The Reckless Oath We Made

by Bryn Greenwood

“I don’t want to go see my folks,” she snapped.

  I didn’t blame her, because Rosalinda’s family were long-denim-skirt-wearing Evangelicals. Her younger sister was the only member of her family who came out for Rosalinda and Edrard’s handfasting, and she acted like I was trying to seduce her because I flirted with her. So I parked her next to Gentry, who’d sat there being chivalrous and nonseductive for the whole day.

  I reached over and muted Edrard’s phone for a second.

  “Just ask her if she wants to go,” I said. Edrard gave me a look of horror. “Just invite her.”

  I unmuted the phone and after a second, Edrard said, “Sweetie, do you want to go?”

  “No! I don’t want to go to Missouri and look for Zee’s stupid sister.” She delivered that in a snarl, but it was the answer I’d expected. Rosalinda was a homebody, and there was no way she wanted to go watch her backup knight in shining armor serve that red-haired minx.

  End result, Rosalinda stopped calling, and two-thirds of the Three Musketeers hit the road for southern Missouri, where we made a few dueling banjo jokes the further we got off the main highway. Gentry had texted us the motel information, so when we got into town around noon, we went straight there.

  It looked like one of those by-the-hour motels on Broadway in Wichita and, when Gentry let us in, the room was all paneled walls and cheap furniture, with a funky smell.

  “Damn. This place smells like a whorehouse,” I said, while Gentry and Edrard shook hands.

  “That’s really flattering,” Zee said. She stepped out of the bathroom wearing nothing but a T-shirt and panties. I stared at her, because she had this enormous tattoo that covered her whole thigh. Honestly, it wasn’t attractive, but it was pretty compelling. Shocking, too. Was that the goal? To surprise you? To make you stare?

  She walked across that nasty motel carpet in her bare feet, and picked up a pair of blue jeans off the foot of the bed. Instead of going back into the bathroom to get dressed, she pulled them on with the three of us there in the room. Hiked up her T-shirt and fastened them.

  “Why don’t we go get some lunch?” I said.

  “You all can go,” Zee said. “But I need to stay here in case they show up.”

  “They?”

  “My uncle and a friend of his might be coming.”

  “I shall stay with thee,” Gentry said.

  “I can stay with you while they go get lunch,” I said, but Zee ignored me.

  “Well, hey, why don’t I just go get us some lunch?” Edrard said.

  “’Twould be well met.”

  Gentry reached for his wallet—he always paid Edrard’s way—but Zee waved him off. She got up and went to a backpack on the dresser and unzipped it. Took out a fifty-dollar bill and handed it to Edrard. We decided on pizza, since we’d passed a place on the way into town. Edrard left to get it, giving me a look like I should come with him, but not when things were getting interesting.

  Zee was sitting on the bed further from the door, so I sat down across from her. She was messing with her phone and didn’t look up.

  “Sorry about barging in while you were getting dressed,” I said. “We didn’t know you were sharing a room.”

  “Why wouldn’t we be?”

  It was a room with two beds, though, and they both looked slept in. Plus, the way Gentry acted when he sat next to her on the bed, a good foot apart, with his hands on his knees, I didn’t think there was any way he’d summited Mount Zee.

  The whole situation had me thinking about awkward love triangles, because whatever her operating system was, she had me intrigued. I couldn’t figure out why Gentry had latched onto her, because she did not fit into his chivalrous little world. She had a mouth like a sailor and a body that was more Rubens’ Venus than The Lady and the Unicorn. Still, for whatever reason, Gentry was really into her, and I didn’t want to be the person who made a mess of his romantic delusions.

  The two of them sat there, messing with their phones, until Zee turned her head and looked at Gentry, then back at her phone.

  “Are you two texting each other right here in front of me?” I said.

  Zee snorted, finished typing something, and put her phone away. Then she got the backpack off the dresser and carried it into the bathroom.

  “So, how are things going with her?” I asked. “Sir Percival still a virgin?”

