by Neil Mcmahon
“I thought he was getting better.”
“The insulin helped stabilize him, but that’s not going to last.”
“You gotta get a more positive attitude,” Freeboot said, shaking his head.
“I’m just telling you how it is.”
Freeboot’s eyes flared, in his characteristic instant transition from seeming tranquility to menace.
“You don’t tell me how it is. I tell you.”
Freeboot turned away suddenly, toward a wrist-thick dead branch jutting out from a pine tree, about the height of a basketball hoop. He was less than six feet tall but he leaped up, caught it with his right hand, and dangled there.
“I was a punk kid,” he yelled out. “Spent a lot of my life in jail. Dope, petty theft, finally pulled five years for armed robbery. I was looking at that third strike.”
He started chinning himself with the one arm. Monks counted ten before he paused again. He did not seem to be straining.
“Then I had a epiphany,” Freeboot bellowed. It was another term, like virtu, that didn’t come naturally from his lips. “I don’t mean like all the guys in the joint who get religion. I saw through this fucked-up society-what it did to me, and how stupid I was to let it. That’s when everything changed. I started to read, man. I started to think.”
He switched hands in midair and did ten more chin-ups with his left arm. Finished, he dropped to the ground, still breathing easily.
“I got my head together and I got my body in shape,” he said. “I got where I need to be.” He folded his arms and waited, his gaze steady on Monks.
It seemed that whatever challenge existed between them in Freeboot’s mind had reached the point where the line was drawn in the dirt.
“To start Revolution Number 9?” Monks said.
Freeboot nodded, looking pleased. “Right on. John Lennon saw this coming.” He spoke with the air of having privileged information. “That song was a message, kicking it off. That’s why he got killed. The deal about the guy being a fan is bullshit. It was the CIA that zapped him.”
“I don’t recall that there was any message in the song,” Monks said.
“That’s the point, man,” Freeboot said mysteriously. “He who hath ears, let him hear.”
So-the Bible, the Beatles, and conspiracy theories had joined the mix. It was impossible to take seriously-and yet, the more that Monks saw and heard, the scarier it got.
“I still don’t get why you care what I think,” Monks said.
Freeboot’s face took on a sly look. “I hear you got fucked over by the system yourself.”
Monks realized that Glenn must have told Freeboot about this, too-an incident from a dozen years earlier, when paramedics had killed an elderly woman by ignoring Monks’s radioed orders from a hospital ER. Then, to cover themselves, they had destroyed the recorded tape of the radio conversation. Monks was eventually vindicated, but by then he had lost his job, marriage, and a lot of his friends, and he had plunged into a rage-driven alcoholic depression that he almost hadn’t come out of.
Freeboot was right. He had been fucked over by the system.
“True enough,” Monks said.
“Cost you big, huh?”
“In a lot of ways.”
“So maybe you and me aren’t so far apart,” Freeboot said.
“Maybe,” Monks said. “Except that one of us is the other’s prisoner.”
“That could change. Let’s say I was thinking about giving you a chance to get on this bus.”
A crow cawed suddenly in the forest, a harsh grating anhhh-anhhh that seemed to tumble in on the wind. The big black shape swooped down out of the foggy treetops a second later. It landed near the edge of the clearing, folded its wings, and hopped to investigate something on the ground, pausing to caw again and glare around, warding off competition.
Monks kept his expression careful, as if appraising the offer.
“You don’t seem to think much of doctors,” he said.
“Oh, they got their uses, don’t get me wrong. What it comes down to is virtu, see?”
“No,” Monks said, “I don’t.”
Freeboot turned away, clasping his hands behind his back. He raised his face to the cloudy sky, as if searching for an answer. The pose seemed staged, like others that Monks had seen-and yet he had the sudden sense that this was a crucial moment-that Freeboot was about to impart something weighty, and that everything that happened from here on would depend on how it played out. Monks shifted uneasily and realized that he was getting cold. The fresh wet wind was picking up, tossing the mist-shrouded treetops.
