by D. J. Molles
Virgil stepped off to the side as he entered the living room. He appeared distracted. Preoccupied in his thoughts.
In the corner of the living room there was small stack of cardboard crates with generic, industrial labeling on the sides. Most of it was in Chinese.
Virgil picked up two of these boxes, which was more than an armload, and he walked to Walt, very businesslike, and shoved them into his arms.
Walt looked at them with a frown. “What the hell is this?”
“Payment.”
Walt’s eyebrows went up. “Payment?”
“It’s cancer meds.” Virgil planted his hands on his hips and didn’t look at Walt. He looked at the other two crates of meds. “The shit that actually works. The shit that the Fed won’t approve.”
Walt had a million questions in that instant, but he shook his head like he was trying to get a cloud of gnats to stop buzzing in his ears, and glared at Virgil. “What am I supposed to do with this shit? I thought the deal was for money.”
Virgil finally looked at him. “Each cycle goes for almost four thousand on the street. And there are one hundred and twenty cycles in a box.” He lifted his arms in a sorry-not-sorry gesture. “We’re not exactly flush with cash right now. And besides, your help was minimally necessary today.”
Minimally necessary? Really?
Walter knew for a fact that his ability to tell a lie from a truth had turned a potentially long interrogation into a short, perfunctory extraction of information. He had saved them time, in a situation where time was worth their lives.
But suddenly, saying any of this seemed useless.
Walt stared at the boxes in his arms. Mouth open. He closed it.
A sinking, frustrated disappointment. The feeling of knowing you’re being cheated, and simultaneously knowing there isn’t shit you’re going to be able to do about it. Was he going to lodge a formal compliant? Take Virgil to small claims for unpaid criminal labors?
“Motherfucker,” Walt mumbled, more to the world and all its shitty circumstances than to Virgil himself.
So the wind blows.
“Ayuh, well…” Virgil trailed off.
Walt stared at him.
Virgil seemed to have already forgotten about Walt. His eyes were staring at nothing, thinking, computing, turning things over in his head.
“Who are the Eudys?” Walt ventured.
Virgil looked at him like Walt was a statue that had suddenly moved and talked.
He sniffed loudly, wiped under his nose, then shook his head. “Nobody. It doesn’t concern you.”
“Of course not.”
Virgil’s expression softened a bit. “Look, man. You don’t want to be a part of this. You’ve said that from day one. So I’m trying to keep you from being a part of this. Do you want to be a part of it?”
Walt rolled his eyes.
“Do you want to be a part of it?” Virgil said, more sternly. “Because I’ll take you on in a heartbeat. I’d love to have you. We could use you. But you know the cost. You know what it takes. And you’ve already made it clear that you’re not willing to pay it. So don’t treat me like the asshole, alright? You want in, you can be in. But then you’re in all the way. You can’t straddle the line.” He moved his hands from one side of his body to the other, a clear delineation of this here, and this here. “If you’re in, you’re in. If you’re out, you’re out.”
Walt nodded. “Right. I know.”
“And you’re out.” It was less of a question, and more of a confirmation of what was already known.
“Ayuh,” Walt turned himself for the door. “I’m out.”
He opened the door, and then stopped himself. He stood there for a second or two, staring out into the darkness outside, and he thought about the CoAx troops, the convoys racing to and fro, the flights of gunships going fast and low over the skies. The blocked exits.
All of it created an undefined fear in his stomach.
He turned to look over his shoulder at Virgil. “The purges. Are they real? Or are they just rumor?”
A dark rumor. Something whispered about, but it was treated like a conspiracy theory. Someone knew someone who knew someone who had been in a district when it had been purged. But there were no videos of it, no pictures of it. No proof that it had ever happened.
In fact, Walter felt silly asking the question.
Virgil shook his head. “No, Walt. The purges are just rumor and hyperbole.”
