by Ginger Booth
The leader had emerged from an RV when they knocked for him. He was maybe 45, pleasantly handsome, lean and square-faced, with a shaggy brown mane and large glasses, wearing a light blue hospital scrub top over thick unbleached thermal shirt, paired with blue jeans and hiking boots. He took our keys and put them in his pocket with a shrug.
“Come in, come in!” He invited cheerfully, in a heavy French accent. “We get so few visitors in Alburg! Because Alburg is evacuated.” He waved apologetically about this inconvenient state of affairs. “Jean-Claude Alarie, of Médecins Sans Frontières. From France. And you are?”
“Adam Lacey, an engineer from Connecticut, and my friend Dee Baker, a programmer. We’re here as tourists. We had hoped to visit Montreal today. Before the border closed.”
“Ah!” Jean-Claude laughed out loud at this great joke. “Yes! Not a good day for that, may be?”
“May be,” I agreed, with a smile and a bow. Adam smiled stiffly as well.
“And what are you an engineer of, Adam Lacey, may I ask?”
“Marine engineer,” Adam replied.
If so, this was news to me. If not, I hoped he was a good liar.
“And Dee Baker? What do you program?”
“Just websites,” I demurred. True enough.
“Well, welcome to my modest clinic and home,” he said. He waved expansively around the beat up old RV. Another wave bid us be seated in the tiny galley behind the front seats. The galley’s small cabinets overflowed with bandages and medical paraphernalia, with extra storage crates stacked around the door as well. Behind this were triple decker bunk cots, lining the sides all the way to the back of the vehicle, plus a small privy at the rear, all empty at present. There were more crates and a collection of picnic tables outside, under a cheerful pink striped awning larger than the interior of the RV. I didn’t spot any red cross logo.
“Would you like some wine? I hope you’re not hungry. I’m sorry, our food stocks are low.” Jean-Claude passed out fresh disposable plastic cups and grabbed a jug of wine.
“We had bread and cheese in the car,” I assured him.
“How wonderful! I love some, thank you!”
Smiling crookedly, I went back to the car and retrieved some food.
When I got back, Jean-Claude filled me in on what I’d missed. “I was just telling Adam Lacey, I am not the ‘leader.’ The men at the bridge, they are jokers. No, I am just a doctor with the gran caravan. I am with them only a few weeks.”
“You have no patients today,” Adam observed.
“No,” Jean-Claude agreed solemnly. “They go to demonstrate at the border. Where you saw them. Now I wait for them to come back. Maybe some.”
“What is their goal?” asked Adam. “We’d heard of the gran caravans, but thought it was just a myth.”
“No myth. Just old people, sick people, their families. You see we are not all old. We travel, enjoy freedom and companionship. Many wait to die. There is no medical care for them. If they go to the American doctor, he tells them they are old, and old people die. And he gives them this.” He scrounged in a drawer and tossed a large white prescription bottle to Adam.
Adam passed it to me after he read it in silence. It was oxycontin, an opiate. The instructions said to take 1 every 6 hours for pain, 20 for painless death. The bottle held 50 pills.
“You may keep that,” Jean-Claude invited. “We have many.”
“Thank you,” I said, and put it in my bag. Adam looked a bit scandalized at this. I shrugged in response. Oxy was a good hoardable. It might have trade value.
I got the feeling Jean-Claude missed nothing in that exchange.
“But what do they hope for by attacking the Canadian border?” asked Adam doggedly.
“Hope? Ah. Some will be injured, and taken to Canadian hospitals. Some will die, and say a glorious ‘fuck you!’ on the way out, eh?”
‘Eh’, indeed. Jean-Claude claimed to be French, but I wondered if he was really French Canadian. If I were the Canadian government, I’d certainly want to keep an eye out south of the border. And gran caravans travelled. As we’d seen, nearly everyone else had already learned not to travel, and we were learning fast.
Adam resigned himself to not getting any better answer. I suspected it was actually the truth. Pointless as it seemed, there were few better points available.
