She can’t leave him like this—he’ll fret all day—so she waves her keys and says, “I’ll see you for dinner!” in a cheery voice that is not her own.
* * *
There is no sign in front of the facility, but her paycheck comes from the Department of Defense. The drive takes fifteen minutes. Getting inside takes fifteen more. The first checkpoint is off a highway walled with evergreens. Here one guard examines her ID while keeping a hand on his holster and another circles the car with a German shepherd. She knows their names are Ernie and Phillip, but she cannot tell them apart. They are both young white men with buzz cuts who wear camouflage uniforms and earnest expressions and call her ma’am.
She pops the hood and the trunk. A mirror sweeps the underside of her Volvo wagon. Only then does the gate open, and they wave her through and say, “Have a good day, ma’am.” She drives a quarter mile down a freshly paved road to the campus, a collection of square and rectangular buildings, all gray and windowless.
Armed drones hover over the parking lot. Guards with assault rifles walk the fenced perimeter. Pines gather so thickly all around, she can barely see the hills humped on either side of this valley. At the entrance to building 3, she again shows her ID to a guard, but this time she must hand over her purse and remove all jewelry and walk through a full-body scanner.
The building appears to be three stories from the outside, but there are five sublevels beneath, and she goes to the bottommost. She cannot walk more than twenty paces without encountering another locked door manned by a guard. The swipe of an ID card bleeps and the light changes from red to green and the locks scrape in their sleeves, and in this way she progresses, in stops and starts, to her lab. She has referred to it as a maze, but really trap is the better word. She feels trapped.
She used to work with a stable of assistants, but not here. Here she is alone with her research. When she enters the space, a thirty-by-forty-foot room, the lights buzz on—UV, to make up for all the time she’s underground. Here is a stainless-steel counter bottomed and topped by equipment cabinets. A small fridge for premade meals and a larger fridge for samples. Filing cabinets. There is a desk on which sits a computer, but it has no external connectivity. She is encouraged to document everything on paper.
One wall appears to be plain steel, but when she nudges a lever, a crack splits down the middle and the armored shell retracts, revealing a bulletproof window, two feet thick. On the other side is a room with the same dimensions as the lab but empty of anything except the boy curled up on the metal shelf that serves as his bunk. No sheets, no mattress or pillow. It took weeks of argument before Victoria convinced her superiors to allow the boy clothes to wear. “It all ends up destroyed, so what’s the point?” That’s what they said. But Victoria persisted and they finally agreed on a black singlet that looks a little like a wetsuit, in part because it is woven through with biotech that reads his pulse, sweat composition, temperature, glucose levels.
“Good morning,” Victoria says over the comm.
On paper they refer to him as Patient Zero. But his name is Hawkin, and she calls him by that name even though she has been reprimanded for it. She can’t not think of him as a person, though her supervisors encourage exactly that.
The boy stirs but does not rise. Not until Victoria asks him to—with a whispering, singsong voice, the way a mother might coo to an infant—and even then the boy sits up with the greatest reluctance, rubbing his eye with his fist. Staring at the floor, he mutters something and Victoria says, “What was that, Hawkin? Can you say that again?”
“I said, do I have to?”
“I’m afraid you must.” And then she clears her throat. “Or rather, we must.”
Only now does he look up at her, his eyes the bright blue of winter stars. The boy’s legs scissor the air and he leans over the cot as though considering a jump from a great height. He is short for his age, around five feet, and narrow-boned.
“You don’t want to help me?” Victoria says.
“No.”
Cameras—black-lensed, insectile—are nested in the ceiling on both sides of the divide, and Victoria glances at them now and then, reminding herself to take care with her words. She’d rather say, I’m sorry. She’d rather say, I didn’t know this was what they were hiring me to do. She’d rather say, I wish I could tuck you into my purse and steal you away from this place. But instead she says, “You’re such a good helper.”
“I’d rather be asleep.” He looks so much younger than his fifteen years, but his sulky, poisonous delivery reminds her that he is deep into his teens. “I’d rather be anything than awake.”
