Vagrancy

by Stacey Mac

  Though the mere memory of him carried me across it, so it is perhaps not so surprising.

  A deep voice from outside says: “Julie? Where did you go?”

  A head and shoulders appear around the cloth, and for a second I think it’s Dean.

  The familiar features see Julie first, and then me behind her, and turn sour.

  Not Dean.

  The man lets the cloth slip over his shoulder, and straightens.

  “Julie, you’re supposed to wait for me.” He talks to the child, but he looks at me.

  I’m being generous. He glares, actually, and openly.

  Omar approaches. “Arlo, Dean was looking for you, man.” His voice is placating. “He’ll be back any second,” and then cautionary.

  “Whatever.” Arlo mutters, and saunters away from me.

  “Dean’s brother,” Omar mouths to me.

  I watch, confused, as Julie dances over to him, and bounces on her tip toes, waiting impatiently as Arlo rummages beneath his bed.

  Dean’s brother? The same height and build as Dean, but his hair is darker, longer. More creases line this face than Dean’s. They share the same skin tone, the same darkened eye sockets.

  I didn’t know. Did I? Did Dean ever mention a brother?

  Either way, it seems this is him, and he hates me.

  Julie is now sitting on his bed beside him, swinging her legs back and forth while he disassembles and cleans a pistol upon the mattress.

  I used to watch my father do this very same thing, in a very similar way.

  Arlo speaks up suddenly. “I assume my brother told you that you were welcome to sleep in here.”

  I swallow. Arlo’s voice and Dean’s voice have similar effects on me, or at least, the voice he adopts as a trainer. The one that I’ve grown to know in close quarters, in darkness, is much less daunting.

  “He did. Doesn’t look like he was telling the truth, though.”

  Arlo doesn’t disagree, just goes on scowling, his jaw twitching.

  Dean chooses this moment to re-enter, and I’m grateful. He looks quickly to Arlo and Julie, and then awkwardly back at me.

  “You okay?”

  I nod. Though I’m not. I’m standing and that’s something.

  “Arlo,” Dean says, “need to talk to you.”

  “Yeah, I’ll bet you do, brother.”

  The silence that follows is punctuated by the sound of a bell ringing. Stupidly, I look to the ceiling, as though the roof of the hut will give me a clearer perspective of where the noise comes from.

  I hear a mass of movement from outside the hut.

  Arlo holsters his pistol and stands. “Come on, Jules.” He strides purposefully towards the exit, knocking into Dean’s side as he passes, and Julie follows close behind, still on tip-toe.

  I look to the ground, uncomfortable.

  Omar whistles, “Well, that went well.”

  “Don’t worry about him,” Dean tells me brusquely.

  “I don’t know,” Omar pipes in, making Dean scowl at the interruption. “Are you sure it’s best, keeping her here?”

  And I don’t know whether he means inside this hut, or inside this sector.

  “Yes,” Dean answers, turning to me. “Speaking of, I need you to stay inside while we’re at the Base, okay?”

  “What’s happening at the Base?”

  “Breakfast,” Dean says, “and task assignment. I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

  “No,” I say, taking a step towards him. “I’ll come.”

  He hesitates. “I’ve already fed you. Don’t be greedy.”

  “Funny. I’m still coming.”

  “There are a lot of people out there who don’t like you.”

  “There are a lot of people in here who don’t like me,” I say. “Might as well go meet the rest. And besides,” I say, peering at him. “We’ve got stuff to talk about.”

  Dean seems to consider the risks for a moment, and then visibly concedes. He rolls his eyes at Omar, and says: “chicks.”

  “I know, right?”

  “No you don’t, virgin,” says Bryce.

  Bryce is wrestled to the ground again.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  The Resolutes have very valid reasons for besmirching Galore, as they have so obviously been doing, I’ve gathered, for a long time. I can’t argue with them. I can barely think of one redeeming quality for my birthplace. But while I share the same views, and call the Galore leaders the same names, and fear them for the same reason, I am still an alien in this community.