I smiled. “And what have you seen, on the gran caravan’s travels, Jean-Claude?”
“Ah, many trees,” he returned with a smile.
“And are we free to go?”
“Where do you go?”
“We need to return to Burlington to recharge my car,” Adam replied. “Then back home, to Connecticut.”
“This should be no problem,” Jean-Claude said. “After dark. At the moment, we like the roads empty. Mm, then we move. Maybe midnight when you go. So relax! Have more wine.”
So we drank and made merry. Jean-Claude regaled us with some tales, and I believed none of them. Eventually an elderly patient came in who required Jean-Claude’s attention. He suggested we take a walk down the island to admire the dunes of Albert Dunes State Park.
Before we made it far, I asked Adam to wait for me. I ran back to the Jean-Claude’s RV to leave him my card. I scribbled a web address, login and password on the back, to the unadulterated satellite feeds, though I didn’t explain what they were. It seemed low-risk. He could use the information. It was credible enough that he could have gotten such access through other connections, without it coming from me. And it might be interesting, to hear from him, and maybe where this caravan went.
It did feel peculiar, trusting a complete stranger I knew wasn’t on the level, when I wouldn’t have shared that access with Adam, or Zack. I’d trust them to sleep with them, but not to share a web address. I didn’t know what these nomads really hoped to accomplish, but earnestly wished them luck at it. How screwy is that.
Back with Adam, we didn’t find any dunes. I doubt anything I’d call a ‘dune’ exists on Lake Champlain. But I could be wrong. The lake shore was pretty, with endless evergreens marching up as close to the water as people allowed.
We saw plenty of new-made gypsies along the way, out enjoying the last of the sunny afternoon. Most of them seemed to be age 60 and up. They enjoyed robust good health for all I could tell. Perhaps they piled all the infirm into their strike forces.
But there were also younger families, and children out playing between the RV’s. A very few middle-aged men and women had communal cook fires going. Some kids played a giant card game. I remembered that, in the seemingly endless days of childhood summer vacation. We’d get a bunch of kids together when it rained, under an awning or in a tent, and played card games. I’d even done it camping with my family, in sites like this.
I smiled and waved at each group. They nodded and turned away. Jean-Claude was the only one who wanted to talk to us.
We reached the southern beach near sunset. We’d left the gran caravan behind, and had the beach all to ourselves. The orange orb of sun slanted slowly into the mists of the Adirondacks in upstate New York across the lake, and a near-full moon was already rising in the southeast. We rolled our jeans up to our knees and waded. The water was chilly, but not bad. It held the summer warmth still. In the evening stillness, the smooth pewter lake reflected the sunset and moonlight like glass.
I gazed out at the view transfixed, cold water lapping quietly on my calves, and muddy sand squishing between my toes.
Adam came up behind me and wrapped his arms around my waist. He whispered tickling in my ear, “Sorry about the sorbet. Missing Montreal.”
“Well,” I murmured, “I think we found a romantic spot anyway.” He kissed me long and deep there in the water, then drew me up onto the beach. Despite the abandoned beach and gathering dark, we played at being a bit discreet. The kids in the caravan were still in mind if not in view. He stood between me and the land as he unhooked my bra and shimmied my layered shirts up to my shoulders. It was warm for November, s
ure, but cold for bare nipples, providing powerful contrast to his hot mouth.
The front of his jeans faced the lake. I soon got revenge.
It didn’t take long to trip each other down onto the sand and forget all about those kids in the caravan. It was dark enough that the stars were coming out, anyway.
8
Interesting fact: The roots of the word ‘disaster’ are ‘anti stars,’ or an ill-starred event.
“I was right about you,” Adam said in the dark.
We walked cautiously up the middle of the road, me folded in Adam’s arm for warmth, back to Jean-Claude and the car. The Milky Way was a brilliant swath above us, and the moon fairly bright. This was good, since there were zero man-made lights visible. There’s only so much a phone can do, used as a flashlight. I loved it. Of all the recent changes in the world, my favorite was giving the night back to nature and the stars.