“I know this is hard to believe,” Victoria says, “but sometimes I’d . . . rather not do this either. But I have to. Because the work we’re doing is important, Hawkin.” She always preferred her lab to the classroom, but she was occasionally required to teach a large lecture course. When she asked Wade how he did it, he said that every instructor should be trained in theater. “You are both intellectually and emotionally manipulating them, trying to get them to feel. Your tone and delivery are as important as the material.” She always acted so woodenly in front of an auditorium of three hundred students, but here, on a smaller stage, she has grown looser, more comfortable, treating Hawkin as both her student and subject while thinking of him privately as something more than either.
Victoria boots up the computer and jots down the readings in today’s log before going to the minifridge and withdrawing what looks like a tray of airline food. A fruit cup, yogurt container, jam pack, butter pack, croissant, and short carton of milk. Along with a variety of candied pills. “Breakfast is up,” she says and slides it into a two-doored compartment that divides the barrier between them. “Yum.”
“I’m not hungry,” Hawkin says, and though it takes some effort, Victoria smiles and, in a voice hollow with irony, says, “Most important meal of the day.”
“No, thank you,” Hawkin says with a shake of his head. “You eat it.”
Victoria pats the compartment door. “Well, it will be here if you change your mind. You at least need to take the pills. Okay?”
“Fine. You said you were going to get me some comic books.”
“I’m still waiting on approval for that.”
“I’m so bored.”
“I’m trying.”
“I feel like I’m going crazy.”
She almost says, Me too, but instead says, “I promise.”
“Okay.”
“So. What are we starting with today?” Victoria goes to her desk and flips open the binder and runs her finger down the sheet. “It looks like we’re going to be spending a lot of the morning with the M16.” Victoria opens a cabinet lined with weapons. She pulls on her protective glasses and tucks the earplugs into her pocket and retrieves the rifle from its ledge and picks up four magazines.
There is a kind of standing desk built in front of the glass wall. On it is a spring-loaded bipod that she locks the M16 into. She activates the control, and a window opens in the divider, and now they don’t need to speak through the comm. Her voice echoes through the divide: “Hawkin? Would you mind taking your starting position?”
Near the back of the room, Hawkin slumps his shoulders and shuffles along until his toes reach the line etched into the floor. It’s marked off in six-inch intervals and runs down the center of the room like a zipper.
“We’ll begin with the left shoulder,” Victoria says. “Ready?”
Hawkin nods and closes his eyes and licks his lips. “I guess.”
Victoria nudges the plugs into her ears, squints shut one eye, targeting the boy’s shoulder, and lets out a long emptying breath. She curls her finger around the trigger. And fires.
5
* * *
When Yesno asks how much time John needs, he says, “About as long as it takes to eat a piece of pie. That okay?”
“It’s absolutely okay.” Yesno actually has a few last-minute errands to run—picking up the b
outonnieres at the florist, stopping by the caterer’s to make sure all is in order—so he’ll plan to pick up John in forty-five minutes or so.
The traffic is thick enough in downtown Northfall that John asks to get dropped off a few blocks away. “I don’t mind,” he says. “Too much sitting. It’ll be good to walk.”
The wide sidewalks and quaint brick storefronts are still there but in a state of troubled transition, like a rosy-cheeked twelve-year-old with track marks, a nose stud, and a black eye.
Wads of gum stamp the sidewalks along with the dank dust of chewing tobacco. Broken glass sparkles. Crumpled McDonald’s bags flutter. A tattoo shop has replaced the bookstore. A head shop has replaced the malt shop. Here is a Harley retailer, a bail bondsman, an EZ Money loan center, and a jewelry store with a thirty-thousand-dollar diamond-studded belt buckle on display.
