by Chad Leito
“Stop,” Lauren screamed. She was crying and Glen turned around and smiled at her. He charged and they both went tumbling down to the floor. Glen’s fists found more flesh to pound and Lauren let out more screams.
It was all of it, I think. The farm. Putting the gun in Saul’s mouth. “I had to kill one of them today. It was a worker, big guy, too.” Lauren’s screams. Pitri’s limp head bleeding onto the floor. Julia’s fever. He ruined Saul’s baseball.
“Hey!” I hollered and Glen looked up from Lauren.
I looked down and saw, to my surprise, that Glen’s gun was in my hands. I cocked it just as he had when he shot his gun at the ground near Saul.
Glen laughed. “You don’t want to mess with me, Little Salyer,” and then he charged. I didn’t aim, but just pulled the trigger. The noise ricocheted around the tiny wooden room and sounded like a bomb went off. Glen’s head exploded and his brains were blown onto the back wall and smeared across a painting if Abraham sacrificing Isaac. His body took two more steps and knocked me over.
I pushed his dead body off of me and got to my feet. I was crying, but something in my head was clicking along. There was a calm about me that took over and it was as though I was in autopilot. Something inside of me had been preparing for this. I had daydreamed about killing him, on some level, and I had a plan. Lauren grabbed Julia and held her. I pointed the gun at Lauren.
She looked at me with scared eyes. “What are you doing?”
“I’m not going to kill you,” I said. “But I am going to lock you in the cellar. Please forgive me. Tomorrow, when they find Glen, they’re going to find you two in there and you tell them the truth. I locked you in at gunpoint and there was nothing that you could have done.”
Lauren nodded and she walked without resistance to the potato cellar. She went inside with her baby, got one last look at the boy who resembled her son, and I locked them inside. I rested the gun against the wall and brushed my hands off. I didn’t trust myself with something so dangerous and my hands felt dirty after handling it.
With Lauren and Julia locked away I went into the dining room and looked over the carnage. Glen laying face down with his head gone from the jaw up. Pitri lay unconscious against the back wall.
Over the next hour, I searched the house for supplies. My hands worked quickly and my ears stayed on alert the entire time. I kept on saying to myself, “what has happened?” I was worried that someone could have heard the gunshots and that they were coming to the house to check. But time went on and no one came. Inside Glen’s bedroom I found a leather satchel that I filled with things I found throughout the house-matches, canned food, binoculars, a knife, pieces of wrapped chicken, and three canteens of water.
The sun was going down and I was out at the well washing my body of Glen’s blood. The water was cool and I rubbed it over my skin with shaking hands until I was clean. When I was done I stood looking over the land and contemplating what to do next. My mouth was dry and my eyes darted back and forth over the sea of green crops for answers. I found none. Glen was dead. The guards would kill me if I were found. Pitre was badly beaten and needed help. Lauren and Julia were locked in the cellar. I replayed what Glen had said about killing the servant in my mind. He called him a ‘big guy.’ I fell to my knees and began to weep. Saul was dead. I was sure of it. My body moaned and my hands shook and I couldn’t move. My stomach hurt with the deep sadness and I wanted to be held.
Something else took hold and I stood up. I needed to stop. I wiped my face of tears. I was only contemplating and if my brother was still alive I was doing him a great injustice by wasting so much time. I shook the bad thoughts out of my head and, with my satchel crossed around my shoulder, I began to move.
As I walked towards my cabin Salyers, Beardsleys and Grecos were coming in from the farm. I moved in between them and it was all that I could do to take the next step. My body was in panic and I tried to calm it so that I did not give myself away. If someone caught wind that something was wrong with me then I was going to be in the Cell when the sun rose the next day. The satchel bounced against me with each step. That was unnatural. I didn’t know what I would say if anyone saw that I had Glen’s satchel. My breathing was becoming too fast. People were looking at me. I must have been pale.
