by J. D. Palmer
“I hate grapefruit,” he says. “Not the taste, just the name. And I was wondering, since there aren’t many people around, if we could change it to…?
BERYL | 4
OUR CAMP IS a quiet, somber affair. Except for Sheila. She is drunk, and angry. A dark angry. An unapproachable angry. After she passes out the rest of us still tiptoe around, whispering the few conversations that take place.
A squeeze on my shoulder as Harlan walks past me to the road. Always the first watch. Though tonight it might be more of the pull to be alone. To examine ourselves in the face of what happened today. To see not what we are, but what we have become.
Maybe an innocence lost. Perhaps forever.
I do not fret. Mine was lost a long time ago.
Theo’s coughing gradually dies down as he falls asleep. I hear the murmur of Josey as he dreams.
I stare at the fire and let time flow past me. The enchantment that the flickering flames cast over me. When I got too old for foster care I was bounced around various halfway houses. One had a three day retreat. A bus trip to a secluded campground. A place for us to talk, if we wanted. Or to gain perspective. At least that’s what they said. Most just used it as a place to try to sneak away. But I always loved the campfire. There’s no pressure to speak around a fire. The flames say enough.
I smile. I feel Harlan standing above me. Pulling the blankets down over my feet. I hadn’t even known they were cold.
I open my eyes to reveal the dark figure above me. My mind stumbles, skips a beat. I know it’s Harlan. But in this darkness I’m ten years old again. Late at night. Always a school night. I’d wake to the elderly man pulling my blanket down. Down and not to make me warmer.
It’s easy. So easy. To drift. To blur the lines. To sink.
But I don’t. I fight it. I grit my teeth and bring my will to bear.
My body twitches, jumping of its own accord as Harlan settles in next to me. My body rebelling even as I embrace what his presence means to me.
I am alone. But I am not.
I close my eyes. And open them. To the world. To the light from the fire. To Harlan’s arm draped over my shoulder. To his hand grasped within mine. My body still trembles, still shakes. But he is patient. He whispers to me of his home, of the birds on the lake. He whispers to me of the beach that sits at the northern tip. Of the mix of sand and clay. Of the sanded glass from bottles long ago tossed into a distant part of the water, only to wash up there. Sharp edges gone. Clean. Almost new. A better version of themselves. Something, he says, his mother would collect and turn into art. Trash to treasure.
I like that.
I don’t dream.
Not like Harlan. I can’t. Not when I have my sanctuary. Sometimes I wish I did. Dream. Sometimes I wish I was brave enough to see what my subconscious might trot out in front of me.
But I can’t afford to be weak.
Not for him.
Not for the group. My family.
Waking up is like suddenly finding yourself without air. I gasp, and tremble. And panic. And all the while scurry around from nerve to nerve in a desperate attempt to hide it from Harlan. From everyone. I don’t know if they notice. I don’t know if they don’t say anything out of pity.
I wake up, and murder is always the first thing on my mind. I want to kill. I want to rage.
I am scared for the people around me.
But I am able to take these feelings and put them behind a closed door. A locked door. The place within the tree in which I keep my words. My worst memories. The sides of myself that even I cannot bear to bring out into the open.
For now.
Part of me knows that someday I will have to face them. Another part of me hopes that the longer they are kept in the dark, the more they will shrivel and decay, turn to a dust that I can simply expose to the new warm winds that blow through my heart. A room scoured clean by time and hope.
It won’t be that easy.
Thoughts for a future that might not exist. For now I’ll hang onto the anger, the rage, the knife’s edge of madness that allows me to protect my family. To give that up now would only make me the latest victim of this harsh new world.
One day…
I grip Harlan’s hand and pretend that I’m doing better. I cling to him with the hope that one day I will be better.
Maybe I do dream, after all.
“Har.”
I point down the road. I’m sure he’s already seen the silhouettes of people. But sometimes… Sometimes the open road takes over. Too much emptiness. Too much quiet. Deep sighs every few minutes and the arched eyebrows that signify that his thoughts are thousands of miles away.
He brings the car to a stop and Theo is already jumping out, gun up and brought about as he checks the road behind us. I join him, gun held out in front of me as I scan the desert to the right.
“You’re holding the gun wrong.”
Sheila stands next to me. She reeks of whiskey and, as if to prove her disinterest, she takes a pull from the near empty bottle.
“Didn’t your daddy teach ya how to hold one? Jesus.”
I am too far removed from that part of my life to let that affect me. Or to bother explaining that no, I never had a father. That I would have loved to have learned how to protect myself from someone. That it would have changed a large part of my life had someone, anyone, been a father figure to me.
“I’m thinking that gun’s too much for you. We should find you a smaller piece.”
I walk past her to the front of the car to join Harlan. I try to smooth my face, walk at an easy pace. But fuck, that girl is wearing me thin. It has been a clockwork of derisiveness that has left no one unscathed. Pushing and probing and asking questions more than skin deep. Questioning. Bitter jokes that come with no apology. She decided to stay with us. But she acts like she wants us to push her away. Throw her to the side of the road. Another abandoned remnant of a time that was.
Too bad.