In the town square there is a steel statue of Paul Bunyan. Forty feet tall. He’s carrying a double-sided ax that rests on his shoulder, the blade flashing silver in the sun. All around him stand protesters holding signs that read Save the Boundary Waters and Ten Thousand Lakes, Not Ten Thousand Bombs and The BWCA Is Ours, Not Yours. Some are middle-aged women in down vests and yoga pants. Others are long-haired and unshaven and hemp-necklaced. The co-op and NPR crowd alongside the funky eco-warriors.
This has been standard in Northfall since he was a kid. The region is defined by protest. That’s what happens when you live in a place remarkable for its in-betweenness; the extremities yank it in both directions. Was it the crown of the United States or the ass of Canada? People wished winter wouldn’t last so long, but then they complained summer was too hot. The ATV crowd claimed to love the outdoors, but the canoe crowd said they had a terrible way of showing it. The town hated the tourists but relied on the money they spent. The Boundary Waters were a national treasure, yes, but the lumber of the forests and the iron ore and the copper in the hills had to be treasured as well.
A man stumbles out of a bar—packed even at this early hour—and puddles the gutter with puke. A woman with blue eye shadow approaches John with a smile that he returns. “Hey, soldier,” she says. “Suck for twenty, handy for ten?”
“No, thanks,” he says.
On the corner stands a man wearing a coat despite the heat of the day. He keeps a pit bull on a choker leash. As they wait for the busy traffic to pass, John kneels to pet the dog, flop its ears. It licks his knuckles. “You want rocks?” the man says.
“Sorry?”
“I got rocks. I got blow. I got crank. I got weed. I got oxy. I got H. I got E. I even got a taste of space dust. Whatever you want, man. Whatever.”
“Space dust, huh?”
“You never flown so high. Take you to the moon and back, man.”
“I’m good.” John gives the dog one final scratch before crossing the street. Even if everything else has changed, the Lumberjack Steakhouse remains the same. An institution in Northfall. The restaurant you took your prom date to, celebrated your anniversary or birthday at, ordering the prime rib drowned in au jus. Or you just went for a grilled cheese and a slice of lemon meringue.
The boardwalk is edged by a railing made from rusty saw blades. On one side of the front door stands a roughly carved bald eagle; on the other, a flannel-and-denim-clad woodsman with an ax.
John pushes open the door and takes in the familiar aroma of garlic toast and charred steak. A glass pie case fills the entryway, every shelf of it crammed with apple, cherry, peach, chocolate cream. An older woman with a denim shirt and a bandanna around her neck leads him from the hostess station to one of the booths along the wall. “Jenna will be here to serve you in just a second, hon.”
“Thanks,” he says, his eyes already on her. Jenna. A few tables away. Pouring decaf into a mug. Strawberry-blond hair pulled back in a messy bun. Freckles sprinkling her nose and cheeks. She looks in his direction, looks away, then looks back again. She continues to pour the coffee even after it spills over the lip of the mug and the old man at the table says, “Hold on, now! Hold on!”
“I’m so sorry,” she says and rushes to the waitress station and returns with a towel and mops up the mess. But even as she soaks and swipes and apologizes again and again to the man, she steals looks at John, trying not to smile.
His birthmark feels like it’s glowing red, throbbing on his face like an alarm, and he can’t help but touch it as if to test whether it’s hot.
Finally she approaches him, the towel balled up and sopping in her hand. “It’s you.”
“It’s me,” he says.
“You’re back.”
“Just for a bit.”
One of her front teeth is crooked and somehow that always makes her smile more sincere. “I knew Talia was getting married, but I still didn’t think . . .” She throws down the towel and wraps her arms around him. He closes his eyes at her touch, savoring it.
“You look so different,” she says and pulls back and studies him in a sad, happy, lingering way, like you do when you’re flipping through a photo album and find a version of yourself that no longer exists. “But you’re still my Johnny?”
“Walked some miles since we last saw each other. You, on the other hand, not a day older.”
“Bullshit,” she says.
“Can I buy you a piece of pie?”
“I shouldn’t sit down. I’m working.” She gestures to the dining room, but only half the booths are occupied. “Maybe just for a minute?”