Walter watched the other man’s face for a moment and read perfectly easily the reality that was hiding behind Virgil’s overt expression. He nodded curtly to Virgil, and then went out the door and closed it behind him.
But as he walked through the crisp night air to his truck, the thing he’d seen hiding in Virgil’s tiny facial cues troubled him.
Virgil was being deceptive.
***
Walt’s Pops lived in an old duplex that he’d moved to not long after Mom breathed her last breaths, laying in a utilitarian hospital bed in the Fed-run cancer clinic just outside of their Agrarian District. They did “all that they could.” Which wasn’t enough.
“All that they could” didn’t include using medicine that had been proven to work elsewhere in the world. Such as the box of meds that now sat in the back of Walt’s truck cab.
And what was a family of growers supposed to do about it? Buy tickets to the UK? Pay for that treatment out of pocket? It was a thing so far outside of the realm of their financial possibilities that they’d hardly considered it, except to look bitterly up at it, like one might look at a mountain that you know you can never climb, but which, at the top, lies all the answers to your problems.
So she died in the bed. As she knew that she was going to when the second and third lines of defense didn’t stop the rampaging “red lung” from spreading out from her chest to other vitals and organs. She died, just like Walt’s Pops knew she was going to. Just like Walt knew she was going to.
Just like all the others.
So the wind blows.
And soon after, Pops signed the lease of Walt’s childhood house over to him and Carolyn, and moved out to a duplex that was dirt cheap because it was barely habitable, but he insisted. Said it was Walt and Carolyn’s turn to make a family. He remembered too well the unpleasant memories of raising his own family with Grandpa Clarence ever-present.
Pops had still been working then. And the duplex left him enough money to help Walt and Carolyn maintain the rent on the old house until they got better secured on their feet. Eventually, Walt went from being a line-knocker on a maintenance rig, to an equipment operator, and Carolyn pulled a supervisor spot at the Town Center messhall, and they were able to pay their own way, although it was still tight.
After that, Pops took his Retirement Subsidy, which allowed him just enough to pay for his duplex, plus food. He lived a very quiet, very lonely existence, Walt thought.
A year after he’d taken his retirement, he’d been diagnosed.
He’d refused treatment. Knew it would be ineffective, as it was with most. Knew it would only steal his last few years away from him, sinking them into constant sickness worse than the cancer itself, and all his days spent inside doctor’s offices, those medical staffs becoming his new family while his last remaining son passed by like a short, pleasant dream when he had time, which would not be often.
That was not how he wanted to go.
Pops was a stubborn man. He wanted to go on his own terms.
And, Walt wasn’t so sure that he didn’t just want to go, period.
Which was why he harbored no great hope when he put the box of meds with the Chinese writing on them under his arm, and he climbed the short, rickety wooden steps to his father’s front door and knocked.
He could hear the TV.
The news. Always the news, rambling on and on about the same old shit presented in new and not-so-exciting ways. Pops was addicted to it.
Walt got no response from his first knock—probably couldn�
��t be heard over the TV, or maybe Pops was napping in the glow and babble. He knocked a little harder.
“Pops. It’s me,” he called through the door.
A hack. Cough.
“What?” The voice on the other side was irritated. “Who is it?”
“Walter.” He looked down at the box under his arm. Then felt the need to clarify: “Your son.”
A grunt. Then another racking cough that sounded a lot like his mother’s racking cough, except for just a touch deeper in pitch.
That was the way of it all, wasn’t it? You live, you work, you procreate, then you get sick from the shit they force you to be around and you die.
What a wonderfully purposeless life. Like a crane fly. Those poor bumbling insects that popped up around this time of year, lived for a few days, just to fly clumsily around, mating with each other and then dying. The whole of their existence to provide food for predators, restart their species’ life-cycle, and then pass on.
So the wind blows.
“Walt?” the voice said, coming closer to the door.
“Yeah, Pops.”
The door opened.