“My son is ordained to be the root of my dynasty,” Freeboot said, still facing the sky. “I know Mandrake’s just a kid. I’m giving him some time, with the insulin. It’s like training wheels. But if you don’t take the training wheels away, he’s never going to learn to ride without them. He’s got to prove he’s got virtu.”
“You mean Mandrake has to pull himself out of his sickness,” Monks said.
“It’s not his fault, I understand that. It’s his mother. No way I could have known she had bad genes. But I can’t be passing my genes down through a kid who’s damaged goods, you know what I’m saying?”
A day ago, Monks would have been astounded. Now, this only filled in another piece of the puzzle. Bound up with Freeboot’s concept of himself as Nietzschean superman was a facile, distorted understanding of genetics.
Then, in an instant of electric clarity, Monks grasped the real reason that Freeboot refused to take the little boy to a hospital-the reason why a man who would eat the raw heart of a deer quailed in terror at being tainted by the urine of his own son. The issues of faith, the distortion of virtu into a mystical healing power, the need to be sure he could trust Monks, were all a sham. The truth stemmed from Freeboot’s diabetic uncle.
Freeboot was afraid that he, not Motherlode, had passed on the diabetes to Mandrake-afraid that medical examination would reveal this, and bring his megalomaniacal theory of his own superiority crashing down.
And he was willing to stand by and let his son die to keep that from happening.
Once again, despising himself for it, Monks kept his true feelings to himself.
“You’ve given me a lot to think about,” he said.
“We’re just talking, that’s all. We got to get to know each other a lot better. Trust, right?”
Monks nodded.
Freeboot turned and started away. The interview was over. But then he paused and looked back.
“You want to take a hot bath, let me know. We got a luxury setup.” He grinned. “Maybe even provide you some company, a pretty girl to wash your back-and, hey, who knows what else?”
“I’ll think about that, too,” Monks said.
He walked on to the washhouse and cleaned up distractedly, trying to make sense of this gambit. Freeboot could hardly be serious about his offer to join, and Monks’s initial hope-that he might be able to pay extortion money for Glenn and be set free-was long gone. After all that he had seen, that would be far too great of a risk for Freeboot. More likely, this show of friendliness was a way of keeping Monks cooperative, for as long as Mandrake stayed alive.
After that…
When Monks walked back outside, he saw that there were now three crows on the ground, croaking and flapping their wings at each other in contention for some bit of carrion. Sidewinder, the guard, was sighting his rifle at them and jerking the barrel up in a pantomime of each gunshot’s recoil.
Monks felt the first light sprays of rain against his face.
In mid-morning, Monks heard the lodge’s outside door slam violently, then bootsteps in the main room, heavy enough to rattle the lamp’s glass chimney. He tensed, fearing that it was one of the guards, coming to drag him off to another lesson that Freeboot had arranged.
But a man’s voice called out excitedly: “Marguerite! Where are you?”
Monks heard her muffled reply from the kitchen.
“Come
when you’re called, girl,” the man commanded.
Monks got up quietly and went to the bedroom’s doorway. The unmistakable shape of Hammerhead stood in the room’s center. He was holding something behind his back. His grin looked manic.
Marguerite walked slowly out of the kitchen, her own face tense and uncertain.
“I’m full maquis now,” Hammerhead announced. “I want you in the Garden, wearing this and nothing else.”
He thrust something toward her, holding it in his big hands and letting it slither through his fingers like a snake. Monks glimpsed a gold chain.
Marguerite’s mouth opened, but not with the pleasure of a woman receiving a gift-more as if it was a snake. Her hands, instead of reaching to receive it, twisted each other nervously.
“Where’d you get that?” she breathed.
Hammerhead frowned. Clearly, this was not the reaction that he had expected.
“Never mind where I got it. You have to do what I tell you. Put it on!”
With obvious reluctance, she reached forward to accept it, and slipped it around her neck. At the end of the gold chain hung a dark green pendant, but Monks was too far away to see it clearly.