“I’ll take what I can get. You still like the banana cream with chocolate sprinkles?”
“Course,” she says. “It’s the best there is.”
“One piece, then. With two forks.”
She returns a minute later and settles into the booth across from him and picks up her fork but doesn’t eat. Her arms are sunburned. Her wedding ring catches a ray of sun and glimmers a rainbow across the tabletop. “You know . . . for a long time, I couldn’t even listen to the radio, read the newspaper. Every time North Africa or Afghanistan or anything came up, I’d get twisted up inside, worrying.”
“Managed to make it through the thresher.”
“How long are you here?”
“Just until tomorrow.”
“Probably doesn’t even feel like home?”
“No. But that’s maybe got more to do with me than with omnimetal.”
She looks out the window, watching the traffic roll by. “It’s pretty scary, the changes going on here. You should hear what Dan’s dealing with on patrol. Just last week, this truck full of —”
“Dan.”
“He was my husband,” she says and then clears her throat. “He’s my husband. Dan Swanson. I’m a Swanson now. You must have heard that.”
“Sure I did. Where’s he from?”
“From here now. Everybody from here’s from someplace else, sometimes seems. But Bemidji’s where he grew up.”
“You married a cop?”
“Guess I drank my fill of bad boys.” She sighs through her teeth. “Not that he was ever that well behaved.” Her eyes dart to a clock on the wall shaped like a loon. “Case in point, it’s been—what—twenty-seven hours since I last heard from his butt.” She says this in a nervous hurry, and John isn’t sure what to make of it. Is she worried about Dan? Or declaring, in a way, the opposite?
“He treating you okay? How long you been together?”
Jenna studies her ring, twists it, smiles. “Four years now.”
“And you’ve got a kid? How old?”
“Four years now.”
“Mrs. Swanson, huh?”
“Yep.” Her lips pop with the p.
A man in a flannel shirt rises from a table and approaches them and says, “Excuse me, miss?”
“Just one second,” she says. Only now does she fork up a piece of pie. She savors the taste of it, like a kiss, with her eyes closed. “Working girl’s got to get back to it.”
She nudges out of the booth and stands over him and he reaches out a hand and she t
akes it and they knit their fingers together. “It’s your eyes.”
“What?”
“I don’t remember them being that shade of brown.”
“Oh,” he says. “Huh.”
“Anyway. Can’t tell you how good it is to see you, Johnny.”
She turns away, takes a few steps, looks at him one more time over her shoulder, then goes back to work.
He finishes his pie, wipes his mouth, drops a few twenties on the table, and slides out of the booth. He doesn’t realize he’s smiling until, on his way out the door, someone says, “What’s with the shit-eating grin?” And slams a shoulder into his own. John manages to keep his balance as the man—the big blond man from the train station, Mickey Golden—enters the restaurant. “Guess we’ll be seeing each other around, GI Joe.”
6
* * *
The Lumberjack Steakhouse has several dining rooms, all lit by chandeliers made from antlers. At a pine-plank table, Mickey Golden drags out a chair, takes a seat, and says, “Hey, boss.” He’s addressing Walter Eaton, the owner of Black Dog Energy, who wears an enormous dove-white Stetson, a bolo tie, and a sky-blue western shirt with pearl snaps that barely contain his girth.
Walt says only, “Already ordered for you.” He’s busy unrolling a map, trying to smooth it with his hands, but it keeps curling back up again. Along the table, other maps are laid flat and weighed down at their corners with water glasses. “Give me some of them rings of yours?”
“Why?” Mickey bristles his rings, some of them diamond-studded, like a second set of knuckles.
“Weigh this sucker down.”
“Rather not undress if it’s all the same.”
Walt whistles and waves over Jenna. She is on her way to deliver an order, a tray balanced on her shoulder, but she complies, because she knows he’ll keep whistling if she doesn’t. He speaks with a Texas twang when he says, “Help me out here, hon. I need a few somethings to flatten this here map.”
The Ninth Metal Page 4