  It is strange to be suddenly cast with the people I’ve never been able to conform with. It is odd, to be feared and loathed as a type that you too, fear and loathe. As though my thoughts and motives and principles were set in stone, calcified on the day I was born a Galore citizen.

  Dean is defensive. It is obvious to anyone who looks at him, in the way he stands just a little in front of me, in the way he holds his hands fisted, paranoid stare shifting. He makes himself clear to anyone who looks my way, he will stomp those who dare to confront me, and it is superbly annoying. Not because he is being protective (god knows I need it), but because it makes me feel weak, look weak.

  Weaker, that is.

  We have found a place around one of the blackened fire pits in front of the Base. Us, and it seems, every other Resolute.

  Omar, Bryce, Dean and I balance plates on our knees or hands, scooping oat mush into our mouths with spoons, and it feels like everyone within a twenty-foot radius watches.

  Today I care little. Mostly I’m just wary, like Dean. I should probably mind that I am being targeted for whispered slurs, and some loud ones, too. Truly, though, I don’t. Maybe I’m well practiced at taking shit, been taking it since I was ten and that training is only now kicking in. Maybe I just have bigger problems and these insults add only infinitesimal weight on the load I carry.

  Maybe I just don’t know how to argue with them, so I don’t try to.

  Bryce tries and fails to engage us in conversation. He teases Omar, to no avail. Omar looks uncomfortable but not paranoid anymore, having fallen for my superior charisma apparently. Or maybe he just trusts Dean. Don’t know.

  Julie sits on the ground in front of the next fire pit, again beside Arlo.

  She rises from her spot, and catches my eye. Without hesitation she hurries my way, but then skirts around me and stops in front of Dean, her hand on his shoulder.

  “Dean, how did she get here?” She asks it quietly, but her eyes slip over to me, and she flushes crimson when she realises that I’ve heard her.

  “I walked,” I tell her, before Dean can answer.

  She steps towards me and then drops, cross-legged to the ground. “Are you from home?”

  I nod.

  “Why are you here now?”

  “I was looking for him.” I nod at Dean.

  This seems to make sense to her. “We walked here, too.”

  Arlo calls to Julie suddenly, and it makes me jump. I was lost in Julie’s tinkling voice, her sweet, dirty face, and I forgot to be defensive.

  “Come here, little brat. There’s still some food on your plate.”

  She scowls beautifully and then saunters back to him, like a child to their parent.

  I frown, confused.

  “She likes Arlo the best,” Dean says, looking at his breakfast. “We can’t keep her away from him.”

  I shake my head a little. “Why?”

  “Probably because he wasn’t the big-bad-guy that dragged her from her house and across the country.”

  “How was she when you found her?”

  Dean shakes his head. “Starving. No food. No firewood. Not enough energy to even throw a good tantrum, though she tried.”

  I look back at Julie, she makes pictures in the dirt with her finger. “She seems to have forgiven you fairly quickly.”

  Dean grins. “You sound surprised.”

  But I’m not. “How did you even find her?”

  “I’d
been doing some scouting missions around Galore, remember? To find those bunkers. I made a note of the grazing houses we passed and tried a few of them until we found her. It wasn’t as difficult as you’d think.”

  I know what he means. The dead cattle, the stench in the air, like a cloud that won’t roll. Tilly was right, her sister would have died quietly there.

  Dean is scooping the last of his breakfast into his mouth, and a drip misses and hits the earth beside his foot, and it is now that I see his goodness. He has been good to me before and he has been mean, too. But where it matters, it now occurs to me, he is exceptional.

  Much better than me.

  I swallow uncomfortably. “Thank you.”

  A small grin and then his eyes shift to something over my shoulder, and his smile widens. “Saved someone else for you, too.”

  I follow his gaze. Coming towards me at a jog, a smile splitting from him, is Adriel.

  He laughs and crashes into me, his arms wrapping around my back. He lifts me off my feet.

  “Heard you were here, you Galore maniac!”

  People surrounding us stare, some look irate.

  “Adriel,” I say breathlessly, my hands clutching at his shoulders. “You’re okay?”

