by James Zerndt
“Cyndi can come, too,” I say, and I can tell he’s wondering how I know who he’s talking about.
“Fine,” he says. “Now if you don’t mind, I’d like to get some sleep.”
Jerusha bops him on the head, says, “Pardon us, Your Majesty,” and we crawl out, walk the luxurious ten feet to our tent.
Once we’re settled in for the night, Jerusha studies my face in the candlelight. “How much did you hear?”
“You lost two games of Spit.”
“And?”
“And you suck.”
“What else did you hear?”
“Something about eggs.”
“I was talking about love.”
“It was making me hungry.”
“Not funny.”
We lie there waiting for sleep and when I try to press up against her, Jerusha turns on her side, butt-checks me.
“Don’t push your luck.”
I don’t push anything and keep my mouth shut, my hips a safe distance away, my arms wrapped around her.
One miracle a day is plenty.
*
In the morning we eat breakfast with a couple from California. Their kid, they tell us, is sitting across from Dustin.
Cyndi.
“Don’t they look like a couple of angels?” the man says, gesturing toward their table. “But watch, once they finish eating, they’ll turn right back into savages.”
Jerusha is quiet, but then she doesn’t say much most mornings. Or maybe it’s the man that’s keeping her quiet. He’s been Stamped. On his neck is a white scar in the shape of a drop of water. The government’s way of keeping track of those who’ve been in Rehab.
He has a long, gray beard hanging from his chin in the shape of an anvil. A lot of the men here have beards. The bigger, the better it seems. Like antlers for Leftovers, a symbol of virility or something. I’m surprised Twink doesn’t have one down to the ground.
“They paroled me because of our Cyndi,” the man says, spooning his plate clean. “I come home and first thing I tell my wife is, “Pack, I know a place we can go.” She didn’t argue. Everybody in Rehab talks about places like these. It’s what keeps you going. But truth be told, I didn’t think it really existed.”
The wife keeps a close eye on the kids across the way, like maybe their Cyndi’s a real trouble-maker or something. From the looks of her Dad, I wouldn’t doubt it.
“How long’s your family been here?” Jerusha finally asks.
“It’s been what,” the man says. “Seven months now?”
“Eight,” the woman says, her eyes on Jerusha now.
“Eight. That’s right,” the man says and reaches over, rubs his wife’s shoulder. “It’s hard sometimes. Not having certain things.”
The woman glances at one of the many outhouses planted around the camp and I know exactly what she’s thinking. They don’t even have body-wipes out here.
“But it’s okay,” she’s quick to add. “We wouldn’t want to lose this place.”
The implication is clear: we don’t want any outsiders screwing things up.
“We understand,” Jerusha says and looks down at her plate. Then, maybe just to change the topic, says, “We like that there are so many happy kids here. It’s really nice to see.”
The couple exchange smiles.
“Yes,” the man says and takes his wife’s hand. “It’s one of the few recreations we still enjoy here.”
It hadn’t really registered before, but now that I think about it, there are a lot of children. And the majority of women are either pregnant or have babies cocooned to their backs.
“So it’s, like, one of the rules here?” Jerusha says, more to her plate than to anybody at the table.
“Let’s just say it isn’t frowned upon,” the wife says, not a drop of humor in her voice. “We don’t like to think of it as raising an army. More like we’re trying to re-populate the Earth with decent people.”
“Well,” Jerusha says, squeezing my knee under the table. “We’ll certainly try to do our part.”
The man raises his glass of goat milk. “To the community.”
“To recreation,” Jerusha says and we all clink glasses.
When I set my glass back down, I can see Dustin walking off with Cyndi again. I can’t help but wonder if maybe I need to talk to him, make sure he doesn’t start doing any recreationing of his own.
*
By the time I make it to the well, Twink already has his shirt off, the black hairs on his barrel-chest matted with dirt.
“You’re...late,” he says, panting but smiling. “Grab a shovel...hop in.”
I pictured men with pickaxes handing bucket after bucket of dirt up from a deep pit. Instead, I step down into something like a shallow grave.
“This aint exactly water science,” Twink says, seeing me just standing there. “Dig.”
We work in silence for the next couple of hours, slowly loading up a wheelbarrow, then dumping the rocks and dirt into the woods. It isn’t until we eat lunch, both of us sitting on opposite ends of what is now a four-foot deep hole, that we really speak to one another.
“How do you know we’ll hit water?” I ask, once I reach the bottom of my can.
“I don’t. Found the last one.”
“Found?”
Twink grimaces. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m kind of psychic.”
“Kind of?”
“Go ahead and laugh, but I’m the one who found water.”
“Let me guess. You made a divining rod out of twigs.”
“Please,” he says. “Any idiot with a stick can make a dowser. What I did was walk around the property for two days without a swallow of water. Pretty soon the landscape became transparent to me and I just picked the spot that seemed the wettest.” He grabs his shovel, pokes around in the dirt some. “Haven’t been wrong yet. About that anyway.”
I hesitate, then say, “So you’re sort of like the leader around here, huh.”