In other words, my mind was out there in the woods and the galaxy instead of with Adam. “Hmm?”
“What I said before, why I wanted to take you to Montreal. Because you’d still see it fresh, and enjoy it, and laugh.”
A slow smile took over my face invisibly in the dark. “That was about the nicest compliment I’ve ever received,” I admitted softly. “You have a real gift. You could twist women around your pinkie with a gift like that.”
“No, I don’t,” Adam chuckled. “I’m an engineer. I was just telling you straight, what I thought. Don’t start expecting poetry out of me, alright?”
“Deal.”
“But all this is exactly what I meant. Our romantic getaway to Montreal was waylaid by crazed and armed senior citizens. Gunfire erupted and we fled for our lives. Fleeing from the fire into the frying pan, we’re taken captive by armed men –”
“It wasn’t that bad, Adam. I kinda enjoyed Jean-Claude.”
“Exactly! You never whined, never lost your head, smiled and made friends with a zealot French doctor. And as for our romantic evening, well. I think Montreal would have been a shallow cliché compared to the evening we’ve had.”
“I don’t believe you. You couldn’t be this good at giving compliments without a lot of practice. You just topped your previous compliment. I have a new best compliment ever. Now I’m scrambling to come up with anything to match it, you know? The best I’ve got is, ‘You sure know how to show a girl a good time.’”
Adam cracked up laughing. It had been a stressful afternoon. He laughed so hard tears came, glistening in the starlight. “You’re good,” he finally managed. “Did I mention your sense of humor?”
“Funny, people often mention my sense of humor. They call it ‘dark.’ Speaking of dark, are we lost?”
“We should have reached the caravan by now,” Adam agreed. There were no looming black humps of RV’s anywhere. “But there was only the one road, and we’re still on it. How could we be lost?”
Eventually the park road we were on met Route 2 at the bridge, where the armed guards waylaid our car. They and the whole gran caravan were gone. So far as we could tell, we had the entire U.S. Alburg promontory to ourselves.
Adam was sure the ‘jokers’ had stolen the car and taken it with them. I insisted Jean-Claude wouldn’t have let them. And at any rate, I wasn’t willing to cross the bridge to the next island until we’d searched here by daylight. I won the debate. We backtracked and eventually found the Tesla, keys in the ignition.
Clouds stole over the gorgeous skies, houses were dark, and there was virtually no traffic on the roads. It wasn’t all that far, but it took hours on the unfamiliar dark back roads to reach Burlington. We felt only slightly bad waking the landlady at the B&B, it being late winter dawn by the time we reached it.
She still had no other guests. But we took only the one room to crash in this time. She was kind enough to serve us a big Sunday brunch at 2 p.m. when we got up.
We asked what she’d heard on the news, from the armed conflict on the border. She answered slowly that there was nothing on the news about that. But a lot of reservists left the day before. She thought they were National Guard reserves, but she wasn’t sure, now that she thought about it. They didn’t have uniforms, just footlockers. She knew some of them were veterans. She’d turned on the news hoping to hear what was going on with that. But instead the news reported that the border closing to Canada was going exceptionally well. So well that they’d moved up the date and closed it Saturday.
She’d wondered what had become of us, but assumed they’d just turned us back at the border, and we’d gone home to Connecticut. Where had we spent the night, anyway?
I might have invented a fairy tale at this question. The B&B lady wasn’t important enough to me to risk defying the Calm Act by spreading public unrest. But Adam earnestly told her the truth.
I’m not sure she believed him. She looked concerned and excused herself. I heard her making several tense phone calls from her office. Apparently that didn’t help. Her gracious smile of Friday was replaced by a pinched and haunted ghost of a smile, as we checked out and said our good-byes.
We never did wear our steampunk outfits that weekend. We agreed jeans were more comfortable for an interstate drive. We were past each other’s costumes by then anyway.
