Stranger Son

by Jim Nelson

  "Execute who?" Ruby said, now growing as alarmed as Benford was agitated.

  "The prisoners," he said, returning to a semblance of calm. "Every man in Folsom and Susanville."

  "What about the women?"

  "Sure, women too. They may very well kill them all." He shrugged. "I can see it."

  Fifteen

  Around six in the evening, Dr. Benford steered the Ford down an off-ramp. Ruby, napping, stirred and peered out the window blurry-eyed. A road sign read they were entering the city of Pinole.

  "Where?" She had to pee.

  "I need to see someone," he said. "Hungry?"

  "A little."

  "There's a Denny's up the way. We'll get some dinner after I'm done."

  He maneuvered through a suburban tract of homes and shopping centers. The sun had nearly set and the houses and parked cars were only outlines. He brought the Ford to a soft halt before a single-story home in the middle of a long block of single-stories. He ratcheted the parking brake with an exhausted pull of his arm. After keying the engine off, he sat in the dim light, silent, staring through Ruby's window at the front porch past the lawn. The hot engine pinged with metronomic accuracy.

  "What is it?" Ruby asked.

  He yanked open the driver's door. The dome light came on and blinded Ruby. He rose from the driver's seat with a kind of determination she'd not seen in him before. He pushed the driver's seat forward and reached into the back. He produced a doctor's bag from the rear floor. He slammed the door shut and strode up the walkway to the front door. He lugged the black satchel as though carrying a bag of paperweights.

  The porch light went on after he rang the bell. A woman emerged with her hair in a bandana and a baby blue robe wrapped around her. Ruby cracked the window and listened. The best she could make out, the woman was not happy to see Dr. Benford. Finally, after a protracted and emotionless conversation, she admitted him to the house.

  Ruby waited in the dark car for forty-five minutes. It felt more like two hours. Benford emerged from the house alone. The woman did not show him out. He returned the doctor's bag to the rear of the car and fell into the seat beside her.

  "Who was that?"

  "Mrs. Benford," he said coldly. He twisted the key in the ignition and released the parking brake.

  "You're married?" she said. "I thought you said you lived in Culver City."

  Benford navigated the car back the way they came through the suburban maze of dark tree-lined streets. Soon they reached a business loop running alongside the highway.

  "We're separated," he said.

  "For how long?"

  "About ten years now," he said. "It's more like we got a divorce but didn't bother with the paperwork."

  "Why—"

  "Let's not talk about it."

  The Denny's greeter led them to a table with chairs facing one another in the center of the noisy dining area. Benford pointed out a free booth jammed in a corner beside the fire exit, and the greeter relented. Only when their dinners arrived did he discuss it.

  "When I left school, I wanted a private practice," he told Ruby. "Like Frank has. I had to settle for staff physician at whatever city hospital would take me. At my pay grade, you get bounced around the state, hospital to hospital."

  "Why did Dr. Abney pick you then?" It slipped out. Ruby regretted it immediately.

  "He didn't ask me because I'm good," Benford said. "He hired me because I'm cheap. I'm sure he thinks I can be bought and will sign any report he wants filed." He picked at the French fries overflowing the oval plate before him. "He'd do the physical himself, but there's no way that would pass muster before a judge." He pinched a steaming hot French fry between his thumb and forefinger and dropped it almost immediately. He dusted salt off his hands as though deciding he wasn't so hungry after all. "And maybe I can be bought," he said with a light sneer, eyes down. "Maybe I will sign the report he wants."

  Ruby sat with her hands under her legs. Her eyes darted left, right, up, down. She could not look at him straight-on. He was pathetic and feeding off of his own pathos. It was much as he'd talked about in the car, how victimhood can feel good sometimes.

  "I wanted a private practice and I didn't get it," he said. "My wife wanted a child and she didn't get one. Without children, there was no more reason to be married. We had no other excuses. Then the clinic here in Pinole let me go and I got picked up by the county general in Culver City. I left her with the house and the good car and moved south. It was that simple."

