The Salt Line

by Holly Goddard Jones

  “He’s always seemed like that.”

  “Not like this. Not quite.”

  Wes ran his thumb along the pages of The Portrait of a Lady, releasing another puff of that good old book scent.

  “At any rate,” said Marta, “I made a quick decision. Maybe it was the wrong one, but I don’t think so.”

  She put out her hand, which was closed around some small object, and opened her fingers to reveal a NicoClean refill canister.

  “What is that, another Quicksilver canister?” Wes asked.

  Marta shook her head. “I thought when I brought it out here it was fifteen grams of street Salt. David gave it to me along with the Quicksilver.”

  Wes processed this oddity. “Why on earth would he do that?”

  “You flatter me,” Marta said. She smiled thinly. “Or else you see me as too old to party. Not that I ever partied, really. But I did this stuff. For years. It’s an excellent high. I have to give June and her people credit. It’s like . . . a gondola ride. Steady and smooth. I quit about a month before boot camp started, and David never knew. Hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

  “But it’s not the Salt?”

  “Oh, it’s the Salt,” Marta said. She unscrewed the cap on the vial, turned it over on its side, and tapped the contents into her left palm. A fine white powder. She rubbed it with the pad of her right forefinger, a longing, almost sensual touch. “Look inside the vial. At the very bottom.”

  Wes did, angling it toward the light coming in from the window. “Is that . . . some kind of microchip?”

  “I think so,” Marta said. “Well, I wouldn’t know, actually. I figure you’d know better than I do. But I think it’s a tracking device. I think he sent this with me to keep tabs on me. Or on you, through me.” She ran a thumb over the chip, thoughtfully. “That’s more likely, actually. He told me to stick close to you. Get to know you. I didn’t know why. And Wes, that’s not what I did. I mean, I got to know you, but not for him. I did it for me. I hope that’s clear.”

  “Hey,” Wes said. “Don’t sweat it. I believe you.” He did. “And you just happened to find it,” he mused. “The chip.”

  Marta cupped her hand and shook the powder back into the vial, then wiped her palm briskly on the leg of her microsuit. “Oh, I thought about blitzkrieging on it. By the second night in here? Oh, I thought hard. I didn’t. But it was close.”

  “So he’s tracking us,” Wes said. “He already knows where we are.”

  Marta nodded.

  “I don’t know what to do with that.”

  “I don’t either,” Marta said. “Well, I’ll say this—if our people made it back to Quarantine, David knows. Whatever stories they’ve told, whatever promises they’ve kept. He knows.”

  “Unless they didn’t make it back.”

  “Yes. Unless that.”

  “You think they might be dead,” Wes said. A wave of sorrow passed through him. He hadn’t cared much for Lee. He’d loathed Jesse. Anastasia, Wendy—they were fine, he’d liked them fine, but he felt no special kinship with them. You couldn’t endure what this group had endured together, though, and not ache at such news. How hopeful they’d all been, gathering their meager belongings, heading out to the van with Andy.

  “I think,” Marta said, “we have to consider that possibility.”

  “Oh, man.” Wes pinched his tear ducts. “Man. Wow.”

  “We can’t trust her,” Marta said. “I’m not saying I don’t sympathize with the situation here. It seems like there are some good people. June might even have their best interests at heart. But there’s some piece of the puzzle missing. Something June hasn’t told us. And she hasn’t started dosing us with the tea, either. Not even you. Or letting us roam free like she promised.”

  “Even Berto’s had trouble explaining that one away,” Wes said. “It’s been days.”

  “We have to assume the worst of them, and we have to look out for ourselves.”

  Wes swallowed hard. Then bobbed his head in assent.

  “I just want to be with my sons again. I can’t see any further ahead than that.” Marta sighed and rubbed her middle fingers along her sharp, high cheekbones. “I need to make sure you know that about me. My motives are selfish. Everything I do—it’s going to be a calculation. Whatever I think is likeliest to get me home to them. Whatever it takes.”

