by Chad Leito
The crowd erupted again in anger and Blaine cursed again, more loudly this time. President Strunk put up his hands and said, “Please, be calm. Allow me to explain.”
“We should go,” Blaine said.
“What? Why?” I was captivated by what was going on.
“The Ms are going to rent a cart to drive themselves and the kids back down to the orphanage. We need a good head start.”
Saul and I both wanted to stay, but if Blaine King was worried that we had been gone too long, it was probably a good idea to leave.
“You’re right.”
Blaine nodded and led the way down the ladder.
As we climbed down the dark tunnel I heard someone shout from the crowd, “so if you’re under eighteen you are forced to work without pay for seven years.” I couldn’t hear Strunk’s answer, but I didn’t need to. The roaring of the angry crowd was all the answer I needed.
Once we reached the bottom of the ladder we hopped over the ticket counter and dashed back over the white turf toward the orphanage. Blaine ran out ahead of us, his ponytail bouncing with his long strides. I stayed behind as Saul trudged along as quickly as he could.
The three of us entered the orphanage and got down on our hands and knees and began to scrub again. Saul’s face was red and he was breathing heavily from the jog. “Try to not breathe so hard whenever the Ms come back,” Blaine said. Saul nodded his head and we continued to scrub.
We cleaned in silence and the speech that I had just heard consumed me. I was going to be leaving my home soon; the ship that my parents and grandparents and many generations before me had lived on. I had figured the stories that I had heard and what a lot of the kids speculated about Mungus was stretched a little bit. I had heard stories of everyone getting 100 acres of land just for living on the planet, that everyone got their own castle, and that everyone would own thousands of livestock. Those ideas had seemed ridiculous and I hadn’t imagined that they would have come true. But slavery? Forced labor? I would not have imagined that I would have found that on Mungus either.
Ten minutes after we began scrubbing for the second time the children from the orphanage returned along with the Ms. All of the boys and girls walked around us with their dirty shoes ruining the floors that we were working so hard on. “Hey, quit that,” Blaine shouted at a plump boy who ran through a sparkling section of the floor that he had just cleaned.
“Blaine, Walt, Saul,” Miss Mary said. “Will you come meet me out in the hall?”
‘We’re caught!’ I thought and as I looked up into Saul’s face I saw that he was under the same impression. Blaine, however, walked out into the hall with such a calm expression that even I began to doubt that he had done anything wrong.
As soon as we were out into the hall, Miss Mary shut the door behind us, muffling the sound coming from the children inside. My palms grew sweaty and I swallowed hard. “I’m sorry that you three weren’t able to go to the meeting today. I know that it was very important to all of you, but rules are rules.”
The three of us nodded in harmony as if we had no objection to our punishments. We all held the same solemn expression of a martyr being read the charges placed upon him.
“But, I am very grateful that you all were so obedient. From now on, you three are relieved from scrubbing the floors during free time.”
All three of us let out a sigh of relief and Blaine said, “Thank you.”
Ms. Mary nodded. “I also wanted to explain to you three a few things that you missed during the assembly.” She then went on to explain to us about Mungus. She told us of all the things that President Strunk had described and we smiled and frowned appropriately, trying to seem like the information that she was giving us was new. She did tell us one last thing that we had not heard while we were spying in the projector room. She told us that on our contract we could list the people in our family that we do not wish to be separated from. She said that, for instance, Saul and I could list each other that would be a formal request that we were sent down together.
“There are no guarantees, though,” she said.
At this comment, Saul began to cry. “So I might not be with Walt?”
“I’m afraid that’s true.”
The orphanage was quiet that night. Saul and I filled out our contracts and requested that we be together on Mungus. We didn’t want to waste any time in filling out either of the papers. I thought that maybe if we were on the top of the stack that there would be a better chance we could be together. After an hour of free time it was lights out. I lay on my back in my springy little bed with my blankets pulled all the way up to my chin. I thought about what Miss Mary had said, “there are no guarantees.” I didn’t know how I would deal with being separated from Saul. The thought tore me up inside. Missing him wasn’t what made me the saddest: what broke my heart was thinking of him missing me. I shifted on my pillow, pulled my knees up to my chest and did something that I would have never let Saul see me do. I cried.
2
Waiting
I had nightmares for the next two weeks. They tried to tell me that I wasn’t going into slavery and that I had to work as a way to pay back what I owed to Ramus, but I couldn’t see the distinction. I had a reoccurring dream that I was trapped in a cage. I looked down and saw my arms (then the arms of an old man with white hair and cracked skin) desperately shaking at rusted metal bars that wouldn’t budge.
Blaine was wrong about being on land in two weeks, but not by much. He was gone twenty days after we snuck into the main hall to watch Captain Strunk give his speech. He wasn’t the only one. The turf streets of the ship were becoming less crowded and more beds in the orphanage were always made. For the first time in a thousand years, people from our ship were going down to land.