  "Doesn't sound simple," Ruby said.

  He picked at his French fries again. "I'm sorry I'm babbling so much. I don't have anyone to talk to, mostly. I guess I'm indulging myself."

  Once their dinners cooled, they ate.

  Sixteen

  Benford didn't want to cross into Jefferson at nighttime. He didn't explain why, but Ruby trusted his judgment. He pulled the Ford off the highway on the east side of Stockton and into the parking lot of the Garden Acres Motel:

  SWIMMING POOL / CONTINENTAL BREAKFAST / FREE HBO

  Again they shared a room, each taking a twin bed. The room was run-down and smelled vaguely of cigarettes. All the furniture was mismatched. Even the beds' headboards were different. It was as though the room's furnishings had been cobbled together from the spare furniture of six different other motels. A single square window looked out onto the parking lot and the highway beyond. Benford shut the curtains.

  Ruby wondered if he would make a move on her. He seemed nice enough, but as she'd learned, they all seemed nice enough at first. She thought he would move on her in Pismo Beach, but when they reached the room, he was so inebriated, she doubted he could will the machinery into action. Tonight, the remorse of visiting his wife seemed to weigh on him. He did not approach her once they were locked inside the room. They climbed into their respective beds with a minimum of words passed between them. He snapped off the nightstand light with a quick "goodnight" and was snoring within a few minutes.

  In the morning, he offered her first crack at the shower. Ruby stood under the spray of hot water for a full minute. She let it soak into her wakening body. The room was drafty and her calf muscles were tight from the cold air.

  She began to feel lightheaded. Thinking the water temperature was to blame, she reached down for the faucet marked C. Only then did she notice the trickle of pink watery blood flowing down the inner side of her right leg. She drew two fingers up her thigh to her vagina. When she held them to her face, she saw they were thick with umber clots. She'd never menstruated before, and she was not menstruating now—the fetus within her was decaying.

  Lightheaded, she fell forward and put her forehead into the shower tile. Hot water coursed down her back. Her face and neck went cold. The room spun sideways one direction, spun back around as though reorienting itself, and then the tub came up from under her feet. A torrent of hot water rained onto her face and into her nose. In her mouth was the salt of the sea. She coughed up a blob of thick seawater—

  Ruby!

  Dr. Benford's face was full and bright, like a harvest moon. The sun, large and white, hung over his shoulder. A jet engine roared in the distance and she recalled the last time she had flown in an jet plane. She was seven. Her mother took her and her sister to Yellowstone. They flew to Salt Lake City, rented a car, and drove for hours. The desert highway cut a line through a boundless plain of stark gray sand. Cynthia could not sleep in the car, she never could. Ruby found time on the highway to be gentle and soothing. She napped to the sound of the radials sizzling on the hot asphalt beneath her. Some harmonic in the road paving caused the tires to make a steady, rhythmic thump, the same timbre and time signature of a heartbeat. Cynthia woke her up to point out a wild animal dead on the shoulder of the road. It had been run over by something large, perhaps an eighteen-wheeler. It had been mutilated into a pile of meat and gray fur and bone.

  She came to with a sharp gasp of air. The big white sun was the bathroom overhead lamp. The humidity fan was whining
and sputtering. She lay in the tub shivering and drenched. Benford crouched on the bathroom floor ministering to her.

  He had set a bed pillow under her head. Her outstretched bare legs nearly reached the spigot. He snapped open shower towels one at a time and lay them over her naked body. He retreated to the beds outside. He returned with a real blanket and his doctor's bag.

  "I'm sorry." Her voice was hoarse.

  He set the blanket over her. He tucked its loose sides down around her. "Lie still."

  "I'm cold."

  "We'll get you up in a minute."

  He yanked open his satchel and searched its contents. He produced a disposable hypodermic needle in plastic wrapping. Its narrow plastic barrel was prefilled with a pale purplish liquid. He tore away the wrapping, clenched his teeth on the hypo's orange cap, tugged it off, and spit the cap away. He pulled Ruby's right arm out from under the blankets and towels and set it along the edge of the tub. With a deftness from decades of practice, he inserted the needle into the crook of Ruby's arm and plunged the liquid.