  “I’m fine. I’m not the one who recently survived a suicide trek. I’ve been meaning to come and see you, but you’re always unconscious, and your asshat boyfriend gets all weird when other guys watch you sleep.”

  I laugh, and find that tears burst free. I shove him away hard. “We thought you were dead, asshole!”

  “Well yeah, dummy. That’s what you Galore-scum were supposed to think.”

  I round on Dean. “And you. You just decided not to tell me you’d broken him out?”

  Dean shrugs, focussed on his food again. “I considered leaving him there.”

  “Regular hero, that one,” Adriel drawls, rolling his eyes. “By the way, I just talked to Terry and I got us all on crop harvesting today,” he winks at me. “Plenty of time to catch up.”

  There must have been some sort of signal that I missed, because the Resolute population is suddenly moving, away from there makeshift seats, presumably to their day’s work.

  “Alright, enough flirting with the girl, let’s go,” Dean says.

  The last to leave, our party begins walking in the same direction, back towards the huts, and I assume, past them to the fields that lay beyond Resolute’s gate.

  I follow them. I am aware that the shoulder knocks I receive are probably intentional. I am aware of the sneers, the unfriendly glances in my direction, but I am more aware of the little dark-haired girl now swinging off Dean’s arm, of the obnoxious laugh that I thought I’d never hear again from my previously-dead friend, and find that I am much more fortunate than unfortunate.

  As we edge through the small gaps between huts, I take Dean’s rough hand in mine to slow him. He looks back at me, and then lets the others round the corner ahead of us, until we’re alone.

  “What’s wrong?” His stern eyes search me.

  “Nothing’s wrong.”

  I want to tell him so many things about his goodness and my gratefulness, and about my luck and his burden. But the words become too big in my mouth and don’t fit, and the seconds dwindle like sand in my hands, so I step forward and reach up to him, placing one hand behind his neck, pressing my lips firmly to his.

  My lips move and he softens, putting one hand around my waist and pulling me to him. Letting me push against him.

  It’s been too long since we touched like this and I feel it, the pull to escape somewhere so that we don’t have to part.

  He pulls away first, but his nose slowly grazes the side of mine, leaving trails of warmth, and I almost lean in again.

  “I’ve missed that.”

  “Thank you,” I say, but my voice is cracked and the words drip intensity, and I know that he understands me.

  “Stop saying that,” he says against my mouth. “Just keep throwing yourself at me.”

  He presses his lips to mine once more, and then takes my hand and pulls me around the back of the huts. “If we get into trouble for being late, I’m telling them you were molesting me.”

  I shrug. “I don’t think they’ll be surprised.”

  *

  Daytime in Resolute consists of working. Not in the fragmented way a Galore day is spent, because Resolutes work together. I am told the schedule has changed somewhat, due to the aforementioned evacuation that lurks in every solemn Resolute face. Most of the population have been given daily tasks to prepare the sector for relocation, and many of them are working here, in the crop fields, pulling potatoes from the earth, and corn from stalks whether they’re mature or not.

  I spend the day in Dean’s shadow, following the easy banter he exchanges with his friends, like a tangled waltz of noise that starts slow but builds and builds to a peak, where, brilliantly, someone will concede with an emphatic, “Shut up, fuckface,” and the rest break into softening laughter before the dance begins again.

  We stop for small breaks between the rows of stalks, leaning back on the ground and sighing to the sun that never quite touches us. My hands claw gently at the forgiving ground, absorbing the earth they are so used to. Even the tiny cuts that lace in the webbing of my fingers feel pleasing, longed-for. Like home.

  I sigh again, thinking about how much I hated the fields my family grazed, and how much I miss them; how much I like this place with Dean and Adriel and Julie in it, and how much I’m hated for being in it, and I tell myself that it doesn’t matter. Wherever we end up, it will be new to them, and new to me, and we will all be outsiders, trying to fit ourselves inside it. Maybe I can start over.

  Later, when the light shrivels, I help as the Resolutes begin carrying baskets and baskets of pickings back through the rows, back to wagons that await us. We will have to pull them back to Base.

