Broken Wings 2 - Midnight Flight

by Andrews, V. C.

  “Don't do anything stupid,” I warned, and looked around. “They hear everything we say, I think. Even when they're not around.”

  “What do you mean they hear everything we say?” Robin asked. Teal looked at me with new fears in her face.

  “Just that. I don't know. Maybe this place is bugged with microphones or something. I get the feeling sometimes that when Dr. Foreman asks us a question, she already knows the answer,” I said.

  The two of them looked at me. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Mindy cross the field toward us. Gia finished what she was doing and sat back on the ground, embracing her legs and lowering her head.

  “What did she ask you?” Mindy fired at me, still crossing.

  “What?”

  “What was the question that she already knew the answer to?”

  “Who's talking to you?” Robin snapped at her.

  “What was the question?” Mindy repeated, ignoring her.

  “I didn't say there was any specific question. It's just a feeling I have about her, that's all,” I said quickly, maybe too quickly.

  “Yeah, well, it's a good feeling, a true feeling, so watch your mouth,” Mindy advised. “And watch what you say about any of us.”

  “Who are you to tell any of us what to do and not to do?” Robin demanded. “Maybe you should be the one who should watch her mouth.”

  “What? What's that mean?”

  “How come you know so damn much about this place?” Robin stepped toward her. “What did you do to be brought here anyway?”

  “I don't think it's any of your business,” Mindy said, and turned to walk back.

  Robin shot forward and grabbed her arm, spinning her around. “That's a lot of bull. You seem to know about everyone else and everything else. We should know something about you. Unless there isn't anything to know. Is that it? Well?”

  “Leave me alone.” Mindy turned to walk away again, but Robin seized her arm again, this time more firmly.

  Mindy tried to break free, grimaced with pain, and screamed. They both struggled in the middle of the new field of tomatoes. Natani came hurrying out from behind the barn and the buddies were crossing the yard, M'Lady Three leading the charge. Neither Mindy nor Robin appeared to notice. Robin wouldn't let go of her. She was turning and twisting her as if she were a big rag doll. They continued to wrestle until Robin threw Mindy to the ground. She fell over a few newly planted tomato plants. Robin reached down to pull her up again.

  “Stop it!” M'Lady Three shouted. The three buddies ran forward and M'Lady Two wrapped her arms around Robin and lifted her up and away from the sprawling Mindy.

  “It's her fault!” Robin screamed, kicking and squirming. “She's been taunting and teasing us ever since we got here.”

  Mindy stood up and brushed herself off. Three of the new plants were smashed. Natani knelt beside them and handled them gently.

  “Nice work, stupid,” M'Lady Two told Robin. “That's a capital crime at Dr. Foreman's School for Girls, destroying food, food we all need.”

  Robin relaxed with fear and M'Lady Two released her.

  “I didn't destroy food. I... she ...”

  “Blaming someone else for things you do is worthy of five demerits,” M'Lady Two said.

  “All right, both of you, march back to the house,” M'Lady Three ordered. “The rest of you keep working.”

  We watched Robin and Mindy walk ahead of the buddies. M'Lady One looked back at Teal and me so we started to dig again. Gia returned to work and finished placing another plant. All the while I noticed how little interest she had taken in what had occurred. She hadn't come to Mindy's aid when Mindy and Robin were struggling and she offered no help afterward, didn't try to defend her. They really had no friendship.

  The realization that the two of them could be here so long together and not become significant to each other depressed me further. Was that how it would soon be for the three of us? We would just slide down this tunnel of anger and fear until we hit bottom and sank into some swamp of disgust?

  Two of the smashed plants were too damaged to remain in the ground. Natani dug them up and carried them away. He returned with new ones and planted them himself. About a half hour later, Mindy came back to the field. She glanced at us and returned to work. Gia didn't speak to her at all.

  “Where's Robin?” Teal asked nervously, looking back.