  Ruby need not ask. It was gefyridol, a prescription drug she took every day or two in whatever form she could manage to obtain it—needle, pill, inhalant, even as a suppository. Without gefyridol, the fragile balance between the fetus within her and her own body would collapse.

  She'd illicitly purchased and shoplifted enough pharmaceutical variations to know this was an emergency gefyridol injector. It was intended for bridge daughters whose late stage biochemistry had gone horribly wrong and was endangering the life of the child within them. These injectors were not produced for Hagars, even though the gefyridol they held worked magic for her body too.

  After the color had returned to Ruby's cheeks, Benford lowered the lid on the toilet and sat beside her. "How long?"

  "I haven't had an episode for two months now." In the San Luis Obispo train station restroom.

  "When was the first episode?"

  "A year ago. Is there something you can give me? I mean, to stop them?"

  "Pons mal is untreatable." He held up the spent injector. "I can give you a few of these, but they're only good for recovery after an episode. They don't prevent mal, you understand."

  "I heard there's a cure." It took strength to talk, strength she did not believe she possessed much of at the moment. "I heard some Hagars say they developed a cure in France, but the government suppressed it—"

  He cut her off. "There is no cure." He'd heard this story many times before, or variations of it. France, the United States, the United Nations, even benign aliens delivering to Earth the cure from their home planet. "Pons mal is not a disease."

  "But some don't get it."

  "All Hagars suffer pons mal. Some suffer it for years. For others, it arrives all at once. They develop the symptoms and three days later they're gone. The procedure you undertook as a child, it put the infant within you into a kind of coma. It prevented you from giving birth and extended your life. But bridge daughter physiology is not prepared for longevity."

  From his bag, he produced a penlight. He leaned over her shining it into each eye.

  "Your body is unwinding," he murmured. "The child within you is unwinding too. One of you will die and then the other will die. It might be you first, it might the gemmelius. You didn't escape the natural symbiosis between you and the child. You only prolonged it."

  She peered down upon herself. On her back, uncomfortable in the hard tub, her chin was compressed on her chest. She only realized now she was naked under the wet towels and damp blanket.

  "Let's get you up and into bed," he said.

  He helped her to her feet. The change in blood pressure caused her head to lighten. She needed his outstretched hand to steady herself. He draped the damp blanket around her body and walked her to the bed. She unceremoniously dropped the blanket and slipped under the covers.

  "I'll rent the room for one more night," he said. "We'll cross into Jefferson tomorrow."

  "No—" A lifetime of miserly instincts kicked in. "Don't pay. I'll be fine."

  "I can't cross the border with you in this state. We have to sell to the border station that you're my nurse. Yes," he waved her off, "that's what I'm going to tell them. I've been thinking it over and you're right. It's the best story we have."

  "What about Dr. Abney? What if he finds out you were late?"

  "I'll tell him I got detained at the border and had to wait it out," he said. "He'll buy it. All he cares about is my final report."

  Her shivering damp body needed time to warm up the bed. She snuggled in, doing her best to ignore the lingering cigarette smell in the air and the water stains across the ceiling like spilled coffee. From beyond the window came a steady stream of morning traffic. She closed her eyes and took in the whistle and rumble of eighteen-wheelers speeding past.

  "I'll go and get us some breakfast," she heard him say. "You're probably not hungry, but you should eat." Gefyridol suppressed the appetite.

  "Coffee," she said, eyes closed.

  "No caffeine," he said.

  "Orange juice," she murmured. He snapped off the light. "And a blueberry muffin."

  "OJ and blueberry," he said. "I'll see what I can do."

  She was asleep before he left. He was relieved. Most Hagars with pons mal wanted to know how long they had. Six months, he estimated, maybe less. One more thing he didn't want to talk about.