Every night or so, I would hear the phone ring as I lay in bed at night. Through the doorway I could see Miss Mabel’s body in her nightgown with big curls in her hair as she walked over to the phone and answer it.
“Hello,” she would whisper into the phone. As she talked she kept her voice low even though there was no point; every boy and girl in the orphanage was awake and wide eyed, wondering if it would be them that she came and pulled out of bed so that they could travel to Mungus that morning.
“Okay, I’ll get them.” Miss Mabel would then hang up the phone and walk down the aisle in between the two rows of beds and pull a few lucky children up and tell them to grab their suitcases. I held my breath when she passed either my bed or Saul’s.
Both Saul and I had all of our possessions packed and ready to go in a leather suitcase under his bed. We were supposed to each pack our own in case we were separated, but we were determined that we would be leaving the ship together. Our suitcase was small but heavy. We each had two pairs of pants, three shirts, a coat, a blanket, and one possession that we kept to remind us of our parents. These were our favorite things that we owned and the only things that could never be replaced.
Saul’s possession was a baseball that our mother made for him before she died. It didn’t look exactly like what Dimaggio used to play with. It was brown, lumpy, and the stitches weren’t in the right place. Still, it was the closest thing that any kid had to a baseball on the Greco ship. “Did you know that they used to use seventy-two every game, Walt?” he would ask me as he admired his lumpy sphere.
My mother knew how much Saul loved the game. She spent a considerable amount of her teacher’s salary to make the best baseball for her son that she could. She bought half a pound of cotton and wrapped it and rewrapped it as tight as possible into a ball. She then wrapped that ball in leather and sowed it shut with red stitches. Saul always took it into the theatre when he watched the Yankees play. He tossed it back and forth in his hands, rubbing it, thumbing the stitches.
My prized possession was buried deep within our suitcase. I didn’t get it out as much as Saul played with his baseball, but the memory of my parents made it my favorite thing in the world. My father was a welder. He helped to re
mold and repair metal on the ship. When my grandmother died, before they shot her body out into space, my father took her wedding ring off of her finger. He then took his father’s and welded them together so that the iron rings were no longer rings, but were in the shape of a small turtle. My mother used to call me “Mr. Turtle.” I don’t know why she did, but it always made me giggle.
The nights passed, and the phone in the orphanage rang. Miss Mabel came and dragged children out of bed to be sent down to Mungus. No matter how much I held my breath when she passed by that first month, she never came to drag my brother or me out of bed.
On Sunday morning Saul and I sat in the UV room. It was a white fluorescent room with UV lamps hanging above. UV time was mandatory for everyone on the ship. I had heard stories of early days when there were dangerously high rates of depression. The doctors examined the people and decided that they were not getting enough vitamin D because they were being deprived of something that our ancestor’s bodies had gotten accustomed to—the sun. Since the Grecos were traveling through space and did not have the luxury of a sun above their heads every day, the scientists at the time created a UV room full of fluorescent lights. The idea was that people would sit in there for some time every week so that their bodies would produce the needed chemicals. After some testing and lobbying, UV time was made a mandatory requirement for all members of the Greco ship. Depression rates went down, or so I was told, and so for the last 700 years of the Greco’s flight UV time was mandatory.
Despite the testimonies that I had heard, I was not convinced that UV time prevented depression. I hated it. Every year we were sent a ship calendar that gave us a UV schedule. Saul and I had to go at the same time, 6:30 a.m. on Sunday mornings, one of our two days off a week. It was the earliest time that you could be scheduled on what was in my opinion the worst day of the week. I dragged myself out of bed, took the train to the UV station with Saul, stripped down to my underwear, put on my sunglasses, and piled into the white room with nine other nearly naked men.
I was tired and lay down on the white floor in the middle of the room and tried to sleep. The fluorescents buzzed above me as the temperature rose. Saul had brought a comic book into the room and was reading while the rays soaked into him. The lights shone so bright against his doughy skin that he seemed to glow. I shut my eyes and tried to doze off but the men around me wouldn’t stop talking.
“I don’t understand why we have to sit in here for UV time when we’re about to go down to Mungus,” a young, slim man said.
“You’re going to Mungus?” a bald man asked. I didn’t remember his name, but I had seen him before. He worked at the market and was always bustling around outside, moving boxes on forklifts while he chugged down sodas. He had broad shoulders and little black hairs curled all over his body.
“Yeah, I’m going down.”
The bald man let out a laugh and rubbed his knees and shook his head.
“What’s wrong with going down to Mungus?” the younger man asked. He leaned toward the bald man.
I shut my eyes behind my sunglasses and tried to not let my tired mind dwell on what they were talking about. I wanted to sleep and I had heard the same conversation hundreds of times.
“There’s nothing wrong with it, I would just never do it.”
“Why’s that?”
The bald man chuckled again. “I just have a hard time believing that when those seven years are up that you will be getting the freedom that they promised.”