  “I understand,” Wes said. “So what do we do? Do you have a plan?”

  “Ha. Not as such.”

  “What then?”

  “I play it like I play chess,” Marta said. “June will come to me. She’ll want me to do something, or she’ll want to ask questions about David. Maybe she’ll kill me and send him my head. I don’t think so, though. Not yet. So right now, I wait and see. When I know her move, I’ll start thinking about mine.”

  Seventeen

  Violet has three distinct memories of the time before she escaped Flat Rock.

  The first is of her mother’s death. She’d had a baby in her belly, she’d explained to Violet (though Violet wasn’t Violet then; Violet’s very young, very well-meaning mother had saddled her with the name Alexandria Magnificent—Alma, thankfully, for short), and the baby had hurt her bad coming out and then ended up dying after all the trouble it had put her through. Violet’s mother was laid up after the birth in their camper, thin under a thinner blanket, and a red bloom had suddenly appeared down where her tummy was, the size of a saucer and then, in seconds, the size of a dinner plate. “Alma,” she’d said, face white as bone and lips the faded blue-gray of a winter sky, “you got to run and get Big Mama right this instant.” And Violet (Alma) had. She had dragged Big Mama, muttering and cursing, to the camper by her index finger. But Violet’s mother was dead by the time they returned. “Mommy,” Violet had said, jabbing the body. “Mommy. Mommy, wake up.”

  Big Mama had slapped her jabbing hand. “Quit that. Your mumma’s dead. Go lay in your bed and hush up before you give me a headache.”

  The second memory of that time is from some summer night. Wall Day, maybe, and there were fireworks over the lake, and this man (his face was a blank to her now, but he’d had a mustache) had made her go with him, she had been very scared, this hadn’t happened before, and Big Mama had said to her, “Put your big girl britches on. It’ll be over before you know it.” So she had expected something very bad, but the man had only hoisted her to the top of his camper, held her hand while the black sky was fissured with gold and green and red, and she hadn’t liked his sweaty palm much, or his loud, stuttering respirations, but he was nice, he didn’t hurt her, and he’d even given her a soft brown sweet square that melted on her tongue. The most extraordinary thing she’d ever tasted.

  This is a good memory. Violet is grateful that one of the three is.

  It would be inaccurate, really, to say the third memory is “distinct.” It lacks form, it lacks narrative. But it makes up for these lacks in its intensity, a story told by sensation—a pain so large and long it nearly blots out every other sense. The pain is

  ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAR

  a thing that keeps happening, that she participates in, it is outside of time, somehow, so that what Violet remembers of her agony might only be its first few shocking seconds, or minutes, or of all the weeks that followed them. There is the pain, the primal enduring roar of it, and a
handful of other sensations that flare across the roar like—well—fireworks. Blinding light, then a dark blot moving across it. Screams. A brief dimming of the pain when something cool and thick touches her neck, and the odd sticky, crackling sound the cool stuff made. Like river mud when it sucks at your boots. This is a comparison Violet can only make now, because she didn’t have boots when she lived at Flat Rock, and she’d never seen a river. Only the lake, the lake so expansive from Violet’s brief glimpses of it that it might as well have been an ocean.

  Violet can remember other things about her years at Flat Rock, but what she remembers are amalgams of many moments and many days. Her walk from home to Fat Daddy’s camper. Shaquoia—she was the one who took Violet (Alma) in after her mother died—frying fish patties on the camper’s little hot plate, and the accompanying smells of oily tinned fish and hot old grease.

  A flicker here, at this memory. A very bad thing. But Violet doesn’t pursue the thought, has no desire to follow it where it goes.

  There was a game she would sometimes play with the other squirrels, if no one needed them, and they kept very, very quiet. Duck, duck, goose. She remembers how it felt to whisper-giggle, needing to laugh but never sure what the laugh would cost you.

