The Salt Line

by Holly Goddard Jones

  “I’m so sorry,” he said. He added in a rush, “I know how it looked. How it seemed. I know why you did what you did. But I want you to know your life was never in danger.” He wasn’t sure this was true, but he continued, anyway. “I wouldn’t have let anything happen to you, Tia.” Why was he telling her this? Stealing what might have been her only reassurance—that she had no choice? “I just don’t want you to think I’d have done that to you. That I’m that sort of person.”

  Well, there it was.

  “And . . . I’ll make sure Berry has everything she needs. That she wants for nothing.” An even bigger lie. With what? Ruby City’s largesse?

  “I’m sorry,” he repeated. He looked into her eyes, hoping to see—forgiveness? Absolution? They watered again, blinked. Another set of twin tears ran toward her chin.

  “Can you close your eyes?” he asked her. He thumbed the safety on his gun back off. “If you can, you might want to close them.”

  Thirteen

  There were three body-shapes laid across the smooth plank floors of Town Hall.

  “I wanted you to see for yourself,” June said. “I wanted you to know what she did, and I wanted you to know what we didn’t do.” She sighed and motioned to Andy. “Show them Leeda and Miles first.”

  He hunched down and peeled back the muslin covering the first body-shape, then the second, making neat rolls of the material down to the figures’ waists. The arms were slim, smooth-skinned. The boy’s were tanned, thatched with curly dark hair. The girl’s were milky-pale and freckled. A spill of light brown hair had been brushed neatly around the girl’s shoulders. The head above that spill of hair was a chin and lips and a beak of nose with a red wet crater opening above the nose. The boy still had a visible eye. Open. Edie couldn’t make out the color from here.

  She remembered them both from the barbecue by the river. The girl had offered to hold Edie’s beer while she went through the line for food. She had slung her gun over her back to extend a free hand. “I can get that for you,” she’d said.

  “Jesus Christ, cover them up,” Lee Flannigan said.

  Andy looked up at June. She dropped her chin in acknowledgment, and he rolled the muslin back up.

  “Andy found the young woman from your group this morning, several kilometers east of here. He and another of our group tracked her with trained dogs. The dogs first landed on what turned out to be the contents of her ejected Stamp. Then they found her. She was—well, you should tell it, Andy.”

  “Paralyzed,” he said hoarsely. “Propped up against a tree and breathing, but that’s it.”

  “Shreve’s,” June said, as if this wasn’t already clear. “I warn you that there’s a gunshot wound. Andy didn’t want her to suffer.”

  Edie waited for the sarcastic, doubting retort to that—from Lee, or even Jesse—but no one spoke.

  Andy hunched down at Tia’s side and rolled the cloth sideways this time, so that most of her body was exposed. Her head had rolled to the side, so that the bullet’s exit wound was mostly hidden from sight. Andy slid his fingers gently under the body’s shoulder and arm and tipped it in the same direction, turning it so that the body was slumped three-quarters of the way to prone, hips hovering awkwardly in space. Edie could see now that Tia’s microsuit, which was blood-soaked, had been cleanly cut down the middle of the back. Andy folded these flaps open, revealing the ragged deep wound they’d seen in the video on that first day of boot camp, saucer-sized, positioned almost exactly between the shoulder blades. Bone—her spine, it must be—winked from the churned red meat.

  Andy stayed hunched, with his back to them, for a strangely long time. Edie realized he was crying.

  “So that’s that,” June said flatly. “Three dead. For nothing.”

  “Four dead,” said Lee. “Your girl shot Mickey.”

  “Mickey was going to have a goddamn hole in his neck just like that in another six or ten hours,” Andy said roughly. He repositioned Tia’s microsuit, rolled her flat, and covered the body again with the muslin. “We did him a kindness. Just like I did Tia.”

  “Two of yours. Two of ours,” June said. “So here’s my question: Can we put an end to this?”

  “There’s a big difference between your dead and ours,” Wendy Tanaka said. “You caused this situation. We didn’t. This isn’t even our fight. Everything you told Wes about your situation could be true, and that doesn’t change the fact that no one here is that Perrone guy.”