  Without answering, Gentry followed Zee to the bathroom. Nothing weird about that.

  They’d been in there for maybe five minutes when someone knocked on the door. It was way too soon to be Edrard back with the pizza, so I got up to see who it was. Zee came out of the bathroom and shook her head at me.

  “Will you do me a favor?” she said.

  “Certs, my lady.” I winked at her, but she gave me a kill look.

  “Sit right there and keep your mouth shut.”

  “Really? That’s—”

  “Seriously. Don’t say a word. Can you do that?” she said.

  I made a little zipping motion with my hand over my mouth. She must have already given Gentry that speech, because when he came out of the bathroom, she didn’t say anything to him. She went to the door and he followed her.

  “Hey, Uncle Alva,” she said when she opened the door. She hugged him for a second and then stepped back to let him in. Him and a guy behind him, whom she didn’t hug. Her uncle was tall, but sort of stooped over, with a scraggly goatee. The other guy was average-sized but with one of those big mountain-men beards. Younger than me if I was guessing. While Zee closed the door, he looked around the motel room. At Gentry. At me.

  The whole thing felt super sketchy, even before Zee turned around and I realized she had a gun stuck in the front of her jeans. Then I looked more closely at the uncle and the other guy, and realized they both had guns, too. Theirs were in holsters and not stuck in their waistbands, but I was in a motel room with three people with guns.

  “Let’s make this quick,” the bearded guy said.

  “Do you wanna see the money?” Zee said.

  “Yeah.”

  If Zee having a gun surprised me, I definitely wasn’t ready for Gentry to reach into the cargo pocket on his shorts and pull out a stack of bills. He passed it to Zee, who handed it to the bearded guy, who flipped through the bundle of money and nodded. When he passed it back to Zee, she returned it to Gentry.

  “All right. So here’s the deal.” The guy reached into his back pocket and pulled out an actual paper road map. He unfolded it and laid it on the dresser. Zee’s uncle stayed where he was, but Zee and Gentry went to stand next to the guy.

  “There’s an old cabin here, back up in the woods. Originally belonged to Craig’s grandparents. Here about ten years ago, his ex-wife sold it to some people who put it in a trust. It’s complicated, but the folks who own that trust are friendly with the wizard”—I swear he said wizard—“who supports Craig. On paper, it don’t look like it’s connected to him. That’s where they are. And it’s pretty far out in the country, not easy to get to, and not many folks around.”

  “That’s a pretty big circle,” Zee said.

  “Yeah, well, I’ve only been there twice, so it’s not like I can give you coordinates.”

  “I bet a satellite map would help,” I said.

  Zee shot me a glare.

  “Like he said,” the bearded guy said. “You look at satellite maps, you’ll be able to find it. It’s the only thing for miles around.”

  “You sure that’s where they are?” Zee’s uncle said.

  “They’re there.”

  “How do you know?” Zee said.

  I’d been trying to keep an eye on the big picture, but I kept coming back to where everyone’s hands were in relationship to their guns. Zee’s uncle had his hands down at his sides. The bearded man kept his arms crossed, so that he was like Gentry’s mirror. Zee had her
thumb in the pocket below where the gun was tucked into her waistband. It made me nervous, but I guess I was the only one.

  “Because I spoke to a man who’s with them. And he seems to think they’d be better off without your gal. Save themselves some trouble. Now, I’m not about to get in the middle of this, but if you go there, I bet they’d talk to you for the right amount.”

  “What’s your friend’s name?” Zee said.

  “Same as mine. None of your business. Now, I think I’ve done what I agreed to do.”

  Zee looked at her uncle and, when he nodded, she held out her hand to Gentry. Just like he had before, he took the wad of cash out of his pocket and gave it to her. She gave it to the bearded guy, and he walked out, leaving the map behind.

  After he was gone, Zee took the gun out of her waistband and set it on the dresser. For almost a whole minute her uncle coughed, and then he said, “I wish I could do this for you, girl. I truly do.”

  “I know. It’s okay,” she said.

