A Savage Generation

by David Tallerman

  Doyle glances rapidly around the yard. His eyes stray up to Plan John’s balcony. He doesn’t want to have this conversation. He doesn’t want to examine his own motives. Hearing the sound of doors opening, he looks downward, toward the entrance of the Big House. Colton, one of the white skinheads who tend to hang together, is standing there waving, at Silensky rather than himself, Doyle realizes.

  Colton calls, “Hey Silensky, get your ass over here. Boss is asking for you.”

  “You better go,” Doyle says.

  “Yeah. Okay.” Silensky looks disconsolate.

  And what did you expect when you agreed to work for Plan John? Doyle thinks, knowing he’s being unfair, that agreed implies the option of saying no.

  He turns away. “I’ll talk to her, all right? But I’m not promising. It’s her risk, so it’s her call. Come find me after dark.”

  * * *

  Kyle is leaving the administrative wing as Johnson enters.

  He’s been given one of the bunk rooms reserved for the guards. There are plenty vacant. It’s bleak, the walls of painted cinder blocks, the furniture metal and plastic, nothing like the home he’s given up. But it’s far better than sleeping in the cellblock, a possibility that fills him with dread. Right now, he’s heading back to his job on the farm. As he understands it, the assignment was Plan John’s suggestion, though Singh, who acts as farm supervisor, was the one to tell him. Kyle is fourteen years old; he can hardly go out on the search parties as his father does. He has no useful skills, no specialist knowledge, not in the way the others seem to have. At least farm work is something he can do.

  “Are you going to see her?” Kyle asks, his voice hushed.

  For a moment he thinks Johnson will ignore him, or deny it. Then he says, “Yes. You want to come?”

  “Sure,” Kyle agrees. If he’s quick, he won’t be missed from the farm.

  More and more, he worries about Carlita. Of the three of them, she has come off worst. Kyle is constantly afraid, surrounded by men who ignore and intimidate him in equal measure, but he also has greater freedom than he’s ever experienced. His father fell straight away into a position with Plan John, one everyone appears to envy. Carlita, though? Through no fault of her own, Carlita has found herself Funland’s final prisoner.

  Aaronovich isn’t in her office, and Johnson doesn’t look for her. He opens the upper door to the infirmary; Kyle knows he holds one key to it, the doctor the other. Johnson descends the stairs and Kyle follows. He knows as well that Carlita is supposed to keep the lower door locked from the inside, but when Johnson tries the handle, it opens.

  When they enter, Carlita is sitting on her bed in the corner, knees tucked up to rest a book against, headphones on. Seeing them, her eyes light. She pauses her battered old CD player, lays the book facedown, and says, “Hello, Doyle. Hi, Kyle.”

  “Hi,” Kyle responds, feeling suddenly out of place. Something about the extremity of Carlita’s solitude makes any visit an intrusion.

  “Carlita,” Johnson greets her. He too seems uncomfortable.

  Carlita swings her knees round, ending in a sitting position at the wall end of the bed. “You look worried, Doyle,” she says. And then, “It’s not about Ben is it?”

  Johnson almost answers, and the answer he’s about to give is clear on his face, but at the last moment he remembers Kyle, and says, “Can you wait outside a minute?”

  “Okay,” Kyle replies, hiding his irritation. What can Johnson say about his father to his father’s girlfriend that he shouldn’t hear? He knows how badly his dad misses Carlita, because Ben tells him, often. He knows he wants to spend more time with her than Johnson is ready to allow, and that Johnson blames the risks of those clandestine visits. The fact that he’s probably right doesn’t make his dad feel better about it, and so neither does Kyle.

  Kyle watches them through the frosted glass, two distorted and inhuman-seeming shapes. Yet their flickering movements give them away: a blur of darkness when Johnson gestures; a streak of lighter brown when Carlita moves a hand; a shimmer when she nods, as she does frequently. She will try and look as though she’s weighing the risk of discovery against the brief diversion of seeing her boyfriend. It’s a sham. Her desperation is impossible to miss. Even if she thinks they’d be exposed, she’d say the same thing, simply because time with Ben offers a break from the unbearable monotony of her life.