He kicks his shovel into the dirt, leans on it, then looks off into the distance. “We’re kind of like an ant colony here,” he says. “Everybody has their job to do. I guess you could say that makes me the queen. The rest are either soldiers or workers. We already know what you are.”
“I’m no soldier if that’s what you’re getting at.”
“You tried to fight back, Thomas. Compared to the rest of us, that pretty much makes you Genghis Khan.”
“Think I’ll demote myself to worker ant if that’s okay by you.”
I can’t help but think about Mom.
She loved ants.
When I was a boy, she’d crawl around in the backyard with me and we’d lie in the grass watching them. I remember her telling me how ants use scent to communicate with each other, how different scents meant different things to them.
She’d sniff the air, pretending to be an ant, then say, “There’s food this way! Everybody line up!”
Or, “Danger ahead! Everybody run!”
Twink, standing in the middle of the pit now with his back to me, says, “Some people here think you’re going to lead us all into Rehab.”
Then there was the death scent.
Everything always seemed to get back around to death when talking to Mom. I mentioned this to her once and she said, “That’s because everything in life eventually does get back to death, Thomas.”
Hard to argue with that.
“Look, I get it,” I say and grab my shovel. “But there’s nothing much I can do about that.”
“Maybe there is and maybe there isn’t. We’ll have to see about that. But for now, the queen wants a well. So, we dig a well.”
I can remember seeing one ant carrying another off on its back and asking Mom why. “It’s covered in death,” she said but wouldn’t say anything more than that. I later learned that she was right, that if you cover a perfectly healthy ant in the death scent, the other ants will pick it up and carry it to where the colony dumps their garbage.
<
br /> The only way the healthy ant can re-join the colony is to completely scrub the smell of death from its body.
She eventually wrote a poem about it.
*
“You don’t look like you’re getting very far,” Twink says, his legs dangling above me, just out of biting range.
It’s clear the queen’s done working for the day, so I take a break, climb out before I take a chunk out of his big, hairy leg.
Once the sweat stops dripping from my eyeballs, I ask who the photo on his dresser was of.
“And just what were you doing in my room?”
“I saw it when we were looking for Dustin.”
“That’s my wife,” Twink says and smiles. “Theresa.”
“So where is she?”
He grabs his shovel, and, for a second, I think he might actually do some work. “Gone,” he says, jabbing the shovel against a rock sticking out of the side of the wall. “In Rehab. Has been for a couple of years now.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
He pokes at the rock until it hangs there like a loose tooth. “Ever since they took her, it’s been my mission to dismantle this system one F-nut at a time.”
“And how do you do that?”
“That’s the hard part. Sort of hard to hit something you can’t see.”
Twink finally manages to dislodge the rock and we watch it tumble to the bottom of the pit.
“So you’re a bootlegger then?” I say after a bit.
“Well, bootlegger is what Gridders call it. Around here I’m what’s known as a Runner. I take it you toured my basement?”
I nod, but I’m thinking about Mom’s ants, picturing Twink scurrying up the mountain with a giant crumb on his back.
“We can’t barter for food on the market unless the bottles can pass as State water. We’ve got about two, maybe three, hundred labels squirreled away. That should buy us a few more months.”
“And after that?”
Twink jumps into the pit, pick up the rock, tosses it out. “I don’t deal in afters. All I know is we’ll manage. We always have.”
I go back to working, stabbing my shovel into the unforgiving earth while my boss naps in the abundant shade of his ego. But it isn’t Twink’s siesta that eventually makes me stop digging. Something cool and dark comes creeping over the hole, over my back, and when I turn around there’s a fat piece of lint lodged in the belly of the sky.
I’ve learned all of their names by now.
Could rattle them off quicker than the alphabet.
Would you rather be a cirrostratus or a cumulonimbus?
*
When we get back to camp, nobody says a word about the big visitor hanging over us.
So I decide to name her.
Betsy.
Betsy is a fat girl’s name.
A girl who cries a lot.
But Betsy has a lot of friends.
All of them fat.
And all of them horrible criers.
“Betsy,” I cry out inside as we walk back to our tents. “Come closer. I want to break your fucking heart.”
*
My teeth ache.
I’m so tired I barely notice how good Jerusha looks wearing battery grease for makeup.
“You look like crap,” she says as I sit down to dinner.
“Gee, thanks.”
I’m about to ask how her day at the still went when there’s some sort of commotion near the food line.
It’s Twink.
He’s making his way toward us, scruffing the necks of both Cyndi and Dustin.
“I think this one’s yours,” he says and pushes Dustin toward me. “I heard noises, decided to investigate. Found these two outside the boundaries.”
Recreation.
“What kind of noises?” I ask.
“I don’t know but my guess is our little Wookie here was showing off for his girlfriend.”
Dustin turns red, mumbles, “She’s not my girlfriend.”
Cyndi is all smiles, like she’s just been awarded a medal of some kind. She bats her eyes at Dustin, says, “He wanted to show me his Yoda and Lando.”
I bet he did.
“Thank you,” Jerusha says. “You can go now, Cyndi. I’m sure your parents are worried about you.”