We are weathering the storm. So far. My silence is, as I’ve learned, my greatest asset with her. Harlan is much more volatile. Too easy to provoke with questions about Montana. About his scars. She’ll get close to taking it too far. Close to the point in which I know he’ll snap.
Then she moves on to Theo.
She feels out our weaknesses. Our pain. Our unmentionables. She finds them and fills the car with a most casual dressing down. As if she were a drill-sergeant hell bent on breaking new recruits.
It’s usually worse when she’s sober.
Two figures stand in the road. One of them waves, arms flapping over his head as if he thinks we don’t see him. Or are ignoring them.
“I don’t feel like talking to them,” Har says. He snorts. “John would be so pissed.”
There is more than a little hurt in his words. But it’s the first time he’s mentioned him since we last saw John standing over his brother. I don’t know if it’s a good thing, or not. I’m probably the least fit person to diagnose someone’s mental status. But it feels good. At least to me. Breaking the silence on something like that is some sort of liberty. A thing is the same even bound in chains, but it will always be better without.
“I guess we better chat. Not unless we feel like off-roading for a bit.”
I knew he would say that. And I knew he’d be balking the whole way. But it’s one of the things I admire about him. The ability to see each new situation as if it were new. Untouched from before. Yes, he’s cautious. But he has room for hope. More than I can say.
“Sheila, you—”
“I’m fuckin’ set.”
Harlan heaves in a breath.“Theo, you coming?”
He nods thankfully, and we abandon Josey to Sheila. Theo takes center and outpaces me by two strides. I fade right as Harlan takes the left. Our guns are up but only pointed at the legs of the men in front of us.
We stop twenty feet away. The men still have their hands out. There is a deep bark and then a guttural huffing. There, in the ditch, is a dog o
n its own. No, not by itself. There is a woman, or at least I think it’s a woman. A form sitting in the shade, an arm crossed over a knee so that the head can rest. A dirty face and eyes that are watching us. She jerks on the leash that leads to the choke chain and all noises from the dog subside.
“We are friends, here, we are friends!” yells the nearest man.
Both are thin. Both with beards heavily tinged with grey. Both with desperate eyes housed in deep sockets, the whites made brighter by their tanned and leathery skin. They are a hodgepodge of new clothes and old. A brand new jacket over a soiled shirt. A greasy ball cap paired with new shoes. Stained pants and new backpacks. One has long hair and the other has none.
“We need help here. We need help.” Long hair speaks. His eyes darting to each of us in turn, wide and imploring.
“What do you need help with?” Harlan says.
“What do you mean?” The man gestures to the wide world and speaks with such incredulousness that I can tell Harlan is taken aback. “What do you mean, ‘what do we need help with?’ The world is fucked!”
“We are aware.”
The man gestures again, frustration painted across his features. “There hasn’t been anyone who’s helped. No one has come at all. We’ve been getting by as best as we can, but…”
He slaps his hands against his thighs. Neither makes eye contact. Only the woman in the ditch.
“Why are you out here?” Harlan is straight to the point. Tired, even. I think, like me, he can see where this is going.
“We were looking for food. Getting by. Ran into some people who, well… They run us out of town. We’ve been on our own out here…”
I can’t feel sorry for him. And I don’t want to. And I can tell he isn’t getting any reaction from Harlan or Theo.
“We need water. And a car. And help, Jesus, we need help! You have to help us.”
“No, we don’t.” Harlan is calm, almost deadpan. To an outsider it might seem callous. Maybe even cruel. But in this world, as in the one before, there is a limitless supply of tools to help you. And this time they are free. Free, if you have the courage to help yourself.
The man kicks the dirt at this last remark, and the dog begins to bark again.
“Shut that fuckin’ thing up!” yells long-hair, as if it’s the dog’s fault we are being so distant.
The woman jerks the chain again, bringing the dog next to her. She pushes the dog down, still choking it.
“You shut up now. You shut up!” A whiny voice. Not a command. Half threat, half plea, if such a thing exists.
“I spent the last month listening to that fuckin’ thing,” the man says, as if to curry up some sort of sympathy. “Morning and night.”
The other man steps forward. He’s more calm. Still a glimmer of pride in his eyes, though they’re also pained. Embarrassed. Shamed at what he’s become.
“Do you know what happened? Do you know when… This’ll get fixed?”
“No,” Harlan starts to say. “I don’t know of any—”
The dog barks again, then lets loose a series of whines. The woman jerks him closer to her and raps him on the nose with knobby knuckles. “Shut the fuck up, goddammit!”
“Stop.”
My gun is aimed at the woman. She slowly releases her grip on the dog.
Silence. All eyes turn to me. I pour each word from my brain into my mouth, properly measured and weighed before I speak again.
“I will give you water. I want the dog.”
“Beryl.” Harlan gives me a look. Our look. The look that is worth a hundred conversations and one good argument. He nods.
The man with hair looks at the dog, then back to her.
“We want more than water. That dog is ours.”
I raise my gun. Words are so muddled, so… beautiful. But so many people ignore them. Or pretend to not understand. So I point my gun and wait, using my silence to convey what words apparently won’t.