  June closed her eyes and made a temple of her hands, pressing the index fingers between her eyebrows and inhaling deeply. “I am asking for a few weeks of your time. Weeks. Weeks you planned to spend out here anyway. I am offering you protection during that time. So this”—she pointed at Tia—“can’t happen to you. And you don’t have to use a single Stamp, and you don’t even have to sleep in your tents if you don’t want to. I’m asking you that in the name of four hundred sixty-eight innocent people.” She stopped. “Four hundred sixty-six. We’re not an army. We’re not bad people. We gave teenagers guns because we didn’t have a better option. I made a call, and it might have been the wrong call, but it was the best I knew to do at the time, and I’m asking you now for some understanding, for some humanity. Wait three weeks. Andy will take you to Quarantine 1 on the scheduled date. The end.”

  “May I speak?” Wes asked.

  “Please,” June said tiredly. “Go ahead.”

  “I believe you. I sympathize with you. With everything you said. I’m willing to stay; in fact, I want to stay. Send the rest back. Do it as a gesture of goodwill. If Perrone wants his Pocketz deal so badly, he’s not going to blow you up while I’m unaccounted for.”

  June shook her head. “No. I send the rest back, and as soon as they’re over the border, and they’re getting asked, ‘Where’s Feingold?’ they spill everything. And then Perrone’s the least of our concerns. Then we’ve got the Atlantic Zone cavalry charging, and I know how these people work better than you do. They shoot first, and then they burn the bodies. They don’t ask questions. They don’t investigate.”

  “What if we just promise to tell them Wes wandered off, got lost?” Anastasia asked. “We say that’s why we came back early.”

  June faltered, looking down at the bodies. Edie felt for her now not just an intellectual sort of sympathy, impersonal, hypothetical, but something more acute than that. And the thing was: she was out here now. What did she have to get back to in such a hurry? Jesse’s apartment, where she tried to make herself unobtrusive and small, so he would like having her around, so he’d never tire of her, so he’d not get to the point of saying: Maybe it’s time you found your own place. That? Or her grief? Or the job she quit, because she thought she hated it, and she no longer needed it, only to discover that hate is relative—that when you have no money of your own, no outside force shaping your days, you might long for even some low-wage drudgery?

  “I’ll stay,” Edie blurted out. “I’ll do the three weeks.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Jesse said. “Are you nuts? Why would you say that?”

  She hadn’t even thought of him, honestly—she hadn’t thought of what her intention to stay would mean to him or require of him. When she gave Jesse the go-ahead to book her on this excursion, it had occurred to her that the trip would fall during what would have been her due date. It was one of the reasons she’d decided, Fuck it. I’ll go. A strange impulse—she knew it even then. Was she trying to distract herself? Punish herself? The baby might have not been Jesse’s, and he had never, probably, done the math she had done, the counting forward of squares on a calendar; there was no reason he’d have known to mark the day when it came, and he probably wouldn’t have understood, even if Edie tried to explain it to him, how she could be both gloriously relieved, and grateful, and free of regret, but also . . . something else. The abortion wasn’t the great loss of her life, but it would probably always be the greatest
mystery; with no other choice could Edie imagine a drastically different parallel version of herself, an Edie catapulted into a radically different future with its own joys and miseries.

  “I’ll stay,” Edie repeated. “But Jesse goes back. And you’ll know he’ll stick to any story you want him to because you’ll have me here.”

  “Fuck no,” Jesse said. “I don’t agree to that.”

  Berto put a hand into the air. “Me, too. Same deal. I stay, Anastasia goes back.”

  Anastasia blanched. “No, Berto! No, I stay, too. We don’t split up, ever.” Tears spilled down her cheeks, and Berto grabbed her, pulled her tawny head close and buried his face in her neck—a rough embrace, Edie thought at first, but then she saw that he was whispering something in her ear, and she kept shaking her head, and then she finally stopped and just leaned on his chest, shoulders quaking.