Cyndi starts to run off, but then stops and turns back. “Thanks for Lando, Dustin!”
Figures he didn’t give her Yoda.
“You went to the car?” Jerusha says, laying into him before I can. “Are you nuts?”
“I didn’t think we’d be gone that long.”
“That’s right. You didn’t think,” Jerusha says and then looks at me, like shit, did I really just say that?
“You’re going to apologize,” I say before Jerusha starts calling him mister or something. “We’re guests here. The least we could do is--”
“I know, okay. I said I’m sorry.”
“No, actually, you didn’t.”
“Well, I’m sorry,” Dustin says and hangs his head. “Okay?”
Twink, apparently tired of playing the fun uncle, ignores Dustin. “I suggest you keep him on a short leash from here on out. He’s a great kid, but if they spot him, he’s going to ruin this for a whole lot of people.”
“We understand,” Jerusha says and pulls Dustin toward her. She licks her thumb, rubs some of the dirt from his forehead. Which is pretty much hysterical, seeing as Jerusha is about a hundred times dirtier than Dustin.
“We’ll talk to him,” I tell Twink.
We’ll beat him.
“There’s something else,” Twink says. “Something we need to discuss.”
“Dustin,” I say. “Why don’t you go get something to eat.”
For once he doesn’t argue, just trudges off, happy to be off the hook.
“It’s all over the radio,” Twink says once we’re alone. “About your parents.”
I hold my breath.
“They’re saying you killed them.”
This is the one scenario I hadn’t played out.
I’m too dumb-founded to speak.
“Is it true, Thomas? Just tell me it isn’t and I’ll believe you.”
“It’s not true,” Jerusha tells him, putting her arm around me.
“All I know is what the radio’s saying.”
“Nobody killed them, okay,” she says. “They killed themselves.”
Twink waits for what he must consider to be the appropriate amount of time when someone tells you their parents committed double-suicide, then says, “Dustin told me you were going to visit them.”
“He still thinks they’re alive,” I manage to say. “I haven’t told him yet.”
“Oh,” he says and before he can ask any more questions, I say, “Does the radio know Jerusha’s with us?” “Yes.”
“What else?”
“They’re calling you a high-level security threat. Offering a fat water-reward.”
“For all of us? Or just me?”
“Just you.”
“How much?”
“A lifetime supply of fresh water.”
“That explains it,” Jerusha says, her voice distant, tired.
Like she’s talking in her sleep.
“Explains what?” Twink asks.
“The looks I’ve been getting lately.”
“You’re not imagining that,” Twink says. “Word travels fast around here.”
*
Once Dustin’s asleep and Jerusha and I are finally alone, she wraps her arms around my neck, asks if I’m coming to bed.
“I think I need to think for a bit. That okay?”
“Everything you are is okay with me,” she says and kisses my cheek. I sit outside our tent staring up at the stars, Jerusha’s kiss still burning away on my cheek, and try to remember what brought us to this place.
Why I thought leaving home was such a great idea.
Why I still haven’t told Dustin.
Colony of One
i am covered in deat
h.
The others will soon come
and carry me away on their backs,
dump my segmented carcass
along with the others
on a heap of black bullet bones.
i’ve never met the queen.
Who’s to say she even exists?
9 Can You Hear the Eco?
When Twink and I get back from another day at the well, the note I left in the morning is still lying on Jerusha’s sleeping bag. I drew a picture of our cloud, Betsy, and the words Olive Juice! across the bottom. Now, inside the cartoon cloud, in Jerusha’s chicken-scratch, are the words I ate you!
Cheesy, I know.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s an Unforgivable of some sort.
Probably should be.
Twink and I are about to see if Jerusha and Dustin went to the hot springs when we see a crowd gathering outside the log cabin. A reconnaissance has just returned and they’re busy unloading their spoils. They look like hunters, their cans of food scattered like tin pelts across the picnic tables. Twink, when he sees them, nearly breaks into a run to greet them.
Jerusha and Dustin are there, too, both of them looking a bit less enthused than everybody else. And Cyndi’s there, of course, stitched right to Dustin’s side.
“Hailing the conquering heroes?”
“Nah,” Jerusha says. “We’re more interested in the fluffy kind of hero.”
“You’re not supposed to do that,” Cyndi says. “It’s bad luck to talk about clouds. Everybody knows that.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Dustin tells her. “Our luck’s already crap.”
Cyndi scoots away from him. “Your luck is--,” she starts to say but stops.
“Our luck is what?” Dustin says.
“Nothing,” Cyndi says. “I’m bored. You want to go to my tent, practice Star Wars some more?”
Dustin shrugs, something he’s becoming an expert at, and gets up to follow her.
I don’t want to know what “practice Star Wars” might mean.
I tell Dustin to meet us back at the tent before dinner and he rolls his eyes, says, “Yes, sir.”
When they leave, Jerusha gives me a mischievous smile, says, “Looks like it’s just you, me, and Betsy.”
“Run or walk back to the tent?”
“Walk,” Jerusha says. “I want to get to know Betsy a little before she leaves.”