  “You take care of her, son,” the uncle said to Gentry. “I know you can handle yourself in a fight, so I ain’t worried about that, but you tread careful.”

  “I shall, sir.” Gentry put out his hand and they shook.

  After the uncle left, Zee and Gentry stood next to each other looking at the map.

  “Am I allowed to talk now?” I said.

  “If you have to,” Zee said.

  “What the hell was that?”

  They didn’t answer and, before I could ask anything else, Edrard came back with lunch. Zee folded up the map, and he put the pizzas on the dresser.

  “How fareth Dame Rosalinda?” Gentry started passing around pieces of pizza, so I guessed we weren’t going to talk about the bearded guy.

  “Well, she wasn’t very happy about Edrard coming here,” I said.

  “Understatement. I suspect my name will be mud when I get home,” Edrard said.

  “I’m sorry,” Zee said around a bite of pizza. “I didn’t think you two would come.”

  “All for one and one for all, right?” That’s what I said, but I was seriously disturbed by the whole thing. Ever since I got the diversion for my DUI, I’d been keeping my head down, being extra careful. This wasn’t anything like careful.

  “I thank you, my brothers,” Gentry said.

  We ate our lunch talking about jousts and armor upgrades. Zee sat there eating, listening to us. When Edrard went to get another piece of pizza, he finally noticed what I’d been thinking about all along.

  “Why is there a gun here?” he said.

  Zee picked it up and set it next to her backpack. Like that solved the problem.

  “Yeah, I have to say, Zee having a gun is just the tip of the iceberg, but maybe we could start there,” I said.

  “She hath arms, for these Knights of the Ku Klux Klan are ne to be trusted ne to be trifled with,” Gentry said.

  “Wait. That guy was KKK?” I said.

  “What guy?” Edrard swiveled to look at me.

  “While you were gone, Zee’s uncle came here with a guy who’s apparently in the KKK. So what the hell is going on?”

  “What did Gentry tell you?” Zee said.

  “That we were going to get your sister,” I said. “I assumed she needed convincing to leave a bad boyfriend. Or he needed convincing.”

  “My sister is LaReigne Trego-Gill. She was taken hostage in the prison escape from El Dorado last week.”

  “You’re serious? And you somehow think you’re going to do what? Go negotiate with white supremacists who murdered people and kidnapped your sister? And then what are you gonna tell the police about how you got her back?”

  “We’ll drop her off in the country and she can walk into town and tell the police she escaped,” Zee said.

  “Yeah, I’m sure nothing could go wrong with any of that.”

  Zee looked annoyed and Gentry was scratching his neck, but I couldn’t get a bead on Edrard. He looked uneasy, but he wasn’t saying anything.

  “Look,” I said, “if that guy is KKK and he actually knows where your sister is, we need to call the police. They’re the people equipped to deal with this.”

  “You don’t have to be a part of this. But we’re not getting the police involved,” Zee said.

  “What do you think we are? Navy SEALs?”

  “No, I think you’re exactly what you are.” She managed to make it sound like an insult. “It was not my idea to invite you along, and Gentry, no offense, but I don’t think this is a good idea.”

  “My lady, with all respect to thy view, ’tis better we should be four than two. I am thy champion, and they aren my brothers-at-arms.”

  “I appreciate that. I do. But I don’t want to drag a bunch of people into this,” she said.

  “Oh, now that’s occurring to you,” I said. “That maybe you shouldn’t take a bunch of amateur knights to a negotiation with the Klan. Exactly what are you going to say to convince them to let your sister go?”

  “We’re not going to negotiate,” Zee said. “We’re going to ransom her.”

  I wondered where the money had come from, and obviously she had money, since she’d given a bunch of it to the bearded guy. The Klansman. I hated to admit it, but I was starting to agree with Rosalinda. Zee wasn’t our kind of people, and she was getting Gentry mixed up in something dangerous. He wasn’t even paying attention to us. While we were talking, he picked up Zee’s gun and very calmly popped the clip out of it. Then he ejected the bullet from the chamber, like he was in a movie.