  Still, Kyle doesn’t like how close she is to Johnson. There’s no need for her to get that close. Absurdly, he feels relieved when they move apart, and when Johnson crosses the room to reopen the door.

  Behind him, Carlita says, “I know you want to be careful, Doyle.”

  “I’ll see how things look.” Does something in his tone admit that her answer was not the one he’d hoped for? “If it seems safe….”

  “Of course. You shouldn’t put yourself at risk.”

  To Kyle, Johnson says, “I need to go talk to the doctor. Don’t be too long, okay?”

  “Sure.” Kyle slips past him, blinking beneath the harsh electric light. Carlita turns her smile on him. He’s known people to have different smiles for different circumstances, but Carlita has one, for everybody and any occasion. Warm, eager, indelicate, it always unsettles him. “Hey, Kyle,” she says. “It’s good of you to come.”

  Kyle shrugs. “I just ran into Johnson.”

  He’s waited, but now he has nothing to say to her. Back before, they’d got on okay, had never been close. Why would they have been? Carlita is his dad’s girlfriend. That doesn’t make them anything to each other.

  “What have you been up to?” Carlita asks, the smile hovering about her mouth. “Still working on the farm?”

  She isn’t really interested. She’s merely bored – going crazy with boredom. She doesn’t care who she talks to, whether it’s Johnson or Kyle or his dad. Anyone is better than being alone.

  Nevertheless, she sounds interested. And Carlita isn’t unique in being lonely. Apart from his father, who he sees less these days than he ever has before, the only person Kyle has to talk to is Nando’s uncle, Tito Contreras. And all Tito wants to talk about, sometimes tearfully, is Nando. Kyle has tried with Johnson’s son, Austin, assuming at first that being almost the same age should be a bond between them, but Austin barely acknowledges his existence, and something about him frightens Kyle.

  So he tells Carlita about the farm. He tells her about Tito, about Singh, who had been a farm supervisor for a while in his old life, and Torres who grew up on his family’s farm in Mexico, and Art Green, the oldest of the cons, who knows nothing about farming and claims he was an architect back in the day, but seems to enjoy the work. Kyle tells her how he gets all the shitty jobs, how he doesn’t mind so much, how they’re already getting beans and potatoes and onions from the hard ground and hope for better next year.

  “God,” Carlita says, “I wish I could see it.”

  “It’s no big deal.”

  “But to be in the open.”

  There’s such desperation in her voice, such hunger. Through her manner more than the words, Kyle feels her claustrophobia, and it’s unbearable. It raises the doubt that he might never be able to leave. “I need to get back,” he says.

  If she’s hurt, if she realizes she’s driven him away, Carlita hides the fact well. “Okay. Hey, it’s been nice talking to you, Kyle.”

  “Yeah,” he agrees. “Only, I don’t want to get into trouble….”

  “No,” Carlita says. “But come again, maybe? Sometime. If you can.”

  Chapter Eleven

  “Do I have a choice?” Aaronovich inquires.

  Johnson considers. “You have a say.”

  “You know my say,” she tells him. “That woman is a ticking bomb. You should have sent them away the second I’d patched them up.”

  “I can’t believe you mean that.”

  And do I?
Aaronovich asks herself. Do I mean it? Do I believe I do? “You and I have the same job,” she says. “To keep the inmates of White Cliff Penitentiary safe. Even if it’s not White Cliff anymore, even if it’s calling itself Funland. If word gets out that that woman is here – and word will get out, sooner or later – then this place is going to tear itself apart. It will burn to the ground. You’ll be lucky if anyone survives that.”

  “You’re a woman,” Johnson says, “and I don’t see anything burning.” He only manages to weather the look of scorn she gives him for a moment. “All right. Fine. But if I’d sent them out of those gates, there isn’t a chance they’d be alive now.”

  “There must be other groups. Other safe zones.”