  “I’ll have to think about this,” June said. She was looking at the bodies on the floor, but she seemed to be seeing through them, or just short of them, her mind working on an equation, carrying the one, moving the decimal.

  “I don’t agree to it,” Jesse repeated. His jaw moved, and he shot Edie a look of anger like she’d never once seen from him. There was no threat in it; that wasn’t what rattled her. He seemed gutted. Like she’d betrayed him. Like he was realizing, suddenly, that he didn’t know her at all.

  “Take them back to the shed,” June told Andy, still off in her own head. “I need to consider this from every angle.” Her pale gray eyes sharpened as she looked up, and she seemed to direct her last words right at Edie: “Sounds like you all do, too.”

  —

  That night, the hostages talked around the lantern for hours, circling the same handful of worries and hopes, reaching no new conclusions. Finally, exhausted, they doused the light and retreated to the shed’s corners, as far from one another as the small space would allow. Togetherness had accomplished nothing, Edie supposed. So now they were planets, flung away from the warm center, alone and committed to their own solitary orbits.

  Edie was no longer sure if she and Jesse shared an orbit, but she followed him to the spot he’d staked out near the door, and she slid into the sleeping bag behind him, pressing her chest, her stomach, her thighs, against his back, his legs. He held himself rigid, all bony shoulder and hip. Making a wall of himself.

  She wriggled up, so she could put her mouth near his ear. “Don’t be mad at me,” she whispered.

  He pulled his shoulder roughly forward. “What do you want from me?” He wasn’t keeping his voice very low. “I’m supposed to leave you here? Or you want me to stay, maybe. Say I’m going to stay with you. Or maybe you want me to volunteer in your place. Maybe that’s what you’ve been angling for.”

  “You know that’s not true,” Edie hissed. “That doesn’t even make sense.”

  He sighed, and his back softened slightly. “I don’t know how to do the right thing here. You’ve put me in an impossible position. I don’t even know what the right thing is.” He was whispering now, too, at least. Though Edie didn’t doubt that anyone in the room who wished to follow the conversation could.

  “You go home,” Edie said. “In a few weeks, you pick me up from Quarantine. That’s what you do.”

  “That’s not what will happen and you know it,” Jesse said. “You trust these people. Why? What have they done to deserve that from you?”

  “Nothing,” Edie said. “I just feel like this is the right thing to do.” What she actually felt, saying this, was absurd. She had always scorned people who made statements like this: claims about their gut, their instincts. And what she felt, the impulse she’d acted on, it wasn’t even anything so sophisticated as an act of the gut. She’d simply acted, thoughtlessly. And for some reason, she didn’t regret it.

  “Or maybe this is about me,” he continued, as if she hadn’t spoken. “Maybe you want rid of me so bad you’re willing to risk your life.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “No, that’s not it at all.” She hugged him as fiercely as she could, one-armed, awkward. “I love you, Jesse,” she said, and she found that she meant it—she did love him—he was a good and flawed man who had given her a reason to keep living when she’d despaired of ever finding one. “I do.”

  “I have a feeling, too,” Jesse said. “You know it? I have a feeling that we do this, and we never see each other again. That’s what I think. You and I split up, and that’s the end.”

  “No,” she repeated. She rubbed her nose against the back of his neck, left-right, in refutation. “No.” She slid her hand forward, grasping the zipper of his microsuit, and worked it down as quietly as she could, though the noise was still humiliatingly loud in the little room, and Jesse jolted from the surprise of it. Still, though, she proceeded, his zipper, then hers, and he rolled onto his back, and she climbed atop him and leaned forward and whispered “No” into his ear again. The air in the shed was hot and close, the nearest person maybe half a dozen paces away, but she needed with all her heart to tell him this loving lie, and to make herself believe it, and so she said “No” again, this time in his other ear, and they moved quickly together, and Edie’s insides rang with the unexpected thrill of it, the audacity of it, and in this way they said goodbye to each other for good.

  For now, Edie amended, lying beside him, catching her breath. Goodbye. For now.