Walter Lawrence Baucom II stood there in the doorway, looking at Walter Lawrence Baucom III.
Pops was a shorter man, just like Walt was a shorter man. Until recently, they’d stood at about the same height. But sometime in the past few months, almost so fast that Walt started to find it hard to recognize him, Pops’s shoulders had rounded, and his thick chest and sunken in, and he’d become stooped, as it seemed all old men became eventually. Like they could no longer bear the mantle of their lives. The years like burdens that drove them steadily into the ground.
He had clear blue eyes, but he was the only one in the family. Walt’s Mom had been a brunette with brown eyes, and both of their children favored her in this aspect. But where Roy had also inherited Mom’s softer features, Walt had taken his father’s hawk nose and his thin lips, and his angular cheeks and jaw.
Those same features looked back at him now, but they seemed…melted.
Pops smiled, but there was hesitation in it. He was pleased—painfully pleased—for the company, but this was not Walt’s usual time to drop by. In fact, it was getting a bit late in the evening. And unannounced drop-ins at later hours were usually omens of unpleasant things to come.
“Walter!” Pops said, and reached out, grabbing his son around the shoulders with arms that still had a lot of strength in them, but were a far cry from what they’d been only a year before, and the soft, trembling embrace broke Walt’s heart.
“Hey, Pops,” he said, hugging his father back. He let himself be drawn into the doorway, and Pops swung it closed with a surprising bang, and locked it with the suddenness of someone who thinks the enemy is lurking in the shadows outside.
Pops turned and looked at him, bushy, graying eyebrows up. “It’s kinda late,” he observed, then waved the statement away. “Not that I mind. Shit, I can’t sleep for anything these days. Usually don’t doze off until two in the morning. It’s good to see you. Just surprised.”
Walt forced a smile. “How are you feeling?”
Pops grunted again, and Walt heard a slight wheeze in the exhale that came after. The older man moved passed him, smirking with one side of his mouth, an expression without much real humor. Perhaps a little irony was all.
“Like ten pounds of shit in a five pound sack, Walter.” Pops moved into the living room where the big blue screen continued to flicker, the volume now turned down to almost nothing, just a faint trickle, like someone had left the water on in the bathroom.
The living room was about all there was to this place. An attached kitchen. A bathroom. A bedroom. The duplex was tiny. And it smelled.
It had smelled when Walt had helped moved his Pops in, and the odor had not improved. He didn’t think it was his father, who had always been almost prissily clean for someone who spent nearly twenty years on the line rigs before moving up to a tractor. And he was still getting around good enough to take care of himself.
No, the place just stank. As houses went, this one was a rotting corpse.
Walt wondered, and not for the first time, if the duplex might be exacerbating some of his father’s symptoms.
Pops found his chair again—the very same, ancient faux-leather recliner that Grandpa Clarence used to commandeer for the better part of every day, with a whiskey bottle in his lap and an unused tumbler sitting on a table, a pointless affectation of restraint.
“Sit down,” Pops said, pointing at the only other seat in the living room, an old wooden chair that looked like the missing piece of a dining set. Another little piece of furniture with ancient memories attached to it, these ones of Walt when he was small enough to crawl under tables, the image, the feeling, of clambering through the legs of that chair, a secret tunnel, a little burrow for his wondering young mind.
Walt considered refusing the seat, but then…what the hell? He was tired. Mentally. Physically. He wanted to sit. He sat down slowly, feeling his age, which was silly, because it wasn’t much of an age, he was still young. Should his knees ache like that? Should his back?
Maybe the first whispers of red lung, echoing through his body.
He put the box of meds on his lap. When he looked across at Pops, the older man’s eyes were on the box, a question in them, but then they went up to Walt’s face, and his father smiled, more congenially, and chose the route of small talk.
“How’s Carolyn?”
Walt smiled politely. “Good. No complaints.”
“Still no chaps on the way?”
Walt sucked his front teeth. “Come on, Pops.” He looked away. “You know the situation.”