  “When last was this cleaned?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” Zee said.

  Gentry opened his big rucksack to get a rag and a bottle of oil. He started taking the gun apart and cleaning it, while Zee watched.

  “You know how to use a gun?” she said. “What happened to swords and armor, Sir Gentry?”

  “I am no fool, Lady Zhorzha. I build flying machines. Yea, I ken the workings of a gun. My father taught me.”

  “Well, I think you should wipe it all down, including the bullets, so it doesn’t have your fingerprints on it. You know, in case it gets used.”

  Gentry nodded and went on cleaning the gun.

  “So, we’re talking pretty casually about shooting people. Did I read that right?” I said.

  “I’m sorry he brought you all the way out here without telling you what was going on,” Zee said. “If I’d known, I would’ve stopped him.”

  “I mean, I kind of knew,” Edrard said. Which was complete bullshit. At no point had he mentioned white supremacists or hostages or anything like that. He had such a fear of missing out, he would go along with anything. “But do we know for sure where your sister is?”

  “Yea, we haven a map,” Gentry said.

  He put the gun back together and gave it a last wipe-down before he put it in Zee’s backpack. Then he went to the bathroom and washed his hands. When he came back, Zee got the map, Gentry got his iPad, and, like we hadn’t been discussing the KKK at all, the three of them started looking at satellite maps and discussing what roads to take. Talking like they were really going to do this, until I thought my head would explode.

  “Josh, will you listen to me?” I said. “While you were gone, her uncle came here with a guy who is apparently in the Klan, and brought that map. Please, will you think about that? Her uncle knows people in the Klan.”

  “Yeah, that’s kind of how prison works. You make friends with the people you make friends with,” Zee said. “Including white supremacists sometimes, which is not my favorite thing, either.”

  “I was here. I saw the guy, Josh. These are not fancy-pants college campus Nazis in fitted suits. These are real, backwoods, cross-burning racists. The kind of people who tie you to their tailgate and drag you to death. Just for fun.”

  “’Tis all the more rea
son I would see them returned to their prison,” Gentry said.

  “Then let’s call the police. I didn’t sign on for some crazy vigilante shit.” I hadn’t signed on for being the only one thinking rationally, either, but there I was.

  “It’s not like her uncle is still in the KKK,” Edrard said, like that was the whole point of what I’d said. “Is he?”

  “No. He never was. He was friends with these people in prison, because he had to be.”

  “Gentry,” I said, but we’d lost him. He was in full-blown campaign mode, scribbling notes on the map with a cheap motel pen. We weren’t getting him back anytime soon, which in some ways made it easier to say what I needed to.

  “Zee, I haven’t known you very long, but I feel you may have missed an important element, so I need you to listen to me really carefully. Gentry is my friend. I care about him.”

  “We all do,” Edrard said, but I thought it was more likely that Zee saw him as a convenience. Someone to use.

  “Okay, great. We all care about him,” I said. “I know you’ve known him the longest, Edrard, but I’ve known him for nearly five years, long enough to say very firmly that he is not all there. I’m not saying that because he’s autistic, so don’t even with that. Autism spectrum disorder is one thing. Plenty of people on the spectrum function really well. Gentry does fine. He has a job. He has his hobbies. But let’s be honest, he also has half a dozen invisible friends who talk to him in his head. Please, will you think about that for a minute?”

  Zee gave me a glare that was so malevolent it made me glad Gentry had put her gun away.

  “You don’t have to be that way about it,” Edrard said.

  “I guess he probably does,” Zee said. “I guess that’s how he sees Gentry.”

  “Oh, don’t get all high and mighty with me like I’m being mean or something. You cannot possibly believe he’s capable of making the kinds of decisions that are involved in this. He has no business going on some half-assed rescue mission with you. You need to call the FBI or something, and give them that map.”

  Gentry looked up from his trance and said, “My lady, we musten go this even.”

  “I know. They won’t stay there. We have to get there before they leave,” she said.