  Seventeen

  His pampering was comforting. Usually she recovered from pons mal episodes within twenty minutes. His ministrations were overkill, but she was not going to complain or shoo him away. Warm between the crisp white sheets—the only truly clean thing in the room—and being served breakfast while tucked in…Ruby had not felt so nurtured since she was a child living in her mother's house.

  At one in the afternoon, she awoke gradually. She yawned and stretched. Crumbs from the muffin she'd nibbled on had wormed into the sheets and caused her to itch. Benford had moved her bedtime sweatpants and T-shirt from the bathroom and laid them out on the end of her bed. She clandestinely clothed herself beneath the covers and rose.

  Benford sat at the room table hunched over his work. He'd opened the curtains for light. Vials and dropper bottles from his medical bag were haphazardly arranged across the table surface. A pair of medical scissors lay on the table beside a roll of clear surgical tape. Corners and strands of cut tape lay about the scissors and on the floor like confetti. Some kind of doctor's arts and crafts project, Ruby decided.

  With a chemist's eye, he added two drops of a reagent to a short tube of red fluid. He stoppered the tube and gave it a vigorous shake.

  "Good afternoon," he said to her. "How are you feeling?"

  "Better," she said.

  The dorm refrigerator hummed on the floor beneath the television set. He lay the tube on the top wire rack and carefully closed the door.

  "Was that blood?" she asked.

  "Yeah." He gathered the vials and bottles and packed them in his bag. "I'm preventing it from clotting."

  That's weird, she thought, and decided it wasn't her business.

  "I bet you're famished," he said.

  "I am," she said, grinning.

  He drove them to an Italian chain restaurant in the strip mall on the other side of the highway. Afterwards, they sauntered down the mall's sidewalk fronting the businesses. Both drank a cup of coffee at a chain cafe. He read a legal thriller on an e-book reader he'd brought from the car. She checked her web sites with her phone.

  Ruby belonged to several online communities of Hagars, secretive bridge daughters, and normal people who counted themselves as allies. At least, they claimed to, and each normal had a different take on how to be an ally. There were those who supported existing Hagars but opposed any more bridge daughters having the procedure performed; those who believed bridge daughters should have the right to choose but only with parental consent; those who believed they had the right to choose without parental consent; and even those who argued for "saving" all bridge
daughters from their fate and funding a scientific moon shot that would eliminate the need for bridge daughters for reproduction. It was an idea first proposed in the 1970s, when the first test tube bridge daughter was delivered in England.

  The most controversial were the Origin First people. There was a strain within the community who believed bridge daughters were a distinct species of human as special and important as any normal man or woman. To Origin First, bridge daughters were superior to normal humans. The symbiosis between bridge and child offered certain immunities from disease normals didn't have, and other advantages the Origin First people liked to play up. Dying before age thirty, of course, was not one of those advantages.

  Mostly, these online community boards were used to share notes on places to stay, where to find cheap meals, listings of sympathetic businesses who hired girls no questions asked, and so on. Some of the boards were for griping and gossiping. Some of the boards were for sharing success stories, no matter how small. Some were for crying.

  With a little searching, she found an old message thread about a Dr. Marcus Randall Benford of Culver City, California. Scrolling through the posts, Ruby picked up a theme: Quiet—helps Hagars—cold but will help you. Ruby added a comment of her own: Sympathetic. An ally. She added five Hagar's Jug emojis to her message like star ratings for a restaurant.

  "Are you up for going into Jefferson today?" he asked across the cafe table. "I paid for another night, but if you're up for it, we can leave now and get in before dusk."

  "I'm fine," she said. "Let's go."

  They packed with some haste. Benford made a final circle through the motel room seeking anything they might have overlooked. Satisfied, he began to close the door behind them.

  "The refrigerator," she said.

  He snapped his fingers. "Good Lord, thank you."

  He returned with the vial of blood wrapped in a white washcloth he'd also kept in the refrigerator. With the cold package secured in his medical bag, they climbed into the Ford and headed off. It was nearly two o'clock when they pulled eastbound on Highway 4.