some kind? Is that a Muslim thing? She knew better than to ask. She should have been afraid, but over time Marg Abercrombie has come too far and done too much to be afraid of men, even strangers who don’t speak. The only thing the driver said to her, and it was as they reached the barrier that the guard had turned her away from earlier that day, was: “Stay down.”
She got down on the floor of the cab and stayed down as the pickup barreled along an access road and the sun left the sky for good. They traveled for a long time with Marg hunched in an obedient crouch. By the time her driver pulled to a stop, it was night. He tapped her shoulder and with every muscle cramping she sat up, expecting instructions. Instead, he pointed. The pickup had come to a stop in the shadow of an 18-wheeler, an oversize moving van backed up to a loading dock. Artificial light poured out of the opening where the van waited like a mastodon at a watering hole. The door to the dock was the only break in a long, low cement-block structure that broke the surface of the desert like an iceberg, so bland and innocuous that anybody flying over it wouldn’t slow down for a second look. Only a desperate mother would understand that like an iceberg, it concealed a tremendous substructure. As with an iceberg, what she saw was only a fraction of what lay beneath the surface, planted deep.
“Oh my God,” she said, “is my daughter in there?”
Her driver didn’t answer. He pointed to a steel ladder planted in the cement side of the building, leading up to the dock. The back doors of the van stood open, ready to take on cargo. In a single, fluid sweep he pointed from the ladder to the ramp that led from the lip of the loading dock into the waiting truck.
“What am I supposed to do?”
How did he let her know without speaking? No matter. She knew. Get in.
Now she is here.
Annie is saying, “Well, whoever brought you, maybe they followed us and they’re like, going to help?”
“I don’t think so,” Marg says.
“You didn’t, like, ask?”
“I was so glad to find you that I kind of lost track.”
Mother/daughter. They are still mother/daughter after all. Annie’s voice hits a querulous little peak. “Now what are we going to do?”
Her long life as a mother has taught Marg patience. “Wait, I guess.”
With an effort, Kelly sits up on the gurney. “You may wonder what we’re all doing here.”
The Abercrombies swivel to look at her. “You know?”
“Pigs don’t move very fast, but—”
“Don’t call yourself that!”
“Chill, Mom, it’s kind of a joke.”
Kelly finishes, “They’re very smart. I wasn’t just buffing my toenails back there in Wellmont. I had my ear to the ground. I overheard certain things. I. Arghh.” Whatever she is remembering must be painful. She clears her throat. “Gack.”
There is a silence while they wait for her to collect herself.
After a while Kelly says, “You know they gave up on making me thin, right?”
“Oh, Kell.”
“That wasn’t what they wanted anyway. They wanted me fat.”
“Fat!” Annie’s voice goes up. “Fat! Like, for what!”
“How did you know?”
Kelly answers Marg’s question first. “For a while, of course, they tried tricky stuff with me, all-rice diet like I’d get so sick of rice that I’d take one look at my dinner and yack. Cute outfits that were too tight, like, that old incentive crap? But that was only for the first couple of months. Later it was shaming and aversion therapy with whips and cattle prods, you know. And all the time they were bringing me these special diet meals. And no matter what I did, I couldn’t lose the weight and the whole time they were making me feel shitty about not losing the weight.”
“You poor kid.”
When she raises her head and glares like that, Kelly looks like a fledgling eagle. “So pretty soon I focused on the food they were bringing in, like, even when I only ate half the stuff they were feeding me … I don’t know. I just kept putting on the weight! Then Annie and I tried our little prison break and we ended up in the Dedicated Siberia.”