“Hey, Little Salyer,” Hank called out.
I froze. Cold sweat came upon my forehead and my mouth was pulled of all of its moisture. Hank came over to me, smiling. He patted me on the back. “How’s the new job?”
“Good,” I said. The words came out too flat. He’s going to know!
“I hear that you’re getting some pretty good food up there. And that wife of Glen’s, I bet she’s fun to look at while you are working.”
“Yeah,” I said and my voice cracked. I cleared my throat. Hank looked from my face to the satchel. From my face to the satchel again. ‘I just killed someone!’ my head screamed, but my face had to pretend that all was calm underneath. My heart rate shot up. ‘Do I still have blood on me?’
“What’s with the purse?” Hank asked.
“It’s for carrying water. I’m sick.”
Hank stepped back and laughed. “Woah! Stay away from me, little guy. Carry on soldier.” He gave me a wink, and with that, he left.
I walked the rest of the way to the cabin and my vision began to close in. Those eyes, right before… Those angry, angry eyes. And poor Pitri on the floor. I saw his face, chewing one of his last bites. “I had to kill one of them today. It was a worker, big guy, too.” I began to walk faster. People around me were staring, they knew something was wrong. I had to see him. Please be in there. My legs were rubber but they kept on taking steps until I was inside of the cabin.
“Hello, Walt!” he said.
Saul was sitting on his cot, unaware that I thought that he was dead. Unaware that anything but normal was happening. I threw my satchel down and latched my arms around his thick neck. I began to tremble. “What happened?” he asked. “Are you okay.”
I sat down on my cot and ran my fingers through my hair. I talked in slow deliberate words. “Saul. Please, listen. Have you eaten your dinner?”
He nodded his head.
“Do you trust me?”
“Yes, Walt.” His eyes were so honest.
“Okay.” I paused as I looked him over. He did trust me, but how much should I tell him? I remembered when he heard that our dad had died. He fell down and flailed on the ground like a fish out of water. He cried and blubbered and no one could make him stop for hours. He wasn’t a normal person and he could be unpredictable. I decided that I would tell him as little as possible. “I’m going to try to escape…”
Saul gasped and I had to put a hand on his knee to calm him down.
“Can you be quiet? Can you be helpful, Saul?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Then listen. The people here are bad. Very bad. You remember how Glen told you that it was strike two?”
Saul nodded. He was on the verge of tears.
“How did that make you feel?”
“Scared.”
“I’m scared too, Saul. Very Scared. It isn’t safe here, so I’m going to leave. You have a choice. You can either follow me or you can stay here.”
Saul considered this. I said that he had a choice, but did he? I thought about that day on the ship when we were scrubbing the floors. I left to go see President Strunk’s speech and Saul followed. He’s scared of things that are foreign to him. And not being with his brother is foreign to him.
“How are we going to get out?”
I told him my plan.
“I’ll go with you.”
When the Salyer guard came by to lock us into our cabins for the night, both Saul and I were lying on our cots and facing the back wall. He shut the door and locked it and after a few moments or waiting I sat up. Saul stirred. “Are we going?”
“No. Not for a while.”
“Okay.”
I went through the leather suitcase that we took do
wn from the ship with us and transferred changes of clothes and other things into the leather satchel that I had taken from Glen’s. The last thing that I took was the turtle necklace that my dad had made me. I felt the fine metal in my fingers. It was beautiful craftsmanship. I missed them. I put it around my neck for good luck.
Hours passed. The moon rose high and an owl hooted somewhere on the farm. “It’s time,” I said to Walt, and we both stood up.
I got down on my hands and knees and dug in the soft earth. Saul did the same beside me and soon there was a big hole behind our back wall. “I’ll go first,” I said. I got down on my belly, and like I had so many nights before, slithered bellow the wall and out into the cool air. “Hand me the satchel,” I whispered, and it popped out of the hole.