“But it’s in the contract…”
“I’ve read the contract,” the bald man said. He began to raise his voice, “It’s the contract that made me so skeptical. Have you read the whole thing? You’re not allowed to communicate with anyone on the ship once you enter Rumus. You don’t think that that sounds weird? You don’t think that that’s a clue that they’re probably not going to be honest with you?”
The younger man began to raise his voice too. “No, I don’t. That kind of thing makes sense if you’re trying to establish a nation. And excuse me for having a family and wanting to be with my kids. I would have to separate with them if I wanted to stay and help to build Terra.”
“Are you serious? Have you been listening to what’s been going on around you? Tons of families are getting split up. Don’t think that just because you signed a ‘family request form’ that you are going to get to stay with your family.”
At this I opened my eyes and looked at the bald man as he continued to rant.
“The Jones’s, do you know them? Cindy and James got split up. The Mickelson’s whole family got divided. The Lee’s seven-year-old daughter was taken from her parents and sent down to Mungus alone. The Burkner’s dad got split up from them…”
The young man was getting red in the face.
“Geoff Spinner got separated from his kids, he’s still on the ship and they’re down there. Mickey Jones’s wife is down on Mungus and they signed one of those contracts. Arnold…”
“Shut up!” the younger man hollered, flailing his hands in the air as he talked. “Just shut up. I don’t care. I don’t care what you think. If I wanted advice, I would have asked you, but I didn’t. Leave me alone, I want to sit in here in peace.”
The bald man looked at me and made a comical wide-eyed face as if to say, “that guy’s crazy,” and the room grew quiet. There was a thick tension and no one was talking. The younger man was panting with anger and people sat still and seemed to be careful not to breathe the wrong way. I tried to remain as quiet as possible.
Saul laughed hard and slapped his knee. The noise made me flinch in the silence, but Saul was as happy as could be. Apparently something that he had read in his comics was funny and he let out a joyful giggle. After he laughed, everyone in the room giggled before becoming quiet again. People didn’t talk after that, but Saul’s laughter had taken some of the tension out of the room.
After fifteen more minutes of the heat soaking into my body and the UV lights humming, the intercom crackled overhead and then a woman’s voice spoke across the ship, “Jasper Rowlings, Vancil Jones, Gregory Marshall, Cathi Akin, Michael Thomas and Brenda Hall, please report to the loading dock. Thank you.” The intercom cracked and it was quiet once again. I had been hearing intercom announcements for the past month, and they still hadn’t called my name. Each time that woman’s voice came on across the ship my heart rate rose and my ears picked up. It was my understanding that they tried to reach people who were supposed to go down to Mungus by calling them on the phone first and then if they didn’t pick up they would call for them over the intercom. After a whole month, I was still as anxious about being separated from Saul as I was the first day.
After our UV time, Saul and I went and threw his baseball in the park for a few hours and then it was lunch. We sat in the orphanage’s cafeteria, a small room filled with cheap plastic tables and chairs that was now nearly empty. We ate alone in the quiet room. The chairs were small and when Saul sat down his knees touched the bottom of the table. Lunch was meatloaf, green beans, and glasses of room-temperature tap water.
Saul ate hurriedly, engulfing huge bites of meatloaf with his fork. I wasn’t hungry. I couldn’t stop thinking about what the bald man had said about so many families getting split up. And despite us putting in our contracts as soon as possible, we still hadn’t been called. I didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing.
Saul scrapped his plate clean and I passed my meatloaf over to him. “Are you not hungry?” he asked.
“Not really.”
“Are you sick,” Saul dug his fork into the meatloaf and took a bite.
“No.”
I heard a phone ringing somewhere else.
“Are you worried?”
I looked up at Saul and he stopped chewing. My eyes felt on the verge of tears. I was scared. I didn’t want to be separated from him. No, more significant than that, I didn’t want him to be separated from me. The bald man had made a good point.
I suppressed my
emotions, smiled, and said, “No, what’s there to be worried about?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
He continued chewing and said, “It would be getting near the end of baseball season about this time of the year.”
“Really?” I said. I wasn’t interested and stared off as Saul continued to ramble on about baseball.
Miss Marianna scooted into the cafeteria. Her eyes were wide with excitement, as they always were, and painted with blue and green makeup. “Saul and Walt, would you two come here please?” she asked, and then shuffled back into the orphanage bedroom.
We followed her and when we were alone she said, “I know how much you two wanted to be together on Mungus…”
Saul and I looked at each other then back at Miss Marianna who was frowning.
Her frown turned into a smile. “I just got a phone call. You two are wanted at the loading dock. Go, hurry and grab your suitcases!”
Saul and I jumped up and down in excitement and then my brother wrapped his thick arms around me and swung me around in the air. Miss Marianna clapped and said, “I’m so happy for you two.”
Saul went and grabbed his suitcase under his bed and then we hugged Miss Marianna goodbye. I wanted to say goodbye to the other Ms, but they were not in the orphanage at that time.
Miss Marianna looked down at Saul’s suitcase, “Don’t you need to grab your things, Walt?”
“I’m packed with Saul.”