Long-hair has the audacity to be offended. To pretend that a minute ago he wasn’t just complaining about the very same animal. “You fucking with us? That’s our dog. And instead of helping us, as any good person would, you decide to rob us? Un-fucking-believable!”
Harlan steps forward. “The dog, and you get water. And a chance to live another day.”
“We want the car too. How are we supposed to get out of here without it?”
Words. More and more words. Losing them made me miss them all the more. But it also showed me when they can be useless. When they are uttered by the fearful, and the self-deceived, to cloud a room with nothingness.
“Beryl?”
Nothing but words. I find myself standing in front of the woman. Gun at my side. Finger on the trigger. She glances up at me and just as quickly averts her eyes. She jerks the dog closer to her, one large arm pulling its head into her lap.
“Ain’t yours. He’s mine.”
The men have stopped speaking their useless words. Stopped kicking the road and yelling and demanding help. Stopped trying to manipulate the situation for the maximization of their benefit.
Nothing but truth, now.
I want to tell this woman that this dog no longer belongs to her. That he never belonged to her. That possessions are a thing limited, an idea. That true possessions stay with us even after they are gone.
I want to tell her how close she is to dying.
Harlan questions his morality, whether what he’s doing is right, or wrong, or simply something he desires. I don’t. If I was alone I would have no problem ending this woman’s life. Anything that would starve and torture an animal out of some distorted idea of mastery doesn’t deserve another breath. I only hesitate out of fear that Harlan might see me as some sort of monster. More and more I don’t think he’d care.
“He’s mine. You ain’t getting him for free.”
I look at the dog. Black all over but for a white stripe down his chest and white splotches on his paws. A broad, square forehead and long jowls. There is missing skin on his front leg and sores around his feet. His hair is thin around the choke chain and I see old scabs. And new. He doesn’t look at me, head pointed at the ground which makes the bones in his shoulders protrude even more.
As if sensing my gaze the tip of his tail gives a brief wag. A scared wag. A wag as if to say he isn’t a part of whatever turmoil is happening between us.
He speaks more honestly than any of these three.
“Beryl.” Har speaks softly. I haven’t moved, but he, if anyone, can sense the storm within. He knows.
I kneel down so I’m eye level with the woman. She peers back at me, holds it for a moment, and then away. Back again. And then she holds steady, taking the time to actually see me.
It’s hard not to feel entitled. I have. Thinking I deserve a break. A family. Time in one place to make friends. A home. Freedom. I wonder, if I had been given these things, would I have continued to ask for more? Would I have turned into this woman before me, someone who takes so much they cannot fathom giving away?
I cock the gun. The dog flinches more than her. She understands, but like most people she doesn’t trust what she sees in someone’s eyes. She second guesses everything until words are said.
“Now.”
She slowly releases the dog, eyes on the ground as she mutters indignities. “This is robbery. He’s mine and you just think you can take him.” She heaves in deep breaths, as if building up momentum for when she cries.
I don’t spare her another glance. The dog is still standing next to her, head as close to the ground as it can possibly get. I lower my fingers to his nose before slowly moving them up to the choke chain. It’s embedded in his flesh in some places. It’s sickening. The anger flares up and again I consider ending this person’s life.
Silence as they watch me slowly work the chain free. Silence as I slip it up and over the dog’s head. Touching a chain again, a chain used for mastery, makes me want to vomit. It burns my fingers. I drop it on the ground at his feet. H
e’s shaking, tail firmly locked between his legs. I rub his forehead, slow circles as I whisper my three words. You are free. Then I stand and walk back to the road.
The dog casts a look back at the woman, waiting for a reaction, then shies away from her and scoots after me.
“You might as well shoot us right now,” says long hair.
Harlan ignores him, already turning and staring back at the car. The small car. The car filled to the brim with no room for a dog.
“What’s wrong with you people?” Long hair says. “Why won’t you help people who need it?”
And it’s not hard to read Harlan’s face. To see him calculating how we can keep the car and the dog. Knowing that it won’t work. The anger. Then his eyes come to mine. And he sees. He understands.
He tosses the car keys onto the pavement. Not out of a sense of compassion, as John would have done. Not out of a desire to help anyone else, or to answer the question asked by Callie and Derek. And certainly not for these people too lazy to help themselves.
Just for me.
We walk. And everyone is angry at me. Or they try to be. Even Harlan does his best to be disappointed. Sheila thinks it’s hilarious that we traded our car for a dog.
“This was getting way too easy, thank you guys.”
No one wants to walk. Not with packs full of food and ammunition. Not with arms carrying guns and water bottles.
Everyone is angry.
All except for the dog. He runs alongside the road. Shaking his head and bluff charging lizards or squirrels or oddly shaped rocks. Movements swift and joyful. Ecstatic to be free. To be fed without remonstration. He is nothing but a scampering, farting, idiot of a dog that startles everyone, at least once, with a cold nose to some exposed body part.
It’s hard to stay angry.
For the first time in a long time we share simple smiles. Reminded, perhaps, that there is more to life. Or less. That there is less to life than the burdens we place on ourselves.
“What’s his name?” Josey asks. The first to break the silence after Harlan told them we’d be walking. For who knows how long.