“Eh.” Pops sneered. “Fuck the situation.” He chuffed. Made a series of other, wordless sounds of indignation. “It’s ridiculous. Insane. I would’ve never imagined it’d be like this, Walt. Never would have imagined.” He jabbed a finger at Walt. “And they can’t tell you what to do like that. They can’t.”
Walt shrugged with his eyebrows. “They can, Pops. And they do. And they have. For pretty much my entire life.”
This conversation had happened before, between each generation of Baucoms, and Walter knew it. Between Walter Lawrence Baucom I and Grandpa Clarence. And between Grandpa Clarence and Pops. And now between Pops and him.
Each telling the other that their hindsight was truly clear, and that things had gotten out of control.
But to the generation being told it was just…life.
When Grandpa Clarence had been an adult, the CoAx had just come stateside to stabilize the faltering republic. And it seemed to be the end of all things to Grandpa Clarence. But to his son, it was just life.
Pops grew up seeing CoAx patrols on a daily basis. He grew up with this war all around him. And when Walt had been a kid, all the other countries had pulled out and it was just Russia and China that remained, and by the time he was a young adult, the Sino-Russian influence on American politics was not anything to gawp at, it was just life.
The Russians and the Chicoms run my life—Ayuh, so the wind blows.
So while laws and regulations and taxes and subsidies that guarded and ruled almost every aspect of human life seemed to chap the ass of Walt’s Pops, to Walt himself, it was just life.
This was just the way of things.
Walt had once heard that if you throw a frog in a pot of boiling water, it’ll jump out. But if you put a frog in luke-warm water, and then slowly turn up the heat, the frog will sit there and let itself be boiled alive.
Walter didn’t think people were so different.
Now, Pops sat in his old chair and regarded his son with misty eyes, his lips parted as though he were about to speak, his fingers rubbing together as though he were nervous about something. No, not nervous. Regretful.
“Maybe,” Pops said softly. “I should have fought. Maybe your Grandpa Clarence was right. Maybe Roy was right. But I didn’t want to fight. I wanted to be comfortable. I wanted to liv
e. And so I didn’t fight. But now I think…now I think I should have.” His eyes blinked rapidly as they looked at Walt. “I feel like I done you wrong by not.”
Walt shook his head, dismissing the notion. “Come on, Pops. If you woulda fought they woulda disappeared you and Mom both. Just like they did Grandpa. Just like they did Roy. And then what?” Walt pointed to himself. “I’da been a ward of the state. Just like Carolyn was. No childhood. No parents. Raised by some ward mother. Probably moved out to some strange District in Iowa.” Walt shook his head more emphatically. “It’s best to stay quiet,” he said pointedly. “A smart man told me that once.”
Pops made a sound like a chuckle, but there was no smile on his lips.
Walt held his father’s gaze for a moment more, then looked down at the box in his lap. “Look. Maybe I can come by later this week. But Carolyn’s probably already off work, and it’s our first day off together in a while. So I should get home and see her. But…I wanted to get this to you.”
“What is it?”
Walt looked at his father from under his brow. Gaze a little more intense than it had been. He knew the stubbornness of this man. Knew it quite well.
“Listen,” he started. “Just listen for a minute and don’t argue with me. That’s all I ask.”
Pops grimaced, but remained silent.
Walt patted the top of the box. “I got meds. Not the shit from the clinic that they gave Mom. The shit that they use overseas. The shit that works.”
Pops twitched, started to speak, started to rise out of his chair.
A flash of anger went across Walt’s face. “Would you shut up?” he snapped. “Seriously, you ornery old bastard. Listen to me. These meds could save your life. I know you don’t give a shit, but I do, okay? I care about you living. I care about you being around. So don’t argue with me about this. It costs you nothing to take these things. The side effects aren’t supposed to be that bad. And they have a much higher success rate. Like eighty percent, or something like that.”