  I allow the others to walk ahead while I linger behind. Arlo crouches, gathering the dropped water cups and bottles strewn on the ground.

  I don’t care what he thinks of me, I swear. I am already a wolf amongst men; untrusted, stray, lesser. If he hates me, then it changes nothing. Wolves are predatory, though; careful, calculating. Pragmatic. It would be more prudent if he didn’t hate me.

  That’s why I’m bothering to ask him, because I have to be pragmatic.

  “Arlo, can we talk?”

  He doesn’t even glance my way.

  “I get that you hate where I came from, but I just wanted you to know; I’m not like them.”

  He stands, turns to me reluctantly. “Yeah, and what are they like?”

  This is a test. “Cruel,” I say, “corrupt…brutal.”

  He nods. “And you think you’re different?”

  He looks so much like Dean, except this man clearly wishes I’d drop dead. “I know I’m not.”

  He laughs darkly. “My brother told me that he tried to help you escape. He put himself on the line for you; some girl he barely knew. You shot him down and stayed in that hole you claim to hate. Is that not cruel?”

  “I couldn’t leave – ”

  “You jumped; abandoned your own sector. Probably because you heard that shit was about to go down. So you ran here, because you knew he had a soft spot for you. You’re using my brother for protection. Isn’t that corrupt?”

  I redden.

  “As for whether or not you’re brutal, well…” he lowers his gaze to mine, makes me squirm. “Have you ever killed?”

  After a few quiet seconds, Arlo nods. “Everyone’s brutal nowadays, kid. That’s a given.”

  He leaves me there.

  I want to shout and spit that I’m not like them. Not like Snare, or Trey or every other fucked up Galore shithead, each one of them trying to climb over the rest. I’m not the same as Jiyah, or Fredrich, or the dead fronter who got in my way.

  But I am like them.

  Bang, Bang. He falls again.

  *

  The Resolutes eat every meal t
ogether in the same way they work and sleep - as a community, and I am suitably impressed in their rich history of not bludgeoning one another to death.

  “What do you think so far?” Adriel asks me during dinner.

  “I don’t know,” I smirk. “I want to assimilate to your ways, but I’m not sure I can.

  “Why not?”

  “I’m not sure I’m cut out for it.”

  “For unity?”

  “For human connection.”

  I watch quietly as Dean and Omar gang up on Bryce, and then the three of them gang up on Arlo. When he doesn’t respond to their insults, Dean picks up a hard bread roll from his plate and pegs it at Arlo’s head. Arlo deflects it at the last second.

  “Idiot. You’re gonna wake her up!”

  Her is Julie, asleep on his lap, the back of her head resting on his chest, and a spoon hanging dangerously from her limp fingers.

  Dean sighs in frustration and turns to face Adriel and I. A bread roll pelts across the fire and catches Dean on the side of the face, leaving a round, red mark.

  Adriel laughs, and Dean’s face lights up with familiar malicious intent, his darkened eyes glinting.

  Arlo’s smugness dissolves as he realises the child on his lap is now awake.

  “Arlo?” she squeaks.

  “Good one, dickhead,” to Dean. “Come on, you,” to Julie, and he lets her piggyback him away from us. Before the night can wash the firelight from her face, her eyes shut again.

  I want to return Arlo’s hate to him; he makes it difficult, though.

  The moon hangs glumly above the smog, having abandoned the fight to break through a long time ago. Wind whistles like spirits between the fingers of trees and makes the fire strain. I hold my hands up to the flickers of bent flame, and let them gently lap over the curves of my nails, never quite letting them hurt me.

  This quiet place that hates me; it’s where my parents were meant for.

  They belonged here. Now they belong nowhere.

  Dean’s warm fingers curl over mine, and he pulls me upwards.

  Most of Resolute are returning themselves to bed, having worked themselves into a satisfying fatigue, having worked for each other, for their people; not for threats, not for fear. I wonder what happiness they must feel, cemented deep in all of them, to be this every day. They were raised in unity.