  Fourteen

  Some Sunday mornings, when most of the villagers were gathered at Town Hall for the church service, June and Roz stayed home and had their own sacred ritual. Once a month, they cut each other’s hair.

  Well, June cut Roz’s. When June’s frizzy curls crept past her shoulders, she’d take a turn on the stool as Roz snip-snip-snipped. But that was an easy job, one blunt pass across the length, no trick to it. Took only five or ten minutes. Roz’s hair, on the other hand, was straight and fine, and she, unlike June, was particular about the cut. She liked a kind of fade (the best June could manage without electric clippers) from crown to nape, then some longer layers on top and in the front. Utilitarian without being outright severe. It took a lot of work and skill to give Roz her signature look, and it struck them both as funny that June was the one who seemed, with her halo of feminine fluff, to be the half of the couple who made an effort.

  But it was a pleasure, cutting Roz’s hair. A little music on the crank-charged Lily Pad—June had an extensive cache of digital audio files, though she found herself returning again and again to country singers from a long-gone age: Loretta Lynn, Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Conway Twitty, Tammy Wynette—a pot of their daily dose of Salt tea, the window open to catch a breeze, weather permitting. They had their most important conversations this way, with June’s fingers running along Roz’s scalp, measuring, comparing lengths, and the whisk of the scissors just audible over the soundtrack of steel guitar and fiddle. This Sunday, June was talking her way around the situation with the OLE group, and what had happened to Leeda and Miles. Rambling, really. She’d said a lot of this before, but Roz was listening carefully anyway, offering affirmations in the right places, and the princes were snoring amiably at their feet.

  “There are the rare people, like my daddy was, who live their beliefs. Crazy people, usually. Like Daddy. He was brilliant but crazy. He gave up his vestment, his whole way of life, and moved out here, because he thought it was the right thing to do.”

  “So did your mother,” Roz said.

  “But she wasn’t crazy.” June combed Roz’s bangs up, tweezed them between her right forefinger and middle finger, and did some expert quick cuts with the scissors pointed at the sprigs of hair. She was good at this. She took pride in it. “Mom went along with it. I guess that’s a kind of crazy. But it wasn’t her vision.”

  “All right,” Roz said. “I’m following.”

  “Daddy was a good kind of crazy. Useful. Then there’s the bad kind of crazy, like the fundamentalists,
but those are two sides of a coin. Anyway, the ones who actually live what they believe are the rarest.”

  “Thank goodness,” Roz said.

  June laughed. “Yes, maybe so. The rest of us in the middle—what we think and do’s trickier. We’re trickier. We trick ourselves. We convince ourselves that we’re living according to our beliefs when we aren’t. Or we change our beliefs so they line up with how we live. Or we don’t believe anything.”

  “Or don’t give it any thought one way or the other.”

  “Oh, sure,” said June. “Which is maybe the same thing as not believing.” She swatted Roz’s shoulder. “Stop drinking for a minute. You’re moving your head too much.”

  “Garsh, sorry.”

  “Take me. I’m not like Daddy. I don’t have that kind of genius, and I don’t have that kind of crazy. I’m out here because I was raised out here. I don’t kid myself that I’d have been a crusader if Mama and Daddy had given me a life in-zone the way they could have.”

  “Well,” Roz said, “I give you more credit than you give yourself, then.”

  “You shouldn’t,” June said. “What I’m saying is, I don’t hold it against them, the Zoners. How they live. There’s a gift in not getting. You’re never asked to give it up. You don’t have to decide if you’re going to live with your hypocrisy or make a sacrifice that no one else around you’s willing to make, just as a symbol. That’s what we’re up against.” She combed her fingers down Roz’s neck, grazing gently, thoughtful. “I never saw myself winning those people over with just a sad story. But I thought our sad story might make them trust our good intentions long enough to get us to the next step.”

  Roz leaned her head back into the motion of June’s fingers, sighing.

  “Those deaths have been wearing on me,” June said. “Even that woman, Tia’s.” She paused, her finger pads resting on Roz’s head. “I’d hoped it wouldn’t come to that. Shreve’s is a terrible way to go.”