  The ranch house was ominously quiet. We could hear bees buzzing at the corner of the cow barn and the pigs slushing about their pen, grunting. About midday, M'Ladies One and Three came out to tell us to report to the pottery barn.

  “You're not only going to try to make your own bowl and dish again, you're going to make a new dish for Gia and you're going to stay there and do it until you do it right, even if you have to stay there all day and all night. And Dr. Foreman, remember, is giving you all your schoolwork to start today,” M'Lady Three told us. “So you better not waste a second moaning and groaning about how hard your life is.”

  “Permission to speak?” I asked.

  “What do you want?”

  “Where's Robin?”

  “She's where you go if you do something Dr. Foreman considers way over the line.”

  “Where's that?” Teal asked. M'Lady Three glared at her. “Permission to speak?”

  “That, Teal, is the Ice Room.”

  “Where is the Ice Room?” she asked.

  “Wherever you keep your worst nightmares,” M'Lady Three replied. “Now get moving. You're wasting precious time.”

  “I can't imagine anything worse than what was done to us last night,” Teal muttered. “She is stupid. After what we told her, she goes and loses her temper. She could have gotten me into trouble again, somehow.”

  “I'm sure she's sorry now,” I said.

  Teal looked hatefully at Mindy. “I don't trust her either. I don't trust anyone.” She glanced at me and I shifted my eyes away guiltily. “Anyone.”

  We marched back to the pottery room. Natani wasn't there, but we knew how to proceed. It took us the remainder of the day to produce five pieces of pottery our buddies approved. Just before they returned to inspect, Natani came in and without speaking helped us. Actually, he was the one who produced the finished products. He left before the inspection.

  “All right,” M'Lady One told us. “Return to the barracks. You have your school work waiting. You have an hour to make use of before dinner. Every minute of time here is to be productive. Laziness is just as bad as anything else and is rewarded with demerits.”

  We found textbooks on our cots and sheets of assignments alongside them. There was work to be done in literature, science, math, and social studies. Everything had a specific deadline, the first being tomorrow.

  “When do they expect we'll be able to do all this?” I moaned.

  Teal shook her head. “This is crazy. She's giving us impossible things to do just so she can punish us with these sadistic things for not doing them. I don't care if I die out there. Tonight, I'm going to sneak some food away from the dinner, even if it's just a piece of chicken or something, and I'll find something to put water in. I'm leaving this place,“ she vowed. ”I'll get someplace where there is a phone and I'll call home. Once my parents find out how gruesome this is, they'll come get me. You can come with me or not,” she concluded with a heavy note of defmiteness.

  “You can't sneak enough food out of there, Teal. And you'll need more than a can of water. You don't know what direction to go in. At night you won't see anything. You could get terribly lost. It won't work.”

  She didn't reply. She sat on her cot with her back to me and then lowered herself to her side. I looked at her and thought, Was there any hope to an attempted escape? Could she be right? Should I go with her?

  Mindy and Gia came in, glanced our way, then went to work on their academic assignments. I opened my math book and looked at the explanations and the problems. It might as well have been written in Greek, I thought. Maybe it was. I closed the book an
d walked to the doorway. Mindy glanced at me, then looked at her books. Gia never looked my way. Teal was still lying still. She had probably fallen asleep, exhausted. I didn't know what was keeping me awake and moving me.

  I saw Natani come out of the cow barn carrying a pail of water that he dumped. Then he went back inside. None of the buddies were in sight. We knew that they lived in the hacienda, probably in the very rooms I had first thought would be ours. What a wishful dream that was, I thought now, and laughed at my naive optimism and innocence. We hadn't been here long, but to me at the moment, it seemed like months.

  I gazed back at Teal once more, then left the barracks and crossed to the cow barn. Natani was adjusting the flow of water into the troughs. He looked up as I approached, then looked at the faucet again.

  “I'm sorry my friend broke your plants,” I told him.

  “They are not my plants,” he said. “They are yours. It is from these plants, from everything we do here, that you have what to eat and drink. Very little comes from anyplace else.”