“Now come on,” Hammerhead said. He grasped her wrist, pulling her toward the door.
“Wait,” she said, struggling with his grip. “I have to feed Mandrake.”
This was not true, but Hammerhead didn’t know that, and he seemed to realize that it was something he didn’t dare interfere with. He hesitated, then pulled her close and planted a wide-mouthed kiss on her, an embrace she neither resisted nor accepted.
“Hurry up,” he said into her ear, in a voice thick with passion. “I’ve been waiting for this forever.”
He let her go and strode out of the building. Marguerite lifted the pendant off over her head and gazed at it, still looking troubled, but fascinated, too.
“If you’re going to be leaving, Mandrake could use some soup,” Monks said.
She looked up at him swiftly, then spun away, clasping the pendant tight in her fist and hurrying back into the kitchen.
He returned to his chair, bemused by the exchange but too burdened by his other worries to try to make sense of it. Mandrake was still withdrawn and listless, not responding to Monks’s attempts to draw him out. At first, Monks had thought it was from the shock of seeing the violent attack last night.
But Mandrake’s forehead had gotten noticeably warmer during the night, and he was developing a weak but ugly cough. Mucus was forming in his nose, streaking his upper lip. Monks feared that he was coming down with a virus, or even pneumonia.
That could easily precipitate a coma. Then the end would not be far off, and there wasn’t a thing in the world that Monks could do about it.
His watch read 10:14 A.M. That left just seven hours of daylight to find a way out of here.
15
By mid-afternoon, the rain was coming down in sheets, driven by lashing gusts of wind that blew the trees around like candle flames. The gloom was already indistinguishable from twilight. The camp seemed almost deserted. Sidewinder continued to skulk around, taking refuge under the eaves of a shed, apparently forbidden to go inside; and a couple of the other men had stopped into the lodge to make sandwiches. But Monks had been alone with Mandrake for the past hour. With the rain, there wasn’t much incentive to wander around.
He walked to the kitchen to check out something that he had noticed on one of his trips back from the washhouse-a gap in the old rock-and-mortar foundation, where the kitchen water and drain pipes ran in. Probably the plumbing had been added some time after the lodge was built, requiring a space for a man to slither in under the floor. The water pipe was wrapped with insulation, suggesting that it was prone to freezing. Monks had done a fair amount of plumbing on his own house, and once in a while the weather got cold enough that he needed to thaw a pipe. It was a lot easier when there was access to it from both ends.
He opened the cabinet under the kitchen sink. A section of the heavy plank floor had been cut out for the pipes, then replaced with two pieces of half-inch plywood, about eighteen by twenty-four inches, joining in the middle with hemispherical cuts around the pipes.
The plywood was not nailed down.
He quickly removed the items under the sink-cleaning supplies and a bucket to catch drips from the leaky drain-and lifted the plywood sections. He could just see a gray patch of twilight through the foundation’s gap, fifteen feet away. It opened out the back, on the opposite side of the lodge from Sidewinder’s watch point.
It would be a tough squirm for a good-sized man. But a good-sized desperate man could make it.
He replaced the stuff under the sink, mentally going through all the factors he could bring to mind. Then he walked to the lodge’s door and stepped out into the rain.
Sidewinder walked to meet him, unhappily drawn forth from his cover.
“Where you going, man?” he said.
“To visit my son,” Monks said, continuing his walk toward Glenn’s cabin. He had been watching it from the lodge’s windows, and had seen Glenn a couple of times, hurrying to the washhouse or on some errand. But he had not seen Shrinkwrap. He was hoping that she was gone.
“I’m already fucking soaked,” Sidewinder complained. “I was outside all night and I haven’t slept. Freeboot’s making me stay on duty, ’cause-”
“Because you asked me that question last night?” Monks interrupted. Sardonic words came to his mind-Sorry I caused you trouble-but he had already made enough enemies here.
Instead, he said, “I’d have worried about eating that raw meat, too. I think Freeboot overreacted.”