Saul came next. His big frame had a hard time fitting. He grunted and struggled and I told him to be quiet. After much effort, he was through and we were both standing on the other side of the fence. “What now?” he asked.
“This way,” I said, and we walked into the fields of cotton. We heard a noise behind us and turned. Three Salyer guards on horses were walking through the rows of cabins. It was midnight and this confused me. “What are they doing here?”
Saul stood up tall and looked over the crop. “There are a lot of lights on around that house up there,” he said.
“We need to hurry.” I grabbed his arm and soon we were flying in between rows of cottons. I didn’t know how the guards had figured it out, but they had. Saul and I kept a steady pace and after minutes of running I led him up to one of the dog fences. We came to a spot in the enclosure where there was a separation fence in between two groups of dogs. The dogs barked and snapped and rattled in the corners of the chain link fence. Surely their barks would alert the guards and I knew that we didn’t have much time. I took the knife out of my bag and the raw chicken wrapped in paper. I tore one of the pieces of chicken into two and threw one over each side of the fence. On each side, one dog went for the bait. That left two snarling and biting and snapping. I looked behind me and could see distant lights of Salyer guards riding on horses and carrying lanterns. I had promised Saul to keep him alive. I took the knife firmly in my right hand and as the dogs came up and snapped and bit at the fence with their muzzles I stabbed them in the face with the knife. They whimpered and hollered and eventually retreated to avoid further injury. I handed Saul the knife and told him to do the same and then I began to climb the fifteen foot wall of metal fencing until I reached the barbed wire.
The barbed wire curved in circles around the top of the fence. My only plan was to crawl through it. I was going to cut myself badly, but I had a better chance of surviving trying to leave then I did staying and being locked in the Cell. The barbs look sharp in the moonlight and a curious thing happened when I touched the wire and tried to move it. It snapped. I felt the metal on the fence and then the material on the barbed wire. It was plastic. It wasn’t real barbed wire, Glen had been too cheap for that. Instead, they had strung up a plastic replica to scare servants from getting onto the fence. It was a scarecrow. “It’s not barbed wire, it’s plastic!” I called down to Saul.
He sighed audibly. He had been scared about sacrificing his body like that. I pulled the cord of plastic down and crawled over it. I looked over my shoulder and saw that, to my relief, the lanterns weren’t moving any closer. Then, I began to crawl on the fence that separated the two dog yards. The top of the chain link fence was narrow and the dogs jumped up on either side of me and shook the fence. “C’mon, hurry!” I called to Saul.
Saul stabbed the dogs through the fence, just like I had, then put the satchel around his shoulder and began to climb. His weight shook the fence with tremors and as the dogs snapped and bit at him I heard him whimper in fear. He continued to climb, just as I had and when he reached the top he started shimmying over the middle fence. When I reached the other side I found that, to my relief, the other set of barbed wire was plastic as well. I pushed the cords down, crawled down a few feet and then jumped and landed on the grass outside the farm. I breathed in deeply and looked around. Next, Saul jumped down and landed on the grass beside me.
“We did it!” he said.
“Of course we did it. Now we need to move.”
I jogged off over the grassy fields and Saul followed me. If we didn’t get out of the middle of the field soon, we would be easy prey for the Salyers with their guns and horses. I saw in the distance a tree line and I ran straight towards it. It was a few minutes jog away and when we were halfway there Saul’s breathing was harsh. “Can we rest, Walt?”
“No, we need to keep going.”
As we got closer, the trees seemed to grow. They were much taller trees then were around the town. The great towers of wood rose up over one hundred feet. We continued running and only stopped once we were deep inside of the tree line. It was shady under the protection of the limbs and out across the fields we could see the farm in the light of the moon. Saul rested his hands on his knees and caught his breath and I leaned against a tree and got out a canteen of water.
“What now?” Saul asked through heavy breaths.