  I jumped on what he said. “How far away is anyplace else, Natani? Really. How far away are we from anywhere?” ,

  He stood up and wiped his hands on a cloth. “Many days, walking.”

  “But doesn't Dr. Foreman leave occasionally? There's a van, of course. The van they used to bring us here. There has to be a road that leads to places, a place to get gas, whatever. Where is this place?”

  "The van comes once a month with food and other supplies. We have a big gas tank here for the van and the tractor. A truck comes and fills it once a month, and we run our electric generators on natural gas. That comes regularly, too.

  “When the doctor leaves, she goes to a place where a small plane waits for her and takes her quickly to where she wants to be and brings her back. She doesn't go very often.”

  I looked around. Perhaps microphones really were secretly placed everywhere. Would Natani tell them whatever I asked him or said? Was he someone to trust? Did he fool us by helping us? I had to know as much as I could. I had to risk asking him questions. Teal sounded so determined. What if I did decide to go with her? Would it be madness?

  “Do you like working for Dr. Foreman?”

  “I don't work for Dr. Foreman,” he replied.

  “What do you mean you don't?”

  “I work for what grows. I work for the animals. I work for the sun and the moon and the stars. My people were here long before Dr. Foreman or anyone else. Signs, houses, papers, don't change the way things grow, the sun's rising and falling. I do what I have always done.”

  “She doesn't pay you?”

  “The earth pays me.”

  Maybe he's just crazy, I thought. Maybe the sun fried his brain.

  “What if someone ran off, Natani? Just left one night and walked away in the right direction? People can walk for days and days, right?”

  He smiled. "Once, a vulture picked up a squirrel at the edge of the desert and flew off with him. The squirrel awoke and screamed, 'I am not dead. How dare you take me?' The vulture, shocked himself that the squirrel wasn't dead, opened his mouth and the squirrel fell to the desert floor. The squirrel brushed himself off. He was insulted. Imagine, he thought, being thought to be dead. He started to strut in one direction and then stopped, scratched his head, and started in the opposite direction. Once again, he stopped and scratched his head. Where were the trees, the rivers he knew? What sort of place was this with ground so dry even rocks looked unhappy?

  "Nervous and worried now, he walked faster, again stopped, and turned to go in another direction. Each time, he walked faster. He grew very tired, very thirsty. Nothing made any sense to him. He could not understand the way and he saw no creatures who could give him any information. The lizards and the snakes were afraid of him. He didn't belong there so they did not trust him enough to wait to hear his questions.

  "Night came and he didn't like where he had to sleep. Something crawled over him and made him jump and he was awake so long, he barely had any rest before the sun came up. He scurried up a small hill and looked around. As far as he could see, there were no trees, no streams, no place to gather food and no one he knew.

  "He walked on, desperate now. He tried to keep himself in one direction, but every once in a while he leaned too far to one side or another, and soon he realized he had been walking in a great circle. Everything looked the same. Very thirsty, very weak, he finally stopped and fell to the dry earth. His eyes closed and opened, closed and opened, and then closed.

  "And lo and behold, the same vulture appeared and strutted up to him. He opened his eyes and looked at the vulture, who seemed to be smiling.

  " 'I thought you said you weren't dead,' the vulture said.

  "The squirrel tried to move, but couldn't and did die. The vulture picked him up and carried him off again.

  “The vulture knows. He or she who doesn't belong out there will soon belong to him. Patience rewards him. He will wait, and to those who scream back at him, 'I am not dead,' he will say, 'You are dead. You just don't know it yet.' ”

  Natani turned back to pour some feed in the trough.

  “But people cross the desert. You do, I bet, or did, didn't you?” I insisted.

  “People who know how to speak with the desert can live with it, but there is little forgiveness there. A mistake, a misunderstanding, and soon, the patient vulture, the desert's undertaker, appears.”

  “If we had food and water...”

  “You cannot carry enough. You must know how to get the desert to give it to you.”