  Though he can’t possibly be certain, Johnson shakes his head. “Anyway, there’s no point in debating this. What’s done is done. The question is what happens next.”

  “You know my opinion on that too,” Aaronovich says.

  “That we keep her like a prisoner? That we treat her worse than the inmates were ever treated?”

  “That whenever you let Ben Silensky in here, you bring them both a step closer to being discovered.” Aaronovich sighs. “Johnson, you know what I think and I know you won’t listen, so why don’t we stop wasting our time?”

  She’s surprised by the aggrievement in Johnson’s eyes. Is he frustrated that she won’t agree with him, or is she doing him a disservice? Before Carlita’s chaotic arrival, she would never have taken him for a man who’d play the authoritarian like this. Maybe he regards himself as a victim of circumstance, and maybe he’s justified in doing so. Then again, doesn’t that describe every last one of them?

  “There’s something else,” Johnson says. “I’m worried about Austin.”

  Ah. So that’s it. “Yes,” Aaronovich assents, “you’re right to be.”

  “Oh?”

  “I tried to tell you when I first met him. The boy is traumatized. He’s been through some ordeal.”

  “Has he spoken to you?” Johnson asks.

  “No. I don’t believe he will, and I don’t need him to. It’s there in everything he does. You know what I’m talking about, Johnson.”

  She wasn’t intending to hurt him. She’s genuinely surprised by the flicker of pain that twists his mouth. Johnson’s face is normally so impassive that strong emotion completely deforms it, in a way he seems helpless to control.

  “He won’t talk to me,” Johnson admits. He says the words with finality, as though he’s already accepted a situation beyond his ability to repair. “I can’t get through to him. I’ve no idea where he is most of the time.”

  He’s scared of the boy, she can see that, or at any rate, scared of what he represents. In that, Aaronovich can sympathize. Even knowing that Austin is essentially a child, that trauma is what’s locked him inside his sullenness and anger, she still finds reaching out to him difficult. Working in a prison doesn’t encourage such instincts. Her job has taught her that boundaries are there for a reason, that while what’s beneath the facade might be different, it isn’t necessarily an improvement.

  Anyway, Austin may be a child, but he isn’t her child. “Well, you need to try harder,” she says.

  Doyle nods, weightily. The gesture doesn’t persuade her that he will, only that he can’t fail to recognize the need.

  * * *

  Austin doesn’t think of what he does as hiding.

  He doesn’t think about it at all. Thinking implies choices, choices would mean options, and those are something he has none of. He does whatever he has to do.

  Austin has a bunk room in the administrative wing, but he doesn’t feel safe there. He can’t sleep; he’s hardly slept for more than a couple of hours a night since that first day. He isn’t sure what he’s afraid of. He doesn’t think in terms of being afraid.

  Kyle is working on the farm, but Austin has been given nothing to do. To Plan John, he seems not to exist. Which is okay; he doesn’t want to exist. Not here. Not like this. If he could make himself invisible then he would, without hesitation.

  So he explores. Funland was built to be somewhere else, to be White Cliff. And even White Cliff has been repurposed and reimagined time and again, shedding skins and growing new ones. Now, he doubts that a third of the place is used regularly. Maybe a quarter hasn’t been touched in years. Instinct, more than any plan, tells him that those lost regions can be his: that there are two Funlands, one within the other, and that the closest he can get to disappearing would be to inhabit that second, shadow Funland.

  But the buildings are dangerous. The cellblock, especially; nothing would convince him to set foot in there. Though he’s made attempts to reconnoiter the administrative wing, it isn’t large and he has no way to predict the movements of the former guards. His father, in particular, seems almost as lost and aimless as Austin himself. Of the three blocks, the one they call the Big House is least used. Whole sections have been given over to decay and dust. Yet the Big House is Plan John’s, and the handful of incursions Austin has made left him terrified.

  So he moved his exploration, more and more, to the walls, and the few smaller buildings nestling in their shade – and from the walls he made the discovery that has defined his efforts ever since. For it was there that he learned how the roofs of Funland were within his reach.