  There were many hurts. Violet doesn’t remember breaking her arm or her leg, she doesn’t remember any one of the hundreds of hits or bruises—but she has a composite memory of Fat Daddy’s furious face, Big Mama’s long-suffering face, a composite memory of the hits and bruises, of the way a bruise starts deep purple and fades to yellow. She has a composite memory of being afraid. Constantly.

  Violet doesn’t remember why she was burned. This is partly because she never knew and partly because there is no why. If a hypnotist or witch doctor were to make Violet remember what immediately preceded the roar, Violet would be able to tell him that Shaquoia was cooking the fish patties, like she did at least once or twice a week, and that Fat Daddy had come over. She would be able to tell him that she was sitting on the floor in what Shaquoia called “the den,” which was really just the open middle space of the tiny camper, putting together a puzzle that had belonged to Shaquoia’s son before he died. She could tell him about an angry shout, and how she’d looked up in the shout’s direction. That was it. One second her eyes were fixed on the puzzle. Mickey Mouse hugging Pluto. A piece was missing, right at the bottom of Pluto’s tongue, and each time Violet (Alma) took apart the puzzle and put it back together, she harbored the vague hope that the piece would suddenly appear, though it never did. The next second she looks up. Then the roar.

  What happened is that Fat Daddy got angry at Shaquoia. There is no why here, either. Fat Daddy got angry a lot. Fat Daddy was missing some essential piece of his humanity. He got angry, and before he could even register his intention, he was grabbing the hot skillet and flinging its contents at the child.

  Then the roar.

  Violet doesn’t remember exactly how old she was that night—which was seven, barely, her birthday passing just a few days earlier without her or any other living person’s knowing—or how long the formless, all-encompassing pain lasted after the burn: months. She doesn’t know that Shaquoia spent her meager savings paying one of her regulars, a logger named Teddy, to steal some burn salve and antibiotics from his company’s infirmary, how she did her best to scrub Violet’s (Alma’s) wounds clean, the way Flat Rock’s harried med-tech instructed her to, but the child’s screams threatened to draw down on them Fat Daddy’s wrath all over again, and so an infection set in, and that was why Violet lost her eye. She doesn’t know that the salve ran out, and there was no money to get more, and so the healing tissue grew hard and contracted, and Shaquoia despaired because there was nothing to be done, short of slathering the child with lard, and Fat Daddy and Big Mama kept telling her to just let them put Alma out of her misery (as if the two of them knew how to do anything but create misery), and she had just about resolved that this was the right thing, the kindest thing, when Teddy offered to get the child out of camp and hand her over to someone who could help her.

  Violet doesn’t know that Teddy, who’d acted in offering to help Shaquoia on a vaguely well-meaning impulse—he was a devout Pentecostal, had always felt guilty about patronizing the Flat Rock camp, though not guilty enough to stop—panicked shortly after smuggling Violet out. What on earth was he going to do with her? Why hadn’t he thought this through? So he’d given her one of his night-night-sleepy-time pills (there went five credits down the crapper), driven a few kilometers off his path back to the logging camp, and walked the child into the woods a little, to a nice, quiet spot where no one would bother her. Like many people who derive their sense of goodness from their religious affiliation rather than their actions, Teddy was able to soothe himself with the belief that this was part of God’s plan, and if the child were meant to survive, God would protect her. If she didn’t—well, paradise would be her reward.

  —

  Violet, since moving out of June and Roz’s place eight years ago, kept a bed at Central Bunkhouse. She had at least a decade (close to two, in some cases) on the building’s other seven habitants, who all worked the flower crop during the growing season and spent the off-seasons on production. Violet was treated by this group with reverent disinterest, like a dotty old aunt who kept changing the names in her will. This was fine by her. The bunkhouse’s list of occupants changed over time, but its attendant passions and dramas did not. They fell in and out of friendships, in and out of one another’s beds (tipsily cavorting in the early a.m. hours under the bedsheets, as if a thin layer of cotton soundproofed their fucking). Eventually, they fucked around enough to start thinking about settling, then paired off, moved out, and some new seventeen- or eighteen-year-olds would take their place. The bunkhouse had slept as many as twenty at a time. Eight, the current number, was as low as Violet had ever known it to be.