“Yeah,” Sidewinder said, seeming slightly cheered by the sympathy.
“Look, I’m not going to try anything, are you kidding?” Monks said. “You can stay where you were and watch the door. I’ll only be a few minutes.”
Sidewinder glanced around nervously, as if fearing that Freeboot would materialize and smite him for this slackness. Then he nodded and hurried back to his shelter. But he unslung his rifle and stood at watchful attention.
Smoke was rising from the stovepipe of Glenn’s cabin, a thin plume barely visible in the rain. Monks knocked sharply on the door, and braced himself for the possibility of facing the hostile Shrinkwrap.
But it was Glenn who answered, opening the door just a few inches. He looked bleary, surprised to see his father. If he noticed Monks’s missing chunk of hair, he gave no sign of it. But, then, Glenn was a good enough actor to pull that off.
“Let me in,” Monks said. “It’s pouring.”
Glenn’s face turned reluctant, and he seemed about to object, but Monks pushed the door open and stepped past him.
Immediately, Monks saw at least one reason for Glenn’s hesitation. There was a woman in the room, but not Shrinkwrap. It was Motherlode, lounging on the bed, watching the screen of a laptop computer that was playing a video-a Tom and Jerry cartoon, it looked like.
She stared at Monks blank-eyed, then glanced furtively at the dresser. He followed her gaze to a syringe-one that had been pilfered from Mandrake’s supply-and a bottle of Percocets. There were other items that Monks recognized as being used to render the pills injectable-a porcelain coffee cup for grinding them up and mixing them into solution, a soggy wad of tissues for straining it, and a length of surgical rubber tubing.
One syringe. Two people.
“I hurt my back,” Motherlode said.
She was wearing sweatclothes, and Glenn was fully dressed; the situation did not appear to be a sexual one. Monks figured that was none of his concern anyway. He just wanted to get her out of here.
“Mandrake would really like to see you,” he told her. “Now would be a good time.”
Her eyes focused a little more.
“I can’t-” she began.
“Try to overcome your pain,” he said, with a harsh edge. He held her gaze, letting some of his anger show in his own.
Pouting, she got up
and put on an anorak, not forgetting to collect her Percocets before she went reluctantly out the door.
Glenn slapped his own thigh in anger. “Now you come in and fuck up my party. This ain’t my room at home, Rasp.”
Monks stepped to a window and watched Motherlode hurry off through the rain. As he had expected, she did not go toward the lodge to visit her child.
“She’s been stealing these from Mandrake,” he said, showing Glenn the syringe. He set it back on the dresser. “You ever hear that it’s not smart to share a needle?”
Glenn shrugged, but he looked uneasy. “I hardly ever shoot anymore.”
“This must be a special occasion.”
“If you’re nice to her, she’ll share.” Glenn grinned slyly, displaying his black-spotted teeth. “Sometimes ’codes are a good way to chill out. Especially when you’ve been doing a lot of crank.”
“That’s what you’re using mostly? Meth?”
“Yeah. Shrinkwrap got me off junk.”
“By getting you on speed?”
“Sort of. Freeboot doesn’t like hard dope for the people he’s got to count on. It slows you down, makes you unreliable.”
“He doesn’t seem to mind with Motherlode.”
Glenn snorted. “He doesn’t care what she does.”
The casual callousness hit Monks with a pain so deep, it went beyond sorrow. It came to him that there was no point in worrying anymore about who was to blame for all that had gone wrong between them. They were like different, hostile species.
And yet, this was still the son that he had raised. That bond that went all the way down to the DNA in their cells-deeper than the rational mind could ever hope to penetrate-would never be erased.
It was impossible to break through to Glenn and impossible to quit trying.
Monks walked over to him and gripped him tightly by the upper arm. Glenn tried to pull away, but Monks, although decades older, was larger, stronger, and not wasted by drug abuse.
“I need you to call for help,” Monks said. “That kid’s going to die if we don’t get him out of here.”