  There’s a ladder in a cage, halfway up the west wall of the Big House, nestled in the crook where it meets the cellblock. Working out a way to get that ladder down, let alone quietly, has become a mission in itself. Clearly there should be a pole, but that could be anywhere. Fortunately, stealing in Funland is easy, so long as you don’t want things that others deem valuable, which means food, ammunition, fuel, and whatever small luxuries can be found. All the items Austin has stolen are worthless to anyone except him, and none of them will be missed.

  Austin considers the results of his handiwork. The twine came from the farm store, which isn’t even kept locked. The same source furnished the broken hand fork he’s bent into something like a grappling hook. The sponges he’s taped tight around the prongs to deaden the sound came from the kitchens, where there are literally hundreds, packed in boxes. No one comes round here, and the adjacent end of the cellblock is long abandoned, probably this portion of the Big House too, but Austin isn’t about to take risks. There’s no possible explanation for what he’s doing.

  His initial try strikes off the wall with a dull chink that makes him wince. The second catches the ladder, only to deflect, as does the third. The fourth, however, snares a rung and holds. He isn’t certain how the mechanism works, or whether brute force will achieve anything. Still, Austin puts all his weight upon his homemade rope. At first, there’s no result, but a shift of footing rewards him with a sudden click, and a rattle like a freight train in miniature. An instant later and the lowest rung is near enough to the ground that, with a jump, he can just reach it.

  Austin’s heart is hammering. Sweat glazes his brow. It’s a good kind of excitement, though, maybe even a good kind of fear. He’s done something. This belongs to him.

  He climbs quickly more than carefully. But at the top he makes an effort to keep low, as he flops through the gap in the parapet that rings the roof of the Big House. Beside the ladder is a crank, and when he turns it, the ladder retreats complainingly into its housing. With that done, still crouched on hands and knees, Austin surveys his new kingdom.

  The landscape is an inhuman one, like somewhere manufactured by giant insects and then deserted. The floor is layered in chipped gravel. Pipes and ductwork rise, dip, and intertwine without apparent logic. Ahead, a low shack juts, with a metal door imbedded in its front. Altogether, the rooftop gives the impression of being unfinished, as perhaps it is. Every part of Funland, after all, has the air of an experiment abandoned before reaching its intended conclusion.

  Regardless, this place appeals to some craving deep in Austin. Th
is, he knows, is what he’s been looking for these recent weeks. This is what he’s sought in Funland’s abandoned corners. He makes a circuit, crouching so as to be hidden from the yard below, committing each feature to memory. When he arrives back at the ladder, he sets out again, even more slowly, pausing often to tease out some feature or judge its relation to the building below.

  By the end of the second circuit, one feature above all others is gripping his attention, filling him with sickly excitement. At half a dozen points, wire gratings cover orifices into the building’s sinews and cavities. Three of them are large enough for him to get inside. He’s checked the screws, and he thinks they’ll come off.

  Austin had wanted a place of his own and he’s found one. What if, close by, is somewhere even better? Somewhere he can’t ever be reached? Yet it feels hazardous to press ahead now, as if, after what he’s ventured today, anything more would be a danger too far.

  Then again, perhaps he doesn’t need to. Time is on Austin’s side. Because the ladder, the rooftop, the vents, and whatever lies beyond them – all of this is his and his alone.

  Chapter Twelve

  Doyle tries to calculate the risk he’s about to take, and what the cutoff will be, at what point he will say no to Silensky.

  Except that, if he’s honest with himself, that isn’t the question. So, at what point will he say no to Carlita?

  If he hasn’t got there yet, perhaps he never will.

  He’s been up on the gate tower all evening, as he was on that day when everything changed. From here he’d watched the ambulance swerve, tumble, and slide, staring uncomprehendingly as it delivered a world of problems right into his lap. Since neither the cons nor the guards ever come up here, apparently not caring what happens outside Funland’s walls, the tower is the one place Doyle is guaranteed privacy.