  “You could show someone how to do that, couldn't you, Natani?”

  He didn't reply.

  “You could show someone enough to help her get across the desert to where people live, couldn't you?”

  “When it comes time, I will teach you what I know.”

  “When is that?”

  “When it comes time. It's not for me to decide. It's the doctor who decides.”

  “What do you mean? She lets us try to escape?”

  “It's her way. I do not understand all her ways, but it's her way. She is a very wise woman.”

  What was he talking about? How did he know how wise she was and wasn't? Where did she find him? Was he just here when she arrived as he said? He couldn't like what he saw happening to the girls. He must despise the buddies. I saw the way he just looked at them when they spoke to us or even to him. It was as if he could look through them or put himself in a different place when he wanted to, but why did he bother? Why did he stay here? Surely there was another farm, another place unlike this where he could be happy.

  None of it made any sense to me. I felt like I was spinning in a nightmare.

  “Why are you here? Why don't you work on a happier place without all this?” I asked, waving my arms. “Are you really part owner or something?”

  He smiled and shook his head. “No, nothing but what I have made myself belongs to me.”

  'Then why are you here? Of all places, Natani, why Dr. Foreman's School?"

  He looked like he wasn't going to answer anymore, and I thought I was probably wasting my breath, but suddenly, he looked at the hacienda and then at me.

  “The doctor helped my daughter's daughter, and I have made her promises that are as strong as the sun. I do not understand all her ways, but she does not understand mine. The birds do not understand the lizards but they live side by side. Each has its own way. This is how it is,” he added, and returned to his work.

  I left the barn and returned to the barracks. Teal still had her back to Gia and Mindy and me.

  Gia looked up. “You shouldn't have let her sleep.”

  “She's exhausted. We're both exhausted.”

  “You've got to start your work, show Dr. Foreman you're making an effort.”

  “I don't understand that math. I couldn't even begin to do it.”

  “You can do it,” Gia insisted. “Let me see what she gave you as your first math assignment.”

  I
brought the book and the assignment sheet to her and she nodded. “It's the same one we had to do. Okay, sit.” She patted her cot.

  I sat and she started to read and explain it to me. Mindy glanced at us every once in a while, but said nothing. Before we were summoned to dinner, I did understand the first lesson.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “You can show Teal how to do it now,” Gia told me.

  I woke Teal up but she was too groggy and cranky to listen to anything. She still mumbled about running off as soon as it was dark enough to escape. Dr. Foreman's words returned to me. I'd be responsible if Teal went off and died out there, and Dr. Foreman would be displeased with me. Who knew what that meant?

  M'Lady Two came to our door and summoned us to dinner. I was hoping we would find Robin at the house when we got there, but she was nowhere in sight. We took off our shoes, washed our hands, and went in to have our dinner. Just a simple thing like having our own bowl and plate had now become a wonderful thing. We went through our ritual of thanking each other and begging each other for forgiveness, then ate what seemed to be a more tasty food that Mindy described as polenta, a mush of cornmeal, black beans, and a beef in some sort of sweet sauce.

  Dr. Foreman arrived and declared she was rewarding all of us for putting in a decent day's work. We were given a plate of cookies for dessert. Mindy, Gia, and Teal were assigned to washing dishes and silverware, and I was told to clean the dining room afterward. While I worked, Dr. Foreman reappeared. She watched me for a few moments. I had the sense she was waiting for me to say something.

  I stopped working, thought about Natani's tale of the squirrel, and then turned to her.

  “What is it, Phoebe?”

  “I'm afraid for Teal.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You've done a very good thing, Phoebe.” Dr. Foreman stepped up to me and took my hands, turning them to look at my palms.

  “Follow me.” She led me out of the dining room, down the corridor, to a bedroom. It was surprisingly bland and unfeminine. There were no pictures on the walls, no pretty curtains or rugs, nor any photographs of family or friends. What kind of a family did she have? I wondered. Had she ever been married? Did she have a boyfriend, children of her own, parents still alive?