  Still, she preferred the bunkhouse to June’s place—she was too old, had long been too old, to keep playing the child, the daughter. June had offered to build Violet her own little cabin—even up in the woods a bit, if what Violet wanted was some privacy and distance—but Violet had turned her down. She wasn’t good with other people. Other people weren’t good with her. But she couldn’t function alone, either. Couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t turn off her mind. Her parade of bunkmates—young, unblemished, caught up in their absurd romances, their petty grievances—were harmless. Sleeping among them was a bit like sleeping among one of Roz’s litters of pups. They were loud and messy, liked to roll each other, liked to get into pointless tussles, but they didn’t know how to inflict real hurt. Not even when they whispered things that Violet could overhear (“Shh, you’ll wake up ol’ Candleface”). They seemed to assume that her ears didn’t work because she was missing an eye. Or that her brain didn’t work. Violet wasn’t motivated to change their minds. She used them, hid behind them. A wall of good fortune. Nothing could reach her through them.

  Wednesday morning, she rolled over, turning her back to the others, and listened as they rose, dressed, heated the teakettle to whistling. There was a rustling behind her. “Violet, I’m putting your tea over here on the table. OK?” Meg, it sounded like. A nice girl. The oldest in the bunkhouse, after Violet.

  “OK,” Violet said. “Thanks,” she remembered to add.

  “Are you sick? Do you need anything?”

  “I’m fine,” Violet said. “Just another headache. I’ll be up soon.”

  “All right,” Meg said. “Find me if you need me.”

  Violet didn’t reply. In a few more minutes, the bunkhouse cleared and she finally had some quiet.

  She rolled onto her back and stared at a water stain on the ceiling, blinking until its familiar shape (like a four-fingered hand) came into focus. The vision in her eye was weakening. Slowly, but noticeably. What would she do if—when—it worsened?

  No. She wasn’t going to think about that right now.


  She waited.

  Twenty seconds. Sixty. Two minutes. There. It happened again. She hadn’t dreamed it.

  The sensation was both intimate and distant. It was like a single piano note in a large, empty auditorium. A flare of light across a night sky. A crackle of static across dead air.

  Her baby. Moving.

  She never smiled. A smile sat stiffly and uncomfortably on her face, pulled at the tendons of her neck. She felt lit from within, though: a secret smile, one that touched her eyes if not her lips. My baby. Mine. She had been walking around for the last three months in a daze of disbelief and terror that occasionally verged into wonderment, though never for very long. Her first clue hadn’t been morning sickness—she’d not once thrown up. Her breasts had knotted like fists. Then, shortly after, she noticed a funny twisting sensation in her abdomen, as if hands were gently but firmly wringing her insides. Doc Owle had made her wait another full week before giving her one of his precious supply of pregnancy tests, and the results had been decisive. As soon as her urine traveled up the stick, the pregnancy indicator line blazed bright purple, darker than the control line.

  Owle had let out a halting laugh. “Well,” he said. “Look at that.”

  Look at that. She did. She looked and looked, a thrill racing through her body and setting her heart to pounding. Still, it didn’t sink in. It didn’t sink in then, or each of the times she came to Owle’s house so he could check her blood pressure and question her about how she was feeling. Only this morning, when she first felt that distant chord getting played deep within her, did she trust what Owle insisted was happening to her. Her body—her abused, broken, pain-racked body, this body she had spent most of her lifetime hating—had done something good. Her baby. She had done this.

  “Hello in there,” Violet said, more terrified than ever.