I’d love to say that it was an uneventful drive back to Connecticut. But we got detoured off I-89 twice on the way down to I-91. One of those times we got lost in the dark empty back roads. Neither detour came with any explanation. Then a hellish thunderstorm overtook us in Massachusetts. We sat out part of it under an overpass for shelter, with St. Elmo’s Fire dancing all over the car and our hair standing up from the static. I still wasn’t sure about our part of Connecticut, but Massachusetts did have tornado sirens. We heard some. The radio news out of Springfield didn’t even admit there was a thunderstorm.
Between the Vermont detours and Massachusetts electrical effects, we needed another Connecticut detour to find a charging station for the car. And had to spend a couple hours napping in the car after midnight waiting for that to finish.
Adam proved himself a gentleman extraordinaire. He didn’t wake me from that nap until we arrived at my house. We agreed to deal with my overweight battery some other time, gave each other a quick peck good-night, and continued to our respective beds to catch a couple more hours sleep before our respective Monday morning alarm clocks rang.
Despite the undeniably wonderful romantic weekend, rich with learning opportunities and Adam’s delicious company, I never wanted to travel again in my life.
Monday sucked.
The section manager had decreed that work weeks should begin all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed with a 9 a.m. section meeting by video, especially after holiday weekends. This was to counteract that distinct programmer tendency toward clock drift. Programmers, over-endowed with the ability to concentrate on something that enthralls them, tend to let the clock slide an hour or two later every day unless something with authority intervenes.
Whose lame idea was this? Oh, yeah. Mine.
With about ten hours of sleep and four hair-raising adventures in the past two days, I was not at my best getting the gang back on task that morning. My material didn’t help. They were unanimously outraged when I told them that Connor was fired. Well, except for our intern Shelley, who was red-eyed, morose, and silently self-absorbed. I made a note to call her later.
They didn’t buy the idea that ark interviews would resume after the New Year. If I’d been a little more with it that morning, I would have realized those two bits of news shouldn’t have been served up at the same meeting.
When I explained our new assignment to do understanding-the-crazy-weather interactives, our graphic designer flat-out asked me if we’d be telling the truth or lying. I assured them that we would do our best to give good actionable information. And I did have the facts available. And I’d be handling the censors for the team.
It’s a bright group. And I have no poker face at all. They had no trouble unravelling that circumlocution.
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“You’ll be the fucking censor for the team, you mean,” challenged Will, the graphics designer again.
That went a little too far. God, I hated it when they did that. “Will, I think you and I need to talk one on one after the meeting. Because I don’t care to be spoken to that way.” I waited him out several seconds, staring directly into the video camera. Fortunately he nodded and backed down. My to-call list of awkward conversations grew to three.
They nearly mutinied when I asked who wanted to volunteer to take over Connor’s job and implement the weather API.
“Guys!” I interrupted, hand held up. They angrily muttered to a stop. “Just think about it. There are skills to gain. Good work to do. I’m not threatening your firstborn. We’ll talk tomorrow in Stamford.” I considered a cheerful, upbeat close to the meeting. I couldn’t think of any. I gave up and just signed off.
Managing Will’s ego took a half hour and another cup of coffee. Shelley’s tale of woe made me really regret ever asking. It sounded like her poor lonely mother was coming unhinged and taking it out on Shelley.
The third phone call was the worst. I called Connor’s apartment to check up on him. His mother answered and accused me of killing her baby boy. She was there packing up his things. He committed suicide on Thanksgiving Day. He overdosed on oxycontin. His suicide note mentioned that he’d been fired.
There wasn’t a damned thing I could do about it except let this poor woman hurl all her pain and invective and abuse on me.
The fourth phone call was to Mangal because I was too upset to work, and I didn’t think I ought to tell Dan, because Dan would think it was all his fault that Connor killed himself.
The fifth phone call was from Dan, because Mangal thought he needed to know.
Not a hell of a lot of work got done that Monday in my section. Whose job was it to make sure we were productive? Oh, yeah. Mine.