“We find shelter and then we wait until the morning, I guess.” I realized then that my planning had only gone far enough to get us off of the farm. Once that was accomplished, I wasn’t sure what to do next.
A groan came from behind us and both Saul and I turned around. We were looking into a dark forest. Great trees rose out of the dirt with branches reaching and crisscrossing like spider webs. The leaves rustled in the night. The wind kissed my face and whispered in my ears. Crazy shadows fell in the dark and I, like Saul, at that time was afraid of the unknown.
“Where are we going to sleep, Walt?” Saul asked.
I looked around for an answer and then tested a trees lowest branch. It was a branch from a giant tree. The branch itself was six feet in diameter. It felt strong. I climbed up onto it then climbed up onto the one above it. “Follow me,” I said. We climbed the tree until we were about fifty feet up. Every few branches I reminded Saul to be careful. When we were high up in the tree the moonlight penetrated better and it wasn’t so dark. It wasn’t as mysterious.
“Is this better?” I asked Saul.
“It sure is, Walt.”
The branches that we were sitting on were very thick and close to the base of the tree were little indentions like the bowl in a spoon. We slept in those dents in the wood that night. Saul and I passed the canteen of water back and forth and I looked out over the farm.
The fences and dogs looked small from that height. They were small. I felt free and my heart felt light. I decided that in those nights of running that this was the feeling that I was trying to achieve. I felt good.
When I thought Saul was asleep he said, “I love you.”
“I love you too,” I said.
I rested my head on the bark with my feet scrunched up against the base of the tree. The indention held me in and since I hadn’t fallen off of my tiny cot in my cabin I was not afraid of falling off of this much thicker tree branch. With my heart at ease, Saul safe, and my freedom gained, I drifted off to sleep.
10
WANTED!!!
The heat woke me. I didn’t know much about seasons because I had lived on a ship my whole life, but I knew enough to be sure that we were in the middle of summer. The first thing that I heard in the morning was a slurping sound. I opened my eyes and saw sunlight leaking through a blanket of green leaves. I sat up and Saul was sitting on the branch beside me, his feet dangling down into the open air. Around his lips, chin and neck his skin was stained purple. “Good morning, Walt!” he said with a big smile showing his purple teeth.
I laughed.
“What?” he said, looking concerned.
“Why is your mouth so purple?”
Saul put a hand up to his lips, then smiled. “Oh,” he said. “I’ve been eating these.”
Saul held out a piece of half eaten fruit. It was the size of a mango, an
d was a perfect red half-sphere on the outside. The outside skin was the consistency and feel of an apple’s and on the inside was a juicy mush that looked like a combination of a strawberry and a grape. I held the fruit up to my nose and sniffed it. It smelled sweet and I was tempted to take a bite.
“You can’t just eat things that you find in the wilderness, Saul,” I said, “they could be poisonous.”
Saul shook his head. “They’re not poisonous, I’ve been eating them since last night and I feel great. Try a bite. It’s good.”
“Well, I’m glad that they’re not poisonous, but please, try not to eat unidentified things in the forest without me. I don’t want to wake up to find you dead from eating some wild blueberries.”
“Okay, okay, you don’t have to lecture. I’ll be more careful. It’s good, just try it. Take a bite.”
I sniffed the fruit once more and then broke off a piece with my teeth. Flavor exploded in my mouth. The outside shell was crisp like the outside of an apple, but about half an inch in it became soft and gooey. I chewed and sugary syrup laced my mouth purple. I licked my lips and laughed.
“These are pretty good,” I said.
“I told you.”
Saul stood up and picked another one of the fruits from a limb above and we sat up high in the tree eating our breakfast. It was cool under the shade of the leaves and I was in high spirits. I felt careless and free. Then I looked over at the farm and a terrible feeling came into my stomach. The night before and our current situation came back to me. I had murdered a man the about twelve hours ago and I was on the run from a group of Salyer guards who wouldn’t think more of killing me than swatting a mosquito. I felt sick.